Accumulation Through War: Capitalism and the Blood of Gaza

Musa al-Sada – Nov 11, 2023

“History, unlike man, acts without any moral considerations. This history is evident in places like Gaza, where it is cheap to feed the population and it is very expensive to attack them with F-35s.” -Ali Kadri

There are many maneuvers and tricks that the Resistance used in camouflaging the preparation for the incredible surprise of October 7. Some may be revealed in the coming days while others will be documented in post-liberation museums and archives. Nevertheless, one cannot underestimate one of the pillars of the camouflage operation that made the intelligence of the occupying army drown in a parallel bubble to reality: the Zionist-imperialist mentality.

In September 2021, for the first time since the siege on Gaza began in 2006, the occupation allowed thousands of Palestinian workers from Gaza to work inside, meaning in the “Israeli economy.” This allowance is connected to two issues: firstly, it aligns with the essence of the Zionist historical process of colonizing Palestine and exterminating Palestinians, turning its people into refugees in their land and then exploiting these refugees for cheap labor under oppressive conditions in building the Zionist colonial economy.

However, the matter does not stop here, since we are discussing a settler-colonial replacement project, we must include the exploitation of Palestinian workers within the context of extermination. Allowing Palestinians to work is merely temporary until the settlers complete the full expulsion of all Palestinians, replacing the cheap labor with another provided by one of the normalizing Arab countries, such as Morocco, for example. This leads us to the second issue, which is turning the issue of exploiting workers into a tool of pressure and negotiation against Gazans and Palestinians in the West Bank, because these workers provide for the livelihoods of thousands of Gaza’s families.

Last August, a leaked communication revealed a conversation between a Zionist officer and a Gazan worker informing him of the cancellation of his work permit because his nephew participated in protests at the separation wall. As for the so-called coordinator, the coordinator of the “Israeli” government’s activities in the “Palestinian territories,” on his official and verified Facebook page (notice how capitalist companies document the work of usurping settlers on social media as if it were a normal thing), he directly threatened: “it is impossible to earn your livelihood by working in Israel on one hand and raising a family member involved in terrorism on the other. Our message is clear: either terrorism or your livelihood.”

Before the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Hamas leadership, in what we can call a desperate negotiation operation, mobilized the youth to demonstrate at the fence with the enemy entity and launch incendiary balloons at settlements in the Gaza Strip to pressure the enemy to allow workers to go to work and facilitate the entry of external financial aid to the [Gaza] Strip. In other words, Gazans, to get a few dollars, must be targeted and their youth assassinated by the enemy army as a form of “negotiation.” (Translator note: this ended with the occupation allowing workers and opening checkpoints for them at night.) On one hand, the occupation is under pressure from settlers who need workers for their factories and investments, and on the other hand, pressure from other settlers who accuse it of submitting to the Palestinians.

This outcome, and the continuity of the imperialist exploitation of the people of Gaza, was one of the pre-eminent factors in the Zionist colonial mind that confirmed the Palestinian resistance would not escalate, because the exploitation of workers constituted a compelling factor that would force the resistance to submit. This, as we all know, did not happen.

Analyzed from this perspective, the Al Aqsa Flood Operation can be read as a Palestinian insurrection against the weaponized transformation of the capitalist exploitation process. The discussion here is not only about the Zionist capitalist structure but also about capitalism on a global level, and direct confrontation with Zionist-imperialism, which is important to define.

Understanding Zionism as Capitalism

There are numerous perspectives through which one can historically interpret Zionism, including cultural, identity-based, and political lenses. However, the dominant interpretation, weakened in recent decades in the Arab context, is the analysis and understanding of Zionism as an economic project representing the arm of Western capitalism. This means that we are not talking about a religious or nationalist movement, but a movement that plays an economic function while cloaking itself in religious symbolism and national myth. Therefore, every action it takes has an explanation and an economic benefit for European and American capital.

According to researcher Ali Kadri, whose thesis we will use in the following paragraphs, Zionism is one of the boldest projects of capitalism ever, grounded in Karl Marx’s assertion that large-scale displacements are the worst nightmares envisioned for the future of humanity. While the oppression and power of capital is not only exercised against the Palestinians, but, according to Kadri, in order to comprehend them, we must measure them against the same standard that a child from Gaza feels when a F16 fighter jet roars above her home. Yes, capitalism is a universal aggressor against humanity, but the historical force of capitalism has never been as condensed as it is in Zionist-imperialism. Here, we witness the ideological power of capital, as Westerners managed to weave a narrative about a divine promise to a group of Europeans of the land of Palestine to carry out ethnic cleansing. In short, imperialist power in Palestine is an intensified manifestation of imperialism worldwide.

Kadri asserts that the Western capitalist class power is represented by its institutions, ranging from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, to “Israel” as a colonial project. From this perspective, the centrality of the Palestinian issue becomes clear not only regionally but also globally. The struggle against Zionism is a struggle for humanity as a whole. Even a cultural reading of Zionism leads to the conclusion that the conflict against Zionism is a struggle for humanity, intensifying historically due to racism and the repugnant obsession with segregating people.

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Because this is a struggle for all of humanity, whenever the Arabs and Palestinians submit to Zionism, capitalism strengthens its grip on the rest of humanity. Conversely, whenever Arabs and Palestinians triumph over Zionism, the imperialist grip on the peoples of the world weakens. Gaza is at the heart of this intensification because it is at the forefront of militarization and the capitalist process of accumulation through war.

On one hand, one might initially pose a seemingly logical question: wouldn’t sending food, medicine, and even rebuilding Gaza be cheaper than bombing it with bombs worth millions of dollars? How does it make sense to bomb a house with a bomb whose cost is exponentially greater than what it destroys? Isn’t that material loss and in contradiction with the capitalist principle of profit accumulation?

Gaza precisely answers these questions by understanding capitalism and the role of Zionism in it accurately. War here, contrary to the portrayal of mere material and financial losses, is part of the budget of the occupying entity and its economy, yes. But from a historical materialist perspective it is a process of capitalist accumulation. This accumulation through war makes war, for Zionism, a precondition of peace and continuity, culturally conditioned into [settler society] as Joseph Massad illustrates.

This can be understood from two perspectives. Firstly, the blood of the people in Gaza is, in a literal sense, profit calculated in dollars for American arms companies. With every residential block destroyed and every massacre in Gaza with a bomb like the MK84, for example, this, in the literal sense, is a figure recorded in the invoices of the US company General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (GDOTS) and its budget for the year 2023. The other, more complex and detailed perspective, is that, according to the logic of capitalist accumulation, one of the main capitalist goals of accumulation and profit-making is to reduce the price and value of commodities and labor. The lower the price of labor, through deteriorating economic conditions in their country and pushing them to emigrate or work for Western factories at low wages, the more it is in the interest of German, United States, and British capital. Similarly, as the prices of natural resources used by capitalist companies for the production of their bombs and weapons decrease, it means more profits for the capitalist class in the West. When we talk about reducing the value of humans and land, we are talking about reducing the value of entire countries and societies. And this process is carried out through [imperialist] wars.

Most importantly, this is the primary role of Zionist-imperialism in the Arab world and globally. Just as the World Bank and the IMF provide financial tools for capitalism to accumulate profits and perpetuate poverty in Asia, Africa, and South America, “Israel’s” role is [perpetual] war and keeping the Arab world in a state of poverty and weakness. This is to reduce humans into mere inputs into the calculations of capital. Just as the process of reducing the value of Gazans to work in the economy of their enemy and to be killed on an industrial scale by [imperialist] military commodities, the fate of being Arab in our present era is to be Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Lebanese, or Libyan, killed or displaced, working for the white man in Europe. Because your Palestinian brothers and sisters have been in the forefront for over seventy years, facing the killing machine without pause for decades, and because they are the subject of this historical profit-making process, this makes the mere existence of Palestinians an enemy of Zionism. The existence of the Palestinian is an enemy of the complicit elites, classes, and the normalizing Arab regimes–those elites who sold millions of Arabs to survive the onslaught of accumulation through war. This is what makes Arab resistance [against Zionist-imperialism] on every front, a battle for all of our futures.

(Al-Akhbar)

Translated by Orinoco Tribune

OT/DZ/JRE