No one is expendable

From Gaza to Lebanon to North Carolina

Photo by jim gade on Unsplash

There is a particular horror in atrocities becoming unsurprising. In a week where one cataclysmic event followed another, Israel’s massive escalation against Lebanon, the southeastern U.S. being ravaged by Hurricane Helene, and the government’s response to it was all terrifyingly predictable. Leading up to the widespread bombing of much of southern Lebanon, and then Beirut, Israel trotted out the same, tired lines we’ve seen again and again over the past year. Netanyahu said that the people of Lebanon have missiles in their garages, Hezbollah HQ is deep under a residential area, and that hundreds of thousands must flee their homes if they don’t want to die. We’ve heard it all before.

The blatant deception and threadbare lies don’t lessen the horror, in some ways they magnify it. Seeing Israel not even bother to attempt real persuasion lays bare their total impunity. They can kill 1,000 Lebanese people in just one week and still have Joe Biden and Kamala Harris put out statements congratulating them for killing one man. The President and VP applauded the killing of Nasrallah, and their statements did not mention the other thousand dead. Not one word referencing the civilian lives lost. The impunity, the dividing lines, the determination of who can be sacrificed is clear.

The U.S. made the difference between who is valued and who is expendable painfully clear immediately after Israel began its carpet bombing of Lebanon. Whereas after October 7th the State Department released a statement about assisting U.S. citizens in evacuating Israel, the bombing of Lebanon merely evoked the following:

Hop on a several thousand dollar flight, if you can. That is the sage guidance of the embassy. But of course that’s because Arabs with U.S. citizenship are not quite on the right side of the dividing line. Especially when Israel is the one attacking them. In Palestine, we’ve seen multiple Americans murdered in cold blood by Israel. Aysenur Ezgi, a U.S. citizen, was murdered in the West Bank just a month ago. A sniper shot her in the head for her participation in a non-violent demonstration. A week later the IDF acknowledged that they probably shot her, but said it was an accident. The U.S. provided no consequence for this murder, just as with the many other times Israel has murdered Americans. Some have been of Arab descent, some have not, but all are sacrificable at the altar of imperialism and continued U.S.-Israeli power.

In the eyes of this power structure all Palestinians, Lebanese, and people across the Arab world are also expendable. We have seen that in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the entire post-9/11 military rampage across the world, where millions have died from direct and indirect causes. Too many Americans have tolerated this out of the unjustifiable and yet persistent idea that in sacrificing ‘them’ we preserve a good life for ‘us.’ This is profoundly untrue. A willingness to sacrifice people in the Global South bolsters the ruling class and hurts the power of the working class everywhere. Global capitalism uses the disparities of worker protections and power in different countries to export jobs to places where the working class is most vulnerable, maximizing their profits while hurting workers both in the countries losing jobs and in the countries where workers are maximally exploitable. Their harmful game of chess relies, in part, on people in the West failing to see how our fate is connected to the fate of the international working class. Until we realize that we have more in common with a Lebanese farmer, a Bangladeshi factory worker, or a Mexican auto worker than we do with any billionaire, they'll continue to get away with this.

We all want comfort, and that’s a reasonable desire. But we have failed to realize that without solidarity with others around the world, without the power generated by a real mass movement of the working class around the world, our comfort will always be fleeting – the ruling class will always work to retake what we win and expand the scope of their greed for as long as the capitalists system persists. They will take wealth out of this country, they’ll take our jobs out from under us, and we won’t have the power to stop them – unless we embrace the truth of international solidarity and act on it.

Photo by James Eades on Unsplash

This hurricane season the brutal flooding washing whole towns away in North Carolina and cutting thousands off from the world should show us just how deep our solidarity must run. We too are sacrificable in the eyes of the ruling class. As aid rushes in, as people label this one of the worst “natural disasters” in a lifetime, we must know that this disaster isn’t natural. Scientists for ExxonMobil predicted climate change with “shocking skill and accuracy” in the 1970s. They knew what was coming, and fossil fuel corporations made deliberate decisions to place profits over our lives anyway. The increasing brutality of climate disasters is not merely a natural phenomenon, it is a capitalist, fossil-fuel phenomenon.

And it’s not just the hurricanes, the floods, and the forest fires that show just how expendable we vaunted U.S. citizens are in the eyes of the ruling class. It’s not just Arab-Americans or activists in Palestine or working-class folks in North Carolina who are in this rapidly increasing sacrificial zone. The ruling class would gladly kill your job to make a buck. Many of the richest and most powerful people on Earth are salivating at the prospect of replacing millions of workers with AI, with no plan to care for the lives wrecked in the process. In fact, with homelessness recently rendered a criminalizable offense, the sacrifice zone has expanded to the most vulnerable, those in poverty, those who need a society that cares most of all.

On the other side of this morbid description of who is expendable is a rapidly growing solidarity. Our fates are not just tied up with the working class around the world because of some lofty idealism — we are tied together by the material realities of the systems we live under. Every day more people realize that you have more in common with a working-class person in Lebanon or Gaza than you do with any billionaire. This is the truth we need to internalize. In understanding and acting on this truth we can build a movement that is international in scope, that lifts up working people around the world and takes us all out of this sacrificable category and into lives of dignity and worth by building systems that treat us accordingly.

We know that we are not expendable, but we have to enforce that truth with the power of our solidarity, with the power of millions and billions of people flexing our capacity to topple the system that sacrifices us and replace it with a system premised on sustaining life. Once you see how this system sees you, there’s no going back. There’s only forging ahead towards an arrangement where we are not sacrificed at the altar of the dollar, but where that which would destroy life is sacrificed to ensure the preservation of both people and this precious planet.