Abbas Nasir : The images on social and mainstream media tell the whole story eloquently, even if the accompanying words of many Western journalists fall short of describing what is really happening, as Israel rains retribution on Palestinian civilians for the Hamas assault on October 7. The latter attack killed the largest number of Jewish people, mostly civilians, in a single day since the Holocaust.
The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany in the 1940s remains one of the biggest blots on humanity as some six million Jews, including women and children, were brutally mass murdered as Hitler and his acolytes pursued their sick and genocidal “final solution to the Jewish question.”
Ironically, it is because of the guilt of not being able to stop that genocide in the heart of Europe that many Western powers today, and the even the media, turn a blind eye to Israel’s excesses and brutality. They also downplay the plight of the Palestinians. Other important factors are beyond the scope of this piece.
It is understandable that Holocaust survivors and their children and their children’s children vowed “never again” The end of the British Mandate in the Middle East and “terrorism” by the Zionists led to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 and the expulsion (Nakba) of the Palestinians from their ancestral land. However, over the past 75 years, this “never again” pledge has created a colonial power in the Middle East that is both brutal in its oppression in the occupied territories and extremely expansionist in its policy as it moves to push more and more Palestinians out of their homes and off their lands.
Its annexation of the West Bank and Golan Heights from Jordan and Syria respectively in the 1967 six-day war was a demonstration of its intent. The West Bank occupation angers the Muslims more as it allows Israel to restrict access to the Al Aqsa Mosque. From 1948 to 1967 Israel’s image as an immense, almost mythical, military power was fortified.
Currently, of the over five million Palestinians, 2.2 million (half of them children) are confined to the Gaza Strip, while approximately three million live in the Occupied West Bank. The Gazans live in what many describe as an open-air prison which is heavily policed, fenced in on three sides with a few crossings, and blockaded and monitored on the fourth by the Israeli navy. In addition to these numbers, about 20 percent of Israel’s population of about 10 million is also Arab (mostly Palestinians), who live the life of second-class citizens and, despite being Israeli, do not have the benefit of full rights enjoyed by the rest of the citizenry.
In the 1973 Ramadan War, the Israeli military’s myth was somewhat punctured by the Egyptian army which crossed the Suez and took back land lost in 1967 in the Sinai to the Israelis. This was followed by the Camp David (peace) Accords.
Retired Gen David Petraeus, who has commanded US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and also headed the CIA, described the Hamas assault as the result of a stunning intelligence failure of both the Israelis and the US. In a television interview this week, he also described the military challenges before the Israelis as very tough and said that in the event of a ground offensive, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) will have to take many casualties as the whole area will need to be cleared “room to room, floor to floor and tunnel to tunnel”.
Coupled with the intelligence failure, a loss of life for the IDF, particularly if it is heavy, will have an impact on Israeli public opinion. As it is, some opinion polls have suggested extreme disapproval of the extreme right coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Miko Peled, a US-Israeli who trained in the Israeli special forces, earning the coveted Red Beret before leaving, also vividly described the disarray in the IDF as reservists were summoned but it took days to deploy them, such were the logistics deficiencies.
Additionally, he also described in detail how Hamas innovated to disable Israel’s electronic eyes and ears trained on every inch of Gaza so when their assault began Israel was taken by surprise and took hours to react.
Mike Peled appeared certain that even if Israel were keen on wiping out Hamas from Gaza, before abandoning the Strip and severing all connections from it (some 13,000 Gaza workers used to cross using one of the many checkpoints into Israel to work), it wouldn’t succeed.
“They have killed over 4,000 Palestinians in Gaza till now. How many more deaths does the world have appetite for 10,000 or 100,000. It can’t go on,” Peled, who is open about his own solution, a life of security and dignity for the Palestinians in their own homeland, told the “Useful Idiots” podcast.
In the meantime, tragically, those claiming to be the heirs of the victims of the worst atrocity in living memory, continue to rain death, pain and destruction on the Palestinian civilians for the actions of those they call terrorists, such is their anger at their own failures.
They manufacture “evidence” that nobody but their staunchest allies find plausible that they, for example, weren’t responsible for the carnage at the Gaza hospital. Among journalists, apart from a handful who have the integrity to question that and also mention the history of IDF lies, all others buy it. One of the worst culprits is BBC Verify.
The nightmare of the Gazans, meanwhile, will continue till the right-wing extremist politicians and the military force at their disposal have fulfilled their bloodlust or till the images provoke such rage that the region goes up in flames.
At some point, like Miko Peled says, negotiations must start. How long do we have to watch this round of massacre is the question on my mind. I also know that those who stand for peace in Israel are not insignificant in numbers. How soon before they assert themselves?
This article was first published in Dawn, an Asia News Network (ANN) partner of The Daily Star.
Abbas Nasir is a former editor of Dawn.