Palestine and Global Crisis Why Genocide? Why Now?

Abstract

The destruction of the Palestinian people is perhaps as close as the world can get to a genocide foretold. The signs that the Jewish state was moving towards genocide have been multiplying for years. The possibility has been inherent to the Zionist project, which from its inception in the late nineteenth century set as its goal the establishment of a Jewish-only state in the land of Palestine. Here, Robinson discusses the genocidal pressures faced by the Palestinian people and the underlying structural roots in the Israeli and global political economy that contribute to these pressures.

"Genocides are never declared in advance," warned Adila Hassim of the South African legal team in her opening statements before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), convened in January 2024 to hear the charge against Israel for the Crime of Genocide; defined by the United Nations Convention as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part (United Nations 2024). But this is not necessarily true in the case of Palestine. The destruction of the Palestinian people is perhaps as close as the world can get to a genocide foretold. The signs that the Jewish state was moving towards genocide have been multiplying for years. The possibility has been inherent to the Zionist project, which from its inception in the late nineteenth century set as its goal the establishment of a Jewish-only state in the land of Palestine.

But genocide could never be carried out without the backing, implicit or explicit, of the ruling groups from the Western heartland of transnational capitalism that under U.S. leadership have served as Israel's principal sponsors. Diplomatic protestations notwithstanding, what may have now made genocide acceptable to these ruling groups is the escalating crisis of global capitalism. The system faces a structural crisis of overaccumulation and chronic stagnation. But the ruling groups also face a political crisis of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony, and widespread social disintegration, an international crisis of geopolitical confrontation, and an ecological crisis of epochal proportions. Israel's campaign in Gaza constitutes a horrific experiment in how the ruling groups may mold interminable political chaos and financial instability into a new a more deadly phase of global capitalism aimed at violently cracking open new spaces for capitalist expansion and imposing more coercive political methods of social control, from authoritarianism and dictatorship to outright fascism in an attempt to contain popular rebellion and the rapidly expanding ranks of surplus humanity.

Genocidal pressures were building up against the Palestinians well before the siege of Gaza that began in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. In Israel it is now perfectly normal to call for genocide against the Palestinians; whereas to the contrary, it is looked upon as treason to defend Palestinian life. Calls were already growing in Israel for ethnic cleansing and genocide against Gazans in the days leading up to the previous large-scale assault on the territory, Operation Protective Edge, which took place in 2014. Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked, for instance, a senior figure in the coalition government that ruled at that time, posted on Facebook that "the entire Palestinian people is the enemy, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure."

A few weeks later, The Times ofIsrael published an Op-Ed piece by ¥ochanan Gordan (2014) titled "When Genocide is Permissible." Gordan claimed that "there's going to have to come a time where Israel feels threatened enough where it has no other choice but to defy international warnings." He went on:

What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion [Protective Edge] that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel.... If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Echoing these sentiments, the Deputy Speaker of the Israeli parliament at the time, Moshe Feiglin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, urged the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately and use every means possible to get them to leave. "Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel's humanitarian efforts," he said. He continued:

The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations.... The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave.

Some of the right-wing protesters who beat leftists demonstrating in Tel Aviv during Operation Protective Edge wore T-shirts bearing neo-Nazi symbols and photos, including T-shirts bearing the slogan "Good night left side," a neo-Nazi slogan popular in Europe at rock concerts by far-right bands, as a response to the original anti-fascist slogan: "Good night white pride" (Aderet 2014). Nearly one-half the Jewish population of Israel at the time stated that they supported a policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and major portions of the population supported complete annexation of the occupied territories and the establishment of an apartheid state (Silverstein 2012).

In an article I published in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Operation Protective Edge (Robinson 2014), I noted that whether or not structural pressures for genocide actually materialize into a project of genocide will depend on the historical conjuncture of crisis, the political and ideological conditions that make genocide a possibility, and a state agent with the means and the will to carry it out:

A slow-motion genocide apparently has already begun in Gaza, where there have been month-long Israeli sieges every few years that leave several thousand dead, tens of thousands injured, hundreds of thousands displaced, and the entire population deprived of the necessities of life, with astounding Israeli public consensus supporting these campaigns. (Robinson 2014)

Between 2014 and 2023 the political climate in Israel continued to shift so sharply to the right that a fascist discourse became palpable in the daily life of the country, with government officials calling for new rounds of ethnic cleansing to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank and promoting an escalation of settler violence and IDF attacks. In the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attack the Zionist project, founded on systematic ethnic cleansing and terrorism against the Palestinians (Pappe 2007), went from slow-motion to a full-on, real-time campaign of genocide against Gazans. The South Africa brief presented to the ICJ documented the torrent of statements by government officials showing clear intent to commit genocide at the highest levels of the Jewish state.

The questions I want to address here are, first, what are the underlying structural roots in the Israeli and global political economy that are bringing about such genocidal pressures? And second, what does the Israeli genocide tell us more generally about the crisis of global capitalism and what the future may hold? To answer these questions, we must step back a few years to focus on the larger structural changes associated with capitalist globalization and the integration of Israel and the Middle East into the new global order.

The Palestinian Proletariat and the Globalization of Israel

Israel's rapid globalization starting in the late 1980s coincided with the two Palestinian intifadas (uprisings) and with the Oslo Accords, which were negotiated from 1991 to 1993 and then broke down in the following years. Backed by and nudged on by the United States and transnational elites as the Cold War wound down, as well as by powerful Israeli capitalist groups, Israeli rulers entered into negotiations with the Palestinian leadership in the 1990s, in large part as a response to the escalation of Palestinian resistance in the form of the first intifada (1987-1991). The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, turned over a Bantustan-like autonomy to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied territories for what was supposed to be a five-year interim period leading to a final settlement that would end the occupation and establish a sovereign Palestinian state. Yet during the Oslo period from 1991 to 2003, when the process finally broke down altogether, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza greatly intensified. Why did this "peace process" break down?

First, the process was intended not to resolve the plight of the dispossessed Palestinian majority. It aimed to integrate an emergent Palestinian elite into the new global order by giving the elite a stake in defending that order. The PA was expected to mediate transnational capital accumulation in the occupied territories while internally policing the Palestinian masses. In exchange, the "peace process" allowed the Palestinian bourgeoisie to engage in a state-building process (Labadi 2018), no matter how truncated and emasculated that state. It has been shown in fact that Palestinian class formation during this time involved the rise of transnationally-oriented Palestinian capitalists integrated with Gulf capital elsewhere and hoping to convert a new Palestinian state into a platform for its own class consolidation (Dana 2014; see also Smith 1986).

Second, the Israeli economy globalized based on a high-tech-military-security-surveillance complex, the importance of which will become clear momentarily. There has been an ever-deeper interpenetration of Israeli capital with transnational corporate capital from North America, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Oslo helped this process along, facilitating an Israeli transnational capitalist presence throughout the Middle East and beyond, in part by allowing conservative Arab regimes to lift the regional economic boycott of Israel and in part by negotiating the creation of a Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) that inserted the Israeli economy into regional economic networks and integrated the whole region much more deeply into global capitalism.

And third, closely related, if the Palestinian bourgeoisie has seen its class formation frustrated by Israeli occupation and by its lack of access to a viable state apparatus, helping to explain its increasing collaborationist stance, the Palestinian proletariat has fast been become surplus humanity standing in the way of transnational capital in Israel and the Middle East. The Palestinian proletariat of the occupied territories constituted up until the 1990s a cheap labor force for Israel and for the Palestinian bourgeoisie. But starting in the 1990s and accelerating in recent years the Israeli economy began to draw on transnational migrant labor from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere as neo-liberalism and crisis has displaced millions in former Third World regions.

The rise of new systems of transnational labor mobility and recruitment have made it possible for dominant groups around the world to reorganize labor markets and recruit transient labor forces that are disenfranchised and easy to control. Transnational migrant workers in Israel need not be subjected to the apartheid system imposed on Palestinians because their temporary migrant status achieves their social control and disenfranchisement more effectively, and of course because they are not demanding the return of occupied lands and do not have a political claim to a state. While this is a worldwide phenomenon it has become a particularly attractive option for Israel because it does away with the need for politically troublesome Palestinian labor.

The 1948 Nakba that established the Jewish state involved the violent expulsion of the Palestinians and the expropriation of their land, but also the subordinate incorporation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian laborers to work on Israeli farms, construction sites, industries, caregiving, and other service jobs and the conversion of the West Bank into a captive market for Israeli capitalists. Up until globalization took off in the late twentieth century, the relationship of Israel to the Palestinians reflected classical colonialism, in which the colonial power had usurped the land and resources of the colonized and then exploited their labor. But Middle Eastern integration into the global economy and society on the basis of neo-liberal economic restructuring, including the well-known litany of measures such as privatization, trade liberalization, IMF-supervised austerity, and World Bank loans, helped spark the spread of mass worker and social movements and grassroots democratization pressures, reflected in the Palestinian intifadas, the labor movement across North Africa, mounting social unrest, and, most visibly, in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

This tidal wave of resistance, starting with the first intifada, aggravated the historic tension between the drive to ethnically cleans the Jewish state and the need it had for cheap, ethnically demarcated labor. Starting in the 1990s, Israel began to resolve this tension between dispossession/super-exploitation and dispossession/expulsion in favor of the latter. By the 2000s, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers-by some estimates up to 600,000-from Thailand, China, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, Kenya, and elsewhere came to form the predominant labor force in Israeli agribusiness under the same precarious conditions of super-exploitation and discrimination that migrant workers face around the world (at least 30 Thai nationals, four Filipinos and 10 Nepalis were killed in the Hamas attack and a number of others taken hostage). In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack Israel deported thousands of Palestinian workers back to Gaza, while Israeli companies asked the government to allow them to hire 100,000 Indian workers to replace them. By early 2024, even in the midst of war, thousands of Indian workers were pouring into Israel (for all these details see inter alia, Ellman and Laacher 2003; Business and Human Rights Resource Center 2023; Goldberg and Debre 2023; Ali and Fareed 2024; Brown 2024).

As immigration has reduced Israel's need for Palestinian cheap labor the Palestinians have become an ever-more marginalized surplus population. It is no wonder, then, that precisely in 1993 -the year the Oslo Accords were signed and went into effect-Israel imposed its new policy, known as "closure," that is, sealing off Palestinians into the occupied territories, ethnic cleansing, and a sharp escalation of settler colonialism. In 1993, the year the "closure" policy began, per capita GNP in the occupied territories plummeted 30 percent. By 2007, the rates of unemployment and poverty had topped 70 percent. From 1993 to 2000-supposedly the years in which a "peace" agreement was being implemented that called for an end to the Israeli occupation-Israeli settlers in the occupied territories doubled to 400,000, then climbed to half a million by the mid-2010s (Associated Press 2013) and reached 700,000 by 2023 (United Nations 2023). Well before the Israeli genocide started in October 2023, acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as some of the poorest nations in the world, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day.

Among the distinct types of racist structures observed in the sociology of race/ethnic relations two stand out with regard to Palestine. One is super-exploitation/disorganization of the working class. This is a situation in which the subordinate and oppressed sector within the exploited classes occupies the lowest rungs of the particular economy and society within a racially or ethnically stratified working class. What is key here is that the labor of the subordinate group-that is, their bodies, their existence-is needed by the dominant system even as the group experiences cultural and social marginalization and political disenfranchisement. This was the historical post-slavery experience of African Americans and Chicanos in the United States, as well as that of the Irish in Britain, Mayan Indians in Guatemala, Africans in South Africa under apartheid, and ethnically demarcated migrant labor, largely Mexican and Central American, presently in the United States.

The other is exclusion and appropriation of natural resources. This is a situation in which dominant groups need the resources of the subordinate group but not their labor-that is, not their bodies, their physical existence. This is the racist structure most likely to lead to genocide. It was the experience of Native Americans in North America. Dominant groups needed their land but not their labor or their bodies-since African slaves and European immigrants provided the labor needed for the new system-and so they experienced genocide. Now, like the Native Americans before them-and unlike the Black South Africans-the Zionist state, the settlers and would-be settlers, and transnational capital need Palestinian resources, specifically land and the wealth that lies beneath it, but Palestinian bodies are no longer needed and simply stand in the way. This shift to surplus humanity appears to be more advanced for Gazans, who have been relegated to the concentration camp that it has been since 2007, when Israel locked Gazans into the strip and imposed a total blockade.

It should come as no surprise, given this context, that the noted Israeli historian Benny Morris, a professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev who closely identifies with Israel, gave a lengthy interview to Haaretz in 2004 (Shavit 2004) in which he referred to the genocide of Native Americans in what is today the United States in order to suggest that genocide may be acceptable. He said in the interview that "even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history." He then went on to call for ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, saying:

[Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know it sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.

When I first quoted Morris in my 2014 article, I stated that his views did not represent consensus inside Israel, but this may no longer be true. Two months into the current genocide over 80 percent of Israelis supported the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (Mayadeen 2023).

The Political Economy of Twenty-First Century Genocide

If the problem of surplus capital is endemic to capitalism over the past couple of decades it has reached extraordinary levels. As global markets become saturated the leading transnational corporations and financial conglomerates have registered record profits at the same time that income has dropped for a majority and corporate investment has declined (Neat 2023). In the first 18 months after the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2022 to mid-2023, the 148 largest corporate conglomerates in the world increased their total net profits by $1.8 trillion, a 52 percent jump, while workers lost a combined $1.5 trillion in income (Oxfam 2024). The transnational capitalist class (TCC) has accumulated more wealth than it can possibly spend, much less reinvest. The more the TCC accumulates, the more it must undertake desperate searches for new outlets to unload this expanding mass of profits. Financial speculation, debt-driven growth, and the plunder of public finance are reaching their limits as temporary fixes in the face of chronic stagnation. New outlets to unload surplus accumulated capital must be violently cracked open.

Surplus capital finds its alter ego in surplus labor as crises of overaccumulation expand the two antagonistic poles of this dialectical unity. The process of capitalist development

constantly produces and produces in direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of laborers, i.e., a population of greater extent that suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population; (Marx 1967 [1867]: 603)

noted Marx in Capital. "This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" (603, emphasis in original). Decades of globalization and neoliberalism have relegated great masses of people around the world to marginal existence (Davis 2006; Robinson 2020). In the coming years, new technologies based on artificial intelligence combined with displacement generated by conflict, economic collapse, and climate change will exponentially increase the ranks of surplus humanity (Robinson 2022). Gaza thus becomes a potent symbol of the plight of the dispossessed around the world, a terrifying mirror reflecting possible futures for masses of people for whom capital has no need.

Yet Israel remains a special case with its own historical specificity of colonialism, apartheid, and fascist foundational ideology. The twentieth century saw at least five cases of acknowledged genocide and likely considerably more than five. The century started with the genocide of the Herero and Nama by German colonialists from 1904 to 1908 in what is today Namibia. This was followed by the Ottoman genocide of Armenians in 1915 and 1916, the Nazi holocaust of 1939-1945, the Guatemalan genocide against the Mayan indigenous of the 1980s, and the Rwandan genocide of 1994. All these genocides must be analyzed in their respective historic conjunctures involving political and economic crises. The Israeli genocide, however, may be most comparable to that of the Nazis, as in the big picture both are responses to a general crisis of world capitalist breakdown.

Genocidal pressures have been built into the Zionist project since its birth in the late nineteenth century insofar as it called for an exclusively Jewish state cleansed of Palestinians. This is why most of us around the world fighting against this genocide condemned the October 7 Hamas attack but also insisted that this conflict began not in 2023 but in 1948 with the incarnation of that project in establishment of the Jewish state. That year, some of the most prominent Jewish individuals worldwide, among them Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, and Isidore Abramowitz (1948), published a letter to the editor of The New York Times warning that:

among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party," a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and fascist parties.

The letter went on to warn that the members of the party, which later became the now-ruling Likud party, "speak of freedom, democracy, and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state" (Einstein et al. 1948).

The Zionist hasbara, or propaganda machinery, has turned such comparisons between Zionism and Nazism into a taboo, yet the comparison is historically and analytically important. Both Zionism and Nazism emerged from the wave of racial nationalism that swept Europe in the late nineteenth century, according to which all people belong to one or another "racially pure" groups that can be traced back to mythical origins and that correspond to racially pure people/nations (see, inter alia, Marius and Paul Weindling 2006; Hobsbawn 2012). Germany was exclusively for the Aryan race going back to Teutonic tribes and earlier, the French going back to Gaul, the British to the Anglo-Saxons, and the Jews to Canaan (Palestine). Campaigns of "blood and soil" were to organize the world according to this ideology. Build into the campaigns of blood and soil that sprung from racial nationalism were expulsion, apartheid, and the specter of genocide.

In order to legitimate conquest, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism the Zionist program of blood and soil in Palestine required the invention of a "Jewish people" (Sand 2009) that belongs to an ancient Jewish homeland, a foundational myth that would convert a faith community among diverse cultures, places, and histories into a racially pure Jewish people/nation that must return to its ancestral homeland. For this to happen, Palestinians had to be removed and erased from history. Zionists and defenders of the Israeli state take great offense at this analogy between the Nazis and Israeli state actions, including the charge of genocide, in part, because the Jewish holocaust is used by the Israeli state and the Zionist political project as a mechanism of legitimation, so that to draw such analogies is to undermine Israel's legitimating discourse. It is crucial to point this out, because that discourse legitimates genocide at the present time. Jewish grief and memory of the holocaust must be weaponized. In order for Jews to be swept up into Zionism, they must be made to feel that there is an existential threat from which they can only be protected by blind defense of Israel, even if this means support for genocide of the Palestinians along with the criminalization of Israel's critics.

If these are the particular historical circumstances that constitute the background to the current genocide in Gaza, they also help us understand how the world-historic conjuncture of globalization and crisis can activate the always-latent potential for extermination. Israel brings home the tension worldwide between the economic need that ruling groups have for super-exploitable labor and the political need they have to neutralize the actual and potential rebellion of surplus humanity in the face of the escalating crisis of capitalist control. Ruling class strategies of containment become paramount, and borders between national jurisdictions become war zones and zones of death. Palestine is one such death zone, the most egregious perhaps, because it is tied to occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. Yet tens of thousands have died along the U.S.-Mexico border and North Africa-Middle East-Europe corridors and in other borderlands between surplus humanity and zones of intense accumulation in the global economy. Just two months before the Hamas attack it was reported that Saudi border guards opened fire without warning and in cold blood killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants trying to join 750,000 of their countrymen already working in the Kingdom (Human Rights Watch 2023).

Conclusion: The Death Cult of Global Capitalism in Crisis

The siege of Gaza and the West Bank is a form of primitive accumulation. In late October, as Israeli bombardment intensified, Israel set about granting licenses to transnational energy companies for gas and oil exploration off the Mediterranean coast, part of its plan to become a major regional gas producer and energy hub, as well as an alternative to Russian gas for Western Europe (UNCTAD 2019; Amoff 2023; Donald 2023; Mazza 2024). One Israeli real estate company notorious for building settlements in occupied Palestinian territories published an advertisement (Wilkins 2023a) in December for the construction of luxury homes in bombed out Gaza neighborhoods, while others spoke of resuscitating the Ben Gurion Canal Project that has been dormant since it was originally proposed in the 1960s (Ridley 2023). The project involves building an alternative to the Egyptian-run Suez Canal that would run from the Gulf of Aqaba across the Negev desert and Gaza out to the Mediterranean. The only thing stopping the newly-revised Canal project is the presence of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Israeli economy is well equipped for genocide. It has undergone several waves of restructuring as it has integrated into global capitalism (Nitzan and Biehler 2002). The first saw a transition from a traditional agricultural and industrial economy towards one based on computer and information technology and high-tech telecommunications. This was followed in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, and the rapid militarization of global politics by a further shift towards a global military-security-intelligence-surveillance-counter-terrorism technologies complex. Israel has become globalized specifically through the high-tech militarization of its economy. Like the larger global economy of which it is a part, it had come to feed off of local, regional, and global violence, conflict, and inequalities. The captive Palestinian population under occupation serves as an expedient target and testing ground for systems of mass repression that have then been exported around the world to control restive populations and surplus humanity (Loewenstein 2023).

This militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression have become central to the entire global economy and society (Robinson 2020). Each new conflict around the world opens up fresh profit-making possibilities to counteract stagnation. Endless rounds of destruction followed by reconstruction fuel profit-making not just for the arms industry, but for engineering, construction, and related supply firms, high-tech, energy, and numerous other sectors, all integrated with the transnational financial and investment management conglomerates at the center of the global economy. These are the gales of creative destruction, to be followed by booms of reconstruction. There is a convergence between the political need to contain surplus humanity and the economic need to open new spaces for accumulation. Peace may not pay but in the context of a transnational capitalism in crisis, genocide becomes profitable and politically expedient to the ruling groups. Gaza is a real-time alarm bell that genocide may become a political tool in the decades to come for resolving capital's intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus humanity.

Yet it is a mistake-a very big one at that-to reduce the project of genocide in Palestine to the Israeli and Western states. Individual capitalist states and transnational elites outside of the West may condemn the genocide and withdraw political support for Israel but they are not-and cannot be-against the imperatives of global capital accumulation that undergird the genocidal impulse. To the contrary, political opposition to genocide simultaneous to the promotion of worldwide capitalist expansion is a contradiction internal to the managers of global capitalism.

The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq followed by the establishment in 1997 of the MEFTA and a host of related bilateral and multilateral regional and extra-regional free trade agreements; and structural adjustment programs unleashed a cascade of transnational corporate and financial investment in finance, energy, high-tech, construction, infrastructure, luxury consumption, tourism, and other services. This investment has brought Gulf capital, including trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds, together with capital from all around the world, involving the EU, North and Latin America, and Asia, inextricably enmeshing them all in global circuits of accumulation. China has become the region's principal trading partner and an important investor in Israel, including in high-tech military and security. The Middle East-Asia corridor is now a major conduit for global capital (see, inter alia, The Economist 2023; HSBC 2023; Labadi 2023; Nair, Di Paola, and Bartenstein 2023; APIC n.d.). Israeli, Arab, and extra-regional transnational capitalists share common class interests that trump political differences over Palestine beyond the immediate conjuncture of the Gaza war.

Palestine has become an exemplary space for carrying out extermination on a wider global scale, a site for the exercise of new forms of absolute despotic power that has no need for political legitimacy. This is more than old-fashioned settler colonialism; it is the face of a global capitalist system that can only reproduce through bloodshed, dehumanization, sadism, and annihilation. The fate of the global working and popular classes, including those swept up into and also those thrust out of the global circuits of accumulation, may depend on the outcome of the Israeli genocide. The center is collapsing. The utter bankruptcy of bourgeois liberalism has opened space for populist fascists to manipulate mass insecurity and anxiety over the future. The battle lines being drawn in the Middle East reflect global battle lines. Netanyahu, Trump, Milei, Bolsonaro-these neofascists represent not aberrations but emerging political forms of the despotic rule of capital.

Disclosure Statement: Any conflicts of interest are reported in the acknowledgments section of the article's text. Otherwise, authors have indicated that they have no conflict of interests upon submission of the article to the journal.

References

References

Abunimah, Ali. 2014. "Israeli Lawmaker's Call for Genocide of Palestinians Gets Thousands of Facebook Likes. The Electronic Intifada. July 7. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes

Aderet, Ofer. 2014. "Right-Wing Demonstrators in Tel Aviv Wore Neo-Nazi Shirts." Haaretz. July 15. https://www.haaretz.com/2014-07-15/ty-article/.premium/israeli-rightists-wear-neo-nazi-garb/0000017f-dc24-df9c-al7f-fe3cl3af0000

Al Sayegh, Hadeel and Rachna Uppal. 2023. "As Israel-Hamas War Rages, Global Finance Chiefs in Saudi Sound Gloomy Note." Reuters. October 24. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-hamas-war-rages-finance-chiefs-meeting-saudi-pessimistic-2023-10-24/

Arab Palestinian Investment Company (APIC). N.d. Company home page, https://apic.ps/

Ali, Arbab and Rifat Fareed. 2024. "Undeterred by Gaza War, Thousands of Indians Turn Up for Jobs in Israel." Al Jazeera. January 24. indians-turn-up-for-jobs-in-israel

Arnoff, Kate. 2023. "Don't Expect Gas Companies to Pause Business on Gaza's The New Republic. November 14. https://newrepublic.com/article/176917/fossil-fuel-companies-plowing-ahead-profit-israeli-gas

Associated Press. 2013. "A Look at Israeli Settlers, by the Numbers." August 18. https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-look-at-israeli-settlers-by-the-numbers/

Brown, Rachel. 2024. "Home Work: Inside the Lives of Migrant Caregivers in Palestine/Israel. Washington University of St. Louis. The Ampersand. https://artsci.wustl.edu/ampersand/home-work-inside-lives-migrant-caregivers-palestineisrael

Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. 2023. "India: Israeli Construction Sector Urges Govt, to Allow Companies to Hire 100,000 Indian Workers to Replace Palestinians Amid Conflict." November 6. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/india-israel-seeking-100000-indian-workers-in-construction-sector-to-replace-palestinian-workers/

Dana, Tariq. 2014. "The Palestinian Capitalists that Have Gone Too Far." Beta. January 23. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/30106

Donald, Rachel. 2023. "Everybody Wants Gaza's Gas." Planet: Critical. October 31. https://www.planetcritical.eom/p/everybodv-wants-gazas-gas

Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.

Einstein, Albert, Hannah Arendt, Sydney Hooks, et. al. 1948. "To the Editors of The New York Times." The New York Times. December 4. https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948

Ellman, Michael and Smain Laacher. 2003. "Migrant Workers in Israel: A Contemporary Form of Slavery." The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network and the International Federation for Human Rights. Copenhagen/Paris. http://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/il 1806a.pdf

Feiglin, Moshe, 2014. "My Outline for a Solution in Gaza." Israel National News. July 15 http://www.israelnationalnews.eom/news/343914#.VAOL5qN SyE

Goldenberg, Tia and Isabel Debre. 2023. "Israel Deports Thousands of Palestinian Workers Back to Gaza's War Zone." Associated Press. November 3. https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-workers-rights-7a86c936a64ab785ab27bd72247ce1ef

Gordon, Yochanan. 2014. "When Genocide is Permissible." The Times of Israel. August 1. https://archive.ph/RPf3M

Government of South Africa. 2023. "Application Instituting Proceedings." December 28. Full text available at https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/01/192-20231228-app-01 -OO-en.pdf

Hobsbawn, Eric, J. 2012. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HSBC. 2023. "Middle East-Asia Corridor - A New Conduit for Global Capital." September 4. https://www.gbm.hsbc.com/en-gb/insights/financing/middle-east-asia-corridor-a-new-conduit-for-global-capital

Human Rights Watch. 2023 '"They Fired on Us Like Rain': Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border." August 21. https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-yemen-saudi

Interesse, Giulia. 2023. "China-Israel Bilateral Trade and Investment Outlook." China Briefing. October 11. https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-israel-investments-trade-outlook-belt-and-road-initiative/

Labadi, Taher. 2018. "The Palestinian Diaspora and the State-Building Process." Arab Reform Initiative. December 5. https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/the-palestinian-diaspora-and-the-state-building-process/

Li, Promise. 2023. "China and Israel Have a Long History of Cooperating in Repression." Jacobin. October 21. https://iacobin.com/2Q23/10/china-israel-repression-military-trade-palestine-technology

Loewenstein, Anthony. 2023. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. London: Verso.

Marx, Karl. 1967 [1867]. Capital, Vol. I. New York: International Publishers.

Mayadeen, Al. 2023. "83% of Israelis Support Ethnic Cleansing of Gazans." Aljazeera. December 24. https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/83-of-israelis-support-ethnic-cleansing-of-gazans-survey

Mazza, Patrick. 2024. "How is Gaza Offshore Gas Development Tied to the Israeli Invasion?" The Raven. January 24. https://theraven.substack.com/p/how-is-gaza-offshore-gas-development?utm medium=ios

Nair, Dinesh, Anthony Di Paola, and Ben Bartenstein. 2023. "BP-Adnoc's Landmark Israel Gas Bid in Flux as Conflict Escalates." Bloomberg. October 11.<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-l 1/bp-adnoc-s-landmark-israel-gas-bid-in-flux-as-conflict-escalates

Neat, Rupert. 2023. "World's 722 Biggest Companies Making $ltn in Windfall Profits." The Guardian. July 5. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/06/worlds-722-biggest-companies-making-1 tn-in-windfall-pro fits

Nitzan, Jonathan and Shimshon Biehler. 2002. The Global Political Economy of Israel. London: Pluto.

Oxfam. 2024. "Inequality, Inc.: How Corporate Power Divides Our World and the Need for a New Era of Public Action." Oxford (UK). https ://webassets. oxfamamerica. org/media/documents/Inequalitylnc ,k6NfmGq.pdf? gl =l·lu7vifm· ga·MTglNjgxNjY3Ny4xNzAlNDY10Dg4· ga R58YETD6XK·MTcw NTQ2NTg4OC4xLjEuMTcwNTO2NiEzMi42MC4wLiA.

Pappe, Ilan. 2007. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. London: Oneworld Publications.

Ridley, Yvonne. 2023. "An Alternative to the Suez Canal is Central to Israel's Genocide of the Palestinians." Middle East Monitor. November 5. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231105-an-alternative-to-the-suez-canal-is-central-to-israels-genocide-of-the-palestinians/

Robinson, William, I. 2014. "The Political Economy of Israeli Apartheid and the Specter of Genocide." Truthout. September 19. https://truthout.org/articles/the-political-economy-of-israeli-apartheid-and-the-specter-of-genocide/

_____. 2020. The Global Police State. London: Pluto.

_____. 2022. Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic. Oakland: PM Press.

Sand, Shlomo. 2009. The Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso.

Shavit, Ari. 2004. "Survival of the Fittest." Haaretz. January 8. https://www.haaretz.com/20Q4-01-08/ty-article/survival-of-the-fittest/0000017f-e874-dc7e-adff-f8fdc87a0000

Silverstein, Richard. 2012. "Poll: Israelis Support Ethnic Cleansing, Annexation, and an Apartheid State." GlobalResearch. October 25. https://www.globalresearch.ca/israelis-support-ethnic-cleansing-annexation-and-apartheid-state/5309661

Smith, Pamela, Ann. 1986. "The Exile Bourgeoisie of Palestine." Middle East Research and Information Project. No. 142. September-October, https ://merip.org/1986/09/the-exile-bourgeoisie-of-palestine/

The Economist. 2023. Can Israeli-Emirati Business Ties Survive the Gaza War?" November 2.<https://www.economist.eom/business/2023/l 1/02/can-israeli-emirati-business-ties-survive-the-gaza-war

Turda, Marius and Paul Weindling (eds.). 2006. Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940. Budapest: Central European University Press.

Wilkins, Brett. 2023a. "'Cashing in on Genocide: Israeli Firm Pitches Beachfront Real Estate in Leveled Gaza." Common Dreams. December 19. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-settlements-gaza

_____. 2023b. "Business of War is Booming as Orders Surge at Top Global Arms Firms." Common Dreams. 28 December, https://www.commondreams.org/news/arms-trade-2666819054

United Nations. 2023. "The Question of Palestine." UN Human Rights Council. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. settlers-are-living-illegally-in-the-occupied-west-bank-meeting-summary-excerpts/ .

_____.2024. "Gaza: South Africa levels accusations of 'genocidal conduct' against at world court." UN News. January 11. https://news.un.Org/en/story/2024/01/l 145402

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). 2019. "The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential." Geneva, https://unctad.org/svstem/files/official-document/ gdsapp2019d l en.pdf