“Ceasefires” Bring No Respite

Since the US-brokered “ceasefire” deal between Israel and Hamas, tens of thousands of Palestinians have returned to Gaza to find their home reduced to rubble, divided in half and still under near-constant fire. Not a single day has passed without Israel continuing to attack and kill civilians in Gaza, with over 100 killed on Tuesday 28 October alone. The “ceasefire”, clamoured for by protestors across the world for years, is revealing itself to be nothing of the sort, as Gaza remains under siege while the IDF and Hamas carry out their grisly piecemeal exchange of the corpses of their hostages to be returned to their families to be buried. As part of Trump’s bogus deal, a yellow “ceasefire line” has been drawn down the middle of Gaza, serving the function of a de facto border and provoking the suspicion that the stage has been set for an annexation by Israel of half of Gaza.

To Israel’s north, Lebanon has likewise seen scarcely a day without another attack by the IDF since their “ceasefire” deal, also brokered by the US, a year ago. As in Gaza, so in Lebanon, Israel’s government has claimed that the purpose of its continued attacks has been to “destroy terrorist infrastructure”. The claim of “terrorism” remains key to Israel’s PR strategy, as the infrastructure the IDF have destroyed in both territories includes hospitals, schools and agriculture as well as housing, while on the ground their recent operations in Lebanon have included the storming of a municipal building to kill an employee in his sleep. Yet there is nothing unusual about Israel literally weaponising the accusation of “terrorism” to justify their endless attacks on civilians in their brutal military assault on their enemies’ territories; it’s exactly the same basis that the US used to justify its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively, it’s how Russia justified its invasion of Ukraine and it's how China justifies its persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

A Global Drive to War

Meanwhile, in Sudan, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were found to be using first French, then British military equipment provided by NATO allies, the UAE. The RSF currently also face accusations of genocide, in a civil war where hundreds of thousands have been killed, many more displaced, and over 30 million are in desperate need of aid in what certain NGOs have condemned as “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”, with the blood shed in the region visible from space.

The war in Ukraine, despite all the high-profile chatter between Trump and Putin, grinds on with tens of thousands dead on both sides. And following alleged sightings of Russian drones in Polish, Lithuanian and German airspace and reports of Russia testing a new nuclear weapon christened a “flying Chernobyl”, the UK and US have now imposed sanctions on Russian oil, triggering a surge in oil prices and, more crucially for both warring factions, forcing their allies into increased dependence and more explicit loyalty.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. According to various estimates, global military spending is reaching record levels while the world is already being torn apart by 56 active conflicts, numbers not seen since the Second World War.

US Reasserts Control

If this sounds like a demonstration of power on the part of the US, its motivation is just the same as any so-called show of force: the reality that its grasp on the global imperialist order is in fact slipping, with China hot on its heels. And in the absence of sufficient economic might to challenge its main rival, the US can only defend its position the same way as every capitalist organism under threat since the dawn of capitalism itself: with brute force. Since the advent of capitalism’s imperialist era (roughly the turn of the twentieth century), where economic competition has taken on the form of competition between nations and national blocs, this can only mean one thing: the descent into generalised war.

While on the international stage this takes the form of arms deals with its clients, and military threats and sanctions on its enemies (the latest example being the conflict brewing in Venezuela), on the “home front” Trump has explicitly threatened to use “dangerous” US cities as “training grounds” for the military. Trump’s omission to mention to whom exactly these cities are “dangerous” is entirely deliberate – they map out neatly onto cities that have seen spates of resistance to raids by the federal ICE agency, to defend migrants against forced deportation.

A System That Breeds War

It is not our place to decide which ongoing humanitarian tragedy merits the greatest part of our horror – not only because there is nothing to be gained from this for either the survivors or the dead, but also because we recognise that, like many deadly shoots of the same poisonous plant, they share the same root. Wars are escalating all across the globe because their shared motive force, the crisis of the capitalist system whose basis is the constant accumulation of profit which cannot escape its tendential fall, continues to intensify. There is nothing abstract or metaphysical about this: it is clear as day that the wars we are seeing are military escalations of the competing interests of capitalist states, and while the ruling class fret over how best to defend their bottom line from the safety of their war offices, working class people are killing and being killed on their orders in our thousands every day.

And any attempt to use their own rules, their own laws, their own moral codes against them is a fatal waste of time. The rules of war exist to justify and moderate the systematic massacres of human beings, and when their rules stop working for the ruling class’ own ends, they simply discard them; despite the best efforts of various governments to eliminate enemy journalists, thanks to social media, we are seeing this unfold in front of our very eyes. The war in Gaza, now considered a genocide by most major humanitarian organisations, provides a stark example. In the words of the UNRWA, “Gaza is becoming the graveyard of international humanitarian law … We have made the Geneva Convention almost irrelevant. What is happening and being accepted today in Gaza is not something that can be isolated; it will become the new norm for all future conflicts." It matters not to the masses slaughtered in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Tigray, Kashmir, Myanmar, whether their deaths are ruled as “lawful” or “criminal”. Not only will condemning their killers as criminals not bring back the dead, it will also not stop the massacres from continuing.

Nor can we hope for any respite in the redrawing of borders or the recognition of states. Since the dawn of capitalism, the formation of nations is anything but a peaceful process, and in the epoch of imperialism, the idea that a nation can be truly “independent” or “sovereign” in any objective sense is completely meaningless. There is no better example of this than Israel itself: formed by survivors of the last global imperialist massacre with the support of the victors of that war who then dictated the terms of the new world order, its existence as an “independent” state has in fact been as that of a client state of the US since the latter won the bidding war for its custom in the 1960s. It would be folly to expect any more favourable fate for a nominally “independent” Palestine than Israel’s “chains of gold”.

In this system whose inexorable need to accumulate profit generates increasingly brutal tyranny and wars without end, the only hope for any way out of the hell humanity has created for itself remains with the working class: the class whose labour produces the goods and provides the services from which all profit is produced and through which the system is reproduced. The class who across all nations of the world are sent to kill and be killed by one another in defence of the profits of our exploiters; yet who have no inherent quarrel with one another. In fact, across all nations, our interests remain one and the same: the overthrow of the capitalist system. It’s in this sense that the choice for humanity remains: socialism or barbarism.

The above article is taken from the current edition (No. 73) of Aurora, bulletin of the Communist Workers’ Organisation.

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Image: Hla.bashbash (CC BY-SA 4.0), commons.wikimedia.org