The ceasefire in Gaza, after 15 months of Zionist genocide, was forced on Israel by the resistance of the Palestinians. However, the form it is taking, with the very-Zionist incoming Trump administration apparently dictating events to Netanyahu and his cabinet, is choreographed to try to save Netanyahu’s regime and limit the damage to the Zionist settler project overall. Trump wants to use this situation, as well as the very convenient, orchestrated overthrow of the Assad government in Syria, overrun by US/Israeli/Turkish backed jihadists, to try to salvage the so-called Abraham Accords – the ‘normalisation’ of Israeli rule over the Palestinians with the US’s historical Arab collaborators: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. The Syrian collapse is being used to counterbalance Israel’s failures in Gaza and Lebanon and try to get the Zionist show back on the road. But that would not even be necessary if Israel had not visibly failed in Gaza.
All of Israel’s objectives in Gaza – the defeat and destruction of Hamas, the depopulation of Gaza, or the extermination of its population, and the settlement of the enclave, have not happened – so far at least. Many have been killed, but the population refused to flee – and forced Israel to take responsibility and be seen to murder them. This has demoralised and discredited Zionism worldwide.
Hamas’s objective on October 7th, 2023, was the seizure of many Israeli captives to exchange for Palestinian hostages, and to survive Israel’s brutal onslaught, which they knew would come on the heels of any serious revolt against the Zionist occupation. On the table now is a major hostage exchange, with many Palestinians exchanged for each Israeli, and a complete, though phased, Israeli withdrawal. Though Israel routinely breaks ceasefires and will break this one, it is the Israelis who were desperate for it, as was the case in Lebanon.
Ther appears to be a collapse of IDF morale, refusals to fight by, to the Zionist ruling class, a worrying number of troops. The Israeli army is said to be collapsing, with mental breakdowns widespread. Hamas’ tunnel network still works well despite the massacres. Israeli troops are ambushed, booby trapped, and taking multiple causalities. But what that is really driving the problems with the IDF is something the Nazis were aware of, tried hard to avoid, and found partial ways round.
If troops are ordered to commit terrible atrocities, they will fall victim to mental illness. The Nazis’ way of avoiding this was SS Einsatzkommandos – getting other forces in occupied countries to carry out the worst crimes. Israel tried this in the 1980s in Lebanon with the Falange, and the so-called South Lebanon Army, but it didn’t work very well. Partly because, though the Israelis were brutal, they had not then reached the threshold of genocide – and their clients not trustworthy. In Gaza they have no such clients. They were not able to get anyone to fight for them, except for some help with arial reconnaissance from Western countries. They had all the arms they needed from external imperialist backers, courtesy of the Zionist lobby. But that’s no shield. They failed to defeat Hamas.
Israel could not recapture those taken. And now they are going to exchange them. That was Hamas’ aim all along. Netanyahu knew retrieving them without a deal was not possible, but it was an opportunity for genocide, for massively reducing if not eliminating the Gaza population. The regime may have killed half a million Gaza Palestinians. The Lancet, last summer, estimated at least 186,000 dead: Susan Abulhawa, the Palestinian scientist who debated Gaza for the Palestinians at the Oxford Union, estimates up to 500,000. No one believes the figures of approaching 50,000 from the civilian Gaza health ministry. They had no chance of keeping count of those buried under rubble, starved to death, or died of thirst, or of injuries that could not be treated because the medical systems were destroyed, or from diseases that were likewise untreatable.
Why now? Trump’s coming has made it possible, but not in the sense that Trump would have it, that his threats of ‘hell’ if the hostages were not released caused Hamas to capitulate. Hamas have not capitulated. They held out for a hostage exchange and got one. That is the achievement of their main war aim. It appears the advent of Trump has given Netanyahu the chance to finally to capitulate. With the Democrats in power, even though they did not dare to cross Netanyahu and the lobby during an armed conflict, part of them might go after Netanyahu in the aftermath. The Democrats have a wing that does not like Zionism very much, though they are too cowardly to do anything about it during armed conflict. If the Israeli genocidal ‘war’ had ended with the Democrats still in power, they might have found their voice and stuck the knife in. The deal now is unchanged from one that was on offer from Hamas since May 2024, but was rejected by Israel as Netanyahu feared being ousted in the aftermath. But things had reached the point where the Israeli assault on Gaza had to end one way or another, because the IDF faced disintegration otherwise.
But the US Republicans led by Trump are as close to Likud as you can get. They will try to protect Netanyahu, and to protect Israel from genocide charges, which for all the Zionist hysteria and witch hunting in bourgeois politics, are an explosive question. It is precisely because the Zionists are so morally tarnished that the Zionist hysteria has risen to a crescendo. The GOP have already driven sanctions against the ICC. So, Netanyahu waiting until Trump was about to take power to do the necessary deal has a certain logic, in terms of attempted damage limitation. Though it is likely to put Netanyahu into deep trouble now from the corruption charges he faces in Israeli bourgeois politics. The far-right Jewish Power party minister Ben Gvir walked out of the government as the ceasefire came into force. The clerical-fascist Smotrich is likely to do the same. Both are hoping for an opportunity to rejoin and restart the assault on Gaza. Netanyahu tried to spin Lebanon as some kind of victory. He was only able to do that because of Syria and the confusion that the collapse of Assad caused.
But he won’t easily be able to spin this as victory, as there is going to be a hostage exchange, which presupposes that Hamas will still be the decisive power in Gaza. Israel’s US cohorts have had to admit that Hamas has gained many more recruits than it has lost volunteers fighting the genocidal attacks. That also makes the two-state sop, the extension of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to Gaza an incredibly difficult objective. Hamas has undoubtedly far greater authority than Abbas’s collaborators. Victory in formal terms for Israel would be the crushing of Hamas and the recapture of the captives without an exchange. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza of its population and the murder of as many as possible was its key war aim, as it realised it had no chance of victory over Hamas. But it has had to concede that Northern Gaza, which it tried to empty with the exterminationist “General’s Plan” in the later part of 2024, will be repopulated. It has also agreed to vacate the Philadelphi Corridor between Southern Gaza and Sinai, which it took from Egypt by force when the genocide was in full swing. It has had to agree to fully withdraw from Gaza.
There are perhaps other domestic benefits for Trump to have the ceasefire declared literally the day before he assumes the Presidency again. By being able to claim credit for the Gaza ceasefire, no matter how temporary, and by planning to negotiate an end to the Ukraine War, Trump aims to wrap up these “forever wars” and under the false banner of being a “peacemaker”, Trump aims to actually prepare for world war. Trump and his faction are seeking to resolve the crisis of US hegemony by re orientating US imperialist strategy to refocus on pressurizing China economically and militarily in the most aggressive way possible. This requires full mobilization of resources for a world war. It requires fascist repression at home to regiment the public to accept a manifestly crazy orientation.
Israel, built on land entirely taken by forced from the Palestinian people, is now the ultimate pariah state in the world. That cannot be sustained for long, even though a Jewish-Zionist caste loyal to Israel exists within the bourgeoisie in the West and is an object of cult-like veneration from the imperialist ruling classes. Cults can face a shock that causes them to internally disintegrate. Zionism is in deep crisis and undermining of its authority provides potential conditions for Israel’s collapse though emigration of many settlers and demoralization of those remaining. The demand for the Palestinian right to return and the creation of a multi-ethnic workers state of Palestine becomes feasible. Documentation of this livestreamed genocide only just began. It has exposed the barbaric nature of capitalist imperialism to billions around the world, and we communists must ram home the lessons of that to build a new, worldwide revolutionary movement.
