By Stephen Gowans
May 9, 2024
The war of the enslaved against their enslavers [is] the only justifiable war in history. – Karl Marx, The Civil War in France
The journalist Max Blumental, who edits the GRAYZONE, posted a video of former US chairman of the joint chiefs Mark Milley cataloguing, in a maladroit effort to justify Israeli atrocities in Gaza, US campaigns in which civilians were slaughtered in numbers matching or exceeding the Israeli-engineered, US-arms-supplied, Washington-approved, genocide in Gaza.
“Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel is doing,” intoned Milley, we should remember that “we slaughtered people in massive numbers, innocent people…men, women, and children.”
“War is a terrible thing,” he added.
Unlike Milley, I don’t condone the killing of innocent civilians, including those killed by Hamas.
But this invites the question: Which civilians are innocent and which are not? Anyone incapable of fighting—children, the aged, the ill—must be considered innocent. Civilians who take up arms and thus become combatants, are not innocent. In a war of oppressors against the oppressed, are civilians who knowingly participate in, benefit from, or approve of oppression, innocent? Is a settler innocent?
We might ask too about how the US and Israeli goals in war compare with those of the Palestinian resistance.
The US goal is to impose the will of the US economic elite on other people so that the global economic order remains tilted in favor of US investors, billionaires, and corporations. Today, the United States overtly prepares for a war of aggression against China, openly acknowledging the reason: Because the East Asian giant, by its size and rapid economic development, threatens to disrupt the US-at-the-top global economic order and topple the US corporate class from its commanding position at the apex.
The Israeli goal is to impose the will of the self-appointed leaders of an ethno-religious group, Jews, on Arabs in the Levant.
The goal of the Palestinian resistance, by contrast, is to liberate Palestinians from the ethno-religious oppression of a racist Zionism that is backed by Washington and which uses Israel as its instrument to pursue US economic and strategic goals in West Asia and North Africa against the interests of the local populations.
By his words, Milley implies that US and Israeli wars are just, and that the killing of civilians in these wars is therefore acceptable. By contrast, his words suggest that the armed action of the Palestinian resistance is unjust and that the killing of civilians in pursuit of liberation is therefore horrible, brutal, and vicious. Twelve hundred people killed in a Hamas attack is flagitious and intolerable in Milley’s view, but tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, slaughtered in a demented, openly genocidal Israeli campaign, is, in Milley’s view, just the regrettable reality of war.
Milley defends the consequences of US and Israeli aggressions by describing war as horrible, brutal, and vicious. In Milley’s words, US pilots don’t drop bombs and Israeli soldiers don’t fire US-supplied artillery shells; instead, civilians are slaughtered in sickening numbers by an impersonal thing called war. On the other hand, Israeli civilians are killed by a very personal thing called Hamas.
Milley’s tacit assertion that US and Israeli wars are just—wars which are, au fond, motivated by goals of exploitation and oppression—speaks volumes about what the Washington elite believes, as does the retired general’s implied condemnation of the war for liberation that lies at the center of the Palestinian resistance; a war of the enslaved against their enslavers.
In the world of the US ruling class, when Hamas does it, killing civilians is horrible, wicked, and intolerable, but when the US and Israel do it—producing civilian corpses in numbers vastly greater than any Hamas could ever come close to even remotely matching—it’s just the inevitable, yes, terrible, but all the same, excusable, consequence of war.
In the US view, then, killing many civilians in an unjust war is perfectly alright, even if horrible. On the other hand, killing comparatively few civilians in a just war is intolerable.
Given that Milley, not alone in the US-Israeli establishment, is willing to tolerate civilian deaths in massive numbers as, what he characterizes as, the regrettable but acceptable consequence of war, one can only conclude that what really bothers him and his fellow worshippers of Mars in the service of economic and ethno-religious elites, is not the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, but the reality that the enslaved Palestinians rose against their Israeli enslavers.
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