2024, the year of disaster and heroism.. 2025, the year of decision

The year 2024 has passed, which we can call the year of transformations, catastrophe and heroism. We witnessed the continuation of the war of genocide, and the accompanying comprehensive destruction of everything in the Gaza Strip, to the point that it became normal news to commit several massacres in one day, or to bomb shelters or aid convoys, or to bomb and burn a hospital and put it out of service, or to see children and women die from the cold or from the lack of medicine or from the rush to obtain a loaf of bread.

The above has become a passing event that does not require any attention, nor even international condemnation, but rather just a feeling of pity or timid condemnations that are of no use.

The great steadfastness and the continuation of the valiant resistance, to the point of being able to inflict human losses on the occupation forces, and launching rockets from areas in northern Gaza towards Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip envelope, where there is no longer one stone left standing, do not diminish the enormity of the humanitarian catastrophe. Rather, there is an urgent need to evaluate what happened, its accuracy, and to draw lessons and morals that will stop the genocide and prevent a decisive victory for the Israeli aggression.

Despite the passage of about 14 months, the war has not ended, and whenever the level of optimism increases regarding an agreement on a partial deal that achieves a truce for several weeks but does not end the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues what he has been doing for a whole year of maneuvers and procrastination, which are called negotiations, and do not actually aim to stop the war, but rather provide a cover for its continuation until it achieves its goals, which revolve around achieving a decisive victory that he and those seeking it, more than anyone else, realize is impossible to achieve.

The fact that the Israeli goals have not been achieved does not mean that a long distance has not been covered on the road to achieving them, in addition to paving the way for achieving the undeclared goals. It is not right to talk about victory in the shadow of genocide, and the evidence for that is all this death and destruction in making the entire Gaza Strip an uninhabitable area, preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, in addition to creating security, military and infrastructure facts in the Gaza Strip, aiming to change the map of the Gaza Strip humanly and geographically.

The repeated displacement within the Gaza Strip keeps the door wide open for displacement abroad to achieve a displacement that they say is “voluntary,” while in reality it is forced displacement. In order to mitigate its impact, they are threatening to allocate an area in Sinai that is two to three times the area of the Strip so that the largest number of Gazans can “move” to it, which will not be large enough for its residents after preparing to cut off at least a third of it for security, military, and settlement reasons.

If the war of extermination in Gaza, which coincides with the war of annexation and decisiveness in the West Bank, does not push the divided Palestinian forces towards unity, nothing else will push them towards it, which imposes the search for another approach other than unity to overcome the comprehensive impasse that the national movement is going through with its various parties and its two wings, the secular national and the Islamic national. Perhaps the approach is the struggle of the popular forces and all those loyal to change the political system through political and popular pressure so that changing it leads to unity, without this meaning a complete neglect of the pursuit of it. Rather, it is possible to proceed in a parallel and simultaneous manner for the sake of change and unity, with a greater focus on creating tools for change and facts on the ground on the path to achieving it.

Unity has not been achieved even at the factional level, despite Beijing’s declaration, which was immediately shelved due to the unwillingness to pay the price of unity, which became further away after the Al-Aqsa flood, as the leadership does not want to put its head under the guillotine alongside Hamas’s head, and it acts as if there is no place for Hamas in the political system after what it has done, and it imagines that by doing so it will guarantee the preservation of its head and its subsequent role.

As for Hamas, it wants to stay and work to ensure its subsequent role, even by demanding an end to the war and a return to the way things were before October 7, without reviewing the validity of embarking on the Al-Aqsa flood given the results it led to, and the need for change and renewal in it based on drawing lessons and morals. It is trying unsuccessfully to seek shelter under Palestinian legitimacy by agreeing to the Beijing Declaration to preserve its leadership, and it realizes that it must be outside the government at least for now, so it agreed to form a consensus government in which the factions do not participate, and then agreed to a community support committee despite all the concessions it entails, while the priority now is to preserve the cause and keep the people on their homeland, and thwart the annexation and resolution plan.

Instead of searching for mechanisms to achieve unity, through implementing the Beijing Declaration or otherwise, there were understandings instead that led to three fruitless meetings in Cairo to discuss the formation of a community support committee; in response to a regional, American and international demand that attempts to overcome the Israeli position rejecting Hamas’s continued rule over the Gaza Strip and the return of President Mahmoud Abbas’ authority, without any guarantees that the occupying state would accept this committee.

Most likely, the occupation will not accept this committee, because it wants to achieve a decisive victory on the path to establishing “Greater Israel,” so it is keen to work towards annexation, displacement, and Judaization, and to establish separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and between Areas A, B, and C in the West Bank, and between them and Jerusalem, and between the West Bank and the 1948 territories, in addition to deepening the Palestinian division between two forces and two programs, and seeking to eliminate any embodiment of national identity, even in the form of the existing authority bound by unfair restrictions, and mortgaged to the commitments of Oslo and post-Oslo, which led to making the authority less than self-rule, and that its survival is the goal and not defeating the occupation and embodying independence, and that the ceiling that governs it is the security-economic ceiling without any political role or horizon.

It has been a leap year not only in Palestine, but in the region, as evidenced by the earthquake that occurred in Syria and its aftershocks. Although the fall of the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad is not to be regretted, and is a cause for hope if things go as they should, its fall and the accompanying Israeli role allowed Netanyahu to talk about a major role for Israel in achieving this “achievement,” as was also evident in the continuous bombing of Syrian targets over the past years, the comprehensive destruction of the various capabilities of the Syrian army, in addition to Israel’s occupation of large areas of southern Syria, and its efforts to divide the country and control its fate.

The occupation is employing, to achieve its goals, the enormous legacy that the new regime carries from the defunct era, and 13 years of civil war in which revolution intertwined with conspiracy, internal revolutionary factors with terrorism and with foreign interventions, including the presence of an American and Turkish occupation, the need to lift the siege and finance reconstruction and the return of the displaced, and the competition of several projects, especially the American-Israeli project and the Turkish-Qatari-Brotherhood project, in addition to the presence of Russian bases, and the control of the Kurds over areas, which imposes caution and explains the lack of clarity of the path that the new regime will follow, as it is not enough to change the form and the softness of speech in light of the exclusion of others and the formation of a government and institutions of one color.

Will the new regime be a democratic civil regime that unifies the country and embodies the Syrian people’s right to self-determination, and is inclusive of all regardless of gender, color, religion, or nationality, and preserves its independence and sovereignty? Or will it be a sectarian, dictatorial regime that feeds the existing division and maintains a formal unity? Or will the country head toward chaos, insecurity, and civil war?

Hezbollah, which fought a support war that exhausted the occupying state and eased the burden on Gaza, received a severe blow that weakened it greatly, but did not eliminate it, and it was able to continue its role after that. Perhaps the harshest blow was the martyrdom of its leader and Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who is irreplaceable, in addition to the loss of most of its leadership and the frameworks surrounding it, and a fundamental part of its sources of military strength, including the supply route in Syria, and dealing a blow to Iran that reduced its ability to operate, in addition to the impact of Lebanon’s special conditions and internal pressures on Hezbollah, which prompted it to agree to a ceasefire without linking that to stopping the war of extermination on the Gaza Strip as it had committed to, instead of coexisting with the Israeli violations.

Despite the severe blows received by the axis of resistance and the dismantling of the unity of the arenas, the loss of the occupying state was not small, on various human, military, economic and moral levels, and on the image of Israel in the world, even among the ranks of public opinion in the allied Western camp that strongly supports the occupying state.

The consequences of the Al-Aqsa Intifada on Israel’s role and future will not be limited to what is happening in the immediate term, which has shown that the occupying state is continuing to shape the new Middle East, but rather what will happen in the medium and long term, which will be very different, as evidenced by the state of political, societal and ideological division that threatens the unity of Israeli society and its role in the future and has not receded much despite waging an existential war.

We should not forget the Yemeni missile strikes on the Israeli interior, which caused millions of Israelis to take shelter and disrupted navigation in the port of Eilat for more than a year. Israel was also exposed to an Iranian attack twice with hundreds of missiles and drones, in addition to the hundreds of operations carried out by Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and the resistance factions in Gaza, as well as the launching of a number of drones from Iraq towards Israeli sites.

If we take stock, we must admit that what the Gaza Strip faced was a catastrophe, and a price that should not be paid because it does not match the size of the achievements at all. Palestine was not liberated in exchange for that price, and the occupation was not expelled from the territories occupied in 1967, not even the Gaza Strip.

In this context, the negotiations from the resistance's point of view focus on stopping the war and returning things to what they were before, and completing a prisoner exchange deal, which reflects the great deterioration, while the occupying state is focusing on a partial exchange deal that achieves a calm for weeks but does not end the war. Also, removing Hamas from the government in the Gaza Strip has become a given for everyone, including Hamas itself, to ensure the acceptance of the occupying state to stop the war, and the donor countries to provide the necessary funds for reconstruction.

Based on the above, the new year is likely to be the year of decision, as the war will end and its final results will be determined. Either the occupation will crown its achievements by resolving the conflict, even if only temporarily, or the Israeli advance will be halted and the new Middle East will be drawn. The scenarios proposed in the new Trump era are the worst of the worst, as maintaining Israeli control over the Gaza Strip and dealing with it in the same way as the West Bank, which the occupation forces are violating wherever, whenever and however they want, is not the worst scenario, while the West Bank will face attempts to annex it completely or parts of it. What Trump and Netanyahu want will not be an inevitable fate if the Palestinians, Arabs and free people in the entire world know what they have to do, and they can know, because more than a hundred years of struggle cannot be wasted.

The preferred Palestinian scenario is unity, partnership and struggle, but it is unlikely to be achieved immediately, and it needs time and a change in the map of Palestinian forces and their weights. The biggest evidence is that we will welcome the new year with the continuation of the security campaign on the Jenin camp, which aims to “impose order”; that is, to put an end to the phenomenon of resistance, so that the authority’s accreditation in the West Bank can be renewed, because there are strong and serious Israeli calls to get rid of the authority, and so that it can return to the Gaza Strip.

This situation is dangerous and its continuation threatens to lead to a maze of self-destruction. If the internal fighting is not stopped, the victor - if there is a victor - will be defeated at the mercy of the only victorious occupation. This will increase the chances of inflicting defeat on the Palestinians. There is a need to evaluate the various strategies adopted that have led to where we are and to formulate new strategies capable of victory.

The internal fighting can only be stopped through a comprehensive dialogue that aims to define the nature of the stage, the challenges and opportunities, and to formulate appropriate strategies away from harmful illusions and losing bets, most importantly formulating an agreed-upon strategy for resistance. There can be an agreement at this stage to focus on providing the elements of steadfastness and survival, and on the forms of popular resistance without relinquishing the right to resistance in its various forms, as this form or that is used according to the stage, and combining several forms in another stage, and adhering to the right to self-defense in all stages.

Since betting on the leadership, forces and elites is a losing bet, as they have become outdated, eroded, flabby and corrupt and have not been united by genocide, annexation and displacement plans and the resolution of the conflict, the bet must be on the Arab and Islamic peoples and the entire world whose public opinion has become more and more supportive of Palestine, and on the popular forces that want change to strive to create new facts capable of finding a new balance of power that prevents the occupation from achieving a decisive victory, then opens the way to its defeat and imposing the name of Palestine on the map of the region and the new world.

In the year 2025, there are existential dangers and a new catastrophe that could befall the Palestinians, and there is a great opportunity to achieve the beginnings of historic victories, and this depends on the peoples and their living forces, their movement and their ability to bring about the required change, as victory can only come through Palestinian, Arab, regional and international change, and this can happen, as the sacrifices, heroism and blood that were shed by committing 10,000 massacres will not be wasted.