Fear Syndrome in Israel

The Palestinian bloodshed has continued, inside and outside the Gaza Strip, for more than nine months, amidst a shameful stagnation in the international scene, which has exhausted its political, rhetorical and media tools, contenting itself with expressing concern and demanding an end to the aggression and the entry of aid, without being able to save the human being who is being killed by starvation with premeditation and deliberation.

It is a scene that reveals the moral and political collapse of the international system in front of the wall of American will that sponsors the Israeli occupation that lives above the law and human values, and thus the logic of the jungle is entrenched. Karim Khan, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, pointed this out in an interview with the American CNN network, after he submitted a request to the court’s judges to issue arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his Minister of War Yoav Galant, saying: “Some politicians spoke to me and were very frank and said: This court was built for Africa, and for butchers like Putin.”

Double standards and racism 
The crisis lies in the double standards, as these politicians want to divide the world into masters and slaves, each with different standards. The value of a Middle Eastern, Asian, or African person is not equal to the value of a Western or Israeli person who shares their culture with theological dimensions.

These double standards, saturated with racism, create in oppressed peoples a sense of the need to defend themselves by force to protect themselves and human dignity. The most prominent people who feel this are peoples under occupation, such as the Palestinian people, whose reliance on the international system and its decisions, and the course of negotiations for more than 30 years, has failed. The result has been more settlement expansion, the continuation of the killing machine, and the destruction of the foundations of life throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem, burdened by Judaization policies.

The West's double standards and bias towards the Israeli occupation are a major factor in the continuation of the conflict in Palestine and the turmoil in the Middle East as a whole. The Palestinian people and the peoples of the region are watching how NATO, the alliance of the Western system, deals with Ukraine, which it supplies with all kinds of weapons, money and relief needs to confront the Russian attack on its territory.

These same people provide Israel, legally known as the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with all kinds of lethal weapons to kill innocent Palestinians (130,000 martyrs and wounded), destroy the landmarks of life in the entire Gaza Strip (34 hospitals and dozens of medical centers were destroyed), schools, universities, and infrastructure, in addition to destroying about 450,000 housing units.

The tragedy and failure continue, including the failure of Arab institutions, as if what is happening in the Gaza Strip is a movie that deserves virtual sympathy in an imaginary world.

The weakness of the international and Arab position, and the absence of effective measures, encourage the occupation to continue its crimes, and create a rolling vacuum in Palestine and the region in general, which can only be filled by the resistance of the peoples to protect themselves from a savage, rogue occupation that has violated international norms and conventions, and does not care about the verbal objections of the countries of the world, as long as it is safe from accountability and punishment.

Eye on the West Bank and Jerusalem 

The closure of political paths due to the failure of the Oslo process and its transformation into a burden on the Palestinian people, and the tendency of Israeli society and its leadership towards political and ideological extremism by rejecting the Palestinian state and refusing to recognize the existence of a Palestinian people with the right to self-determination, all of this increases the intensity of the confrontation; because the occupation, rhetorically and realistically, is working to undermine the national situation in the West Bank in parallel with its ongoing aggression against the Gaza Strip.

It is true that Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right, led by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich, are seeking to prolong the war for personal reasons, or for fear of failure in any upcoming elections due to their inability to achieve the goals of the war against the Gaza Strip. However, it must also be said that they see their presence in power as a golden opportunity to achieve their goals of gradually annexing the West Bank and Jerusalem to the State of Israel according to procedures based on imposing a fait accompli by force.

This central project of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank pushes Benjamin Netanyahu and the extreme right to cling to the idea of eliminating the Palestinian resistance and Hamas militarily and authoritatively. The existence of the movement and the resistance is not only a threat to occupied Israel, but also a reason for disrupting the annexation projects of the West Bank and Jerusalem, and confusing Israeli calculations in the region, most notably the normalization project. This explains Netanyahu's insistence on removing Hamas from the equation, or imposing negotiating conditions, which means accepting the occupation and its control over Gaza, as well as the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The weakness of the current US administration, and its avoidance of exerting real pressure on the occupation government for fear of negative repercussions on the Democrats’ chances in the elections, encourages Netanyahu and the extreme right to continue with their plans.

For Netanyahu, it was time to wait for Republican candidate Donald Trump to return to the White House if he continued to lead the polls, and with him Netanyahu hopes to cooperate to eliminate the Palestinian resistance and Hamas, and perhaps launch major military strikes against Hezbollah to create a security buffer zone around the northern borders of Palestine, so that he can devote himself to moving forward with ending the idea of a Palestinian state by annexing the West Bank and Jerusalem.

This is not far from the thinking of Donald Trump, the author of the Deal of the Century, which he prepared in partnership with Netanyahu in his previous term.

We are still in the midst of the battle, and the coming months are crucial in shaping the future; because the occupation wanted it to be an existential battle on the land of historic Palestine, and it is a mandatory path imposed by the extreme right led by Netanyahu, who associates defeat in his mind with the beginning of the end of Israel. Netanyahu promised the Israeli public in 2017 that the State of Israel would overcome the curse of eighty years, and exceed one hundred years to surpass the age of the Hasmonean state in ancient Jewish history.

Will Netanyahu succeed in this and become the crowned king of Israel, or will they both be cursed by the eighth decade?

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We are still in the midst of the battle, and the coming months will be decisive in shaping the future, because the occupation wanted it to be an existential battle on the land of historic Palestine, and it is a mandatory path imposed by the extreme right led by Netanyahu, who associates defeat in his mind with the beginning of the end of Israel.