The Enemy Trinity

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The Palestinian Marxist Ghassan Kanafani, in his famous study of the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–9, and its defeat, theorised the regional and international character of the Palestinian struggle through the alliance of enemies it faced. Reflecting on the Palestinian uprising under the British Mandate, he wrote ‘between 1936 and 1939, the Palestinian revolutionary movement suffered a severe setback at the hands of three separate enemies’. This tripartite enemy constituted and remained ‘the principal threat’ to Palestinian liberation: ‘the local reactionary leadership; the regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine; and the imperialist-Zionist enemy’.

The ‘enemy trinity’, Kanafani argued, was not only present in the 1930s but remained relevant in the 1970s. Kanafani himself was assassinated by Mossad in 1972. Israel received military, diplomatic and economic support from the imperialist powers because of the strategic role it played in maintaining their dominance in a key region of the world economy. It was for the same reason that the reactionary Arab regimes – principally amongst them the Gulf and Jordanian monarchs – were backed by Washington, Paris, and London. The Arab ruling classes, in turn, benefited from this arrangement through access to power, wealth, and influence at both local and international levels. The Palestinians and the wider Arab masses shared a common enemy alliance that needed to be defeated if liberation was to be achieved for all.

When the masses erupted onto the streets and workplaces of the region in 2011, and then again in 2019, they made the connection between their own poverty and oppression and that of the Palestinians. They were not only doing so in the abstract – as people who spoke the same language and faced different oppressive rulers – but in the most concrete way possible. They were recognising, once more, the realities of a century of collective repression and control by Western Powers, local ruling classes, and Israel.

Palestinian liberation as a regional project

The Palestinian national movement understood itself as part of a wider regional struggle against imperialism from its earliest days – both as it confronted British imperialism and the Zionist movement in the 1930s as well as during its reconstitution in the 1950s after the Nakba. If this was especially true amongst its Left-wing factions – most famously in George Habash’s formulation that the road to Jerusalem runs through the capitals of the Arab world – it remained present across the different political wings of the movement whether communist, nationalist, or islamist. All emphasised that the liberation of Palestine would be one aspect of the wider liberation of the region.

This focus remained as long as the struggle for the liberation of the whole of Palestine and the return of the refugees – ‘liberation and return’ as the PLO slogan had it – was the guiding principle of the Palestinian national movement. After the expulsion from Lebanon in 1982, Fatah first and then the wider PLO started to shift their focus from decolonisation to nation-building in a mini-state on only part of historic Palestine. Yasser Arafat increasingly turned to a conservative regional strategy. The transition is summed up in the famous cartoon of Arafat deftly skipping from a hammer and sickle to a Saudi crescent. The question was no longer how to change the balance of forces in the Middle East as a whole, but how to accommodate a Palestinian institutionalised presence within the existing ones. It is also in this period that the Palestinian political identification of Zionism as colonialism was played down. ‘Recent Palestinian political history’ as Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie and Sobhi Samour point out in their Settler Colonial Studies article, ‘has been a long march away from a liberation agenda and towards a piecemeal approach to the establishment of some kind of sovereignty under the structure of the Israeli settler colonial regime.’ Such an approach can only confirm, and not challenge, the regional and global structures of which the oppression of the Palestinians forms a bulwark.

The questions of regional liberation and anti-colonialism did not disappear from the Palestinian national movement all together, however. Among those who rejected the retreat of the Oslo years, from the internal opposition within Fatah to the communist and islamist wings of the movement, liberation from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea continued to be understood as part of a wider struggle against reaction across the Middle East. This political position emerged from the international realities that the Palestinians faced, on the one hand, and from the analysis they made of the enemy they faced, on the other.

Indeed, since the Nakba and the expulsion of three quarters of the Palestinian population who lived within the area that became the Israeli state, the majority of the Palestinian people have been marooned beyond the borders of their homeland. Roughly 7 million today live in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan (where around half of the population is Palestinian or of Palestinian descent), as well as in the West Bank and Gaza. Until the first Intifada in 1987, these refugee populations formed the political centers of the Palestinian national movement. Palestinian factions launched military operations from these enclaves against Israel, but also participated in wider uprisings against the authoritarian regimes they encountered. The so-called ‘Black September’ in Jordan in 1970, a popular insurrection against the monarchy now glossed – inaccurately – as a ‘Palestinian-Jordanian civil war’, and the alliance of the Palestinian organisations with the Left in the first phase of the Lebanese civil war, were crucial such moments.

The mainstay of this strategy, debated across the Arab Left, and popularised in English in the pages of Khamsin, the journal of the Israeli Revolutionary Socialist Organisation, was the unity of national, regional, and global structures of exploitation and oppression. At the heart of this strategy lay the calculation that the defeat of pro-Western regimes would not only isolate Zionism and make a collective regional confrontation possible, it would also put greater pressure on its imperial sponsors. Anti-imperialist or Arab nationalist regimes would force a choice on Europe and the United States: continue to support Zionism and cut ties with the rest of the region, or break with Zionism and attempt to maintain relations with the rest of the Arab world. This dynamic was visible, for example, in the US and the USSR’s hesitations on which alliance to make: either with Israel or with Arab nationalism.

Importantly, Zionism was understood in very similar ways by both Zionists themselves and their imperial supporters.

Zionism as a regional project

Palestine was (and remains) an important nodal point in the world economy. At the crossroads of historic trading routes between Africa, Asia, and Europe, Palestine is also located on the Eastern side of the Suez Canal, the beating heart of world maritime trade. From the 1920s to the 1940s the country played a crucial role in the oil routes of the British empire, whose pipelines ran from Kirkuk in Eastern Kurdistan (today’s Northern Iraq) to Haifa, from where it could be transported more easily to European markets. To have a friendly western population, armed and ready to suppress Indigenous populations’ rebellions, was a major strategic asset for first European and then US imperialism.

Other settler populations played this role in many parts of the world. British settlers in the Falklands, Afrikaner settlers in the Cape, the Pieds Noirs in Algeria; all accumulated indigenous land in order to defend the trade routes of their empires. This connection was made directly by Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British Military Governor of Palestine, when he described the Zionist presence in Palestine as a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’. Decades later, the US Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig put it in these terms: ‘Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.’

Similarly, the Zionist movement understood itself as a colonial project and an ally of Western Imperialism from its emergence in the late nineteenth century. Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist Organisation, wrote in his The Jewish State:

Should the Powers declare themselves willing to admit our sovereignty over a neutral piece of land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two territories come under consideration, Palestine and Argentina. In both countries important experiments in colonisation have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews. An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration. The Society of Jews will treat with the present masters of the land, putting itself under the protectorate of the European Powers, if they prove friendly to the plan.

For Herzl, Israel would ‘form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.’ He added: ‘[w]e should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence.’ Similar ideas have continued to be expressed in different ways by Israeli politicians and policy makers up to the present. Perhaps most famously, Ehud Barak described Israel as ‘a Villa in the Jungle’, an island of Western civilisation surrounded by dangerous savage barbarians. In the context of Israel’s current genocidal assault on the Palestinians in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu remarked, in a similar vein:

They want to return the Middle East to the abyss of the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages, whereas we want to take the Middle East forward to the heights of progress of the twenty-first century. This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle … I tell our friends in the enlightened world: Our war is also your war. If we do not stand together in a united front, it will reach you as well.

The Zionist movement first, and then the Israeli state after 1948, played its strategic role diligently over the last century. In the 1930s, the Zionist militias were trained and armed by the British army to help break the Arab Revolt. These ‘Special Night Squads’ were tasked with guarding key infrastructure of the empire in Palestine against attacks by the revolutionaries, first among which was the Iraq Petroleum Pipeline. Simultaneously, the Histadrut – the largest Zionist trade union federation –  provided workers to break the Palestinian strike in key industries.

After the creation of the state of Israel, and despite confrontations between the Zionist movement and the British over the speed at which the Zionists would be allowed to take control of Palestine in the 1940s, Israel continued its close collaboration with European powers, including France, which made Israel’s nuclear program possible. In 1956, after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, Britain and France called on Israel to invade the Sinai desert and take the canal by force. Israel complied and Britain and France stepped in, presenting their action as ‘keeping the peace’. It was only the intervention of the US and the USSR – keen to demonstrate their new status as the most important global powers – that forced all three invading forces to retreat. Ben Gurion famously argued after this humiliating defeat that Israel could not again declare war on its neighbors without explicit American support.

The 1960s marked the turn of Israel fully into the US sphere of influence. Military aid and investment grew rapidly by the mid-1960s and Israel once again played its role as a loyal ally in ‘a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’. As Arab nationalism grew in influence, rejected Western dominance, and increasingly aligned itself with the Soviets and the newly independent Third World, Israel’s military became a key asset to break the movement’s back. It did so in two wars, in 1967 and 1973, during which it both humiliated the two most important Arab nationalist regimes – Egypt and Syria – and took control over the whole of historic Palestine, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai desert. Expanded colonial rule for Israel was the reward for its military success. As Henry Kissinger made plain, in talking about US support for Israel in 1973:

The United States saved Israel from collapse at the end of the first week by our arms supply … What we wanted was the most massive Arab defeat possible so that it would be clear to the Arabs that they would get nowhere with dependence on the Soviets … we sought to break up the Arab united front.

He summed up US policy as aiming ‘to enhance Israel’s strategic capacity in the region, consolidate friendly Arab regimes, and to isolate and debilitate the Palestinian movement’. The breaking of the united front and the military defeat of Arab Nationalism, at the very moment that the world economy was entering its first major crisis since the end of WWII, opened the door for bringing the Egyptian regime into the US sphere of influence. The 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, under US tutelage, represented the final outcome of this process and the opening of a new role for Israel in the region. Indeed, from that moment on, while it still played a military role – as its invasion and occupation of Southern Lebanon in the early 1980s demonstrated – its new task would increasingly become one of facilitating the US economic domination.

Normalisation

Peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, on the one hand, and the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO under Yasser Arafat, on the other, would lead to economic and political normalisation. In 1998 and 2004, respectively, the United States created Qualified Industrial Zones in Jordan and Egypt. Companies within these zones could produce without the restrictions of local labor law and could export tax free to the United States. They had to, however, include Israeli inputs in production to do so – 8 per cent worth in Jordan and 11 per cent in Egypt.

At the same time, Israeli capital was increasingly integrated into its US counterpart, making the distinction between the two increasingly ambiguous. Starting in the 1980s the process took a number of forms. First, Israel was given preferential access to the US market through a gradual free trade agreement. Whereas, across the Global South, countries were forced to open their markets in one fell swoop, and thereby saw their industries collapse under the unequal competition of the Global North, Israel was first given unilateral free access to the US market for a number of years before having to reciprocate. Second, the US allowed Israel to privatise American military technology – the only country in the world to receive this right. A swathe of Israeli entrepreneurs emerged from the ranks of ex-IDF officers, who laid the foundation for Israel’s so-called start-up nation. Third, both the US and Israel encouraged joint US and Israeli ventures, at the very moment when the Israeli state and Histadrut-owned enterprises were being privatised. The outcome of these intertwined processes was that by the turn of the millennium, as Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler point out in their book, The Global Political Economy of Israel: ‘there were already 110 “Israeli” companies listed in New York, with a market value twice that of the 665 companies listed in Tel Aviv. An estimated 60 to 90 per cent of all new Israeli start-ups filed for a U.S. charter’, a process which was facilitated by the fact that the state ‘unilaterally recognised corporate registration in the United States’. 

In this context, the spread of Israeli influence and strengthening of its economic relations with the Arab world was de facto also the spread of US economic influence and interests.

In the same period, the US attempted to develop free trade agreements with states across the Middle East and North Africa in a series of so-called MENA summits. As Adam Hanieh points out in Lineages of Revolt, 

[t]he MENA summits explicitly linked normalisation to the consolidation of neoliberal reform, with the integration of Israel into the region predicated upon the dropping of barriers to trade and investment flows under the auspices of US power. 

Ruling classes in the region were invited to partake in the spoils of neoliberal reform, but only if they were prepared to abandon their commitments –  however rhetorical they might have been – to Palestinian liberation and normalise relations with Israel instead. Changing relations with Israel was a test of fealty, a declaration of loyalty to the global neoliberal order and its imperial overseer.

The so-called Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 between the UAE, Bahrain, Israel, and later Morocco and Sudan, were a further step in this direction – although this time in a slightly different set up. The United States, since the Obama presidency, had started operating its ‘tilt to the pacific’, in which it recognised China as its greatest rival and decided to focus its military and strategic might to contain it. The Middle East was lessening (although not disappearing) as a focus, especially since the US had become virtually self-sufficient in terms of oil and gas production. The hope was therefore that the US’ closest allies could maintain control over the region, without its direct participation.

Political and economic deals were made, principally with the UAE, and open negotiations were initiated with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The point at which the path to attempted normalisation began in Saudi Arabia can be precisely identified: 11 February 2011. The US’ acquiescence in the toppling of Hosni Mubarak put the al-Sauds on high alert: no longer could they place their trust in imperial protection against threats from below or without. Riyadh forged a relatively independent path in the counter-revolutions against 2011, focusing on breaking the uprisings militarily and refusing to support the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots as an alternative to the existing regimes – as the US attempted to. This allowed the KSA to distance itself somewhat from direct control by Washington and to start demanding the kind of access and support that the Israeli ruling class already has to the US economic and political system – and to its weaponry.

The normalisation negotiations were therefore not so much about an agreement between the Saudi regime and Israel, but between the former and the US. In this process, Israel was a means and Palestinians disposable afterthoughts. The Saudi rulers had clearly given their agreement to the previous round of negotiations, without which its vassal state, Bahrain, would not have signed on. In the beginning of 2023, however, the kingdom started openly discussing normalisation with Israel in exchange for increased US military support and its own nuclear program to rival Iran’s.

All of this took place on the background of growing Israeli aggression across historic Palestine – especially visible in the intensified attacks by settlers across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where pogroms and murders became increasingly normalised. 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians since the second Intifada, even before the current genocidal war. The message was clear: the reactionary Arab regimes had abandoned their pretense of caring about the Palestinians, and Israel was convinced that it could advance both its economic power in the region and its colonial project at home without worrying about any significant push back. Benjamin Netanyahu’s smug UN performance on 22 September 2023, where he presented a map of the ‘new Middle East’ in which Palestine had entirely disappeared, represented the regional and Western ruling classes’ state of mind perfectly.

Al Aqsa Flood’s regional implications

This status quo was shattered two weeks later, in the first minutes of operation Al Aqsa Flood. Well before the Qassam fighters entered any Israeli urban or agricultural centers, the break out from Gaza, the destruction of the barbed wire surrounding 2.3 million people, the end – however brief – of the eighteen year illegal blockade of the strip, demonstrated that Israel’s rule would not go unchallenged and that the world – Arab or otherwise – could not continue to ignore the Palestinians without paying a terrible price.

The political developments since have shown just how brittle this ‘new Middle East’ was. As Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza, millions took to the streets. Crucially, in Egypt and Jordan the collaborationist regimes were put under major pressure by reemerging mass movements that they thought had been repressed into oblivion. Across the region, presidents and kings who had spent the early decades of the young century developing closer economic, diplomatic, and military relations with Israel were forced to issue statements of denunciation, restate their commitment to Palestinian statehood – however truncated – and break ranks with the United States. In the face of growing instability, even Saudi Arabia has been forced to react in order to safeguard its regional influence. It has broken off negotiations over its potential normalisation with Israel and entered close diplomatic negotiations with Iran.

As soon as news emerged of a major Palestinian operation breaking out of Gaza, the Israeli and Western media focused on the supposed guiding influence of Tehran. It was Iran, we were told, not Hamas, which had organised this offensive, in order to weaken Israel and undermine the Abraham Accords. Palestinians lacked the military technology or know-how to pull off such an extensive operation. Hamas would not act without the express green light from Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic. Each and every explanation was more convincing to pundits and experts than the obvious one: keeping a population of 2.3 million people captive, nearly 80 per cent of whom are refugees from Israel’s previous ethnic cleansing campaigns, while limiting their supply of food, fuel, medicine, and building materials, interspersed with regular devastating bombing campaigns, for eighteen years straight, has consequences – and terrible ones at that.

Despite evidence of Iranian and/or Hezbollah involvement remaining underwhelming at best, these pieces of ‘analysis’ have not abated over the course of the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza. Not only do they continue to be central to think pieces and Israeli talking points, they have also served as justification for the US, Britain, and several other European countries to send military hardware and personnel to the region. Battleships, spy planes, and ground troops surround Israel, purportedly to protect the country from Hezbollah or Iranian retaliation. In practice, the Western powers are demonstrating their support for Israel, while it carries out its genocidal offensive on the inhabitants of the strip in a region-wide reenactment of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The Imperial powers cannot abide that their regional designs be disrupted, especially by a population they considered defeated and contained. The punishment must be as terrible as it is demonstrative. All must see the price paid by those who resist.

Iran and Hezbollah could not, on the other hand, have been clearer that they do not intend to intervene, a smattering of tit-for-tat missile exchanges in Southern Lebanon aside. In a much-awaited speech on 3 November, Hassan Nasrallah pontificated for more than an hour on the strength of the Lebanese resistance but said little. Hezbollah would not do more than it was already doing, the General Secretary told the world, which was already plenty. ‘In response to the US’, said the Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in an interview with the Financial Times, ‘we said that Iran does not want the war to spread, but due to the approach adopted by the US and Israel in the region, if the crimes against the people of Gaza and the West Bank are not stopped, any possibility could be considered.’ A month, and thousands upon thousands of Palestinian deaths too late, the threat remains as empty as when it was uttered. As is surely obvious to anyone, had Hezbollah and Iran really wanted to attempt a death blow against the Israeli state, they would have done so with maximum force on the night of 7 October when the population was reeling, the high command paralyzed, and the reserves un-mobilised.

This is not to claim that the Iranian regime does not sit at the center of the ‘resistance axis’ – an alliance of states, military organisations, and political parties in the region, centered on the Iranian regime, which opposes US imperialism and Saudi power in the region – retaining other players in its orbit. Tehran has proxies, such as many of the Shi’a militias in Iraq and Syria, which have recently mounted minor attacks on US assets in those countries. Some are clients, with their own interests and capabilities, but nonetheless over whom Iran retains a passive veto, in which category Hezbollah is the exemplar. Others are allies, who share some strategic interest but are essentially independent. Hamas falls into the latter category – the Assad regime in Syria, by contrast, contains elements of all three. The outlier here is the Ansar Allah – i.e., the Houthi-led government in Yemen –  which is at once the most rhetorically committed to the ‘resistance axis’ and at the same time most prepared to exceed the pre-existing rules of engagement. This has been made clear, for example, by its repeated seizing of Israeli ships, and the targeting of American ones, off its coast.

Hamas’ attack could not have come at a worse time for the axis, which has scored a number of important diplomatic victories over the last year: a trade agreement with China, a reopening of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, and a fairly stable agreement on its nuclear program with the US. The result of its participation in successive forms of counter-revolution since 2011, most notably in Syria, is that its major components have much to lose from a regional conflagration whose outcome they can neither control nor predict. Hezbollah cannot afford to lose its traction over much of the Lebanese state, defended as recently as 2019, nor the Islamic Republic its hard-won victories over recent protest waves. Neither has an interest in the still-febrile Syrian battlefield being reignited. Stability, for all involved, is the name of the game.

Yet, stability is hard to come by these days. The region is again witnessing the kind of mobilisations not seen since the 2011 revolutionary wave, which was drowned in blood and vengeance by the regional ruling classes and their allies. In Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, and Morocco, to name only the largest, mass mobilisations have seen millions take to the streets. The ever-servile Jordanian regime has been forced to speak out about Western complicity and even canceled a US-sponsored summit in Amman after the attack on the Al-Ahli hospital. In Egypt, demonstrations returned to Tahrir square for the first time since 2013, and the chants quickly included internal social demands. If the latter demonstrations were given some space to operate by a regime seeking a safety valve for popular pressure, they nonetheless represent a dangerous trend for Abdel Fatah El Sisi and his allies. As was the case a decade ago, mass movements in the region are making the connection between the oppression of the Palestinians and their own – especially given their regimes are often involved in both. In the words of Fatima Said, ‘We are not freeing Palestine. Palestine is freeing us’.

Implications in the West

Much the same can be said further afield. In Britain, the US, and across Europe, we have seen an unprecedented level of mobilisation. No previous war or act of oppression against the Palestinians has provoked so large and deep a movement. Demonstrations, occupations, sit-ins, and trade union refusals to handle military exports have mushroomed across the West. Whereas in previous upsurges of solidary, such as during the Second Intifada, actual support for Israel was combined with a form of liberal rhetorical hegemony – ‘violence on both sides’, ‘a complicated issue’, and so on – the government response in countries such as France, the UK and Germany has been simple, outright repression. It is sufficient to remember that, as recently as 2010, the then Prime Minister and now Foreign Secretary (Lord) David Cameron described Gaza as a ‘prison camp’ to register how sharply this particular Overton window has slammed shut.

Yet, in the face of this repression, the solidarity movement has redoubled its efforts and taken on its governments, demanding that they end their economic, military, and diplomatic support for Israel and end their complicity in genocide now, and in colonial rule always. In France, the movement was able to roll back bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and in Britain it claimed the job of far-right Home Secretary Suella Braverman. In Belgium and in Spain, politicians have started talking about sanctions –  and drew Israeli ire when they repeated their denunciation of its crimes in front of the international press on 24 November at the Rafah crossing. Ireland has followed suit, while in the US the left wing of the Democratic party is being moved slowly – all too slowly – towards calling for a ceasefire.

However, the US – pulling a more split EU than ever behind it – has thrown itself fully into supporting its unsinkable aircraft carrier, which suddenly does not look so stable. Two actual American aircraft carriers have been rushed to the Mediterranean alongside 2000 marines, followed by a British gunship and spy plane, as well as German and Dutch troops stationed in Cyprus. Far from allowing the US to focus on containing China’s growing influence, its closest ally in the region is in need of direct military and political assistance. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been dispatched to attempt to contain Israel’s most fanatical ministers who see in the current crisis an opportunity to ethnically cleanse Gaza as well as important sections of the West Bank, while also trying to bring Arab regimes back into the fold. Blinken not only participating in but chairing an Israeli war cabinet meeting points to how much the US is having to involve itself directly.

It is difficult not to think that, in the process of defending its special relation with Israel, the US is severely damaging its relationship with its other close allies in the region. The fact, for example, that the US requested from Egypt that it accept to facilitate Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the strip by taking in the Palestinian refugees in the Sinai desert, is extraordinary. Not only is the Egyptian regime’s animosity towards the Palestinians well known, but the idea that it should accept hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions –  of highly politicised refugees into an area on which the state’s control is already tenuous, which borders both Israel and the Suez canal, can only be received in Cairo as an insult and a total disregard for the regime’s own stability.

The empire suddenly looks rather overstretched – between Ukraine, Palestine, and China – and forced into taking actions to satisfy its allies, which it has spent much of the last decades trying to avoid. It would be premature to announce the end of the project of regional normalisation between Israel and key Arab states, although the direct entry of the KSA into the fold appears rather unlikely in the short term. That said, it would be equally unwise to imagine that Israel will be able to return to the pre-7 October status quo. Several European states appear on the brink of imposing real sanctions on Israel and recognising a (truncated) Palestinian state. The masses have returned to the political stage across the Middle East and North Africa, while the Palestine solidarity movement has poured out across the streets, stations, and workplaces of the world – including in the imperial core. Even the American right, historically so solidly united on the question of Zionism, is showing significant disagreement on the US’ continued unconditional support for Israel. Key figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have repeatedly argued against US military and financial resources being expended to support Israel, distracting from the more important task of containing growing Chinese power.

The task for the Left in this situation is clear. We need to intensify the current crisis of legitimacy by increasing the pressure on the institutions and governments of our own countries. We need to demand that they break off all economic and political relations with Israel as well as with all companies and institutions who participate in or profit from the continued dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people. We have to call for sanctions to be placed on Israel, for all military exports to end to the genocidal state, and to increase diplomatic pressure on Israel until freedom and democracy are a reality for all, from the river to the sea. The alternative is plain for the whole world to see: more ethnic cleansing, more massacres, more destruction.

Jamie Allinson teaches politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh and is a founding editor of Salvage. He is the author of The Age of Counter-Revolution: States and Revolutions in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is one of the co-authors of The Tragedy of the Worker (Verso/Salvage Editions, 2021).

Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is the author of Settler Colonialism: an Introduction, co-editor of the free ebook From the River to the Sea: Essays For a Free Palestine and sits on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism and Notes from Below.