Fragments #2: Gaza without illusions, Zohran for NYC, Tooze on the Holocaust, 8% beers of MENA, Abundance (resistance style), &c.

The second Fragments – a series with few short, sharp articles about what’s been on my mind over the past week or so.

Hello. I took an unexpected leave of absence from this newsletter for a few months to work on an exciting project that won’t come to full fruition for some time – please excuse my recent absence. My plan is to write for Zero Line more regularly in the coming period; I appreciate everyone who has subscribed. Thank you.

Gaza without illusions

When the scale of the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 became known, it was said that Israel had suffered a “failure of conception.” They had the intelligence to understand what was being planned, and they would have known – if they had cared to know – that they were unprepared. But they had failed to conceive of the operation’s enormity and audacity.

Since that day, observers external to the Netanyahu government have suffered a similar failure of conception. Israeli leaders have articulated, in the full light of day, their intentions. And yet when, in recent weeks, Israel turned to the final stage of its plan – herding Palestinians into a pair of concentration camps on Gaza’s coast – it was as if that prospect had become evident for the first time.

A series of myths have contributed to that failure. The first myth was that the Palestinian armed resistance would be able to prevent the IDF from taking durable control of large areas of Gaza. This notion was inflated by a series of social media users who boosted videos of armed resistance operations, no doubt encouraged by Twitter’s pay-per-view scheme. But, however resolute the fighters, they were fundamentally outmatched. Israel has paid less in blood for its incursions than most observers expected.

The Gazan armed resistance has killed just ten Israeli combatants on the Gaza front since Israel definitively broke the ceasefire in mid-March, including a police commando and a nominally-civilian contractor. In this time, Israel has killed several thousand Palestinians, at times more than one hundred per day. More to the point, Israel has been able to operate with near impunity in demolishing the built environment: what once had been homes, and then a battleground. But an IDF soldier who spent his deployment razing Rafah told 972+ that “there were no encounters” with Palestinian fighters.

Coming soon: I will write about the counterinsurgency myths that have contributed to this failure of conception.

A second myth was that some undiscovered decency lurked beneath the shell of Israeli public opinion that would restrain the Netanyahu government. There are indeed Jewish Israelis who see Palestinians as fully human, and who have thrown themselves into opposing the genocide. But it is necessary to acknowledge, for realism’s sake, that they are a small minority, and that structural pressures in Israeli society continue to reduce their relative weight. Today, 82 percent of Jewish Israelis want to see Gaza ethnically cleansed, while 47 percent (including three in ten secularists) say that “when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants.” The young are the most violent and racist of all: two thirds of those under 40 even want to expel Palestinian citizens of Israel. Israel is indeed in a state of “moral collapse.”

The third myth was that Israel’s goals would become untenable due to the international community. These hopes were most feeble when invested in the Arab world – which lacks the military power and political will to act on behalf of Palestinians – and in Europe, which is only now taking the most cosmetic action. The UK’s Keir Starmer might be the most risible. Days after signing onto a strongly-worded statement and announcing sanctions against a settler leader, Starmer dispatched his trade envoy to Israel. Lord Ian Austin said he was there to “promote trade” with “the great multi-cultural democracy that is Israel.” If the gesture was intended to signal that the earlier statement was insincere, it was successful. As one Israeli legislator put it, “Everyone got used to the idea that you can kill 100 Gazans in one night. . . and nobody in the world cares.”

As to the idea that the United States might intervene decisively, it remains the last, distant hope to avert a durable ethnic cleansing. In my last essay, I gave too much ground – albeit with formal caveats – to the myth that the U.S. had decided to do so. U.S. policy seemed to me – still seems to me – so irrational in both geostrategic and domestic-electoral terms that I was too ready to believe it was over. The reports of Trump’s “pressure” on Netanyahu have so far turned out to be illusory: just like similar reports under President Joe Biden.

According to one credible estimate, as of a fortnight ago, up to 109,000 of Gaza’s Palestinians were thought to have been killed through traumatic injuries alone: around one in twenty of the enclave’s 2023 population. At the end of September last year, a Brown University report estimated indirect deaths – including those from hunger and lack of access to medical care – at over 67,000. The total death toll may now be encroaching on one in ten, and will only get worse as Israel propagates severe hunger as an aid to ethnic cleansing. Its pseudo-humanitarian food program is being used to disappear Gazans who refuse – or are unable – to collaborate. Whole families are incinerated on a daily basis.

As I observed in October 2023, there is almost always a military solution in heavily asymmetric war. The question is just whether the international system and the domestic politics of the stronger power permits that solution to be applied. If Israel is to be prevented from ethnically-cleansing the majority of Gaza, and establishing new borders on its ruins, it will only be through the forceful intercession from beyond its borders. But what form might that take?

Military intervention to stop the genocide

Ahmed Ibsais, a Palestinian-American writer, has used a Guardian op-ed and his newsletter to call for a military intervention against Israel. I’ve seen the call taken up on social media by a number of Europeans – including those who’re normally opposed to Western military intervention. In principle it’s impossible not to agree: if such an intervention were possible, it would be an obligation. While the point of such calls is more moral than practical, let’s take the time to think about what it would involve.

European states are currently unable to deploy even 25,000 soldiers in Ukraine in order to police a notional future ceasefire. Part of the problem is political will. But there is also a deficit of material capacity.

In mid-2024, Israel had about 40,000 active combat soldiers, and could deploy tens of thousands more in a crisis. But there are much bigger problems than troop numbers, including Israel’s sophisticated air defences. Europe, meanwhile, lacks “force enablers,” secure regional bases and sufficient ammunition stockpiles. France and Britain needed to call on U.S. support to intervene in Libya in 2011. It was a sign that European militaries were already unable to act outside Europe without U.S. assistance – let alone in the teeth of U.S. assistance to an opponent.

Egypt, the most powerful of the states bordering Israel, would likely take a beating in a direct confrontation because it lacks the ability to contest Israeli control of the air, the crucial ingredient of its partial success in 1973.

Young men at a funeral in Western Libya’s Nafusa Mountains, June 2011. Photograph: Tom Dale

This thought experiment points to a few basic realities. In cases of genocide, states are the necessary vector for meaningful action, hard power is the primary determinant of states’ ability to act, hard power requires long term investment in both cutting-edge military capacity and mass, and European countries would need to invest more to be in a position to confidently intervene against Israel, even if the U.S. chose not to back Israel directly.

The logical conclusion is that a forceful anti-genocide politics – whether in Gaza or Ukraine – requires support for increased military expenditure. Because the fruits of that expenditure can inevitably be misused, there follows a strong obligation to intervene more broadly in the politics of state. The anti-militarist and direct-action-only traditions of the European left have no serious answer to this problem. On that note . . .

Zohran Mamdani for NYC

Zohran Mamdani, a candidate backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, has surged in polling for the primary election next month that will determine the next Mayor of New York City. Mamdani still trails frontrunner Andrew Cuomo by nine points in polls. Cuomo is a former state governor with a record of corruption allegations, plutocratic priorities, and aggressive sexual harassment.

Mamdani’s election would be an exciting prospect due to his bold policy platform, which includes rent freezes, public housing construction, free bus rides and childcare, a $30/h minimum wage, an experiment in non-carceral community safety, and a pilot program for subsidised grocery stores. He’s also an excellent communicator: listen to his recent interview on the Odd Lots podcast (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, other apps).

Why hasn’t Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Mamdani yet? Some observers have focused on AOC’s close ties to third-placed candidate Brad Lander, a more moderate progressive – but the option of a double endorsement in the ranked-choice vote would be open to her. More persuasively, AOC might want to limit her exposure to Mamdani’s more radical brand in anticipation that she will attempt to oust Senator Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic caucus, in a 2028 primary. AOC currently leads Schumer by 19 points.

Victories by Mamdani and AOC would have international as well as domestic implications. While the NYC Mayor’s international purview is limited, the election of a candidate who openly backs sanctions on Israel would mark a shift in the window of political possibility. Voting in the Democratic primary will open by post on 14 June and close at the ballot boxes ten days later. The election against a Republican opponent, a formality, will take place in November.

See also: James Meadway asks whether the British left will be able to take advantage of growing political dealignment do that which it has always failed to do before: constitute a viable force outside the Labour party.

What makes the Holocaust exceptional?

As usual, it’s impossible not to appreciate the erudition of Adam Tooze’s latest essay, on the image of the Holocaust as a death factory, seen through a lens borrowed from Leon Trotsky. It’s worth a read. However, I’d suggest it takes on ideas that no one really holds as proxies for a sentiment that they do.

Yes, people associate the Holocaust and industrial modernity. But no one has maintained that a) a large proportion of Germany’s industrial/logistical capacity was devoted to the holocaust, or that b) the Holocaust required the use of Germany’s most advanced technology at every stage of its operation. The sentiment exists for another reason: simply that the part of the Holocaust that culminated in the camps was historically novel in its use of industrial methods, of any technological level, in all of transport, administration, and killing at once. That is a fair observation.

Adam undoubtedly knows that least half of the killing of Jews didn’t take place in the extermination camps at all. If we include the labour camps (which seems appropriate), at most 3.5m of the 6m total were killed industrially. But the remainder were killed in ways decades or centuries old: shot over pits, disease and hunger, forced marches. That’s the main fact elided by the image of the Holocaust as production line.

What was most exceptional about the Holocaust, aside from its scale, was its genesis in pure hatred. Most genocides in history have arisen from some sort of prior ethnic conflict: usually over land (as with native Americans) or political authority (as with Circassians). These conflicts produced cycles of violence that were always grossly uneven, but nonetheless real. Hatred in these cases lies downstream of violent conflict. In that sense, the present Gaza genocide is typical. Genocides with their origins in hateful ideas – the Holocaust, or the attempt by the Islamic State group to destroy the Yazidis – have an especially disturbing quality, but they are comparatively unusual.

The Holocaust remains the archetypal genocide in the Western imagination. The archetype is misleading when it encourages observers to think that what is happening in Gaza cannot be a genocide just because it occurs in the context of a (heavily uneven) cycle of violence, or because Palestinians are fighting back. It is also misleading when it encourages Israelis to see a similar sort of hatred behind the Palestinian national movement.

See also: The international legal definition of genocide is too restrictive. However, legal academic Alonso Gurmendi has a good video breakdown of why even that high standard is met in Gaza.

Petra (8%)

On a recent trip to Jordan I was blown away both by the ancient, rock-cut city of Petra, and – no less monumental – the product of the national brewery which shares the same name. Particularly refreshing is the bold decision to offer their lightest beer at 8% ABV (10% and 13% cans are also available). Petra don’t make a fuss about their 8% offering, unlike Egypt’s Al-Ahram Beverages Company (est. 1897), who describe their Meister Max as “a beer for a new and daring men generation. . . it has the edge of being the beer that offers you power, taste and style all at the same time.” A friend remembers only the metallic taste and industrial hangover.

Notes and recommendations

Tomorrow, Sunday 1 June in London, UK there is a march for the freedom of Ukrainian children who have been abducted by Russia. Assemble 1pm at Marble Arch.

On a visit to Ukraine, two U.S. senators claimed they had the support of a senatorial supermajority for an expansion of sanctions on Russia and massive seizure of its assets. They also threatened China with 500% tariffs if it continued to buy Russian oil. Donald Trump would have a veto. Also of note: Ukraine reported the first combat use of a long-range, autonomous AI-guided drone package.

Listen to Arab Barghouti, son of Palestine’s most popular national leader Marwan Barghouti, interviewed on the Rest is Politics: Leading (various podcast apps). He has also appeared recently in segments with Mehdi Hassan (YouTube, Zeteo) and Peter Beinart.

The book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, published in March, aims to offer a new agenda for the U.S. Democratic party, centred on the abolition of regulations that inhibit the construction of homes and infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants. I recommend Joe Weisenthal’s excellent review, which raises larger questions about how (if at all) the U.S. investment model can compete with China’s. For Boston Review, Sandeep Vaheesan offers a blizzard of alternative explanations for the failures the Abundists identify – see also the Brett Christophers book he mentions. The agenda has been criticised as a vehicle for right-wing ideas and corporate interests. That might be unfair regarding many Abundist policy recommendations, but looks to have some truth regarding the broader political project.

A former head of the IDF’s intelligence directorate has published an analysis of Israel’s options for a strike on Iran. He writes that Israel has the ability, without U.S. support, to destroy relevant Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Despite some ambiguity over whether Iran has hidden stockpiles and facilities, he assesses that the main reason for Israel not to act without U.S. support is the fear of a severe cycle of escalation, culminating in “a war of attrition.” Also of note: one alternative goal of Iranian negotiators, as compensation for a halt to their drive for an atomic bomb, may be sanctions relief that would permit expansion of Iran’s domestic nuclear energy program. Abundance, resistance style.