The end of Israeli complacency

MR.

GARCIA

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• Israel insists on ending the offensive on Gaza despite the US call for a ceasefire

The sudden outbreak of war inside and outside Israel's borders has taken a self-indulgent nation by surprise.

In the 12 years that Benjamin Netanyahu has led the country, the Palestinian problem was buried and forgotten.

The recent Abrahamic Accords, which had established diplomatic relations with four Arab countries, appeared to have weakened the advancement of the Palestinian cause.

Now, it has resurfaced with violence.

An isolated incident can ignite a war, but the causes are always deeper. In this case, the trigger - the eviction of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, for the benefit of Israeli nationalists - touched every sensitive nerve in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, its humiliating control of access to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the omnipresent memory of the Nakba (the expulsion when Israel was founded in 1948 of 700,000 Palestinians) and the sufferings of the Israeli Arab minority fuel the flames. that they have turned on.

It may be true that the disputed properties in Shaykh Jarrah belonged to a Jewish family prior to 1948. But the Palestinians see the incident as part of Israel's relentless campaign to

Judeize

Jerusalem, and as a

glaring

injustice, as Israel was partly built on properties abandoned by Palestinian refugees. Although Jews have the right to claim property they owned prior to the founding of Israel, Palestinians do not. Those facing eviction in Sheikh Yarrah cannot take back the homes they owned in Jaffa and Haifa.

At first glance, the latest escalation of violence is patterned after all ethnic wars. Muslims in Ramadan shouted nationalist slogans and clashed with Israeli far-right groups chanting "death to Arabs." The Israelis marched arrogantly with their flag to commemorate Jerusalem Day, which commemorates the 1967 Israeli capture of East Jerusalem and the Esplanade of the Mosques, site of the Biblical Second Temple and the Al Aqsa Mosque (completed in 705). Clashes broke out around Al Aqsa; from inside the mosque, some worshipers threw stones at the Israeli police, who responded with rubber bullets and other projectiles that injured hundreds of people.

But the young Arab protesters can claim victory, because they forced a postponement of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling on the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.

They also forced the police to change the route of the march for the day of Jerusalem, so that it did not pass through the Muslim quarter in the old city.

The outbreak spread to pre-1967 Israeli territory, where Islamist groups incited Israeli Arab youth.

Judeo-Arab cities considered examples of coexistence, such as Acre, Ramallah, Jaffa and Lod, erupted in an orgy of violence and vandalism.

The latter was practically taken over by gangs of young Arabs.

This was a pogrom, Jewish residents said.

An elderly Jewish woman recalled

Kristallnacht

, and the mayor of Lod made the same comparison.

But the core of the conflict has been in Jerusalem.

The city gave Hamas a golden opportunity to prevail over the negotiating sector of the West Bank Palestinian Authority and end the dying leadership of its president Mahmoud Abbas, who a few weeks ago canceled a legislative election under Israeli pressure, fearing that Hamas ( who has governed Gaza since 2006) wins it and extends its control to the West Bank.

Abbas presented the decision as a protest against the Israeli refusal to allow Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to vote.

But the truth is that today the Palestinian Authority has almost no presence there;

the void it left has been filled by mostly secular Palestinian youth who have made the Esplanade of the Mosques a symbol of their resistance to the Israeli occupation.

The outbreak of violence has allowed Hamas to connect all the dots and assert its primacy within the Palestinian national movement. He has positioned himself as the protector of Jerusalem and Al Aqsa; as the spearhead in the Palestinian national and religious struggle against the Israeli Jewish occupier; and as the voice of the Arab minority in Israel.

The Israelis and their complacent government have been caught off guard. Hamas has launched a missile attack on a scale never seen before on Israeli cities. They have even fired salvoes in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, forcing half the country's population to run to shelters. The Israelis are now left in doubt as to whether their vulnerable home front would withstand a war with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia deployed across the border in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has an arsenal of 150,000 missiles far more deadly than Hamas.

To defend its position, Hamas was willing to pay a high price. The Israeli punitive airstrikes on Gaza have been devastating, brutally effective against Hamas military commanders. But Hamas knows that in the asymmetric wars of this era, a militia hiding among two million civilians, in one of the most densely populated areas of the world, is virtually immune to defeat. He also knows that the reverberation of war in the region will force neighbors like Egypt and Qatar (a sponsor of Hamas) to mediate a ceasefire.

From the ruins of Gaza, Hamas will proclaim victory, not necessarily military, but in the minds of its people.

At this point, Hamas will have achieved its main goals: a totally discredited Palestinian Authority and the reinforcement of its own prestige as the guarantor and ultimate protector of the holy sites in Jerusalem.

The paradox is that Netanyahu is not interested in destroying Hamas.

Quite the contrary: it shares with the militia a tacit agreement against Abbas's Palestinian Authority, which during his governments he tried to weaken and humiliate by all means.

A state under Hamas control in Gaza is for Netanyahu the ideal pretext to reject peace negotiations and a two-state solution.

Netanyahu even allowed Qatar to pay the salaries of Hamas officials to keep Gaza running.

Israel clearly cannot claim victory.

The fragile coexistence between Jews and Arabs within its borders has been shaken.

The internal consensus among Israelis that held that Palestinian nationalism was defeated and that therefore a political solution to the conflict was no longer necessary has been shattered.

And even as the escalation of violence intensifies, it has become clear to the two contenders that the era of wars and glorious victories is past.

Shlomo Ben-Ami

was an Israeli Foreign Minister and Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace.

Author of

Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

Translation by

Esteban Flamini.

© Project Syndicate, 2021.