Why do the rich and right-wing in Britain so love their Nazi uniforms?  Whether it is Tory students, royals, politicians, or upper class jocks, the naughty pleasures of pretending to be a fascist bomber or concentration camp guard are irresistible for some.  Lately, some LSE students, most likely fitting into the category of the aforementioned upper class jocks, were discovered engaging in a drinking game called the 'Nazi Ring of Fire'.  You can imagine the sorts of rituals involved - saluting the fuhrer, that sort of thing.  A Jewish student who objected to this display was assaulted.  Now, I'm sure the students involved don't quite get the furore that has resulted.  Most likely, they think the affair was maybe a bit off-side, but otherwise bloody good sport.  Too bad for them.  Let them suck it up.

I'm rather more concerned about the way the political reaction has panned out.  First of all, it's worth saying that there's a fairly sensible article by Jay Stoll, president of the LSESU's Jewish Society in the LSE newspaper, The Beaver.  (I don't know why they called it that.)  Stoll rejects the scapegoating of Muslims for antisemitism, and suggests that the usual culprit is actually the upper middle class boarding school type.  That's probably true in the UK.  Even here, though, there's already something odd going on.  The newspaper calls the affair an 'antisemitic' drinking game.  Now, I hope you understand what I mean when I say this is bordering on euphemistic.  I just mean that there's a lot more involved in Nazism than antisemitism, and the decision to inhabit a Nazi persona for kicks signifies something more than judeophobia.  

What more?  Well, what more is involved in 'national socialist' politics?  Nationalism, anticommunism, anti-liberalism, patriarchy, homophobia, strains of virulent biological racism other than antisemitism, social Darwinism, extreme political authoritarianism, class chauvinism, contempt for the poor and weak, etc.  It is absolutely correct to identify and attack the vicious antisemitism involved in such Nazi performance, particularly as it was a Jewish student who was assaulted.  But antisemitism won't stand in for every evil of Nazism.  I think what's really going on with such people is not just antisemitism, but more fundamentally a certain admiration for supermen, hatred for the weak and vulnerable, enjoyment in the imperial bunting, the festivities and aesthetics of domination and hierarchy.  It's not fascism, but the licensed pleasure of a class on the offensive, people who are intent on clinging on to everything they have and taking more, exhaling with gratification and relief as the opposition is violently policed, or bombed.

In this connection, a less sensible response to the affair came from Tanya Gold of The Guardian, who usually makes her wedge writing lighter fare.  (I click on the links, sometimes).  She proves the old adage that if antisemitism prompts you to defend Israel, you have already forfeited your probity on both subjects.  Actually, that isn't an old adage, I just made it up: but it is nonetheless true.  I suppose one could make the 'paradoxical' point that Israel is organised antisemitism, which is also true.  Or, in a more elaborate version of the same basic idea: Israel is an apartheid state that can only exist through the expropriation and murder of Palestinians, and to identify its interests with those of Jewish people as such is to defile the latter, to defame them, to blood libel them.  This, while correct, is utterly inadequate, because the perspective of Israel's victims is lost in this.  What I really mean is that defending the state of Israel by reference to instances of antisemitism in modern day Europe is, wittingly or otherwise, another way of identifying with a would-be master race - with no sense of irony.  Worse still when they rank instances of legitimate protest by pro-Palestinian groups as examples of mounting antisemitism, or worry about a "demand that Jews denounce Israel if they wish to be accepted in polite society", as if it wasn't the victims of Israeli oppression and their allies who are debarred from 'polite society'.  Of course, Zionism is not fascism, but nor is it the eternal other of fascism.  You can't have it both ways.  Either racist, nationalist, imperialist ideology is objectionable, in which case its organisation in a state is calamitous, or you must count the thuggish Nazi impersonators as bedfellows.  This is a choice that Israel's founders and planners have always faced, and they have always opted for the latter without embarrassment.

JamieSW's comprehensive summary of the Palestine Papers asks if the comprador regime's pandering to Israeli rejectionism means it is finished:

Most of the Arab world’s anger so far has been directed not at the Israeli government but at the PA. This makes sense: Arabs take Israeli rejectionism for granted. Unlike many liberals in Europe and America, they cannot afford the luxury of delusions about our ally’s role in the region. The PA’s collaboration has also long been clear, but the extent of the betrayal revealed in the documents is nauseating. They record Abbas greeting Condoleeza “birth pangs” Rice with, “[y]ou bring back life to the region when you come.” “I would vote for you”, senior negotiator Ahmed Qureia told Livni; Ariel Sharon was my “friend”, Abbas enthused. We already knew about the PA’s collaboration with the US and Israel to overthrow Hamas; its support for the Gaza siege; its close cooperation with the Israeli military; and its diplomatic manoeuvres to bury the UN inquiry into the 2008-9 Gaza massacre. These new leaks promise to reveal how PA “leaders were privately tipped off” in advance about the Gaza massacre – something previous leaks have already confirmed.

Again, none of this should come as a surprise. The PA is a product of the Oslo process, which was designed, as former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami put it, to groom a Palestinian leadership class to act as “Israel’s collaborator in the task of stifling the [first] intifada and… [cut] short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence”. The aim, another Israeli minister explained, “was to find a strong dictator to ... keep the Palestinians under control.” The PA is “almost wholly dependent upon American, European and Arab political and financial support, as well as security and economic cooperation with Israel” and so can only operate within limits dictated by Israel and its international backers. This was dramatically illustrated when Palestinians elected a government that didn’t enjoy the backing of their occupiers in 2006. The US, Europe and Israel responded by starving it of funds, isolating it diplomatically, kidnapping a third of the cabinet, killing hundreds of Palestinians, destroying Gaza’s only power station, and training and arming Fatah militias to overthrow it. It is a mistake, then, to focus overly on the corruption and venality of Abbas, Erekat, et al. The more important point is that the PA is structurally incapable of serving as an instrument of Palestinian liberation. Our takeaway lesson from the documents should be the need to end our government’s support for Israel’s occupation and Abbas’s quasi-police state in the West Bank.

The PA’s strategy as revealed in the documents is delusional, on the (perhaps unreasonable) assumption that its objective is to secure a negotiated settlement to the conflict. It appears to be under the impression that if it just offers Israel one more concession, cedes one more bit of territory, compromises on one more basic Palestinian right, then the U.S. will force Israel to accept a settlement. The reality of the American role hardly needs elaborating here; it is encapsulated well enough in Rice’s response to the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948: “Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time.” The gaping yawn wasn’t transcribed. When Palestinian negotiators objected to Israel’s insistence on annexing yet more Palestinian territory, Rice was blunt: “You won’t have a state… your children’s children will not have an agreement.”

It is still too early to predict how reaction to the leaks will play out. The PA is denying everything on the grounds that, paraphrasing Erekat, ‘we can’t have offered Israel virtually all of East Jerusalem, because if we had then obviously Israel would have accepted it’. What is the Arabic for ‘facepalm’? “We don’t hide anything from our brothers”, Abbas insisted as the PA threatened to shut down Al Jazeera. Abbas has accused Al Jazeera of declaring “war” on the Palestinians – Erekat is presumably drawing up an agreement to cede East Jerusalem to Riz Khan.

The popular legitimacy of the PA, already damaged, is surely now destroyed. In the long-term – possibly sooner - this could spell its demise. Certainly Palestinians will not achieve their liberation under its auspices.

"An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

The Israeli government and media has been vilifying the Free Gaza movement in a rabid build-up for weeks, but who would have anticipated this bloody culmination? Who would have expected this act of high seas piracy? Israeli claims that they were fired at, or even attacked with "knives" and "other cold weapons" when they illegally boarded the flotilla, before going on to stalk the sleeping and the innocent can surely be dismissed as vulgar propaganda. From the people who gave us the fastest re-definition of the term 'civilian' of any belligerent state in recent history, such talk is emetic. The idea that there was a "fight", any kind of meaningful combat, between unarmed peace activists and trained killers is just absurd. But let's note a few things. For a start, it is Israel's official contention that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, that their murderous blockade has no severe consequences for the people of Gaza, even at the same time as their official spokespersons speak of Gaza explicitly in the language of genocide. This after the Goldstone report and a mountain of evidence compiled by relief agencies and NGOs documenting the effects of Israel's blockade. It is, of course, absurd and despicable, but it should remind us what kind of state we're dealing with, what kind of logical somersaults it is capable of performing while maintaing perfect equanimity.

Now recall that for weeks the Israeli state has been declaring that the aid flotilla constitutes a violent attack on Israeli sovereignty, though Israel has no sovereign right to police the borders of Gaza. They claimed that the convoy was bringing assistance to terrorists, and warned that it was being funded by the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood. They claim that such aid vessels help keep Hamas in power and Gilad Shalit (who he?) locked up. They claim that the convoy, rather than the blockade itself, constitutes a violation of international law. Israel's ability to exhale falsehoods and absurdities seamlessly, poker-faced, and then to suddenly and without missing a beat alter its story when it becomes clear that not even its loyalist drones are gullible enough to believe it, is not unique but it has a unique pedigree. For the Israeli state is singular in its self-righteousness. This is built in to official doctrine and practise, entrenched in its forms of governmentality. It is always the victim, no matter what it's doing today - whether slaughtering refugees in Sabra and Shatilla, or murdering sleeping families in Dahiya, from Nakba to Cast Lead - it is always on the precipice of being exterminated by a new wave of Arab Nazis. Given this, any effort to undermine its 'defensive' actions is an attack not only on its expansive notions of sovereignty, but on the 'Jewish state'.

By the logic of Israel, any abridgment of its right to murder Palestinians constitutes an act of antisemitism, an existential attack on the Jewish people, whom they represent by proxy. Its job, then, is to do whatever it deems fit in discouraging and punishing said 'antisemites' while aggressively retailing whatever they do to an increasingly hostile world which, at any rate, they insist is driven by exterminationist antisemitism anyway. If the two ends - the violent preservation of Israeli supremacy in the Middle East, and the global PR - increasingly come into conflict, this is only because of a 'new antisemitism', not because of anything Israel actually does.

In other words, by the twisted logic of Zionism: Israel can impose a blockade on Gaza that systematically starves civilians, leaves them to die without medicine, destroys their sewage and power systems, leaves them utterly dependent on international aid delivery which it imposes the most grotesque restrictions on; then it can demonise and assault an aid flotilla intended to break the blockade, fire on the residents, murder people in their sleep, the better to deter anyone from attempting to violate its supremacy in Palestine again; then it can manufacture whatever story it requires to force a hostile world to accept its actions, muddy the waters, juggle narratives, befuddle and confuse people, following up one bit of legerdemain with yet another and another, etc; and it can do all this while remaining the perpetual victim (remember Sderot!), while doing nothing more than defending itself, defending its famed "right to exist", and by proxy the right of the Jewish people to exist. That, the logic of Zionism upon which the Israeli state is founded, alone explains the insane combination of thuggishness, deceit, secrecy and sanctimony that has always characterised Israel's conduct.

Meanwhile, the British government is rapidly moving to fulfil its promise to make it possible for Israeli war criminals to visit the UK without being disturbed by Inspector Knacker.

To destroy the basis of Palestinian nationhood, Israel had to crush every manifestation of civil society, political and military development among the Palestinians living in border areas and miserable refugee camps, from 1949 onward. Repeated incursions into Jordan, including the bombing of Irbid, and the ethnic cleansing of one and a half million people from the Suez Canal area in 1970, was a logical corollary of this. The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan had been the Zionists' key ally in the originary purge of 700,000 Palestinians that enabled the Israeli state to come into being. It was a major host of refugee populations, tightly controlling their movements and environment on Israel's behalf. Israel foresaw, however, that if local populations sympathised with the refugees, they had a political problem on their hands. So, their repeated attacks were in part an endeavour to turn local populations against the Palestinians, frightening them enough to pressure the Jordanian government into acting against the refugees. After a series of massacres by the Jordanian state, refugees aligned to the PLO were driven into Lebanon, right into the middle of a brewing civil war between, loosely, left-wing and Islamic groups on the one hand, and right-wing Maronite groups on the other. The PLO sought to avoid being dragged into that war, but when Phalangists started, using Israeli-supplied weaponry, to attack Palestinians, the PLO joined with local leftist forces. Israel was intervening directly long before its invasion, its actions including the napalming of a refugee camp, killing 200 people. By 1982, under the Likudnik Prime Minister and veteran of 1948, Menachem Begin, Israel had opted for open conquest.

Israel had a number of interests in the war. They wanted to crush the PLO, to align themselves with the right-wing Maronite forces with whom they believed they had a natural alliance (and it would make sense geopolitically in terms of opposing both left-wing and Islamist movements), and to extend their border somewhat to the north. Just as was witnessed during Israel's assault on Lebanon in 2006, Zionism is ideologically committed to the idea that the territory at least up to the Litani river belongs to Israel. The attempted ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon during the invasion took the form of dropping leaflets from 20 June 2006 on civilian areas, ordering all Lebanese to evacuate for their own safety - and then dropping bombs on them as they fled. On 23 June 2006, Israel explicitly acknowledged that it intended to set up a military administration in the entire area south of the Litani. Whether or not international opinion (ie, that of the US and its allies) would accept this, it would count as yet another 'fact on the ground' that Israel could defend on the grounds that retreat would only encourage the evil-doers. Well, the first invasion of Lebanon was even more ambitious in its aims. Israel believed that in alliance with the Phalangists, it could control up to two-thirds of Lebanese territory. Given Israel's long-standing obsession with the 'demographic problem', moreover, it would not be sensible for them to annexe the territory without being sure that they could control, deplete and expel the Palestinians in that territory.

As usual, Israel's aggression was prepared by various provocative actions designed to elicit a response from the PLO, including 'training exercises' in Lebanese territory, attacks on Lebanese fishing boats and violations of air and water space. No retort was forthcoming. So, following the attempted assassination of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov by the Abu Nidal group, Israel launched a series of bombing raids in Lebanese territory (where the Abu Nidal group did not have a presence). The PLO did respond this time, shelling northern colonies - or settlements, or villages, or 'Jewish residences', or whatever euphemism you prefer. Israel took the cue to invade, protestings its determination to crush terrorism and protect its civilians from shelling (does this sound vaguely familiar?). In reality it embarked on the attempted annihilation of the PLO as a physical force of resistance, and of the whole idea of independent Palestinian nationhood. And it is in this context that one must understand the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

The PLO was, Israel recognised, not merely a military or paramilitary outfit, but a popular political force well-rooted in the exiled Palestinian population. To attack the PLO was not just to attack their troops, but the whole civilian infrastructure which supported them. And it wasn't enough to attack them in Lebanon. It is forgotten, perhaps, that during the invasion Israel also quoshed a number of civic and elected institutions in the West Bank, imposing authoritarian rule by whatever proxies and quislings they could find (few in number as it happened). It set up, funded and armed Village Leagues to keep control of the territories, authorising them to carry out arrests and attacks on opponents. This is the role that, sadly, Fatah has come to embrace. In Lebanon, the annihilationist motif was evident from the beginning. Long before Sabra and Shatila, the earliest targets of the war included refugee camps such as Rashidiyeh, which was reduced to rubble. Its residents fled or were killed, and those who were caught were rounded up and taken to a nearby beach to watch the destruction. All males of teenage years and older were blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken away. And they were not heard from again. Again, the Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp was largely flattened by bombing, and its mosque bulldozed afterwards. Approximately 100 mangled bodies were found under the mosques ruins. Hospitals were destroyed, orphanages flattened by cluster and phosphorus bombs, a school in Sidon was destroyed with 300 inside killed and, with ruthless efficiency, the Israeli army blew housing blocks and apartments to craters, if they suspected that there might be PLO activists inside. Hundreds of thousands of refugees - mostly women and children, since males were more robustly dealt with - were wandering aimlessly through Lebanon's carnage, starving and out of their minds with terror, before Sabra and Shatila. And all the while, incidentally, liberal and left-wing figures from the United States were taking IDF tours of southern Lebanon, cheering on the bloodshed. Jane Fonda, who had funded the Viet Cong, found herself conscripted to Israel's army of overseas cheerleaders, as did Tom Hayden, the former Sixties radical. Michael Walzer's verdict can be summarised in the simple phrase: "just war".

In September 1982, a month after Israel's demolition of the PLO had been consecrated, the IDF sealed off the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. On Thursday 16 September 1982, truckloads of Phalangist and Haddad troops entered the camp from behind IDF lines. The Phalangists selected for the attack were drawn from the most extreme elements of the militia, while the Haddad troops were more or less direct auxiliaries of the Israeli army. They killed and killed for days. At night, they killed by they light of flares, methodically massacring the inhabitants, scooping them up with bulldozers and burying them under the rubble. Those bodies which could not be buried were taken away in trucks. On Friday 17 September, the Israeli chief of staff and met with the Phalangist high command, commended their hard work, and offered them a truck with IDF markings so that they might better do their work. They were given another 12 hours in the camp to finish their work, which they duly completed by 5am on Saturday 18 September. After the massacre was completed, journalists began to arrive on the scene. Robert Fisk was one of them, and reported:

"What we found inside the Palestinian Chatila camp at ten o'clock on the morning of 18th September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination ... there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into the rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army medical equipment and empty bottles of whisky ... Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot at point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.

"The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old ... On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short, dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead ... One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed through her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror." (Robert Fisk, Pity The Nation: Lebanon At War, Oxford University Press, 1992).

The UN General Assembly considered this an act of genocide. It is important to see this in light of the processes that led to the massacre. It was not an isolated incident, but the horrifying - from the IDF's perspective, apparently, glorious - culmination of Israel's war on the very idea of the Palestinian people. It has a genocidal logic which has been repeatedly expressed in the various massacres in Israel's wars, whether in Qana or in Gaza, where the IDF seemed to go out of its way to violate every last humanitarian norm - indeed, to prove that it absolutely did not consider the Palestinians worthy of even the most minimal human consideration. The incident in Gaza City, on 22 January this year, in which the IDF sealed off a neighbourhood, bombed and shelled it, blocked medical and humanitarian entry, and knowingly left children to slowly die next to their already deceased relatives, was a clear indication of this. Remembering Sabra and Shatila is not just about paying ritual tribute to the dead, for whom tributes are worthless. It is about knowing what it is that the Palestinians are up against, and understanding the urgent need for solidarity today. The TUC's support for the BDS campaign is long belated recognition of that.

Guest post by redbedhead:

It may seem crass to talk about winning and losing in the face of the Gaza slaughter, as though it were a football game. But there is good reason when one considers that the final tally of a battle or a war shapes key future events, determining the likelihood of future victories or even whether other battles will be entered into by those involved. And it is not only those directly involved who must be considered, for a victory or defeat by the army of choice will determine future actions. It is a truism about the Middle East, for instance, that Israel's 3-day, smashing victory over three Arab armies in 1967 secured them the sponsorship of the United States, which has sustained their superior position viz. their regional competitors.

Based upon a body count it would seem that Israel is the definite winner. There are, after all, something like 1300 dead Palestinians, plus another 5400 wounded, with well over half of the total being accounted for by civilians, even with only women and children being counted as such. This compares to 3 dead Israeli civilians and another 10 dead soldiers, most of them killed by friendly fire, apparently. But we can't look at the present invasion in terms of crude - and deadly - numbers. Israel has a massive military superiority over Hamas and its allied militias, like Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and DFLP. They have F-16s, guided bombs and missiles, Merkava tanks, phosphorous shells, unmanned surveillance drones, a navy, all the latest techno gizmos, access to US satellite intelligence - not to mention, apparently, the intelligence support of Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's favourite Palestinian collaborator, and leader of Fatah. All of this ensured that a Hamas military victory over Israel was utterly impossible and Hamas seems to have been smart enough to avoid direct confrontations in the open.

Israeli political leaders had set themselves a series of goals prior to and during the operation. Since Israel initiated the present conflict, planning it far in advance, prior even to the 6 months ceasefire negotiated with Hamas, and set the terms for its victory, it must be measured against those goals. In addition, other, unintended consequences must be looked at. Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, along with Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have argued that the primary goal of the Gaza invasion was to stop Hamas lobbing rockets and mortars into southern Israel. If this were really the purpose of the attack, then certainly Israel has failed miserably, as demonstrated by the ceaseless firing of rockets throughout the invasion and even immediately following Israel's unilateral ceasefire. What's more, if the Israeli government wanted to end Gazan rocket fire the answer was very simple - meet the conditions of the original ceasefire negotiated with Hamas and agree to continue it. Hamas had, after all, met its terms - not only discontinuing Hamas' firing of rockets but putting a lid on rocket fire by rival militias such as Fatah and Islamic Jihad. Between June 19, when the ceasefire was agreed and November 4, when Israel launched a military raid, breaking the ceasefire, rocket and mortar fire was effectively nil (see attached pdf,p.6). It was Israel that failed to meet the terms of the ceasefire and which repeatedly provoked Hamas with attacks, arrests and killings.

The second stated goal was to prevent Hamas from re-arming. However, again, actions speak louder than words. If this were Israel's sole goal, they could have negotiated a deal with their pliant Egyptian ally or focused bombing strictly in the border region, where the smuggling tunnels exist. Nonetheless, even the head of Israel's intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, reports that the tunnel network hasn't been destroyed and that it will be up and running again in short order if Egypt doesn't clamp down. In other words, stopping smuggling was never dependent upon bombing the hell out of Gaza - it couldn't even be effective. What was required was Egyptian cooperation. But Egypt is now less likely, not more, to agree to a politically unpopular clampdown against the Palestinians, after hundreds of thousands demonstrated in solidarity with Gaza and against the Egyptian dictatorship. That was made clear after Israel and the US signed an agreement - without telling the Egyptians - to tackle the tunnels on Egyptian soil. The Egyptian Foreign Minister responded saying that Israel and the US can "do what they wish with regard to the sea or any other country in Africa, but when it comes to Egyptian land, we are not bound by anything except the safety and national security of the Egyptian people and Egypt's ability to protect its borders." President-for-life Mubarak went on television to specifically state that foreign monitors would not be allowed in Egypt. But even if Egypt agrees to more American Army Engineers to help it police the border, or an increase in police numbers IDF officials don't believe that this will stop the smuggling. So, Israel's second policy goal is clearly a failure. The real key for Israel was the need to restore its deterrent capability" - basically to instill fear in any and all Arabs who might think to challenge the occupation or any other Israeli strategic goals. New York Times billionaire columnist Thomas Friedman supportively referred to this as "educating" Hamas by "inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." This was, in other words, according to Israeli supporters and critics, a terrorist operation by the state of Israel. As Norman Finklestein pointed out in a recent interview: "The goal of the operation was to terrorize the civilian population so that Palestinians would be afraid of Israel. This is the dictionary definition of terrorism."

Has Israel restored its deterrent capability, so badly damaged by its failed war in Lebanon in 2006, and its withdrawal under duress from Gaza in 2005 and southern Lebanon in 2000? Certainly every Israeli politician, journalist and military leader is claiming this. However, if the goal was simply to impress upon Hamas that they couldn't defeat Israel militarily, this was already known. Hamas has been trying since at least 2002 to agree a long term truce with Israel, only to face Israeli bombs and targeted assassinations. Certainly by now, any Palestinian knows that it doesn't matter what you do, Israel will try to kill you:

"it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days."

The irony is that this pattern almost ensures the continuation of violent resistance since even non-violence is met by Israeli attacks. At a certain point, Israel's deterrent capability is undermined by the fact that only utter defeat and an acceptance of genocide would prevent Palestinians from resisting Israel's aggression. Certainly Hamas was suitably unbowed to fire off nearly two dozen rockets after Israel's unilateral ceasefire and to demand a withdrawal within one week or they would restart hostilities. What's more, everyone can see, as they did in Lebanon in 2006, that while Israel could defeat three Arab armies in six days in 1967, after three weeks fighting a starved, blockaded, disarmed population in Gaza, the IDF didn't take more than a corner of Gaza City.

Ultimately, of course, it will be in the coming days that the interpretation of events will unfold, depending upon the actual state of Hamas and other resistance organizations. It is likely that while Arabs throughout the region will of course remember that Israel can, in fact, destroy unarmed populations, that it is possible to resist and survive. What's more, Hamas will likely be strengthened politically, while Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization will be fatally weakened. Israel, the US, EU and their Arab client regimes may try to hold him up but everyone knows that they are now dead as a resistance movement and thus in the eyes of the Palestinian people. This makes it more likely that Israel will, as a result of this onslaught, be forced to recognize Hamas as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians, as will the international community. The 18 month campaign to destroy the results of the democratic election of Hamas, first by arming Fatah and fomenting a civil war and now with a direct intervention, have utterly failed. And outside of the Middle East, Israel has managed to discredit itself even further, spurring into being a massive movement in solidarity with the Palestinians and against Israel. They have shattered the myth that Israel is the victim and the Palestinians the aggressors. This movement, the heroic resistance of the Palestinians and the images of Israel's utter brutality, which they were unable to hide, though they barred all journalists from entering Gaza, has pushed even Israel's staunchest allies to criticize them. Turkey, Israel's only Muslim ally, strongly rebuked Israel, demanding their exclusion from the UN until they implemented the Security Council resolution. Egypt, the biggest Arab nation and paid billions by the US to play with Israel, has been made even more unstable by the slaughter, creating concern for the US' major Arab bulwark in the region. Jordan recalled their ambassador in protest. And there is even suggestion in a fascinating article by Justin Raimondo that the US ruling class is growing tired of Israel's mad dog routine, which threatens US hegemony in the region by alienating Arab allies and threatening others with domestic political upheaval because of Israel's penchant for killing Arab civilians.

It's unclear how all this will pan out over the medium term. But it is clear that the Gaza operation, which Israel was forced to end before Obama's inauguration, has not all gone the way Israel hoped. It may not even go the way that Livni and Barak hoped it would in terms of their electoral prospects, with the ultra-war mongers in Likud making most of the gains from the invasion. Hamas and the Palestinian people will live to fight another day, with a much larger international movement, one in which the call for boycott and divestment may get a major hearing. And the whole region has been destabilized thanks to Israel's compulsive need to avoid peace at any costs. The blowback is looking to be much worse than what they started out fighting, as they have internationalized the conflict.

Zizek describing Hezbollah and Hamas as "fascist" is no surprise - the flip side to his contrarianism is that, when in doubt, he just repeats liberal banalities because that's what he essentially believes. However, I encounter this sort of nonsense from people who ought to know better, and I think we all do. And after seeing this resentful "yeah, well..." sort of reply from Alan Johnson to the Hamas minister Bassem Naeem, one starts to realise how the liberal theodicy of the Middle East conflict relies upon this canard. After all, Johnson is not the sort of nasty person to deny the Palestinians their rights (those being constrained to what is deemed compatible with the continuation of Israel's existence as a Zionist state). And since he is the sort of person who thinks Israel would as soon have peace as perpetual war, there must be some reason why it has so far failed to materialise. Extremists 'on both sides' obviously contribute to the impasse, but the real story is that Hamas plots genocide against the Jews. Can't trust 'em - not 'partners for peace'.

The ideology of Hamas is not obscure. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the main goal of the organisation is to eventually replace Israel with an Islamic Republic on the whole of historic Palestine. Its most vociferously expressed conviction in its early years was the belief that Israel could not be won over through negotiations and concessions, and that only a military jihad could succeed. This in fact constituted a departure for the historically quietist Muslim Brothers, but in truth it was the first intifada and the way in which it was crushed that galvanised the organisation. Two key figures inspire Hamas' ideological orientation. The first is Sayyid Qutb, whose doctrinal contribution became a staple of Brotherhood ideology in the course of struggle with the Nasserist state. Qutb articulated a right-wing variant of Third Worldist discourse, rejecting both socialism and American-style capitalism. Like ideological confederates such as Mawdudi, he sought to renew Muslim societies from the weakness that had allowed them to be overwhelmed by colonial powers by resuscitating their moral power. Reacting against the chimera of a distinctly Western weltanschauung, comprising nationalism, secularism and liberal democracy (cf Mawdudi), Qutb regarded the unconditional sovereignty of God as the basis for such renewal. If you're an Anglo-American writer in need of a justification for perpetual war, the technical term for this doctrine is "Islamofascism".

Still, as Zizek himself has pointed out (on Haider v Blair), fascism is not just a bundle of elements (anti-socialism, anti-modern reflux, patriarchy, corporatism, etc), it is a particular articulation of those elements. In my view, it is far better to see Qutb's doctrine as a conservative form of anti-colonial nationalism, in which the plane of nationhood is transferred to the Umma. Realistically, Qutb's ideal state would probably not have differed that much from Nasser's, except for added religious trappings. Were it not for the failure of the Free Officers to accomodate the Muslim Brothers in the corporatist Egyptian state, indeed, Qutb would have been happy to support that state - he had himself been a supporter of the Free Officer rebellion. Mind you, the British had no problem deeming even Nasser a "fascist" when he nationalized the Suez Canal, because only a fascist would do something to annoy a declining empire. The second key figure for Hamas, is 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam, an important figure in the Palestinian resistance to the British occupation who was killed in the build-up to the 1936-9 uprising. In fact, Qassam had form as an anti-colonial fighter, which career he began when Italy invaded Libya in 1911, and continued with the Syrian revolt against the French Mandate. His contribution to the Palestinian struggle was to form 'Black Hand', an underground resistance movement which - of course - the British Empire considered a 'terrorist' outfit. The anti-colonial lineage is crucial, and this is recognised in Hamas ideology.

The Muslim Brothers emerged as a serious force in Palestine particularly after the 1967 war and during the Israeli occupation. In this time, the rising profile of religion in politics and daily life saw the number of mosques soar, particularly in Gaza, where the number rose over the first twenty years of occupation from 200 to 600. This was the main vector through which the Brothers established a presence, aside from using zakat to supply alms to the needy and so forth. When the first riots of the incipient intifada erupted in December 1987, several of the Brothers based at the Islamic Centre in Gaza met to discuss a response. They started to publish propaganda leaflets calling for action against the Israeli occupation, and formed the original nucleus for what would become known as Hamas (short for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya or "Islamic Resistance Movement") in 1988. For nice liberals, this is the moment of disaster, but I actually think that hitherto quietest bourgeois Islamic nationalists throwing themselves into the resistance is a good development, not least since the PLO was increasingly bankrupt politically and militarily since its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982. In fact, it should be said that older members of the Brotherhood were quite trepidatious about getting involved in the uprising, since they still maintained that Palestinians needed to be educated in Islam before they could be ready for a full-scale rebellion - it was the younger generation who drove the evolution of Hamas into a serious organisation of resistance.

Hamas' goals, as explained in its Charter, are congruent with those of the Brotherhood, but place far more emphasis on the specific Palestinian problem, and less on reforming society along Islamic lines. The organisation certainly considers the whole of historic Palestine an Islamic waqf, or trust, but this is really a religious form of Palestinian nationalism. In fact, what was distinctive about Hamas in the 1990s was that while the PLO were retreating from the mainstays of Palestinian nationalism and popular armed struggle, Hamas conspicuously held to them. Of course, simple tactical flexibility has ensured that it has always differentiated its long-term goals from short-term aims such as establishing a state on Gaza and the West Bank. So it wasn't that weird for it to declare a willingness to arrive at a ten year truce with Israel based on a two-state settlement. Although Hamas is usually equated with suicide attacks, it has always been pragmatic about the use of force, deploying it in much the same way as secular Palestinian groups such as Fatah and the PFLP. It cooperated with the PLO over the Oslo negotiations process, for example, despite its misgivings. And though Hamas has always rejected the PLO's inherent right to lead the Palestinians, it has also opposed intra-Palestinian bloodshed and sectarianism and has, even before its velocitous rise since 2000, sought to forge a coalition with the organisation on an agreed platform.

The key point that has animated liberal critique of Hamas, aside from violence, is antisemitism. Without question, the early Hamas doctrine held that the defense of Palestine was part of a resistance not only against imperialism or Zionism but against essentialised blocs of Judaism and Christianity, who they depicted as engaged in an existential battle with Islam. They drew on claims from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to interpret their struggle as one against Jewish world domination. In a reductionist way, you could see this as the result of 'false consciousness', or a simple lack of class analysis. True enough, if your oppressors tell you that they represent the world's Jews, that they are the Jewish state, and you lack the conceptual apparatus with which to disentangle such nationalist myths - because you are subject to your own variant of such mythology - then the antisemitic conspiracy theories might be alluring. And this reductionist interpretation is certainly better than the even more reductionist take, which is that Islam is inherently antisemitic because of its dangerous proximity to Judaism which produces a narcissistic recoil (actually, in that highly culturalist assessment, Zizek might well have drawn consciously from Huntington or even Michael Ignatieff). I think there is also an element of subverting the morality through which Israel asserts its dominance, namely its claim to represent the victims of the Nazi holocaust. If Israel were the culmination of a conspiracy, there would be no need to defer to the tragic recent history of a People of the Book. As Edward Said never tired of arguing, this style of denunciation is a hateful inversion of logic. The proper way to undermine the legitimacy of Israeli oppression is to point out the structural similarity between Israel's racism and European antisemitism, between its modes of domination and those of European states. I need hardly add that the antisemitism in the Covenant is, however inexcusable, in no way equivalent to European antisemitism, which was not even remotely a reaction to oppression. Such analysis will hopefully become passe, at any rate, if Bassem Naeem's simple and straightforward repudiation of antisemitism is representative of Hamas' current direction. And what then will be left for the defenders of Israel, as its ministers draw on the metaphors of the Shoah to describe its atrocities against Palestinians? As increasing numbers of Jewish people reject Israel's claim to represent their interests? As Hamas defends Palestinian democracy and Israel and its allies attack it and undermine it?

Would it be better if the Left were stronger than the Islamists in Palestine? Unquestionably, if it was a Left worth its salt. If, that is, it was a Left unlike any that people like Alan Johnson or his conferes would accept. By no means do I think Hamas has the answers. As things stand, much - not all - of the Palestinian Left is taking a sectarian approach to Hamas while broadly aligning with a decrepit and corrupt nationalism that will surely bring them down with it. One would hope in the minimum for a renewed spirit of Palestinian unity, but that of course depends upon the nationalist wing evacuating itself from the imperialist camp. In the meantime, I fear that Hamas are currently the only serious resistance movement in Palestine, for all their shortcomings. The libidinised appropriation of the language of anti-fascism by liberal apologists for Israel both disgraces that tradition and helps isolate and vilify the major obstacle to Israel's successful wiping of Palestine from the map.