The Gaza war or when extremes seek each other out
Justice is injustice equitably distributed
Maurice Chapelan
It is said that in times of pain, in the face of all kinds of escalations, the path is one of hope and it is useless to take refuge in vanity.
It is sad to note how in recent decades indifference has become an evil that corrodes our lives, and how arrogance, fatal and dangerous, has not ceased to instill in states, groups and individuals a false sense of self-sufficiency and even supremacy. A feeling that, at the end of the day, is nothing more than a shield that hides weakness or fear of facing the real challenges: those of putting oneself in the Other's shoes, of understanding their needs and attending to their humanity.
Yes, nothing is easier than self-deception until it backfires. But the bad thing is that those who always pay the bill are not the hate-mongers or their relatives, but the simple and innocent citizens.
Honoré de Balzac said that glory is a poison that must be taken in small doses in order not to fall into arrogance, and to tell the truth, both Israel and the international community have long been ignoring the Palestinians, pretending and acting as if they did not exist.
Since the signing of the Oslo accords that cost the life of Yitzhak Rabin assassinated by an ultra-right wing kid, successive governments in Israel, encouraged by the complicit and blessing silence of the US and the EU, have not only been unraveling from those accords but have tightened the noose on the neck of the Palestinians even more by installing more settlements and cutting more and more of the Palestinians' living space both on land and sea.
However, I do not understand how a movement like Hamas, which does not cease to claim its Islamism and build its narrative on the religious record, does not respect the ethics of war as raised by the prophet of Islam himself and persists in trampling corpses and mistreating the elderly while shouting Allahu akbar. Denis Diderot rightly said that from fanaticism to barbarism is only one step away. Let us not forget that Hamas is the Palestinian faction of the Muslim brothers who killed the Egyptian president Anwar Saddat, and let us not forget that instead of Hamas it would be ideal to speak of several Hamas, since the political leadership lives in luxury hotels in Qatar, while the various military groups are the ones who keep the local compass by paying obeisance to this or that party.
Similarly, I do not understand how they intend to isolate a people of almost two and a half million inhabitants in a strip 40 km long and 10 km wide, a pressure cooker and an open-air hell as we have been hearing for years without doing anything, where 70% of young Gazaouis have never met an Israeli, and 75% of them are unemployed despite having gas and oil a stone's throw away from their coast. Let us also remember that the GDP of a person living in Gaza is $2,000 per year compared to $45,000 for an Israeli. Yes, I do not understand that a youth with no direction and no future perspective is asked to embrace peace and understand empathy.
In order to escape from the justice system that has been besetting him for years, and with his last coalition government with the last right wing, Netanyahu is leading the Middle East to the abyss and his country to ruin. He, his justice minister, the architect of the attempt to control the Supreme Council of Justice, as well as the head of national security are three arsonists who have not ceased to sow the clusters of anger.
After months of street demonstrations in Israel against their attempt to 'mainmise' over the High Council of Justice, this war with Hamas comes to silence critical voices within the army. With the launching of a national unity government, he already has the opposition in the can. Together we are invincible, he tells the opposition, and there will be time for criticism, he adds.
When Netanyahu came to power in 1996, his first statements were: Oslo is the problem, not the solution! Since then, he has not ceased to create discord and division among Palestinians, between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, his motto towards Hamas is the "laisser faire", that is to say to maintain a tension of mild intensity, controllable, and to enter Gaza every so often (2008, 2012, 2014) to "mow the lawn" as he repeats with sarcasm.
With the latest tragic, nauseating and condemnable events, I have no doubt that Netanyahu and his partners of the last right are the worst enemy of the Israelis, just as Hamas is the worst enemy of the Palestinians. Let us not forget that last July large demonstrations took place in Gaza against the Hamas government and were harshly repressed by Hamas with imprisonment, harassment and torture.
These two extreme sides seek and find each other, they share interests and a scavenger nature, since they live off the corpses they sow in their blood marriages. Hamas and the Israeli right wing have sabotaged the Oslo agreements that took place between the Israeli left and the PLO. In 2005, and with Sharon's blessing, Hamas occupied Gaza killing hundreds of PLO members. Even more, since 2014, there has been no dialogue, apart from security issues, between the Israeli government and the Palestinian authority.
The barbarism we are witnessing now was then only a matter of time. With it we went from underestimation to overreaction, i.e. once what was least expected from Hamas has happened, what level of violence will Israel's reaction reach?
There is a wisdom that says: "An eye for an eye and we will all be blind". The history of this conflict - as of others - shows us that software based on revenge and vengeance only fuels extremism and worsens the situation. There is no need -or perhaps there is- to remember that the role of a government is to protect its population and not to take revenge. For this, we need statesmen who think of future generations, not opportunistic politicians who only think of winning future elections at the cost of radicalizing the people, as has been the case in Israel in recent years.
Having said that, what are the scenarios that await us now?
-One: That the Israeli government will continue the aerial bombardment of Gaza for a limited period of time in order to provoke a greater number of deaths and to demonstrate to the badly wounded and angry Israeli people that the Palestinian casualties have been greater than theirs. As of today, Friday, October 13, Israel has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza causing nearly two thousand deaths (including a dozen hostages according to Hamas) and some ten thousand wounded. This attack could be followed by a limited ground incursion in order to reach negotiations through intermediaries for the exchange of prisoners.
-Second: That a comprehensive ground incursion be chosen until Hamas is wiped out and Gaza is taken over. This scenario is very time-consuming and entails a high number of casualties in the ranks of the Israeli army which will be forced to conquer street by street, tunnel by tunnel, without counting the casualties of the hostages. Moreover, there is the eminent risk of the entry into action of other actors both local and foreign in a war that could restructure the power relationship in the Middle East and overturn the US-sponsored Deal of the Century called the Accords of Abraham that expected the accession of Saudi Arabia and thus fulfill the objective of several regional actors led by Iran.
In any case, however many attacks by the Netanyahu government on Gaza and regardless of their degree and nature, what is certain is that unfortunately, with this macabre attack by Hamas, the Palestinian problem has once again taken its deserved place on the international stage. It is striking that the map reflecting the positioning of countries in the face of this new serious crisis shows the same fracture lines as the Russian-Ukrainian war. This means that the world has changed a lot, that the West no longer has a monopoly on international politics, and that the solutions to conflicts will be even more complex.
In fact, the competition or overlap between these two conflicts confirms the thesis that one war drives out the other. This new conflict serves Russia which, as we know, maintains a close military collaboration with Iran in its war in Ukraine. Iran, as we know, is one of the essential mentors of Hamas. The convergence of interests of several new international actors in a world in full restructuring foreshadows the global, devastating and lasting character of this new war if the US gives Israel free rein to take its revenge to Kafkaesque limits.
Likewise, this new conflict has associated for the rest of time the figure of Netanyahu with that of a leader who could not protect his people and guarantee their security, in other words, the worst image that an Israeli politician can have in a state that has been forged around the idea or the ghost of security.
In the face of such a dangerous escalation, and in order to avoid the worst scenario for everyone, it is worth asking who is the honest broker acceptable to the two belligerent parties.
There is no doubt that the US and the EU can exert great pressure on the Israeli government, but only to reduce the degree of barbaric and unjustified collective punishment. However, to mediate in order to find solutions, we believe that Qatar, which has been paying for years - in a macabre three-way game (Israel-Catar-Hamas) - the salaries of Palestinian civil servants in Gaza as well as all the reconstruction expenses, can do so.
Other countries such as Egypt, Turkey, Germany and Morocco may also have an interesting role to play:
1-In the short term:
-Create a safe humanitarian corridor to get food and medicine to the martyred population of Gaza.
-Impose the humanitarian law of war.
-Exchange prisoners and hostages.
-Stop the process of ethnic cleansing - and future deportation to the Sinai desert that Egypt rejects - suffered by a population caught between the Israeli blockade and the Hamas dictatorship.
2-Medium term:
Return to negotiations in view of finding a definitive solution to this conflict, that of two states as stipulated in the Oslo agreements or the integration of Palestine into Israel in a democratic and equitable state. It should be noted that the Abraham Accords do not take into account the interests of the Palestinians in general and those of the people of Gaza in particular. The EU, in order to prevent the collateral damage of this violent conflict from reaching it, has several levers to seriously facilitate negotiations this time: First, because it is the entity that contributes the most money to Palestine (Gaza included), and second because it is Israel's first economic partner.
For this to happen, a credible Palestinian interlocutor is needed first. In my opinion, Marouan Barghouti, who has been in Israeli jails for decades without being the perpetrator of any attack, is the only one who can move lines.
To conclude, and in the face of the fanatics on both sides, in the face of their perverse will to always return to religious records to annihilate the other and perpetuate conflicts, here is a passage from 'the milonga of the Jewish Moor' by Dino Ferakis (sung by Jorge Drexler) hoping that from this earthquake new and clean springs will come out, and from this volcano new islands of peace and empathy:
I am a Jewish Moor
Who lives among the Christians
I do not know who my God is
Nor who my brothers are
There is no death that does not hurt me
There is no winning side
There is nothing but pain
And another life that flies away
War is a very bad school
No matter what costume you wear
Forgive me for not enlisting
Under any flag
Any chimera is worth more
Than a sad piece of cloth
Let's wait!