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Hamas/Israel conflict: news and discussion

littlebabyjesus said:
There are situations in which a class based analysis breaks down. Palestine/Israel is one of those situations, where one whole group of people is a particular kind of underclass, a prisoner class.

This is similar to a situation of slavery. Or apartheid SA. To talk about different classes of people in other ways, you first need to agree that they are all people in a fungible sense.
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One way class does operate is in West Bank. When Israel occupied it settlement building helped "proletarianise" Palestinians who had worked on land they now lost. Creating a cheap labour force for Israel. The intifada led to Israel trying to replace this cheap labour force with workers from abroad.

The official Israel union the Histadrut was mainstay of Labour Zionist period. Only representing Jewish workers. Also owned and directed a lot of business.

There has been growing increase in inequality since the privatisation of a lot of Israeli economy with demise of Labour Zionism which ran Israel.

Privatisation included the Kibbutz movement to my surprise.

There are long standing divisions in Israeli society. The elite Ashkenazi and the marginalised Mizrahi Jews. Along with the ultra orthodox - once a minority now increasing in size.

I dont know enough about this. But inequality and social divisions within Israel that can be traced back to its beginning mean its not the stable safe haven of united people that Id assumed.

However those divisions and conflicts within Israel leave Palestinians out.
 
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Spandex said:
The genocide developing in Gaza has been front page/headline news in the UK for months, with live update pages on the most viewed news websites bringing the latest developments to your phone every few minutes. Social media is full of horrific images and partial takes. It's built on an issue that has been a regular news story for as long as I've been alive, from PLO attacks in the 70s to the IDF indiscriminately bombing Gaza every few years over the last couple of decades. There's widely divided positions, with the entirely different narratives of Israel and Palestine having little in common, giving plenty to debate. The UK government solidly supports Israel in its attacks on Palestine, the US even more so.

The unfolding genocide in Sudan has barely been reported in the UK - you have to go back a month to find a report in the Guardian. Everyone agrees its a bad thing, but you have to go hunting to find any information about the background. The UK government barely seems to have a position on Sudan - the FCO haven't updated their Sudan webpage since October.

It's hardly surprising that one prompts lengthy discussions and the other tumbleweed.
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Did I suggest that I was surprised?
 
Spandex said:
It's hardly surprising that one prompts lengthy discussions and the other tumbleweed.
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The RSF in Sudan, grown from the Janjaweed militias, some of them fought as mercenaries for the Gulf states in the Yemen war.

Edit to add

Israeli missiles hit sites near Damascus, says Syria – as it happened
17/12/2023
The Syrian army has said Israeli missiles launched from the occupied Golan Heights hit sites near Damascus that regional intelligences say targeted Iranian militias’ stronghold near Syria’s holiest Shia Muslim shrine. Syria’s air defences shot down some of the missiles that targeted the countryside around the capital in an incident that injured two soldiers, the army said in a statement on Sunday.
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Spandex said:
It's hardly surprising that one prompts lengthy discussions and the other tumbleweed.
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Indeed - but this extra care and attention / thoughts and prayers doesn't just spring forth from nowhere, there are clear reasons Israel-Palestine takes up more consciousness inside 'christendom' (or we could say our western-liberal hegemony) than similar conflicts in places unconnected with Jesus, Abraham et al. There's cultural baggage going back literally thousands of years, that seems to make nearly everyone feel more emotionally invested in this particular conflict than most (all?) others.

May I add apropos of this, that armaggeddon is a place, and it's in Israel. I know that's well known but it illustrates the point, this is the cultural water we swim in.

I had a picnic there once fwiw. I always thought Picnic at Armaggeddon would make a great band name.
 
I'd add that anti-semitism is also part of that western-liberal cultural baggage, that's exactly why poisonous Israeli demagogues and their mouthpieces are able to weaponise the term as they do.
 
SpineyNorman said:
Absolutely. It's bad faith whataboutery intended to give the impression Israel's critics are antisemitic.
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Except, some clearly are anti-Semitic including those who claim to be on the left. The Islamic republic of Iran Broadcasting's programme "Palestine Today" presented by former Labour MP Chris Williamson and former academic David Miller is devoted to attacking Jews, dead or alive. One of their favourite tropes is the idea that Odessa in Ukraine was also a Jewish settler colony. Odessa was created by Russian Empress Catherine the Great two hundred and thirty years ago. Williamson and Miller, of course, don't mention the several pogroms in the nineteenth Century in which Jews were murdered

Zionism has deep roots in Ukraine. Jews were a significant element in the settler colony of Odessa.

Along with a range of non Jewish colonizers they settled on land from which Muslims and others had been expelled in the settlement around Khadjibey in 1794.

Ukraine, especially Odessa, was a key locus of the rise of the Zionist movement in the twentieth century.
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Israel and Ukraine

A frequent guest on this racist broadcast is Asa Winstanley who gets lauded by Larry further up this thread. Winstanley also pops up on broadcasts on the same channel presented by Assadist apologist Richard Medhurst.
 
Gramsci said:
One way class does operate is in West Bank. When Israel occupied it settlement building helped "proletarianise" Palestinians who had worked on land they now lost. Creating a cheap labour force for Israel. The intifada led to Israel trying to replace this cheap labour force with workers from abroad.
(...)
However those divisions and conflicts within Israel leave Palestinians out.
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I don't entirely understand. Gaza and the West Bank weren't feudal societies before 1967. There has been a good deal of work on the class structures in Palestine during the Mandate. A quick search threw up:

Arab Labor In Mandate Palestine - The Emergence of a Working Class (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question)
The rise and development of the Arab working class was closely connected with all the demographic, economic, and social changes that Palestine experienced after it was colonized and ruled under the British Mandate.
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Those 'demographic economic and social changes' included Jewish immigration and the development of a specific Jewish capitalist sector in addition to the smaller Palestinian capitalist sector, but the overarching catalyst was British imperialism.

In the early 1930s, the migration of impoverished peasants from their villages to the towns noticeably accelerated in the wake of the large growth in Jewish immigration to Palestine, the increasing acquisition of land by Zionist organizations, and the continuing deterioration of traditional Arab agriculture. Since the fledgling Arab industrial sector was unable to absorb new workers, most of these impoverished peasants, denied any access to the Jewish economy due to the “Hebrew labor” policy, moved into the construction sector and into the projects set up by the British Mandate authorities in the early 1930s: expanding the road network, developing the railways, improving Haifa port, enlarging its facilities so that it could receive large ships and oil tankers, and granting concessions to foreign companies.
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(There are other related articles at that site). See also the PDF attached below Talal Asad (1976). Class Transformation under the Mandate.

The occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 significantly changed the situation and proportions of the different classes in them but it didn't initiate their creation. See for example Hilal, J. (1976). Class Transformation in the West Bank and Gaza - PDF attached below

This has a section about proletarianization after 1967, but it's not about people being forced off the land and into wage labour (a process which had already begun significantly under the Mandate) but the changed status of sections of the middle classes
The petit bourgeoisie in the West Bank and Gaza has been weakened substantially, due to the general effects of Israeli economic policy and particularly the employment of Palestinian wage labor in Israel. Many Palestinian small farmers, artisans and shopkeepers could not compete with the wages paid by Israeli capitalists or the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Squeezed by the rising cost of living, many of this petit bourgeoisie were forced into wage labor.
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An interesting article about the development of the Palestinian middle classes. Itamar Radal - The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class Under the British Mandate, 1920-39 (2016) PDF attached below
 

Attachments

  • Talal Asad (1976). Class Transformation under the Mandate.pdf
    978.1 KB · Views: 2
  • Hilal, J. (1976). Class Transformation in the West Bank and Gaza.pdf
    1,000 KB · Views: 2
  • Itamar Radal (2016) - The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class Under the British...pdf
    2.8 MB · Views: 4
mojo pixy said:
I wonder what Russia's abstention was all about? Worried about setting a trap for itself later maybe.
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"By signing off on this, the council would essentially be giving the Israeli armed forces complete freedom of movement for further clearing of the Gaza Strip," Russia's UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the council before the vote, which it abstained from.


anyway its all bullshit theatre
 
Lurdan said:
I don't entirely understand. Gaza and the West Bank weren't feudal societies before 1967. There has been a good deal of work on the class structures in Palestine during the Mandate. A quick search threw up:

Arab Labor In Mandate Palestine - The Emergence of a Working Class (Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question)


Those 'demographic economic and social changes' included Jewish immigration and the development of a specific Jewish capitalist sector in addition to the smaller Palestinian capitalist sector, but the overarching catalyst was British imperialism.


(There are other related articles at that site). See also the PDF attached below Talal Asad (1976). Class Transformation under the Mandate.

The occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 significantly changed the situation and proportions of the different classes in them but it didn't initiate their creation. See for example Hilal, J. (1976). Class Transformation in the West Bank and Gaza - PDF attached below

This has a section about proletarianization after 1967, but it's not about people being forced off the land and into wage labour (a process which had already begun significantly under the Mandate) but the changed status of sections of the middle classes


An interesting article about the development of the Palestinian middle classes. Itamar Radal - The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian-Arab Middle Class Under the British Mandate, 1920-39 (2016) PDF attached below
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I'm not denying class has it's place. The Mandate was a period of change.

Not had a chance to look at your previous links.

However as a point. I'm reminded of the historian Rashid Khalidi discussing his family. They were from Palestinian elite going back to days of Ottomans.

When it came to the Nakba they were forced to leave like any other Palestinian. One of his relatives lost his whole library he had built up in his understandable haste to leave. They were relatively wealthy.

As far as the Nakba went didn't matter what social class you were if you were Palestinian you had to go.

Whilst class is important it doesn't explain everything.
 
Cid said:
Worth viewing the unpaywalled version if you can (think you get a limited number/month) as it has a lot of maps, images etc.
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This is why I posted the actual WP article which ppl should have been able to read as it had a code that allows anyone to read it. The archived version is missing loads of content.
 
mojo pixy said:
Indeed - but this extra care and attention / thoughts and prayers doesn't just spring forth from nowhere, there are clear reasons Israel-Palestine takes up more consciousness inside 'christendom' (or we could say our western-liberal hegemony) than similar conflicts in places unconnected with Jesus, Abraham et al. There's cultural baggage going back literally thousands of years, that seems to make nearly everyone feel more emotionally invested in this particular conflict than most (all?) others.

May I add apropos of this, that armaggeddon is a place, and it's in Israel. I know that's well known but it illustrates the point, this is the cultural water we swim in.

I had a picnic there once fwiw. I always thought Picnic at Armaggeddon would make a great band name.
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It is if I remember Meggido and I have been there…
 
Dystopiary said:
Paywall busted:

https://archive.ph/4QinW
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“The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century,” said Michael Lynk, who served as the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022.
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What gets me is the Starmer is still opposing a ceasefire.

I looked up Green Party and they imo are putting what should be the Labour line.

www.greenparty.org.uk

“Silence is complicity”: Green Party urges UK government and opposition to call for ceasefire in Israel-Gaza conflict | The Green Party

www.greenparty.org.uk www.greenparty.org.uk

Read this and it comes across as basic middle of the road position that a party in UK should take.

That its in Starmer terms not one he agrees with shows how far to the right he is.
 
This 21-year-old Gazan singer has written a hauntingly poignant lament to the genocide.



And somebody else has set this to Banksy's "Children of GAZA"



Certainly making this grown man cry - Happy Christmas - war isn't over.
 
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