The ongoing carnage in Gaza over the past four months represents the culmination of a long process of dismantling the codes and norms that the world adopted since “modernity” declared itself, its principles, and its values - not just those which were established post-World War II. This carnage declares the characteristics of a new global hegemony, and for this reason, it holds great significance that transcends the Palestinian issue.
This colossal massacre, unprecedented in its proportions, is committed before the eyes of the entire world that watches it “live” as it unfolds. It is concomitant with the failure of the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution demanding a ceasefire, while the tragedy of the people of Gaza escalates to unimaginable levels, evoking “apocalyptic” omens. Meanwhile, Israeli ministers in power continue to explicitly state that they will not allow the entry of food, water, and medicine into Gaza, nor will they allow the presence of safe shelters for Gaza’s population. Leaders of most powerful Western countries support Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and supply weapons and missiles to Israel throughout the process, while some countries belonging to the “South”, including Arab and Islamic countries, either openly or covertly lend their support.
This “spectacle” implies that the unbridled brutality in Gaza and all over Palestine does not aim to achieve victory in its “war” against the Palestinian resistance movement. Instead, it strives to terrorize the “audience” watching, and, specifically, to announce the absence of any boundaries.
What happened after the bombing of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital at the beginning of the Israeli aggression is telling in this regard. Israel first denied its responsibility for the bombing, but soon went on to shamelessly bomb, destroy, and invade every hospital in the Gaza strip.
War… Israel’s Most Profitable Business
14-02-2024
One of the traits of the Gaza carnage is the pervasiveness of deception, which has also proven to be limitless. This is evident through daily instances of blatant lies, such as designating “safe” corridors, roads, and zones, accompanied by calls for Gazans to adhere to them, only to be bombed immediately afterwards, all the way to the original fabricated story about beheaded Israeli infants. This also has a specific function: to blur the boundaries between truth and lies, creating a landscape where arriving at any conviction becomes impossible.
This “spectacle” implies that the unbridled brutality in Gaza and all over Palestine does not aim to achieve victory in its “war” against the Palestinian resistance movement. Instead, it strives to terrorize the “audience” watching, and, specifically, to declare the absence of any boundaries.
There are thousands of examples in the world that reveal the nature of the hegemonic world order, vaguely and meaninglessly termed “neoliberalism”, in an attempt to avoid naming it for what it truly is. This order establishes everywhere a “tomorrow without a future”, where immediate survival becomes the only possible “dream”.
Studying the characteristics of this carnage is necessary to understand its nature. It is an extreme retrieval of a preceding carnage in Iraq, which functioned almost as a “rehearsal” to the present one, culminating in Iraq’s occupation, destruction, and dismemberment at the hands of the American-British axis.
While all these traits have been applied in intensified and accelerated ways in Gaza, they are not unfamiliar within the current social, political, and economic measures across various regions worldwide. These frameworks may appear unrelated at first glance, but upon closer scrutiny, one can discern their common ties to the current stage of the capitalist system.Top of Form
In France, the land of the “Enlightenment” and human rights (though the country arrived late to adopting blatant neoliberalism and is now hastening to catch up with the rest of the world), the State of Law is eroding as laws are flexibly interpreted. The Yellow Vests protest movement, which erupted in 2018, faced repression with a violence unprecedented in the country’s history, after it became impossible to ignore the movement. Notably, laws of exception (Article 49.3 of the French Constitution) were invoked 19 times in a single year to sidestep parliamentary votes on legislation that the executive authority wishes to push through, despite opposition in the Parliament. This is indicative of a diminishing adherence to the principle of the separation of powers (farewell, Montesquieu!), for the sake of overlooking – among other matters – scandals of states figures who were standing trial. Successive decisions were taken that impact critical areas like public education and health—foundational pillars of the French Republic, breaching electoral promises.
Then there is the so-called “suburbs issue”, the “banlieues” where the “colored” people live, including Africans, Arabs, and Asians- even if they hold French citizenship. These are millions of descendants of former French colonies who arrived in successive migrations during the twentieth century to work in mines, factories, and menial service jobs, often serving as soldiers; the human fuel for WWI. The “banlieues” issue is approached with racist, discriminatory violence for which a theoretical framework is provided, according to arguments that become increasingly fascist as the general crisis intensifies.
Pressing global concerns are, meanwhile, met with neglect and total disregard, such as the climate crisis that threatens mankind and the entire planet (this is evident in the ironic choice of the UAE as the host for the COP28 climate summit last year!). Additionally, the issue of irregular migration is addressed in disastrous ways (from drowning migrants to repressing them), despite the fact that the problem is caused in the first place by the mechanisms of violence applied worldwide, including wars, oppression, uncalculated global resource depletion, and rampant pollution that disproportionately affects countries of the Global South on all continents. There are thousands of examples in the world that reveal the nature of the hegemonic world order, vaguely and meaninglessly termed “neoliberalism”, in an attempt to avoid naming it for what it truly is.
Israel is no longer just a “tool in the hands of imperialism”. Israel is no longer just settler-colonialist, as France was in Algeria, for example. Rather, it has become a major player and crucial global actor within the hegemonic system of speculative capitalism. It also produces tools for unbridled spectacle consumption, which manipulates people into swallowing the bitterness of their marginalization and tolerating a life without a future.
It will also be necessary to study the direction in which Israel has shifted and this shift’s sociological, political, and economic consequences, and it must be studied at the level of our own “self-perception”, along with the set of values that guide this perception.
This order establishes everywhere a “tomorrow without a future”[1], where immediate survival becomes the only possible “dream”. This is why younger generations sense that they are living in conditions worse than their parents’ and realize that the promise of steady progress is nothing more than a complete delusion.
Finding the connection between these phenomena and noting the similarity of the norms on which they are based raises questions whose answers depart from the usual discourse, which now appears to belong to another world; one which has crumbled and no longer exists.
What is today’s hegemonic capitalism?
Capitalism today is no longer that system Karl Marx once scrutinized! Surplus value is no longer the product of the laborious transformation of raw materials into goods by workers. Capitalism is no longer related to material production, but rather to financial and real estate speculation, as well as direct plunder. It is no longer the private management of the production of material goods and services, as the value derived from various speculations and transactions far surpasses the worth of commodity production by thousands of times.
The traits that have been applied in intensified and accelerated ways in Gaza are also present within the current social, political, and economic measures across various regions worldwide. These frameworks may appear unrelated, but upon closer scrutiny, one can discern their common ties to the current stage of the capitalist system. Finding these connections raises questions whose answers depart from the usual discourse, which now appears to belong to a world that no longer exists.
A shameful decadence prevails in the region, crushing the populace through oppression, impoverishment to the point of starvation, and the spread of despair - a tried-and-tested trinity. Groups of mobsters oversee every facet of daily life in these societies. These groups are well organized and disseminated under the supervision of the authority itself according to assigned roles and locations. This intricate web is wrapped up in a foil of widespread corruption that permeates both authorities and societies. Top of Form
Ending the fixed peg of the dollar’s exchange rate based on its convertibility to gold value in the early 1970s[2] has led to this fundamental shift, as multinational banks, financial companies, and holding companies began to create enormous, largely fictitious financial values, resulting from large and complex financial structures that offer great interest, while generating extremely violent crises, as in 2008.
The entire political system is adapting to this new reality. The relationship between the state and society has underwent a radical change. Political authority can now abandon its responsibilities towards society, as it no longer views it as the producer of wealth, which allows authority to callously ignore society’s grievances. This marks a major rupture in the context of the balances within the capitalist system, one which leftist parties, unions, and even the most radical opposition movements have failed to discern. They have thus failed to crystallize the necessary notions and analyses that can recapture people’s attention and, in turn, regain their lost effectiveness. Instead, these parties have continued to reiterate the conclusions of a bygone era, contenting themselves with exposing the violence perpetrated against them.
What is Israel today?
The events unfolding in Gaza, whose chapters have yet to conclude, are bursting with the unimaginable suffering and losses of its people, including the loss of lives. The intended role of these chapters is to underscore this reality and put an end to the meaningless blabber around the applicability of “human rights” laws universally and for all causes, including, particularly, discussions on the “peaceful solution” and the “two-state” solution. One may even contemplate proposing a new calendar for humanity, marked by “year one after Gaza” (year one A.G.), as Gaza, though unintentionally, has made visible a reality of immense intellectual and historical ramifications. This helps explain, for instance, why “indigenous” peoples who survived previous genocides in the Americas have identified with the Palestinians, and why oppressed peoples worldwide have stood in solidarity with Gaza, with South Africa being a stark example. Even the increasing apprehension of younger generations of “Westerners” towards events in Gaza could be a response to an early glimpse they have taken into their own potential future, as many of them, too, have been rendered “numerically superfluous”!
Israel is no longer a “tool in the hands of imperialism”. This statement has become simplistic and it, too, belongs to the past. Israel is no longer just settler-colonialist, as France was in Algeria, for example. Rather, it has become a major player and crucial global actor within the hegemonic system of speculative capitalism. It produces advanced weapon technologies and surveillance systems designed to safeguard this system. It also produces tools for unbridled spectacle consumption, which manipulates people into swallowing the bitterness of their marginalization and tolerating a life without a future.
It will also be necessary to study the direction in which Israel has morphed from the “soft” kibbutzim to Tel Aviv’s Silicon Valley, from the educated European Ashkenazi figures who founded and ruled Israel over the years (in turn colonialists who committed horrendous crimes against the Palestinians), to the current psychopathic criminals who lead it today, who transcend colonial attitudes and practices, and who rely on an extensive base of primitive settlers who terrorize and plunder the West Bank and Jerusalem. This shift and its consequences must be studied sociologically, politically, and economically, and at the level of our own “self-perception”, along with the set of values that guide this perception.
“Influencers”
The governing bodies of multinational banks, holding companies, and key strategic institutions have formulated intricate structures designed to influence how states operate. Their objective is to align these state mechanisms with the agenda of privatization, and ultimately dismantling services administered by authorities, thereby diminishing the role of the state. This influence over the state can be exercised thanks to the social proximity between power elites and these milieus, and thanks to corruption. Such connections are masked through control over the media, which manipulates public opinion. While these bodies may disagree over minor issues or compete in the power arena, their fundamental alignment with dominant economic powers unites them, shaping their shared worldview.
What is the current state of our region?
Limitless chaos reigns everywhere, from Iraq to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya… A shameful decadence prevails, crushing the populace through oppression, impoverishment to the point of starvation, and the spread of despair - a tried-and-tested trinity. Mobster groups, from the largest to the smallest, oversee every facet of daily life in these societies. These groups are well organized and disseminated under the supervision of the authority itself according to assigned roles and locations. This intricate web is wrapped up in a foil of widespread corruption that permeates both authorities and societies.
The UAE serves as a crucial link in the current speculative capitalist system, embodying the ideal culmination of the economic paradigm of the macro-market, located halfway between European capitals and Asian centers of production. Dubai boasts an extremely significant financial status in terms of exchange volumes, which can - and this is not a small advantage - camouflage and mask the nature of the exchanges and ongoing operations.
How is it possible that the UAE, a small country in terms of area and number of indigenous population (they numbered 900 thousand in 2010, but the number has since jumped to two million people through a process of selective naturalization, while the UAE hosts six million “non-citizens”), holds more weight and importance than the great Egypt? How was Dubai able to play such a destructive role in Sudan, Yemen and earlier, in Libya, establishing ports on the coasts of the Horn of Africa? All the while, it dreams of turning into the Israel of the Arabian Gulf, warming up to Tel Aviv even as the Gaza massacre is ongoing, sending volunteer medics to serve in the ranks of the Magen David Adom (Red Star of David) and naturalizing thousands of Israelis who have become citizens and can travel through our region as they please. What magic formula – and what insolence- is possessed by this country?
The UAE serves as a crucial link in the current speculative capitalist system, embodying the ideal culmination of the economic paradigm of the global market, located halfway between European capitals and Asian centers of production. Dubai boasts an extremely significant financial status in terms of exchange volumes, which can - and this is not a small advantage - camouflage and mask the nature of the exchanges and ongoing speculative operations. The UAE, confident in the support of the highly influential global media channels it finances, possesses the ability to influence (and sabotage) in ways that far exceed those of a destitute and dependent Egypt run by military generals.
This text merely initiates an exploration of the characteristics of the current reality in the world and in our region in an attempt to understand it. It is not yet complete, in the sense that it aspires to continue studying these traits and delving deeper into their features in a way that is interactive. Therefore, Assafir Al-Arabi welcomes all comments in this regard, and gladly receives suggestions for critical or responsive texts. Contact us at: arabi.assafir@gmail.com
Translated by Sabah Jalloul
