After the Oct 7 Gaza breakout, I was taken aback to hear that Jake Sullivan had said publicly, a week prior to it, that the “Middle East”* was more stable than it had been for many years. How could he, with access to the best intelligence infrastructure in history, be so naive? Alternately (if he knew better), how could he not realise that such a falsity would soon bite back?
I live in South Africa, which for all its flaws still has signs of progress. One is that a few years ago, we withdrew our ambassador from Israel. National TV and other news provided the context: the Great March of Return. Probably the greatest anti-violent (by which I mean, non-violent protesters deliberately exposing themselves to violence) campaign in history. At the time, I noted the words of an Israeli spokesperson who, when asked why protesters were being gunned down, answered “Because they’re too many to arrest.” The words of John Kennedy also came to mind: “Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable.” I mention all this because global social media discourse suggests that the March was not similarly highlighted everywhere.
Kennedy’s words returned with force on Oct 7; hence Sullivan’s absurd utterance gobsmacking me when I learned of it a day or two later. The only explanation I find plausible is that Sullivan shared the Zionist regime’s view of Palestinians as animals successfully cowed by ongoing “grass-mowing.” This also resolves the false dichotomy where on one hand, the regime is supposed to have been totally taken by surprise by the breakout, on the other is accused of having cynically engineered/enabled it. Cherry-pickers can support either, because evidence points both ways; what happened was that a “controlled opposition” (that was managed, rather than operated) got out of control - as humans do, when tormented sufficiently.
The above applies regardless of which permutation of narratives one chooses to describe the actual events of Oct 7: daring, brutality and sadism by Palestinians/disproportionate, panicking retaliation by Israelis (including deliberate sacrifice of fellow-Israelis). Hence I don’t spend time assessing those events, other than to conclude that the overriding objective of the guerillas (as opposed to the spontaneous rampagers following through gaps in the fences) was to take hostages to exchange for the thousands held without due process in Israeli jails. Of course, their organisations no doubt also had strategic (geopolitical) objectives.
What makes all this worth blogging about is that it seems actually to be changing the global distribution of power. The linear application of hegemony has led to a non-linear phase change, and I think the Great March of Return (on top of all that came before) set up the tipping point. Also, that it happens as the Ukraine proxy war approaches denouement isn’t coincidence; Hamas actually cited the global shortage of NATO-spec munitions as a relative advantage.
Addendum: to my consternation, the above has been misinterpreted by a minority of respondents as adhering to the “tankie” paradigm (a stereotype of naive, crude anti-NATO-imperialism).
It goes without saying that Hamas is just another nationalist movement, having as they all do, a self-serving elite; in fact plenty of evidence points to the Zionist regime’s role in fostering it as a rival for Fatah. However, the argument made about inevitability refers to the desperation felt by ordinary members, who are also ordinary Palestinians. This desperation fueled the Great March, which was not a Hamas initiative. It also fueled the Al-Aqsa Flood, which was.
Blindness to this human desperation, such as that of Sullivan, and of the smug “tankie”-baiters, is just bigotry.