Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip is failing. Bibi Netanyahu’s coalition war cabinet vowed to wipe Hamas off the map and create the conditions for a second Nakba. Instead it is facing mounting casualties, and through its savage bombardment, testing the patience of its sponsors, with US President Biden forced to admit that it is “starting to lose support” and in danger of becoming more of a liability than an investment.
The army has incurred so many losses that it has dedicated a webpage to aggregate them. The recent incident that epitomizes this defeat — as reported by Mouin Rabbani — Israeli generals stated that the Izz-al-Din al-Qassam Brigades and the Jerusalem Battalions of Islamic Jihad (PIJ) were on the verge of collapse. Two days later, ten soldiers were killed in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood on the eastern fringes of Gaza City, closest to the boundary with Israel. The highest daily toll of military casualties since 7 October.
The myth of imminent victory sprouting from the mouths of generals and politicians hides a deeper, more uncomfortable, truth: Israel is losing the political war. The warnings of political disaster are being voiced by a growing number of establishment analysts.
In a major assessment, The Nation magazine drew parallel with the Tet Offensive that shook the US occupation of Vietnam in 1968. The logic of guerrilla warfare inverts the conventional meaning of traditional military victory. In the words of Henry Kissenger: “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”
Arie Krampf echoes Kissinger’s sentiment in Adam Tooze’s substack, he details how the intifada dealt a heavy blow to Israel’s economy. According to Central Bank estimates the Palestinian uprising was costing Israel as much as 3.8 percent of its GDP: “The outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 turned the game upside down. The failure of the Camp David Summit in that year marked the end of the peace economy.”
The Nation notes that, “in 1968, the Vietnamese revolutionaries lost the battle and sacrificed much of the underground political and military infrastructure they had patiently built over years. Yet the Tet Offensive was a key moment in their defeat of the United States — albeit at a massive cost in Vietnamese lives. By simultaneously staging dramatic, high-profile attacks on more than one hundred targets across the country on a single day, lightly armed Vietnamese guerrillas shattered the illusion of success that was being peddled to the US public by the [US president] Johnson administration. It signaled to Americans that the war for which they were being asked to sacrifice tens of thousands of their sons was unwinnable.”
If the stated purpose of Israeli counterinsurgency lies in breaking the resistance from its popular base, the role of the insurgent is to rebuild the bridge with its own population while politicizing war in the imperialist’s backyard. Following that logic, if the Tet Offensive was successful in reenergizing one of the largest anti-war movements in the US, the 7 October offensive was successful in shattering Israel’s aura of invincibility within the settler community, the region and the world.
Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet and commander of the Navy confirms the logic of political victory over short-term military goals. Drawing from the Sheikh Jarrah incidents of May 2021, he wrote: “When there was fighting during two weeks and around 300 Palestinians were killed (to 17 on the Israeli side) — Israel thought that Hamas “suffered a huge loss and a huge military defeat” but from Hamas’s standpoint it was “a huge victory” because this led to Hamas, for the first time, getting more than 50 percent of the support from the Palestinian people.”
A recent poll of Palestinians vindicates this. In the West Bank, support for Hamas stands at 44% (compared to 12 % three months ago), and for Fatah at 16% (from 26%). In the Gaza Strip, support for Hamas today stands at 42% (from 38%) and support for Fatah dropping to 18% (from 25%).
The current onslaught on Jenin and the West Bank alongside the intensification of bombing in the south of Lebanon and Syria, signal Israel’s need to expand the conflict. The Israeli army has suffered severe losses which has prompted it to intensify its collective punishment and killing of the palestinian population. The latest Abu Ghraib reenactment, where dozens of Palestinian men were stripped to their underwear, blindfolded and made to kneel in Beit Lahia, is a confirmation of this.
These tactics are for internal and external consumption.
The Israeli ruling class is fractured, the only glue holding it together is agreement on the oppression of Palestinians. The recent protests demanding Netanyahu’s resignation are driven by demands for a technocratic and tactical form of genocide that could “regain” Israel’s shattered reputation. You can almost hear Israeli oppositionists whisper: “Let’s return to 6 October, as this form of occupation is more acceptable to the world”.
Expanding the war would allow the IDF to prolong its genocidal campaign and squeeze as much support from its allies. But a regional war is making its allies nervous. The US remained steadfast in its diplomatic and military support to Israel — from awkwardly deleting tweets calling for a ceasefire to bypassing Congress and invoking national security to approve a sale to Israel of more than $100 million in ammunition — but increasingly unhappy about the war. US Secretary of State Blinken unabashedly stated that, “There needs to be a premium put on protecting civilians… I think the intent is there, but the results are not always manifesting themselves”.
What is at stake is Israel’s intent, not actual results on the ground. This dichotomy ignores statements from Giora Eiland’s, a retired Israeli general and former national security advisor. He wrote: “Gaza’s weakness is its lack of resources. It has no energy, no food and not even water. As such, it can be easily defeated by means of an economic blockade. Hamas is pleased to see its subjects getting killed by IDF fire. But it is afraid of hundreds of thousands of starving and hopeless civilians rising up in rebellion.That is an outcome that can be achieved by creating a severe shortage in medical treatment, food, cooking gas and fuel.”
Israel’s plans of “wiping Hamas off the map” by any means necessary seems to have been replaced by a strategy to exasperate and expand the blockade, ensuring the “de-development” of Gaza once again, to borrow from Sarah Roy.
As Jehad Abusalim reminds us: “After Israel’s occupation of Gaza in 1967, one of its initial actions was the destruction of the Gaza (Shuja’iyya) train station.
This station connected Gaza to the broader Levant region, and after the 1948 Nakba, it still served as a link between Gaza and Egypt.”
As geographer Lisa Bhangalia in her research on USAID and Kareem Rabie in his research on neoliberalism in the West Bank have shown, there is an interrelation between the aid industry and the military-industrial colonial complex.
Israel destroys infrastructures using US armament; and EU or opportunistic Gulf states and/or Turkey pay for infrastructure construction; only for that to be destroyed. This cyclical logic benefits the construction firms; financial schemes; and the international aid industry. The logic of settler-colonialism is resumed.
Again, The Nation’s use of the historical precedent of the Tet Offensive is a useful guide: “The Vietnamese leadership measured the impact of its military actions by their political effects rather than by conventional military measures such as men and materiel lost or territory gained.”
The Palestinian resistance is firmly invested in Israel’s psychological exhaustion, demonstrated by its willingness to engage in PR stunts while releasing Israeli hostages, promotional videos of resistance fighters blasting military vehicles and Hamas commander Abu Obeida’s carefully curated speeches that contain enough soundbites for Al Jazeera’s instagram posts. The Palestinian resistance, as true representative of contemporary guerilla warfare, measures its victories by their political effects even though it is also faring extraordinarily well in conventional military measures.
While any attempt by Israel to politicize any criticism — characterized by Netanyahu stating that “investigating Israel’s war crimes is pure anti-semitism” — has failed to derail the growing global solidarity movement.
Much has been written on the Blowback: The Gaza war’s massive toll on Israel’s economy. Kit Klarenberg warns that, “Israel may never recover from its post-October 7 economic collapse. The Palestinian resistance managed not only to destroy Israel’s internal security perception, but also to erect significant risk barriers for foreign investors.”
Less has been written on the role of organized labor in the creation of logistical chokepoints that enable the suffocation of the settler-colony.
In his attempt to “avoid the national question in Israel-Palestine”, Emilio Minassian claims that, “Gaza, in the last instance, ‘depends’ on national Israeli capital. And as long as Israeli capital hasn’t authorized the development of another, ‘Palestinian’ capitalist entity at its side, the Gazan proletariat, even under siege, is regulated by its economic circuits.”
As Adam Hanieh states, Israeli capital is deeply implicated in the settler-colonial project alongside that of the Gulf kingdoms. Hanieh shows that a full understanding of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip needs to integrate the internationalization of Gulf capital with the exigencies of Israel’s occupation that is mediated by the Palestinian bourgeoisie represented by the Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian working class has shown its willingness to break with the settler-colony, especially in the construction, sanitation, hotel, and restaurant sectors, as well as the ranks of taxi drivers and bus drivers. The Palestinian working class is thus not an inanimate object that is pushed around by the Israeli settler-colony while it is managed by Hamas, it is the living subject of history that is shaping the class struggle in Palestine by combining resistance with strike action.
Palestinian activists and grassroots organizations called for a global strike on 11 December to demand an immediate ceasefire. This was supported by The National and Islamic Forces, a coalition of major Palestinian factions.
Although well-meaning, these calls have failed to coordinate with major trade unions around the world to synchronize a call for a global strike. The strike was observed predominantly by shop owners and sections of the petty bourgeoisie sympathetic with the Palestinian cause.
Entire neighborhoods in Beirut, Amman and Brussels responded to the call and vowed to do so again on 18 December. However, the global working class holds the real power to stop the genocide. Workers in Palestine, a collection of Palestinian trade unions call to #stoparmingIsrael has been endorsed by trade unions around the world.
At the time of writing, dockers and port workers at the European Dockers Council workers took action to halt arms trade; fourteen trade unions and over two hundred civil society organizations from Spain had launched a campaign calling on the government to end its arms trade with Israel; members of the Turkish Liman-İş Sendikasıunion at the port of Izmir stood in solidarity with the Palestine;
USB and SI Cobas dockworkers and community activists blocked a Zim shipment in Porto di Salerno;
Maryan Apparel Pvt Limited in Kerala; the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE); Unite the Union South West Staff and Officers Branch; The All India Central Council Trade Union; and S.I Cobas in Italy, the trade union representing all workers in the Barcelona port. Trade unionists and activists in the UK blockaded the arms company BAE Systems; Raytheon offices in Goleta, California were shut down; CGT Getafe, Airbus workers in Getafe Spain stood in solidarity saying “no to arms sales to Israel”; Belgian transport unions refused to load and unload weapons; While the UAW, the United Auto Workers in the US, has called for an “immediate, permanent ceasefire”.
More pertinently all major Indian trade unions representing over one hundred million workers, have called on the Indian government to scrap agreements with Israel, specifically those pertaining to sending Indian workers to replace the Palestinians, appealing to workers to boycott Israeli products and to refuse to handle Israeli cargo. These represent a fraction of the examples of growing support for Palestine in workplaces, schools, universities and across the world.
Furthermore, we should not underestimate the impact of the naval operations carried out by Yemeni Houthis and Somali pirates in the Red Sea that are targeting Israeli commercial ships. These operations are a painful blow to the occupation economy – 98% of Israel’s maritime trade goes through the Mediterranean or the Red Sea.
The Yemeni operations are creating a chokepoint to all commercial movement exacerbating the collapse of the already brittle Israeli economy and the effective closure of the Red Sea aIsrael has lost this war.
These operations are a painful blow to the occupation economy – 98% of Israel’s maritime trade goes through the Mediterranean or the Red Sea. Some of the top global shipping lines, such as MSC and CMA CGM, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have stopped using the Red Sea and Suez canal. l as an international coalition headed by the US to protect shipment titled “Operation Prosperity Guardian” continues its bombing of Yemen, its effectiveness remains limited exemplified by Biden conceding that the “airstrikes are not stopping the Houthis” but that they will resume nonetheless. Bombings over results. Commodities over humans. Shipment over aid. Weapons over ceasefire. The impetus of a crumbling empire endures.
In addition, these operations raised more than tenfold maritime insurance rates. It is likely that Israel will stop transport through the Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and divert ships to the already crowded port of Haifa.
In practice, this means that cargo ships coming from countries such as India or China will have to circumnavigate Africa which will lead to higher costs. The goal of the Houthis is to retaliate with an economic blockade on the supporters of the genocide, despite the anger and resentment by the Arab regimes.
Israel’s weapon and surveillance export: the aura of invincibility dissipates
Palestine has long been the laboratory for advanced military equipment. As Paddy Dowling reported, “Weapons tested in each war Israel wages see a spike in global demand. The current Gaza war is the latest laboratory for its arms industry”.
Israel’s military industrial complex is a global industry. As researchers at Workers in Palestine have shown. Israel’s manufacturing of weapons, surveillance equipment, monitoring and spy technology are exported based on their efficiency which is tested on Palestinians.
But what happens when surveillance equipment that is meant to safeguard the settler-colony fails? The political and security failure of 7 October laid bare the efficiency of surveillance equipment and monitoring and spy technology that did not deliver.
Dowling adds that, two weeks after the Hamas offensive, “The Israeli army released footage on October 22 of its Maglan commando unit deploying a new precision-guided 120mm mortar bomb called the Iron Sting, against Hamas in Gaza. The bomb’s Haifa-based manufacturer, Elbit Systems, has been advertising its qualities on the public relations page of its website since March 2021, when it was integrated into the Israeli military.”
Israel is trying to save face by highlighting other “precision-guided” weapons in its arsenal such as the Iron Sting. Additionally, and as Israel’s surveillance equipment and spy technology hardware needed a facelift, the NYT claims that “Israel knew about Hamas’s plan more than a year before the attack took place”. Again, the two contradictory and yet complementary facets of settler-colonialism are laid bare.
The use value of settler-colonialism is to protect settlers against indigenous insurgents. Its raison d’être is predicated on its ability to secure the ever-expanding project of settlers. Setting up a settler-colony is expensive and is not a sustainable project, this is why it needs to be part of the imperialist project but it is its most costly endeavor. This is where the exchange value of the settler-colony is introduced. Spyware, surveillance equipment, weaponry, food and green colonialism and technological investments are all part of the long term projects of the settler-colony to make it sustainable.
“Making the desert bloom” the famous Israeli idiom about Palestine might be more about the settler-colony’s internal sustainability than what it was originally meant to characterize, a piece of heaven in an infertile, chaotic and hostile environment. This exchange value has clearly clashed with the originally use value of the settler colony.
The NYT attempt to restore Israel’s reputation proves one thing: Israel values its exchange value more than its use value. As the Hannibal directive proves, it values its ability to export surveillance equipment more than it values the lives of its settlers; undermined efforts of normalization and weakened the Arab regimes; reinvigorated the Palestinian resistance; mobilized millions across the world in solidarity with Palestine; precipitated internal and external contradictions to a point of no-return, where anti-colonial insurgent logic becomes the norm and not the exception. This is why it is not just losing this war, it has already lost this war.