The lost war
What is being fought in the Middle East, and which due to the delirium that has taken hold of the Western ruling classes could still lead to a terrible regional-world war, is something that the Israeli Zionist leadership refuses to recognize as such, and with them the entire West, which drinks from their narrative.
What Israel does not know nor does it want to understand, first of all because it has an absolutely mediocre ruling class, a mix of bigoted fanatics and fat political sharks, is that breaking up History, fragmenting it into separate segments according to one's convenience, not only does not really serve to shatter it, but prevents us from grasping its meaning, its direction; ignoring the past inhibits the ability to understand the future, to have a vision of it.
Since the foundation of the state of Israel - which, it should not be forgotten, is a specific project of Zionism - the indigenous Palestinian population has always been considered exclusively as a problem [1], denying its humanity in essence. A problem because she owned the land they coveted, because she was too numerous, because she didn't bow her head enough. From there it was a shorter step to openly considering them animals than one might think.
Except for rare and laudable but unheard exceptions, the Israeli leadership has always been victims of this distortion of perspective, which then led them - precisely - to a reading of their national history in which the Arabs are only an obstacle, ferocious beasts that make it difficult establish peace in the promised land. This inability to look at history even from the Palestinian side meant that they did not see history, but only a series of unfortunate setbacks.
For Israel, October 7, 2023 is only the last – these damned animals, who do not accept soma and instead of working for us, attack us! – and in his incomplete vision it can only be followed by exemplary punishment. Maybe even decisive.
Israel now thinks it can complete the work begun in 1948, and then carried forward in 1967. To re-establish the natural order of things.
This is why he is unable to understand two fundamental things: what is being fought is a war of liberation (like the Algerian one, like the Indochinese one, like the South African one...), and that October 7th is the date that marks the turning point, after which nothing will ever be the same again.
It doesn't matter how many wild beasts you kill if you forget that they are fierce.
Colonial powers become ferocious when their dominance is challenged. And the people who want to free themselves always pay an enormous price. The Algerians had 2 million deaths, almost a fifth of the population. The Vietnamese 3 million dead. But in the end the French had to leave.
Colonial rule ends when the dominant power pays a price it can no longer bear. And that's the difference. For the dominant, the maximum acceptable price is very low, but for the dominated, who fight for their own freedom and that of future generations, it will always be much higher.
Dismissing the Palestinian Resistance as a matter of terrorism - forgetting among other things that they founded Israel by making widespread use of this practice... - is what will prevent Israelis from understanding the history of which they are part. And then to face it.
As the late Henry Kissinger said of the Vietnam War, “we fought a military war; our adversaries fought a political one. We sought physical wear and tear; our adversaries aimed at our psychological exhaustion. In this way we have lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of partisan warfare: the guerrilla wins if it does not lose. The conventional army loses if it doesn't win." And the IDF is not winning at all. He can't win. The Resistance does not need to inflict a military defeat on the enemy that, in itself, causes its collapse. He doesn't need to win it strategically on the battlefield. It is sufficient that he manages to maintain his fighting capacity over time, that he manages to inflict tactical defeats.
The al-Aqsa flood operation is the Palestinian equivalent of Dien Bien-Phu for the Viet Minh, of the Tet offensive for the Viet Cong.
The historical-cultural approach with which Israel faces the conflict, even before the strategic and tactical one, is the insurmountable limit for Tel Aviv. And it is the cause of the mistakes he is making in the war. She doesn't understand that facing the Resistance groups as if they were criminal gangs will get her nowhere. He does not understand that imposing military administration on Gaza tomorrow is a huge favor to Hamas, which will be relieved of the burden of government and will be able to concentrate on the fight. He does not understand that the wave of military attacks in the West Bank, and the further delegitimization of the PA (which is the government of his proxies), are an assist for Hamas, which wants more than anything to reunify the Resistance fronts. She doesn't understand that constantly threatening her neighbors will only make them jump on her at the first moment of weakness.
He does not understand that it is no longer 1967 or 1973, and that his enemy is not the Jordanian, Syrian and Egyptian armies, but an extended guerrilla front, capable of fielding at least as many men as Israel can mobilize.
The illusion of power, the denial of the changes that occur in the world around us, are a constant cause of bloody adventures. Paradigmatic, from this point of view, is the story of the Ukrainian adventure. Although it was studied and prepared for a long time, it ended up – predictably, one might say – in a disaster. It is true that it has severed, at least for a few decades to come, the profitable relations between Europe and Russia, but not only has it not weakened the latter at all, but has actually led to its strengthening - and more generally, precisely in geopolitical terms, it produced the political, economic and military fusion between the main enemies listed by the USA: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
One of the many connections [2], in fact, between the war in Ukraine and that in Palestine, is that both were faced by Western powers with the belief that they could at least manage them, if not win them. And instead they both marked a turning point, that point in history beyond which everything changes, forever.
Furthermore, and this too seems incredibly to escape the Israeli leadership, the political-military strategy adopted to deal with the crisis triggered by the October 7 attack seriously risks undermining the very existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state.
In fact, having chosen the genocidal path, as a presumably decisive tool for both Palestinian terrorism and the Arab demographic threat, means at the same time having taken the millenarian strategy of Zionism to the extreme possible. Beyond the nuclear massacre - which would overwhelm Israel as much as and more than its enemies - there is no longer a possible beyond: genocide is the extreme limit that can be reached. And when it proves ineffective (and once again, no one should know better than the Jews that it cannot be otherwise), it will undermine the founding idea of Israel, its national ideology.
The dream of an exclusive homeland, of the Jews and only for the Jews, as well as the illusion perpetrated for eighty years that this dream was actually achievable, will collapse. When Israeli society has sedimented in its conscience the material, concrete impossibility of achieving it - because the Palestinians will never give up, they will never stop being more, they will never accept to live like beasts - then everything will change there too. Of course, not tomorrow. It will perhaps take ten years (and they will be bloody and painful years), but in the medium term this will mean the political death of the Zionist project. The liberation of Palestine will also free Israel from its obsessions. Her war is lost.
Notes
1 – The slogan on which Zionism first built the idea, and then the Israeli state, was the famous double lie “a land without a people for a people without a land”. Double because that land was inhabited by the people of Palestine for thousands of years, and because - very simply - the Jews are not a people, but simply the followers of a religion. And even though this religion is very exclusive (Jews do not proselytize, they are one by birth), the fact remains that its followers have spread around the world for over two thousand years, during which Semitic ethnicity has certainly become watered down much more than what happened to the Palestinian Arabs - who are themselves Semites. It is no coincidence that most of the current Israeli leaders are Polish, Russian, Romanian... And among the Jews living in Israel there are two communities that are not at all Semitic, that of the Falashas (Jews of Ethiopian origin) and that of the Jews of Indian origin .
2 – On this aspect of both conflicts, see “Two wars”, Substack and “Info-warfare: the 'third war'”, Substack
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