Long article from July but informative:


Gaza is Free and Does Not Bargain

New Socialist.



July 12, 2024
Tom Gann


The statements of the Resistance groups are a valuable source of knowledge about what's happening in Palestine. So why aren’t British journalists paying attention?

The Israeli idea is that the real problem does not lie with the official Palestinian leadership; it is the Palestinian community which rejects the Israeli maximalist solution and expresses its readiness to oppose it, supplying an endless flow of fighters to the resistance organisations and rendering every possibility of agreement with the Palestinian negotiators impossible to implement.

Walid Daqqah

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Calagacus, quoted in Tacitus.

On December 30th, an ‘Israeli’ soldier being held by the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades (the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) was killed following a failed rescue attempt. In an official statement, the group described the “many human losses” they inflicted, and how “dragging behind the tails of disappointment and defeat…the zionist enemy in its stupidity and arrogance, targeted that location with its air force to cover the retreat of its defeated soldiers which led to the killing of the prisoner”. The Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades have also reported that they are in possession of IOF laptops and a set of flash drives, which were seized “during the heroic Al-Aqsa Flood battle” and through which they have “obtained… valuable and precious information, military plans, and private data… [from which] our fighters are now benefitting.”

On January 4th, US and “coalition” forces, quite possibly including Britain, assassinated Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces commander Taleb Al-Saedi in Karbala. The Popular Mobilisation Forces are part of the Iraqi Armed Forces and were cohered predominantly to fight ISIS. The PMF’s role as part of the Iraqi state, albeit with considerable autonomy, gives their position a contradictory character with regard to the US and Britain. They are among the most effective forces fighting ISIS, but, at the same time, elements of the PMF are designated by the US as terrorist groups. On the most basic level, the irony of assassinating a commander in a serious anti-ISIS military force, when fighting ISIS is the justification for the ongoing US and British presence, should be obvious. On top of this, the assassination of a figure who is, essentially, a senior commander in the Iraqi Army is a grotesque violation of sovereignty. In response to the assassination, the Iraqi government have opened talks aiming to set a timetable for the total withdrawal of US and coalition forces. The US has not accepted this demand, though it seems possible that their military presence will be reduced. The wider context for the assassination of Al-Saedi is the extent of Iraqi solidarity with Palestine.

‘Israel’ cannot be abstracted from world imperialism under the hegemony of the US, and the other side of this, of course, is that regional conflicts cannot be abstracted from the question of Palestine.
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Both these stories matter a great deal, but I have seen no mention of them in the official press. Moreover, they have barely been mentioned in more critical outlets, or even on British pro-Palestinian social media. Only after the Iraqi Resistance killed three US soldiers on January 28th, “with the explicit purpose of stopping the zionist genocide on Gaza”, and the US immediately ordered reprisal strikes, did Western media begin to pay attention to the extent of Resistance attacks in Iraq and Syria—mostly by reporting on US Defence Department press conferences. One such report, in the Guardian, tells us that “[US Defence Secretary Lloyd] Austin acknowledged that there had been 160 strikes on US bases in Syria and Iraq since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October,” but offers little more explanation of the situation, and no broader contextualisation. In April, following Iran’s response to the ‘Israeli’ attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the Guardian published a just-about-adequate piece aiming to contextualise ‘Israel’-Iran relations, which stated that, “after years in which both sides operated within the framework of a largely undeclared set of ‘rules’, Israel… bulldozed through every red line”. However, the analysis entirely ignored the existing role of the US in Iraq and Syria. The US appears only as a benign and fully external agent—but nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is, ‘Israel’ cannot be abstracted from world imperialism under the hegemony of the US, and the other side of this, of course, is that regional conflicts cannot be abstracted from the question of Palestine. The US is aiming to suppress—on behalf of ‘Israel’, but ultimately to secure its own hegemony—solidarity action with Palestine across the Arab nation.

Continues here:

https://newsocialist.org.uk/gaza-is-free-and-does-not-bargain/