Israel's ingenuity in "manufacturing pretexts"

The incident of a missile hitting Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights adds to Israel’s new credit in the “pretext” industry, which it has excelled in since its establishment in 1948, until the present moment, and has become one of the main tools for marketing war, politics and image, and even reaping quick gains, which may be Western financial aid, or the supply of weapons and ammunition.

In this incident, despite Hezbollah’s denial that it had struck a football field in the occupied part of the Golan Heights, killing and wounding Druze who insist on the plateau’s affiliation with Syria, and its presentation of political, moral, and even technical evidence from a military perspective that it had not done so, Tel Aviv was quick to turn the incident into an opportunity to continue a war that Benjamin Netanyahu does not want to end, because his interests require this, and he is considered at the forefront of those responsible in Israel’s history for making excuses.

To begin with, Arabic dictionaries define “al-dharī‘a” as “what a person uses to hide a real reason for his action.” Or it is “a means or an artificial reason to achieve a goal.” Islamic jurisprudence has defined the principle of “blocking the means” as a preconceived notion, meaning “closing the door to what is used to justify sin and disobedience, in order to block the paths leading to them.” Philosophical dictionaries and glossaries link al-dharī‘a with utilitarianism or pragmatism, and it is a type of “corrupt evidence” or “flawed proofs” that fall under the category of “logical fallacies.”

Israel was established primarily on a pretext based on a false invocation of history and a corrupt interpretation of religious texts. Then it began to fabricate several pretexts to seize Palestinian cities, villages, towns and their land, after forcibly displacing them from them or completely subjecting them to the authority of the occupation, until it obtained land on which it declared its state, and which was recognized by countries and international organizations in succession.

Not only that, but the aggression extended under the pretext of outside Palestine, as we found it evident in Israel’s invasion on October 29, 1956, of the areas east of the Suez Canal and the Sinai Desert, and then the Gaza Strip, in order to give the British and French forces a pretext to join the war two days later, in what was known as the “Tripartite Aggression” against Egypt.

This pretext was primarily to serve a political and military plan that the three countries had drawn up in a secret meeting held in the town of Sevres, France, between representatives of Britain, France, and Israel, one week before the start of the Israeli military action. Its undeclared goal was to overthrow the rule of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser after he nationalized the Suez Canal.

Israel returned to using the pretext of exploiting Nasser's decision to close the Strait of Aqaba to launch the June 1967 war, although the Egyptian president at the time did not intend this decision to declare war or pave the way for it, as indicated by the statements he made during and after the war, and the documents he later revealed. Israel struck Iraq in 1981 under the pretext of preventing it from possessing nuclear weapons.

Israel followed the same approach in all its successive strikes against the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria. This was clearly evident before the July 2006 war against Hezbollah. Israel used the operation carried out by the party on the 12th of the same month to capture two Israeli soldiers as a pretext, and launched a full-scale war on Lebanon, which it had already prepared for since it was forced to leave southern Lebanon in 2000, especially after it became certain that the American axis in the region had failed to move Lebanon from the “axis of resistance and rejection” to the “axis of dependency and normalization,” a promise that Washington had made to Israel after the occupation of Iraq and the blatant threat to the countries of the region.

This Israeli pretext is not hidden from the Lebanese. Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil had previously spoken about this matter on September 28, 2018, in response to Netanyahu, who claimed in his speech before the United Nations that there was evidence of Iran’s support for Hezbollah in making its missiles precise, and that Israel would “fight” Iran in Lebanon. Bassil said: “Israel is once again inventing pretexts to justify the aggression, and that from the platform of international legitimacy it is preparing to violate the sovereignty of states.”

The repeated Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip in the years 2008, 2014, 2021, and finally in the “Al-Aqsa Flood” war were not without pretexts, as Israel went to great lengths in the current war to manufacture the pretext through the crude propaganda with which it paved the way for the war by launching lies about burning children and raping women, during the surprise attack launched by the resistance on October 7 on the settlements in the Gaza envelope.

This Israeli pretext is not limited to military aspects, but extends to the economy as well. In 2013, the Ministry of Economy in the Palestinian Authority accused Israel of employing “pretexts” to force Palestinian manufacturers to buy raw materials from its companies, by creating a series of legal and administrative complications, and tightening restrictions at the entrances to cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, if they wanted to buy raw materials or production requirements from Arab countries. This is an issue monitored by international reports and indicators, including a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) explaining the reasons for the decline in Palestinian economic growth rates.

Since Hezbollah entered the war with calculated strikes according to what it calls the “rules of engagement,” Israel has wanted to expand the response to become a comprehensive war, especially after the deterioration of its army in the Gaza Strip. However, the American administration has always rejected this Israeli desire, while many in the West understood it as a mere “escape forward” desired by this faltering army, and an attempt to prolong the war desired by Netanyahu and his allies in the government.

The Majdal Shams incident came to put the final touches on the new Israeli pretext, which was quickly translated into an approval to launch a war on Lebanon, after Israeli propaganda and complaints, which did not aim to justify the war only, but to restore part of the old image that was wounded and cracked as a result of the Israeli army’s excessive killing, burning and destruction in the Gaza Strip.

Thus, the management of pretexts constitutes an integral part of Israeli military, political and economic behavior, as Tel Aviv relies on the pretext being based on some fact, however small, insignificant or faint, and inflates it and markets it with bright colors of propaganda, and it is confident that there are those who cover up and justify its aggression, or it does not care about the exposure of the lie that resides in its pretexts, as long as it has achieved its goals, even if that is a complete violation of international law.

Israeli pretexts are not limited to military aspects, but also extend to the economy. It employs “pretexts” to force Palestinian manufacturers to buy raw materials from its companies, by creating a series of legal and administrative complications, and tightening restrictions at the entrances to cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, if they want to buy raw materials or production requirements from Arab countries.