People in Gaza have suffered enough
Is Hamas a terrorist organisation, a social welfare government or a well-oiled war machine? An understanding of this question enables the current hostilities to be appreciated.
Numerous stories have been told about how Israel retains the right to defend itself from acts of terror committed by its overtly hostile Arab neighbours.
On the other hand, Hamas has steadfastly emerged as an entity capable and able to offer public welfare to the needs of many Palestinians.
To the Palestinians, Hamas is an organisation fighting for freedom. Just like any insurgency, it has both political and military flair. Its military touch is presently engaged in intense hostilities with the Jewish state of Israel which state is considered to be an occupier.
From its Gaza enclave, Hamas has been shelling Israeli cities with improvised weaponry and skill that is indicative of updated capabilities.
The Americans, on the other hand, borrowing from their “tried and tested” Bush Doctrine, labels Hamas a terrorist organisation and therefore sees it as its right to wage a preemptive war against any nation that might one day threaten the United States.
By the way, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
From political obscurity and reeling as a consequence of the Gaza blockade, Hamas has been able to occupy the moral high ground in the current hostilities with Israel.
Suddenly, Arab nationalism is reverberating right across the world. Thousands and thousands of Arabs and sympathisers around the world are rallying in solidarity with the besieged group.
The murder of innocent children, as young as five years, by the Israeli war machinery is achieving the opposite of what is intended to do.
From nowhere, Arab leaders are reaching out to Hamas and even US President Joe Biden is beginning to show signs of capitulation, leaving the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his bellicose rhetoric stranded and he calling for a ceasefire.
An insurgency is a struggle for legitimacy; a political process that uses acts of terror as a tactic to recruit and communicate.
The hundreds of rockets being fired from Gaza towards Israeli cities have managed to terrify Israel and its citizens into an overreaction punctuated by unnecessarily extreme violence resonating around the threshold of war crimes.
Entire media houses are being bombed to smithereens as the well-experienced Israeli Defence Forces see Hamas shadows everywhere.
This is working well into the hands of Hamas. The brutality being waged by Israel against innocent Gazans is just but helping alienate Israel from sympathisers, who otherwise would have sided with it. The mismatch is palpable.
The use of the Iron Dome to protect Israelis and its absence in Gaza exposes the duplicity of the Americans and their lack of sincerity.
Netanyahu is sounding more and more like Libya’s former strongman Muammar Gaddafi before that UN resolution 1973 that was issued under the auspices of the doctrine of responsibility to protect (R2P). In a normal world, he is a definite candidate for The Hague, but again, we all know the statecraft.
For Hamas, they must not overdo their thrust, for, the cost of military violence is proving to be too much on its stricken society. Buildings are being razed by precision attacks from the IDF and its drones.
The precise nature of the attacks reminds me of Eli Cohen, the Mossad master spy who advised the Syrians, after infiltrating the government of Al Assad the father, disguised as an Argentine expatriate by the name of Taabet, to plant eucalyptus trees on top of an arms cache.
That majestic piece of intelligence work led to a decisive military victory by Israel as it just targeted the eucalyptus trees, in the process destroying tonnes and tonnes of war munitions. The same with the current blitz on buildings in Gaza; there definitely is evidence of collaboration with the aggressor.
People in Gaza have suffered enough. Hamas has made a statement. Israel is slowly being blamed. Already, instability is beginning to emerge in the West Bank. Can we witness a regional escalation? In the interim it’s a definite No. This is because the same Arab states who are supposed to be siding with Gaza have blackmailed it by recognising Israel in one of fromer US president Donald Trump’s biggest diplomatic coups.
It has to be remembered that Sudan was even made to pay US$300 million+ and forced to normalise relations with Israel for sanctions to be removed. Reminds me of a certain paragraph in the book Arab Mind that said the Arabs are themselves divided.
These divisions mean that the more Hamas continues shelling Israel and the more Israel counters, the more isolated it becomes. Talk of the law of diminished marginal returns.
As it stands, the moral high ground is with Gaza but the human cost is unnecessarily high.
Amid all this, the big shadow of Iran is lurking in the horizon. Remember, Iran uses a potent asymmetric warfare strategy to checkmate its enemies. They fight via proxy and it is believed that its surrogates are being infiltrated into Syria to wreak havoc and cause pandemonium in Israel.
This was the justification given towards the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian major general, on January 3, 2020 when the US launched a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport that targeted and killed him while purportedly on his way to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi in Baghdad.
Are we witnessing his dry bones coming to life? Time shall tell.
In the interim, the war must be stopped. A ceasefire must be negotiated and a humanitarian corridor opened.
Summarily, the question asked earlier remains unanswered. Israel will tell you that they are fighting terrorism.
The Americans will regurgitate the same rhetoric. Hamas will argue and say that they have an equal right to defend its people from attack just like Israel.
Service delivery within the Gaza strip has been affected by these Israeli bombs.