Gaza: A horrendous Imperialist War and the Fight for Peace.
Nidheesh J Villatt
“The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilisation”
– Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet
“In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table”, writes Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, two American surgeons who were volunteering at Gaza European Hospital. These American doctors were writing about their experience of operating a “malnourished” 9 year old Palestinian girl Juri who ended up in the preoperative area of the hospital.
While describing the “topography of cruelty”, these two surgeons with a combined 57 years of volunteering in more than 40 surgical missions in the global south reiterated that “what we saw was unspeakable”. As these surgeons pointed out, UNICEF’s declaration of the Gaza Strip as the most dangerous place for children was hardly unexpected. The brutal reality that the children suffered was a reflection of the true nature of imperialism that ‘imperialism means war’; in this case perpetrated through the hands of its zionist lackey.
According to the official estimates by UN & WHO, by this time around 39,000 people were killed in Gaza Strip. However, The Lancet, a renowned British medical journal, has cautioned that the Gaza crisis’ true mortality rate could be much higher as it was sure to have been significantly underreported, with a possible death toll of above 186,000.The Lancet report titled “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential” estimated that “this would translate to 7.9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip”. If 7.9% of Indian population died, it would come to around 114 million people. This is the gravity of the terrible tragedy being unleashed upon the people in Gaza.
Considering the gravity of the situation, The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the apex UN legal authority, in its July 19 order ruled, “the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful; the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible; the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the occupied Palestinian territory; the State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damages caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; all states are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
Earlier, in May 2024, ICJ had ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. The colonial settler state went on ignoring all these orders with an ingrained character of pathological perversion. From the reports available from the Israeli local media, Israel soldiers have been openly admitting that they went on shooting and killing innocent Palestinian civilians for fun when they got bored. They also burned civilian homes after occupying them. For instance, +972, an independent magazine of Israeli and Palestinian journalists have carried testimonies of Israeli soldiers who killed civilians as part of fighting their boredom. “The testimonies paint a picture of a landscape littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or to be eaten by stray animals”.
This barbaric attack on Palestine has the total support of US imperialism. Palestine is a living example of Lenin’s insightful formulation that the primary method for resolving financial capitalism’s internal contradictions has become increasingly reliant on imperialist war. Writing his classic pamphlet on Imperialism in 1916, Lenin had exposed the claim made by the apologists of imperialism that “the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy”. Lenin categorically argued that “in reality it increases them”.
Writing about Gaza, Arab Marxist Ali Kadri recalls a postulation made by Lenin that “higher debt issuance by imperial powers signals war”. Drawing on Lenin, Kadri explains that “the higher the frequency and amount of credit issued, the more it forces society to be subjected to a higher rate of exploitation to meet future returns”. In a heavily financialised economy, war is the “big industry of capitalism”. The crux is that Israeli war “adds to accumulation by militarism on a global scale”, and thus tries to save monopoly capitalism characterised by the marxist law of the “Tendency of the rate of profit to fall”.
In a press release issued on June 20, 2024, office of the High Commissioner of the UN Human Rights quoted certain independent UN experts to officially record that the western financial companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America etc. might be going on profiting from the war on Gaza. This profit has come from their investment in the western arms corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Caterpillar, ThyssenKrupp, Rolls -Royce Power Systems etc. This proved that the military-industrial complex has leached bloody money from the marauding hunt for profit on the one hand and went on unrolling the war project to intimidate free nations with a view to expand the area of imperialist domination to the central Asia, which is the eye of the gas-basin. Both ways war has become all the more essential for the sustenance of the imperialist system. Its zionist lackey also shares this essentiality. They have become necessary enemies of peace.
This has become a chronic horrendous lethality that stares us in the face, all the more menacingly; due to the intensification of rabid imperialist hunt for natural resources and fuel, because of the failure of imperialist globalisation and its mantra of neoclassical economics and neo-liberal rule. To escape a catastrophic expansion of the hostilities into a regional war, the world people have to fight against this war project of imperialists and their rabid Zionist lackey for peace; peace that brings freedom and sovereignty to Palestine and begets peace for the world.
- Palestinians inspect the ruins of a building destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis in the southern of Gaza strip, on October 8, 2023. Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons ↩︎
- Palestinians inspect the ruins of Aklouk Tower destroyed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on October 8, 2023. Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons1 ↩︎