Last month, from August 5 to 7, the State of Israel heightened its ongoing military conflict with Palestinian forces in the Hamas-governed Gaza enclave, provoking a low-intensity battle with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a minor far-right Sunni Islamist party, as well as smaller PIJ-allied factions. In an operation codenamed “Breaking Dawn,” the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched a barrage of so-called “targeted airstrikes” into the Gaza strip, the densely urbanized Palestinian enclave bordering the southwest corner of Israel. PIJ and its allies returned fire, launching around 1,100 rockets into Israel, without definite targets.
The IDF airstrikes hit apartment complexes, a cemetery, and other public buildings and areas, and killed at least 35 people — 13 enemy combatants, 2 police officers, 5 uninvolved Hamas and Fatah operatives, and 15 Palestinian civilians, including 9 children — according to reports compiled by Ha’aretz. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is reported to have unintentionally killed 14 Palestinian civilians, including 7 children, with malfunctioning rockets that hit urban areas in Gaza, including a refugee camp; these reports, initially made by Gaza-based journalists, have been corroborated by the Associated Press. According to Al-Monitor. Of the 900 or so PIJ rockets that reached Israel, over 97% were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system. No IDF soldiers or Israeli civilians were killed during Op. Breaking Dawn. By the end of the IDF–PIJ battle, at least 49 Palestinians had been killed, while as many as 360 were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Overview of the IDF–PIJ Battle
The battle followed a series of recent escalations by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the occupied West Bank. On March 22, an ISIS operative carried out an attack in the southern Israeli city of Be’ersheva, killing four civilians before he was shot dead. Over the next few months, sporadic shootings, car rammings, and knife attacks were carried out by Palestinian militants, dubbed a “new terror wave” in the Zionist press, which altogether resulted in 19 Israeli casualties — mostly civilians, plus some border police and soldiers — according to Time Magazine. The IDF responded with mass arrests in the West Bank — over 500, according to the Times of Israel — sparking violent clashes. By the end of July, according to Al-Monitor, 53 Palestinians had been killed by the IDF. The epicenter of these escalations was the Palestinian city of Jenin, situated in the northern West Bank, where over 30 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF this year, including a famous Al-Jazeera journalist who was covering an IDF raid.
The “West Bank” is the area east of the 1949 Israeli–Jordanian armistice line and west of the Jordan River, designated by the 1992 Oslo Accords, along with Gaza, as the territory for a Palestinian state in the U.S.-formulated and internationally-endorsed “two-state solution.” Despite the formation of the State of Palestine in 1993, most of the West Bank is either directly controlled by the State of Israel or militarily occupied by the IDF, with Israeli administration based in the large swathes of the territory that have been settled by Israeli citizens since Israel’s victory in the 1967 “Six-Day War” — a situation that is condemned by almost all countries, international bodies, and relevant NGOs as an illegal occupation, violating international law. The only country that has consistently defended the occupation, aside from the State of Israel itself, is the United States of America, which has used its permanent seat on the UN Security Council to veto UN General Assembly measures, such as sanctions, against Israel. Successive far-right Israeli governments, as well as the current big-tent government, which includes “socialists” and a center-right Arab party, have supported continued settlement expansion and indicated plans to eventually officially annex most or all of the West Bank.
On August 1, the IDF raided Jenin and arrested Bassem al-Saadi, West Bank leader of al-Quds Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s military wing. During the raid, the IDF also shot and killed a 17-year-old PIJ militant, Dirar al-Kafrini, in a brief firefight.
In response, over the next few days, PIJ leaders in Gaza threatened retaliatory attacks against Israel: As quoted in the Jerusalem Post, Khaled al-Batsh, chair of the PIJ politburo, declared on August 3, “We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel.” Between August 2 and 5, the IDF and al-Quds Brigades prepared installations on either side of the Israel–Gaza border.
On August 1, as tensions escalated following al-Saadi’s arrest, Israel closed the Gaza border, interrupting fuel transport. By August 6, the lone power plant in Gaza was forced to temporarily shut down for lack of fuel. The residents of Gaza, who usually have access to electricity for only 12 hours per day, were reduced to 4 hours per day of electricity for the duration of Op. Breaking Dawn.
Finally, on the morning of August 5, after last-minute UN and Egyptian negotiation attempts failed, the IDF launched what the Israeli government characterized as “preemptive strikes” on PIJ positions near the border, initiating the battle.
Israeli Interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered the strikes without consulting his Cabinet, after obtaining the approval of the “left-wing” Attorney General of Israel, Gali Baharav-Miara, who signed off on all military actions short of a formal declaration of war. Lapid took his current position as “interim” Prime Minister in July — barely a month before authorizing Op. Breaking Dawn. He is, however, a veteran functionary within the occupation-state, having previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, and Minister of Strategic Affairs (which largely deals with efforts to counter the global, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the Israeli state, Israeli industry and trade, and Israeli academic and cultural institutions). Many political analysts, both in Israel and around the world, have speculated that PM Lapid, who is behind in opinion polls ahead of the upcoming 2022 Israeli general elections, initiated Op. Breaking Dawn to drum up support from his right-wing militarist base, which currently favors former PM and current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Likud Party by wide margins. Such cynical and violent political maneuvering is common in Israel. Palestinian lives are often taken in military operations ordered by Israeli politicians and military officials to boost their political clout.
In any event, Israel’s purported justification for “preemptively” bombing Gaza, namely to maintain “public security,” is clearly false. Given the near-perfect success rate of its U.S.-funded Iron Dome defense system in intercepting rockets, Gaza-based militaries present virtually no danger to Israeli civilians. Commentators in Israel and worldwide widely condemned the IDF strikes as unprovoked, as well as extremely disproportionate.
Moreover, as a matter of “military ethics,” it is standard procedure for Israel to carry out targeted assassinations of enemy combatants and politicians regardless of whether civilians may be harmed. A widely-cited 2005 article by two Israeli authors in the Journal of Military Ethics, titled “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” has served to entrench the practice, especially in “targeted airstrikes” against Palestinian militants in Gaza. When the IDF murders a 5-year-old girl, as it did in its “targeted airstrike” on Tayseer al-Jabari, al-Quds Brigades commander for northern Gaza, this is considered justified as an acceptable counter-terrorism casualty by Israeli politicians and the Zionist press. This policy has been repeatedly decried as “collective punishment,” a violation of international law, by most countries in the UN General Assembly, and is one of the many violations that have raised demands to have Israeli officials tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Al-Quds Brigades retaliated by 9:00 p.m. on August 5, several hours after the first IDF airstrikes. The PIJ was joined by military cadres from the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Maoist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), two minor Communist parties in Palestine.
On August 6, the Israeli Occupation Forces arrested another 19 members of the PIJ in the West Bank. The occupation carried out further raids, arrests, and assassinations of Palestinian militants and politicians in the West Bank for the duration of Op. Breaking Dawn, storming refugee camps, forcibly arresting Palestinian freedom fighters, and starting gunfights that killed more Palestinian children.
After three days (66 hours) of IDF bombardment, Egypt, which often takes the role of mediator between Israel and Palestinian forces in Gaza, successfully organized ceasefire talks between Israel and PIJ. The ceasefire was brokered Sunday, August 7, and a representative of the UN Security Council confirmed the next day that the ceasefire had gone into effect on Sunday, shortly before midnight.
In all, Op. Breaking Dawn and the violence precipitating its authorization has been the most intense in Palestine in just over a year — since May 2021, when Israel and Hamas, the party that governs Gaza, with support from PIJ, fought an 11-day battle. The May 2021 outbreak resulted in over 200 Palestinian casualties in Gaza — 128 civilians, according to the UN, and between 80 (according to Hamas) and 200 (according to Israel) militants — with over 2,000 people wounded, as well as 14 civilian casualties in Israel, inlcuding Jews, Arabs, and South Asian migrant workers. The battle coincided with riots in major cities, including Lod, Akko, and Jerusalem, characterized by bombings and arson attacks against homes, synagogues, and mosques, as well as racist lynch mobs, in which one Arab and two Jewish civilians were killed. Irregular fighting in the West Bank and along the Israel–Lebanon border resulted in the deaths of 28 Palestinian militants, one Hizbullah militant, and one Lebanese civilian. This outbreak followed months of protests in Palestine and worldwide over the planned evictions of several Palestinian families from their homes in the predominantly Arab, affluent, and historically politically influential Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, amid ongoing Zionist efforts to replace the current residents with a Jewish majority.
The Situation in Gaza
The Gaza strip, centered on Gaza City, is internationally recognized as part of the State of Palestine, but currently stands as a de facto state of its own, territorially and politically independent of both the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. Gaza has its own government, military, and civil infrastructure. However, Gaza remains economically dependent on Israel, which, in partnership with Egypt, enforces a naval blockade of Gaza, and controls the territory’s fishing waters and energy supply. Much of Gaza’s workforce commutes to Israel for jobs. Gaza also relies heavily on foreign aid, primarily from wealthy European Union countries. The enclave has been governed by Hamas, or the “Islamic Resistance Movement,” a right-wing Islamist organization, since 2007, and various Hamas-aligned Palestinian forces also operate within the enclave.
The present situation began to take shape in 2005, when Israel unilaterally “disengaged” from Gaza, demolishing all Jewish-inhabited settlements and forcibly removing all Jewish residents from the territory. Full civil and military control over Gaza was then handed over to the State of Palestine.
Elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) were held in 2006. At that point, since 1993, when the State of Palestine was formed, Fatah, a centrist and secular nationalist party, had been the sole governing party, winning an outright parliamentary super-majority in the 1996 Palestinian PLC elections and the presidency in the 1996 and 2005 Palestinian presidential elections. However, in the 2006 elections, Hamas, running for the first time, won an outright majority (74 of 132 seats) in the PLC. This was despite concerted U.S.–Israeli efforts to fix the election in favor of Fatah: USAID spent millions advertising for Fatah, while Israel prevented Palestinian residents of eastern Jerusalem, projected to favor Hamas, from participating. (Eastern Jerusalem is claimed by the State of Palestine as its capital, but was unilaterally annexed by Israel in the 1980 “Jerusalem Law,” after being taken from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.) Additionally, electoral factions had formed within Fatah over allegations of corruption, splitting its ticket. Not only was Fatah unseated, but so was the Palestine Liberation Organization, the big-tent coalition of Palestinian parties that formed in 1964 to organize the Palestinian nation (including the diaspora) for international recognition, initiated the Oslo Accords, and helped lead to the formation of the State of Palestine.
Initial attempts to facilitate a peaceful transition of power failed. Although Hamas had officially taken leadership, Fatah officials refused to recognize its authority. Fighting broke out between Hamas and Fatah, starting with minor clashes and assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, and then escalating to a low-intensity civil war. By the time peace talks had successfully ended the fighting, Hamas had been forced out of the West Bank and retreated to Gaza, which it wrested from Fatah. Thus, since 2008, Gaza has been governed by Hamas, while the West Bank has been governed by the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is more aligned with Hamas than Fatah, and is actively pursued by the Israeli Occupation Forces, has made Gaza its base of operations, although it is also active in the West Bank.
No elections have been held in the State of Palestine since 2006, largely because Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and current president, is corrupt and increasingly unpopular. If an election was held in the near future, Hamas would almost certainly win an even larger majority than it won in 2006. The prospects of such a result are against the interests not only of Fatah and Israel, which has a stable working relationship with Fatah, but also the imperialist interests of the U.S., European Union, and Russia — the major parties to the “Quartet on the Middle East,” which has facilitated the “Israeli–Palestinian peace process.” The Quartet insists upon the fundamentally unjust, and increasingly unpopular, “two-state solution,” in which the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine remains divided between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine — one state that privileges a Jewish majority and another state that is almost exclusively Arab.
Hamas has waged four major battles in an ongoing “war of attrition” against Israel since it took power in Gaza. However, it stayed entirely on the sidelines during the August 2022 IDF–PIJ battle. “Our people are waiting for the Palestinian resistance to take the decision and retaliate.” So said Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, on the night of August 5, 2022. IDF jets had already killed at least 10 people, three of whom were civilians, including a five-year-old girl named Alaa Qaddoum.
Continued Raids in the West Bank
On August 9, two days after the Israel–PIJ ceasefire, the Israeli Occupation Forces raided the city of Nablus in the West Bank. Their target was Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a 26-year-old commander of a local cell of Fatah’s network of armed militias, collectively known as al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Al-Nabulsi stands accused of planning a number of attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers and has been wanted by the occupation forces since February this year. Rather than surrender himself to arrest, al-Nabulsi and two others barricaded themselves in a residential building and prepared to fight to the death; in a final video stream, al-Nabulsi said he would die a martyr and implored Palestinians to “never forsake the rifle.” A firefight broke out between the occupation forces and Palestinian militants, and over 60 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were injured in the crossfire, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.
Fatah issued a statement on al-Nabulsi’s death, in which they declared that “the cowardly crime of assassination will only increase our people’s determination.” The PFLP said the resistance “has emphasized the failure of the occupation,” and Hamas hailed the epic heroism of those who died protecting al-Nabulsi. Armed resistance has become increasingly popular among Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly the younger generation, and the various parties and factions are responding to this trend. The more the Israeli forces intensify military pressure, the more closely the freedom fighters across the Palestinian political landscape — whether affiliated with Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, Hamas, or the PIJ — will be forced to stand together, and the more closely Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization will be drawn towards the necessity of reconciliation.
At the same, despite the official statements issued by the entrenched, corrupt, and stale Fatah leadership, the bravery displayed by al-Nabulsi and other young militants reveals the party’s growing unpopularity with the Palestinian masses. The revolutionary youth of Palestine are increasingly looking towards armed resistance, even in those cells attached to Fatah, rather than the “legitimacy” conferred by the U.S.-led “international community” for the party’s adherence to the unjust “two-state solution,” its two-faced collaboration with the State of Israel, and its total dependence on the import of financial capital from imperialist Western European state-sponsors.
The bigger picture: Israel and U.S. Imperialism
This explosion of Zionist militarism in the past year and more is the latest chapter in a century-long genocide that has its origins in the Zionist political movement that emerged in 1880s Western Europe.
Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer, formulated the nationalist ideological framework, which he described as a “colonial” movement in his diaries, after witnessing the antisemitic “Dreyfus Affair” in France, and as a direct response to the so-called “Jewish Question” — i.e., what to do with the Jews in Europe? The proposition put forward by “racial” antisemites as early as 1750, that Jews are a parasite attached to the “white race,” and should therefore be removed from European society, was a pillar of later Nazi ideology and culminated in the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Herzl’s utopia was a world in which antisemitism had been eliminated by reconstituting the Jewish people, then dispersed in diaspora communities across the world, as a nation-state in Palestine; a world in which the Jewish people were “normalized,” because they would have become like any “normal” European nation-state. (Of course, with historical hindsight, we know that the establishment of the State of Israel has done nothing to eliminate or diminish global antisemitism.) Amid fresh waves of pogroms in the Russian Empire and new antisemitic laws throughout Europe, the nascent Zionist movement managed to recruit large contingents of the Jewish bourgeoisie, liberal intelligentsia, and some rabbinical authorities by convincing them of the proposition that Jews needed to, and could successfully, leave Europe, as well as all other regions of the diaspora, for Palestine. The Zionists proposed a bargain with the colonial powers of Europe: In exchange for funding Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Zionists would open what was then an underdeveloped, feudal region of the Ottoman Empire to Western European capital. Herzl initially attempted to convince the Ottoman sultan that the Jews would, in exchange for Palestine, develop the region and support and level out Turkish monetary policy. The sultan, mainly concerned with holding together his crumbling empire, could not afford to draw ire from Muslims and Arab nationalists in Palestine, and refused. The Zionist movement then turned to the powers of Europe, especially the British Empire.
This evil bargain lies at the basis of the Zionist project. In 1947, nearing the end of the British Mandate, a civil war broke out in Palestine between the Jewish Yishuv (Hebrew for “community”), which included a mix of centuries-old Jewish communities and recent arrivals, and Arab nationalists, supported by armies from the surrounding Arab-majority states. By 1948, following the Israeli declaration of independence, the Zionists achieved their biggest success: the destruction of Palestinian civil society by the ethnic cleansing of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — half of the Arab population of Palestine at the time. This was the Nakba (Arabic for “cataclysm” or “catastrophe”). Since then, continuing to the present, the Israeli Occupation Forces have sought to “complete” the Nakba by utterly annihilating the last vestiges of Palestinian sovereignty and nationhood.
In the decades since the Nakba, Israel has sought abroad for sponsorship from the imperialist states, and found in the U.S. Empire a willing partner. In the post-war order, the ghouls at the heart of U.S. imperialist foriegn policy were willing to sponsor any state or group that could be used as a bulwark against the threat of Communism. At a time when Arab nationalism would dovetail with socialism and the development of Communism in the Arabic world — indeed, right as the growth of pan-Arabism threatened imperialist oil production — the Cold Warriors of the U.S. Empire stepped on the scene to back the Israeli occupation and genocide. This has been the status quo until today.
Those behind the occupation sit comfortably in their mansions in the Berkshires, their penthouses in New York City, their enormous ranches in the occupied U.S. countryside, and in the White House in Washington, DC. The architects of the Palestinian extermination, the Nakba, the Cataclysm, are the monopoly capitalists of the United States Empire and the lickspittle politicians that serve as their agents. Neither of the major parties differ when it comes to Israel and the occupation: both are wholly and entirely dedicated to completing the Palestinian genocide abroad, just as they are both dedicated to completing the Indigenous genocide at home.
But who are these capitalists? How are their interests served by the genocide? The U.S. embassy itself explains: “[c]ritical components of leading American high-tech products are invented and designed in Israel, making these American companies more competitive and more profitable globally.” Cisco, Intel, Motorola, Applied Materials, and HP all have partnerships, research labs, or factories in occupied Palestine. Some 2,500 U.S. firms have their homes in Israel. Israeli capital coming into the U.S. in investments is approximately $24 billion USD. U.S. capital has established a “free trade” agreement with the Israeli occupation government, and trade between Israel and the U.S. was worth $50 billion USD in 2016. Israeli markets are inter-penetrated by U.S. products, extending the lifespan of U.S. capital. Thanks to the imperialized periphery, Israel has the highest concentration of engineers and PhDs per capita in the world: a veritable nation of petit-bourgeois technical experts, ready-made to provide war technology that will first be tested on Palestine before it is used abroad by the U.S. military.
The average factory worker in Israel makes 79,000 Israeli New Shekels per year — the equivalent of $24,162 U.S. Dollars. The average salary for a factory worker in the territorial U.S. in 2022 is $32,507. Capital can be put to use in advanced technical manufacturing in Israel for far cheaper than in the imperialist center. This means the more jobs that U.S. monopolists can export to Israel, the higher the general rate of profit. Advanced electronics can be manufactured there cheaply, and then resold in the imperialist heartland at the price they would have cost if they had been manufactured inside the US.
Perhaps most importantly, the colony of Israel stands at a crossroads of global oil trade, and from the military bases within its borders, the U.S. can exert pressure on its “allies,” like the US-backed dictators of Saudi Arabia, as well as its enemies, like the anti-US government in Iran.
It was none other than the leader of the current criminal regime in the White House, sitting U.S. President Joseph Robinette Biden, who once declared that Israel was so strategically key to the empire that “[i]f there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved.” Every year since 1985, the illegitimate settler-empire of the U.S. has given the settler-state of Israel at least $3 billion U.S. dollars. In 2019 alone, the U.S. also gave Israel $4 billion U.S. dollars in military aid. The U.S. guarantees $8 billion U.S. dollars in loans. These numbers don’t even begin to capture the so-called “foreign military financing” provided to Israel on a yearly basis, or the fact that a large amount of the equipment in use by the IDF is American. Indeed, the IDF uses Gaza as a testing ground for advanced US-imperialist weaponry.
In every sense, Israel is now a colony of the United States, which provides its arms and armaments. The U.S. Empire has a vested interest in the colony, and in making sure it thrives at the expense of Palestinian lives. Israel, just as much as the United States, is the enemy of liberation everywhere. In exchange for Yankee weapons, the Israelis teach the Yankee police how to choke and kill; in Israel, they stand on the neck of Palestine. In the US, they stand on the neck of New Afrika.
The Zionist Israeli government is a single link in a vast chain wrapped around the throat of the world. That chain has its anchors in the United States.
