Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Palestine

Palestine’s Last Hope

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On October 23, 2025

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We’re about 3 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $9,010 from 79 people out of a readership of about 10,000. 

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It is now over 20 years ago that I first wrote that Israel would either become a single, secular state, or it would ethnically cleanse or genocide the Palestinian. There were no other solution sets: the land is not actually large enough, nor does it have enough water to divide it into two states and in any case, it was obvious Israelis would never go for that.

Even at the time I figured genocide and ethnic cleansing was more likely, there’s a point where the depravity of a people becomes so pronounced (as it was for colonial North Americans) that no other solution is likely, given the means.

I don’t know how many of you have read bin Laden’s writings. (I don’t endorse him, but he was a smart man.) His fundamental point was that America must be defeated before various local evils, because America was propping them all up.

As retired IDF general Yitzak Brick said:

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

The only way the Palestinians don’t get genocided and ethnically cleansed out of Palestine (the ceasefire/peace will be temporary, and has been violated multiple times by Israel even as they ramp up attacks on the West Bank), is if Israel can’t. And the only way Israel can’t is its economy collapses and takes the country with it, possibly with its neighbours opportunistically jumping in.

Fortunately Trump, with his escalating trade war, is working on it.

First we have the rare-earth export controls from China. Most weapons need rare earths, the West is ten to twenty years from being able to produce enough (always bet the under on China, and over on the West), and China’s controls include any use of rare-earths for weapons. If Trump doesn’t make peace with China, on their terms, the weapon flow to Israel will slow to a trickle. (It will be even worse for Ukraine.)

But there’s far more that China could do. A cursory search shows that it controls the majority of production of the following:

  • Graphite. US is 100 import dependent. China controls 90% of the processing. Used in batteries, EVs, lubricants and steelmaking.
  • Gallium. China does 98% of this. and the US is 100% import reliant. A lot seems to come in from 3rd parties, but China could shut that down. Used for semiconductors, LEDs, solar panels and radar.
  • Solar panels and wafers are about 80% China manufactured. 95% for polysilicon wafers.
  • Lithium ion battery cells and packs. China has about 80% of the manufacturing, and these things go in everything, including almost all consumer electronics.
  • Refined graphite anodes. China produces 90% and you need them for Lithium-ionC batteries.
  • Consumer drones. (Important for agriculture and the parts often used for military drones.) China controls about 80% of production. More, I’d guess.
  • About 80% of generic drugs are produced in China.
  • Legacy semiconductors (28nm+). As Europe is finding out, since China will no longer let Nexperia import them, and auto assembly is having to shut down as a result, China controls a lot of the manufacture of these items. Taiwan, etc… have moved on, but these are used in consumer electronics and autos in vast quantities and mostly supplied by China.
  • High Capacity transformers and inverters. (Can’t transmit electricity without them, and China has at least 70% of the manufacturing, probably more.)

Imagine if China put export controls on all of this?

The US economy would collapse. Nothing of significance can be manufactured in the US or Europe without Chinese components. It’s that simple. China would take a big hit, but they can tank it if they have to.

And, almost overnight, Israel would be without its suppliers. Plus, of course, they are reliant on US subsidies, and America wouldn’t be able to afford them. Europe wouldn’t be able to make up the difference, even assuming they didn’t get hit hard too.

Now I don’t necessarily expect this, it’s not a prediction, but it’s the only route I see left for any sort of relief for Palestinians.  And if it does happen, I doubt Israel would survive.

It’s also worth running thru to understand just how precarious a position the West has put itself in with regard to China. More on that later.

Taking the Hit For Stopping Genocide

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On December 11, 2024

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I’ve noticed something interesting. Every time I write about what might be done to stop the Israeli genocide, actions which would require serious fighting, people say “well I understand whey they don’t want to do that because Israel will bomb the hell out of them.”

And that’s true (though not as true when it comes to Iran, which has plenty of effective AD.)

The issue here is that there’s a genocide going on. My estimate for casualties is over half a million, and other people are starting to make the same estimates. For the past two months Israel has basically let no food into Northern Gaza. The number at the end will probably be over a million dead.

So you’re either willing to do what it takes to stop it, or you aren’t. Both Hezbollah and Iran pulled their punches and let Israel set the tempo of engagement, choosing when and where to fight, instead of engaging it when Hamas still had a viable fighting force. Iran had the missile capacity to wreck Israel’s air defense and air bases. Instead they let their proxies fight alone, and that went very badly for them.

With the fall of Syria, well, it’s no longer possible to stop the genocide. Senior Iranian leadership told their juniors they were going to intervene, then didn’t.

At least half a million people are going to die because no one was willing to do what it took to stop it.

It’s unfair this was on Iran and Hezbollah. It’s an amazing indictment of every great power in the world, and the local Arab states that none of them did anything meaningful to stop a genocide and that many helped the genocide along.

As for Iran, they themselves have pointed out that one has to resist America and Israel wherever they attack, because the plan is to end up taking out Iran. Khameini, if he hasn’t already, needs to get his head out of his ass and build nukes. And if Russia and China want to keep Iran as part of their great alliance, they need to take action.

As for Hezbollah, well, they’re cut off from land resupply from Iran. Israel and America will get to them. Playing everything cautiously did not work.

America is falling, there is no question about that. But Empire’s rarely go quiet into the night. The Age of War and Revolution continues.

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Jewish, Israeli & Zionist Are Three Different Things

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On June 21, 2023

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There are few people I despise more than those who conflate being anti-zionist with being anti-semitic.

Anyone who does this is a write off to me. Worthy of no respect; moral or intellectual. I only hope they are being paid well to be both evil and intellectually dishonest.

“We are going to emigrate to Palestine until we are the majority, then use force to steal Palestinian homes” is not defensible in any terms except “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”

And no one who is Jewish should want to live in such a world.

Some Jews are Zionists, but not all Jews are Zionists. This is fairly basic.

One can be against the Zionist project and not be against the Jewish people. It is evil of Israel to wrap themselves in Jewishness, and push their crimes onto people who had nothing to do with them.

Some Jews are Zionists, but not all Jews are Zionists. This is fairly basic. One can be against the Zionist project and not be against the Jewish people. It is evil of Israel to wrap themselves in Jewishness, and push their crimes onto people who had nothing to do with them.

In the long run, the crimes of Israel, because Israelis wrap them in “Jewishness” do more damage to Jews than perhaps even to Palestinians.

Being Jewish and being Israeli and being Zionist are three different things.

Conflating them is wrong.

There isn’t much of a real opposition left in Israel; of people who genuinely oppose stealing other people’s homes. But they exist. That’s why being Israeli /= being Zionist.

Being Zionist means believing you have a right to take other people’s homes. Being Israeli is citizenship

This is similar to the fact that both Russia and the US have done a lot of evil shit, but that doesn’t mean all Russians or Americans are evil, just the ones who support doing evil shit.

Likewise, there were Germans who opposed the Nazis. They were not evil. They were good.

You don’t get to choose if you’re German, or Jewish, or American, or Russian. You do get to choose whether you’re a Nazi, a Zionist, a Neocon or a Stalinist.

You get to decide whether you support doing evil or oppose it.

Apartheid is evil. Are you for it, or against it?

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The End of Israel?

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On April 2, 2009

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I will confess that over the years I have moved from a strong support of the Israeli side to a disgust so deep that it is almost existential. I am not so self-righteous, so sure of my Gandhi-nature, to think that if I had been born in Palestine, as a Palestinian, that I would be committed to a non violent solution.

People don’t seem to get it. Most Palestinians have never known anything but occupation. They have never known anything but curfews, residences being bulldozed, travel passes and settlers moving in increasing numbers and taking the best land, along with access to water.

They have never known anything but a boot in the face. It’s that simple.

And the Israeli army, once the finest in the world, has been, as all armies are, coarsenened by the occupation. The Israeli state bemoans suicide bombers, then kills Palestinian opposition leaders with rockets – rockets they know will cause collateral damage (a phrase that means “will kill innocents”). They have complete access to the country and could easily assassinate people cleanly, without collateral casualties – they choose not to. They could arrest those same people, again easily. They chose not to. The blood is on their hands as much as those of the innocent Israeli citizens killed by Palestinian suicide bombers and rockets.

But there is much more blood on their hands. Much, much more. As with the narcissism that is America bewailing its losses (oh, you’ve lost 2,500, eh? How many have the Iraqis lost?) Palestinian losses are much higher than Israeli, and like Israeli they are predominantly innocent civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But I find it funny too, in a dark sort of way. My cold hard calculation is that the odds favouring Israel’s survival as a Jewish state have never been worse. Over time demographic realities will end the possibility of a two state solution. They will come to be an ethnic and religious minority ruling over bantustans full of Muslims who can’t vote, who are subject to attack, who are not allowed enough water for agriculture, who require passes to trvel from one part of Palestine to another – people who are clearly disenfranchised second class citizens.

Failure to make peace with Palestinians; greed for more and more of Palestine; the constant undermining of any faction capable of actually delivering a peace (ie. what is happening to Hamas right now); refusal to negotiate until the Palestinians have given up most of the items on the table prior to negotiation – all of these have doomed Israel to turn into South Africa.

Oh, none of this is to say that Palestinians bear no blame, let alone all the Muslim nations who have chosen to use the Palestinian situation as a political football. There have been despicable acts on both sides. But Israel chose to occupy Palestine – they chose to rule over non-citizens, and to keep them down with a military boot. They are the ones with the most power in the relationship – and in the end it is their dream of a safe Jewish state which is going to be destroyed by their own actions.

For the two-state dream is dying. Failure to achieve it leaves Palestinians clearly under Israeli rule. The majority of them have never known anything but Israeli rule.

What do you call a person who is subject to the authority of a country, who was born in land that country rules, who does not have a vote?

The failure of a two state solution, the insistence that Israel has the right to do anything it wants, including arresting cabinet ministers of a foreign government, in their own country, makes it clear that Palestine is not a separate country.

And if it is not a separate country, then it is part of Israel. And in the end it will be recognized as such.

Soon enough America is not going to be able to afford to continue massive subsidies of Israel. Soon enough protectionism and isolationism is going to be on the upswing. Soon enough other powers, like Europe and China, will find their relative power growing.

Soon enough, Uncle Sam isn’t going to be enough.

Soon enough, Israel is going to find itself all alone, locked in a country with a mjority of the population being Palestinian – Palestinians who have every reason to hate their occupiers.

And they will be faced with a series of horrible choices, choices that will either see the end of Israel as a Jewish state, will see them turn to ethnic cleansing, or will require them, at long last, to face what occupying another people’s country has done to their noble dream.

Originally Written June 29th, 2006 at the Agonist. More true now than it was then.

How ‘Bout Treating Palestinians Like Equal Human Beings

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On March 31, 2009

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Pat Lang sums it up nicely:

On a grander scale, Israeli complaints of continued Palestinian (Hamas) smuggling of supplies and munitions are a validation of the analytic comments I made here and on television to the effect that the Israeli effort at Gaza (Cast Lead) would be a total strategic failure if the Palestinians did not submit to the Israeli collective will as a result of that punitive campaign.

They have not submited and so it is fair to say that “Cast Lead” was strategically a total failure that served once again to demonstrate the impotence of Israeli arms in dealing with the essence of their “problem” with the Palestinians.  What is next, forced “re-locations,” a first strike against Iran as a relief from having to deal with the truly existential issue of Palestine?  How about face to face negotiations with the Palestinians as equal human beings?  How about that?

The Palestinian problem only as three solutions—real negotiation leading to a single state or two state solution with the settlers withdrawn, or full on ethnic cleansing.  The Israelis need to cut bait and decide if they are monsters or human beings and which one they’d prefer to do.  In the meantime, until they decide that, perhaps they should stop with the deliberate war crimes:

Well, the photograph above is of white phosphorus shell fired from either artillery or mortars.  It is bursting over an upscale civilian apartment development.  There are a lot of pictures like this.  Any old soldier, including ones from the IDF, knows that this is white phosphorus shell.

White phosphorus (a metal) burns on contact with air.  It burns under water.  If you get it on you, it will burn through your arm, leg, etc., until the burning phosporus comes out the other side.  Your only real recourse is to cut it out of you with a knofe before it does so.  White phosphorus shell is legally used for generating smoke on the battlefield.  It used to be common in aerial bombs.  Germany and Japan were heavily bombed with this among many other  things for the specific purpose of burning down their towns.

So.  The IDF spokeman is a liar.  The question of whther and to what extent the IDF also shot civilians deliberately I leave to the conscience of IDF soldiers who seem unwilling to shut up about it.  God bless them.

Saying this sort of thing is one of the last taboos, where you can get real pressure to stop.  But I don’t imagine Pat Lang cares much what people tell him to do and I think the worm is slowly turning.  The Israelis deliberate decision to commit premeditated war crimes during the Gaza incursion turned a lot of stomachs.  It was different mostly in degree, not kind, to the sort of thing they’ve done before but just people have a threshold beyond which evil becomes too hard to ignore.

Hopefully Americans and, more importantly, the arbiters of American discourse in the media and politics, are beginning to be tired of covering up Israeli atrocities.

Hopefully.

And meanwhile the Israelis are 0 for 2.  Neither their war against Hezbollah nor against Gaza achieved the goals they themselves declared were the victory conditions.

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