Editor-in-Chief of the British Middle East Eye website, David Hirst, began his article on Saturday about the Gaza war by saying that it was a major miscalculation for Israel, and in addition to being a moral and military disaster, it is fueling resistance and reigniting the embers of anger throughout the Arab world.
Hearst pointed out what US President Ronald Reagan did after a heavy Israeli barrage of bombing during the siege of Beirut in July 1982, when he called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, asking him to stop the bombing. Reagan said at the time, “Here on television, night after night, the symbols of this are shown to our people.” War is a “holocaust”.
The writer commented that, unlike the Democrats in the White House today, Republican President Reagan of the United States was able and willing to back up his words with actions, so the United States stopped cluster munitions and the sale of F-16 aircraft to Israel.
Considering the extent of the Israeli destruction of Gaza compared to the Allied forces’ bombing of German cities in World War II, the writer quoted military analysts interviewed by the Financial Times newspaper that 68% of the buildings in northern Gaza were destroyed by December 4, after only two months of bombing. It is close to the Allied bombing of Hamburg (75%), Cologne (61%), and Dresden (59%), but what happened to these cities was two years after the bombing.
A fundamental weakness
Hirst added that nearly 20,000 Palestinians – 70% of whom were women and children – were killed in half the time it took to force the Palestine Liberation Organization to leave Beirut in 1982.
He warned that the destruction inflicted on Gaza lays the foundation for another 50 years of war, and generations of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims will never forget the barbarism with which Israel dismantles the Strip today.
Hirst pointed out that this message was understood by some Israelis, such as former head of the Shin Bet security service, Ami Ayalon, when he identified a fundamental weakness in traditional thinking in Israeli security circles, which is that while the Israeli army sees victory through the prism of brute force – the more people it kills. The more people are destroyed they think they have won – the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) views victory through the prism of “soft power,” the more hearts and minds it gains the greater the victory.
The writer stated that the Israelis are committing the same mistake that the French committed in Algeria when they killed more than 1.5 million Algerians between 1954 and 1962, believing that by doing so they would win the war, but after the war ended they were forced to leave and grant Algeria its independence.
A series of US intelligence assessments confirm the significant rise in Hamas’s popularity since the beginning of the war.
Informed officials say that the movement has succeeded in establishing itself in parts of the Arab and Islamic world as a defender of the Palestinian cause and an effective fighter against Israel, according to the American CNN network.
Divide and conquer
This is bad news – as Hirst says – for all those countries – led by the United States, of course – that believe that the Palestinian Authority can replace Hamas in Gaza, and these are not just numbers, but rather the new political reality after last October 7.
The writer continued that the Israeli attack on Gaza led to a change in the entire Middle East region, as promised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but not in a way that his government or future governments might benefit from.
During 17 years of the rest of the world forgetting or ignoring Gaza, as America and the major European powers did their best to reinforce the siege that Israel imposed on the Strip, and throughout 17 years of the Israeli policy of divide and rule by separating Gaza from the West Bank and removing every possibility of participating in a national unity government that would bring together… Gaza and the West Bank today as never before.
Hirst added that even the first and second intifadas did not achieve the same success that Hamas achieved in Gaza during the past two months.
He believed that the result of this war could be a continuous state of conflict, which would deprive Israel of claiming that it had become a normal Western-style state.
Under these circumstances, the expansion of the war will always be present, as demonstrated by the Houthi attacks in Yemen on Western ships passing through the Red Sea.
Hirst concluded that “Mitot Hamas” (the fall of Hamas) is a slogan in Hebrew and is the goal of the Israeli war government, and after two months of this destruction they can also amend it to become “Mitot Israel,” because this is the effect that this war may have.
