How will war in the Holylands end? With a mushroom cloud or a new deal

Below is my brief analysis of the escalating conflict in Palestine

Too many folks focus tightly on one aspect of a complicated 76-year-long conflict that they fail to see or otherwise completely disregard details they judge as unimportant. I enjoy listening to the military successes of the Palestinian resistance and how many occupation soldiers they killed or wounded and how many tanks and APCs they crippled and took out of action each day. Its confidence boosting stuff, it’s never happened before in the history of Israeli Arab conflict that a small irregular force of insurgents through hit and run tactics keep the bulk of the Israeli army engaged and bogged down for nine months in a tiny sliver of a territory such as Gaza. I also want to know of the daily human rights abuses committed by Israeli soldiers, the way they treat Palestinian prisoners as human shields or the way they target Palestinian civilian neighborhoods with 2,000 pound bombs. It should all be tallied and a record should be kept no doubt. But if we think that armed struggle at this hemorrhagic rate in terms of civilians lost is a path to eventual success in the field, then I’m afraid that is delusional thinking. If we think by listing the atrocities and crimes against humanity committed daily by Israeli forces we are going to get some kind of action from either international courts of note then we are just as delusional.

 

 

First step to victory is to understand your enemy.

 

Our enemy has a serious issue, a mass delusion if you will, they firmly believe that in every generation there is always someone out for Jewish blood, for no good reason, just out to kill Jews. This is a societal delusion in Israel. They firmly believe all Palestinians want to kill all Jews. As a partial Palestinian myself I can say my people didn’t CC me with that particular memo, and several of my more nationalistic Palestinian family members can attest to not getting it either. What nonsense is this, you’d think, a paranoid delusion shared by an entire people who firmly believe that there is always someone out there who wants to get them, annihilate them, wipe them from the earth. Now granted Hitler and the Nazis did want to do that and their final solution was set in motion with typical German efficiency, but that is history, far in the past. All Palestinians ever wanted was to liberate and recover their lost land, their identity and culture, to live on their land as free people not subject to brutal military rule. The best we could hope for, I speak for myself here, is some kind of peaceful coexistence with the former enemy, but only after we get back our state, our national homeland, or at least part of what it used to be. The only ones with murderous intent were those who called themselves Zionists and came to Palestine with the intention of pushing out the indigenous people of the land and bulldozing their villages and pretending they never existed in the first place.

 

But, that is how today the majority of Israelis feel, rather firmly believe. So the problem isn’t with one Israeli government or another, nor with any political party, the problem is that all Israelis feel the same way about Palestinians and support their army’s bombing campaign in Gaza and brutal repression in the West Bank, in fact they want the army to do more, to take further “preventive” measures to ensure the perceived safety of Israel and the Israeli people. They believe in continued escalation in the use of forces against an enemy that they believe wants to kill them all, which means that ultimately the Israeli population would be more than willing for their armed forces to use nuclear weapons against Iran, the presumed puppet master moving all the strings from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq and the occupied territories.

 

This firmly held belief that Israelis must always overwhelm their enemy with ever greater use of force and resort to ever escalating brutality means that conventional armed conflict, even a guerrilla war is not the answer, nor can it ever be as long as Israel has options and nonconventional means with which to counter and the willingness to use them. What use is a liberated land that is burned and poisoned with radiation, assuming the use of small tactical nuclear devices may at some point be considered. The answer is no one comes out a winner here. The only long term strategy to defeat Israel is economic and financial pressure and the dismantling of its complex system of friends and allies all around the world that support and supply the Zionist entity. That is the true long game. This hot war must stop now before both sides do something they will regret and take a position they cannot back down from.

 

It is important to understand what motivates and moves the Israeli enemy, now so many generations have been born on the land we claim for ourselves, so many have been raised there and had ideas put in their heads about their “enemy”, who we are and what we are prepared to do. It is important to understand our enemy beyond the kneejerk stereotyping and oversimplification of the other side that so many on the side of Palestinian rights often resort to. A simple aggressive message that paints the Israelis in an unflattering light is tempting to promote. Showing the Israelis in their full quirky complexity makes them less easy to hate, and maybe more relatable in a crazy mental asylum resident kind of way. (Yes, they are all crazy!)

 

So while I will never lose sight of who my enemy is and what he is, I am not so proud and stubborn or arrogant as to advocate war without end, in fact, had I been in charge I might be willing to agree to a short break in fighting instead of a total and final ceasefire. If I am confident of victory, then a break would allow for the dust to settle and the fog of gun smoke to clear, give civilians some relief even if short lived, and let the diplomats have another go at it. There is no doubt Israel has been badly bruised and bloodied and weakened, but as long as they are mobilized for the daily fight, there is little opportunity for any political awakening within Israel and for the possible emergence of a new current in Israeli political life that would advocate a more rational response and a different course in response to obvious Palestinian determination to win back their country no matter the sacrifice.