The Gaza War and the Arabs' strategic choices

First, the dimensions of the current Israeli war in Gaza and Palestine:

Most Arab leaders - governments, intellectuals and politicians - are mistaken if they believe that the war that Israel is waging, and behind it the United States and its Western allies, is primarily a war against the Hamas movement, even if Hamas was the one that caused its outbreak. Those who bet on the Israeli war to eliminate political Islam movements and liberate Arab or Middle Eastern countries from them and their adventures, in favor of enhancing the chances of the birth of secular or semi-secular, democratic or pluralistic political systems, are most mistaken. The goal of the war, on the contrary, is to block the way to such birth of national, democratic, and secular systems that cannot be created and shaped without a minimum level of peace, stability, sovereignty, respect for human rights, and consideration of the interests of the Arab peoples, foremost of which is launching the wheel of civilizational, economic, political, and moral development. There is no factor that has contributed to undermining this human development and depleting the intellectual, human and material efforts of these peoples more than the wars that have been continuing for more than a century to empty the region of its power and weight and strengthen the hotbed of Jewish settlement.

This settlement, securing its presence, expanding its base of expansion, and enabling it to impose its will on neighboring Arab countries, has turned into a black hole that swallows up all the intellectual, human, and material efforts of the Arabs for an entire century, dooming them to decline, backwardness, and regression in all fields, to the extent that it has made subjecting their peoples to this agenda the core of the  Global political agenda, especially Western, in the Middle East. This necessitated depriving its people of their sovereignty and not hesitating to interfere in their internal affairs, supporting military and security dictatorial regimes, protecting them, and covering up their violations of civil and political rights, no matter how serious.

Hence, the Washington/Tel Aviv battle to subjugate the Palestinians and the war of ethnic cleansing that it is adopting in Palestine are inseparable from the battle to defend the authoritarian regimes that it was betting on to ensure normalization with Israel, liquidate the Palestinian issue, and establish an alliance that would ensure that the Middle East remained a region of Western influence. This is one of the most important motives for Normalization is the stabilization of the foundations of authoritarian regimes that were destabilized by the Arab revolutions in the past decade, and which now realize that they have no hope of survival after their national bankruptcy and failure, even in responding to the basic needs of their societies, in the field of freedoms and civil rights, and even in the field of providing bread, water, and electricity, except by betting on Western and American protection in particular. Thus, there are no longer differences between these regimes and the apartheid regime in Palestine, nor any significant differences between the practices of the Israeli occupation regime towards the Palestinians and the practices of many Arab regimes towards their people. Here too, Israel provides, in its war against the people of Gaza, a role model for using starvation, thirst, and deprivation of peoples of any humanitarian services as a weapon to subjugate them and force submission on them.

The Israeli war and Western complicity with it appeared to be a blatant challenge to the political and moral principles on which loyalty to the state, the regime, and public morals are based.

These Arab leaders are wrong if they believe that the Gaza war is only related to Palestine, even if the issue of Palestine, the land and the people, is at its heart. In essence, it is a regional war to preserve American control over the Middle East and its strategic advantages in the face of any internal Arab or regional Turkish and Iranian competitions. At the forefront of the tasks of this war to maintain Western control is to restore the credibility of the Israeli deterrence, which it is betting on as a major regional power that threatens regional countries aspiring to expand the margin of its initiative, secure and protect subordinate regimes against internal or external disturbances, including deterring the Arabs from thinking outside the box in which this policy itself has placed them.

But its goal is also, beyond that, to confront the attempts of the major rising powers aspiring to change the international system centered on the West and its interests and to establish a new system that redistributes the cards of control and spheres of influence in the world, and with regard to international decision-making. This means that this war has a global dimension, represented by Washington asserting its control over its areas of influence and not giving up its monopoly on shaping the global policy agenda in a way that serves its goals and strategic interests. It views any party that violates its decisions, does not abide by them, or does not act on them as rebellious against it and a threat to international peace and security, and therefore vulnerable to the sanctions it deems appropriate. It does not hide that its decision is the law, whether it agrees with international law or contradicts it. It does not pay any attention to the latter when it comes to what it calls its interests or the interests of its allies.

Gaza is today the epicenter of the clash and the theater of operations to restore the reputation of this central American force that clings to control and unipolarity, to the extent that Israel’s deterrence of the Arabs and erasing the negative impact of the Al-Aqsa flood on the credibility of this deterrence is the necessary condition for forcing the Arabs to continue to join the West, and with Washington in particular, and preventing them from thinking in expanding the scope of their strategic initiative by establishing positive and independent relations with rising international powers, such as China and Russia, with whom Washington believes it is in a real historical war due to its dispute over the monopoly of the right to formulate the international political agenda, and their endeavor to form a broad international coalition against its unilateral control.

Secondly, in the difference in Arab and international responses

Large segments of public opinion in the West have realized the motives behind this American-Western policy aimed at making them bear the price of neo-colonial wars of control, not only on the material level and daily living conditions, but more than that at the expense of their peoples’ civil rights and freedoms and involving them in racist and genocidal wars, which they will bear. Its moral, political, and even economic responsibility for many decades to come. Hence, what is happening in the West in response to the policy of supporting settlement, occupation, terrorism and ethnic cleansing does not express a profound political and ideological revolution among the Western peoples against the fabricated narrative that their countries have mastered regarding the Israeli and Palestinian issue only, but rather it is more than that a revolution of conscience against crossing all moral limits. And humanity in managing this colonial war, which went beyond the model of the crusade launched by George W. Bush against Iraq to the model of wars of racist extermination. 

It reflects the response of Western consciousness to the historical and political deception promoted by colonial propaganda and media that there is no solution to the Palestinian issue, and therefore there is no escape from supporting Israel until the end and financing the Palestinian war of extermination.

The Israeli war and Western complicity with it appeared to be a blatant challenge to the political and moral principles on which loyalty to the state, the regime, and public ethics are based, despite the absence of cultural or political kinship with the Arab countries and the Palestinian people.

To the extent that the war in Gaza placed the regimes in a dilemma of lack of strategic options in a war that would decide the fate of the Middle East, it placed the Arab peoples before a great challenge to which their elites were also unable to rise to the level of a minimal response.

To the extent that this awakening of conscience constitutes one of the manifestations of the decline of the hegemony of the neo-colonial system, it also highlights the explosion of the contradictions of the existing system of international control, and works to reshape the popular political consciousness, and the return of the conflict to its main internal axis, after the long control of the right-wing and racist movements and their bet on detonating foreign wars to cover up on their social contradictions. This means that the ideological crisis will spread to these central countries, regardless of the final military outcome of this ongoing war in Gaza. On this awakening that was sparked by the genocidal war in Gaza in the countries of the Western Center, we can bet, and we should bet in the future, on expanding the circle of cross-border alliances and strengthening solidarity between the democratic forces in the global North and South in order to expose the growing methods of racist thinking and the struggle against the policies of oppression, deprivation of will and sovereignty, and formulating proposals for new global policies that break with the colonial spirit and logic. In order to open new horizons for social liberation and democratic movements curbed by the alliance of imperialism and tyranny in most regions of the world, and to push towards changing the priorities of global politics.

In the Arab region, where the strongest forms of alliance prevail between imperialist control projects and tyrannical regimes, between oil rents, arms trade, and investment in armies and militias, the big explosion in Palestine, and in Gaza in particular, has put governments before difficult choices, as it has undermined their strategic project for normalization with Israel and behind it with the West, to secure its systems against popular revolutions and protect it from external threats, and Iranian ones in particular, without opening another horizon for it to formulate new options to confront external dangers and threats, thus leaving it in a strategic vacuum, unable to keep pace with the Palestinian uprising, nor to stand against it and deepening its estrangement with its peoples who automatically stand in solidarity with it. 

Ignoring the Israeli cleansing war is no less dangerous than accepting armed Palestinian resistance projects, which carry both ideological, political and strategic risks. Therefore, its position was to wait and open windows on its Islamic environment to ease the burden of the West’s challenge by supporting the resistance and Palestinian demands on the one hand, and the dangers of standing up to its people in solidarity with the resistance on the other hand. It is walking on a tight rope, holding its breath and weighing every step according to the gold standard, so as not to exceed the limits of the margins of its almost non-existent initiative. 

But the regimes were not the only ones who lacked initiative. To the extent that the war in Gaza put the regimes in a dilemma of lack of strategic options in a war that would decide the fate of the Middle East, it placed the Arab peoples before a great challenge to which their elites were also unable to rise to the level of a minimal response. 

Therefore, silence, hesitation, and passive follow-up were the major characteristics of the behavior of the large bloc of people disqualified from politics, besieged ideologically, politically, and security-wise, and lacking any political and intellectual leadership. Thus, contrary to what led the Western public to demonstrate enthusiastically after discovering the deception behind its regime’s marketing of Israel as the protector of Western, civil and humanitarian values in the Middle East and the savage Arab world, Arab protests or demonstrations of solidarity did not emerge until late, and were much less powerful than what happened in Western countries. But this does not mean the absence or weakness of sympathy for the fighters of the Palestinian factions.

The Washington/Tel Aviv battle to subjugate the Palestinians and the war of ethnic cleansing it is adopting in Palestine are inseparable from the battle to defend authoritarian regimes.

The weakness of the Arab popular demonstrations compared to the demonstrations and protests of the masses of Spain, Italy, Ireland, Britain, the United States, and other foreign countries stemmed from their audience’s loss of confidence not only in the regimes that govern them, but also in the factions, militias, and even opposition political forces as well, many of which participated in their suffering, and it was one of the manifestations of their surrender and acceptance that Israel and the Arab governments have resolved the situation in their favor, and they cannot change any of the miserable conditions, including accepting the Israeli settlement policy as a fait accompli.

Indeed, a section of the Arab elites in government and opposition have reached a firm belief that liberation from the Palestinian issue and its related aspects of struggle and focus on hostility to Zionism and confrontation with the West, and therefore, accepting the fait accompli and giving Israel what it wants, is a necessary condition for political and social liberation in Arab societies, even if it was at the expense of the Palestinian people, “who were unable to unite their ranks and reach understanding among their groups,” to put pressure on Israel and the West to obtain some of their rights. In short, Palestine has become, in the eyes of the majority of the ruling elites and the Arab opposition, an unbearable burden for the sake of achieving local or national political and ideological liberal aspirations. In their view, it feeds Islamism, fixation on identity, and belief in the rift between the West, Arabs, and Muslims. Thus, it deprives them of integration into civilization. Accepting its existence as it is, is less harmful to the Arabs than resisting it or standing in the way of its expansionist projects.

Third, a heroic chapter in the decolonization and the return of history to its course

On the other hand, Israel was subjected to a historic blow, which was imposed on its public and many of the international powers that stand behind it and use it as a sharp sword to deprive the Arab countries, most notably Egypt, from restoring its regional role, gathering the Arab countries around it or establishing an effective regional alliance that enhances all of their chances of achieving success in economic and humanitarian development, and increases the confidence of the peoples of these countries in their countries and their investment in them, to maximize their opportunities for progress and ensure the future of their coming generations. This strike shook the foundations on which Israel was founded, and the great progress it had achieved in the past decades. We would be wrong if we thought that this exceptional strength and progress resulted from nationalism or adherence to religious belief. What attracted and continues to attract Jewish immigrants to Palestine is, first and foremost, the exceptional privileges that each colonial regime offers to its audience, in exchange for conscripting them into the permanent war against the peoples from whom they have seized their movable and immovable property and directing them towards the new settlers who find themselves transformed into new masters and feudal lords simply by their loyalty to the new state, and their obtaining its citizenship, after they had been displaced and poor in their countries of origin. But it is not the theft of indigenous property and its free appropriation from them that explains the size of these privileges, but rather the large investment placed in the occupation by the Western bloc, which from the beginning made Israel the “regional” or local guardian of its interests in the region, in exchange for its work on its strategy, implementation of its plans, and undertake to deter its people, governments and elites. It is a purely strategic investment, and has nothing to do with what is rumored about the West’s acquittal of the Holocaust committed against the Jews in Europe, nor its leaders’ compassion for the victims of Nazism.

From here, the depth of the crisis in which the “Al-Aqsa Flood” placed Israel and threatened its future emerges. If Israel loses its role, it will be a deterrent force for Arab governments and peoples and a heavy stick that can be used to strike any serious attempt to liberate itself from its hegemony or eliminate any dreamer of an independent policy that puts the interests of its people and nation at the forefront. In the face of colonial interests, the West no longer has an interest in defending its superiority, control, and massive military and political investment in it. If the West’s in-kind and invisible financial, military, diplomatic, ideological and media aid weakens, and the strategic returns of the occupation diminish, there is no longer anything to encourage the Jews of the West and the world to join it and bear the burden of the wars that its function calls for in return for few or no benefits. In this case, the Zionist settlement project, that is, for Israel, no longer has much appeal.

Israel is waging a battle for its existence to the extent that it seeks to reaffirm its exceptional military and strategic ability to serve its financiers from Western countries.

Therefore, it is true that Israel today is waging a battle for its existence to the extent that it seeks to reaffirm its exceptional military and strategic ability to serve its financiers from Western countries. In order to prove this, it must erase the shame of the defeat that its army and security suffered on October 7, restore its deterrence, and restore its readiness to terrorize Arab countries and peoples, extract their submission, and humiliate them. This is the most prominent challenge it faces today, which makes it believe that it is faced with an equation that cannot be undone. Either its existence, which calls for the end of the Palestinian people and their cause, which undermines their livelihood and ends their function, or the existence of the Palestinian people, whose achievement of a Palestinian state alongside them means nothing but the elimination of its geostrategic role on which it built its control, its material and symbolic wealth, and its superiority, that is, its actual myth.

What position responds to the interests of Arab governments in this confrontation? 

It will certainly not be possible to distance oneself from the confrontation, consider the matter to be related to the factions, Gaza, or Palestine, and seek mediation to end it. On the contrary, they should benefit from the crisis of the Israeli apartheid regime, and behind it the crisis of Western, and especially American, control, and employ it in order to expand the circle of their initiative and the margin of independence of their decisions and ensure a better future for their countries and societies.

This means that they work together and systematically, so that Israel is not the winner in the end, and that the Palestinians achieve the most important part of being recognized as a people, a political community, and an independent and sovereign state alongside other regional countries. Palestine winning this major political battle does not mean the disappearance of Israel, which is not their desired goal now. Rather, it is to limit it, remove its fangs, and transform it into a natural state subject, like all countries in the region, to one law, which is international law applied by the United Nations and the rest of the international rules and norms. This provides these governments with the opportunity to rebuild their relations with Israel and other regional countries on the basis of prevailing international agreements based on the principle of equality, i.e. principled equality and exchange of interests, not on coercion and coercion by force on the one hand and acquiescence on the other. This is what will encourage the entire region to break out of its barbarism, which was mainly linked to Israel’s wars and its undermining of all international norms, and to work with the logic of force and conquest at home and abroad, and motivate it to come under the roof of the law.

Large segments of public opinion in the West have realized the motives of American Western policy aimed at making them bear the price of wars of neo-colonial control.

Adopting and pursuing this option does not require the final military victory of the Palestinian factions over the Israeli force, armed with modern weapons and supported in an unprecedented manner by the American and European Atlantic military arsenal, as this is impossible. It only calls for not neglecting the Palestinian strategic, political and media achievement, which diminished Israel no matter what happened afterward, made it smaller, exposed its lies and deceit to the world, and mobilized large sectors of global public opinion, including, and especially, in the United States and Europe against what has become clear that Israel, which, along with the West, is accustomed to repeating that it is the only democracy in the region, to justify absolute and unconditional support for it, it is nothing but an apartheid state, and a barbaric force that does not abide by any international standards or humanitarian values. Building on this, the Arabs can impose on the Americans, who are supposed to recognize that they can no longer protect their interests in the region with Israeli force that was “Deflated” by the Palestinian factions, and they must build their relations with the Arab countries on the basis of greater respect for their independence, interests, and the rights to respond more positively to the aspirations of their peoples.

The success of Arab governments in achieving such a more independent relationship with the United States and the West will not only enable them to impose their respect on others, but also to open up to their people and save money invested in the arms race, in wars, and in the reconstruction of destroyed countries here and there, to improve the living conditions of their peoples and their rehabilitation. This reduces the risks of revolutions and uprisings, and opens the door to gradual democratic transformation, to the extent that it changes the general aggressive climate prevailing today in relations between and within countries between governments or frightened ruling elites and grieving or afflicted peoples, or both.

The bottom line is that what we witnessed two months ago, and are still witnessing, of the success of a small group of faction fighters in dislodging the static tectonic regulations and changing the balance of power, is an epic new chapter in the long and stubborn process of decolonization, and one of its major and exceptional battles is similar to the battle of Algiers (1957), which struck the bell of the French colonial withdrawal. Unfortunately, it will not be the final chapter. 

There are still many peoples and groups living under occupation, and they are exposed to discrimination, persecution, and racial discrimination, but it remains an inspiring confirmation of the inevitability of history returning to its natural context, I mean human liberation and the trend towards justice and equality, despite all obstacles.

But before that, it remains the culmination of the spirit of exceptional sacrifice, human heroism, faith in the cause, and refusal to surrender to the fate of force and injustice. The first people to be inspired by are the Syrians who are suffering under the brutal dictatorship, which is the monstrous product of the complicity of Israeli colonial control and hateful tyranny.