Deniz Adalı
November 2024 – Kaldıraç Issue 280
October 7 marks the anniversary of the day when the Hamas attack pierced Israel’s so-called Iron Dome defense system. On the one hand, this is the stage at which Israel’s arrogance of “we cannot be defeated” (akin to a thug placed in the neighborhood by his master, the United States) is pierced. But in reality, to suggest that this is where the war began, that is, with October 7, would be, as the expression goes, ahistoricizing. It goes back before that.
As they say, everything has a past, and there is no existence or occurrence without a history (you can also say without a time), without a place. On October 7, 2023, it is possible to conclude that the war did not start, but that a new phase of the war started, taking into account the previous stage, and taking into account the fact that Israel continues its massacres and attacks against the Palestinian people every day.
Keeping this in mind, it is possible to make an assessment of the recent state of war. Otherwise it would be wrong.
Three questions may be asked.
Firstly, an assessment about the current state of the war can be made. Accordingly, one can reflect on the gains and losses of the different fronts of the war. In other words, one year since October 7, one can begin to discuss which side is heading where.
The second one is to emphasize the tendency of the war to expand, in the current situation, to include the entire Middle East. Today, the war has reached Lebanon and, according to Erdogan (not because his words are plausible, but because of the burden of the phrase “look who said it”), there is even speculation of an Israeli attack on Turkey. Erdoğan is in fact not a person whose words are credible. But if this matter is being brought up as an agenda, even for the purpose of manipulation, it points out the seriousness of the proliferation tendencies of this war.
And third, will the spread of war be limited to the Middle East? As many regions of the world today have turned into powder kegs, the possibility of war spreading from every field is increasing.
Perhaps, one year into this new phase of the war, it is possible to discuss and evaluate these three points.
Let us start with the first point.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas, with its attack, changed the course of the “war” that had already been going on.
For one, the “two-state solution and the 67 borders” had been shelved, even though it had been resolved by the UN. In other words, no one was discussing Israel’s step-by-step progress anymore. Israel was making periodic moves. For example, it declared Jerusalem as its capital. Every month a countable number of Palestinians were being massacred. It was reinforcing its “prestige” (murderers have prestige too) with the Ibrahim agreements. This situation has changed after October 7. The resistance of the Palestinian people became the world agenda again. Dying step by step has replaced by a different process. The Palestinian who crosses into Israel every day in order to work is now able to leave all the humiliation there.
Secondly, the genocidal Israeli response to the resistance launched by Hamas has devastated Gaza. Buildings were destroyed, but the spirit of resistance was revived. Today, 14 organizations in Palestine (we may be wrong about the number, but 14 organizations can be counted) are active on the resistance front. Apparently, the destruction of most of the buildings, the bombs, do not always break the resistance.
Thirdly, despite the Palestinians being killed day after day, the Western world was going out of its way to whitewash Israel, and this covered up the murderous massacres of Israel’s administration. Israel’s “righteousness” was not only an idea supported by states in the Western world, but also the people, the large masses, did not see Israel’s brutal, murderous, genocidal stance. This is over. Western states, as part of the NATO mechanism, support and back Israel. It is as if the entire NATO mechanism is at war against the Palestinian people, indeed in the entire Middle East. Germany, without any shame, calls its genocidal policies “Israel’s right to self-defense”. So do other states. Scotland, Ireland, slightly Spain, seem to be voicing out, and they are not defending Israel. The majority of states are pro-Israel and support its massacres.
But this policy no longer resonates with the masses. Israel is recognized as a genocidal state both by its own people and by the peoples of the world. In a sense, the mask has fallen off. Israeli officials, without hesitation, have defended the slaughter of children. They have issued fatwas stating there are no civilians there, there are no children there, there are no human beings there. And in many Western countries, speeches of this kind have been uttered by so-called columnists and public figures. They give fatwas that children will grow up to be terrorists, they shout that it is right to kill them, and they still do not refrain from calling themselves human beings.
That is to say, support for Israel has, and is, in fact, stripping Western democracy of its scales. The West’s talk of “human rights” applies only to its own races, and even more so, only to the Western bourgeois class. And this is true.
Fourth, despite the devastated Gaza, the Palestinian resistance, including Hamas, continues.
Fifth, Israel’s sky cage or iron dome, its air defense system, has been breached many times and it is now clear that it can be breached. Moreover, the resistance front does not prefer to attack civilians as Israel does. This is an important point of distinction. It is clear that the resistance front chooses to attack military targets. To what extent they have succeeded in doing so is another matter, but if you look at Israel’s mass killings, it is possible to see the difference.
And sixth, in many countries, including Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq, support for the Palestinian resistance is growing. This support now expresses itself as a “resistance front”. The strength of this resistance front seems to be “weak” against Israel, which is supported by the US, Britain and NATO. Military experts, pro-Western experts, are constantly saying this. The message is: Since you are weak, since you have no chance of winning, then you must submit. The masters always maintain their sovereignty this way. But despite this, we are far from the point where the outcome of the war can be said to be automatically decided.
On the Israeli side of the war, other points should be added.
We may say the seventh. Israel is launching very violent attacks in its air operations. Today, while Israel continues the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, it is carrying out violent attacks on Lebanon. Yemen is being attacked by the US and Britain.
These Israeli attacks are aimed at destroying the entire people.
Let’s put it this way. If Russia had fought against Ukraine with the same logic, the civilian casualties and the devastation in Ukraine today would be horrible to even imagine. Of course the whole West would condemn it. But there are only a few Western countries that condemn the Israeli actions, Ireland and Scotland. We also have the condemnation of Spain, which is extremely hypocritical. Only when the attacks on Lebanon began, colonial France began to express its discontent. And so quietly that they do not even hear it themselves. While the entire West is witnessing protests against Israel, Western states ban Palestinian flags, chase and detain 10-year-old children.
Eighth, Israel is launching particular attacks on the leaders of the opposing front. Many leaders have been assassinated in Syria, Iran, Lebanon. This policy of assassination is, of course, designed to gain the psychological upper hand in the war. It can be noted that they have made some progress in this regard. But the explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies during the war must be recorded as the new peak of state terrorism. In the age of monopolies, will these “technological” attacks be carried out by Apple tomorrow? Monopoly means dominance. Market dominance and relations of dominance bring along violence at all levels. The modern mafia is a creation of monopoly capitalism. And this can be witnessed in the Israeli attacks.
In order to wage a large-scale war, Israel needs the support of the entire West, especially the support of the United States. This is the ninth point. An Israel with its sky cage pierced is spreading the war.
The desire to spread the war is no longer a secret desire. It is obvious and Iran is set as the target of the war. This is now clear. Iran’s desire to limit the war is presented as Iran’s weakness. By this means, ways are being sought for Turkey, for instance, to participate in the war on the side of Israel.
This brings us to the second part: The war is evolving into a regional one. There are many signs of this. Erdogan’s statement that “Israel will attack us”, after first saying that we will invade Israel, which is extremely funny, is clear evidence that the war has become a regional reality.
The US and the Israeli front, not to mention NATO, want to spread the war. Today, the attacks on Yemen on one side, Iraq on the other, Syria on the other, and Lebanon on the other, are all very evident.
This situation is in fact not a possibility, it is a reality.
The attack on Lebanon intensified in October, early October. The second Iranian strike on Israel and the unexpected Israeli casualties did not suffice to prevent the attacks on Lebanon. Israel seems to have no intention of stopping.
The question remains: Will Israel further resort to more violent attacks in order to end its collapse? Because one of the possible outcomes of the war, despite being supported by the West, is further loss for Israel. This possibility is apparent.
On the other hand, Israel is launching air strikes with great force. Although these airstrikes psychologically indicate Israel’s strength, in reality, they are not enough for Israel to win.
At this point, the following question can be asked: What is the real objective of Israel? War always has a purpose. This purpose is not simply about fighting. Israel has not been able to defeat Hamas in Gaza, to break the Palestinian resistance, despite razing it to the ground and massacring thousands and tens of thousands of people. Now, with the bombardments carried out in Lebanon, will it be able to destroy Hezbollah? The answer to this question is, of course, negative.
The US and NATO, the gods of war, actually want to wage war against Iran through Israel, after having succeeded in neutralizing Hezbollah. When Israel escalated the war, Biden declared that “we are strong enough to wage war both in Ukraine and in the Middle East”.
Thus, the US, which is heading the war, has clearly expressed its willingness to escalate the war. At this point, it would not be fortune-telling to predict that the targets of the war spreading in the Middle East will be Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The US intends to overcome its defeat in Syria this way. We can also include the defeat in Ukraine among these. Hence, the US will put Israel on the field more and more in order to escalate the war. On the one hand, this proves that Israel has been put in a very risky situation, and on the other hand, it proves that the tendency of the war to spread cannot be easily prevented. Israel’s seeming strengths also reveal a deeper weakness. Otherwise, practices such as blowing up pagers cannot be accounted as a show of strength. The majority of the deceased are children and the amount of bombs dropped is close to 10 times as much as Hiroshima. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear what Israel has gained. The ground war is a stalemate for Israel.
The United States is pursuing a war against Iran.
For this purpose, it wants to escalate the war to the Caucasus. The steps it has taken in this regard are evident in the case of Armenia. The US will not hesitate to use every contradiction in the region to inflict destruction on the peoples.
However, Israel, which has been used in this war, has now begun to experience the war within itself. As the war progresses, the tendency of the people of Israel to mobilize against the Netanyahu government, which was previously the case, is falling back at times. The whole society wants to be organized according to the war, to be brought into line. Of course, the resistance inside Israel has not ended.
Turkey is another front in the war against Iran. Its membership in NATO and the support given to Israel feed this view. With its Kürecik base in Malatya, Turkey is in fact providing great support to Israel. Moreover, quite openly, it supplies Israel with all kinds of goods, including oil, armored materials, iron, etc.
Turkey’s hypocritical policy is far from concealing the situation. For, the supply and support provided to Israel is both multifaceted and gigantic. This level of support cannot be hidden. Erdogan’s high-pitched statements, even if they are put in place to conceal this reality, are far from accomplishing this.
Turkey, of course, is accelerating its massacre policies against the Kurdish people, against the Kurdish resistance, using this war as an excuse. In this regard, it is accelerating its settlement in Syria and Iraq. This clearly means being a part of the war. In this turmoil, Turkey is making preparations for all kinds of attacks against the Kurdish resistance. The master, on the other hand, wants Iran to be encircled. But this is not so easy.
Of course, the important decision point of the war is to organize the attack on Iran. The USA, Britain and NATO are trying and will try every means to advance this war.
From here, it is possible to come to the third point. This point is the reality that the war is a worldwide war. The war has already become regional. There is no other step left except the direct involvement of Egypt, Turkey and Iran. They are also indirectly involved in the war.
The US is eager to expand its war against Russia through Ukraine with new moves against China. At this point, it is clear that it has put Japan, South Korea and the Philippines on a path.
At this point in the war, the lies of the West, of NATO, such as “Western values”, “Western democracy”, “human rights”, started to lose their power. This is a reality. Even though the Western front still maintains these discourses, this is the case. And in fact, the West has already thrown off these masks as it continues its attacks. In all Western metropolises, the masses are no longer fooled by these lies. Yes, they have not yet been able to put up an effective resistance at this stage. But nevertheless, it is obvious that the masks have fallen. This also means the collapse of the ideological arguments of the imperialist world.
The US-NATO front tends to wage a worldwide war without recognizing any rules. For this reason, it would be erroneous to look at the war only within the framework of its expansion in the Middle East. In all the centers of the imperialist West, war plans are being made again and again and preparations for war are being accelerated. The war industry emerging in this economic field, even if taken alone, gives a conclusion about the dimensions of the war preparations.
Whether the US and NATO are expanding this war with new moves in the Middle East, in Ukraine or around the China Sea, or whether they are doing it in more than one place at the same time, they will not hesitate to expand the war.
At this point, to assume that “nobody has lost their minds, there will be no room for a world war, a nuclear war”, is in fact not to understand the crisis the imperialist system is going through, and even more, it is not to understand what is called imperialism, if it is not childish naivety, if it is not a desire to nurture endless optimism.
The US is in the process of losing its hegemony worldwide. And no sovereign hands over hegemony easily. This hegemony is being undermined by China’s economic development, Russia’s entry into the field, the West’s loss of technological superiority and, finally, the tendency of the dollar to lose its international power. Yes, these are not yet complete processes. But the trend is apparent.
Now, we can go back to the beginning: Israel is not alone and it is not enough to ask, as if it were alone, what it wants in this war. This is a war for the redivision of the Middle East and, moreover, for the redivision of the world. Otherwise, it is not just limited to the insane demands of a fascist mob.
Anyone who is disturbed by this war, anyone who calls oneself a human being, has to be realistic if they want to prevent this war. This war will not come to an end by Israel somehow being satisfied, by the US somehow realizing the seriousness of the situation. Peace can only be achieved through struggle. Until the entire imperialist system collapses, there can be no real peace. The way to realize this, the way to stop the war, is for the peoples, the world proletariat to rise up. There is no other way than a wave of socialist revolution. Yes, many people will see our call for revolution and socialism as something impossible. After all, socialism was dissolved in the USSR and many shortcomings of the experience of socialism have been exposed. But let us think about it, if the humankind had been content with trying once and failing once, it would not have been able to develop the steam engine, or, for example, it would not have invented any vaccine, or, for example, it would not have landed on the moon, or, for example, it would not have invented the light bulb, or, for example, it would not have created works of art that are considered masterpieces. Therefore, the shortcomings of the experiences of socialism cannot cause us to discard the struggle for socialist revolution, for a world without war and exploitation, a world without the exploitation of human by human.
Today the whole earth is experiencing a situation in which the possibilities of overthrowing the capitalist-imperialist system have developed. The lack is in the forces that will fight for socialism and revolution, in their organization. And we know that these deficits can be filled extremely quickly. Sometimes history flows extremely fast. Decades fit into a year.
Today the question is this: What does it mean to remain silent, to be a spectator to the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza and Lebanon? This is a process in which the bystander ceases to be human. This is a process in which it is not possible to remain human by being a bystander. So, without losing a minute, join the ranks of revolution and socialism, join the struggle against the system, with whatever you have, right now, today. Finding a way to do this is an expression of the will to remain human.
Today, supporting the struggle of the working class is the only way to remain human. And revolution and socialism will get closer and closer with your struggle as well.
