Urgency & Chaos

Hadash are a coalition in the Israeli Knesset led by the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), who oppose colonialism and racial supremacy, fight for taxing the rich not the poor and to improve conditions for working class Palestinians and Israelis and they are anti-Zionist. There are 120 seats in the Knesset and ten parties who names include variations of the words ‘Zionist,’ ‘conservative’ or ‘religious,’ the only exception being Hadash. It is a formidable bloc to overcome. There is opposition to the government, but this is based more on the character of Benjamin Netanyahu rather than his Likud Party’s policies.

One of the issues Hadash have to confront is the gentrification of Palestinian areas where property is bought cheaply, renovated then sold or rented out for more than the average Palestinian worker can afford. This is ethnic cleansing through real estate.

Every day in Gaza, people are being killed: there was a massacre at an aid site where food was to be distributed but as people tried to get hold of the packages Israeli forces fired on them. It was a trap.

The only country that can hold Israel back is the USA but there is a powerful pro-Israel lobby and Netanyahu has proved able manipulating the vacuous Donald Trump, which means he and his Republican Party are not going to alienate Jewish voters at upcoming elections.

I'm told that Zionist leaders are messianic and expansionist and that the Israeli government distributed 300,000 weapons to Jewish citizens, essentially arming an untrained militia, many of whom are settlers in vacated Palestinian villages. The simple terms ‘settlers’ and ‘villages’ are being used to describe something much more violent: the settlers force Palestinians out of their homes, out of their villages, away from their crops.

The West Bank has now been occupied for 60 years: the Israeli state controls work permits, freedom of movement and the flow of workers through the security gates, which are the most  visible forces of oppression but there also invisible forms: taxes collected from working Palestinians on wages and goods (like VAT) in Israel are not being distributed to the Palestinian Authorities in charge of Gaza and West Bank, so teachers are not paid, roads and pavements are left in appalling condition, and infrastructure is collapsing. Taxes are weaponised by the Israelis who claim that the money goes to extremist ‘martyrs,’ which is the same reasoning that the Israeli government used to bomb southern Lebanon villages, claiming they were hiding Hezbollah.

A comrade explains the theory of urgency and chaos. A lot of different power structures affect life in Israel, that affect the pace of life, so it is essential to respond in the present. Political crises consolidate the sense of chaos: going to sleep at peace, then waking up to war is chaotic as there is no predictable pattern to follow. The chaos makes planning ahead difficult: travel, education, weddings… There is also a chaos in uncertainty, that people do not know what might happen next. It is not recommended to plan too far ahead because things will have changed before you get there, which is the uncertainty of chaos. Things are delayed, cancelled, controlled by others; it is tiring, stressful, and emotionally damaging; but it gives urgency to the activities of Communist Party militants, that things need to happen now, not in a few weeks because everything will have changed by then.