Yet again Israel attempts to impose its will by force, and yet again it will fail, writes Ayman El-Amir* Israel has made its point in Gaza. It has demonstrated to everyone who is still in doubt that it is the warrior state that, like the hordes of the Moguls, will live by the sword. By shock and awe and the use of overwhelming firepower, Israel has killed and maimed thousands of Palestinians, destroyed a sizable part of Gaza's infrastructure, paralysing the normal functioning of life in the Strip, and dealt a punitive blow to the resistance and to its missile network. Israel has visited an atrocious version of the Warsaw Ghetto upon the Palestinians of Gaza but, like the Warsaw Ghetto story, the Israelis might be surprised by the result in the long run. What Israel sought, above all, was to punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas as their government. It wanted to send a strong message to other Palestinians that "resistance does not pay, submission may". That is why it embraced Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, because he is willing to engage in marathon negotiations that lead nowhere. By its genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has unwittingly refuelled the spirit of resistance both among the Palestinian population in their occupied land and throughout the Arab world. Unlike the vulnerable population of the Gaza Strip, Israel was under no serious threat from Hamas's missiles, fired in frustration over the slow death Israel imposed on 1.5 million inhabitants under its economic blockade. A considerable part of the tunnel-based smuggling into Gaza was made necessary by the needs of bare survival. Smuggling of arms to a people under brutal occupation and siege is incomparable with a militaristic state armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. As was the case in the failed war against Lebanon in 2006, Israel wanted to show both friend and foe that it is still the invincible military master of the region, especially now that Egypt is out of the fray and no other Arab country is a match for Israel. It was primarily the myth of invincibility that Egypt wanted to debunk by the October 1973 War. Hizbullah achieved the same in the 2006 Lebanon war. Israel, however, has never abandoned the belief that military hegemony is more rewarding for its expansionist ambitions than to settle for a just peace. While Israel was founded upon violence against Palestinian Arabs, its policy of aggression was boosted by the Bush administration's belligerent mentality and illegal invasions in the Arab and Muslim worlds. All Arab countries aside, Israel is eyeing two adversaries: the Palestinian resistance and Iran. Palestinians' resistance and commitment to their legitimate rights is a major threat to Israeli ambitions. Despite all pretence and argument to the contrary, Israel would like nothing less than to lock the Palestinian people into an American Indian-style reservation, a Bantustan they can call their independent state. The Palestinians are a grim reminder of the original crime Israel committed in 1948 and that does not want to go away. Resistance is the Palestinians' means of survival and the assertion of their identity. As a Palestinian woman survivor of genocide in Gaza put it recently, "Since Israel came into existence we have seen nothing but murder. Let them kill us one more time; we will still be here." That is Israel's worst nightmare. The rise of Iran is another nightmare. Israel's strategy of military superiority that was cracked by the October 1973 War is now facing its most serious challenge since Egypt opted out of the conflict. It is not that Iran is a direct threat to Israel, but its rise as a regional power could undermine, and thus neutralise, Israeli belligerent arrogance. It would mean that Israel would no longer have a free hand to carry out any military act in the region for whatever pretext it could claim. It will have to think twice. And that explains Israel's rabid urgings to the US to deal with Iran by curbing its rising power and blocking its support of counter-Israeli resistance in the Arab Middle East. Neutralising Israeli superiority may offer the best opportunity for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement in the same way the October 1973 War reduced the Israeli sense of invincibility and paved the way for negotiations. For decades, Israel has been killing and maiming Palestinians, infants and the elderly alike, while it lobbied and manipulated Western governments and the public about its vulnerability. If the West is serious about achieving a just and lasting Middle East peace it will have to level the field by deflating Israeli arrogance. If Western European countries and the US that created the state of Israel in the first place continue to hedge Israeli occupation and war crimes, then Arab resistance and Iran's growing strategic presence will provide the alternative. Palestinian and Arab resistance has proven more adamant and more creative since the Lebanon war. What it needs now, and probably will develop in the next stage, is the missile capacity to marginalise the murderous advantage of Israeli F-16s and killer Apache helicopters. By all indications, Western initiatives seek to freeze the Gaza situation through a ceasefire that would give Israel the upper hand and put the fundamental issue of Israeli occupation in abeyance. That is where the West has led the Middle East problem: Israeli occupation, annexation of territory and expansion of settlements has been relegated to the background and Hamas's resistance and the firing of rockets towards Israeli settlements given central stage. Arab regimes are pressured to believe that Iran, not Israeli occupation and expansion, is the primary threat to their survival. It is similar to US attempts in the 1950s to persuade Nasser that communism and not Israeli seizure of Palestinian territory should be his first priority. It is in this spirit that the US Congress has passed a resolution expressing "vigorous support and unwavering commitment to... the State of Israel" while extending condolences to the families of Palestinian and Israeli victims. The language and content betray the hand of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful Israeli lobby that no member of Congress can afford to ignore. It is an exercise in hypocrisy that glosses over the documented humanitarian crimes committed by Israel in its invasion of Gaza, based on the conventional wisdom that it is less risky to extend blind support to Israel than to criticise it. The timing of the resolution is crucial, coming a few days before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in. It seeks to steer Obama in the direction that Israel sees most fit and to proscribe his flexibility in addressing the Middle East problem. It is not that Obama has not shown enough loyalty as evidenced by his speech before AIPAC in the summer of 2008 and his subsequent visit to Israel. It is that it will be difficult for him to escape the pro-Israel paradigm set by the Zionist lobby and forced upon US foreign policy for decades. While he can count on the compliance of an array of moderate Arab rulers, he will not win "the hearts and minds" of the Arab public within whose ranks he would like to improve the US's image. For Israel, the Gaza campaign will reward it with a bitter harvest. It will reinvigorate the resistance, undermine Arab "moderates" and reconfirm the perception of the Arab people everywhere that Israel remains the Arabs' number one enemy. This is already demonstrated by the fact that 30 years after the peace treaty with Egypt, Israel is still regarded by the majority of Egyptians as the most abhorred foe, and the first strategic concern for Egyptian national security. For the Palestinians who have lived through the tragedy of the Gaza invasion, Israel will forever be the implacable enemy that came out of the Warsaw Ghetto and transferred it to the Arab world. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
