By: Aphra

06 May 2025

Profits and power are all war is good for. War brings out the very worst in some people. The fact that it also brings out the best in some is no compensation for the horrors that the worst unleash – on innocents, non-combatants, civilians – the majority of whom are women and children, and the elderly and infirm.

Wars have always harmed innocents; even in the days when armies fought each other on a battleground, there was a massive toll on non-combatants.

• Innocent people whose homes and animals were destroyed and whose lands were laid to waste.
• Innocent men forced into fighting and dying in wars that benefited only their masters.
• Innocent women who were raped or murdered or maimed or left destitute.
• Innocent children who died or were crippled or traumatised by seeing the world they knew reduced to ruins, and the people they loved and relied upon, killed or crippled.

Modern high-tech warfare is predicated upon the killing of huge numbers of non-combatants whose humanity and suffering are cloaked by arguably the most soulless of euphemisms ever devised – collateral damage.

The warmongers and their lackeys sit on their well-padded backsides in safety and comfort agreeing on such things as the justifiable ratio of dead and injured non-combatants when weighed against the achievement of any given military objective – the principle of proportionality –  arguably the most obscenely cynical and self-serving formula in a world heaving with them.

Behind the veneer of seemingly civilised debate about what is an acceptable level of collateral damage, not once do the warmongers or their lickspittle lackeys stop and ask whether any number of dead innocents is worth what they have done or are planning to do.

Of course, they can’t afford to pose that question; they have to tell themselves their wars are fought for good reasons– in self-defence, the righting of serious wrongs, or preventing more from being committed.

The acceptability of a formula to calculate a justifiable number of dead and maimed innocents, is strengthened by the reverse telescope effect that is created by great individual and national power. The greater the power, the greater the distancing of the lives, and the diminution of the worth and the humanity of powerless people, especially those who are labelled as the “enemy”.

Strip away the layers of lies and obfuscations, and the truth is exposed in all its simple, unadorned monstrousness – war is always about self-interest, greed, and the obsessive pursuit of power.

A justifiable response to an unbearable harm or an existential threat

The horror show that is modern warfare is obscured when the actions of demonstrably monstrous belligerents are repackaged as righteous, as a justifiable response to an unbearable harm or an existential threat.

All of this is nowhere more apparent than in Zionist Israel’s attempt to obliterate the Palestinian people in pursuit of its aim to spread its increasingly fascistic wings over the part of the Middle East to which Zionists lay arguably the most spurious of historical, religio-cultural and indigenous claims.

The Israeli state was born out of Zionist extremism and acts of terrorism perpetrated by the same sort of far-right ethno-nationalists as those who now wield far too much influence in the country.

The moment that Yitzak Rabin was murdered by a right-wing fanatic, the Israeli far-right stepped up its plans to kill the peace process, to divide the Palestinian people geographically and ideologically, and to subject them to persistent repression intended to provoke reactions which could then be used to justify even more brutal forms of repression.

That has culminated in what most of the world sees now as a calculated act of genocide, an attempt to destroy an entire people, not just by both indiscriminate and targeted bombing via guided missiles, drones and planes, but also by starvation achieved by destroying the means of food production and cutting off food aid. Added to the bombardment and starvation is the real threat of mass deaths by disease caused by the killing of medical staff and destroying hospitals, clean water supplies etc.

Longer term, just like the Americans did in Vietnam, Israel will leave a legacy of birth defects caused by exposure to carcinogenic, endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging substances contained within armaments and/or released as a result of what the armaments destroy.

Whole families have been wiped out in seemingly calculated attempts to annihilate entire bloodlines. Infrastructure containing the repository of personal data about Palestinian people has been destroyed, stranding already stateless people in a civil vacuum.

Not only have almost all civilian structures been bombed to rubble, the IDF targets the people and the machinery capable of rescuing victims trapped under the ruins of their homes, schools, hospitals, clinics, shops. Untold numbers of innocents, including babies and children, have died waiting for rescuers who can do nothing because the IDF has destroyed heavy equipment, and it targets rescuers with drones and sniper fire.

The situation for women is especially dire. Not only do they and their children comprise the majority of the 52,000+ dead, the survivors – women who are pregnant or breast feeding, women who have lost children or given birth to horrifically damaged babies, or who are seeing their children slowly starve to death or facing death from water-borne diseases, older and disabled women – all suffer a heightened level of trauma.

The use and the threat of sexualised violence by the IDF and settlers against Palestinian women, men and children is well documented. It is as brutal as it is calculated to “dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part”.

All the lifelines – not just in terms of material aid but in the comfort gained by knowing that people outside are seeing and care about what is happening – are being severed by Israel.

Any other country that slaughters aid workers, medicos and journalists in the way the Israeli military has done would be condemned by the US and Europe, but they not only enable Israel’s war crimes, they also sycophantically agree with the war criminals when they declare that any criticism of their actions is a “blood libel” and antisemitic.

Gaza is among the cruellest and most barbaric acts of state belligerence the world has ever seen, and it is being seen with more immediacy and graphic horror than wars on civilians usually are.

When the US attempted to obliterate North Korea, killing upwards of 1 in 5 North Koreans and wiping out almost all civilian infrastructure, killing almost all domesticated animals and incalculable numbers of wildlife, no one saw it, and the US and its allies lied about what they’d done and why.

Bizarrely, the ability to see the full horror of modern warfare seems to have had a desensitising effect on some people in the west.

There are those who loathe the “enemy” so much that they wish death on babies, and there are those who hide from the reality of thousands of shredded children by claiming the footage is all fake, and they deploy such hasbara words as “Pallywood”.

There are some who seek solace in a studied ignorance, or in comfort blankets like feel-good stories about the rescue of a dolphin caught in a fishing net, and there are others who shrug and ignore it as an unwelcome distraction from their comfortable, hedonistic lives.

And there are politicians and other people of influence who tug their forelocks to the US-Israeli axis, express support for what Israel is doing, repeat the claim that it has the right to defend itself even when it is obvious to all people of common sense and good will that the obliteration of Gaza is a war crime of historic proportions.

The politicians who do the USA’s bidding and support Israel are at least honest about their collusion with an axis of power that is committing atrocities and taking us towards global war. Those who do not support it but say nothing, are cowards.

The waves and forms of Palestinian resistance

We cannot understand the waves and forms of Palestinian resistance unless we understand the inter-generational effects of the initial forced displacement of Palestinians and the obliteration of all vestiges of Palestinian occupation of the land followed by a rewriting of history through a Jewish supremacist and anti-Arab lens.

We have to acknowledge the ways the Israeli state has kept that initial wound open and bleeding via decades of constant provocations and humiliations dished out to Palestinians at the hands of the IDF and settler zealots.

We must also acknowledge their actions in the Occupied Territories, the longest military occupation in modern history, which, given Israel claims it has been under constant attack there, by international law should be termed “Invaded Territories”.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Hamas attack of Oct 7th was either incited by the Israeli state or at least the preparations for it were allowed to proceed.

There is no doubt that many of the Israeli innocents killed on that day died as a result of the actions of Israeli pilots – either panicking and firing indiscriminately or having been ordered to kill enemy combatants with no regard for the deaths of their own people, or because of the monstrous Hannibal Directive – the order to kill their own to prevent them from being taken hostage.

To hide the truth from their own population, and to lay the foundation for justifying what they were about to unleash, the Israeli government and compliant media and NGOs concocted a number of horror stories, accusing the Hamas fighters of acts of the most extreme savagery and depravity.

There is no doubt that atrocities were committed by Hamas fighters or by men who followed them through the gaps in the suspiciously easy to breach border, but even by the twisted logic of proportionality, what has followed is obscene overkill.

This is happening because the Israeli government is hostage to some of the most extremist right-wing politicians in a largely right-wing world; it knew that enough frightened, grief-stricken people and those already full to the brim with fear and loathing of Arabs, would believe the stories of the rape and mutilation of women, and beheaded babies.

They also knew that all of the latter group, being utterly mired in the swamp of racism, zealotry, and confirmation bias would continue to believe the stories, despite all the compelling evidence to the contrary.

They continue to trot out the most inhumane justifications for the fact that most of those killed in Gaza are women and children, and among the survivors desperately trying to live in the ruins of their world, women and children are the most vulnerable to death and injury from snipers, bombs, disease and starvation.

Variations on the hasbara theme

Even in parts of the left we hear variations on the hasbara theme that this is all the fault of Hamas. They are fundamentalist monsters who force the “most moral army in the world” to kill non-combatants by hiding among civilians.

They line up behind far-right Zionist propagandists and give voice to forms of Islamophobia seeming to forget or ignore the role that the west, including Israel, has played in the fomenting of Islamic extremism in order to defeat socialism.

They cite the claim that the Israeli state is the only democracy in the Middle East in which women’s and LGB rights are assured, unlike all Muslim states. They choose to ignore or downplay the patriarchal division by sex that lies at the heart of all the Abrahamic religions – an unbroken line from Judaism to its two vigorous offshoots, Christianity and Islam.

These leftwing supporters of Israel ignore the fact that it is a democracy which advantages Jews, and women and GNC people have formal rights and social freedoms only as long as the Israeli far right doesn’t become strong enough to curtail or remove them.

What these people on the left who support Israel don’t know or choose to ignore is that Israeli far-right extremism is more powerful than ever, and it is rooted in the supremacist, anti-democratic and racist legacy of the likes of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Its obsessive focus and its influence have been increased both by the October 7^th attack, and by the Israeli casualties of the resulting counter attacks on Gaza.

There has been an increase in the influence in government, the military and media of overtly supremacist, racist and anti-democratic groups accompanied by a rise in racist far-right rhetoric on social media which also spills out into national discourse.

If this was happening in Israel alone it would be worrying enough, but the Israeli far-right is part of matrix of international extremist movements meaning that far-right Israeli narratives converge with broader anti-migrant and anti-Muslim narratives across the west.

Something the lefties who support Israel don’t acknowledge, much like the lefties who could not see past their hatred of Assad to what was likely to follow his removal, is that Kahane’s extremism extended past a loathing of Arabs into a hatred of secular and liberal Jews.

If his extremist ideology gains more power, how secure are the democratic freedoms that Jews in Israel currently enjoy? How secure is the world?

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