Israeli and American officers, like a lot of their supporters, have known as the Hamas incursion on Saturday “Israel’s 9/11”, drawing parallels between Hamas and al-Qaeda and between Israel and the USA.
“If the USA skilled what Israel is experiencing,” President Joe Biden stated, “our response can be swift, decisive and overwhelming.” The “brutality” and “the bloodthirstiness” of Hamas, he added, “brings to thoughts the worst rampages of ISIS”. He even repeated the sensationalist and unsubstantiated claims that Hamas fighters had “raped ladies” and “beheaded infants”.
Main European capitals bolstered the false analogy of 9/11 and the damaging notion of “us vs them” by draping their most iconic buildings in Israeli flags as if to declare “they’re all Israelis” identical to they declared with disastrous penalties that “they’re all Individuals” after the 9/11 assaults on New York and Washington, DC.
Like a well-rehearsed orchestra, Western powers condemned the “unprovoked” assaults on civilians and voiced their unconditional help for the fanatical Israeli authorities to do no matter it takes so long as it takes to “defend” its individuals in opposition to “evil”.
The diploma of hysteria and the hypocrisy are as mind-boggling, as they’re reckless.
Among the photographs from Israel are little question grotesque however the photographs from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and so on have been no much less horrific. Twenty years of Western and Israeli wars within the Center East have led to not hundreds, however thousands and thousands of Arab and Palestinian casualties
Within the eyes of the West, it appears, Israel has a “responsibility” to defend its individuals, however the Palestinians haven’t got the precise to guard themselves as if they’re individuals of a lesser god. Israel seemingly additionally has a proper to defend and even increase its occupation and apartheid regime, however the Palestinians haven’t any proper to specific their frustration or battle for freedom and justice after seven many years of dispossession, oppression and siege.
For European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen, “Russia’s assaults in opposition to civilian infrastructure, particularly electrical energy, are warfare crimes. Slicing off males, ladies, kids of water, electrical energy are acts of pure terror.” However Israel doing the identical in opposition to Palestinians in Gaza is reliable self-defense! That is the very embodiment of hypocrisy and double customary.
To be clear, Hamas is an Islamist group that has routinely used and remains to be utilizing controversial and unsavoury strategies to additional its agenda. However like different anti-colonial actions that employed questionable strategies, it’s before everything, a nationalist motion that lengthy condemned al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS), and by no means staged an assault exterior historic Palestine. Not like al-Qaeda, Hamas has received a majority in parliament in Gaza’s final legislative elections in 2006, and after surviving an American orchestrated coup it has acted because the de facto authorities of the besieged strip.
Above all else, the hysterical comparisons between Hamas’s operation on Saturday and 9/11 are reckless and totally harmful, for they serve to fabricate the case for a wider warfare, as we witnessed previous to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq on false pretences. Such comparisons assist demonise Palestinian leaders and dehumanise Palestinian individuals, paving the way in which for a genocidal warfare, beginning in Gaza. To make sure, demonising different leaders is ugly politics, however dehumanising a complete individuals, is racism, pure and easy.
In that approach, this false and hysterical analogy quantities to a inexperienced gentle for Israel to observe up its illegal siege and indiscriminate bombardment of the Gaza Strip with an much more horrifying land invasion that might devastate the greater than two million Palestinians residing there.
Certainly, after failing to decrease Hamas with 4 wars and a 17-year-long siege, the Israeli authorities now appears decided to annihilate Hamas, each politically and militarily, by means of an invasion and reoccupation of Gaza.
For that objective, it has already recalled some 350,000 army reservists and amassed 100,000 troopers in addition to a variety of tanks on its southern border. In the meantime, the makes an attempt to create a humanitarian hall to ship individuals from Gaza into the Sinai to maintain them “secure” and to make it simpler for Israel to invade are sure to be rejected by Palestinian and Arab leaders alike as not more than a pretext to expel Palestinians from their homeland, once more.
The anticipated floor invasion of densely populated Gaza with no escape routes offered for the individuals who reside there, is sure to trigger tens or a whole bunch of hundreds of casualties amongst Palestinians over weeks or months of preventing, particularly if, as anticipated, Israel makes use of heavy weapons and extreme bombardment to attempt to scale back casualties amongst its personal forces. Certainly, Israel’s looming invasion of Gaza is sure to show into essentially the most bloody city battle because the Second World Battle an armageddon with disastrous regional implications.
Even when Israel efficiently reoccupies the Gaza Strip, albeit at a excessive price, and dismantles the army and administrative infrastructure of Hamas, what then? Will it merely hand it over to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah after Israelis paid a excessive value for taking it over, because it did up to now? Will it maintain the Gaza Strip completely, offering meals and providers to its inhabitants? Will it have the ability to finish the concept of Hamas as a resistance motion in opposition to occupation?
Israel doesn’t appear to have any solutions to those thorny questions on “the day after”. Certainly, there isn’t any telling what’s going to occur after such a genocidal invasion and occupation in Gaza, Palestine or the area usually.
There are already indicators of the warfare spilling over to the north and east, forcing, or slightly permitting, Israel to widen its circle of destruction. This might simply result in the USA and its newly deployed naval armadas being drawn into one more harmful regional warfare, as if 20 years of endlessly wars weren’t sufficient.
Israel and the USA should not repeat the identical blunders repeatedly as in the event that they realized nothing from many years of warfare, occupation and human struggling attributable to their bungles. It’s excessive time for Western powers to begin appearing like grown-ups and cease parroting Israel’s debunked lies and cliches. Make no mistake, there isn’t any army reply for the Palestine tragedy, solely a political and diplomatic answer.
Marwan Bishara is an creator who writes extensively on international politics and is broadly thought to be a number one authority on US overseas coverage, the Center East and worldwide strategic affairs. He was beforehand a professor of Worldwide Relations on the American College of Paris.
