Netanyahu and the falsehood of the alleged arrogance

Since the start of his devastating war after October 7 of last year, Benjamin Netanyahu has promoted two contradictory ideas: First, that Israel is fighting an existential war in which it is defending its survival, and he exaggerated this to the point of describing the Israeli losses in the Al-Aqsa flood as the largest since the Holocaust. The fundamental goal of this idea is to portray Israel as the victim, and even to monopolize the title of victim in general. Netanyahu and his supporters from the West and East did not mind that Israel occupies the land of another people and is practicing the worst oppression and war crimes of our time.

The second idea was that Israel was all-powerful and all-powerful, and would redraw the map of the entire Middle East for the next fifty years, something that had not happened since the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement.

There is no need for us to refute the first idea, as it has no credibility, because the real existential danger is the conspiracies and crimes that the Palestinian people are facing to liquidate their national cause and their right to freedom and self-determination, although it is necessary to hint at the validity of the belief of some Israelis that their entity is entering, at an unusual speed in the path of states, into a phase of decline that may reach the point of demise, if the current fascist approach of the Zionist movement continues with all its components.

What concerns us is the second idea that Israel is all-powerful and will redraw the map of the Middle East. This idea contradicts a series of events and facts that have been revealed over the course of the war that has been going on for more than a year.

First, after more than a full year of the longest war in the history of the Israeli entity, it seems unable to complete or achieve its military objectives in the Gaza Strip, despite the huge difference in capabilities, capacities, weapons and number of soldiers, as the Israeli army, which is considered among the strongest armies in the world, faces a resistance force that has been besieged for seventeen years, and yet it has failed to uproot the resistance, failed to impose its military control, failed to recover its prisoners, and failed to achieve the ethnic cleansing that was its main goal. This army finds nothing to compensate for its failure except the brutal brutality of civilians, especially women and children.

The second fact is that the Israeli army, before opening the Lebanese front, was unable to confront the Palestinian resistance in Gaza without an American air bridge, and support in the form of weapons and intelligence services from a significant number of European countries, including Germany and Britain. It even needed the American fleet to flow into the region’s seas in order to be able to focus on its attacks on the Gaza Strip.

The third fact was that the “mighty Israeli army!!” was unable to confront the Iranian missile and drone attack without full defensive air support from NATO, the US Central Command, and a number of Western bases and armies deployed in the region. Despite all that support, Israeli military bases were seriously damaged in that attack, and the United States was forced to send its most advanced air defense system (THAAD) with its American military operators to Israel.

The fourth fact was Israel’s inability to confront the marches coming from Lebanon, the failure of the Israeli army to carry out a large-scale ground invasion of southern and central Lebanon as it had planned, and its inability to capitalize on its intelligence success and assassinate a significant number of Hezbollah’s leadership to achieve the complete collapse of the party that it had dreamed of.

The fifth fact is that the rise of fascism in Israel could not protect it from escalating internal disintegration due to the length of the war, the increasing human losses, the deepening of the economic crisis resulting from unexpected losses, and the flight of hundreds of thousands in search of security and safety, after all of Palestine became an open arena of confrontation.

The irony is that all this failure is taking place in the shadow of regional and global opportunities that Israel has not had in the past, and will not have in the future. It launched its war in the shadow of the complicity of a number of regional countries, and those who want to increase it can refer to Bob Woodward’s new book entitled “War”, and in the shadow of an unparalleled weakness at the level of governments in Arab and Islamic solidarity with the Palestinian people, in contrast to the positions of the peoples, of course, who are the ones who are defeated.

On the international level, Israel received absolute support in terms of weapons, money, and political support, and even direct military participation from the US Army and a number of Western armies. It also enjoyed financial support of up to $40 billion from the Biden administration, and protection that reached the point of insolence in the Security Council and the corridors of the United Nations. In this confrontation, the Palestinians did not have a pole parallel to the American and Western pole globally, as was the case in the Cold War, in light of the American-Soviet competition at the time. There is, of course, a difference between support with political statements and positions, and material support with weapons, money, and even soldiers and officers.

Despite all these huge differences in capabilities, resources and sources of support, Israel failed to achieve its goals, and continued to stagnate, finding nothing but the brutality of defenceless civilians as a means to vent its anger and sense of failure.

It is not our intention here to diminish the extent of the human and material losses caused by the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, especially in the Gaza Strip. These are enormous human losses whose horror cannot be described in words.

However, all these losses did not achieve a strategic victory for Israel, nor did they even bring about the strategic transformation it sought.

With the beginning of the decline that Netanyahu and his government leaders are facing, it seems clear that the image of strategic might that he tried to promote has evaporated, and this will have an impact on the behavior of many governments in the region that were hoping that Netanyahu would fulfill their dreams of getting rid of what they consider, unjustly, to be their enemies.

Netanyahu will have to confront his strategic failure and the personal difficulties that haunt him, in light of the exposure of the facts of the ongoing conflict, especially among the components of the Palestinian people after the illusions of compromise solutions and reliance on the United States as a mediator have disappeared, and after entire generations of Palestinians have become deeply convinced that what they are facing is not only the effects of the first Nakba, from ethnic cleansing, the longest occupation in modern history, and the worst system of racial discrimination (apartheid), but rather they are facing the same system of settler colonialism that has escalated to become fascist in every sense of the word, and how clear this was in the vote of the Knesset, with its ruling and opposition parties, to prevent the work of the International Relief Agency, in what embodied the greater truth, that Israel is trying unsuccessfully to escape from its past, its crimes, and its short history.