A deepening crisis

O P I N I O N

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon under the pretext of putting an end to rocket attacks on northern Israel. Israeli troops did not withdraw from Lebanon until 2000, leaving behind the fiercest and most effective enemy Israel has had to deal with. Hizbullah, a Shiite Lebanese resistance movement, emerged out of the ashes of that invasion. Israel has failed to secure its northern borders and Hizbullah remains a serious threat to Israel.

In 2009, Israel is attacking Gaza under the same pretext and the outcome of the ongoing war on Gaza is yet to be seen. Israel may achieve its proclaimed goal of ending rocket attacks from Gaza but that is no guarantee for its security. It may be able to defeat Hamas but it will not prevent the emergence of similar groups. Hamas, like Hizbullah, is first and foremost a resistance movement. Labeling it as ‘terrorist,’ ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘militant’ does not obscure the fact that Hamas, like Hizbullah, is a product of invasions and occupations.

Gaza now can be easily described as a cage filled with refugees and their descendants. They were crammed there as a result of the 1948 war that led to the creation of the state of Israel and were later occupied by Israel in 1967. The unilateral withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza strip did not change any of their bitter realities. The withdrawal was followed by a three-year blockade that reduced Gazans to a subhuman existence, similar to that to which Iraqis were reduced in the 1990s. The blockade came partially as a punishment for the Palestinians for electing Hamas into office. As is well-known, the popularity of Hamas, like other religious movements in the Middle East, was due less to its political ideology and more to its reputation as an effective provider of social and educational services rendered to fill the void left by corrupt or absent states. In a nutshell, the Palestinians elected whom they thought would serve their needs better but those elected happen not to serve better the needs of Israel.

And the needs of Israel go well beyond just the security of its borders. Rather, Israel’s security requires so many needs. Based on that, it is not clear yet what the real objectives of the war on Gaza are. Those may be hard to determine now but it is easier to assess some of the implications of the war. For many of us following the news through life coverage from inside Gaza and from the Middle East (and not through filtered and rigorously edited news in Western media whose coverage and reportage is based more on wishful thinking than realities), the following observations can be made.

First, and as the French La Liberation has noted, support for Hamas, as a result of the current war, has increased among the Palestinians, even among those who usually support Hamas’ rival Fath. This is a natural outcome of such an atrocious attack that has claimed the lives of more than 1,000 lives so far, almost half of them children and women.

Second, Israel seems to be unwillingly gambling with the status quo in Egypt. Any change in that status quo and Israel will be biting its fingers in regret. The Egyptian regime, perhaps the most rotten and corrupt of all Middle Eastern dictatorships, has been an ally of Israel and is seen now as complicit in the war on Gaza. But Egypt is a country that is already crumbling, with Egyptians lacking basic services and basic security. A prolonged war on Gaza may very well bring the demise of the Egyptian regime.

Third, this war has further widened the gap between the Arab regimes and the people they govern. The reaction of what we call the ‘Arab street’ to the war on Gaza has been overwhelming and emotions are running very high. The Algerians have even defeated the State of Emergency and gone to the streets in protest. This war has renewed Arab (and international) support for and engagement in the Palestinian question, especially among the younger generation, as one can conclude by observing the news.

Where the region is heading after this war is not hard to predict. The Middle East’s tragedies that began with the collapse of the Ottoman order have not, sadly, reached their conclusions yet.

Amal Ghazal is an assistant professor of history at Dalhousie.