The global left supports Palestine, or at least believes it does.
To the point of praising Hamas, whose members are labeled as partisans of the Global South resisting the broadly and negatively perceived West. This resembles the grotesque Kremlin propaganda defending its aggression against Ukraine.
Today, we witness a new pattern, dragging an area usually sensitive to Jewish causes into what is improperly defined as anti-Semitism.
How can this be explained?
The basic explanation lies in the crisis of political representation amid societal change.
The case of the (Nouveau) Front Populaire in France is emblematic, going beyond the construction of so-called islamo-gauchisme (a bizarre synthesis of Islamism and Marxism) played by Mélenchon. This group calls for the mobilization of French Islam in a way that echoes “class struggle.”
Islam is identified with the banlieues and irregular immigrants, and in the inevitably subversive and conflictual logic of the extreme left, represents the violent force that can overturn the balance from below.
This is true for various social centers and university associations outside France as well. They don’t care about Palestine, but this subversive proletarian unity, the eternal utopian engine of poor titanism, matters greatly.
A second explanation considers the instrumentalization of the extreme left, always functional to the system it deludes itself into rebelling against and is literally a servant of, to play a role in the formal design of political frameworks after the partitioning, akin to a Yalta Conference but to the cube, that is taking shape globally.
If this helps the extreme left here to design a globalization of the orks, it may help to provide the small and unfree State of Palestine that will be formalized with an islamo-gauchiste mix, which will always and inevitably answer to Tel Aviv and the petro-monarchies.
For Israel, this will be a return to an old method. Since after the Six-Day War (1967), Israeli embassies, particularly in Paris, funded and guided Palestinian Marxist circles to simultaneously counter Arafat’s leadership and exacerbate international terrorist tension, preventing support for the Palestinian cause globally.
With the Soviet implosion and the failure of the communist illusion, Tel Aviv turned to religious extremism, even being involved in the constitution of Hamas. Many years later, Netanyahu publicly welcomed Hamas’s funding by Qatar, as it would hinder the recognition of the Palestinian State. And here the interests of those who want to keep the tension high with no way out agree. Whether in Israel, in the Wahhabi autocracies or among the religious internationalists who, from Tehran to ISIS, have disintegrated the Arab cause, various environments, even hostile ones, share this interest.
The New York Times, a newspaper close to the American Jewish community, revealed that on October 7th, the head of Mossad, David Barnea, visited Qatar, clarifying to the government there that the Prime Minister was in favor of Doha’s continued financial support for Hamas.
Not to mention the Egyptian and American warnings of the imminent attack.
After resolving the Gaza issue, Tel Aviv will need to find another “manageable” enemy, likely an islamo-gauchiste entity, as Hamas has become untenable.
We are not here to speculate on how October 7th happened, whether it could have been avoided, or if it was allowed to happen, but simply to understand the meaning of the management of this conflict. It cannot be summarized by racial and religious hatreds, though they are marked, because these hide significant divisions on both sides and also substantial materialistic objectives.
The motivations for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the attacks to the north by Israel are not explained solely by the present concerns of military security. They must also be sought elsewhere, both in Israel’s internal difficulties, where secular modernists coexist with fanatical zealots who reproduce like rabbits and, exempt from military service, invite their coreligionists to get killed to provide them with lands to cultivate, and in the design of the new international order and the role that Tel Aviv has already assumed in it.
Since 2019, Israel has begun transforming into an Israeli-Arab energy hub. It started with the partnership signed that year with Saudi Arabia, which Tel Aviv has been supplying with gas ever since. In 2020, the Abraham Accords followed with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and effectively Morocco.
On September 20, 2023, 17 days before the Hamas attack, a new agreement was signed with Saudi Arabia, and the formal recognition of a Palestinian state became essential.
Presumably, this small state will not have access from anywhere other than Israel and will have to be reduced in terms of territory and population.
Hence the military strategy that aims, among other things, to eradicate the Rafah crossing and prevent potentially uncontrolled access to the Palestinian reserve.
In this action, Israel can count on Egyptian complicity, as since 2014, Cairo has been destroying homes and crops around Rafah, within its own territory.
In recent years, Israel has reached an agreement on maritime borders with Lebanon, initiating the exploitation of the Karish field and injecting new resources into its own energy market.
The discovery of large quantities of natural gas off its coasts has represented for Israel not only an economic opportunity but also a factor of national power.
The increase in energy prices in global markets and the growth in national production have allowed for significant profits.
The discovery of the Tamar and Leviathan fields has considerably reduced energy imports, transforming Israel into a net exporter of natural gas by 2020. Since then, much of the gas produced by Israeli fields has been exported to Egypt through the East Mediterranean gas pipeline, an infrastructure that connects Ashkelon with the Egyptian city of Arish and was initially designed to supply Israel with Egyptian gas.
Israel’s “maritime shift” towards submarine gas has led to strengthened relations with Egypt and the creation of a solid partnership with Cyprus and Greece. Israel’s participation in the East Mediterranean Gas Forum can be seen as part of this phase of renewed regional activism.
Israeli companies like NewMed Energy have expanded their portfolio by investing in hydrocarbon exploration in Moroccan waters, while in September 2021, Mubadala, the sovereign fund of Abu Dhabi, invested one billion dollars to purchase a 22% stake in the Tamar field. While natural gas remains at the center of these energy relationships, there have also been significant investments in renewables and hydrogen.
Cooperation in these areas is also at the heart of some regional or interstate cooperation platforms in which Israel has recently participated, from the Negev Forum to the I2U2, the recently established forum with the United Arab Emirates, India, and the United States.
Over the course of two decades, Israel has transformed from a country dependent on hydrocarbon imports to a net exporter of natural gas.
But also in the strategic hub of common Israeli-Arab capitalist interests, being drawn more to the east than to the west. It is de-Westernizing itself.
All of this helps explain the scorched earth strategy practiced by Netanyahu because it is not only about ethnic balances and the possibility of assigning new plots to settlers but also about the freedom to manage strategically important places from an energy standpoint. One might also add the project of the Ben Gurion Canal, as an alternative to the Suez Canal (which since 2020 has been a source of tensions and uncertainties), whose route would pass near the northern border of Gaza, the besieged enclave that housed more than two million people before the beginning of the latest conflagration.
The Palestinian tragedy cannot be attributed solely to the clash between insane racisms; there is much more to it.
Many shout for Palestine, but it seems that what is happening bothers few, perhaps only the Europeans. Consider that at Eurosatory in Paris, the land armament fair, Israeli companies and citizens with Israeli passports were denied entry. In France!
Despite this, no one effectively supports the Palestinian cause, least of all its “friends.”
Funding for Palestinians comes from these entities, listed in order of amount: the United States, Germany, the European Union, Sweden, Norway, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, and Turkey. Only two (the eighth and tenth!) are Muslim, and moreover, the eighth is factually allied with Tel Aviv.
In response to the Iranian missile attack on April 13, the MEAD (Middle East Air Defense) anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense, following the Abraham Accords, which include Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, was activated.
So how can the conflict and massacre be reduced to the schemes of ethno-religious clashes?
How many Arab and Islamic components are concrete allies of Israel, while the Jewish state itself is torn internally and faces difficulties with Western communities?
Reality is changing, and so is its narrative: in the future, the left will return to replace the fundamentalists as Tel Aviv’s (but also Whashington’s, Moscow’s and Ankara’s) puppets, against whom they vainly shout.
This is for the facade and for the assisted servility that is typical of the left. But then there is the reality to consider.
International tensions today are driven by factors of imbalance and rebalancing, primarily demographic and energy-related.
For public opinion, and often for the actors themselves, a summary and schematic reading in which to get bogged down is necessary. Unless one knows how to break them to stir the waters.
Now that, in the absence of anything better, the schemes return to the past (islamo-gauchisme) and somehow retrace those of fifty years ago, they must always be addressed with the possible alternative model since then, that is, with the third-way logic that envisages cooperation between Europe and Arab social-nationalism, opposed and massacred by internationalist bourgeoisies, religious fundamentalists, and, of course, anti-European imperialists.
That logic could have redrawn the map and prevented the current inescapable stranglehold.
And it is still the only one with this potential.
In this situation, as in others, the wheel has turned, and it has shown that we were right and that we still are and always will be.
Let’s calmly manage to impose it once and for all!
