For over 6 months, the imperialists who trumpet the virtues of their so-called “rules-based international order” continue to support the genocide of Gaza. The US, Britain, Germany, and France continue to sponsor and sell arms to their settler-colonial Zionist state. Even the Irish government, who talk big on Gaza, have overseen a massive increase in dual-use weapons trade with Israel. From 7th October 2023 to the 8th February 2024, Ireland approved dual-use export licences with a value of €31.4 million to Israeli end users.1 Shannon airport transits soldiers and arms to and from the region and the government flatly refuses to inspect the aircraft. At their ard fheis, Fine Gael members voted down a motion proposing to enact the Occupied Territories Bill and recognise the state of Palestine.2 Simon Harris may pretend he is “repulsed” by Israel’s actions in Gaza, but as UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said in March: “there’s this tendency to be very supportive with rhetoric, as Ireland has, but when it comes to taking concrete actions, there is zero. Not a little. Zero.”3
Albanese’s landmark UN human rights report “Anatomy of a Genocide”4 is unequivocal on what the West has facilitated. She examined Israel’s actions and patterns of violence since the 8th of October 2023 and concludes the threshold indicating their commission of genocide has been met. The stakes now could not be higher. Food and water is blocked from reaching displaced Palestinians. Deaths by starvation are on the rise, Palestinians seeking aid are being attacked, water is contaminated by sewage, 50,000 pregnant Palestinian women and 20,000 newborn babies have been put at risk by these conditions imposed by the Zionist regime, increasing miscarriages by up to 300 percent. The IOF is systematically destroying all of Gaza’s hospitals, educational institutions, slaughtering patients and medical staff. As I write, nearly 400 bodies have been discovered in mass graves surrounding two hospitals. Many appear to have been tortured and executed, others buried alive, some beheaded.5 Israel’s relentless targeting of all means of basic survival has engineered a collapse of life-sustaining infrastructure and corresponds, writes Albanese, “to the stated intentions to make Gaza ‘permanently impossible to live in’ where ‘no human being can exist.’”6
While the IOF centres its attention on the destruction of Gaza and its people, it takes thousands of casualties, and relentless coordinated destruction of military equipment from the resistance forces in a guerrilla war on the ground in Gaza. The IOF are also entangled in constant military engagements at the Lebanese border and the occupied Golan Heights with Hezbollah and Iran-
backed forces operating out of Syria. The economy is suffering. Most airlines have suspended flights. Yemen’s Ansar Allah, and now Iran, are militarily disrupting Israeli trade and shipping in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. The Iraq resistance forces have been striking US bases in both Syria and Iraq. The Axis of Resistance is making the IOF onslaught costly.
Iran and the US don’t want a wider war in the region. Israel appears to be willing to draw the US and Britain further into a conflagration from which they would not easily detach themselves. The 1st April 2024 bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus and the response illustrates this. The US claimed they were not involved, had no forewarning of the attack and warned Iran not to respond. To add insult to injury, the US, Britain and France refused to condemn the attack at the UN Security Council. Iran sent hundreds of drones and missiles, less than a dozen of which hit military targets. There was clearly a high level of back-channel coordination for this “slap” to Israel. Yet the response, while dramatic, was clinical and measured and designed to limit escalation. Iran got to demonstrate their deterrence capacities, and they restored prestige by showing restraint while letting it be known they will not keep taking hits lying down.
One resistance strategy, as once elaborated upon by Hassan Nasrallah, is to free Palestine without having a wider war. To constantly increase the insecurity and the cost of the existence of the Zionist state, and of doing business with it. Until the settlers’ life becomes intolerable, and slowly they leave. The brave activists in Ireland confronting government politicians, breaking into Shannon (solidarity to the Shannon Three!), disrupting complicit businesses like AXA, are adopting Nasrallah’s strategy to the local context.
The settler colonial Zionist state is the foremost embodiment of the central historic contradiction, that between imperialism and the working people of the Third World. It is the quintessential instrument of imperialist domination, controlling trade and energy routes, fueling instability, undermining sovereignty and working to de-develop and dominate the peoples of the region. The liberation struggle in Gaza is the world’s most intense insurrection to the world-ending imperialist project of capitalism. Solidarity with Gaza and the resistance is solidarity with a better future for all humankind.
1Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, written answer 5477/24, Thursday, 8 February 2024 2‘Fine Gael votes down motion to enact Occupied Territories Bill’, The Journal, April 6th 2024. 3‘Government’s lack of a meaningful response to Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘shameful and disgraceful’’, Irish Examiner, March 25th, 2024. 4‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, Human Rights Council Fifty-fifth session, 26 February–5 April 2024. 5‘Signs of torture as nearly 400 bodies found at gaza hospitals mass graves’, Aljazeera, 25 February 2024. 6Ibid, p.11.
