It's already one year since the war on Gaza started. "Israel's right to defend itself" as Starmer, Biden and the rest call it, has already laid total waste to this tiny strip of land. Its shell-shocked and terrorised people - minus the 10% who are by now dead, missing under rubble, or wounded - have nowhere left to hide.
"Self defence"?. Those who swallow and then regurgitate this absurdity should never again be given the time of day by any sane human being. But the reality is that the majority of western politicians and their loyal media repeat this over and over. And TV presenters across the board continue to invite Israeli representatives to "give their side of it" literally, ad nauseam.
So, let us ask: given that the events of 7 October are again fresh in everyone's minds, can anyone tell us how many Hamas invaders the IDF eventually defended itself against, on Israeli soil, on 7 October? That is, when it finally turned up, 12 hours after the Hamas attack began? By definition, this was the one and only opportunity for "self defence".
What's more, to talk about Hamas using a population for "human shielding" as an excuse to bomb hospitals and schools - and tents on beaches - which is often repeated by MPs and Israeli spokes-people on our air- and internet-waves - is equally ridiculous. How is it possible for any militia to operate inside a densely-populated area of 140 square miles (London is 600 square miles!), without "hiding" itself among the population? Hamas tried to, by building tunnels, but this has given the IDF an even "better" excuse to bomb everywhere and with even heavier bombs - since they don't actually know where these tunnels are.
...and just who is proxy of whom?
And now the invasion, heavy bombing and killing of civilians (over 2,000 so far) has extended to the "sovereign" country of Lebanon, for the 3rd time in recent history. Today the excuse is even more transparent: Hizbollah rockets - mostly intercepted by the Iron Dome - which have been fired into Israel with the sole aim of getting it to stop bombing Gaza. Wasn't "cease-fire" the only demand of Hassan Nasrallah, the now-assassinated Hizbollah leader? But of course - he was a "designated terrorist" and "Iranian proxy" and so he must have been lying.
Strangely enough, when the Lebanese ambassador to London - a representative of the caretaker government and nothing to do with Hizbollah - was interviewed, he refused to condemn it, insisting that it is a home-grown, Lebanese organisation, and recalling its roots in the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He added that Hizbollah was now, de facto, the only defence against Netanyahu's terror campaign, since the Lebanese army was vestigial and the few UN peacekeepers near the border, totally impotent.
We should recall what happened in 1982 in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, near Beirut: the systematic killing in the course of just one night, of 3,500 women, children and men, with knives and bayonets, by a fascist Christian militia known as the Phalange - entirely facilitated by the Israeli army under General Ariel Sharon, who was later to become Israel's Prime Minister, despite being tried for this war crime.
Sharon supplied the lime, the bulldozers and the body bags to literally cover up the massacre. At the time, Hassan Nasrallah was a young recruit in the army fighting the IDF. It was out of this cruel war that Hizbollah was born and first and foremost, as a pro-Palestinian force - with the aim not to exterminate "Israelis", but to overthrow a Zionist, Jewish-supremacist, apartheid state.
class struggle, the only answer
Netanyahu and his war cabinet cannot pretend that this current war is not expansionist in its aims. Many suspect that southern Lebanon, up to the Litani River (and why not further) might be "annexed".
He has already warned the Iranian regime that "There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach", boasting of his obviously superior - US-backed - and in fact, nuclear, military power. But an existence which is guaranteed only by constantly imposing military superiority on the region - and what's more, as proxy for the USA - means a permanently insecure military state. And that's precisely what Israel is and has been, ever since its artificial creation in 1947 and its expulsion of Palestine's Arabs. As long as the fundamentalist, religious Israeli state remains, solely recognising the right of Jewish people to live as equal citizens on its soil - it can never be secure. The oppressor is never free.
The West's politicians - even when it seems indefensible in the context of the catastrophe they've sponsored in Gaza - cannot do otherwise than support their Israeli monster. This bloody chaos and horror is the only future that capitalism in this phase of imperialist degeneration has to offer - and in fact this is just the beginning; "we ain't seen nothing yet..."
That said, the working classes of the world have the power to turn around this headlong dash into the abyss, by fighting their capitalist classes and the politicians who represent them - using the power in their own hands and feet. We may not be able to stop the war in the Middle East today, but if we decide to fight collectively for our class interests and we win, it will be one step towards averting further death and destruction for our Middle Eastern sisters and brothers, tomorrow.