By Charles Onunaiju
The surprise attack on illegal Israeli settlements by the armed wing of the Palestinian nationalist and resistance movement Hamas on October 7, 2023, got the Benjamin Netanyahu regime into a frenzy of fury with the consequence of a savagery that is unknown in all human history. The settlements are illegal because, in 2016, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 with 14 votes and only the United States abstaining in reiterating its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. The resolution further underlined that it would not recognize any changes to the June 4, 1967, lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the two sides through negotiations. Without justifying the deaths of civilians in the attack, the settlements were illegal under international law and its Jewish inhabitants did so in breach of subsisting international convention
However, had Mr. Netanyahu been killing the resistance fighters of the Qassem Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, who carried out the attack on October 7, the orgy of horror and its harvest of deaths he has unleashed would have be more tolerable.
But the Israeli killing machine has been murdering children, women and the elderly and burying most of them under the rubble. Homes, hospitals, churches, mosques, courts, sewage systems and other essential civilian infrastructure have been summarily flattened.
Mr. Netanyahu and his clique in the so-called war cabinet claimed they are fighting a war but against which army or nation state? Palestine is largely an occupied territory without the formal status of a sovereign state and a formal and structured national military institution.
Hamas is no more a mere nationalist movement and resistant forces whose motive and method is no less sanguine as the Jewish Hagenah and Irgun, two extremist paramilitary Zionist movements whose path of terror smeared with blood and destruction led to the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. on April 9, 1948, Irgun and its Stern Gang raiders carried out its most horrific massacres when it swooped on the village of Deir Yassin on the west outskirts of Jerusalem and slaughtered nearly 200 Palestinian men, women and children and paraded those it captured through the old city of Jerusalem and thereafter executed them. The massacre at Deir Yassin formed part of the trajectories of Zionists terror that triggered the exodus of Palestinians.
In place of the emptied Palestinian village, whose residents had either been killed or expelled, the Jewish settlement Givart Shaul Bet was established.
The British, in late 1947, worn out by a ferocious Jewish terror campaign led by people who included future Israeli premiers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, had wearily explained that it would end its 30-year occupation of Palestine.
After handing over the Palestine issue to the United Nations, the then newly formed international organization worked out a plan to partition the territory between Jews and Arabs. Under the plan, the Jews, who made up just over a third of Palestine’s population at that time were awarded 55% of the land and this understandably enraged the Arabs who were not even consulted. But even the heavily favorable distributions to the Jews did not assuage the Zionists who wanted the whole land for themselves.
Thus the foundation for what appeared to be intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflicts was laid. But the relevant point to be made here is that, despite the British complicity in the conflict, London refrained from deploying the full weight of the formal state organized violence in response to the terror of the Zionist paramilitaries. The state of Israel does the opposite today, deploying fighter jets in relentless bombing of defenseless Palestinian men, women and children with the declared intention to eradicate the largely invisible and shadowy Palestinian resistant fighters. The relentless and Indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians in Gaza demonstrates clearly that Israel is not a state under international law or convention but a brutal, genocidal and eccentric entity neither restrained by law nor constrained by enlightened public opinion.
Addressing the pleas of reason and the law to this entity that is under the suzerainty of fascist thugs would be a waste time and this is where the silence in Arab capitals is direct complicity in the genocide against their kith and kin in the occupied Palestine.
From the day of the genocide against Palestinians Arabs, common sense would have suggested that Arab chiefs of staff and defence ministers would have been meeting to draw up contingency plan to halt the mindless and brutal massacre of their kin. Instead, they resorted to the platform of the United Nations, where there is no doubt that Israel’s most notorious enabler, the U.S. would wield the veto in any resolution that would restrain the Netanyahu clique.
The Zionist movement rejected the disproportionate 55% of the entire mandate Palestine awarded to them in 1947 and the current Israeli regime of Netayahu makes no secret of its intention and desire to reclaim the entire Palestine. The current declared intention to defeat and eradicate Hamas is a smokescreen and blatant alibi to drive away and expel the Palestinians in order to fulfill the historic Zionist agenda of owning the entire land of Palestine.
Since the start of the genocide following the attack on October 7, what is certain is the scale of destruction of homes and other civilian infrastructure and the killing of children, women and the elderly. Neither ammunition dumps or identifiable bodies of Palestinian resistance fighters have been uncovered.
The world has seen only piles upon piles of civilians slaughtered. The Al Qassem Brigade, the military wing of Hamas, is estimated to have about 30,000 fighters organized in five brigades, made up of 24 battalions and 140 companies.
The resilience and the fighting capacity a Hamas military wing, which has seen nearly 200 Israeli soldiers killed since the Israeli ground operation and occasional missiles lobbed into Israel, means that the group is far from near extinction or eradication and that Netayahu’s rhetoric in this direction is as empty as it is deceptive. Netayahu’s frustration is understandable. Having been nicknamed “Mr. Security” for his posture of guaranteeing the Israelis eternal peace and security while their Palestinian neighbours live in perpetual turmoil of routine harassments and deaths, the events October 7 up-ended the myth of Israel as an impregnable fortress beyond the reach of Palestinian resistance.
The famed Israeli internal and external intelligence and special services both the Shin Bet and Mossad, which failed abysmally to anticipate let alone prevent the October 7 attacks, struck at the very heart of Israel’s invincibility and shattered it once and for all.
Smarting from the destruction of the facade of eternal invisibility, the Netanyahu regime launched into a fury and rage and, like the proverbial bull in a china shop, is taking down everything along the way, including the lives of babies, the elderly and infirm people.
Despite the eccentric rhetoric of Netayahu and his close associates, a lot of Israelis, including those whose relatives were taken captive by the Palestinian resistance fighters, believe that a permanent truce and a durable solution consisting in the main the two-state framework is the most viable to bring peace between the two peoples in particular and the region in general.
The entire world views the two-state solution as the ultimate in resolving the conflict, except for Washington, which enables and sustains the Zionist regime’s killing machine. The U.S. and the Israeli regime’s rhetoric of holding Hamas accountable is a non-starter. Only a sovereign and independent Palestinian state can be held accountable, not only under international law but even by the convention of bilateral and multilateral engagements. Only a responsible, accountable and sovereign Palestinian State can rein in the excesses of militant groups that perpetrated the October 7th attack and therefore Israel’s security and enduring peace can only be guaranteed by a credible Palestinian State-partner, who can enact and implement laws capable of not only restraining the excesses of militant groups but punishing them according to their Sovereign law .
The Zionist vision of greater Israel at whose core is the expulsion and exclusion of the Palestinians is an ideological fantasy, bereft and deficient of simple pragmatic geo – political reality. The Israel that is at peace with her neighbours, including the Palestinians and trading with them and also, in an elaborate social, economic and political intercourse with them could still be the dominant and preeminent power in the region.
However, now the Arab regimes standing by and issuing platitudes as if Israel and its chief patron, the United States cares, have let down her kins in Palestine, leaving them to the brutal and blind rage of an ideological entity, for whom everything must fit into a preconceived notion or taken apart.
The current genocide and elaborate blood spill along with destruction in Gaza will remain a permanent and historic indictment of the Israeli regime and eloquent testimony to the complacency and complicit of the Arab states. At the peak of apartheid horrors in South Africa, African countries did not just issue platitudes, they provided material including military support to the resistant and anti – apartheid forces. But for Arab regimes, who have both the wealth and other geo – political instruments to compel a rethink of the Zionist pogrom against the Palestinians, the love of Washington and her wheeling-dealing counts above the blood of the innocents spilled and splattered all over Palestine. History will indict them as the contemporary of the lousy and insensitive Nero that fiddled with the harp while Rome was burning.
•Mr. Onunaiju is research director of an Abuja-based think tank