Afrasianet - Tariq Hammoud - A final ceasefire still faces significant obstacles, all centered on Israel's predicament the next day, Netanyahu's personal postwar dilemma, the last chance for the far right in power, and the army's failure to present its security vision for its postwar position in Gaza. Especially after more rockets were fired on the 171st day of a war that wiped out everything in Gaza, except the resistance.
In these circumstances, the umbrella of Western international support for Israel's genocidal war against the Gaza Strip is relatively disintegrating. Despite the continued embrace of crime and its perpetrators, Western positions in general are unanimous on the need to end the war and stop the bleeding of the high costs in the West's reputation and moral standing.
In addition, for the first time in Western political history, the position on war has become electorally determined, in one way or another, from its view of the Palestinian issue. It is at this moment when the interests of Western political power have been isolated, even temporarily, with Israeli behavior, the greatest nightmares of the Zionist project and its settler state are manifested. The organic relationship between the West and its disguised colony in the East is the only existential explanation for Israel as a viable entity.
Today, Israel faces complex dilemmas that prevent it from responding to stop the war despite exhausting all the time given to it internationally to complete the mission. It cannot continue without Western military and political support, nor can it stop the war and face the absent answers to the next day's questions.
While the war leadership continues to continue crime despite its international exposure, it is betting on its ability, and the ability of the lobby supporting it in the West, to repair this decline in the relationship at a later date. This is largely realistic, given the known penetration of this lobby into the structure of the Western political elite.
It is true that little bet can be bet on shifting attitudes towards war by Western governments. Western governments that supported the recent Security Council resolution continue to be a lifeblood of war, both militarily and economically. The relationship between these governments and the occupying power has not changed, and these positions are self-defense in the face of the deteriorating reputation of activists, who have taken it upon themselves to spoil every public appearance of Western officials and to besiege them socially.
The Biden administration wants the Security Council resolution, which calls for an end to the war within Ramadan, to push Netanyahu and his war council forward in order to conclude a truce that would pay for the release of detainees instead of a free ceasefire. At the same time, it needs to present itself as an administration that makes peace, as it creates war in front of specific segments of the American electorate.
In this context, Western political discourse is centered against Netanyahu as a person, not towards Israel or its genocidal military. Other genocidal symbols such as Gantz and Galant, who are described as "human animals," are courted and marketed as rational or wise leadership, knowing that neither is in favor of stopping the war, of course, and there is no difference between them and Netanyahu regarding the ceasefire in Gaza.
Netanyahu, despite his corruption and deserving of impeachment, is the right ram to hold him solely responsible for the innocence of the rest of the criminals in this war. On the one hand, he is actually responsible for failing to complete the mission despite the time and cover given to him. On the other hand, everyone knows that it is politically finished, and the continuation of the war is his only game to delay announcing it.
This shift will undoubtedly deepen the Western position on Netanyahu's pit. The man – who until the sixth of October boasted of one achievement, his ability to build Israel's international relations and alliances in impossible spaces – stands completely isolated internationally after the "free" world gave him a blank check for committing the most heinous war of extermination of the twenty-first century. Yet he has failed to capitalize on that support, and is asking for more of it after six months of war.
However, the passage of a resolution in the UN Security Council that includes the term ceasefire for the first time cannot be considered irrelevant. Although the resolution does not give a useful sentence to the final cessation of the war, it is the first position since the beginning of this war in which the occupation stands completely isolated, even from its closest international incubator, the United States of America.
Despite the superficiality of the demand, and its humanitarian triviality in relation to the crime committed and ongoing and its repercussions, the recent Security Council resolution is a rare moment if compared to the hysterical Western attitudes of the first months of the war. Israel has lost the military battle, and is on its way to losing a strategy that could establish a new understanding of how to deal with the expected gains and costs of a Western-protected settlement only.
This stems from a global movement – especially in the United States – that has become precisely targeted at Zionist lobbyists that infiltrate political decision-making, such as the campaigns launched against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which it considers to be opposing parties with absolute Israeli loyalty, even if at the expense of the American national interest.
This is a remarkable development in the trends of the popular anti-occupation movement. In addition, the war has shown a clear division in the political position in the West, where the segments of young people who are aware of the reality of Israel as an occupation and apartheid regime are remarkably increasing, while the older generation, whose position is still framed by the traditional media's narrative, which in turn is linked to the penetration of lobbies and fear campaigns that they master in the face of "deviant" narratives from the path set.
It can be said that this war may have brought the relationship between the Western international incubators and their eastern colony to a level where costs are equal to returns, a level that may require reconsidering the form of this political trade, either by reproducing it in a way that increases return against cost, or by reducing expenses in order to balance the return.
In both cases, the Zionist project is facing a turning point, not only in its relationship with the land it colonized and with its owners, as this is a well-defined relationship with the nature of its formation as an eternal clash between a colonizer and a liberation movement, but also in its relationship with its international extensions as a project capable of providing more strategic importance for its existence and continuation as a colonial settlement that ignores the existence of facts, which continue to repeat themselves every day in some way, and the last of which will not be what is happening in Gaza now.
It should be recalled that Western governments, especially the United States, continue to disrupt all other available international mechanisms in order to prevent the situation from escalating and to put an end to this war at a certain level. The American veto hand was one of the memories of the war that many of the victims of this catastrophe and its followers will never forget.
Western leaders who flocked in support visits stood hundreds of meters from the Gaza border, hearing explosions, in order to cry with one eye, and reduce their humanity to lamenting one side. All of this will not erase his memory of cursing Netanyahu and patting his accomplices on the shoulder.
- Researcher specialized in Palestinian affairs and international relations