Biden scrambles to make concessions as 'Israel' collapses from within

Julia Kassem

Source: Al Mayadeen English

Tel Aviv is running short on change to buy more time out of its quickly transpiring political and entity-wide disintegration, with no cards left to play either on the battlefield or military arena.

 

On the evening of May 31, Biden urged the passage of a three-point plan to end the war, urging “Israel” to accept the multi-stage proposal for a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, prisoner exchange, and resumption of humanitarian aid to the enclave amid a six-week (though likely extended) ceasefire. His proposal not only came more as a concession to the Palestinian Resistance, even over his appeasement to Israelis, but in doing so, he matched the same 3-point ceasefire plan al-Qassam presented months before "Israel’s" invasion of Rafah. After “Israel’s” rejection and subsequent Rafah invasion, Hamas made it clear that those concessions would be the furthest it would be willing to make. On the flip side, the US and “Israel” are growing only more isolated, more defensive, more sunk into losses, and more submerged into irreversible damage at the political and military levels.

Though Biden said “Israel” had “devastated” Hamas forces over the last 8 months, the US President’s haste and urgency in urging a ceasefire was motivated by the reality of the opposite: that the Palestinian and Lebanese Hezbollah Resistance have placed occupied Palestine at the verge of liberation and "Israel" at the verge of disintegration. The Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance, even considering their escalation, have still only expended a fraction of their capacity. The Palestinian Resistance’s tunnels and infrastructure are still intact. The Zionist entity claims to have lost around 600 soldiers, though the number of soldiers and officers reported by Haaretz on the first day of Al-Aqsa Flood is much higher, therefore making evident that the real number is multiple times as high and the structural damage to its military has been irreversible.

As the Zionist entity comes to terms with the collapse of its deterrence power and reaps the fruits of its absence of strategy, the US likewise failed in its attempts to lessen the burden of Hezbollah’s Resistance operations against the Zionist entity by negotiating separate peace deals with the Lebanese Resistance group. On May 31, former Israeli soldier and Biden energy envoy Amos Hochstein again made his rounds to Beirut in futile attempts to bribe Lebanon with 12 more hours of electricity in exchange for a restoration of the pre-October 7 status quo on the Israeli-occupied Palestinian border. Hezbollah, however, has made it clear for months, in the face of myriad French and American attempts, that scaling back its pressure on the Zionist entity from the northern occupied Palestinian front completely rests on ending the war on Gaza. In his latest speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Nasrallah also hinted at the interconnected fate of Palestine with Lebanon in emphasizing why Hezbollah has entered this fight on Gaza’s side: “This battle means the future of Lebanese wealth and sovereignty, just as it is for Palestine.”

Still using just a fraction of its capabilities, Hezbollah then further took down the already disabled north of occupied Palestine, with completely unintercepted Burkan rockets and kamikaze drones resulting in nonstop fires over 30 locations across those settlements, most notably in Kiryat Shmona and the occupied Golan. All that is left, as per Israeli officials, is for Hezbollah's elite Radwan units to march right through.

Now, contrast this with the lack of vision “Israel” has for its crumbling future, let alone for the rest of this siege. Since the Zionists' threatening invasion of Rafah started, the Palestinian Resistance had ambushed, sniped, and destroyed multi-million dollar army vehicles at every turn. Right after the Zionist entity’s Rafah invasion, Hezbollah immediately ramped up its precision strikes on Israeli bases, directly and consistently hitting its targets and destroying entire soldier groupings. It was evident that as “Israel” spent months in the lead-up to the Rafah invasion boasting and threatening, Hamas and Hezbollah spent their time preparing and calculating, intensifying their attacks with scathing intensity and accuracy on both fronts.

As Hamas smoked “Israel” on the ground, Hezbollah worked to neutralize and disable “Israel’s” long-boasted air superiority. On the maritime front, Ansar Allah completely blocked the naval routes for the Zionist entity, expanding into its 4th phase of escalation, completely blocking off Zionist shipping routes, not only through the Red Sea but throughout the entire Indian Ocean as well. On May 30, in response to their support of Gaza and the Ansarallah strike-down of the 6th MQ9 $3 million US Reaper drone, the US launched an airstrike on a radio station in Hodeidah, coastal Yemen, killing 16 people and injuring scores of others. In response, Ansar Allah moved from targeting Israeli-linked commercial ships to directly damaging US aircraft carriers themselves, waging a successful attack on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Today, the occupation media admits they’ve lost control of occupied Palestine’s border with Lebanon, with returning settlers to the north of occupied Palestine becoming another impossible goal for the entity on top of its other failed objectives. Over 100,000 settlers have left occupied Palestine (Other estimates, however, report between 60,000 and 80,000), with nearly half in the northern towns confident that they won’t return. Settlers historically have been the occupation’s grounding strategy and leverage to secure control over the land “Israel” occupies. Within the first few weeks of Al-Aqsa Flood, by late October of 2023, over 28 settlements were evacuated.

Today, nearly the entire region between the Lebanese-Palestinian border and the line from Nahariya to Safad in occupied Palestine is mostly deserted. The General Director of former Israeli Prime Minister Rabin's office, Shimon Sheves, takes it a step further, saying that "Israel" has clearly lost occupied al-Jalil, admitting that “Israel's security belt with Lebanon now passes through the Amiad-Acre line."

All the while, the disintegration of “Israel” became more apparent both in terms of territory and in terms of the functioning of the occupation entity government. A Haaretz-published article, as shown in the graphic, highlights the new border thanks to Hezbollah Resistance. “Israel” in the aftermath of a potential ceasefire has no plan or course to recover the northern border of the land it occupies, with Hezbollah well on its way to establishing a new security zone.

Having had it with the occupation government's inability to return settlers, the territorial collapse began to take place alongside the internal administrative collapse within the entity. The northern occupied Palestine region Margaliot settlement recently seceded from the Zionist entity, having echoed loud complaints from both settlers and its administration for "lack of protection" from the Zionist government. In August, a month and a half before Al-Aqsa Flood, some Margaliot settlers admitted to preferring Hezbollah’s protection. Days after the Rafah invasion under the completely un-intercepted and accurate strikes waged by Hezbollah drones, leaders of northern Israeli settlements convened in “Israel’s” "Conflict Zone" forum to separate into the independently-run “State of Galilee.”

Sayyed Nasrallah reminded the Zionist entity leadership of the extent of its losses in his latest May 31 speech. In light of Israeli Security Minister Gallant and PM Netanyahu’s claims of victory and success, Sayyed Nasrallah exposed the banality of their claims, especially with empty brags about their distance on the Lebanese border in light of months’ worth of Israeli threats to invade Lebanon. Hezbollah added insult to injury in delivering blows that not only demonstrated a honed and perfected precision, but also waged close-range attacks, such as the highly impactful Lebanese Resistance strikes on the Ramya base and the Kfar Chouba hills, the decimation of the occupation’s Military 91st division headquarters, or the June 1 destruction of 769th East Brigade Headquarters in Kiryat Shmona.

The leadership of the entity, meanwhile, has never been closer to complete collapse. The fray between Netanyahu and his Security Minister Gallant has reached its breaking point, with the security chief insisting on reconciling with Washington’s consensus on the future of Palestinian rule – a comprador Palestinian government – with the Israeli PM insisting on complete Zionist rule over Gaza. An Israeli soldier in Gaza amplified these divisions in his calls for mutiny against the Israeli security minister – “change your tactics,” the IOF soldier told Gallant in a viral video also reposted by Netanyahu’s son Yair on social media –“or our military coup will show you how real Jews win.”

Meanwhile, the Zionist entity’s occupation leadership, as well as its opposition, remains in a row with Netanyahu set to reject Biden’s ceasefire deal, with Israeli opposition leader Lapid urging the PM to accept it. At the other end, far-right Zionists in the government, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich – in alignment with Netanyahu, threatened to dissolve the government altogether if the deal was passed. The Resistance itself enabled the conditions where it could even come to the negotiating table with the upper hand, with the US and “Israel” pinned into an ultimatum to either accept a proposal ultimately on the Resistance’s previously laid out terms or sink further into defeat on the battlefield.

After sustaining heavy losses in Jabalia, the Israeli army was further confronted with the realities of its impending defeat. Genocide is no longer the course to successfully impose Israeli political will upon the Palestinians by force, and the reversal of expansion and taste of defeat that first struck the entity in 2000 will quickly accelerate to “Israel’s” downfall. As Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Abu Hamza said in his latest speech, it is “the horror of attrition that will drive the enemy out of Gaza.” Tel Aviv is running short on change to buy more time out of its quickly transpiring political and entity-wide disintegration, with no cards left to play either on the battlefield or military arena.