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Political observers' harrowing concern is to consider how timely this political undertaking is under the current circumstances and whether it positively impacts the future of the conflict. It’s not enough to make political statements with no questions about their opportunity and feasibility. Otherwise, the proponents are adding to the problem rather than addressing it, especially since they have failed over the last two years to offer working political mediations. Why were they unable to stop the conflict and engage the conflicting parties on alternative political courses?
The flaunted strategy of Hamas was a major obstacle since it declared, from the very beginning, its open determination to annihilate the State of Israel at any cost. The pogrom that initiated the open-ended cycles of violence was meant to elicit the strategic, political and humanitarian imbroglios that punctuated every single stage of the conflict. The nihilistic savagery, the hostage drama, the criminal human shield strategy and the erasure of the interfaces between war zones and civilian areas were all different facets of a single reality: the creation of an intractable and convoluted dynamic of violence.
The purported Arab and Western mediations have overlooked the knotty plot of the unwinding wars and sheltered behind the conventional rhetoric of the two-state solution at a time when the Hamas declaration of war questioned the very notion of a negotiated solution and the principle of the two states. Arab mediators have no excuses since they are the bankrollers of Hamas, and are fully cognizant of its strategic goals, while the Europeans are contenting themselves with principled pronouncements without any incidence on political and military realities.
There’s a credibility gap at the onset of the military dynamic that questions their motivations and ability to make sense of the unfolding events and their consequences. How can you address issues of this magnitude without any preliminary engagement to forestall the pre-programmed, disastrous political and humanitarian outcomes? Aside from the fact that this conflict dynamic is part of a broader geostrategic and political plot designed by the Iranian imperial policy, it’s no mystery that the cascading wars were part of the strategy of the “integrated operational platforms” devised by the Iranian regime. When the so-called mediators decide to overlook the geostrategic facts and deal with the issue as if it were a circumscribed geopolitical conflict with no larger strategic purview and wide reverberations, we are faced with major political and ethical riddles.
You cannot improvise a major political role and expect to be welcomed, especially when your political motivations are inherently biased and target Israel as if it were unilaterally responsible for the impasses. The conflict dynamic was meant to perpetuate itself at the crossroads between competing power politics and the intentional politics of victimization advocated by the leaders of Hamas and backed up by their regional and international relays amongst Islamists, woke leftists and the insidious Arab and Muslim autocratic handlers. One wonders how this interlocked political plot is likely to unravel if the virtual mediators fail to connect the dots and make sense of the interrelated dynamics.
The deliberately contracted conflicts are no hazard and are unlikely to be dealt with if ideological biases, blatant antisemitism and partisanship are going to frame the presumed diplomatic process from end to end. What needs to be done at this stage is to defuse the inevitable collision course structured by ideology, unilateralism, power politics and discretionary political fiat. Emmanuel Macron's political blunder is not accidental and is definitely related to the complications of the French political scene, occasioned by his domestic failures. His pointless challenging of Israel will end up eliciting a Cold War-type of conflict, where the overlapping collision dynamics are going to question French and European civil peace and drive extremism on every side to a new height.
President Macron knows quite well that his legitimacy within France is at stake, and the civil concord is at the mercy of the least clumsy movement in the wrong direction. His demeanor questions his legitimacy, moral credibility and ability to rule a country running amok under his administration. If he fails to see the various facets of the ongoing dynamics, the incoming events are likely to be a bad omen, so a reality check is mandated lest the events take a slippery turn.
Otherwise, Arab and Muslim politicians are, for once, urged to live up to their responsibilities and force a political solution on the maverick terrorist group whose apocalypticism has become highly destructive. It takes bold political steps to liberate the Israeli hostages, secure the withdrawal of Hamas from Gaza and pave the way for the takeover of a transitional governance endorsed by the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Short of this disentanglement process, conflicts are likely to sour, and the rise of extremism will come to a head.
The issue of statehood cannot be tied to the cynicism of Hamas and its Islamist handlers (Iran, Qatar and Turkey) and their proxies. The Israeli strategy that led to the destruction of the Iranian operational platforms is irreversible, and Israel and the US will never condone its rehabilitation under any pretext. Benny Gantz, in his last article (NY Times, September 24), invited political actors to overcome their ideological biases, which ascribe the perpetuation of the conflict to the personal interests of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and readjust their lenses to get a better understanding of the security and strategic issues at stake.
The retaliatory measures considered by a slew of left-leaning governments in Europe are adding to the complexities of an already complex situation. None of these hypocritical paragons of virtue have demonstrated their good faith and bothered to engage in diplomatic endeavors that aim at ending this nihilistic conflict and paving the way for a negotiated political solution addressing the historical conflict. Otherwise, the strategic data has changed, and the blackmailing politics do not seem to work. Western democracies, rather than rallying political obstructionism under the spur of their fractured political landscape and its upheavals, should restore their neutrality and work on a negotiated solution to end all wars.
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