Gaza: the Golgotha and the Stalingrad …

Highly intelligent analyses, coupled with an easy familiarity with English vernacular – the better to convey matters of political-economy with vivid accuracy ¹ – have propelled Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, to celebrity status on the international Left. A touch of motor-biking street cred, snappy dress-sense and breezy but smarm-free affability with a talent for ad-lib, well, these haven’t harmed his image either.

Meanwhile his fellow member of Greece’s hapless Syriza government, right royally shafted by German bankers and IMF in the “debtor crisis” of 2015, has ploughed a less eye-catching but no less worthy furrow. I speak of Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, no stranger to Steel City Scribblings.

(Top tactics for top tacticians of pronunciation: these dauntingly polysyllabic Greek names roll off the tongue easier when broken down to constituent syllables and taken lentissimo – till you get the hang of them, at which point you may up the pace of delivery, if only in your head.)

Here’s Dimitris today, translated from Greek by Christian Haccuria, and edited solely for brevity by me. I’ve chosen not to include it in my ongoing series, Road to WW3, but it could easily have been placed there – and will likely be cited in future posts in that series.

Gaza, the Golgotha and the Stalingrad of Our Century

“The enemy is not Hamas, nor its military wing. The enemy is every child in Gaza… Not a single child will there.”
Israeli politician Feiglin on Israeli Channel 14, May 22, 2024

“Thank God, we are erasing Gaza, erasing this evil. All of Gaza will become Jewish.”  Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, Times of Israel, July 24, 2024 

The Palestinian people have been at the forefront for 22 months, especially in recent weeks, in one of the greatest and most significant epics in humanity’s ancient struggle for Freedom—in the battle of Civilization against Barbarism and Neo-Fascism. 

This epic fight is entirely comparable in heroism and significance to that of the defenders of Stalingrad, who sealed humanity’s struggle against Nazism. Perhaps it is even greater, because the defenders of Gaza have neither a state nor an army to protect them from Israel’s genocidal, criminal hordes. And as with Stalingrad, the conflict in Gaza will have global consequences 

The only weapon of the Palestinians is dignity. “We will die, but not leave our homeland,” they daily declare – here and here – in word and deed. As a result, the Netanyahu regime and its army of murderers, torturers and rapists grow ever more frenzied. The “achievements” of this army surpass those of the Nazis, but without the so-called “justifications” of the latter. 

Hitler’s justifications hold zero weight but Germany only turned to him after years of humiliation under the Treaty of Versailles, Economic Crisis of 1929, and the paralysis and inability of Social Democracy and Communism to offer an alternative. Hitlerism was the desperate counterattack of a defeated nation

This, we repeat, does not justify the Nazis in any way but who has harmed Americans and Jews since 1945? Are they not, to a large extent, the ruling classes of the dominant nations? Against what or whom do they “defend themselves”, launching decades of intervention after bloody intervention in the Middle East and across the globe? What justifies the regional and global gangsterism of Israel, the US and their allies?

Here we see unbridled arrogance and desire to dominate without moral justification, or even its pretence —leading to complete moral degradation, as seen in the actions of the Israeli army in Gaza, and in the reckless brinkmanship of the proxy war against a nuclear power in Ukraine. 

We could fill endless pages with the “achievements” of Israel in Palestine, documented by so many reputable international organizations and humanitarian groups. “What Israel is doing are the worst crimes I have seen in decades” , says the long-time head of UN aid programs. ² Even former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert admits his country is committing war crimes, causing horrific casualties, and is run by a “criminal gang” under Netanyahu. In Gaza, Israelis are committing, says Olmert, an “indiscriminate and unlimited, brutal and criminal murder of civilians”. It is the result of government policy consciously, devilishly, and maliciously irresponsible. Ex Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon also characterized Israeli actions as ethnic cleansing due to the messianic and fascist ideology of Netanyahu and his government.  ³ 

Nor is it up to us to determine the rightful leadership of the Palestinians. The decades-long policy of Israel and US left the Palestinian people no choice but to turn to their most militant factions, those who refused to compromise with the occupier and won the right to represent their people through armed struggle, such as Hamas, now largely separated from its original leaders in the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad.  We in the West have been inundated by accusations against Hamas, similar to those that levelled at the time against Nelson Mandela, the Algerians of the National Liberation Front (FLN), the Cypriot EOKA or the Greek EAM. 

Only a tiny fraction of the increasingly horrifying news from Palestine is published or broadcast by our media, lest it provoke an uprising of Western public opinion against an Israeli regime that, in proven reality, controls to a large extent through various lobbies and secret services, our own states, politicians, publishers, and “journalists.” Even alternative, critical sources publish many condemnations but too little documentation of what is happening in martyred Palestine, where Christ was crucified, and where our world and our civilization will be reborn or lost. 

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1. See for instance the Global Minotaur – introduced by none other than Paul Mason, the ‘crack-smokingly inaccurate’ subject of my post yesterday – in which Yanis uses Grecian myth to make the points that ruling classes – under feudalism no less than capitalism – don’t just have to extract surplus wealth. They need also to safeguard it; in the historically unprecedented case of America’s creditors by accumulating, with the mounting anxiety of those fearing themselves caught in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme, IOUs in the form of US dollars and Treasury bonds.
2. I featured the words of former UNRWA boss Chris Gunness in a post this weekend.
3. Two things. One, is Dimitris a tad uncritical here? Aren’t Yaalon and other former senior politicians in Israel – like Piers Morgan, Guardian, and Western corporate media at large – belatedly waking up to the extent of their own culpability, and rushing in with too-little-too-late to cover their backs? It’s right to quote them of course. I’m adding perspective is all. Two, part of the sanitising process already under way is to scapegoat Netanyahu – just as, in that other theatre of the empire’s globalised war on humanity, Zelensky is fast becoming Washington’s fall-guy.