Gaza is a generational touchstone and the key dividing line of politics in the West. It has laid bare the lies of the society we live in. It has exposed the genocidal bloodlust of the political right. And it has tested official “progressive” liberal politics, which has so often shown itself to be utterly hollow or cowardly.
Anyone can now use Google Maps’ satellite view to see for themselves the apocalypse wrought by Israel and its allies over the past three years. Gaza City, once home to around 700,000 people, is a mostly bombed-out hellscape of ruins. The same is true of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and other major centres.
Rafah was a city thousands of years old, first recorded in an inscription from 1303 BCE. It has now been wiped off the face of the earth. Google still displays location markers for what once existed: “Kamal Adwan School”, “Playground”, “Musab bin Amir Western Mosque”, now a pile of rubble—“temporarily closed”, according to Google.
About 80 percent of structures in the Gaza Strip have been damaged; two-thirds of those are destroyed, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. Israel has used the so-called ceasefire since last December to systematically demolish remaining structures in the 60 percent of the Strip occupied by its forces, while killing another 1,200 Palestinians and herding around 2 million into unliveable tent cities in an ever-shrinking concentration camp.
When millions around the world poured into the streets to take a stand against this barbarism, they were viciously attacked and slandered by the institutions of our “democracy”, which have cried about “social cohesion” while turning a blind eye to the genocide and the growth of fascism they are helping to stoke.
The ruling class and the political establishment want to go after not just the Palestine movement, but the left more generally, which has naturally been at the centre of that movement. Hence the persistent effort to define antisemitism as a problem of the left rather than the far right, to ban the word “genocide”, and to criminalise opposition to the state carrying it out.
This is not because loyalty to Israel itself is so important to the establishment, but because this loyalty test is a proxy for loyalty to Australian capitalism; a test of subservience to Australian billionaires, bosses and bureaucrats.
Will you keep your mouth shut? Will you force that student to remove their keffiyeh? Will you cancel that author? Will you censor that article? Your answer will determine your place in Australian society. With troublemakers pilloried and purged, the apparatus can be hardened, ready to oversee the next war, the next genocide, the next round of cutbacks and layoffs, the next racist campaign against immigrants and refugees, as capitalism lurches towards its next crisis.
Despite the establishment’s intimidation and slander, and partly because of it, a seismic shift in attitudes has occurred. A July Pew Research poll found that 79 percent of Australians have a negative view of Israel, and just 4 percent have a strongly positive view. Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets. The movement globally has been big, defiant, and defining for so many people who have thrown themselves into it.
Yet it has not produced a widespread radicalisation or a sizable new left committed to confronting and overthrowing the capitalist system more broadly. There are many reasons for this, from the relative weakness of far-left organisations going into this period, to the weakness of the workers’ movement and spinelessness of trade union leaders.
The depth of feeling and moral commitment to the cause of Palestinian liberation is palpable, but the general political level remains low. Instead of generalising from the atrocity in Gaza to develop a critique of capitalism and imperialism, there is an obsession with the pro-Israel lobby, and there are illusions in reactionary opponents of the US and Israel such as the Iranian regime. Instead of open debate about the best strategies and tactics of resistance, recriminations focus on who is qualified to lead campaigns against the Australian government—not based on ideas or organisational skills, but on individuals’ identities.
While our side sustained the largest anti-war movement in Australian history, the far right, rather than the left, has emerged as the most organised political force and is making all the running to push society in its desired direction: more racism, more militarism, more exploitation and fewer democratic rights.
We must continue to demand a free Palestine, while also throwing ourselves into the urgent fight against One Nation and the disgusting extreme right movement they are building. Ultimately, we must build a socialist left that offers a vision of hope, solidarity and a challenge to the whole system that underlies these horrors.
