The bias of Western leaders does not help the Israelis wake up

The extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu received overwhelmingly biased positions from Washington, European and Western capitals. It did not hesitate to invest these positions immediately in the field by relentlessly committing horrific war crimes in the heart of densely populated residential Palestinian areas and burning overcrowded refugee camps with continuous bombing. Shocking events continue hour after hour, as was seen in the Jabalia market massacre (on Monday, 9 October), and this confirms that the leaders siding with Israel did not help Israel to wake up from its chronic illusions that lured it into the predicament in which it is now stuck.

These capitals know that the sweeping bias towards the Israeli position is being used by Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, which is what happened in every previous round, as a cover to commit atrocities on the ground and horrific war crimes against the Palestinian population and civilian facilities in the Gaza Strip, under the pretext that “the world is standing with us in this moment”. These positions continued while the Israeli warplanes were engaged in their usual hobby, practiced in every round of escalation, as they bomb the homes of Palestinians, demolishing them over the heads of their inhabitants and bringing down entire residential towers in full view of live news coverage. They demolished major places of worship in the middle of cities and refugee camps, so the number of children and mothers killed by the raids increased. In the first 48 hours alone, the Israeli forces killed 150 victims, as well as injuring hundreds of other civilians. These figures skyrocketed quickly after that, in the form of mass massacres committed by the Israeli army using tons of explosives dropped on the most crowded refugee camps in the world.

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It was noticeable that the generous positions of support for the extremist Israeli leadership and its army, which were involved in a series of previously documented war crimes, did not express any reservations or realisations while they blindly supported the occupation state, settlement and oppression. These positions did not call for the need to adhere to international law, for example, or to keep in mind humanitarian principles and the right to life. It is no wonder that the Israeli army continues in its sweeping campaign against the people by annihilating entire families by bombing their inhabited homes in the heart of residential neighbourhoods in the Gaza Strip, or targeting a convoy of ambulances loaded with injured people, as documented by video clips. This is in addition to the continuous killing of defenceless young Palestinian boys in refugee camp in the West Bank, away from the world’s attention.

Israel is living under the shock of the great event that befell it on the morning of 7 October, but it has not shown willingness to doubt the soundness of its approach, although its utter failure in trying to subjugate the Palestinian people has been exposed. So, it began to commit its reckless mass murder with greater cruelty than any previous round, using its huge military arsenal to overturn the Palestinian residential areas. What concerns it now is re-imposing the equation of arrogance, oppression and comprehensive control that it imposed on this nation for many decades, and it still hopes it will last forever through the guarantees of support and bias it enjoys.

The incontrollable Israeli leadership circles at the political and military levels lack any rationality that would help them deal with fundamental questions dictated by the position to which they led themselves and try to get rid of their traditional delusions that rely on the arrogance of force. The unconditional support messages that came from Western capitals acted as a sleeping pill that does not help stimulate the minds of Israelis to pull themselves out of the impasse and search for a strategic path different from the traditional thirst to shed Palestinian blood in masses and continue to rob them of their rights and stifle their opportunities in life.

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Israel’s “friends” should have to be frank with it, even if only in a whisper, and told it that it was Israel itself that created the grave predicament it finds itself in today, because it drugged itself with delusions when it imagined that it could continue to persecute the Palestinian people forever and control all areas of their lives. It believed it could continue to besiege more than two million people in a large prison called the Gaza Strip without experiencing any anger from this nation that is isolated from the world. Israel deluded itself into believing that it can exercise oppression and power in the West Bank without receiving an audible outcry from the people it oppresses, and that it can enjoy complete calm while stealing Palestinian lands and homes every morning, and carrying out slow, continuous ethnic cleansing in villages, towns and residential neighbourhoods in full view of the international community without this nation staging an uprising to demand their rights and dignity. The most extremist and racist government, more so than its predecessors, escalated the policy of storming the holy places and insulting the Palestinians in Jerusalem while going to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It intensified the procedures of daily humiliation at the crossings, escalated its brutality against thousands of Palestinian prisoners, and unleashed the hands of armed settlement militias to burn Palestinian villages, without wanting to feel the pulse of these people.

The Israeli leadership has gone far in its new round of aggression, including a horrific violation of international laws, and threatening the people of the Gaza Strip with deprivation of food, electricity and fuel because it has received generous, unconditional support from Western capitals, and because it has, once again, been guaranteed immunity from accountability and liability. This was the case in the past, thanks to the American and European cover given to it in every round of escalation.

One of the curiosities of the situation is that the Israeli leadership assumes the role of Ukraine and Russia at the same time, as it is the occupying power and wants, at the same time, to gain Western military, political and economic support like Kiev. What is even stranger is that there have been disgusting positions from Volodymyr Zelensky, in particular, in which he supports a country that occupies the land of the Palestinian people, while he personally appears as a resistance leader against the Russian occupation of his country. This further misleads Israel, without doing it a favour in the long term. Israel’s supporters should have helped it wake up from its slumber and discover the absurdity of its chronic delusions, and Israel’s allies should have been clear with it that the occupation project is moving in the opposite direction, against the logic of history and that it is unsustainable.

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The extremist Israeli leadership and its army, which is experiencing the bitterness of the outburst of anger of the Palestinians besieged against it, do not want to face urgent questions about the truth of Israel’s vision for the future of the Palestinian people. This nation, which the Israeli governments have not yet recognised, even in abstract verbal terms, are merely “Palestinians” to them. The Israeli leadership ignores answering simple questions, such as its vision for resolving the Palestinian issue. Rather, it began to ignore this issue completely. The matter has reached the point that Israeli governments refuse to even sit with the Palestinian Authority, which adheres to the imaginary path of peace and continues to provide diligent security services to it. Israel’s problem is with the Palestinian people, in general, and not with Hamas alone.

The reality of the situation is that Western governments aligned with Israel sold the Palestinian people a great illusion called the promise of a Palestinian State achieved through the “peace process” and then did not dare, during the past thirty years, to be frank with them about the irreversible blockage of this path because they do not want the Palestinians to take another path, even if it is just to call for an international boycott of the occupation or to resort to international criminal justice.

The capitals that are blindly biased in favour of Israel should have realised the significance of the explosion of the besieged Gaza Strip in the face of the occupation, and this specifically came exactly thirty years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, in which the US, European countries and the international community presented a promise to the Palestinian people of a final resolution that guarantees the establishment of a viable Palestinian State, in exchange for abandoning resistance of the occupation. The bitter result was the collapse of the promise and the evaporation of the “two-state solution”, instead being replaced with the prolonging of the occupation, expanding settlements and the disappearance of any hope of establishing a Palestinian state through negotiations, in addition to Israeli control over the crossings and checkpoints, the continuation of daily arrests, and the deprivation of Palestinian refugees of their right to return to their land and homes. The US and European countries did not want to be frank with the Palestinian people about the visible truth that the political path had completely ended and that there was no partner in the successive Israeli governments to reach any peaceful solution, while the rise of settler fascism had eliminated any opportunity even for the establishment of a fragmented Palestinian state lacking sovereignty.

The Palestinian people are facing a choice between lifelong slavery under a military occupation authority that confines them in ghettos according to the apartheid system and highly developed persecution, or the choice to try to seize their freedom and rights and rise up to regain their human dignity like other national of the world.

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