The more I look at 'Israel', the more I'm reminded of the last days of Imperial Japan
It seemed on paper that invading China would be very easy for Japan. "Israel" committed the same mistake.
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In 1937, Japan invaded China by staging a border incident in Manchukuo, the colonial name given to Manchuria which they had seized from China several years prior.
Only eight years later, in August 1945, Japan surrendered and signed a peace treaty that gave everything back to China.
I wonder, will “Israel” also last that long after October 7?
The Manchukuo incident gave justification for a full-scale war on China which, at the time, was riddled with civil wars, economic and social issues.
Largely thanks to the Chinese resistance, Japan surrendered in 1945 and the imperial system was abolished. China emerged from this damaging war, a war of extermination vying for colonial control, stronger than they had ever been before. In fact, the end of the war and the proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949 ended the Century of Humiliation, the hundred years past in which China took defeat after defeat.
How Japan became a colonizer
For the purpose of this essay, we will look specifically at Japan’s conduct in China.
In 1894, after China had been defeated in many wars and was forced to make huge concessions to colonizers such as France, the UK, the USA and Russia, Japan had to grab a piece of China for themselves too.
Japan was in a much different position from China. China — at the time under the Qing dynasty — was paralyzed by a rigid imperial system that grew complacent, thinking that it could never be taken down.
Meanwhile, Japan had been forcibly opened to foreign traders and relations in the 1850s at the behest of the USA. After this episode, which Japan considered a defeat, they decided to embark on a large program of reforms known as the Meiji Restoration. This was very successful in Japan, and allowed them to acquire military technology and equipment to rival with other powers as well as advances in social issues, the economy, etc.
China had also embarked on some reforms following earlier defeats but was also refused by the Western Powers (who understood that China represented a much more interesting place to conquer than Japan due to its large size, population and economic activity). For example, when China set out to acquire modern naval ships, the British and French only sold them outdated and obsolete ships so that they would still retain an edge.
At the onset of the First Sino-Japanese war in 1894 Japan was, for all intents and purposes, much stronger than China.
The war started in Korea — which Japan would go on to colonize and annex — and ended in Manchuria. There, China took defeat after defeat and was simply unable to slow the advance of the invaders.
The war ended less than a year later, and Japan walked away with Korea (which had been a tributary state to China, hence causing China to enter the war), Manchuria, and the island of Taiwan.
We can draw a parallel here with Palestine and its occupier. The situations, after all, are similar in nature. Palestine is also occupied, and has been for decades. The Palestinian people, much like the Chinese, also suffered heavy and humiliating losses. But in the end, China won and ended their century of humiliation. What lessons can we draw from the past and apply to Palestine today?
With this victory in 1895, Japan had signalled its own imperial ambitions, and with it, went on to commit crimes that generally accompany such endeavors.
After Japan had successfully modernized, it had quickly exhausted its domestic markets and had to find an outlet to export capital. Thus, the conquests of Korea and Manchuria allowed a new influx of workers to be exploited. Japanese civilians were encouraged to settle in the conquered lands and open businesses there, much like Palestine is being settled by Zionists who displace the native population and steal their land, and exploit their labor. The “kibbutzim” for example rely heavily on Palestinian manual labor: in this piece, the supposedly “progressive” 972 Magazine laments the “massacre” that killed a Palestinian laborer in a kibbutz, but never asks why, for all his life since his teenage years, he had been working solely in the fields! Are kibbutz settlers too good to pick their own vegetables?
Resistance was met with harsh collective punishment. On March 1st 1919, for example, a huge peaceful movement was organized in Korea — reminding us of the March of Return held in Gaza. Appealing to the Japanese conscience, students and civilians took to the streets. They were massacred by the colonial police. According to Britannica, “about 7,000 people were killed by the Japanese police and soldiers, and 16,000 were wounded.”
This was far from the only massacre the Japanese committed in Korea (or any of the territories they occupied), and new events routinely come to light, making it difficult to estimate exactly how many innocents the occupiers killed.
Japan was also famous for its “comfort women”, though these came to be later, at the start of the war. They weaponized rape and gave it a justification, and with that at least 200,000 women from colonized territories were sent into sexual slavery at the whims of the Imperial Army to “boost” morale. We have to understand that “comfort women” was not a few bad apples trafficking women from inside the Japanese Army, but a policy enacted by the highest levels of the Army.
Rape is often used as a weapon of war, a weapon to further humiliate and break the spirits of the colonized while letting the colonizer know that he is superior, that he has earned the rights to dispose of the colonized as he pleases, that he should not see them as equals, but as objects to fulfill his needs and wants. This is not new. However, you might have heard about the uncovering of sexual torture in “Israeli” prisons towards Palestinians, notably as a report came out only a few days ago (content warning: textual depiction of acts of torture). Rape is used against all genders and all ages, with little distinction, and has been going on in Palestine since the Nakba. In fact, the events of the Nakba are only complete with the inclusion of the many sexual assaults the settlers committed on Palestinians.
The history of Japan in China
Japan and China enjoyed, to put it mildly, lukewarm relations for a time after the 1894 war. Manchuria was occupied, but the rest of China was spared. In 1914, the Imperial system in China was abolished after a civil war, one of many in China’s history. At the same time, civil wars rarely end quickly, and this gave rise to a period of warlordism: a period where every local ruler was trying to secede and become an emperor of their own fiefdom.
Through the united front of the Communist Party (CPC) and the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT), warlords were eventually all arrested or assimilated. Still, this period had further weakened China who was barely coming out of their imperial system and had to fight civil war on top of civil war.
In 1937, Japan finally launched a full-scale invasion of China, and a protracted war would last until 1945.
Much like in 1894, the Japanese quickly secured victory upon victory. They seized the major coastal cities, and in each and every one committed massacres. Nanjing remains the most famous example — which the Japanese government denies to this day, by the way. There, they executed more than 300,000 civilians and surrendered troops. They raped tens of thousands of women. Moreso than the acts, the way in which they went about it is also well-known: some soldiers held contests between themselves to see who could behead more people in a day. They raped children and pregnant women, and would kill the fetus and the mother afterwards.
Mind you, these are accusations which “Israel” throws at the Palestinian resistance all the time, last of which was after the operations on October 7. There is a difference however between the “40 beheaded babies” & the “rapes at Nova Festival” and the massacres at Nanjing, in that there is ample evidence of Nanjing. The Imperial Army took pictures of their crimes and beared witness to it, happily writing about it in their letters or journals. This is the difference between the two events, and it also echoes what the zionist army is doing in Gaza and the West Bank right now: they, also, happily document the crimes they commit and the humiliations they enact.
In this video, an IOF soldier giggles as he throws a flash grenade in a packed mosque.
Today, 8 months after the operation on October 7, the mainstream media is finally conceding that the rape and beheaded babies stories were entirely fabricated and had no basis in reality, months after independent journalists and analysts had said the exact same thing!
The massacre at Nanjing, much like the war crime at the Nuseirat refugee camp from a few days ago (in which the IOF, posing as aid workers, killed over 250 Palestinian civilians and children to save 4 of their POWs held in Gaza), was supposed to destroy the morale of the Chinese and accelerate their surrender.
Instead, it had the completely opposite effect. It galvanized morale, and united the Chinese like never before, because now they had a common goal: removing the occupier. All other problems Chinese society faced could wait until after the war.
Likewise, we see that the Palestinian identity is very strongly identified. Hamas, when making statements, talks to all Palestinians, and not only those in their party or in Gaza. It often calls for Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem to protest by all means available. When Hamas or resistance groups negotiate prisoner releases, they often include West Bank Palestinians even though those are not Hamas.
This national unity, which requires a national identity to exist, strengthens the resistance at large, whether it is branded as Hamas or not. It also shows Hamas’ principles, that they act for all Palestinians and not just a few, and in fact is making them very popular in the West Bank, where they have no presence!
In China, the KMT had comparatively few weapons compared to the Imperial Japanese Army. They used many different guns (which also implies many different calibers). They primarily fought with light infantry, meaning no armor (tanks or vehicles), and no air or navy. This is a very similar situation to Gaza, where the resistance has, at most, RPG rounds and mortars. They have no protection against the occupier’s drones and fighter planes.
The war in China quickly turned into protracted warfare. The Japanese army would advance, and have to dispatch soldiers to occupy the vast Chinese territory. As the KMT fought against the invader and slow his advance, the Communists would mostly act in guerilla operations in the occupied territory.
While Japan controlled China on the maps, their occupation was limited to the cities and railways (necessary for logistics over the vast distances of the Chinese country) — in the same way that after claiming victory in Gaza, the occupier is still unable to root out the resistance [Hamas and others], who have been shelling settlements in “Israel” for the past several weeks from areas the occupier had deemed “liberated” in Gaza.
In the Chinese countryside, the Communists carried out guerilla operations, especially at night. They enjoyed popular support there and were able to effectively harass the occupiers. Building this goodwill with the masses is crucial for a resistance movement to succeed, and was a big part of the reason why the CPC won the civil war against the KMT after World War 2.
It is very interesting to see how the war was seen in China at the time. In On Protracted War, Mao Zedong — the leader of the Communist faction, and eventually the People’s Republic of China first President — wrote that:
Our enemy, Japan, is first of all a moribund imperialist power; she is already in her era of decline.[1]
Mao attributed different causes to Japan’s decline than we do for “Israel”. However, he also noted that:
… that is the very reason the enemy has launched this adventurist war, which is in the nature of a last desperate struggle. Therefore, it is an inescapable certainty that it will not be China but the ruling circles of Japanese imperialism which will be destroyed as a result of the war. Moreover, Japan has undertaken this war at a time when many countries have been or are about to be embroiled in war, when we are all fighting or preparing to fight against barbarous aggression.[1]
Adventurism is basically spontaneous action without any stable or serious organization to back it up. Much like Japan entered war against China to delay its near decline and was forced to act by the circumstances, “Israel” entered Gaza for no purposes other than to save face after they were forced to respond to October 7. The fact are that:
“Israel” did not enter Gaza to save their prisoners, as they have already killed many on October 7 and more than 100 since then in Gaza. They are not interested in bringing them back.
“Israel” did not enter Gaza to destroy Hamas either, as we see the resistance still has most of their capabilities intact.
Instead, all they can do is reduce Gaza to rubble and kill its inhabitants. But what then? This cannot go on indefinitely. Eventually, there will be nothing left to destroy.
The Nethanyahu government entered an adventurist venture. He himself doesn’t know what he expects to get out of Gaza, and what he can realistically get — after all, it’s not like the venture is panning out terribly well for the occupation, whose soldiers keep turning up dead.
The few plans the occupation government has proposed, such as turning Gaza into beachfront property for settlers, or a park, were made after the fact and were never serious plans. For one, Gaza sits on a large offshore natural gas reserve; it would never be emptied just to build houses.
Gaza is Nethanyahu’s last desperate struggle. His government is deeply unpopular, and the “Israeli” population is not sure what they want: part of them wants him to pull the troops out of Gaza, and others want him to go even further, whatever that may mean. It’s not like they can go much further than killing between 60 and 200 thousand Palestinians.
Every massacre they commit, every child they kill and every innocent they torture, instead of demoralizing Palestinians and urging them to drop their weapons, further galvanizes them and brings all Palestinians, from Gaza to the West Bank, together. Their massacres only create more resistance fighters.
How did Japan react when it saw it could not defeat China, and that their own defeat was approaching?
It itensified war crimes. The Nazis, incidentally, also did that as they were retreating to Berlin.
In Ryukyu [“Okinawa” under current Japanese occupation], as the US Army was approaching, the Imperial Japanese Army ordered the locals to first kill their family, and then fight until death. Meanwhile, all the Japanese officers fled back home to Tokyo. Some 2000 children were forcibly mobilized by the IJA to fight in the Battle of Okinawa.
The massacres “Israel” is committing, such as the horrific death toll of 250 Palestinians and 3 confirmed POWs to save a measly 4 of them (that could have been exchanged months ago had “Israel” agreed to negotiations) is not the sign of the winning party. The winning side in war doesn’t need to turn up the barbarism as time goes on, because it knows it’s winning. When business is going as usual, that is when the barbarism is complacent and banal.
It’s simple: as the occupier gets pushed out, they are reminded of their own fragility, and that their entire “national identity”, if one can call it that, is based on a very fragile base: it requires them to either kill or displace all Palestinians, which they are nowhere near succeeding after more than 70 years. Every victory the Palestinians achieve reminds the occupier of this fragility, and so it steps up the atrocities to try and regain control of a losing situation and fool the world into thinking they are actually winning.
We see from the Resistance’s statements that they are much more composed and thought out. Here is Abu Obeida’s statement (Hamas spokesman) on the war crime committed in the Nuseirat refugee camp:
What the Zionist enemy carried out in the Nusseirat area in the central Gaza Strip is a compounded war crime, and the first to be harmed by it are its captives. The enemy managed to liberate some of its captives by committing horrific massacres, but at the same time, it killed some of them during the operation. The operation will pose a great danger to the enemy's captives and will have a negative impact on their conditions and lives.[2]
It is a very composed and purposeful statement, highlighting not the Palestinian deaths, but the Pyrrhic victory for the occupier that purported to be saving its “hostages” no matter the cost. It is a statement that shows thoughtful and careful wording, a far cry from the chaotic Nethanyahu government at this time which resorts to impersonate aid workers and kill 250 Palestinian civilians to achieve a symbolic victory!
The Nethanyahu cabinet, meanwhile, is in complete shambles: Gantz, one of the occupation ministers, left the political coalition and his ministerial position. Other ministers such as Ben-Gvir have threatened to leave over the peace deal Biden “wrote up” a week ago.
The late imperial Japanese cabinet also entered its own crisis in the last days of its war. The US was fighting its way north, and the Soviets had liberated Manchuria in record time. The cabinet was split in three camps: should it keep fighting, or should it surrender to the US, or to the Soviets?
A war cabinet that cannot agree to follow a clear line opens itself up to becoming paralyzed. In such a situation, troops may receive contradictory orders or not even receive orders at all. Lawlessness in the ranks prevails, and soldiers end up doing whatever they want, with little regard for the strategic designs. This is already somewhat the case in the IOF, though not entirely because the cabinet is not sure what they want to get out of Gaza. Rather, we’ve seen over the past 8 months (and earlier wars, such as the 2006 invasion of Lebanon or the 2005 IOF removal from Gaza) that the IOF is not very disciplined, and not very concerned about being in Gaza. They should be much more concerned and cower for their lives in the rubble but instead, as we see from resistance videos, they seem to treat it as a vacation: standing near windows, walking in the open, not scouting ahead, etc.[3]
There are many more similarities we could draw, but I’ll stop there. We could talk about Unit 731 who ran unethical experiments on prisoners of war and compare them to the “doctors” who are encouraged to perform unnecessary procedures they are unqualified to do on Palestinian hostages, for example. We could talk about how “Israel”, much like late Imperial Japan, is being slowly isolated from the world and its markets, with growing impact with each passing day. I’ve made some of these arguments in another essay already too.
But I think the point is clear. We think things will last forever up until they don’t. One day, sooner than we may think, there will be a turning point and “Israel” will crumble from that point on.
We can help, right now, achieve that turning point. Another thing Mao talked about in regards to the war in China is the concept of revolutionary defeatism. He urged all (progressive) Japanese to be patriotic for the downfall of their empire, to do whatever they could at the moment to help hasten the defeat, which would help China win. Likewise, anything we can do to prevent help towards “Israel” directly and instantly helps Palestinians win. The geographical distance is not preventing us from helping
To win, we need concrete and material acts. Protests are good, but they don’t hurt the regime. Organize strikes for Palestine. Organize blockades. Encourage your union to refuse to serve “Israeli” orders at your place of employment. Keep hounding your elected officials, right at their doorstep, right in their offices. Protest and camp to force your university and employers to divest from “Israel”. Hold them up to their promises. You don’t have to organize all of this by yourself. Find groups (such as BDS) who are already involved in such tactics, or have experience with them. Organize with them.
Collectively, and not individually, is the only way we can have a painful impact on the occupier.
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Great writing as always! Love the great lines you drew in between the two of them!