Violence harms the victim, but the aggressor is unlikely to emerge unscathed. On a large scale it is a recognized and terrible driver of history, destroying and devouring human lives, even leading to genocide. The right causes can lead to unbearable horror. There is no war without unexpected effects, sometimes contrary to those sought. It happens now as it always has. This is how nations are born and empires die. Thus, unrecognizable in the post-war period, winners and losers emerge, each of the contenders engaged in a fight to the death. And so the old order disappears and the windows open onto a new, not always better, one.
Such transformations are taking place in the Middle East after two years of war, not even over, which both sides perceive as existential, a euphemism for the danger of extermination and disappearance of their nation. On the one hand, Palestine led by Hamas, which wanted to throw the Jews into the sea; and on the other the Netanyahu government, which is fighting for a Greater Imperial Israel without Palestinians. Two genocidal intentions, one now defeated and in retreat and the other always victorious and ongoing. Equal in evil intentions, they differ in means: those of Hamas are scarce and disqualified as terrorists, and those of Netanyahu are immense and uncontrolled, under the umbrella of US money, weapons and diplomacy.
One month after the start of the truce imposed by Trump, talk of a ceasefire is exaggerated. Gazans, civilians and children continue to die. Bombing and destruction continue on a large scale. Humanitarian aid is insufficient, as is health care. The foreign press and only some NGOs are not allowed entry, under strict Israeli control. The whole dimension of the catastrophe comes to light and with it all the atrocities, those of some and those of others, despite the efforts of concealment and censorship or of indifference and voluntary blindness.
But there are facts that don’t lie. Half of the Strip remains occupied and the entire Strip is under direct Israeli control, separated and enclosed by the Yellow Line, the new border that encloses two million Gazans. The open-air prison has shrunk in size and the living conditions are more inhumane, but the size of the population has not changed, still decimated by the almost 70 thousand deaths. If everything is slowly improving for the inhabitants of Gaza, still mired in the post-war abyss of death and misery, nothing is improving for the Palestinians as a whole, especially in the West Bank. During this month without bombing on the Strip, its inhabitants suffer aggression from settlers and pressure from the army at a level unknown in the entire history of the occupation since 1967.
With attention still on Gaza, Netanyahu’s extremist government takes the opportunity to push forward with the annexation of the biblical territories of Judea and Samaria that do not legally belong to it. The illegal settlers, authentic squatters, are not satisfied with the territory they have already stolen and are increasingly dedicating themselves to directly terrorist activities. They attack families in their homes, destroy businesses, properties and water pipes, set fire to mosques and schools, uproot olive trees and even kill with impunity under the almost always complicit gaze of the army. Since there will be no annexation of the entire Gaza or expulsion of its population, as the Israeli far right wanted and as Donald Trump encouraged, it is in the West Bank that genocidal ideas continue to advance.
Neither the invasion nor the war is over. This is only an attenuation, perhaps a flexible pause at Israel’s convenience, part of a regional military control strategy, also applied in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen or Qatar, where Netanyahu has the possibility of carrying out prevention and punishment operations. If Gaza is marching towards the West Bank, increasingly compressed into a bantustan surrounded by the Israeli army, the West Bank is going in the opposite direction towards the destruction and forced displacement of the population as in Gaza.
Led by Netanyahu, a new Israel is being born, on the road to an ethnic and militarized, authoritarian and illiberal democracy, promoted to regional hegemon, seeking recognition from neighbors through threats and shared deals with plutocratic autocracies. His horizon does not include Palestine and the Palestinians as citizens with rights, free and equal, despite the vague promises of the Trump plan for a distant future, indispensable as bait to obtain the approval of the United Nations and then attract the Saudi monarchy.
Israel is winning by force, but is losing as a cause, unlike Palestine, martyred and decimated, but at the height of international recognition and its prestige as an idea. The long war is not over.
