The first anniversary of the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel falls today. On the anniversary eve, Israel was busy still bombing the Gaza Strip, hitting a mosque it said Hamas was using for military operations, which just goes to show that regardless of what happens militarily in the region in which Israel believes it is forced to fight on seven fronts, including taking on Hezbollah with a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, only political solutions will work towards bringing long term peace.
The history of the Jewish state of Israel amid Arab lands has been punctuated with wars and incursions. So many red lines have been crossed in 75 years that the world has become inured to hearing of the shattering of peace each time a major event takes place to derail all talk of a just solution for Palestinians and Palestinian refugees and peaceful coexistence for all with Israel.
Only a thin red line separates the definitions of armed activist and a resistance fighter, and an even thinner one sets apart a terrorist and a freedom fighter. The fact is that each time a peaceful solution is worked on, as in the Camp David Accord in 1978 and the Arab League proposal in 2002 when Israel was offered normal relations with all Arab countries in return for a full withdrawal from lands it took in 1967 and the creation of a Palestinian state, a group destroys it, like the Hamas did in blowing up an Israeli hotel full of Holocaust survivors.
The Abraham Accord proposals of more recent vintage have been blown to smithereens by the October 7 incursion into Israel that has become the biggest defining moment placing not only the region under the threat of a wider conflict but also engendered fears of a world war as Iran got into the conflict by raining missiles on Israel in support of its proxies in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
It is ironical that of the 200 missiles Iran launched, only a few may have got through Israel’s Iron Dome and they managed to take the life only of a Palestinian in the West Bank. It is Iran’s encouragement of this axis of resistance and its direct interference in a war in which its territory was not invaded or threatened that has placed this conflict dangerously close to a precipice with Israel now mulling options on how to take revenge.
The deadliest imaginable price was paid by the people of Palestinian Territories for the October 7 operation as their home of the Gaza Strip was reduced to rubble, almost all its 2.5 million people displaced and well over 40,000 lives lost. And yet Israel, which would like to project itself as the protector of itself, democracy and the West, must translate its military’s tactical achievements by looking for a diplomatic solution through which its 60,000 people displaced from the north can return home.
A constant criticism of Israel’s extensive military operations to hit back at its tormentors in various militant groups is that it has had no clear exit strategy after its troops cross the borders. So long as war on many fronts against existential threats suits Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuance as the Prime Minister, there will not even be talk of peace and a political settlement that should include the much vaunted two-state principle of a self-ruled Palestine coexisting with Israel. Without that, there will only be war, destruction and death.
