On the Siege of the Hospital Al Shifa
The Zionist occupation is in complete disarray.
Al Aqsa Storm was, among many other things, an intelligence failure on the part of the Zionist occupation. Just the commencement of the operation was a victory of historic proportions on the behalf of the armed Palestinian resistance. So caught off-guard was the occupation that “Prime Minister” Netanyahu’s first response was issued only a few minutes before my own. It was incoherent, and the response of the occupation since has been similarly incoherent.
From the earliest moments, the occupation began acting like a cornered dog. The days of children throwing stones are over. The resistance of today is fully armed with all the weapons it needs to destroy hundreds of Israeli tanks and kill Zionist militants on a scale that is not known, but is not good for the morale of the occupation. The resistance has acted in a remarkably coordinated manner. Hizbullah was prepared from day one to respond to the cue. Other countries have cut off trade relations, expelled and returned “ambassadors”, and even taken steps towards declarations of war with the entity. The cry of the western media: “Do you condemn Hamas?” No. The resistance, and its exponentially growing base of sympathisers, follow it in lock step. This is the strength of the resistance, which is now quite mature. There is clear leadership. Seeing this strength, the western media attempt unsuccessfully to sow disharmony in the handful of schmucks still willing to talk to them.
The western media is the only group in the west that has such an unflinching, unthinking attitude of loyalty towards the leadership of its side of this “conflict”. The US-aligned Arab states, as well as in particular the United States and Germany, have undertaken a number of fascist measures including the blacklisting of pro-Palestinian activists as well as Arabs and Palestinians themselves and outright criminalisation of support for Palestine in whatever ways they can finnagle. Whether these measures are constitutional or legal under the systems of these countries is no longer relevant and has not been relevant for a long time.
Something is different from when this happened in 2001, though. In 2001, these measures enjoyed legitimacy and the consent of the governed, which felt itself to be under attack. Today, they are being pushed through unilaterally by an unpopular president in response to something that obviously has nothing to do with the safety of the American people and does not scare or even concern them. Coexisting with the similarly ailing panic campaigns against fentanyl bombs and trans women on bicycles, the barely strung-together words mumbled by America’s ailing President on the threat posed by Hamas, the civil service organisation which leads the bravest people in the world in the most just war in history, ring hollow if they are even heard at all. The American people, though still very ignorant of the outside world, are not so naive as they once were. The old tricks don’t work anymore.
So complete is the information victory on the side of the Palestinian people that even Biden’s administration is turning its back on him. They worry that America is embedding itself in more wars than it can sustain. “Blue no matter who” stands revealed as the genocidal fascist slogan it has always been.
The clear moral superiority of the Palestinians not just over their genociders but over the Americans themselves permeates their every word and action. It is only incidental. It is not a performance for the cameras. The same religion which has taught them the importance of armed resistance, the same religion which has taught them how to behave towards a just political leadership, is the same religion which has taught them the importance of the care of elderly and disabled and of dignity and last rites — areas where even the Americans know their country has no ground to stand on. These are the Muslims they’ve been demonising for this entire century.
So it stands for the Americans. The situation is similar in kind in the Arab states surrounding the occupation. The credibility of the pro-US regimes from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and Egypt is permanently defaced. Any step that they take in support of their masters only draws further attention to the absurdity and illegitimacy of their existence. The inevitability of the fall of these regimes constrains their active participation in the slaughter and coerces some degree of tolerance of dissenting actions, such as the transport of supplies into Palestine via Egypt. The age of the Muslim nations of Asia looking to Saudi Arabia for spiritual guidance are effectively over. The new legitimate leadership is that which most effectively opposes Israel and the United States. And rightly so. It is clear that these long and brutal struggles have matured the Palestinians and the Afghans. In the brutal conditions imposed by the long War of Terror, there can be no real talk of the obsolesence of religion when it constitutes the backbone of global anti-imperialism for the time being. Where the Islamic religion is strong, the armed resistance to American imperialism is strong. Where there is a weakness of one, a weakness of the other can be insinuated. Deferral to front-line indigenous leadership is deferral to religious leadership. And for now, it is good.
And the western allies have minded their positions as allies. They have neither sought to “correct” nor to reprimand the leadership. The call for a ceasefire does not come from the Islamic Resistance Movement, it is an independent initiative. But the American people are not yet ready to sacrifice for what is righteous and necessary the way Palestinians do. So their ceasefire initiative is not bad for their conditions, and it brings them into no conflict with the armed heroes of the epoch — an achievement, given their nation’s recent history.
Faced with unprecedented solidarity in the real sense, not just a hollow slogan, from not only the Palestinains, not only the Muslims, but actually also the youth and organised labour of the entire world, the Zionist camp is in disarray with Biden and Netanyahu facing obvious conflict not only between each other but also in their own administrations and constituencies. But the criticism of Netanyahu from his electorate is quite the opposite of that directed at Biden. The Zionist settlers are angry that he has not been killing Palestinians fast enough. They think he’s doing a really bad job at it. They think they could get another guy who’d do it better.
Faced with these clearly contradictory pressures, does patriotic Netanyahu seek to salvage his “nation” in the eyes of a world which is quickly running out of patience with it, or does he seek to placate his bloodthirsty electorate of gluten-free neo-nazis with a political sleight-of-hand and salvage his career? Juxtaposed against the sincerity and the patriotism shown by the “children of darkness” under his occupation, cynical Netanyahu chooses the latter. While the expeditious holocaust of a civilian population is clearly a matter of “national” importance, it is not as important as the career of a single politician in the “only democracy in the middle east”.
With active fronts in the war to the north, the east, and the south, Netanyahu decides he has found a Hamas base. Where? The hospital Al Shifa. By destroying this “Hamas base”, Netanyahu hopes to salvage his credibility with his electorate. In an attempt to seize control over the information war, Netanyahu decides to project strength and only strength. This he does by waging a siege on a hospital for a week. A week’s worth of resources have been dedicated to this as the war rages on and the occupation loses militants, vehicles, tanks, and territory. It may be some time before we become fully informed of the losses sustained by the occupation over this time, not just because of standard-fare fog of war and the systematic targeting of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, but also because we are, if nothing else, and to the dubious credit of Netanyahu, well and truly distracted by the sheer atrocity of it all.
Not only is the hospital Al-Shifa obviously not a target of military significance, but the well-documented war crimes which have taken place over the course of this week have only exacerbated and accellerated the occupation’s loss of moral credibility. All so that Netanyahu can prove that he is strong enough to fight babies. Not even particularly healthy babies, but babies in the ICU. Even these babies, however, can last over a week under siege by the IOF.
Whether this projects strength or not — fingers crossed! — will be seen in the future. Chances are better that it draws formerly neutral or even antagonistic populations and nations into the War on Terror — on the side of babies in intensive care.
