By Ali Karbalaei
Israel has historically excelled in turning crises into expansionist opportunities
TEHRAN- The historical process of the Arab-Israeli conflict shows the Israeli regime has always excelled in turning crises into expansionist opportunities rather than peace. That allowed the occupation to accomplish its Zionist project, which is yet to be completed.
The question is whether the regime will be able to take another step toward that mission today in Gaza?
As soon as this regime declared war on the Gaza Strip, the United States, along with most Western European governments, rushed to declare their "absolute" and "unequivocal support" for all measures taken by their "ally" to achieve a decisive victory.
These countries provided political and moral backing. The U.S. went further by providing financial support and shipping advanced weapons.
The same governments were quick to endorse Israeli propaganda campaigns that Hamas is no different to Daesh and that Operation al-Aqsa Storm was no different from the September 11 attacks.
The U.S. promoted the fake Israeli propaganda claiming that Hamas fighters had raped women and beheaded children.
The most surprising aspect is the insistence of these countries on the legitimacy of this war on Gaza based on "Israel’s right to defend itself" in accordance with the text of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which allows all member states the possibility of resorting to force in response to any attack.
It's quite a twisted logic and not at all consistent with any correct or objective reading of the text or spirit of the UN charter.
The Charter, which permits the use of force for self-defense, at the same time prohibits occupiers of other people's land resorting to the Charter to try and expand their occupation.
More importantly, the Charter also recognizes the right of all people's self-determination and future and permits national liberation movements to take up arms and liberate their occupied homeland and to enable their people to exercise their right to self-determination.
The Charter not only stipulates in more than one place the right to self-determination, but it stresses that enabling an occupied population to exercise this right is necessary and a condition to achieve this noble goal.
People around the world have the right, in such a context, to ask who qualifies to be treated as an aggressor and who deserves to be treated as a victim.
It isn't morally and legally permissible to view the party that carries weapons in defense of a population who were uprooted from their homeland and forced to live in refugee camps as an aggressor, as the U.S. and western European governments claim, while viewing the occupying party that practices settlement expansion, ethnic cleansing, and racial discrimination as the victim.
When the occupier uses force to perpetuate its occupation of the lands of others, it is not permissible at all to consider its behavior in this case as a "legitimate act of self-defense".
It is absurdly illogical to label Hamas that gained the confidence of the majority of the Palestinian people in the 2006 Gaza elections as a "terrorist entity".
The international community has a legally binding duty to deal with Hamas as an integral part of a broader Palestinian liberation movement that includes other factions with diverse orientations.
Although it is recognized that the Operation al-Aqsa Storm led to the commission of violations prohibited under international law, due to acts that affected unarmed settlers, no one has the right to overlook the crimes the Israeli regime has committed and is still committing, against Palestinian civilians since the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948 until today.
If the international community has overlooked all the massacres committed by the occupation regime over the past 75 years, is it permissible for the international community to also overlook the violations committed by the current Israeli government?
Formed less than a year ago, it has broken the record for violations of international law and exceeds records of any other government since the establishment of the entity.
In just 9 months, the number of settlements this government built, homes it demolished, Palestinians it kidnapped at gunpoint and threw into prisons, attacks committed by settlers, and incursions into holy places that these settlers carried out under the guard of Israeli armed forces as well as the public calls to demolish al-Aqsa Mosque and Judaizing Islam's third holiest site are a horrifying record.
The Operation al-Aqsa Storm was a reaction long in the waiting against Israeli extremism and terror, something the international community, especially the Security Council, failed to halt, let alone restrain.
The Israeli government has tempted its current war cabinet to persist in committing the most horrific types of violations, and so it must bear the responsibility for what happened on October 7 and what may happen in the future.
It is impossible for any neutral observer with any degree of impartiality and integrity to view the war launched by the Israeli occupation against Gaza as an act of "legitimate self-defense".
Even if the West considers that the Israeli response, which began about three weeks ago and has not yet been completed, is a reaction to the al-Aqsa Storm, it is recognized that every war, whether defensive or aggressive, has limits determined by international law.
It is necessary to take into account the symmetry between the size of the force used when exercising action or reaction.
According to the Israeli sources, the al-Aqsa Storm led to a loss of life totaling approximately 2,000 people, including dead, missing, and prisoners, and about 5,000 wounded, including about 1,200 disabled soldiers. It also led to the destruction of the military division responsible for the Gaza Strip.
All of which are indicators that suggest the main goal of the Palestinian resistance was primarily military, although at the same time it led to many casualties among settlers, who are, from a Palestinian point of view, usurpers, squatting on Palestinian land.
As for the Israeli response, which is still ongoing, it has killed more than 7,000 people, most of them children and women, and completely levelled an unprecedented number of residential zones in the Gaza Strip, while forcing hundreds of thousands from the north of Gaza to be displaced in the south.
The brutal Israeli bombardments directed at civilians, and not Hamas fighters, are primarily intended to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip of residents and forcibly move them to the Egyptian Sinai.
The world is watching a process of genocide accompanied by forced deportation of Palestinians, all of which constitute war crimes.
Since its creation, the Zionist regime saw crises as opportunities to expand its occupation.
In 1948, Zionists took advantage of their first crisis in Palestine (when Arab armies entered the conflict to support the Palestinians) and annexed more Palestinian lands.
If the occupying regime was genuinely seeking peace, it would have exploited the armistice talks in 1949 to reach a permanent settlement.
In 1967, Zionists took advantage of the crisis from the closure of the Strait of Tiran and further expanded their illegal occupation of what remained of Palestine, in addition to the Syrian Golan and the Egyptian Sinai.
Israel had the chance once again to barter the new lands it illegally occupied in 1967 for peace treaties with Arab countries that would have allowed it to retain 78% of stolen Palestinian lands and establish a state for Palestinians that would have constituted 22% of pre-1948 Palestine, but it rejected every formula for peace.
These days, Israel is seeking to turn the crisis from the Operation al-Aqsa Storm to forcibly deport the residents of Gaza to the Egyptian Sinai, and then devote its time to the residents of the occupied West Bank and forcibly deport them to Jordan, which will practically allow it to liquidate the Palestinian issue.
The Western backing for the Zionist regime has led only to one result: pushing the regime toward more extremism to achieve its expansionist plans by completely eliminating Hamas and overthrowing its rule in Gaza.
All of this is nothing but a pipe dream as the current regional and international conditions are completely different from all the conditions that have characterized the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict throughout history.
For the first time in the history of this conflict, a Palestinian resistance movement has succeeded in breaking and overthrowing the prestige of the Israeli army in a unique military operation that the Palestinian resistance personally undertook to plan and implement in its entirety.
The Israeli army will never be able to regain its lost prestige, no matter how far it continues to take unlawful revenge on the defenseless Palestinian population.
Amid this barbaric behavior, the masks will fall off, not only from the Zionist entity but also from the West, whose era of decline has started to become clearly visible.
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