On the Israel-Palestine conflict and Just Peace


Published: 2/11/2023, Edited: 3/11/2023

What we are currently seeing unfold in Gaza is a genocide. The government of Israel, the most right-wing in its history, has chosen this path knowingly invoking religious and ethnosupremacist language. Similar language has been used by Hamas - the defacto government of the Gaza Strip which has held a totalitarian grip on power and all of its ministries since becoming elected in 2006, and obtaining no subsequent mandate from its people, usurping power that it received from the Oslo accords, but while also having any and all of its agency curtailed by preceding and successive Israeli governments (despite its creation being supported by the then government of Israel to create a force more pliable than the PLO in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict). Innocent civilians are now cornered and suffering a hell on Earth that words can't describe. 

The duration and complexity of this conflict is often underestimated, in my view. Many people wish to claim that its just simple as determining some semblance of a just cause for excusing genocide because the largest open air prison in the world with 2.3 million people is run by a totalitarian Islamist organisation that arguably has some of its roots traced to Amin Al-Husseini. He licensed the targeted killing of Jews by the Nazis, including in Arab areas seeking to advance all of their causes for the purposes of obtaining guarantees from the Nazis on the independence of Arab states. The Hamas charter can be seen as a continuation of this legacy, and the mass murder of innocent Israeli people on the 7th of October could be construed as an example of this (but its possible there are many more sinister things at play here).

The massacre on the 7th of October has been traumatic to witness through the media, and to a lesser degree on a personal level because having put my hand up to be a member of the Voice to Parliament, seeing no attempt made by our representatives to reach consensus over the course of many months, and having yelled at a protest against Aboriginal deaths in Custody in Melbourne on the 7th of October "I'm your stupid fucking voice" (because of my awareness of the likelihood of myself being surveilled, and the likelihood of the content of my conversations being used), "Sovereignty was never ceded" thrice, "End Aboriginal deaths in custody" and "End all wars", to find out later that day that the heinous acts carried out by Hamas occurred around the same time on the same day (the same day the Prime Minister of Australia voted 'Yes' to the Voice, and the same day also happened to be Vladimir Putin's birthday, but maybe these are all just wild coincidences). It makes me feel though that someone thought I'm licensing violence by saying any of those things (how on Earth could it? and nothing I say should be construed as any endorsement to cause anyone or anything any harm), or maybe someone thought that I'd support terrorism or genocide by wearing a Krama. If that's your interpretation you are wrong, and you would know that by seeing the purpose and intent in my expressions and publications, and identifying the vibe within and between all of them. It wouldn't be the first time there was a strong correlation between something I said or in this case possibly wore, and a contemporaneous event. 

There is indeed a connection between the war in Ukraine, the Voice to Parliament referendum and what has been happening in Israel-Palestine since 1948. In each case, there is a larger and/or more powerful occupying power and a smaller/weaker one. In each case the smaller/weaker power has not ceded its sovereignty and in each case both of the directly involved powers have failed to agree on the principles on how they will cooperate, with genocide, ethnic cleansing, linguicide and war all being a part of the equation. As in all wars, there is extreme disinformation with truth becoming the first casualty, mutual dehumanisation from extremist/ultranationalist elements, and deep lack of concern for the lives of civilians on the part of the governments involved. This is true in the cases of the Ukrainian assimilation of the Russian speaking population of southern and eastern Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the historical treatment of Jews leading up to and including the Holocaust, and the subsequent treatment of the Palestinian people since the Nakba (who were promised statehood, and the same rights as everyone else), as well as the genocide of the First Nations people of Australia after its colonisation.

This is termed "systemic oppression" which occurs when the ruling class wields coercive, political, economic, social, financial and any other form of institutional power to sustain systems of unfairness and injustice against other groups and the public interest in order to maintain the establishment's vision of the social order. The monopoly on the use of force by our highest levels of power operates as the highest level of the mafia. 

Systemic oppression can be used to describe how the Russian speaking population felt in relation to the events that followed the ousting of the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovich, as well as what Ukraine experienced following its invasion, as war, genocide and ethnic cleansing can be seen as the most extreme end on the spectrum of systemic oppression. The less extreme forms of systemic oppression include practices like salami-shaving where governments, corporations and other established power structures seek to deprive a group or an individual of their rights and ability to give free prior and informed consent. This can be seen in the way elements of the mining industry treat First Nations people, such as those in the Yindibanji Aboriginal Corporation. 

The open air prison that is the Gaza strip, and the active and militarised expansion of some settlers into what they see as their 'God given land' within West Bank, in my view, sits somewhere between salami shaving and genocide on the spectrum of moral gravity. The moral gravity also needs to factor into consideration the relative power and legitimacy of the governments, the representatives they're composed of, the representatives' ideologies, and in the simplest cases the relative power between the entities in an interaction. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where innocent civilians were never the casualties of the political and financial establishments and elites. The moral gravity of plutocratic neoliberalism is significantly worse than the moral gravity of a starving person stealing bread from a profiteering supermarket, yet one gets punished with fines and jail, and the others who do it at the biggest scale get away with it scot free. 

Another consideration is the existence of the fund-management firms and financial institutions dominated by Western Neoliberal Plutocracies (use this term whenever you can to describe the systems we live under in the 'West'), and the 'global market' where anything can be traded nowadays, and it appears that the trade that has most recently occurred (according to my observations) is between Hamas, the government of Israel and other Western Liberal Plutocracies. I suspect that this trade has involved the ethnic cleansing and Genocide of Gaza for the purposes of constructing the David Ben-Gurion canal to undercut Egypt's dominance over trade in the region over which Israel, UK and France invaded Egypt during the Suez Crisis. In the words of George W Bush Jr "money trumps peace sometimes". This was said in 2007 (during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), and now it seems money trumps peace all the time, and that our state captured Western Liberal Plutocratic governments actually don't have any power - they are all run by Blackrock (which is currently laundering money to buy Ukrainian land), State Street Corporation and the Vanguard Corporation, all of which own most of the companies we've every bought anything from. Just take a look at Australia's farcical defense policy at the moment - its essentially a part of a worldwide money laundering system which uses our taxes to prop up international defense contractors hungry for money and death, slushing it with centuries of stolen wealth from Australia (at resource tax rates well below those in places such as Norway) and countries too small or too weak to protect themselves from Western Neoliberal Plutocrats which allegedly supported the Voice to Parliament referendum (or more likely sought to ensure that it'd be weak, and hoped that it would mediate away Australian First Nations peoples native title claims, and their ability to consider their mineral-rich lands 'sacred'). This is a particularly vicious form of neoliberal plutocratic neocolonialism in action, if true.

Considerations of moral gravity are not excuses for actions that are bad or wrong, such as the heinous terrorist acts of Hamas on the 7th of October. Such extreme terror acts do however have explanations, which is why the global debate about the distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters continues to rage on - because to hide their accountability, governments now seem to potentially delegate their decisions to the financial markets, which in turn organise trades to keep themselves clean(er). Its the same reason why governments use private military contractors - to limit their own liability for the heinous acts that they cause, foment and encourage. 

It appears that the world as it is set up today, with the formerly Democratic, Western Liberal countries that have been captured by neoliberal plutocracy that has progressively monetarily, ideologically and politically defrauded subsequent generations and other people in that generation since the 1970's is designed to treat us like slaves for the benefit of the plutocrats with the occasional "mowing of the grass", or the "tall poppies". This is why the intersectional protests for Palestine around the world often include the chant "We are all Palestinian", in my view. We recognise that not only was their promise of statehood not fulfilled by the British Empire and the United Nations, but they were collectively ganged up on and ethnically cleansed from their land to facilitate 'the right of return' and the creation of a Zionist state (which curiously has similar basis for the right of return as expressed by the Nuremburg Laws) by the US, UK, France, Soviet Union and many other powerful members of the international community, which even still could have been facilitated without any ethnic cleansing if they had a plan for the welfare of all people as was the intention of the then recently passed UN Charter in 1948 which was the last time we said "Never again", as we dove into the 'Cold War'. The same ultranationalism we see in Russia and Ukraine was catalyzed by the Nakba in the British Mandate of Palestine, and we are increasingly seeing it in First Nations communities as well as in Australian communities of a colonial heritage, and most recently in protests around the world that have expressed anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and anti-Arab sentiments. When we protest against this likely planned genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza, we must remember that many Israelis and Jews oppose the heinous actions of the government of Israel, that not all Gazans support Hamas, and that Hamas' leadership doesn't reside in Gaza but in Qatar and other places that are more comfortable than Gaza, and likely have been involved in this potential trade over the David Ben-Gurion canal. 

Apart from financial and ultranationalist elites the forces that have likely had a hand in this may include Artificial Intelligence and active or passive digital surveillance, and I hope that this could serve as a good starting point for politically informed citizens and activists everywhere to start building the nodes of a bigger picture and following the money, because it is the shadowy billionaires in these hidden markets who are pulling the strings, and it is them who hold the highest share of responsibility as well as the leaders of governments who fail to resist the bribery and the money laundering. I suspect what they've done is created an intertwined political and economic market and now decide what happens in the world based on what certain people of interest say, or how many people say it, but they're bent on doing damage and fail to listen to anything constructive or productive, or implement ideas that don't serve neoliberal plutocracy or the national interests of wealthy countries.  

Another level to consider is that there is a concerted attempt to distract the global public from these above points, and redirect the debate towards the ethics and morality of whether a genocide and ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza is an appropriate or proportionate response to the massacre committed by Hamas on the 7th of October (judging by the media response to these attacks and the subsequent genocide, they have succeeded). Questions like this may be better deferred to the consensus position of the Parliament of the World Religions, Congress of World Cultures and the United Nations General Assembly, and the individual contributions of accomplished ethicists and moral philosophers, not the shills who exist to justify their existing power structures within Hamas or the ultranationalist Zionists in Israel or anywhere else. I may attempt to publish on the ethics and morality of what we've seen unfold on and since the 7th of October, but I sense that the full range of the facts needed to form an informed perspective may not be out there yet for me to speculate on any meaningful solutions to this conflict, beyond;

Be kind to each other, division benefits their agenda, whoever they are. The historical injustice suffered by the Palestinian people is real, as is the historical injustice suffered by the Jewish people, and it lives on and will continue to live on in their living memories for generations, and one day the string-pullers in the funds management industry, financial interests and their government backers will be brought to justice. Historical injustice is the consequence of systemic oppression, and at this stage considering the dominance of the ideological neoliberal plutocratic lie that the world has adopted (through the deprivation of a universal basic income or alternate dignity-preserving measures from neoliberalism, as demanded by Milton Friedman and Fredrick Hayek), I would be surprised if most of the world is not a subject of systemically oppressive practices of the neoliberal plutocrats (whether they are in the West, or not). If you're a part of a non so called "Western Liberal Democratic government" (aka Neoliberal Plutocracy), and you feel the vibe (looking straight at Vladimir Putin, Xi Xinping and Narendra Modi), you will use this to help demonstrate a global mandate for change by sharing this or related information to demonstrate the need for change peacefully and in a civil manner with no damage to property. Indeed, I believe that any 'Reset' should occur not on the terms expressed by the World Economic Forum, but on the terms expressed by John Rawls - undoubtedly (in my view) the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century. 

Lastly, considering at least one of the possible worlds of international relations with respect to what is happening around the world right now, such as if any alien forces, quantum or psychic relations are involved (as if its not already too much of a mindfuck to be speculating so much about a massacre of innocent people which follows a genocide of innocent people) - our governments and the neoliberal plutocrats may be treating this all as a theatre to determine whether we ask an alien invasion force(s) to leave for a while before we decide how it should be decided if it stays, where it stays, and when it can come back (if at all). Until I started paying attention to this years' disclosure by David Grusch and Ross Coulthart on Non-human intelligence, non-human biologics, recovered alien craft and the relationship of all this to the Vatican, I would have deemed this last possible world as the most psycho of the lot, but since then it seems a lot more plausible. The most psycho possible world of all would be that God exists (in some sense of the word God) and either conditionally or unconditionally requires human sacrifice, and our top political leaders and their top neoliberal plutocrat equivalents are essentially determining who gets sacrificed and where, and that would be the most horrific and disturbing possible world of all. 

Stay strong, keep protesting, keep informed, act where you are most effective, and be kind to each other - that disarms the force of division that the neoliberal plutocrats and any of their political lackeys (or other forces at play) are seeking to exploit. It is very hard to think about things at this level without loosing your own mind.

Lastly, its important to consider that 

1) the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Ukraine have geopolitical factors

2) that our political systems, while often secular have a religious inspiration, influence or affected by religions

3) that many people feel that we are in "the end times" as foreshadowed by religious texts

4) that most Christians expect a second coming of Christ, and Muslisms expect a Djaal and/or and Mahdi, and that some Jews are expecting a true prophet

5) that the West's political systems are often termed as "Judeao-Christian" and indeed follow a political theology that was imported from religious theology which is described by Carl Schmitt, and others

6) that we live in an extremely divided world where billionaires and other groups with massive financial interests seek any excuse they can to utilise international and all other affairs to preserve their wealth while sacrificing your children and incomes to preserve their wealth (regardless of where they live)

7) that countries continue to follow what they see as their "national interest" at the expense of collective wellbeing because you work too much and don't speak out enough about where your taxes are spent

8) that we've allowed international capital to exist essentially untaxed through loopholes, lengthy consent forms that no one reads or gives genuine consent to, does not serve the public interest first or at all, and leads to geopolitical tension

9) that we face several simultaneous existential threats, and threats to our individual freedoms and for those of us who live in 'democracies' we never got to vote on anything affecting our lives other than specific people in our electorates that are supposed to represent us

10) that we have all been and continue to be consistently lied to about the direction of our socieities because the leaders in power are incapable of saying things how they are because it may affect their electoral prospects or the value of the stocks of the donors that have donated to them

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