Gaza, the crowd celebrates its fighters
Paolo Arigotti interviews Fulvio Grimaldi on what is happening in Palestine and the Middle East
Faced with the apocalypse that has struck Palestine, specifically Israel and Gaza, the reaction of many, all experienced analysts, is this: “It is clear that Netaniahu left it to Hamas. He was looking for an opportunity to definitively put an end to Islamic terrorists.” The belief in the infallibility (of biblical origin?) and invulnerability of the state proclaimed in 2018, on the invaded and occupied territories, “State of the Jews”, is so rooted in the well-intentioned “the only democracy in the Middle East” that the The simple idea that the world‘s Fourth Military Power may have suffered a setback strikes him as blasphemous and surreal.
A statement that applies in particular to the intelligence services, unanimously recognized as the best in the world, the external Mossad and the internal Shin Bet. It is difficult to accept that these two instruments of surveillance, espionage and clandestine operations allowed themselves to be so surprised. Even more so since there are those who attribute to him the availability of as many as 50 Palestinians who infiltrated Gaza. But do those who suspect them to be aware and users realize the catastrophe of image and credibility suffered and what blow has been dealt to the psychological safety and trust in the State of Israeli citizens?
But no, paper tiger – exaggerating a little – Israel has demonstrated that it is, while still capable of sticking its claws into defenseless people and stone-throwing children. The propaganda of his unbeatenness essentially serves to make those who attribute him to an unchangeable reality resigned, no matter how much iniquity he commits or blood he sheds.
In my personal experience, apart from the Six Day War, which succeeded in a flash thanks to the surprise destruction of all the air forces of enemy countries, every other war event has spoken badly. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War, today remembered by the Palestinians’ irruption into the inviolable land assigned to them by the Israelis, Israel was taken totally by surprise and saved itself thanks to the massive contribution of US weapons.
In 2000 and 2006, despite carpet bombing of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, Israel was driven out of Lebanon by Hezbollah, a guerrilla force armed with rags and Kalashnikovs. In the 1980s and then 2000s, the two Intifades, which lasted for years thanks to an uprising of eminently unarmed young people, led to the most serious crisis ever known by the colonialist and confessional State: immigration, vital to containing the demographic expansion of the Palestinians and, indeed, immigrant Jews began to return to their countries of origin, foreign investments, vital for the economy, ceased completely.
It is therefore necessary to get rid of both the paralyzing idea of Israeli invincibility and the cunning for which the para-Nazi regime of Netaniahu, Ben Gvir (“Spit on the Christians in Jerusalem!”) and Smotrich would have let Hamas, now also supported by all the Resistance organizations (except for Abu Mazen’s collaborators in the PA, who were completely displaced), raged with missiles and fighters in almost the entire territory of Israel. With the enormous success, even psychological, of the prolonged incursion into the colonized territories and the capture of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of inhabitants of the Israeli colonies, of soldiers and even of the general at the head of the elite armed forces. These hostages could put a limit to the air and land offensive announced by Netaniahu.
The fact is different and it seems incontrovertible to me, beyond the vengeful fury of Netaniahu and his cronies which will be exerted in an increasingly ruthless measure on Gaza. This far-right government had grasped the zeitgeist in the West and aimed to free itself from control of the judiciary with a reform that placed the Supreme Court – about to try Netaniahu and two of his ministers accused of corruption – under government control. A bit like what the Melonians Cartabia and Nordio are trying to do and what Biden and Zelensky are doing in their respective contexts.
The regime responded to the revolt at the beginning of the year by all the Jewish people, jealous of democracy (for themselves, of course, the Palestinians don’t count) by distracting from the usual external enemy. A misdirection through devastation and slaughter, of the army and settlers in cahoots, in the occupied territories in the West Bank. It didn’t help to stop the protests. Even reservists participated, who, by refusing to serve, threatened serious consequences for the efficiency of the armed forces.
Now the consolidation of Israeli society will be achieved with the usual war against that determined desperation that is Gaza, a strip of approximately 300km2 containing 2 million open-air prisoners, of which 45% are unemployed and, predictably, a good share no longer home, or life. And perhaps we will also expand to Lebanon, a prey that has always been denied and coveted. The turmoil on the border is already underway.
The fact that things, despite the suffering and sacrifices to which the Palestinians oppose a capacity for life and for claiming justice as our history has rarely seen, go very badly for Israel, is also due to the tactical intelligence of the Resistance. On the one hand, it has placed sticks, perhaps unbreakable, between the legs of the “normalization” process between the Jewish State and some Arab countries. The Abraham Accord with Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, partially Sudan, and Saudi Arabia in perspective. Given the compact alignment of the Arab populations alongside the Palestinians, those “conciliatory” governments, to guarantee their own stability, will have to review their intentions.
Already the reconciliation, mediated by a skilled and wise China, between the two opposing fronts, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which had, for the benefit of the USA, fueled tensions and conflicts throughout the region, has weighed on the possibility of the USA and Israel determine events and balances in the region. Now the bluffs of Israeli-Western poker – the invincible “democratic” State, the “terrorists”, the “moderate” Abu Mazen, the new pro-Western Israeli-Arab constellation – have been seen by the irreducibility of a people with whom they thought they could have closed the discussion. That center of the world that has been Palestine for 75 years will make everyone move on.