System reset*: Gaza 2023 represents a significant and unexpected set of events, events whose causes had been festering for a while and so should have been expected. Their significance is multifaceted. For this reason, two recent articles on this site have been withdrawn to allow the unpacking of their contents in more detail. As the events unfolded, they pointed in all the directions at once, making sequential journalistic reporting difficult. It has been necessary, therefore, to separate discussion of Middle East political developments, from that of American politics, and ultimately from the broader questions of the neoliberal world order and the associated geoeconomics of the Dollar system.

Saigon 1975 (above) marked the end of the first American empire. The 1970s saw the chaotic rise of the second American empire characterised by the neoliberal world order. The Gaza events come at the tail end of a troubled period for the empire. For the Biden administration, the relevance of the words uttered by British PM Jim Callaghan (1976-79) before losing power to Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. As Callaghan viewed the gloomy future, he famously said ‘the sky has turned black with the flapping wings of chickens coming home to roost.’

Biden’s chickens are:

*– 20 years of wars, theft, and corruption have ended in a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan.

*– The calculated provocations intended to draw Russia into a war in Ukraine indeed did lead to a war, but one which by its own admission it has lost. This is especially case since the provocation was supposed to lead to sanctions so great that they would sink the Russian economy and with it the current Russian régime led by Vladimir Putin. This hope has been in vain.

*– Since the Oslo Accords in 1993 American administrations have given lip service to the Two State solution and Palestinian rights, while actually doing nothing about them. Since the democratic election of Hamas in 2006, Gaza has been blockaded by Israel.

Then on 7/10 the “Aqsa Flood” happened: a lightning attack by Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, that wiped out Israel’s Southern Military Command among other military installations, destroying Israel’s and thus America’s credibility in the Middle East region.

*– The Israeli Defence Minister launched an unprecedently brutal attack on Palestinians, even by Israeli standards, in retaliation. He articulated the attack as the intentional genocide of what he called ‘human animals,’ by which term he was referring to the Palestinians.

The US State Dept and the White House, the UK, Germany, France and Italy given what amounts to attempted genocide unconditional support, demonising Hamas as a terrorist organisation that now had to be eradicated.

*– What is significant is that the Aqsa Flood attack by the Qassam Brigades flushed out the strategic American masterplan for the Middle East region intended to counter China’s rise and its establishment of the Belt and Road Initiative. This was a geoeconomic plan that involved the establishment of the “Biden Corridor” across the Middle East linking Europe with India that appeared to require the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

*– According to concerned observers on the ground, aggressive diplomatic moves by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken across Arab capitals were being made that were focused on putting pressure on the financially-strapped Egyptian régime of Abdelfattah Sisi, with proposals of debt forgiveness in exchange for its acceptance of the relocation of Gazans to Sinai.

The next article discusses these developments in the context of the resistance of Palestinians to these efforts, a new diplomatic environment created by the seminal peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran brokered by China, the moves made by the Axis of Resistance, and the policy contradictions that are in fact the most serious obstacles facing US officials as they negotiate the problems of using a settler colonial state to further imperial interests in the region. [Ref: Prt 11 Post-Script 14 -1]