To Be Thrown Into The Sea: Class Composition and the Annihilation of Gaza

The angels of death rain bombs over Gaza as horrified onlookers seek to comprehend the method behind the madness. Destroy Hamas. Split unity government. Gas reserves. The blogosphere and the newspapers have all sought a strategic logic behind Operation: Protective Edge. There must obviously be a reason. There has to be a reason. Everything has a reason. But all we are doing is playacting as little Kissingers looking for meaning where there is none. Destroy Hamas. Split unity government. Gas reserves. These all might be short-term ends for Israel but this is not why it fights. It fights in order to fight. There is no rational strategic calculus if by that we mean the calibration of means and ends to goals. Israel goes to war simply to go to war. It wants to annihilate Gaza.

The task for thought is not to explain the rationality of Israel but its lack of one. It is the transformation of class relations during the 1990s and 2000s which has brought us to the point we are at now. The elimination of the Palestinian working class and the transformation of Gaza into a gigantic slum have broken apart the strategic calculus which sought a managerial relationship between colonizer and colonized. Instead, the role of force in Gaza is to eliminate the populace there. It is not just guns, planes and tanks but the slow death of economic siege which is the continuum of tactics for Israel. Its mode is less French Algeria than Belgian Congo with some humanitarian dressing. The intellectual hitmen of the IDF always bludgeon us with the blackmail that Arabs and Palestinians want to ‘throw Israel into the sea.’ Today, we are seeing who is actually about to sink into the Mediterranean.

 

 

From Working Class to Surplus Humanity

 

Palestinians between 1967 and 1987 formed the core of the Israeli working class. They were the super-exploited workers that contributed much to the prosperity of Israeli capital. Since the signing of Oslo in 1993, proletarianization has gone reverse course as Palestinians particularly in Gaza have been excluded from the labor market. This has been a result both of conscious de-coupling after the First Intifada and objective transformation in the structure of Israeli capital under conditions of global neoliberalism. During the First Intifada, Palestinian laborers were able to use their structural position within the economy to threaten the entire socio-political matrix of the Occupation. Economic boycotts, labor strikes, resignations from government and police positions, tax refusal and merchant strikes brought the Israeli economy to a standstill. At no point before or since have Palestinians brought Israel to its knees quite like it did between 1987 and 1991. In the wake of Oslo, there has been a systematic de-development of the Gaza Strip and exclusion of Palestinians from wage labor. Israel engaged in a campaign to break Palestinian society at its economic base.

At the same time, Israel began to deepen the liberalization process initiated after the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. A primarily manufacturing and agrarian economy during the period of Labor Zionism, the welfare and warfare state placed limits on the penetration of the world market. In the 1990s, Israel began importing cheap labor power from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and South America.  The result was massive relocation of production, large-scale transfer of cheap labor power and high rates of unemployment. As agriculture markets and markets for manufactures globally saturated, Israeli capital restructured itself around real estate, the high-tech industry and the military-industrial complex.

The transition to export-led growth and the service sector was punishing to all workers but particularly so for the Palestinians. They found their labor increasingly redundant and were expelled from the valorization process to languish as either the unemployed or the most abject forms of wage slavery. As Yael Epstein notes, the case of the Israeli and Palestinian economies is a case where “a strong first world economy borders on a weak reposition of cheap labor power. The decline of Palestinian labor market and the grave problems facing the Palestinian economy at large are thus also indicative of a global process” of capitalist restructuring.

 

The Catastrophe of The Present

 

The final nail in the coffin for the Palestinian working class came with Ariel Sharon (he never goes away does he?). The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza earned Sharon the reputation of a peacemaker. In reality, it was a key step in his ‘dual war’: military politicide in the occupied territories and economic onslaught against all but the richest Israelis. The withdrawal made the occupation more economical in terms of blood and treasure and allowed liberalization to occur at greater heights (Peled). Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections locked in the notion that ‘there is no partner for peace’ allowing the oppression, expropriation and ghettoization of Palestinians to be pursued with even greater impunity.

Sharon’s government was also responsible for unprecedented levels of poverty and inequality created by his economic policy especially the dismantlement of the welfare state. The result has been a disappearing working class. Currently, 80% GDP per capita comes from international trade (not production). Industrial employment has steadily declined from 35% in the beginning of the 1970s to 18% at present. In 2013, a sharp decline in the absolute number of industrial workers employed seems to indicate that the trend-line downward will only continue. The percentage of agriculture employment- especially important for Palestinians- is a mere 1.7% of total employment. By contrast, a full 80.3% of the working population is in the service sector. Finally, Israeli welfare spending ranks near bottom of OECD countries at 15.3%. What Sharon brought about was a crisis in the capital-labor relation whereby the wage no longer guarantees social reproduction. In the case of settler colonialism, the crisis takes on an especially brutal form of ghettoization and massacre for Palestinians and leads to vicious ethno-nationalist sentiments within the Jewish working class and petit bourgeoisie.

As long as Palestinians were a working class, Israel was responsible for their reproduction as labor-power. It put an inherent limitation upon the capability to use force demonstrated by the difficulty that the IDF had in restraining the First Intifada. They are no longer a working class but what Marx calls a “consolidated surplus population.” That is, a population composed neither of workers nor an industrial reserve army but a mass absolutely redundant to the valorization process. Marx’s account focused on the rising organic composition of capital throwing off labor without being absorbed into new industries. His account tells part of the tale insofar as the Israeli economy is tied to the general transformation of capitalism that took place after the mid-1970s. And yet, it is not simply the organic composition of capital which accounts for Gaza but rather the hellfire and brimstone of occupation which contours the specific appearance of surplus populations.

The wholly typical and definitely unique emergence of Gazans as a surplus humanity determines the especially vicious nature of violence. The territoriality of Gaza is only indirectly constituted by capital. In this sense, the Gaza is one among many in the planet of slums. The distinction between Gaza and the favela is that the favela’s disorder is confronted by policing violence which manages the areas slowly overrun by gentrification. Gaza is not similarly managed; its goal is not to order the disorderly but to erase it.

Gaza is the zero-point of the capitalist present: a fully militarized neoliberal state physically eliminating a mass of those who have nothing. Politicide and economic policies against the working class initiate a logic of domination in Gaza based not on exploitation but elimination. We only need to see the calls to genocide and rise of explicitly fascist discourses not just by opportunistic Israeli politicians but the citizenry at large. Homicidal selfie: the cultural logic of late settler colonialism.

The 2007 siege culminates the choking of Gazans who are, as of now, literally unable to reproduce their means of subsistence. The little salvaged through periodic openings of the Rafah Crossing or humanitarian aid is insufficient to change reality: the 1.5 million residents of Gaza will be unable to inhabit their homes by 2020. Postmodern genocide needs no storm troopers, but the molecular destruction of everyday life. Why worry about building a concentration camp when the refugee camp suffices?