Last weekend’s Hamas incursion into the Israeli mainland took the Zionist entity by surprise. A surprise the entity experienced exactly 50 years ago in 1973. Then the governments of Hafez Al Assad in Syria and of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, going for their respective geostrategic objectives, went to war. Egypt was able to make a few gains in Sinai; the gains which it cultivated for the final cession of escalation with the entity. Syria to date could not get back the Golan Heights, lost in 1967 during the Six-Day War.
The two surprises were different on many counts. Obviously, the finales are bound to be different. It can be safely forecast that the stakes now are much higher and consequent scale of destruction and the radius of war cannot be predicted to be ‘manageable’.
The 1973 Yom Kippur was a payback orchestrated by the two Arab governments who were humiliated in June 1967, when their air forces were devastated while still parked on the respective tarmacs. In 1967, much was lost by Jordan, Syria as well as Egypt at the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Making use of the surprise element as well as the overconfidence of the IDF, the Arab forces were able to make some gains.
That ongoing Yom Kippur, October 7, is different or can be different, provided the key players, stakeholders remain on the ‘scene’, kill disinformation, shun an apologetic posture and go beyond ‘routine’. For the resistance axis, the stakes are more critical. Mere lip service will prove to the Palestinians that they are not different from the previous franchise leaders. If anything decisive comes out of the uprising, the resistance narrative might be saved for another day, otherwise another global plan like Oslo will be tabled for further compromise
Here it may be pointed out that the Arab governments were structurally incapable to strike Israel as they could have. They left much of the job to the foreign operations sections of their elite intelligence agencies. Their job did not go beyond a few hit-and-run guerilla operations without any decisive value. The modus operandi of the intelligence outfits was like that. They would maintain an operational cadre for these operations, preferably in Lebanon. The local handlers would be lured into the trap on the promise that fallen heroes would be compensated. The poor and destitute sections of Lebanese society and the Palestinian diaspora, already living in subhuman conditions, were easily lured by these incentives.
For the Arab governments, there was the benefit of being in the news headlines courtesy this or that operation. For the local handlers, Palestinian leadership as well as the human fodder, there were free arms, meals and compensation if killed in the line of fire. Revolutionary Iran’s first defence minister, nuclear Physicist Dr Mostafa Chamran (1932-1981), who spent a few years as exiled political dissident in the civil war-ridden country has chronicled these happenings in his memoir on his stay in Lebanon.
Practically, neither the Palestinian movement achieved any benchmarks, nor were the Arabs interested in solving the case, as it should have been. The outcome of that situation was individual arrangements between the respective Arab governments and the Zionist state. Jordan, one such kingdom created out of the Ottoman Empire, was most compliant with the Israeli government, despite a general image of being opposed to occupation. Here it may be pointed out that the ethnic Jordanians are much closer to the ethnic Palestinians than other Arabs. That historical context and American uneasiness with the same precipitated the famous Black September 1970 massacre of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), mass devastation of the Palestinian refugee camps. That crackdown in Jordan and the Palestinians’ next diaspora to Lebanon, which culminated in the last big incursion into any neighbouring country, the 1982 Lebanese Invasion by Israel.
That diaspora in a way laid the ground for what can be termed as an alternate current in the Palestinian political map. The militants of the past and the pragmatists of today, found it okay to cooperate with the global guarantors and through them with Israel. The PLO leadership, which was angry with the Egyptian military leadership in 1978 over its compromise with Israel, was itself a stakeholder in the 1993 Oslo Accord. During the period under discussion, came the rise of the radical Islamist group Hamas on the sidelines of the 1987 Intifada. The intifada was unique on the count that it happened within the Israeli borders in places where the Palestinian were in majority. The Hamas political leadership laid its hopes on PLO and consequently the two pieces of land, Gaza strip and the West Bank, were awarded to the Palestinian Authority as part of the physically coexisting states of Israel and an independent Palestinian state.
Here it is pertinent to note that there are two trends within the Palestinian diaspora as well as the Muslim world in general. One calls for a two nation-solution, which means the Oslo Accord. The other trend, generally called the ‘Rejectionist’ front, has been previously composed of the left-of-centre Baathist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq. After 1979, Iran seems to have wrested the mantle from the Left front. The growth of Islamist groups in Palestinian diaspora during the Intifada and after filled the necessary gap within the Palestinian line up.
Hamas since its coming to limelight courtesy martyr Sheikh Yassin (2003) has been able to form the government in the PA areas in 2006. Much of the tenure was marred by street level killing of its cadre by the Israeli air force. It would not be an exaggeration that the IDF air arm stands out as the unique one with ability to target slow moving four-wheelers on Gaza streets on board fast-moving flying machines like F-16s.
The coexistence trend seems to be politically hibernating after getting the Palestinian Authority. The rejectionist Palestinians best represented by Hamas automatically found a common cause with the states like Iran and groups like Hezbollah. It was no coincidence that Ismail Hanieh, one time Prime Minister of the PA, was one of the speakers at the funeral ceremony of slain IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani.
Unlike the previous arrangements between on-the-spot Palestinian resources and the funding government, a sort of independence of action and indigenization seems to exist. It is no more a cache of arms supplied by the benefactor government, rather the combatants on ground have their own ways and methodology to plan and execute operations. It is with the logic of imagination that that much firepower from Hamas displayed over the Israeli skies could not have come in ‘containers’ from the Islamic Republic, but was assembled or developed within the Palestinian territories.
As things stand, with the President of PA Mahmood Abbas, a mere symbolic head of PA, the Hamas movement seems to be the political force on ground in the Palestinian lands. If that had not been the case, the PLO controlled PA with active encouragement from the other stakeholders might have neutralized the movement long ago. The relentless IDF bombing draws a clear line that the PA and IDF stand on one side and Hamas alone on the other side.
Given the fact that the Hamas movement is holding on against the internationally supported onslaught despite a very small piece of land and danger of complete wipe-out, the situation can escalate into a much wider conflict, despite restraint by the key players. Any participation of Hezbollah or any Israeli strike on Iranian targets can force other players to jump into the fray.
Any decisive stalemate from the Palestinian side can be the basis for talk on the table with a better stake in hand. Given the 57-member-strong Muslim polity, which seems to agree with Abraham Accord ‘blessings’ as dictated by the west, a lot still depends on the Arab and Muslim streets, not the streets of Tehran or Beirut only, to politically knock out the Abraham Accord.
That ongoing Yom Kippur, October 7, is different or can be different, provided the key players, stakeholders remain on the ‘scene’, kill disinformation, shun an apologetic posture and go beyond ‘routine’. For the resistance axis, the stakes are more critical. Mere lip service will prove to the Palestinians that they are not different from the previous franchise leaders. If anything decisive comes out of the uprising, the resistance narrative might be saved for another day, otherwise another global plan like Oslo will be tabled for further compromise.
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