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Political and military events are overlapping and questioning notions, dynamics and taxonomies. The Gaza war and its immediate bloody antecedents have elicited a set of political, strategic and ethical controversies that question notional equivocations, sequential linearity and clear-cut scenarios.
The terror attack on South Israel is a blatant declaration of war based on a clear representation of its immediate outcomes, impact on the Israeli and Jewish psyche, and backlash within various Islamic and emerging strategic and ideological power blocs. What they have failed to foresee are the adverse reactions, their chain effects and the short-sightedness of this whole conjecture. However expedient and spectacular was the attack, the planners underestimated its disastrous humanitarian and urban costs and consequences, the irreversible political dynamics it propelled, and the flimsiness of the political and military projections.
The declaration of war has inevitably led to an official act of war by Israel which straddles the entire strategic network weaved by the Iranian power player. The Gaza war episode is part of an integrated strategic platform that has been building over three decades and whose obvious threats have been underrated and overlooked by the ultranationalist and messianic coalition in Israel, at a time when internal divisions and security hazards were exponentially increasing, and the peace prospects fading away from the horizon. The genocidal nature of the terrorist attacks left Israel with very few choices on how to deal with their dire consequences and ideological subtexts.
The withdrawal from Gaza in 2007 was part of territorial concessions that Israel was willing to consider as part of an overall normalization plan which proved to be wishful thinking. Gaza was hijacked by radicals as a counter-strategic platform to challenge the Palestinian Authority and derail the Oslo dynamics while perpetuating the Palestinian dependency and instrumentalization by Arab and Muslim power politics. The cumulative deficiencies of the Palestinian Authority, the resurgence of Palestinian radicalism and its Islamization, and the countervailing radicalization of Israeli politics and its judaïsation generated common distinctive hallmarks: heightened strategic security concerns, ideological polarization, zero-sum politics, further colonies, resumption of violence and terrorism, stringent stigmatization and recoil of multilateral diplomacy. They have jointly led to the re-institutionalization of enmity, the unraveling of a whole legacy of mediation, international resolutions and peace agreements, peace-making narratives, and revived security concerns on both sides.
The nihilistic turn of events unveiled major miscalculations on the part of Hamas, highlighting its dismal military ineptitude and moral depravity and the cynical political calculations of the Islamic regime in Teheran. The Iranian plot was predicated on the presumption of the “unified battlefields,” the cementing of regional and international power blocs and the recast of left-wokeism around Palestinian radical militancy. On their side, Israelis and Jews, by and large, woke up to the resuscitated historical traumas of the Holocaust, antisemitism and pervasive ontological insecurity. However challenging the Gaza war and its metonymies, Israelis have no choice but to engage in a war of necessity whose goal is to destroy Hamas military infrastructures, dismantle the human shields strategy and manage their interfaces. The strategic, ethical and operational challenges are part of the overall plot and cannot be disassembled, and the nihilistic nature of the terrorist attack is no coincidence. Israel is compelled to oversee the military defeat of Hamas, confront Hezbollah, various Iranian militias and Houthi rebels on a strategic continuum extending between the Near East and the Southern end of the Arabian peninsula (Yemen and the Bab el-Mandeb strait), and deal, jointly with its nemeses, with the risks of a generalized war. The Iranian grandstanding and ideological rambling is going awry with the negative military developments in Gaza, and the imperiled political and military gains garnered throughout the last three decades.
We should never overlook the fact that the strategic purview of this attack and its incidence on the mapping of the new Cold War coordinates. The topical nature of the terrorist assault cannot conceal its ultimate geopolitical and ideological motives: the derailment of the regional normalization process engaged by the US-Saudi joint venturing, the completion of the Abraham accords and the restart of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Iran’s scheme encountered multiple obstacles that betray basic misperceptions, let alone ideological and strategic scotomes: the determination of the Israeli retaliation, the head-on confrontation with the Iranian security threats, the support of the transatlantic community assorted with prudence, proportionality and respect of the Geneva convention stipulations, the disintegration of the BRICS and the new Cold War power blocs with India’s alignment to Israel’s counter-fighting, the distancing of China, the confrontation with Russia and the weakened standing of its offensive politics, the solidification of the European strategic limes with the endorsement of the Ukraine and Moldavia candidacy to the community, the enduring military support to Ukraine despite its imponderables, the obvious distancing of Arab politics from Iranian power politics and the counter-mobilization against the ideological obfuscations of left-wokeism in academia, media and public debates.
The October 7th, 2023 genocidal massacres and the tragic plight of Gaza and civilian Palestinians dragged onto the surrogate battlefields are the outcomes of an intentional criminal framing that merely instrumentalized the impasses of the conflict and its compounded destructive effects. Tragically enough, the truce cannot be enforced unless Hamas is defeated and the strategic demarcation lines are definitely set at the regional level. The cynical and criminal miscalculations of Iranian power politics and their muddled frontlines are part of the strategic counterplot and should be dealt with as such. Nonetheless, Israelis and Palestinians should put an end to their everlasting procrastination insofar as moral reciprocity, mutual acknowledgment, dual statehood and strategic security, there is no more room for waffling and indefinite deferred decision-making.
These cycles of violence should come to an end and usher in a new dynamic of diplomatic engagement, conflict resolution, confidence-building measures, and integrated security and economic strategizing. The completion of the Abraham Accords, the US-Saudi normalization and stabilization plan for the region is inevitably on a collision course with the Iranian regime and Islamist warmongering politics, ideological polarization and civil war projections. The defeat of Hamas or its deliberate surrender is the shortcut to end the war travails and cumulative tragedies. The takeover of moderates, on both Israeli and Palestinian sides is imperative if we were to oversee an end to this outlasting war and its deleterious consequences.
