dc.contributor.author	Bichler, Shimshon
dc.contributor.author	Nitzan, Jonathan
dc.date.accessioned	2024-10-23T01:03:46Z
dc.date.available	2024-10-23T01:03:46Z
dc.date.issued	2024
dc.description.abstract	The war that started in 2023 between Hamas and Israel is driven by various long-lasting processes, but it also brings to the fore a new cause that hitherto seemed marginal: the armed militias of the Rabbinate and Islamic churches. The Rabbinate militias, embodied in Jewish settler organizations, have taken over not only Palestinian lands, but, gradually, also Israeli society. The Islamic militias, represented by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, rose to prominence after the traditional resistance groups of the Palestinians – primarily the PLO and the PFLP and, by extension, also the Palestinian Authority – weakened and proved unable to reverse, let alone stop, the Israeli occupation. The rise of these militias, though, is hardly unique to Israel/Palestine, or even the Middle East. It is part of a broader, global process, in which ‘private’ military organizations, financed by states, church-related NGOs and/or organized crime, fight for and against states as well as each other. The ascent of such groups is closely related to the decline of the nation-state and its popular armies, a model that developed in the wake of the French Revolution but no longer resonates with the increasingly globalized nature of capital accumulation. Our previous studies of Middle East wars emphasized the ‘state of capital’ – our notion that the capitalist mode of power fuses state and capital into a single logic in which dominant capital groups are driven by the power quest for differential accumulation. We showed that, in the Middle East, this logic was imposed by a Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition of large oil and armament corporations, OPEC, financial institutions and construction firms, whose differential incomes and profits were tightly correlated with – and helped predict – the cyclical eruption of ‘energy conflicts’. But this mode of power comprises not two elements, but three. In addition to state and capital, it also includes the supreme-God churches, and in this paper we outline the role of these churches and their militias in capitalism generally and in Middle East wars specifically.
dc.identifier.citation	The Road to Gaza. Bichler, Shimshon and Nitzan, Jonathan. (2024). Working Papers on Capital as Power. No. 2024/01. August. pp. 1-19. (Article - Working Paper; English).
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10315/42365
dc.language.iso	en
dc.rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subject	capitalism
dc.subject	capitalist mode of power
dc.subject	Christianity
dc.subject	church
dc.subject	dominant capital
dc.subject	energy conflicts
dc.subject	Gaza
dc.subject	Islam
dc.subject	Israel
dc.subject	Jehovah
dc.subject	Jesus
dc.subject	Judaism
dc.subject	Middle East
dc.subject	militias
dc.subject	modes of power
dc.subject	Occupied Territories
dc.subject	oligarchy
dc.subject	oil
dc.subject	Palestine
dc.subject	church
dc.subject	religion
dc.subject	state of capital
dc.subject	war
dc.subject	Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition
dc.title	The Road to Gaza
dc.type	Working Paper

The Road to Gaza

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