Dear Friends,                                                                                                What Now?

I’m not putting in the photographs, you’ve seen them, you can look them up any time. Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, just for a start.

What now?

Guernica, Nanking, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, even Hiroshima and Nagasaki rose again. Vietnam (with Cambodia and Laos) where bombing focused more on rural areas – but do not forget the 1972 “Christmas” bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong – is still fighting the war against dioxin; but its cities thrive.

Ukraine depends on ending the war with territorial integrity. Achieving that end has become vastly more difficult now that the Federal Government of the US no longer exists. But Ukraine and its people have shown not only an almost unimaginable will to resist aggression, but also a strategic and tactical skill that has few equals. When the war is won Ukraine will be rebuilt by its people, though terrible scars will always remain.

I don’t know about Syria.

Gaza … Gaza and the West Bank. The only entity, the only agency that could conceivably rebuild Gaza, truly rebuild it for and with its people, is the sovereign State of Palestine.

Everyone knows this. Netanyahu certainly does, that’s why he’s planning the total occupation of Gaza, and the forcible expulsion of the Palestinian population.

This is one more catastrophe for the Palestinian people, another Nakba. Against it, the first and foremost goal must be true self-determination for the people of Palestine.

What about everyone else? The people of Israel, for example. Will their peace and security be advanced by the ethnic cleansing of Gaza? That’s complicated – or maybe it isn’t. Anyway:

First: if you destroy people’s homes, their cities and villages, their hospitals, schools and universities, reducing them to rubble with 2000 lb. bombs; if you show that you are quite willing to kill them all … then the animosity towards you of those who survive will be multiplied a hundred-fold.

Second: what are you going to do with those who survive? You have the power of life and death over them – they know it, they’ve seen it, we know it. Are you going to kill them all, as you have killed so many thousands of their families, their relatives, their neighbors? What will you do with the millions of bodies? Remember, killing them all will not end the hatred, their kinsfolk will take it on, but, once again, multiplied a thousand-fold by what you have done. Are you going to expel them all from their homes – ruined as they are? Where to? Or will you just leave them there, but now commanding them directly, the iron heel stamping on the human face? Remember, they hate you far more than ever, and for very good reasons. Direct and violent coercion of a large population doesn’t usually work out very well.

Third: and let’s get back to Israel and Palestine, how long can the Israeli government maintain something like its current policies? From the beginning, Israeli governments have been tempted to found Israel on the right of conquest. The early Labour governments did try to resist the temptation; yielding to it has always been implicit in the Likud governments. The present government rests on nothing else. Rejection of the two state solution is merely a corollary of the fundamental right guaranteed by force.

Israel, defying theology, has become the last Crusader State. The fate of all the others is not a good sign. The thing about the right of conquest is that it only lasts for as long as the conqueror can hold down the conquered. If the conquered are significant in number then the conqueror’s right will always be in question. All the other Crusader States fell because the conquered finally conquered their conquerors.

The destruction of Gaza, the genocide, is the right of conquest carried to its limit. It is hard to see how the Israeli government can escape its own military “triumph”. What now? looms over not only the government but the people of Israel.

But my concern now is for the people of Gaza. What can they do, what can we do so that their future is something more than bombs and the iron heel?

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby