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The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation Is – Despite All Damage – Effectual
On Monday Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah held a speech which to a large part explained the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation and why it can be seen as a success. (Nasrallah is currently the public spokesperson for the various Resistance groups involved in the current fight):
Sayyed Nasrallah maintained that the Palestinian resistance wanted Al-Aqsa Flood Operation to be a chance to revitalize the Palestinian cause and remind the whole world with the Palestine and Palestinian rights thrown in the oblivion.
On the other hand, some Arab regimes promoted ‘Israel’ as a normal entity that preserves democracy, according to Hezbollah leader, who added that the steadfastness of women, children and resistance fighters in Gaza has changed this situation.
Nowadays, Palestinian and the Palestinian rights are being highlighted all over the world, Sayyed Nasrallah said, adding that over 140 states voted for granting Palestine a full UN membership.
Sayyed Nasrallah affirmed that the Israeli envoy’s act of shredding a copy of UN Charter over a vote in favor of Palestinian rights displays the Zionist arrogance and carelessness about the international resolutions.
The most important political media scene that reflects the victory of the Palestinian resistance is the moment the Israeli UN envoy raised the picture of Hamas military commander Yahya Al-Sinwar.
Another expression of the success is the fact that Israel has achieved not even one of its war aims:
Sayyed Nasrallah mentioned that the Israelis tell the Zionist officials that three main targets of the war–eradicating Hamas, liberating the captives, and protecting the settlements from Gaza missiles– have not been achieved yet.
Hezbollah leader said that Hamas continues fighting the Zionist occupation forces across Gaza, holding most of the Israeli captives, and firing missiles at the Zionist settlements in the south of occupied Palestine.
Sayyed Nasrallah added that the Israelis also failed to achieve the implicit targets, including displacing Gaza locals, noting that the Gazans showed a great steadfastness against this scheme.
Alaistair Crooke described the Resistance strategy as designed to exhaust Israel:
Seyed Hassan Nasrallah (as the spokesman for the unity of Resistance Fronts) has made clear that the aim of the Resistance is to exhaust "Israel" — and to drive it to a state of defeat and despair — such that Israelis begin to recant the claim of special rights and exceptionalism, and become content to live ‘between the River and the Sea’ with others (Palestinians), sharing in a parity of rights. That is, with Jews, Muslims and Christians living on a common territory. There would then be no Zionism.
Seyed Nasrallah explicitly foresaw the possibility of such an outcome emerging — without major war.
I do not yet see such a situation evolving. Israel has instead descended into barbarism.
But current headlines of the Times of Israel do reflect the heavy strain Israel is under:
Defense Minister Gallant is as right-wing as Israel's Prime Minister Natanyahoo but a bit more realistic. The Biden administration is currently trying to install him as the Prime Minister of a less radical Israel government.
The required marketing campaign for this is run through David Ignatius' Washington Post column (archived):
It’s time for Israel to begin building a Palestinian security force in Gaza that can provide stability there after the political power of Hamas is broken, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a blunt briefing this week.
“The idea is simple,” Gallant told me. “We will not allow Hamas to control Gaza. We don’t want Israel to control it, either. What is the solution? Local Palestinian actors backed by international actors.” Gallant’s frank comments mark a turn in the Israeli government’s debate about governance and security issues in Gaza, known by the shorthand phrase “the day after.” His views are widely shared by the defense and security establishment but opposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition.
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Biden administration officials say Gallant has taken a larger role in U.S.-Israeli dialogue in recent months, as relations have soured between Netanyahu and President Biden. One U.S. official described Gallant as an “indispensable” problem-solver in the increasingly tense debate about how to end the war in Gaza.
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In January, Gallant released a public plan that stated his central point: “Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against Israel.” He proposed a multinational task force to help stabilize Gaza including U.S., European and Arab partners, with Egypt playing a special role as a “major actor.”
The idea is stupid.
Some heavily bribed remands of the Palestinian Authority selected by Israel and guarded by foreign occupation forces will never be able to rule Gaza.
As Amal Saad, a British-Lebanese scholar of all things related to the Resistance, concludes:
Hamas has not only weathered the storm of Israel's scorched earth policy but has emerged more resilient and adaptive in the face of this approach. Rather than breaking its resolve, Israel's overkill strategy has unwittingly fostered a more robust and determined adversary, and allowed it to rally support in Palestine and beyond.
Given these realities on the ground, Israel's misguided belief that it can handpick Gaza's future government borders on delusion. Far from weakening Hamas' grip on power, the war has paradoxically served to solidify the movement's status as the only legitimate and effective governing force in Gaza.
This does not bode well for the Zionist settler state:
This rare phenomenon, where one of the world's best-equipped militaries has its weaknesses laid bare for its enemies to exploit, has not only sealed Israel's fate in the current conflict but predetermined its failure in future wars. The acknowledgment of its military shortcomings, diminished morale among its troops and the growing confidence of its emboldened foes, all point to an inevitable outcome: a series of future defeats that will further erode Israel's once-formidable military reputation, strategic position in the region and even its survival.
I do not know enough of the internal dynamics of the Resistance to judge on this but that experts see a chance of such an outcome gives me some hope.
Richard Seymour writes:
South Africa is back at the International Court of Justice, asking the court to order a halt to Israel’s assault on Rafah. South Africa’s legal team argues that this is the endgame of a genocidal campaign, intended to finally remove the last “area capable of human habitation”.
One important aspect of their case is the systematic assault on hospitals and medical facilities, as well as the mass graves discovered at several hospitals implying the massacre of people seeking medical treatment and refuge. The discovery of new mass graves at Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals yielded evidence pointing toward horrifying atrocities. As experts at the UN Human Rights agency put it, just over a week ago:
“Over 390 bodies have been discovered at Nasser and Al Shifa hospitals, including of women and children, with many reportedly showing signs of torture and summary executions, and potential instances of people buried alive”
As a UN spokesperson said, a major source of suspicion is that some of the victims also “had their hands tied”, with some also “stripped of their clothes”, implying that they were killed in extrajudicial executions. A member of Gaza’s Civil Defence team exhuming bodies at Al Shifa also reports the discovery of “headless corpses” which raises grim questions about how those victims died. Some had medical tubes still attached to them. All of this has nothing to do with achieving conventional military objectives, but in a war of punishment and subjugation, where the point is to inflict as much pain as they can get away with, it counts as a win. Doctors bury their mistakes; the IDF buries its successes.
We don’t know how many Palestinians are buried in mass graves. Euromed Monitor counts 140 mass graves in Gaza thus far. I don’t know they’re defining ‘mass grave’, of course: the term is not defined under international law, and I suspect many of the graves are those dug by Palestinian medics to decently cover the dead and prevent the spread of disease. However, the definition outlined by the Bournemouth Protocol would cover these graves too.
Perhaps more significantly, from the point of view of investigation, Euromed estimates that on top of the official death toll some 13,000 Palestinians are missing. They suggest the majority are either buried in rubble and debris, implying that they were crushed in bombings, or into Israeli detention facilities. But as Gaza’s exhausted and heart-sick residents tentatively return to areas from which the IDF has withdrawn, it would be surprising if exhumations and recovery efforts didn’t disclose more mass graves. Lawyers and human rights organisations are calling for an urgent international inquiry led by forensic experts, but of course the IDF will not allow them into Gaza.
Now, given the grave allegations against the IDF and the high stakes of the case being heard by the ICJ, and given that Israel already suffered a preliminary defeat in January, you would think they would be treating this with the utmost seriousness. You would expect the legal team to have upped the game, and moved beyond the pure theatricality of calling South Africa an outrider for Hamas. You would be wrong. Israel, though one would have expected it to prize its standing as a legal entity, is treating the court with as much overt contempt as it earlier treated the United Nations, and as in general it treats public opinion. This is part of a general historical tendency, as governments and parties of the right grow less interested in the apparatuses of broad public consent, and more interested in orchestrating and manipulating passions in ways that excite their base and demoralise the enemy. They’re very happy to ‘trigger the libs’, and they seem not to mind international censure as long as they have the unconditional support of the Biden administration and the Republican leadership.
They care about what they can get away with. Every step in this war, starting with the blitz on northern Gaza and now concluding with the assault on Rafah, has been exercise in testing these boundaries. By way of illustration, consider the situation a month into the war, before the serial assaults on Gaza’s hospitals began. Even at that stage, during the intensive AI-led bombardment, there was conspicuously no effort to protect hospitals as would be mandated by international humanitarian law. This impression has been confirmed by a recent study published in The Lancet. And even during that first month, an editorial the same issue reports, the rate of killing of women and children was far higher even than in previous assaults waged under the rubric of the ‘Dahiya doctrine’. The fact that this didn’t provoke any serious backlash from the coalition supporting Israel is what enabled the war on hospitals and the massacres whose victims are now being disinterred. The fact that though Biden balked at Rafah and threatened to withhold arms, he still sent a $1bn shipment, is what now enables Israel to do whatever ghastly things it is doing in Rafah.
Where is all this headed? South Africa’s lawyers are right to point to the establishment of genocidal conditions through this war. It isn’t just a matter of how many people they kill in direct violence, or starve to death or cause to die of preventable disease over the coming months. It is about making the place unliveable. That is why in addition to all the attacks on residences, schools, hospitals, churches, mosques and so on, they have destroyed 40% of Gaza’s agricultural areas. It now seems clear that Israel’s plan is not to end the war with a ceasefire agreement – because there are no terms that Israel could agree to other than complete surrender – but to carve up Gaza into a series of zones encircled by military bases, and with different levels of direct military presence, each policed by periodic bombings and invasions. They are going beyond the old pattern of economic blockade and ‘mowing the lawn’ to ‘de-develop’ Gaza. They’re going for the destruction of the Palestinian people, as far as they can, as fast as they can.
Posted by: JAB | May 17 2024 17:29 utc | 235
Haaretz | Israel News
Netanyahu and His Partners Will Not Stop, Even After Bringing Disaster Upon Israel
The prolongation of the war, the prime minister’s weakness both at home and abroad and the fact that Israel is becoming a pariah state have only intensified Netanyahu’s messianic complex
“His mood recently has been delusional and dangerous,” one minister said. “He’s lost it, and we’re all going down with him. In his view, everyone can pay any price as long as he survives.”
In reality, this messianic complex was always there. “You sit with Bibi, and he’ll explain to you how he single-handedly saved the country,” his friend Arnon Milchan told police in 2016. “Netanyahu’s assumption … and I’m using his own words, is ‘we’re facing a Holocaust now … and if I fall, the Jewish people will fall.'”
The prolongation of the war, Netanyahu’s weakness both at home and abroad and the fact that Israel is becoming a pariah state have only intensified this mood, as reflected in his “a nation that stands alone” speech and his overt fear of the protests against his government, which he sees as a genuine threat to his life.
To keep his governing coalition intact, he is willing to pay any price, from entrusting the police to a convicted criminal through heaping generous funding on his partners to his willingness to institutionalize ultra-Orthodox draft-dodging.
He’s also running the war according to his partners’ whims. This has led Israel into pointless bloodletting, as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said publicly.
The conversations with Milchan are further proof of Netanyahu’s juggling skills. And for now, it’s working. Seven months ago, not many people imagined that the war would last this long or that Netanyahu would remain in power despite the protests that were expected to erupt like a volcano. But one person who did read the map correctly was that nemesis of Netanyahu’s diehard fans, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
“This war is likely to last as long as the War of Independence,” rather than resembling the 1973 Yom Kippur War or the 2014 war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he said in private conversations six days after the October 7 massacre. “As far as Netanyahu is concerned, it can go on, with pauses, until after next summer. That will ensure that he doesn’t have to testify at his trial, which will languish due to the challenges he has taken upon himself. The public will forget the shock it’s experiencing now, and all the anger against him will die down.”
Perhaps the man who brought disaster on the country will soon drop the ball, but Israel’s tragedy will likely not end there. The political forces that have kept Netanyahu in power are far from disappearing, and it’s not inconceivable that the worst still lies before us.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, a failure as national security minister, is currently winning at least 10 Knesset seats in polls, even without Bezalel Smotrich, and he’s especially popular with soldiers and new voters; Reservists fighting in Gaza have frequently been shocked by evidence of Kahanism among conscript soldiers; And even with a microscope, it’s hard to detect any differences between some of the rising stars in Netanyahu’s Likud party and members of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit.
The fact that Netanyahu’s bloc, which is supposed to be at a historic nadir, is nearing 50 seats in the polls ought to further terrify anyone who fears for the country’s future. Given the comparative birthrates of coalition and opposition supporters, the alliance between Likud, the ultra-Orthodox parties and the far right hasn’t yet said its last word, barring a dramatic sobering up by one of those three groups.
In another few years, when Israelis take to the streets to demonstrate for what little remains of our democracy, they may well discover that they are a negligible, persecuted minority. Then, there will no longer be anyone to keep the government from achieving total victory – castration of the law enforcement system, a hostile takeover of the media, politicization of the defense establishment, silencing critics and using the Shin Bet security service against political rivals. An isolated Israel will entrench itself in its own righteousness and fight tooth and nail for its survival, until it is defeated.
Given America’s threat to halt arms supplies, Netanyahu compared the war of 1924 to that of 1948. “There was a U.S. embargo then … and opposite us were five Arab armies – and we won,” he said. What a yawning abyss there is between him and Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, for all the latter’s weaknesses.
Ben-Gurion, whose wartime appointment books show his feverish efforts to secure supplies of arms and ammunition for the young country, went to military funerals and corresponded with bereaved families. His son Amos was a battalion commander in the pre-state Haganah militia and then in the Israel Defense Forces.
In this context, Ben-Gurion was quoted in Tom Segev’s book “A State at Any Cost” as saying, “I always wonder – no one has yet attacked me, no one has tried, in his sorrow and grief, to cast a stone at me, no one has raised his voice to me, and no one has shouted in his pain: ‘You wanted a state, and we are paying the price.'”
He saw any war as “a horrible and terrible catastrophe” even for the victors, “a cruel waste of blood, destruction of property, loss of spiritual and material resources.”
Ben-Gurion’s ambitious vision was a country founded on the prophetic ethics, whose pillars would be the importance of human life and human liberty. As we marked Israel’s 76th Independence Day this week, his words seem disconnected from this place, where life is cheap and liberty is dying. In the foreseeable future, only Orit Strock and her colleagues can still expect happy holidays.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-16/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-and-his-partners-will-not-stop-even-after-bringing-disaster-upon-israel/0000018f-82a5-d430-a38f-c7e51d600000
This will not last. It was doomed from the very beginning.
Posted by: Lavrov’s Dog | May 18 2024 8:28 utc | 265
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