The two great powers most involved in the war against Palestine are inching toward their own moments of 
citizens’ electoral decision-making even as the death toll in devastated Gaza approached the 35,000 mark in this eighth month of the terrible war. Despite much furore against the war in both, the former Palestinian colonial power, UK, and, current biggest military underwriter, USA, the elections due later this year in both countries will not see any change in their war policy, analysts say.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports the gruesome daily experience ofwar-battered Gazans, sheltering in make-shift camps, having to avoid corpses being dug-up by dogs in the adjoining cemeteries which are ever-expanding due to constant burials. These are the kinds of niceties of life that the America’s and Britain’s ‘Free World’ claims to be upholding.
These horrors of Gaza continue to overwhelm the watching world community, as talks to end the military onslaught on the already pulverised tiny enclave (just half of Colombo district) seem stalemated. More bombing killed another 104 Gazans on Sunday. A rare salvo of the Gazan resistance militia’s usual, home-made, small rockets fired at the Israeli military siege-lines near the Kerem Shalom entry point to the Strip killed three Israeli soldiers, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) claimed.
Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, says it had fired “short-range rockets” at the blockading IDF units.The IDF said 10 projectiles had been fired from a location in southern Gaza, about 3.6km from Kerem Shalom which is one of just three entry points into Gaza maintained by the IDF in its more than a decade-long blockade of the Strip. The Gaza enclave (Gaza city itself was an ancient Phoenician port) has long been overcrowded with over 2 million people. They comprise the original native Arab population in its old cities along with a million plus permanent Palestinian refugees who were pushed out from their own neighbourhoods elsewhere in Palestine during the ethnic cleansing of 1947-48 in the violent creation of the Israeli state.
That ethnic cleansing,by the Israeli settler militia, with the colonial UK governorate standing by, drove out nearly a million people – over 80% of the indigenous population in the land of Palestine at the time. They fled their farms, villages, towns and into refugee camps on the periphery of their homeland – in Gaza and along the eastern borderland – and also across land borers into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. Some migrated to other Arab countries.
The Palestinians, have called this terrible experience of eviction from, and destruction of, their homeland, the “Catastrophe” (Nakba in Arabic).
Ethnic cleansing
Every year, the Palestinian people, now fully ‘stateless’, most of whom have been living as refugees in crowded, badly maintained, urban ghettoes on the fringes of neighbouring Arab cities, observe a ‘Nakba Day’ on May 15. Next week, for the 75th year, Palestinians, wherever they are, as well as millions of sympathetic people across the globe, will mark the Nakba, even as Palestine currently suffers another ethnic cleansing that is far more violent and environmentally devastating than the original Nakba.
With their natural growth, the number of stateless Palestinians now total some 6 million, mostly in other country refugee ghettoes but also in a few villages and townships in ‘official’ Israel as well as in similar refugee housing in militarily occupied Gaza and the West Bank.
Following Sunday’sunexpected deaths of three soldiers, the Israeli government has promptly closed the Kerem Shalom crossing, one of three routes through which supplies are supposed to be trucked into the permanently blockaded Strip. In any case, as UN and other emergency aid agencies keep saying, no where near the required quantum of supplies are being allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli occupying forces. The Gazans are dependent totally on externally supplied goods – even drinking water.
The political negotiation conducted last week in Cairo, Egypt, between Israel’s Likud coalition government and Hamas’ government in Gaza made little progress however, given the Likud representatives’ persistent refusal to end the IDF offensives. The other sticking point is the number of prisoners to be released by both sides. The talks are being conducted through interlocuters, namely the US representing Jerusalem and Qatar representing Hamas.
Anyone who watches or reads international news these days (for the past six months) will know of the massive death toll in Gaza, and the hundreds killed by IDF units (and the army-backed, marauding illegal Israeli settlers) in the West Bank.
Equally important are the thousands of Palestinian civilians – including women, children, elderly – seized from the West Bank by the IDF and held in Israeli jails since October 7. The United Nations has counted more than 4,700 Palestinians arrested in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem since that date.
This is in addition toall those officially detained or abducted un-announced by Israeli forces in recent years in their raids on Palestinian neighbourhoods both in ‘official’ Israel (i.e. within the pre-1967 borders) as well as in the (post-1967) Occupied territories – in effect the entirety of the region once called Palestine.
By April 2024, according to UN counts, more than 9,312 Palestinians in total were being held in Israeli prisons.
Israel seemingly wants the release of all Israelis detained by the Hamas-led resistance force that attacked across the IDF siege lines on October 7th. While some 250 prisoners were taken by the Gazan raiding forces on October 7, more than 30 were foreign migrant workers (mainly Asian). These were all released.
Coalition
Israel says that Hamas still holds about 130 prisoners, and wants them all returned at once but does not give any guarantee to end its military operations.
And, in exchange, Premier Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud party coalition is ready to release no more than a few hundred of the nearly ten thousand Palestinian detainees currently held in Israeli prisons, including children, teens, and older women and men.
The Likud coalition has an internal consensus on obtaining the release of all Hamas-held Israelis because it is a huge issue of political and electoral importance. Opinion polls indicate that if a legislative election is held now, the Likud would do badly possibly pushing Netanyahu out of power. That could expose the once-popular Premier once more to police and judicial actions on various corruption charges.
But the ruling coalition is wracked with internal differences over an end to military operations. Two ultra-conservative, Zionist parties, that currently help prop up the coalition with its voting strength in the Knesset (parliament), threaten to bring down the regime if it agrees to any permanent ceasefire.
All the coalition parties now find themselves trapped by their original promise to totally “eliminate” the Hamas movement by swift military action in vengeance for the October 7 attack. Six months on, that endeavour has been neither swift nor indicative of the effective military action needed for this purpose. Half a year of unrestrained war, using every tactic other than the nuclear strike that some Zionists call for (fortunately many Israelis are vocally opposing such an extreme action), has gone by. The Gazan militants are still able to occasionally fire a small salvo of mostly ineffective missiles.
Just as much as the Israeli government is trapped by its electoral rhetoric, thereby seriously prolonging the ongoing humanitarian disaster affecting the whole region, so are the major political forces in the United States also trapped by their own promises to stand by Israel “come what may”.
Elections
The US holds its next presidential elections this November and both the incumbent, Democratic President Joe Biden, as well as the main opposition Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, are locked in a very tight race. Political pundits are unable to make a clear prediction of the outcome.
But all pundits unhesitatingly affirm that whichever party comes to power, America’s active sustenance of Israel’s very militaristic strategy will continue. The only difference might be in the coherence of strategy and implementation that the Democratic Party can deliver and the almost chaotic incoherence of governance – both domestic and in foreign relations – that Donald Trump epitomises. Certainly, Jerusalem will prefer the coherence. The Republican leadership is there, however, to ensure that Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies and incompetence do not seriously affect Washington’s continued underwriting of the West’s Israel project.
In the United Kingdom, too, elections are due in the autumn but there is a clear front-runner. All opinion polls indicate that Labour is set to return to power in Westminster after 14-years in Opposition. Last week’s local government elections saw the Labour Party emerge dominant in much of the cities and towns.
London’s charismatic Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, secured a record third term. Analysts say that the vote swing in the local elections was one of the biggest in decades.
In the UK, too, the governmental change is not seen as causing a significant shift in foreign policy, especially any shift from London’s unhesitating sustaining of the war against Palestine.
This is because it is the UK and the US that were the original initiators of the post World War 2 creation of the state of Israel on Palestine land. All this implies more war and suffering in the months to come.
However, given the shifts in the larger global order and the heightened volatility of the world economy, analysts cannot see any long-term sustaining of the current disastrous geopolitical violence.
