The Gaza war: Tunnels and lights

The habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

A. Camus

Just as one war drives out another as I pointed out in the preceding article also dedicated to the violence in Gaza since October 7, one emotion also drives out the other. After the underestimation, I said, we wait to see how far the overreaction will go and with it the emotion. 

In any case, three things should be noted: 

1-That there has been a substantial change in the character of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: from political and secular it has taken on a religious dimension. 

2-The stronger the reaction and thus the emotion, the more Israel loses.

3-The return to the status quo is impossible.

While the successive visits of senior US officials to Tel Aviv after October 7 (Blinken two visits in five days, Secretary of State for Defense Austin and then Biden) have demonstrated the unfailing support of the US for the State of Israel, they also make clear the distrust of the US administration of Netanyahu. 

The US is aware that unconditional support for Netanyahu is seriously harming its interests in the region. Therefore, the US administration is trying to prevent Netanyahu's revenge from reaching catastrophic limits. Thus, on the one hand, they would avoid setting up another war front in an area that the US no longer considers a priority, and on the other hand, they would stop the announced exodus of their Arab allies to the other side led by China and Russia.

Reminding Netanyahu that he should not make the same mistakes as the US after the 9/11 attacks was a clear message of what is expected of him. The same message was repeated days later, this time via the press, by General David Petraeus, former CIA director and former commander-in-chief of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since the beginning of Israel's blockade and bombardment of Gaza, and its banning of foreign journalists and observers, Hamas seems to have a monopoly on information. The late Haaretz military correspondent and one of Israel's top geopolitical analysts, Zeev Schiff, used to say that there is no cannon more powerful than communication. To tell the truth, Hamas seems to have won the battle in this field.

With the hospital bombing, the Islamist movement succeeded a few days after the 7-O massacre in reversing the trend of solidarity in the West, inflaming the streets in Arab countries and radicalizing the most moderate of its citizens. It is striking that the late reconstitution of the real events that took place was only possible thanks to the images of the Qatari channel Al Jazeera.

The declarations of Yosheved Lifjitz, the elderly hostage released by Hamas, about the good treatment she received from members of this movement, is another proof of the poor media effectiveness of the Israeli government despite having an impressive communication structure, the Hasbarah.

While it is crucial to know who was behind the hospital incident, whether it was carried out by an Israeli missile or a stray or intercepted Islamic Jihad rocket, whether it hit the building or fell in the parking lot, how many casualties it caused, five hundred or thirty, the damage is already done and everyone is entrenched in their position. When you don't control the information you don't control the emotion. At the end of the day, one listens to what one wants to hear according to one's affinities, longings or ghosts. Social networks only accentuate this deceitful tendency and finish off what little critical and/or analytical sense is left.

In Arab and Muslim countries, as elsewhere, every day that passes, one hears an eloquent rumbling, claiming that the Palestinian Authority has been negotiating, yielding and even playing the role of policeman against its people in favor of Israel for decades, reaping only stain and disrepute. In the West Bank as in Gaza, the majority of the population does not adhere to the Hamas thesis but rather looks down on the Palestinian Authority and considers it a puppet of the Israeli government.

With their refusal to comply with dozens of UN resolutions, their determination to continue the occupation, to treat the moderate Palestinian side with denigration and to encourage the most radical settlers, successive Israeli governments, Netanyahu's in particular, encouraged by the complicit silence of the international community in general and the West in particular, have been nurturing feelings of fear and hatred in both Israeli and Palestinian society.

Faced with the premeditated exhaustion of peaceful means by the successive Netanyahu governments, with the deafening silence of the international community, with the rise of messianic discourses on both sides, resorting to violence, to barbarism, was only a matter of time, pure tautology. It is not for nothing that violence is the last refuge of incompetence.

To equate Hamas with Daesh, to reuse the paltry record of G.W. Bush, to propose the creation of a new "war on terror", to propose the creation of a new "war on terror". Bush, proposing the creation of a coalition against Hamas, pretending to eradicate it from Gaza, are patent examples of such incompetence that concerns both narrative and deeds.

Sane people know that violence only leads to the cemetery or the hospital, and that when it takes place it is due to a lack of vocabulary and an excess of contempt, l'hogra in Moroccan dialect. 
God knows how much the Palestinian people have suffered!

As I said before, both Americans and Europeans will always defend the State of Israel, but they have long realized that supporting Netanyahu, besides undermining their image and interests in the Middle East and the Islamic world, is creating more political division within their respective countries and exposing them to terrorist threats.

They also know that the 7-O massacre took place for two essential reasons resulting from Netanyahu's pernicious and flagrant irresponsibility: 

-First: Encouraging the installation of new settlements to the detriment of UN resolutions and giving free reins to the Israeli ultra-right to deepen its plundering, slaughter and humiliation of the Palestinians. 

-Second: Emptying, for purely electoral reasons, the area where the Hamas incursion (and other factions) took place of soldiers and moving them to protect their friends in the illegitimate settlements of the West Bank and Jerusalem whose population has increased by 42% in relation to 2010 and by 222% between 2000 and 2021. 

This is what the UN Secretary General referred to in his last speech, boldly and unabashedly. Is there an effect without a cause?

Today, things have become so poisoned that although the Palestinian cause has returned to the international scene, many parameters make it difficult to achieve progress on the path of appeasement and negotiations.
Between the election year in the US, the elections soon to be held in Egypt, the interest of several countries in this war continuing to overshadow that of Ukraine, the prevailing division in a world in full geopolitical reconstitution, the anger of the street in Arab and Muslim countries, the lack of credibility of the top leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, etc., no one wants to get involved. 

At the Israeli level, things are also verging on chaos. Between the atmosphere of hatred and the desire for excessive revenge of the Israeli government, the pressure exerted on it by the families of the Israeli hostages who want their loved ones back safe and sound and the Hannibal directive to go to hell, the uncertainty prevailing in the army as to what to do after the ground attack, the pressure from the US, the EU, the Israeli government, the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, etc., no one wants to get involved. The uncertainty in the army about what to do after the ground attack, the pressure from the US, the pressure from the EU, the risk of the internationalization of the conflict, the refusal of the settlers to leave the West Bank, let's see who is the brave one who decides to risk his life and take the bull by the horns.

That is why, today, the best help that the US and the EU can give Israel is to convince it to leave the logic of revenge and move towards peace and dialogue, since the solution to this conflict will never be military but political. And that is why, today more than ever, the international community must become involved in the search for a solution to avoid a global disaster.
Faced with such complexity, one of the possible scenarios to get out of this mousetrap could be to allow the Hamas leaders to leave Gaza with the hostages for a safe capital, Doha in this case, where they will be handed over to the host country. 

It may seem utopian in view of the desire for revenge we are talking about. However, a country cannot have revenge as its goal. An eye for an eye and we all go blind, as the saying goes. Or is it not enough to have more than 7,000 dead and 20,000 wounded Gazans without counting the victims of this Friday's raid? 

In addition to preserving the lives of the hostages, of thousands of innocent people on both sides, we would have removed the extremes of one side from the middle in the hope that as soon as possible the international community and the Israelis of peace (and there are many of them) will remove the extremes of the other side, Netanyahu and his partners of the last right, making way for moderate people on both sides to restore confidence and lay the foundations of an imperfect and perfectible peace. The long way is the short way, as the saying goes.

Given the degree of mega-violence and mistrust we have reached now, and in view of the weakness of the Palestinian authority, it is propitious that Gaza be placed under international protection on a provisional basis. The implementation of a Marshall plan to rebuild it as soon as possible is of the utmost importance. This will give the Gazan population a reason to cling to life and keep them away from the shadows of radicalism and the sellers of death and mirage.

Subsequently, the Abraham Accords could be taken up again on a new basis that guarantees the interests of the Palestinians and the Oslo Accords process could be set in motion, this time in a serious and committed manner. 

Da Vinci said that force is born by violence and dies by freedom. 

Freedom is what the Palestinian people are waiting for.