Israel's tactical victories and strategic failure

Written by: Dr. Mustafa Barghouti
The reactions of Israeli officials to what is happening in the West Bank range from panic at the extent of their surprise at the escalation of resistance to the occupation, to exaggeration in claiming imaginary victories achieved by the occupation army and its security apparatus in suppressing the Palestinian people. Both responses, despite their contradictory nature, essentially express a chronic inability to understand the Palestinian people and their motives, including an inability to anticipate their actions, especially when it comes to the younger generations. They also express poor judgment and failure to assess the results of the conflict raging on the ground. The behavior of Israeli settler colonialism here is not different from many examples of colonial regimes that repeatedly failed to understand the peoples they rule and oppress, and practiced stupid arrogance that always ended in the collapse of the colonial system that established them.

The racist ideology of the Zionist movement, and the thought based on the negation of the other, in addition to the need to deny the great crime committed during the Nakba in 1948 against the Palestinian people, deepen the inability to see the Palestinians as a people who have rights and human characteristics like other peoples, and who, therefore, has the ability to develop an ability to resist injustice to which he is exposed. The intellectual positions of the Israeli system appear to be governed by a chronic fear that any partial recognition of the Palestinians' humanity will lead to the catastrophe of recognizing the scale of the historical crime committed by the Zionist movement, and what this means in terms of a complete collapse of the structure of the Israeli narrative, which has been presented to the world and the Israelis themselves for eight decades. That is why the Israeli establishment also dwells on describing every Palestinian act of resistance, no matter how noble, as terrorism, and at the same time exaggerates it in exaggerating the claim that Israel is the victim, even though it is the one who practices the occupation and perpetuates the apartheid regime.

The rulers of Israel compete in shedding Palestinian blood as fuel for their electoral campaigns, and do not hesitate to use lethal weapons against a civilian population in the first place, and unleash the hand of settler colonialists to attack the Palestinians and their homes, properties, and trees, with full protection from the occupation army. In every round of confrontation, whether in Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or the Palestinian interior, the Israeli establishment uses the most lethal weapons, a highly developed and complex intelligence system, uses collective punishment, and oppresses civilians and children, then announces its tactical victories, by destroying and killing Martyrs, the liquidation of groups, and the arrest of thousands.

On the surface, it seems every time that the occupation has achieved victories that it sells to its extremist fans and is proud of. These results cannot be considered victories, as the discrepancy in losses is understandable in light of the huge difference between the military and human capabilities of the occupation army and that of the Palestinian resistance. However, the occupation hides, and perhaps does not realize, that its tactical successes are nothing but deceptive manifestations of a major strategic failure, because things are measured, in the end, by their results.

The first of these results confirms the failure of the Israeli-Zionist institution, despite the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, and the aggressions of 1956 and 1967. The largest part of the Palestinian people succeeded in remaining steadfast in their homeland, so that their number today is greater than the number of Israeli Jews on the land of historic Palestine.

The second of these results is that all operations of repression, killing, and arrest have not succeeded in imposing submission and acquiescence on the Palestinian human existence, which has become a resistance existence, using all forms of resistance, from the simplest to the most complex.

The third consequence lies in the failure of the Oslo project, which set a trap for the Palestinians, with the aim of buying time for the Zionist movement to spread settlements and to force the Palestinians to submit to permanent occupation under the cover of self-rule governed by Israeli control. The Palestinian people overcame that project and returned to cohesion around the option of a strategy of resistance and struggle to change the balance of power, instead of yielding to its imbalance in favor of Israel.

The fourth result was the return of the cohesion of the components of the Palestinian people and their arenas around a vision for a common national project, in the arenas of common struggle, of which we saw a shining example in the Battle of Jerusalem in 2021.

Perhaps the fifth strategic outcome will be the development of collective Palestinian awareness towards the realization that the collective Palestinian goal is no longer only an end to the occupation, but rather includes the overthrow of the entire system of apartheid and racial discrimination in all of historical Palestine.

After 74 years of the Nakba, the destruction of 500 Palestinian villages and towns and the displacement of 70% of the Palestinian people, and after 55 years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian people unite around the option of resistance and struggle, and the chances of isolating Israel are increasing at the international level. It seems clear that a qualitative shift has occurred in the consciousness of an entire people, and the realization deepens that Israeli settler colonialism will face the same fate that colonialism faced in many other countries, and this is accompanied by a comprehensive Palestinian awareness of the need for self-reliance, self-organization, and the challenge of the entire Israeli system of occupation and apartheid.

As for Israel's choice to destroy the so-called "two-state solution" and to establish the reality of "one state with an apartheid regime," it has no permanence, and the end of its path, if it continues, can only be its demise, and the imposition of full equality in national and civil rights, foremost among which is the absolute right of the Palestinian people to freely decide his fate.

In the end, despite the oppression and Israeli denial of the facts, the Palestinian people rise up once again in resistance, confirming the words of the Palestinian poet and activist Tawfiq Ziyad: "We are not better than any people in the world, but there is no better people in this world than us."