Israel seems like a bull charging blindly, overwhelming everything in its path without knowing where it is going. Since launching its military offensive to annihilate the terrorist organization Hamas, in retaliation for the savage attack on October 7 against southern Israel – in which 1,200 people, most of them civilians, were killed and another 240 kidnapped – Gaza It has become hell. More than 20,000 Palestinians – most of them also civilians, many of them children – have died and hundreds of thousands – 85% of the 1.9 million inhabitants of the strip, according to the UN – have abandoned their homes fleeing the bombings and the fighting, besieged by hunger. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed or damaged. When the war comes to an end, nothing will be left standing.
Without a doubt, military operations respond to a strategy. But beyond that, what is there? Apparently nothing, no plan, no political vision. Israel has launched revenge without thinking about the day after. And if anyone has thought about it, perhaps it is an unspeakable plan: the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza, the return of the Jewish colonies unilaterally dismantled by Ariel Sharon in the “disconnection” of 2005. There are those who suspect it, like in the UN as among neighboring Arab countries, where they fear an uncontrolled exodus of Palestinian refugees to Egypt.
The expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza, which Jewish fundamentalists openly defend, would mean the burial, by force of deeds and weapons, of the two-state solution established by the UN and foreseen in the Oslo agreements of 1993. Netanyahu's hostility to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is well known. And all their moves so far have been aimed at making it unviable, as confirmed by the proliferation of new settlements in the West Bank in recent years and, more recently, the violent harassment of Palestinian farmers by extremist settlers – with the shameful support of the army. to expel them from their lands.
When the war against Hamas ends – which, according to the Israeli army itself, will take months – only a field of ruins will be left. And immense resentment and hatred. Hamas will be defeated, but the brutal war in Gaza will fuel the emergence of new generations of Palestinian fighters. Israel will never achieve the peace and security it longs for. And, along the way, she will have lost her soul.
In these last eleven weeks, the far-right government led by Beniamin Netanyahu has ruined before the world all its political capital, its moral legitimacy. Not even his most firm and faithful ally, the United States, endorses – although until now it has reluctantly tolerated it – his actions. President Joe Biden himself has publicly reproached him for the indiscriminate bombings in Gaza and the enormous number of civilian victims they continue to cause. The death of three Israeli hostages, waving a white flag, at the hands of their own army clearly shows the modus operandi: shoot first and ask questions later.
Washington, Israel's great support in the world, where it is increasingly isolated – as can be seen recurrently at the UN – fears being dragged into discredit at a time when its role as a hegemonic power is more contested than ever. And it pushes to open a new phase of the war that is more selective, more digestible. But Netanyahu, whose main objective is his political survival, turns a deaf ear and tries to buy time, in the hope – which he shares with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, stranded in the war in Ukraine – that a victory for Donald Trump in the elections 2004 completely changed the scenario.
The United States has in its hands the definitive weapon to subdue its wayward ally: its decisive economic and military aid, valued by the Eurasia Group at 160 billion dollars since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. But that would be, symbolically, , like pressing the nuclear button.
Meanwhile, Washington multiplies its efforts thinking about the day after, trying to ensure that, after the war - and after a transition period to be determined - the government of Gaza is assumed by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), expelled from the strip in 2006 by the Islamists of Hamas (which would inevitably involve revamping the discredited institution currently headed by the octogenarian Mahmoud Abbas). His bet is clear: reactivate the two-state solution. But Netanyahu, who had played a sorcerer's apprentice by promoting Hamas to the detriment of the ANP precisely to keep the Palestinians divided, does not even want to listen to him. In fact, he does not want anything that means strengthening the path towards a Palestinian state.
And yet, as difficult as it may be, what other alternative is there? What the messianic ultras who are in the Government of Israel today dream of – that is, keeping all the territory between the sea and the Jordan – would imply reinforcing and maintaining in aeternum the occupation and subjugation of the Palestinians. And it would make Israel the closest thing to apartheid South Africa.
