IT has been a tough year for very basic assumptions about common humanity and the most fundamental of shared values. The scales have again been forced from our eyes once more as the most powerful nations in the world essentially only endorse power even in extremis. 

Most MPs elected this year remain silent on the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, while figures like David Lammy and Keir Starmer appear to think it doesn’t count as a crime. It’s been a tough year for anyone bearing witness to body parts strewn across phone screens, tougher more to observe Israeli soldiers prancing in stolen clothing and stitching children’s toys to D9 bulldozers.

One key outcome of 2024 has been the exposure of the “might is right” system and the nature of zionism. If there is one thing that Hamas achieved it was this exposure of what zionism really is, and which is why amid the carnage it makes sense to get better informed about who did what and why. 

Hamas and Hezbollah have been monstered in the mainstream media. At the beginning of the genocide Israeli propagandists were keen to elide them with extremist bogeymen. With breathtaking hypocrisy Hamas was slandered as “Hamas-Isis” in 2023, but in 2024 an offshoot of the actual Isis took power in Syria, and this time to Western acclaim. 

Primary evidence was distilled in Hamas: The Quest for Power (Polity Press, £17.99) and further a history of the Lebanon’s Party of God was provided by Hezbollah: Mobilisation and Power (Hurst, £18.99). 

Hezbollah was formed in 1982 and Hamas in 1987 as responses to Israeli attacks in Lebanon and Palestine. Both started as expressions of Islam, as Shi’te and Sunni respectively. Both experienced the lethal expansionist intentions of zionism, its ethnosupremacy, willingness to use force and alliance with the most powerful nation on Earth, itself with a track record of genocide and the gleeful use of military power. From a position of extreme weakness, both Islamist organisations first turned to religion for purity and strength. 

Both, however, developed explicitly secular goals: resistance to zionism and colonialism. Hamas, under siege for almost its entire existence was able to form strategies of impact but not to acquire great military strength. Hezbollah became a formidable military force ultimately expelling the Israelis from Lebanon in 2004. Both were pragmatic organisations that had ultimately to deal with reality, including expecting — as inevitable — the assassination of their leaderships. The lesson both organisations learned was that power only respects power.

Amid many considerations it is worth remembering that the present world crisis was catalysed by a group of people marginalised, incarcerated and then besieged and attacked unlike any other in modern times. It’s worth remembering what organisation, strategy, discipline and determination can achieve, no matter how it is ultimately judged.

The tragedy is that had Israel decided to obey international law the “security” some experts thought it sought as a primary goal had been achievable for decades. Gaza, A History (Hurst, £18.99) described what happened but was quite weak on why. Expansion was driven by ideology, racism was a primary part of that ideology. Alas, security does not seem to be the primary goal of the Israeli state, rather it was expansion at any cost. 

There are many things which drive ideology. You quickly learn that the mainstream media has a role in this and this survey of the mainstream press showed that the news has rarely been about actual news. Terry Kirby provided us with a portrait of the tabloid press as poisonous political weapons in The Newsmongers, A History of Tabloid Journalism (Reaktion, £20). 

However, the turd of the year has to go to Dictators Inc. Lauded as an intellectual manifesto of the technocratic elite who could sort out the world if only they were allowed to, this was in reality a work of ideological fundamentalism. People and countries are either (only) good or (only) bad based on identities assigned by ideology. 

It does, however, show that the ruling class is just as blind as we once were.