Israel shall not achieve at peace what it could not get through war

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  by Dr Amira Abo el-Fetouh

Students gather in front of Humboldt University to stage a protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza in Berlin, Germany on December 13, 2023. [Halil Sağırkaya – Anadolu Agency]

After more than 80 days of brutal and ferocious war on Gaza Strip, the Zionist entity has not achieved any of the goals it announced before the war. It hasn’t been able to eliminate Hamas, nor has it been able to free Israeli prisoners. Rather, it killed three of its imprisoned soldiers, allegedly by mistake, in addition to other prisoners it had killed in its brutal raids on Gaza Strip. Israel also failed to push the people of Gaza to flee from the violent bombardment with phosphorus bombs to Egypt’s Sinai, thus it hasn’t achieved the goal of displacing people from Gaza.

The Zionist enemy has lost hundreds of its officers and soldiers. Many Western military experts have already declared the military ground campaign a failure and that the scale of human losses exceeded all Israeli expectations. Under the weight of painful resistance strikes and the destruction of hundreds of tanks, Israel was forced to withdraw the Golani Brigade after 60 days of fighting during which it suffered huge losses. Isn’t this a clear admission of defeat?

Most Zionist analysts and former military leaders are talking to the Hebrew media about Hamas’s victory and that continuing the war will inflict heavy losses on Israel. They hold Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responsible, saying that his stubbornness and arrogance caused the invincible army’s image to be destroyed on a world stage, its prestige to be lost and the Israeli economy to collapse. This is in addition to the panic and dread in which the Israeli people live under the weight of Qassam rockets and the pressure being exerted by the prisoners’ families on the right-wing government to bring back their sons. Demonstrations against Netanyahu are sweeping all the occupied Palestinian territories and gathering in front of his house demanding his departure and trial.

The Zionist enemy has also been defeated in the media. In fact, a broad range of Israeli circles acknowledge this defeat. Israel has falsely claimed that Hamas stores its weapons in tunnels under hospitals to justify its crimes of bombing hospitals. The American newspaper Washington Post conducted a lengthy investigation into this matter and concluded that “Israel’s evidence does not rise to the level of showing that Hamas used Al-Shifa Hospital as a centre for command and control.” This is an important and serious testimony that clears Hamas of Zionist slander.

Add to the above the weakness of Western international support for this war compared to its support for Israel in all its previous wars since the 1948 war. This was clearly evident in the votes of 13 countries in the Security Council and the UK’s abstention, the country that established this Zionist entity. This indicates a political failure whose effects will emerge successively, and which is a continuation of a trend that is gradually growing. Meanwhile, at the popular level in the whole world, the number of demonstrators has multiplied by thousands all over the world in support of Gaza and condemnation of the dirty Israeli war. For the first time, the Zionist entity has lost international sympathy, and Western public opinion has seen the Israeli state for what it is. It is not a state, and its fighters cannot be called an army. Israel is now left with governments that realise its importance as a Western settlement in the region, that is, an agent of the old colonists, and US President Joe Biden said it: If Israel did not exist, we would have invented it.

With no permanent ceasefire, Palestinians in Gaza inch closer to death – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/Middle East Monitor]

There is no doubt that the Zionist entity has lost the war on the military, political and media levels and now it is seeking, through the back doors, Qatari mediation in a new round of negotiations to end the war in a way that does not disgrace it, and so it says it is ready to agree to a humanitarian truce. Netanyahu, the criminal, is convinced that achieving the war goals is not possible, and because Hamas is victorious, it must dictate its terms. The response came quickly from the resistance saying it will not enter negotiations until the Israeli army withdraws completely from Gaza with a permanent ceasefire. This is an important development. In the first truce, the resistance was in favour of extending the ceasefire one day after the other, but the balance of power has now changed and is completely in favour of the resistance. Israel has lost for the first time and its entity is in danger, and this is what greatly bothers the Zionists.

From this standpoint, Netanyahu must swallow the poison and stop the fighting to begin a round of indirect negotiations with Hamas. Therefore, we urge the resistance to keep the ceiling of its demands high and not be content with only exchanging prisoners and emptying Israeli prisons of Palestinian detainees. The plight of the people of Gaza may push the victorious resistance to exaggerate in humility. It may get preoccupied with rebuilding what was destroyed and removing harm from the people, so it may provide concessions while the West does not provide much in the reconstruction process. It is a betrayal of the blood that was spilled, the lives that were lost, the souls that starved, and even the victory that was achieved, for the situation to remain as is and for the collaborating Palestinian Authority to remain as the one that rules and the one who negotiates and speaks on behalf of the Palestinians. It is absurd that the price for all this destructive war is only the release of all the Palestinian prisoners. Although that is important, of course, it is a small price in comparison to the numbers of martyrs and wounded and the terrible destruction in Gaza, which included more than two-thirds of the buildings in the north. Western experts and analysts speaking to the Washington Post said that Israel has inflicted on Gaza destruction that has not been parallel this century.

The resistance must dictate its conditions in proportion to the Zionist crimes and the scale of the resistance’s unprecedented victory in the history of Israel. It is not permissible for the resistance to have the price of victory be the same as the price of steadfastness as in the past. The siege must be lifted and the crossings opened. Victory has no value unless Israel and its allies pay the price for their crimes, and the Zionists and the West must understand that they will not obtain through negotiations what they could not achieve in war; if they could not achieve it in war, they will not be able to achieve during times of peace.