Israel's worrying options!

There is no surprise in the events in Gaza except in the timing and scale of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation. Gaza was living in a catastrophic situation under a continuous siege for 17 years, under the eyes of the world, and with great disregard for its plight. The situation in the Palestinian arena in general has been simmering ever since Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli extremists decided to implement the two-state solution, and the world helped them do that by removing the Palestinian issue from the agenda, while the policies of settlement expansion and land annihilation, intensifying pressure on the Palestinians, and escalating provocations in Jerusalem continued.

The Palestinians' sense of injustice must have increased as they see the double standards in the West's dealings with the Ukrainian crisis, and the raising of voices about legitimate rights, international laws, and resistance to the occupation, while this talk fades when it comes to them and their cause.

What did Israel and the world expect then?

Inside Israel, there were voices, albeit a few, warning that closing the path to peace, the policy of arrogance, and continuing to undermine the rights of the Palestinians and confiscate their lands, would lead to the detonation of the situation. But the world did not pay attention to those voices, which made the Netanyahu government persist in its escalatory policies and arrogance until it was surprised by the “flood of Al-Aqsa,” which will certainly have repercussions.

Israel is now mobilizing for a large-scale ground attack expected at any moment, and Hamas and the other Palestinian movements must have taken this into account when they launched this operation, and thus prepared for it. The expected battle will certainly be more difficult than all the previous ones, and the losses on both sides will be greater. Fighting in Gaza's narrow streets and densely populated neighborhoods will be a difficult process and may mean a longer fight than what happened in the 2014 summer war, which lasted 51 days. The scale of material and human losses, the number of rockets fired by Palestinian factions, and the tons of bombs and projectiles that Israel dropped on the Gaza Strip throughout the period of that war have been exceeded today, even before the expected ground invasion began.

Israeli thinking seems focused on a massive operation to cause the greatest possible destruction in Gaza, and to “discipline” Hamas and its allied factions. Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesman for the Israeli army, confirmed in statements on Tuesday that hundreds of tons of bombs had already been dropped on Gaza, and acknowledged that “the focus is on damage, not accuracy.” Israel is now practicing a policy of collective punishment, whether through unprecedented bombing or by placing Gaza under a comprehensive siege.

If Israel thinks rationally, all of its previous operations in Gaza or the West Bank have only achieved intermittent truces at best, while true peace remains elusive. All the lethal force it uses, the Iron Dome, the costly wall, and continuous electronic and aerial surveillance, did not succeed in protecting it and it was exposed by very simple means, some of which were primitive, used by Hamas and the factions participating with it in the “Al-Aqsa Flood.” Bulldozers destroy the wall and open gaps in it for fighters to cross, crossing with cars, gliders, motorcycles, tuk-tuk buses, and waves of missiles that are incomparable with the latest military technology that Israel possesses.

The problem is that Israel will not see things from this perspective. Rather, Netanyahu, under current pressure and accusing his government of the greatest security failure, may also consider reoccupying the Gaza Strip, an option that will not only be extremely costly for Israel, but will lead the entire region to a catastrophic situation open to destruction. All possibilities, including expanding the scope of the war and its repercussions, and creating more factors of destabilization, especially with the rise of the Israeli right, which wants to completely erase the Palestinian issue, while many have begun to voice calls to expel the Palestinians, displace them, and empty the land from them.

Last May, Israeli analyst Gideon Levy wrote in the Haaretz newspaper, warning that after Netanyahu and the extreme right succeed in killing the two-state solution, there will be two plans or possibilities for the end of the apartheid system in which Israel is operating. “One of them is favored by the extreme right and almost all Israelis, which is a second Nakba. If the confrontation reaches its climax, and Israel finds itself faced with two options: either a system based on one democratic state for two peoples, or a collective expulsion of the Palestinians in order to preserve the Jewish state, then the most likely and clear choice for almost every Israeli Jew is to expel the Palestinians.

It is this second option that makes many countries in the region worry about Netanyahu’s policies and the blockage of the horizon for Palestinian peace. Therefore, it was not surprising that Cairo was quick to respond to what appeared to be Israeli attempts to encourage the residents of Gaza to head to Egypt in search of safety from the violent bombing that has been continuing for days.

Israel wants and hopes to wash its hands of the Palestinian issue and deport it to other Arab countries. You want normalization without real compensation, and peace without prices or concessions. This thinking will not achieve a solution or stability, but rather will further aggravate the situation.

The inescapable truth is that there is no solution or stability without a just peace, and this has a price that Israel does not want to pay. As long as the situation remains like this, and the agendas of Netanyahu and the extreme right continue to push towards more expansionist policies and attempts to erase the Palestinian issue, cycles of violence and wars will continue, Israel will not know peace, and the region will not enjoy the stability it longs for.

Source: Al Sharq Al Awsat