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@JamesieMcJamesFace

>From an Israeli nationalist perspective, ‘other groups of workers… threaten to dilute the proclaimed “Jewishness” of the state’ and this ‘raises some challenges’ for the ‘ethno-nationalis[t]’ state (p. 170). As migration [for the purposes of labour] is a significant challenge for Israel [it cannot rely on migrants from neighbouring countries], the state ‘decided, grudgingly, to invest its energies in combining a highly repressive apartheid regime with exploitation of a subordinated labour force drawn from the occupied population’ (p. 170). It is thus caught in an ‘impossible’ balancing act between ‘ethno-nationalist’ apartheid and ‘economic dependency on Palestinian labour’ (p. 170).

So, racism here is used as a release valve to contain the otherwise obvious and explosive contradictions of a "supreme" ethno-nationalist state that is, at the same time, dependent upon those "inferior" races. I suppose this highlights the importance of an intersectional anti-racism in the fight against capital, as anti-racism serves to heighten this contradiction and resolve it by means of both racial and class liberation. You can't have racial or class liberation in isolation; they're a package deal.

>The religious differences between Palestinians and Israelis are virtually always highlighted as the main reason for suffering in the region. The fact that Palestine sits on a pathway ‘crucial’ for the circulation of oil, and the British used it as such in the early twentieth century, is, by comparison, overlooked by commentators generally. The ‘Middle East remains crucial for the extraction and circulation of oil and gas today’ which makes the presence of Israel — an important ‘bellicose ally’ — a ‘major strategic asset for Western imperialism’ (p. 176) at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, at the gateway of the old Silk Roads. The notion of it being an intractable conflict of religion ignores the material and fundamental reasons for the conflict.

I think a simpler approach to dismissing the "religious differences" excuse to conflicts, in general, is the dearth of such conflicts in the absence of material motivations for them. That is, religious differences rarely, if ever, seem to drive mass behaviours that the masses know for sure would harm their material interests and/or have no material gain; only to drive behaviours that might benefit those masses' material interests.

>The expansion of Israeli interests ‘was de facto also the spread of US economic influence and interests’ (p. 178). Meanwhile, countries across the Middle East and North Africa were invited by the US to enjoy ‘the spoils of neoliberal reform under US supervision’ if they gave up even their pretence of supporting Palestinians (see p. 178).

I think this does a good job of explaining "why don't the Arab nations, that outnumber the Israeli occupiers, overpower Israel and free Palestine?" Beyond the stick of US military intervention, there is the carrot of "the spoils of neoliberal reform." Such a move by the Arab nations would cost them materially on both fronts. Perhaps this is why most material resistance to the genocide emanates from groups already suffering on both fronts: Yemen, and, to a lesser extent, Iran, both come to mind.