I think the celebrations of the Hamas attack that have cropped up here and there are pathetically wrong. What’s happening in Israel-Palestine right now is the worst outcome in every respect. And it holds up a mirror to global civilization. We should all take a long hard look.

The idea that you could be pro-Hamas is crazy. 1,500 individuals just went on a killing rampage culminating in their own deaths, with the near certain promise of involuntary martyrdom for their own civilians. The idea that you could be pro-Israel is equally crazy. Israel has fallen under the leadership of a war party that pursues colonization and accepts continuous counter-insurgency as a norm, with the consequent dehumanization of the killers called upon to enforce it - and of the entire society, called upon to forget what they permit and desire. In all likelihood, the IDF will now commit war crimes on an historic scale, hardening the murderous resentment of Muslims across the Middle East and beyond.

Israel, under the influence of its war party, has become an apartheid state. There is no way that an apartheid state can avoid bloody revolt. And all the Western societies harbor aspects of the apartheid state.

Apartheid is a set of bureaucratic and police procedures to separate one segment of a population, to subjugate all the people who comprise it, and then to effectively forget them, considering that the procedures of exclusion and subjugation are necessary and just. In the contemporary period, when unskilled labor is not required for the production of vast wealth, this results in unbearable juxtapositions of opulent luxury and rank misery. The most horrible image to come out of Israel is what happened at the music festival - both what Hamas did, and the fact that this carefree festival could be held within a few miles of an open-air prison.

Such an image comes very close to US reality. The obscenely wealthy US is a carceral state with racist police forces that target Black people in particular. Ghetto conditions, without viable schooling or employment, lead to criminality and then to prison. Once you’re in prison you are subject to extremely dehumanizing bureaucratic control, enforced by violence, often in crumbling and overcrowded facilities whose very existence is unknown to most people. The rage and despair this generates came into view, not through any official channels but through cell phone videos, culminating in the single, unequivocal scene of George Floyd’s cold-blooded murder on a city street. The uprising that ensued opened up a brief period during which Americans came to envisage what civil war might look like.

I reckon we can still envisage what that looks like, but the exercise of democracy - through the vote, through public expression of grievances and through institutional change - seems to have pulled us back from the brink, for the moment anyway.

I have no illusions about how long the peace will last. What we are experiencing in the world right now is the simultaneous breakdown of the neoliberal world order, and the intensification of climate change. Both of these are occurring in societies with undiminished capacities for the production of wealth - but with radically diminished capacities for the expression of solidarity, whether through material redistribution or through cultural transformation in recognition of past harms. The war party in Israel has brought this situation to its extreme. But look at what is happening right now at the borders around the US and EU. Remember the hang-gliders. Imagine what those borders could become in the near future.

The United States is already delivering more weapons to Israel. That is wrong. They have all the weapons they need. The threat to Israel comes from their own apartheid policies, and from the support they receive for those policies.

The contemporary state of Israel results from a process of forced colonization in the wake of Nazi genocide. All the Western countries have an historical responsibility for the tragic situation that has taken form there. The urgency now is to call a halt to hostilities, and progress rapidly to a viable two-state solution. The $3.8 billion per year currently transferred from the US to the IDF could go a long way to creating real global security, through solidarity rather than violence.

Otherwise the not-so-distant image of ourselves will come out of the Israelo-Palestinian mirror and settle on everyone’s future.

Mokum weeps

Brian Holmes has written his commentary from an American perspective. On this very issue, the Amsterdam perspective is important for us as well. 

Amsterdam has a centuries-old Jewish tradition, with scholars like Spinoza and a militant Jewish working class. During the German occupation, Amsterdam rubbish collector Piet Nak and street worker Willem Kraan organised the February Strike, as a protest against the persecution of the Jews. We are Mokum. But nevertheless, on account of WWII, Jewish Amsterdam came partly to an end: almost the entire Jewish population, including Anne Frank, was deported and did not return. To this day, this is a deep trauma in our city.

Hamas, which wants to destroy Israel and is synonymous with anti-Semitism, touches an open nerve here. Every Ajax-fan knows all about this.
So Hamas’ atrocities of 7 October were felt doubly hard in Amsterdam. The city was full of posters with images of Israelis being carried off by Hamas.
The disgust is rightly enormous.

Netanyahu’s response is full of the same kind of destructive thinking. He seems to be heading for an outright genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu has been flouting all human rights of Palestinians for 20 years, permanently destroying Palestinian cities, destroying the Palestinian economy and shitting on international treaties. The international community, led by the USA, the EU and the Dutch government, has – except for the occasional weak protest – never lifted a finger for the Palestinians, who now live as second-class citizens, poverty-stricken and without any prospects, under Isreal’s yoke. The big pro-Palestine demo on 15 October in Amsterdam shows that people here are fed up with that.

The daily killing of Palestinians is disgusting.

The only way out of this hopeless situation is towards peace and respect for both Jews and Palestinians. The same Piet Nak of the February Strike was a leading member of the Dutch Palestine Committee in the 1960s and 1970s. That is why it was great how Amsterdam councillors Itay Garmy (Jewish, Volt) and Sheher Khan (Muslim, Denk) jointly answered the war-and-destruction-rhetoric of Hamas and Netanyahu: ‘We have to realise that we are two peoples of the same tribe and with that realisation we have to bring peace.’