A New Unprecedented Chapter

As we await Israel’s vengeful wrath and its punitive offensive against the people of Gaza, the next hours are likely to witness the first steps towards opening a new and unprecedented chapter in the century-old assault on Arab Palestine.

In Gaza, a relentless air campaign has released over 6000 bombs, that have killed over 750 children amongst the 2750 dead, all of whom have been subjected to a cruel and collective punishment for events they did not participate in and cannot be held responsible for.

Israel’s military assault will most likely be spearheaded by heavily armoured columns supported by combat engineers, dividing Gaza’s 360 sq. kms into separate sectors  and intended to clear the way for the Special Forces and infantry who will seek to uproot the resistance organizations, destroy their military facilities and deliver a final and decisive blow to their fighting capabilities. Although Israeli forces will try and locate Israelis held in Gaza, it is now clear that Israeli leaders are quite ready to sacrifice their lives as part of their relentless retributive campaign  

However, Israel’s real problem will begin after the initial phase of the offensive is deemed to be over. Israel’s ‘day after’ plans seem to be shrouded in confusion and wishful thinking. Even if the initial offensive brings Israel troops into the heart of Gaza, the resistance forces will be offered multiple targets for a sustained guerrilla campaign and the emergence of new post-occupation forms of resistance . Reoccupation will entail other problems: establishing control, and the need to cater for the population’s daily needs in the wake of unprecedented destruction and loss of life. It will also require a local address and mechanism of government, but it is very hard to see who will step up to take upon themselves that role—or how any local administration will have even a shred of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. It is also very hard to see any outside combination of forces will be ready to  inherit and manage the consequences of Israel actions. Should it succeed in taking over Gaza, Israel will be taking over an extraordinary burden and challenge with no comparison to anything it has faced in the past.

Israel’s military commanders and politicians have spoken of making Gaza uninhabitable and turn it into a desert, not for just today or tomorrow, but permanently ; in other words, to revive mass depopulation and the notion of transfer as Israel’s grand strategy, to be threatened or applied whenever circumstances allow not just in Gaza but potentially  in the West Bank as well.   But the fact is that, besides outright genocide, there is no feasible depopulation option in Gaza: there is nowhere for the people to Gaza to go. Egypt is not an option—Egypt has made it clear that it will not agree to host tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Sinai or be seen as complicit in Israel’s design to wipe Gaza off the map; and we know from our bitter historical experience what happens once Palestinians leave their national soil.

What may be taking shape is a redefinition of the terms of Israel’s occupation of the entire land of Palestine. Israel’s longer-term problem will be that its renewed occupation will only lead it down a new blind alley of unforeseen circumstances.

Despite the terrible images coming out of Gaza, it is worth recalling that the Strip has been the incubator for the contemporary Palestinian national movement in all its different iterations: from Fatah, to Islamic Jihad, to Hamas. Israel has tried everything in its 70 year assault on the Strip; from mowing down the unarmed refugees seeking to return to their homes and fields after 1948, to the repeated massacres of the first occupation in 1956 (now hardly remembered by the outside world), to the mass expulsions of 1967, to Sharon’s brutal ‘pacification’  campaign in 1970-71, to the era of settler occupation up to 2005, and to the endless siege and repeated bloody assaults ever since.  In all their anger and desperate to avenge their humiliation, Israeli  leaders act as if history’s bitter experience leaves no aftertaste.

The latest brutal assault may well redraw the map as Netanyahu has threatened, but not in the manner that he anticipates; rather with Israel mired in a new and terrible phase of conflict with long-term and unforeseen consequences. The Biden administration and the West’s blind and unconditional support for Israel makes them complicit in the new occupation and its crimes, and will bear heavily on relations between the West and the Palestinian and Arab peoples for decades to come. Rather than ‘normalizing and stabilizing the region’ as the so-called Abrahamic accords promised, and should Israel persist with its retributive campaign and occupation, the next phase is likely to be that of extreme turbulence, with the constant threat of a widespread regional war, and increasingly strained Israeli relations with all its Arab neighbours governments and peoples, including those with whom it has ostensibly resolved its conflict.