It began inside Israel on October 7. It then caught fire in Gaza, soon a field of ruins and mass death. It was quietly linked to the West Bank, where in one year alone 700 Palestinians have died in attacks by Israeli settlers and army attacks, and now bombs are beginning to fall in their cities. Now it has fully entered Lebanese territory, after bombing cities, selective assassinations and planting explosives in Hezbollah’s communication systems. And it is already looming in Iran with the Israeli threat that weighs on oil installations and the corresponding inflammation of world energy prices.
Such are the great war fires of uncontrolled wars directed by vengeful escalation and the instinct of destruction. They go out when there is no fuel of lives, wealth and political will left to feed them. They destroy everything: international legality, borders, foreign sovereignty, the right to life and dignity, any sense of compassion and decency. Anticipating them, avoiding escalations and then negotiating sustainable truces to seat the contenders at the negotiating table is the obligation of diplomacy, responsible governments and international institutions, starting with the United Nations, everything that has failed for a year.
This widespread failure is astonishing, since Hamas suddenly entered southern Israel, with a terrible toll of death, torture and destruction and the kidnapping of hostages by the hundreds, as if the gates of hell had opened. The Israeli secret services failed. It took his army a while to respond. His Government, the one truly responsible for the safety of citizens, failed. And it continued to fail even more catastrophically with its excessive and vindictive military response, which went beyond the right to defense and all proportionality, encouraged by the expansionist ideas of the most extremist cabinet in the history of Israel.
Joe Biden, the leader of the free world, has failed, who only achieved a brief truce and has not been able to prevent the escalation. Also the United Nations Security Council, doubly blocked by the United States veto of the Gaza war after the blockade by Russia and China over the Ukraine war. The European Union has counted for nothing, as divided in its vote in the United Nations as the rest of the planet. The double standard used by everyone when condemning the atrocities of others and justifying their own has never been so starkly evident.
Everything has failed and everything has changed. Let’s see what’s left of those poor countries and what the map of the region looks like. Israel, the most powerful and armed nation, feels fragile and vulnerable. It is not enough to neutralize Hamas, but it needs to put an end to Hezbollah and then to the Islamist regime in Iran. Their diplomacy no longer counts, if anything, to obtain weapons and support in the face of accusations of war crimes, genocide and apartheidbefore international courts. The lives of the hostages do not even seem to matter, of whom he has only rescued seven with military means from the Hamas dungeons.
There is opposition to war, naturally. The relatives of the hostages, the mothers of the soldiers, the few militants of the peace camp. But it is the time of the hawks. Of the world in black and white. Of the facing maps of the curse against the blessingwith Israel becoming the vanguard of the Western world attacked by Islamic terrorism that has the help of Russia. Benjamin Netanyahu would now win the elections. Weapons summon all demons until they become reality: both accuse each other of being fascists and Nazis; as anti-Semites and philterrorists who oppose Israel, and anti-Muslim supremacists its defenders.
War feeds the symmetry of hatred and dehumanization. According to former minister Shlomo Ben Ami, “an Israeli leader has yet to emerge who truly feels sorry for Israel’s share of responsibility in the Palestinian tragedy of dispossession and exile. (…). It is Israel’s moral abdication and complete indifference, the lack of imagination to conceive the suffering of the other – typical of bitter national conflicts, which always tend to metamorphose into a story of competitive victimhood. The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi also denounces these two mimetic nationalisms in their blindness to the sufferings of the adversary: “The irony is that, like all other peoples, Palestinians assume that their nationalism is pure and historically rooted while they deny it to Israeli Jews. ”.
“Israel leads the way,” Sílvia Orriols, president and deputy of the far-right independence party Aliança Catalana, wrote on the social network X (formerly Twitter). It is difficult to find solidarity with Israel, but rather with Netanyahu and his own xenophobic ghosts. War is not a path. It is the destruction of any path.
To read more:
‘Palestine. One hundred years of colonialism and resistance’
Rashid Khalidi
Captain Swing, 2023
‘Prophets without honor. The fight for peace in Palestine and the end of the two-state solution
Shlomo Ben Ami
RBA, 2023