Afrasianet - Hassan Awrid - We do not have the right to deal as a historian deals with events, as the war that raged since the seventh of October of last year, because the historian treats events impartially, like feeling a lifeless corpse.
It is not justified to look at the war on Gaza as if it were gone, or to be astonished by the pain, heartbreak and anger surrounding it, and to reflect on what is to come.
We don't dating, but we gain insight, and we think.. We recall with something that some ears refuse, that the "before" October 7 was a model of a crisis reality. For the daily suffering of the
Palestinians, for the continuous raids on Jerusalem, for humiliating searches at the crossings, for prisoners languishing in cells, even slowly dying, to rally around the Palestinian cause, and to prepare for its death while it is still alive.
Do we dare to say that there is "after", as a journalist for the Observer (Jason Burke, The Day That Changed the World, September 29) put it.There is a mixture of what follows, because the world is no longer what it was, and will not be, and there is now, and it is a continuous present, of killing, destruction and displacement.. and there is a tomorrow shrouded in fog, and overcast.
The world is no longer the same because post-World War II architecture, including the United Nations, which was founded so that what happened during the war would not be repeated, is collapsing. And the ugliness is coming back even more vicious. Everything that can be a conscience, disabled or paralyzed. The United Nations is no longer just powerless, it is accused.. The General Assembly, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, UNRWA, are all in the dock.
The rising forces did not lift a finger, except rhetorical denunciation. Neither China nor Russia have been able to change the course of things. The United States has singled out the Middle East, and tomorrow it will be difficult for the Russian bear, the Chinese dragon, or the old European Union to appear to help set the rules of the game in a volatile region.
The region will continue until further notice, to the tunes of "American peace." The United States is the setter of the game, and the top of the game is to defend Israel, provide it with weapons, expertise, intelligence and diplomatic coverage.
American diplomacy, which was crude in its clarity, has changed and has become a bag in its ambiguity. It wants a ceasefire, and it supplies Israel with weapons. It expresses concern for what befalls civilians, and does nothing to stop the war. The United States has become fluent in the Orwellian language, saying the opposite thing, and mixing diplomacy that satisfies all parties, publicly, with a military arsenal that has one and only orientation: Israel's security and its "right" to defend itself and achieve "justice."
No red lines, no international law, stands in the way of this approach sponsored by the United States. A new chapter of "American peace" in the region is looming, based on force and justice.
Europe is out of coverage, it doesn't speak a single language. Britain and Germany are part of the American choir, and France is seeking to find a role for them without touching the ball, as a stray footballer, running here and there, without a ball, even if he seems effortless.
The world is no longer the same, because the post-World War II architecture, including the United Nations, which was founded so that what happened during the war would not be repeated, is collapsing. And the ugliness returns even more fierce
In all wars, more military personnel are killed than civilians, but in the Gaza war, civilians are the dead, women are the victims, and children are the dead.
Military operations take place in a hotspot, Gaza, but have extensions in several places, in the West Bank, then in distant places, in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, and adjacent to Lebanon.
Thus, US soldiers are killed in Jordan on January 28, and the US responds in Iraq. Iran launches drones on Israel on April 13 in response to the killing of its military staff in Damascus. Israeli airstrikes on Syria on September 8. British-American attacks on Yemen on February 4. Israeli aerial bombardment of Yemen's Hodeidah port. Ismail Haniyeh is killed in Tehran on July 31. The substitution of the West Bank and the killing of a raging man. Then a cyber war on pager devices, and one of its chapters, and when it ended, the martyrdom of Hezbollah leader His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
The scope of confrontation is wide, and the actors are numerous. All-out war, in multiple places. There is no longer unity as the unity of a theater: a known place, a certain time, a consistency of meaning. The space is expanding, time is non-linear, and war is inconsistent. Not because war is meaningless in the first place, but because the victim is portrayed as an executioner, and the executioner as a victim.
The war waged by Israel is, in its rhetoric, for civilization against barbarism. "Civilization" is the bombing of civilian structures, the killing of children and the demolition of hospitals. The rules of war, as humble, are disappearing and terrorism becomes part of the new war. How do we call bombing civilians without a crime if not terrorism?
The media was bombed and its men killed. The media does not have to be a witness. During the war on Gaza, the media achieved what previous media did not achieve, which is to portray a war of extermination in zero time, which is in progress. The killer refused, so he closed the Al Jazeera office. As in ancient times, genocide and ethnic cleansing should be carried out out of sight
in order to circumvent them and be characterized as collateral victims.
One of the lessons of the Gaza war is that the conventional war, with armies with its three units: land, air, navy, armor, infantry, and cavalry, is over. The final removal of conventional warfare takes place in the Ukraine arena, between Russia and Ukraine. Updated version of World War II.
As for tomorrow's wars, they are a form of the Gaza war, cyber, intelligent, from its soldiers artificial intelligence that tracks faces and disables radars. Tomorrow's wars will not have an arena of confrontation, no specific time, no single front. It mixes the rules of war with the practices of terrorism.
There is tomorrow.. but who draws it? Strength? A new catastrophe worse than the first catastrophe?. Israel's calculation is not only to finish off the Palestinian cause, but to eliminate the Palestinians by pushing them to leave. Netanyahu's choice is to hold the Palestinians responsible for the deaths of detainees, to invest in the situation of oppression, and to capture Gaza, with another weapon, starvation.
The war on Gaza, and in Gaza, is a defeat for the human conscience. The hordes of students in Western universities cried out, and the pleadings of human rights defenders in international courts against those responsible for humanitarian crimes increased, but this did not change the reality of the situation, because the war continues, and criminals are roaming and roaming. Any description of this that is going on is that it is a form of the law of the jungle.
It should be admitted that both the United States and Israel have shown an uncharacteristic desperation to disregard all voices condemning the war condemning killing.. They held on until the storm passed. And what is sad, and shameful, is the domestication of death and killing.. The images of destruction do not stir consciences. The world was domesticated by death. Sometimes he finds justification for it. There are other places where death takes place, and it is not talked about. The pinnacle of villainy.
Gaza will not die, even if it is wounded, but it is the universal conscience that is threatened with death. Justice will die, truth will die, dignity will falter, and we do not need to read Thomas Hobbes' "The Two Leviates" to realize that without a universal social contract, which requires adherence to established rules, anything will be possible. Life will die then, hope will die, creativity will die, thinking will die, and all elements of interaction, such as acquaintance, trafficking, and cooperation, will be absent. It is the end of history, not as Francis Fukuyama envisioned it, with the supremacy of the Enlightenment thought, but with the teetering of the idea it carried, the moral defeat of the West, and the prevalence of the law of the jungle.
Perhaps it is worth reminding Westerners to read Shakespeare, when he said that "there is something rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark, as in Hamlet", that "the world is inconsistent", as in Hamlet again, and that "the blood that flows in the Jew is the blood that flows in all men." Just as the Palestinian, just as Shakespeare said in "The Merchant of Venice." The Palestinian today, like the Jew yesterday, is a human being, entitled to, in principle, what man is entitled to, and is denied, in principle, what is forbidden to all human beings.
Gaza is no longer the gate of the sun, but the gate of hell that will come on dry and green if the matter is not remedied, sooner, to minimize the damage. Humanity is facing a test of conscience, which threatens it more than it threatens Gaza.
Writer and academic from Morocco
Professor of Political Science at Mohammed V University in Rabat