The surprise multi-front attack by Hamas terrorists on Israel on the 50th anniversary of Yom Kippur war, and Israeli security and intelligence agencies having caught off guard, this time as well, is a premonition foretold.
Ironically, it comes at a time when leading Israeli media as well as academia, from Haaretz to Jerusalem Post, are busy analysing unheeded five decades old lessons, and the elusive quest for peace.
This eerily brings to mind the Hegel-Marx remark about history repeatedly swinging between the tragic and the farcical.
Iron swords
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “avenge” the killing of innocent civilians while defence minister Yoav Gallant said that ‘Hamas has made a grave mistake by launching a war on the Israeli state’.
Reactions from the neighbouring Arab states demonstrate the rifts in the region where there’s no salve for old wounds other than letting them fester. The vicious circle of grievance, rage, violence, and blood-letting repeats endlessly here.
While Egypt and Jordan have called for “calm, restraint, and respect for international law”, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, have laid the blame solely on Israel, and compared the carnage by Hamas militants to a revolutionary uprising of the oppressed – borrowing worn-out jargon and ad nauseam cliches from moth-eaten and mildewed Marxist playbooks.
Oil-rich Qatar, host of the recent FIFA World Cup and third largest shareholder in Volkswagen, the world’s biggest automaker, says, “Israel alone bears the responsibility for the current escalation due to its ongoing violations of the rights of the Palestinian people”.
It is noteworthy that Doha has been the political base of Hamas since 2012.
Walking the tightrope between inflamed public sentiments and diplomatic necessities, Saudi Arabia has called for a ‘two-state solution’, while UAE presses for ‘immediate ceasefire’ and ‘exercising restraint’.
1973 redux
The 1973 conflict unalterably changed the configuration of Middle East as well as dynamics of global energy politics. Endless queues at gasoline pumps in the USA due to embargo on crude export became a common sight.
Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, went from being an implacable foe of Tel Aviv to resolving differences after recognising the futility of mutually destructive conflicts, needles mayhem, and pyrrhic gains.
Israel, on her part, honorably returned Sinai to Egypt, which was annexed along with Golan Heights, Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem following the Six Day War of 1967 in which combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were thoroughly routed.
Arab demoralisation in the wake of this defeat was such that it led to public disillusionment with the regnant ‘secular nationalist’ strongman leaders. Support for Islamism was galvanised, as Israel-inflicted humiliation and defeat got interpreted as divinely ordained punishment.
WATCH: #Israel helicopter was seen targetting a #Hamas terror camp near the #Gaza Strip.
The strike happened in the Israeli territory of Zikim.
Israel Defense Forces have intensified air strikes across the Gaza Strip after reports surfaced that Iran is supplying ammunition to… pic.twitter.com/wEErowC1eh
— The New Indian (@TheNewIndian_in) October 10, 2023
Sadat, on his part, showed steely resolve as well as statesmanship, eschewing hollow Nasserite rhetoric of Pan Arabism and quest to conquer Jerusalem, in favour of peace and pragmatism.
Then Israeli PM Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat shared the Nobel Peace Prize five years later in 1978. Sadat addressed the Knesset to thundering applause. For a brief while, he was a man of the moment, drifting Egypt away from the Soviet orbit, and committing sort of a heresy by hedging his bet on the USA in the Cold War days.
But to be a peacemaker and a pragmatist in the Middle East is very dangerous. While watching a military parade in Cairo and taking salutes from officer corps, Sadat was assassinated by a group of military conspirators.
A polyglot Egyptian surgeon who was jailed as a part of the plot later fled to Afghanistan to fight alongside Mujahideen. This was Ayman Al Zwahiri, the deputy of Osama Bin Laden, who became chief of Al Qaida following his death.
Hamas strain
The radical Islamist Hamas, which uses civilians as human shields, brooks no dissent. It uses schools as ammo stockpiles, enforces sharia laws, harasses women and minorities, and has killed moderate opposition from Fatah and other Palestinian Nationalist groups. The group has its origin in the same virulent strain. It is nothing, but naked terror machinery.
The Preamble to the Hamas Charter reads, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam invalidates it, just as it invalidated others before it”. It fantasizes a millenarian apocalyptic conflict.
Latest blitzkrieg bravado on its part will inspire Islamist terrorists and Jihad Inc operatives from Kashmir to Xinjiang, and Rakhine to Mindanao. Just like the Afghan war of the 1980s which served as a cause celebre for the aggressively faithful.
Peace that wasn’t?
While there has been much fanfare about Israel’s rapprochement with the oil-rich GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries, Saudi Arabia and UAE, the biggest threat to it remains undaunted and undiminished – the joint Hamas-Hezbollah nexus and their regional sponsor Tehran.
The Netflix movie, ‘The Angel’, based on the eponymous book by Israeli author Uri Bar Joseph, is a biopic of the extraordinary life of Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of Gamel Abdel Nasser, who became a key advisor to Anwar Sadat.
Marwan was an Israeli spy who hoped for peace between the two countries and died in London in 2007 under mysterious circumstances.
There’s a memorable line in the movie, ‘In a conflict where there are only losers on all sides, an ever-lasting peace is the only victory’. Egypt and Israel understood this in the wake of the 1973 war. But to expect any kind of accommodation, rationalism, or peaceful co-existence from the deranged cult of death, misery, perpetual victimhood, everlasting rage, and martyrdom that Hamas is, would be akin to a belief in rainbow coloured flying unicorns.
READ: FIR lodged against AMU students, say Palestinian freedom only through conflict
Henry Kissinger, the old-hawk of US foreign policy, once famously said on the Israel-Palestine conflict, “The minimum concession that the Arabs seek is greater than the maximum Israel is willing to concede”.
Two-state solution is just a deceptive fig-leaf. Hamas would settle for nothing less than the complete annihilation of Israel and pogrom of her citizenry.
Meanwhile, the most incuriously irksome characters of all, the bumptious mimics with no-skin-in-the game, but who have been muddying the discourse since long, are at their finest again – inciting and celebrating violence, orientalising bloodlust by citing Frantz Fanon and Paulo Frieie, cheerleading destruction, and glorifying nihilist fanatics as modern day people’s liberators.
In his 2008 book, ‘Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State’, late Tarek Fatah, a sympathiser of the Palestinian statehood, wrote: “The Palestinian movement cannot be allowed to degenerate into a fad for out-of-luck leftists in search of a cause. Those who hate Israel more than they love Palestine cannot be part of the solution”.
“When these rich armchair anti-imperialists spout on about Palestine, they seem to do so out of an addiction, not a commitment”, he added.
Habitual pavlovian reflex is back in action. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are the author’s own.