Israel In Gaza: No End In Sight To The War To End All Wars

One year is a long time in a war. When Hamas breached Israeli defences on October 7, killing around 1,200 people and taking over 250 nationals hostage, Palestinians, long used to daily humiliation from a repressive and vastly superior army, rejoiced. It was unthinkable that a non-state actor like Hamas could take on the might of the Israeli state and that the country’s much admired intelligence system (Shin Bet, Mossad and army intelligence) could be caught napping. There was celebrations not just among Palestinians but in the mosques and bazaars across the Arab world.

For the people of Israel it was a physical and psychological blow, something they did not expect under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s watch. Netanyahu's stand on Palestinian "terrorists" has always been clear—kill them all. At one time, he is alleged to have played footsie with Hamas to ensure that factional fights among the Palestinian groups would weaken the movement. He often boasted while appealing for votes that Israelis could breathe easy when he was in power. October 7 was Benjamin Netanyahu’s darkest hour.

Israel got into action two days later with Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announcing the complete blockade of Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he said. Netanyahu hammered in the point with a  Biblical reference. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” the PM said in a public address at the start of the invasion. Sheryl Ono, a Jewish writer and editor recalled the story in the Medium Daily Digest.

The reference to Amalek in the Hebrew Bible has great significance for religious nationalists in Israel, both within the military and outside. According to the Bible, Amalek was a tribe that attacked the Israelites. The God of the jews commanded Israeli king Saul to wipe then out, saying no one should be spared, neither women nor infants. Saul killed the Amaleks but going against God, he spared just one man. Later, his descendent attacked the Jews in Persia. The message was clear to Israeli soldiers: Don’t spare anyone.

Within a year, Israel has nearly razed Gaza to the ground, killed many Hamas leaders, and has taken out Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah along with his top commanders. Netanyahu in his address to the people after Nasrallah’s killing boasted: "There is nowhere in Iran or the Middle East beyond the reach of the long arm of Israel, and today you know how true that is." "I say to the Ayatollah's regime: whoever beat us, we will beat them," he said, the arrogance in the statement quite obvious. Now, Lebanon is going the way of Gaza with Israeli planes relentlessly attacking civilian areas with impunity in the name of fighting terrorism. Israeli soldiers have begun a ground invasion into Lebanon.

Israel has dealt a devastating blow to Iranian proxies in the region by taking out the top leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas; adding insult to injury, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a government guest house in Tehran where he had come to attend the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian.

After all this humiliation, and especially with the killing of Nasrallah, Iran had to react. It did exactly that on October 1 by launching nearly 180 ballistic missiles into Israel. Israel, and US forces firing from destroyers parked in nearby waters, intercepted the missiles and the damage was minimal. What form and shape Israel’s counter strike will take is not clear.

With the success of the military campaign, some Israelis are now publicly seeking a regime change in Iran. Israel and the US are in talks on how best to respond to Iran. There is discussion on destroying Iran’s oil infrastructure and crippling its economy further. No one knows what Netanyahu is planning and whether the US will be able to stop him from striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for US President, has called for destroying Iran’s nuclear facility. Netanyahu, a close friend of Trump, has for long been wanting to do that.

Yet, at this hour of triumph in its military campaign, Israel has lost the moral ground it had after October 7. Across the world, especially in the Global South and among young people in the US, Europe and Africa, there have been protests against Israel’s conduct of the war in both Gaza and Lebanon. South Africa has dragged Israel to the International Criminal Court at The Hague on charges of genocide. American campuses have been rocked by protests this summer calling for an end to the war. Young people are appalled at the Israeli Defence Force’s brutality and the humanitarian crisis in both Gaza and Lebanon. Israel has flouted every rule of war mandated by the Geneva Convention with impunity with the US firmly by its side. The call for a ceasefire by the rest of the world has had little impact on Netanyahu and his far-right Cabinet ministers.

The initial aim of Israel’s military campaign was to break the back of Hamas and rescue the hostages. A year down the road, more than 41,000 Palestinians are dead—among them 16,000 children, more than 800 doctors and medical workers, and 174 media persons. Gaza is now almost uninhabitable and Hamas has been considerably weakened. Yet many Israeli hostages remain in Gaza, their condition unknown. Families of those in captivity have been holding daily protests imploring the government to rescue their loved ones. But having destroyed Gaza, Israel now wants to secure its border with Lebanon in the north. Missile and rocket fire from Hezbollah had led to the evacuation of around 60,000 Israeli civilians from the north. The army action is to return these internally displaced people to their homes and ensure that Hezbollah's capacity to take aim at them is permanently smashed. It is going about making the border areas in Lebanon unliveable. But the ground invasion, with close air support, has also led to the death of at least eight IDF soldiers. Hezbollah may be down and without their top leadership, but committed fighters are continuing their attacks.

"We are still in the beginning of this confrontation. Hezbollah is not a small organisation. It has a huge presence and structure on the political level, the social level. and military level. They received a heavy blow and now they are trying to recover. Once this happens, and most probably it will happen soon, we will witness a very bloody phase of the conflict,’’ says Istanbul-based Mohammad Makram Balawi, the director general of the League of Parliamentarians for Al-Quds, a pro-Palestinian group.

There is widespread support for the war in Israel, despite protests from families of the hostages. But even this section wants the war to continue once the remaining hostages are released. “Netanyahu relies on two main pillars: the existential fear ingrained in the Israeli consciousness that if Israel loses its military superiority, it loses its right to exist (a classic colonial perspective); and a deep hatred of Arabs within Israeli society, whose political culture ignores the killing of Palestinians and Arabs, and is willing to take disproportionate and brutal steps with no self-criticism,” writes Abed Abou Shhadeh, a Jaffa-based political activist in a column for the Middle East Eye.

Netanyahu knows that the time is right to take on Israel's enemies and redraw the contours of West Asia. The US has a lame duck President in place at the moment and Netanyahu has cocked a snook at Joe Biden over and over again. Moreover, the powerful Jewish lobby spends millions funding pro-Israeli lawmakers—both Democrat and Republican. In a close race, which pundits are predicting, Biden will not wish to risk taking a stand against Israel, giving Donald Trump an edge over Kamala Harris, the Democrat presidential nominee.

While Netanyahu’s endgame is not known, many in the region believe that Israel wants to occupy Gaza and drive Palestinians out to the Sinai desert in Egypt. This has been the Zionist dream since 1947 and Netanyahu and his hardline supporters think that the time is just right to push for the Zionist dream of a greater Israel promised in the Bible.

Netanyahu and the army generals are in a triumphalist mode at the moment and are inclined to believe that they can take on Iran or any other country in the region. The support for Netanyahu is growing by the day but many Israelis are appalled how jews familiar with their own history of suffering under Hitler could turn into tormentors.

"Israel is turning, with alarming speed, into a country that lives on blood. The daily crimes of the occupation are already less relevant. Over the past year, a new reality of mass killing and crimes of an entirely different scale has emerged. We are in a genocidal reality,’ ’Gideon Levy, a respected Israeli columnist wrote in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.

Israel is in no mood for a diplomatic solution. Netanyahu’s "dost" Narendra Modi should repeat the advise he gave to Vladimir Putin, that this is not the era of war, referring to Russia’s war on Ukraine.