By Alvaro Verzi Rangel on October 10, 2023
photo: Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency
The unexpected offensive launched last Saturday by the Palestinian group Hamas on various points of Israel’s territory, as well as the devastating military response by Tel Aviv and the rapid escalation of the conflict, in which the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah got involved hours later by attacking Israeli positions near the Lebanese border, adds an explosive ingredient to the already unstable world scenario.
Let us be clear from the outset: this is not a war between two peoples on equal terms: there is an occupier and an occupied, a colonizer and a colonized, an oppressor and an oppressed. Beware: Israel is not the victim but the victimizer.
This escalation between Hamas and the Israeli government adds a point of high explosiveness to the planetary map, in addition to the strained relations of the United States with Russia and China, which multiplies the danger of a large-scale confrontation whose consequences are best left unimagined.
This operation of the Palestinian resistance is the response of an oppressed, occupied, colonized and blockaded people to the constant and intolerable provocations of the current extremist Israeli government, as well as to decades of structural violence and violation of the most fundamental human and collective rights, including the right to self-determination.
Peoples who have known colonialism, state terrorism and its gross violations of human rights cannot be fooled by the rhetoric of the Western powers and their battalions of international media power, which have always allied and aligned themselves with the oppressor.
Gideon Levy points out in Haaretz that behind all this is Israeli arrogance. “We think we have permission to do anything and assume that we will never pay, never be punished. And we think we will continue and nothing will interrupt us. We will arrest, we will kill, we will abuse, we will despoil, we will protect the settlers and their pogroms, we will go to [the Palestinian territories] and of course to [the Esplanade of the Mosques] – more than 5,000 Jewish settlers in Sukkot alone.”
“We will shoot innocents, we will gouge out their eyes and smash their faces, we will expel them, we will expropriate, we will steal, we will rip them out of their beds, we will subject them to ethnic cleansing, and of course we will continue the incredible blockade of Gaza. And we will assume that it will be business as usual,” Levy added.
The Palestinian people are expected to be docile and patient victims. For 75 years now, dispossessed and expelled from their land in the ethnic cleansing that culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel on the ruins of Palestine, they have been waiting for the West to recognize their right to fight to regain their homeland and return to it.
Four generations of Palestinians have seen governments, summits and UN resolutions pass without any of them being accompanied by the political will and concrete measures to end the impunity of Israeli crimes: 30 years after the deceitful Oslo Accords, today the Palestinian people have less freedom, less justice, less equality and less territory than before.
No one doubts that Washington is the main international accomplice in all this, since . Israel is the largest recipient of cumulative U.S. assistance in the world since World War II, including a total of $158 billion in bilateral assistance in recent years: almost all of it in military assistance, according to official figures.
In the most recent agreement, Washington has pledged an additional $38 billion in military assistance between 2019 and 2028. But it is the successive failures of U.S. military intelligence that are surprising.
Just a week ago, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan commented very confidently that the Middle East region is calmer today than it has been in the last two decades. His “smarts” were in for a surprise as some of the Palestinian resistance erupted, despite full U.S. support for Israel.
Tariq Ali, Pakistani writer, film director and historian, points out in New Left Review that the Palestinians are rising up against the colonizers: “Israel is a nuclear state armed to the teeth by the US. Its existence is not under threat. The Palestinians, their land and their lives are. Western civilization seems willing to stand by while they are exterminated,” he adds.
War is the most extreme form of terrorism, said historian and war veteran Howard Zinn, noting that in modern times, it is the civilian population that suffers the most. Israel has declared war in response to an armed offensive by Hamas and again justifies its acts of terror by claiming to be a victim of terrorism.
Immediately and predictably, the U.S. government proclaimed its loyalty to Israel, condemned the acts of terrorism, and was shameless enough to claim that the attacks were unprovoked and therefore criminal. The U.S. government is already preparing more immediate military assistance to its ally. Israel has the right to defend itself, Biden proclaimed (obviously the Palestinians do not have the same right), notes journalist David Brooks.
Since Netanyahu’s right-wing government came to power this year, Israeli soldiers have already killed more than 250 Palestinians, at least 47 of them children, in the West Bank, and violent attacks against Palestinians to expel them from their land by Israeli extremists have intensified (almost 600 attacks in the first half of this year, according to the UN).
Since September 2000 some 10,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces; and Palestinians have killed 881 Israeli civilians.
Israel maintained a military occupation of Gaza for more than half a century and then in the last 15 years this was followed by an illegal siege and naval blockade, turning the territory into an open prison with some two million Palestinians trapped in conditions condemned by the UN and human rights groups.
The current world tension doubly weakens the action of governments and supranational organizations that should have agreed decades ago to become factors of peace in the Middle East: The United States, Russia, the European Union, the Arab League and Iran, among the main ones. In less conflictive circumstances, the international community was not able to push the Israeli-Palestinian conflict towards a solution and a negotiated peace.
This revival of the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is taking place against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, geostrategic tensions in the China Sea, hostilities in Yemen between factions backed by Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the tangled panorama in the countries that share the Kurdistan region (Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey), and the chaotic political situation in several sub-Saharan African nations.
Added to this is the electoral rise of the ultra-right in several European countries and the crisis in the United States, where presidential elections are approaching and are fraught with the risk of spillover and violence.
Since 1967, both the General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council have issued more than fifteen resolutions aimed at achieving a formula for coexistence between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, which have been systematically ignored by the Tel Aviv regime, which has not only festered the conflict, but has also undermined the authority of the international body.
Obviously, the Security Council has always lacked the political will of the US, France and the UK – permanent members – to make these resolutions binding. And the stubbornness of the Israeli rulers has resulted in enormous additional suffering for both societies and in human and material destruction in which the Palestinians have traditionally borne by far the brunt, but which is now also reaching the Israeli camps and cities.
The only possible solution for coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis is to recognize and implement the right of the former to establish their national state in the entire occupied West Bank, in Gaza, with the eastern portion of Jerusalem – Al Qods, by its Arabic name – as its capital, recovering the territorial demarcation that existed until the 1967 war.
In doing so, Israel would have to cede many of the territories it has been illegally occupying since then. In return it would gain certainty of national security and lasting peace for its people.
In order to negotiate, it must first be recognized that it is necessary to put an end to the immense asymmetry of power, arrogance and impunity that have allowed Israel to systematically sabotage all efforts at dialogue and to advance its relentless appropriation of Palestinian territory and expulsion of its population.
In his third term as Prime Minister of Israel, after having held the same office from 1996 to 1999, and from 2009 to 2021, Benjamin Netanyahu sought to limit the powers of the Supreme Court of Justice through laws that were passed by his slim majority.
This offensive, aimed at making total control of the institutionality viable, gave rise to a series of demonstrations, repeated every weekend from January to the present, to prevent the imposition of legislation – promoted by the alliance of the right and the ultra-right – to limit the autonomy of justice, restrict individual freedoms and consolidate the apartheid model against the non-Jewish population.
Argentine analyst Jorge Elbaum points out that this rupture of internal consensus within Israel was read by Hamas activists as a window of opportunity to project the current military initiatives on the military forces and the civilian population. But, he points out, the military actions carried out by Hamas will once again unify Israeli civil society behind the foundational banner of national security.
As of October 7, more than 200 Palestinians were killed (including 48 children), more than 450 Palestinian homes were destroyed, entire communities were displaced from their land or endured veritable settler pogroms; there are 5,200 detainees (1,264 of them without charge or trial), including 170 children and teenagers, torn from their beds in violent nighttime raids.
Israel has a population of almost nine and a half million inhabitants, a quarter of whom are Muslims. Palestine, on the other hand, has five million inhabitants, two million of whom live in the Strip. The war situation suffered by these 15 million inhabitants benefits both Netanyahu and the Islamic fundamentalist sectors.
Both refuse any political solution for the establishment of a sovereign Palestine, living together in peace with a secular, multiethnic Israel, alien to supremacism and apartheid policies that primarily hit the Arabs living within its borders and those who survive in occupied territories.
Alvaro Verzi Rangel Sociologist and international analyst, Co-director of the Observatory on Communication and Democracy and senior analyst at the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE, www.estrategia.la).
Source: Cuba en Resumen