How will it end? In Rafah, one of the most lacerating tragedies of the contemporary world takes place day after day after months of massacres and massacres: the 1,200 Israeli deaths on 7 October, the 35,000 Palestinians, 70 percent of whom are women and children, Jewish hostages. including no one really knows how many are still alive. It is a question that everyone asks, even the most indifferent because it is clear that from here, as from the Ukrainian front, our future will emerge and the way in which we will be perceived as a credible Western civilization in the South of the world.
The situation in these hours appears to be in a distressing and increasingly catastrophic stalemate for the Palestinians.
From a humanitarian and pure survival point of view. He continues to die, with and without bombs: hunger and disease, as well as the steel of bullets, are enough to eliminate the Palestinians and reduce them to ghosts in the midst of the rubble of Gaza. It is a material and moral degradation that points directly to their ability to resist, to the very idea that they can exist as a people and as a nation. That’s why they call it genocide.
It is not a technical or legal definition – that is under examination by international institutions – it is the reality of the facts, it is a political judgment that shakes, or should shake, consciences. We negotiate and fight while waiting for an Israeli military offensive or a ceasefire, as if this new creeping massacre, conducted in suspension, were the natural state of things. But the feeling is that none of the protagonists on the field, from Netanyahu to Hamas, care that much about the victims. They are playing a different game, that of political survival. First Bibi Netanyahu who, as we have been repeating for months, sees war as the only way to stay in power.
But is it exactly like this? It is largely so, yet perhaps the situation is more complicated, the choice less clear-cut than it seems: either war or leaving the scene. In reality, Netanyahu – caught between two fires, the extremist right and Biden’s pressure, as Michele Giorgio wrote yesterday – aims to manage the war but also a possible ceasefire which, given the precedents of recent decades, is never definitive.
The state of war in the Palestinian territories is perpetual: every day, for half a century, Israeli governments have waged war, seized Arab land, erected walls, blocked roads, eliminated the most basic rights, and stifled freedom of movement. and of thought: this is a colonialist state that has implemented an unsustainable condition of apartheid. The ultimate goal is to expel the Palestinians, not to make peace with them and to live in two states. This is why what is underway is a macabre and precarious negotiation with respect to the goals of this government and what Zionism has become in the hands of the most radical and extremist parties.
In reality, the Israeli prime minister has been in power for twenty years, a sort of Arab raìs, in this case Jewish, confirmed by flurry of elections, who maneuvers the levers of power with corruption and has manipulated domestic and international public opinion for decades , including anti-Semitism, as US Senator Bernie Sanders, a Democrat and Jew, underlined. He has a short-term and not so distant goal: to overcome the American elections in November where if Trump were to win things would certainly be better for him than with the current American administration which he has treated as a sort of doormat.
Trump is the one who recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state against every UN resolution, the Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan occupied since 1967, he is the mediator of the Abraham Accords with the Arab monarchies where a possible Palestinian state could be buried. Biden inherited this “package” by accepting a vision of the world so short-sighted and unsuccessful that a few days before October 7, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared that «the Middle East region is calmer today than it has ever been over the last two decades.”
The editorial team recommends:
Concern for Rafah, Biden stops sending weapons
And this is how Biden and his men fell into the trap of Gaza, allowing themselves to be continually blackmailed, with an administration in full electoral campaign and declining in consensus to the point of giving Israel billions of dollars in military aid, to then arrive at the current blockade on bomb deliveries to Tel Aviv which appears to be merely a clumsy attempt to save face.
On the other side there is Hamas which obviously will not disappear with the incineration of Gaza. The Islamic movement was able to get the ball rolling on the Israeli side even though the US has now asked Qatar, where they have a military base, to eliminate its presence. But doing so would mean antagonizing the Muslim Brotherhood that Qatar has always protected. It means entering into friction with Iran and its allies who still focus on Hamas which even at the time of the Syrian civil war had sided against Assad.
The so-called “axis of resistance”, as Tehran and the Shiite militias Hezbollah call it, is feared by Israel but even more so by the Arab states, inert in the face of the massacre in Gaza. Like Europe, not even they have put the shadow of a sanction on Israel. And they too must ensure their survival. So how will it end? It will not end, not even this time, with this macabre and precarious negotiation.
