On 11 September, the Pentagon announced the return of the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt, signalling the end of the US operation to keep two groups of warships in the Middle East and signalling an easing of the situation in the Middle East. On the same day, Israel offered Yahya Sinwar, leader of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), to leave the Gaza Strip with his family in order to reach a ceasefire agreement, signalling that Israel was considering ending the siege of Gaza. However, it is unclear whether Netanyahu’s right-wing government will move from one battlefield to another, ending its offensive in Gaza in the south and turning north towards Lebanon.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has entered its 12th month and there are no winners. The biggest losers are, of course, the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, ‘hell on earth’ and ‘the biggest open-air prison’, where more than 41,000 people, mostly civilians, half of them women and children, have lost their lives. The humanitarian crisis, in which dozens or even hundreds of Gazan civilians die every day as a result of various Israeli attacks or bombardments, has turned the suffering of 2.3 million Palestinians into hell. However, the third ‘national catastrophe’ since 1948, and the highest cost of living in 76 years, has not led to an end to Israel’s illegal occupation, and the six Arab states and the Palestine Liberation Organisation that have normalised relations with Israel have not returned to the principle of ‘peace in exchange for land’ – the peace price paid has not returned the occupied territories.
Israel’s overwhelming superiority over the Palestinians is by no means a victory: the country has been plunged into a rare state of war, foreign investment has been withdrawn, flights have been disrupted, credit ratings have been downgraded, the international image has been shattered and internal contradictions have come to the fore, with political elites blaming each other. Israel, the world’s military power, lost at least 500 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, at least 670 soldiers were killed in action, 11. 000 soldiers in need of psychiatric treatment, atrocities committed by soldiers who cannot control their behaviour or violate the laws of war or humanity continue to come to light, the entire Israeli army is depleted as a result of ongoing military operations, there is a clear shortage of soldiers and religious students have been forced to enlist, and delays in reaching a ceasefire have led to a situation where 251 people who lost their freedom at the outbreak of the conflict were forced to join the Israeli armed forces. The delay in reaching a ceasefire, which led to the deaths of 251 detainees who had lost their freedom at the outbreak of hostilities, triggered waves of protests and demonstrations in Israel.
Israel’s biggest problem is that it faces condemnation, accusations and prosecution for ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘war crimes’ and even ‘crimes against humanity’ for exceeding its right to self-defence and using excessive force. It has also stirred up a hornet’s nest of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, leading to a number of State and non-State actors joining forces to directly or indirectly engage in conflict with Israel in support of Palestine, notably Iran and Syria and four major factions forming a coalition between hard-line forces, including the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces, the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces, the Yemeni Houthi forces and the Palestinian National Liberation Front. The formation of an ‘axis of resistance’ by Iran and Syria, together with four major groups (Hamas and other Palestinian hardliners, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the ‘Popular Mobilisation Forces’ in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen), plunged Israel into its greatest security dilemma since the Fifth Middle East War in 1982, and even into the unconventional mode of the Sixth Middle East War, in which it had to fight on five or six fronts in three directions: south, north and east. Even the natural barrier of the Mediterranean Sea in the west is no longer a reliable security depth for Israel and it is forced to rely on the naval and air forces of the United States and other Western allies for collective defence.
Netanyahu can’t think with certainty about putting the brakes on the Gaza war because he has to please his far-right party members, otherwise his weak coalition government would collapse. Moreover, by maximising the consequences of the war, he is trying to alleviate his political, legal and security responsibilities for the great ‘national catastrophe’ and ‘national shame’ that has been dubbed ‘Israel’s 911’. But the war cannot go on forever; Israel must be a country with an army, not just an army in the name of the country. Netanyahu and his government, on the brink of a major struggle for the fate of the country and his personal future, are really at a ‘strategic crossroads’: to continue or to end? If he continues the war, will he end the Gaza war and start the third Lebanon war? This is because Israel is constantly exposed to Hezbollah attacks, which are increasing in intensity.
In recent days, senior Israeli officials have signalled an end to the Gaza war. On 9 November, Defence Minister Galant said that after 11 months of liquidation, Hamas’ “military organisation” in Gaza no longer existed and that conditions were ripe for a temporary ceasefire, but that the window had closed. Earlier, the Israeli military said it had essentially eliminated some 20,000 Hamas militants and ‘targeted’ a number of Hamas leaders, including the deliberate choice of the Iranian capital Tehran to get rid of Ismail Haniyeh. Objectively speaking, Hamas has indeed suffered a major disaster and is now forced to resort to guerrilla warfare.
Over the past few months, accusations from US political and military circles about the escalation and expansion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and war have become more and more explicit and focused on Netanyahu, in particular his continued obstruction and sabotage of the ceasefire negotiations and his proposal to take control of the Philadelphia Corridor between Gaza and Egypt and the ‘Nechalim Corridor’ separating the north and south of Gaza, which is the only way for the US military and political establishment to control the ceasefire talks and ceasefire negotiations. The question is whether such accusations and pressure should be made public. The Israeli negotiating team also warned Netanyahu that he could ‘destroy the agreement and thus bring about the end of the hostages’.
Netanyahu’s first and public demand for war on Gaza was clearly an impossible task: ‘de-Hamasisation, de-militarisation and de-radicalisation’. The so-called ‘trinity’ is not water without a source or a tree without roots, but a national liberation movement based on the long-standing illegal Israeli occupation, blended with Palestinian national hatred, legitimate rejection and even violent resistance. Unless the Palestinians are killed and expelled and the occupied territories are zeroed out or ‘Israelised’, Israel, like Sisyphus, will push the huge rolling stone of occupation up and down the mountainside, up and down, and the cycle will repeat itself, generation after generation paying an infinite price for expansion and occupation.
Netanyahu and many Israeli leaders know what the problem is, but due to a lack of strategic courage and historical responsibility, they do not act to end the illegal occupation and end the suffering and great evil it inflicts on Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and their peoples. Instead, by focusing on realistic short-term gains and the status quo, they seek to legitimise the occupation and, over time, to make it permanent. Through illegal occupation, social Darwinism and the application of the law of the jungle, they seek to create a fait accompli and, ultimately, to make themselves the rightful owners by permanently plundering the land of others.
After King David captured the capital of the Jebusites some 3,000 years ago, the Israelites renamed it Jerusalem and described it as the nation’s ancient capital and spiritual home forever, making no mention of the previous 1,000 to 2,000 years of the Jebusites’ founding history and ignoring a series of indelible facts of history: Some 2,000 years after the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple and expelled the Israelites in 135 AD, Israel is no longer the dominant indigenous people of Palestine; since 638 AD, when the expeditionary forces of Omar, the second caliph of the Arab empire, captured Jerusalem from Eastern Rome, Jerusalem has been controlled and ruled by Palestinian Arabs or Muslims throughout its long 1329-year history, except for the Christian crusaders of the 11th-12th centuries, who controlled it for nearly a hundred years, until it was captured from the Jordanians by Israel in 1967.
The root causes of this widespread outbreak of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are Israel’s unending occupation and ‘de-Palestinianisation’, the continued blockade of the Gaza Strip with the connivance of the bipartisan US government, the continued encroachment on Palestinian lands in the West Bank, and even the intensification of its claim to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. The rise of the ‘axis of resistance’ and the multiple attacks on Israel are also a consequence of the Gaza conflict and the suffering of the Palestinian people.
It is clear that the logical choice is to address the symptoms and root causes or to stop the boil or put out the fire. The only way out of Israel’s national crisis is to end the military siege of Gaza as soon as possible so that the attacks of the ‘axis of resistance’ will stop. However, if a long-term solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to be found and if Israel’s peace, security, development and prosperity are to be maintained, the principle of ‘land for peace’ must be applied without compromise and the issue of the return of the occupied Arab territories must be resolved as a single package, including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian and Lebanese Golan Heights. This includes the Syrian and Lebanese Golan Heights.
If the Israeli government, headed by Netanyahu, launches a large-scale invasion of the north and a new war in Lebanon for its own selfish purposes, Israel will be plunged into a catastrophe of unspeakable proportions and it will be difficult for the current government to give an honourable account to the history of the country and the nation.
*Prof. Ma, Dean of the Institute of Studies for the Mediterranean Rim (ISMR ), Zhejiang International Studies University (Hangzhou). He knows the world affairs well, especially the Islamic and Middle East politics. He has worked for many years as a senior Xinhua correspondent in Kuwait, Palestine and Iraq.
