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THE IRON DOME IS GLOBAL – AND SO IS THE RESISTANCE  
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Naomi Klein
March 2, 2024
Red Pepper
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_ All we have is our solidarity. Our determination. Our resolve. And
our shared moral commitment to the preciousness of life. With that, we
can build a world with no iron domes. With that we will earn our hope.
_

US President Joe Biden visiting Israel’s Department of Defence, who
oversee the iron dome, in 2022, (Credit: Office Of The President Of
The United States)

 

When my dear friend Asad Rehman asked me to help close this gathering,
his specific instructions were to speak about the political situation
today and to do it in a way ‘filled with hope’. A bit of a tall
order and I’m not entirely sure I can deliver. Let’s see what we
can do instead…. 

The last time I was in London, it was late September. Just five months
ago. But five months that feel like a hundred years.

One hundred years of Palestinian parents wailing over their murdered
and maimed children. One hundred years of bombed schools and raided
hospitals and desecrated mosques
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One hundred years of Israeli soldiers making TikToks of their war
crimes.  One hundred years of teens trained in fascism blocking
trucks filled with food
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One hundred years of open calls to annihilate more than two million
captive, occupied, ghettoized people. One hundred years of giddily
expressed plans to turn Gaza into a parking lot
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An Israeli beach town
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A museum [[link removed]].
A slaughterhouse
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A buffer zone
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One hundred years of fired truth tellers and one hundred years of
wilfully obtuse pundits.  One hundred years of universities that
can’t say ‘Palestine’ and one hundred years of NGOs that won’t
say ‘genocide’. One hundred years of failed and vetoed
resolutions
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a ceasefire.

If not hope, then commitment

All of this makes it difficult to deliver that speech filled with
hope. What I can muster, what I feel more deeply than ever, is
resolve. Commitment. Commitment to the movements that this gathering
represents. Movements for true equality, and justice — social,
racial, gender, economic and ecological justice. Movements that exist
in every country. Movements that have grown with tremendous speed over
these past terrible months. Grown not only in the size of marches and
blockades but in the depth of their analysis. Grown in their
willingness to make connections across movements and issues, and in
their willingness to name underlying systems.

If these months have taught us anything, it is that these movements
are all we have. In your country as well as mine, there is no moral
leadership except the leadership rising up from the grassroots. All we
have is one another.

We should pause over this, because it is part of the horror and
vertigo of our historical moment. Israel’s annihilatory campaign in
Gaza is not the first genocide in modern history. Not the first time
openly fascist forces have fused a violent, supremacist ideology with
a seemingly limitless commitment to wipe out a people they consider a
demographic threat.

The distinctive unity of the global political elites

What is unique, at least since the era of open colonialism and its
genocides, is the unity this carnage has inspired among political
elites in the Global North, and to some extent beyond it. After all,
when fascism rose in Europe the 1930s, it had powerful supporters in
our political classes, but it also had powerful opponents.

That is far less true today. All across what passes for a political
spectrum, from the rabid far right to the mealy-mouthed centre left,
we have witnessed powerful actors putting their partisan differences
aside to come together in active support of these crimes against
humanity. Far from fracturing our political class, this iteration of
fascism has united it: Donald Trump agrees with Joe Biden
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Sunak with Keir Starmer
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with Marine Le Pen
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Trudeau
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Meloni
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Orbán
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Modi
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And so, we must ask: On what precisely do they all agree? What are
they uniting behind? What are they all defending when they speak of
Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’?

It’s too simple, I’m afraid, to say they are united in defense of
a single state. They are, of course, but they are also united in
defense of a shared belief system. Amidst the reality of global
economic apartheid and accelerating climate breakdown, they are united
in a shared supremacist vision of safety and security for the few.
This vision is the flip side of their steadfast refusal to in any way
address the underlying drivers of these crises: capitalism, limitless
growth, colonialism, militarism, white supremacy, patriarchy.

As Sherene Seikaly [[link removed]] puts
it, we are ‘In the age of catastrophe’ and ‘Palestine is a
paradigm’. 

Israel’s Iron Dome – a global security model

And Israel, a kind of pioneer. For decades now, since giving up on any
pretext of a peace process, Israel has pursued its own security and
land hunger through an elaborate system of high-tech fences, walls and
its so-called Iron Dome shield. Its architects pride themselves on the
ability to intercept rockets and missiles and repel all threats. That
system of high-tech surveillance and enclosure
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a material reality on a particular geography – it is a way of life
for Israelis and was a way of slow death for Palestinians long before
October 7th.

But in addition to being these things, the Iron Dome is also a model
– a super-concentrated and claustrophobic version of the very same
model of security to which all Global North governments subscribe, the
very same governments that have lined up behind Israel’s genocidal
campaign. It’s a model in which the borders of wealthy states –
grown wealthy through their own colonial genocides – are protected
by their own versions of the Iron Dome. 

Because, in fact, the Iron Dome is global. It stretches along our own
fortressed borders, with their lethal fences and walls and detention
centres, and it reaches outward into a transnational gulag
of offshore migrant detention camps
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barges
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embedded with saws
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the Rio Grande and coast guards that watch ships drown
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the Mediterranean.

And the Iron Dome also reaches inside our impossibly unequal and
unaffordable countries and cities. It is the ballooning police budgets
that unleash militarized forces to clear parks of encampments of
unhoused people and repress Indigenous blockades against fossil fuel
projects, foisted without consent. And these same forces stand ready
to put down the next wave of racial justice rebellions, which they
know to be inevitable. The Global Iron Dome is also the surveillance
nets tracking down whistleblowers and waging war on journalists who
dare to tell the truth about our wars and spying, of whom Julian
Assange
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only the most prominent symbol.

Might _will_ make right

As it is for Israel, this Global Iron Dome is about a belief in the
prerogative of states to meet human demands for basic rights and for
the basics of life with brutal state violence. A commitment to making
people who fall outside of the state’s highly policed and racialized
circles of protection disappear – by locking them away, by pushing
them further away, by letting them drown. And it is also about
claiming the prerogative to meet resistance from the oppressed with
lethal force.

Israel’s Iron Dome is extreme because its ethnonationalism and
supremacist ideology
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so explicit. Yet we should be clear that Israel modelled itself
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racist colonial laws, logics and practices borrowed from earlier eras
of colonialism forged in and by our own nations, and also that Israel
is itself a model: from the start, the Iron Dome was built for export.

We need to understand this because on October 7th, that model and that
dome collapsed before the eyes of the world. Hamas’s attack –
brutal and horrific – shattered the entire illusion of safety and
security for the few that this model embodies. And that terrified not
only Israelis, not only Netanyahu’s government – it also shook our
own governments to their core.

Because if Israel’s heavily armed walls and fences and drones and
dome could not hold, what does that say about our own countries’
illusions of safety and control? It begged the question: If Israel’s
Iron Dome could fail, what about all the other Iron Domes? In the face
of the mass displacement of people, spurred by endless wars and
criminal climate arson and cruel economic policies of immiseration,
will they also fail?

I believe that this fear is why our governments have united in such an
unprecedented fashion to assert their central belief system: That
might _will_ make right. That he who has the most advanced weaponry
and the highest walls _will_ succeed in containing and controlling
the billions in dispossession and desperation. This belief system,
more than anything else, helps explain why the governments of the
wealthy world have joined Israel’s revenge frenzy with such
unshakable enthusiasm, and why so many have refused, months into this
slaughter, to even call for the barest of minimums: a permanent
ceasefire.

The security of the gilded bubbles of luxury

They understand that Israel’s unending campaign is also a form of
mass communication – that it is a message. And the message is being
sent not only by Israel’s government but by every government that
has blessed this onslaught – with words, with votes and vetoes at
the United Nations, with photo ops, with weapons, with money, and with
domestic attacks on Palestine solidarity.  The message being
broadcast is a simple one: That the gilded bubbles of relative safety
and luxury that are dotted across our cruelly divided and fast-warming
world will be protected at all costs. Up to and including with
genocidal violence.

In the many pillaged parts of our planet, this obscene message has
been clearly understood. Gustavo Petro, the courageous president of
Colombia, decoded its meaning immediately. Back in October, just a few
days into Israel’s onslaught, he stated
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‘The barbarity of consumption based on the death of others leads us
to an unprecedented rise of fascism, and therefore, to the death of
democracy and freedom. It’s barbarism, or global 1933.’

In Israel’s attack, and the support for it from the governments of
the North and from right-wing forces in the South, he also saw a
preview of a shared future, writing: ‘What we see in Palestine will
also be the suffering in the world of all the peoples of the south
[as] the West defends its excessive consumption and its standard of
living based on destroying the atmosphere and climate… knowing that
it will cause the exodus from the south to the north’.

This system, Petro reminds us, ‘is ready to respond with death’ to
‘defend the consumption bubble of the rich on the planet and not
save humanity, whose majority is disposable, like the children of
Gaza’.

It is worth reading Petro’s entire statement, which I think is
historic, but I’ll skip to the end: ‘We are going to barbarism if
we do not change power. The life of humanity, and especially of the
people of the south, depends on the way in which humanity chooses the
path to overcome the climate crisis…. Gaza is just the first
experiment in considering us all disposable’.

All we have is each other

What else is there to say? Perhaps only this: We are hosted here today
by War on Want [[link removed]]. And the war on want is the
only war worth waging, and wage it we must. We either transform this
death machine through the just and equitable redistribution of wealth
within the boundaries of the earth’s limits – what many at today
gathering have referred to as ‘a Global Green New Deal’ – or
this nightmare engulfs us all.

All we have is each other. All we have is our movements and the power
we build together. All we have is our solidarity. Our determination.
Our resolve. And our shared moral commitment to the preciousness of
life.

With that, we can build a world with no iron domes. With that we will
earn our hope.

_This article is taken from a speech delivered virtually by Naomi
Klein to Still We Rise festival on 24 February, 2024. Her speech can
be viewed in full here
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at 21:30_

_Naomi Klein is the Faculty of Arts Professor of Climate Justice at
the University of British Columbia and the author of The Shock
Doctrine (Penguin) and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror
World (Penguin)._

_Red Pepper is a quarterly magazine and website of left politics and
culture. We’re a socialist publication drawing on feminist, green
and anti-racist politics. We seek to be a space for debate on the
left, a resource for movements for social justice, and a home for
open-minded anti-capitalists.  _

_We’re a non-profit magazine, and we operate on a shoestring. We
think the left needs non-sectarian publications yet unafraid to take a
stand, radical yet non-dogmatic, and thoughtful yet orientated on
real-world activism.  If you think so, too, please
consider subscribing to Red Pepper
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can afford._

* Palestine
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* Israel
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* Gaza
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* Iron Dome
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* Gustavo Petro
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