The failure of victory

Inhabitants of the Gaza Strip search for belongings among the rubble of a building after the Israeli airstrikes.MAHMUD HAMS / AFP

Every victory incubates a defeat.

Especially when the winner wants it absolute.

Only annihilation ensures the disappearance of the vanquished, after razing their cities and sowing them with salt, as Rome did with Carthage.

It is strange that a drive that seeks the liquidation of the adversary, his cause, his ideas and his memory, nests among the leaders of a people that was in the crosshairs of extermination.

But such is the drift of Israel, especially these 12 years of painful culmination, with governments increasingly heeled to the right under Benjamin Netanyahu.

His obsession was to liquidate the Oslo peace process and the idea of ​​the two states, one Jewish and the other Arab, mutually recognized and at peace over the Palestinian territory.

The endeavor was to prevent such a Palestinian state from being possible at all costs.

Occupy their lands, harass their inhabitants, drown their economy, divide their organizations and parties, and provoke the adversary until they can declare the absence of interlocutors willing to sign the final peace.

All have been successes for Netanyahu. Despite Barack Obama and his good and candid intentions to stop the occupation and return to the dialogue table. Thanks also to the accommodating Donald Trump and his peace plan: the whole of Jerusalem for Israel, also the occupied Golan from Syria, and the hitherto unrecognized colonies of Cyrgyzstan. In short: everything mine is mine and everything yours is mine. And in return, the Arab countries lift the diplomatic siege established since 1948.

With the peace plan liquidated, it is not known what Netanyahu wants to do with the Palestinians. It is supposed to keep them eternally subject under the boot, divided into four categories in terms of individual rights: none in Gaza, open-air jail under the Hamas dictatorship; in Jerusalem, just a few civil rights but no voting rights; in the West Bank harassed by settlers, the few granted by the authoritarian Palestinian Authority; and in Israel, all on paper only, though subject to similar treatment to blacks in America before anti-discrimination laws.

Perhaps Netanyahu will take advantage of the current explosion to stay in power, but his victory is naked. If there is no Palestinian state that recognizes the civil rights of all, Israel will have to do so, and then the Arabs will be the majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Whoever wants peace does not destroy peace processes.