On the Israeli side, 12 people were killed, including two children and soldiers, in rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. The fighting, the fiercest in years, came to a halt on Friday under a Qatar-Egypt-brokered ceasefire.
As we know. Under pressure and fearing a civil war inside its official borders, Israel agreed to halt its 11-day bombardments of Gaza.
The ceasefire was brokered by Qatar and Egypt, under pressur from Russia and
China. But even before the shooting stopped it had transformed the political
landscape. The Israel/Palestinian « confrontation »
has shifted away from focusing solely on Gaza to
multiple fronts – Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank ,
Israel itself– and an upsurge in any one of them could start a new round of
violence, as Israeli occupation navy is back to it’s favourite daily hobby
terrorizind fishermen in Gaza. Since yesterday morning, thier ships of terror
have been firin g voileys of bullets to keep fishermen from trying to put bread
on their families tables. This is a common daily practice by the IDF, the
Israeli Forces of Occupation. Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel has
been arresting Palestinian youngsters for « activism » on social media.
Israeli police said that more than 1,550 have been arrested so far.
Events in Jerusalem ignited the present crisis and there is every chance
that they will do so again. Far-right Israeli groups, with the help of Israeli occupying
military police, are intent on tightening their grip on the city and
eliminating the Palestinian presence wherever they can. The political temperature
will stay high, simmering just below boiling point. Another flare-up in
Jerusalem would make it boil over.
Israeli leaders had hoped that the cantonisation of the Palestinians –
three million on the West Bank, two million each in Israel and Gaza, 300,000 in
Jerusalem – would fragment them politically as well as geographically. For a
time, this strategy appeared to work, but over the last two weeks the crisis in
one Palestinian canton has swiftly spread to the three others.
Israeli police efforts to evict Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah
neighbourhood of occupied Jerusalem and their use of stun grenades and teargas
in al-Aqsa mosque led to Hamas reaction firing rocket barrages from Gaza. Followed,
the harassment of Israeli-Palestinians inside Israel by Jewish Supremacists,
which, in turn provoked protests by Palestinians on a larger scale than
anything seen since the second intifada 20 years ago. On the occupied West
Bank, protesters poured into the streets in every town and the internationally
recognised Palestinian Authority was mocked and marginalised.
For all the empty talk about one- and two-state solutions to the
Israel/Palestine problem, the outcome of the fourth war centred on Gaza proves
that the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is a single
political unit. What affects one part of it affects all the rest.
The latest Gaza war showed that Israel does not have a viable military or
political strategy for fighting or engaging with the Palestinians other than
the ethnical cleansing. Israeli generals and officials claim to have degraded
the military infrastructure of Hamas, killed some of its commanders and
destroyed part of its tunnel system. Israel was certainly surprised by Hamas firing 3,700 homemade
rockets into Israel, despite being isolated in Gaza for 15 years.
Even if Hamas proved to have a little more military
muscle than expected, though, there is no doubting Israel’s superiority over
the ill-equipped paramilitary force it faces in Gaza. But this superiority stubbornly refuses to produce victory or rather that
Israel knows what such a victory would look like. It cannot realistically
expect to eliminate Hamas and carry out regime change in Gaza without
reoccupation, which would provoke even stronger Palestinian resistance ;
mostly because more and more Palestinians see Mahmoud Abbas as Vichy and the
Hamas as the only Resistance. Keeping the Palestinians there imprisoned under a
state of permanent siege, the status quo for the last 15 years, has just been
shown not to work.
Claims of Israeli military success as justification for agreeing to a
ceasefire are a smokescreen concealing Israeli failure to gain any real
advantage from a bombardment that killed 232 Palestinians, including 65
children, but did little else. Israeli commentators are franker and better
informed about this lack of success than their western counterparts. The
editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Aluf Benn, calls the conflict
just ended “Israel’s most failed and pointless Gaza operation ever”.
He says that all the PR of the Israeli army cannot “cover up the truth: the
military has no idea how to paralyse Hamas’s forces and throw it off balance.
Destroying its tunnels with powerful bombs revealed Israel’s strategic
capabilities without causing any substantive damage to the enemy’s fighting
abilities.”
Many states have faced similar frustration when fighting an asymmetric war
against a militarily inferior but undefeatable opponent that has the resolve of
Justice on their side. This happened to Britain in Northern Ireland between
1968 and 1998. The sensible response of a government that fails to get its way
by physical force is to seek political engagement with the other side to work
out a compromise.
But this is precisely what the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu
and his political partners cannot do. For almost a quarter of a century, his
strategy since he was first elected Israeli leader in 1997 has been to argue
that Israel can have a permanent peace without compromising with the
Palestinians. This view, dominant from the centre left to the hard right, held
that the Palestinians had been decisively defeated and there was no need to
concede anything to them. With all American Presidents, mainly Donald Trump
giving total support to this maximalist position during his four years in the
White House, many Israelis were persuaded that Netanyahu had been right.
Gaza looked as if it had been successfully sealed off, the occupied West
Bank broken up into Palestinian Bantustans and expanding Israeli settlements,
Jerusalem was encircled from without and increasingly de-Palestinianised from
within, while the Palestinians in Israel remained an embittered but impotent
minority. Arab states were normalising relations with Israel and the
Palestinian Question no longer figured on the international agenda.
It was all a mirage. The latest bombardment of Gaza may look like the three
previous ones in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014, but it is far more important because
the Netanyahu/Washington policy has collapsed and there is nothing much to put
in its place. The old Israel/Palestinian crisis is back and is more envenomed
and widespread than before. An ominous new feature of it is Palestinians in
Israel taking to the streets to demand equality and an end to discrimination.
Israeli illegal settlers from the West Bank have been coming back to Israel to
lead anti-Palestinian demonstrations within mixed Jewish/Palestinian towns and
cities.
Such developments do not mean that the balance of power between Israel and
the Palestinians has abruptly skewed in favour of the latter. On the contrary,
one of the problems in convincing Israelis at every level that they should
engage with the Palestinians is that they do not believe they need to. Hamas have
been energised and the Palestinian Authority further discredited by the latest resistance
of the former and coward compliance of the latter. The fact is that there is an
overall vacuum of Palestinian leadership and organisation. This is not quite
such a crippling disadvantage as it might appear since Palestinian political
movements have a long tradition of prioritising their grip on power over
everything else.
The ceasefire that came into force between Israel and Hamas early on Friday
morning ushers in a period of enhanced instability. Israel is in a state of
permanent crisis because it has no military solution to Gaza/Hamas while its
right-wing leaders are blocked off by ideological fixations of ethnic cleansing,
which keeps them from seeking to open up diplomatic and political options.
The idea of weakening the Palestinians by fragmenting them has turned out
to be counterproductive. Israeli leaders will now have to cope with four
different variants of the Israel/Palestinian crisis, each of which may, like
the coronavirus, become the dominant strain and detonate a new explosion. As
the Palestinians have nowhere to go and nothing else to do but to fight for
survival, in their own historical land.
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