Afrasianet - Oraib Al Rantawi - It never occurred to me that I would write on the occasion of the end of 1000 days of aggression and resistance, disaster and heroism, while the war has not yet ended, and the massacre is still continuing, the "flood" that began on October 7 is still continuing, and the earthquake that it created is still moving from one square to another, and its aftershocks are striking deep in the region and the international community, creating revolutions in the scene, image and narrative that never occurred.
I remember one meeting with a senior Hamas official shortly after October 7, when I asked him if the Qassam Brigades had prepared for a war that could last for three months on the Gaza Strip, and his answer was full of confidence and optimism: Yes, we have prepared for a war that could last for six months, not just three. I returned that day to write and declare, motivated by this assessment, that Hamas is not a tunnel to be "blown up" or a building to be "blown up," so that the movement and the resistance will end and a new page will be opened From the book "The Israeli Era".
No one in this world has answered, with a statement, a hint, a piece of information or a leak, that the Flood and the subsequent aggression will extend in time for so long, and that steadfastness and resistance will reach all these peaks, and that savagery and criminality, this lower level of decadence and meanness, will reach its limits. All of this was beyond all imagination, neither for those who launched the Flood nor for others, although some of the advocates of "retroactive wisdom" and others from the school of "eternal fascination with Israeli superiority" do not hesitate Today, they claim otherwise, and they attribute to themselves the credit of "alleged epistemic superiority," or they give their "subservient realism" the cloak of "rationality."
For the past 1,000 days and 100 days, Gaza has been sending its composite messages, broadcasting live two images that cannot be understood without examining and reading them together: the image of legendary heroism and epic resistance against an enemy rife full of weapons and hatred, and the image of the humanitarian catastrophe that befell the Gaza Strip and its people.
The trembling and the defeated turn a blind eye to the first, and they see only the second, not because of their excessive humanity, but because of excessive humiliation and submission, while some of the proponents of the "revolutionary sentence" see only the first, turn a blind eye to the second, and do not hesitate to reduce the scene to an easy talk about a difficult situation, a single revolutionary sentence that spares the torments of millions of people for a thousand days and a day.
It is Gaza, gentlemen, as it has turned into a "nom de facto" that summarizes the struggles of an entire people for more than a hundred years. It has become a title for all the honorable and free people of the world, reducing the goals of their legitimate struggle against the extreme right, hateful racism, and hateful populism.
What you see is a banner condemning the genocide and glorifying Gaza and its people in any part of the world, until you realize that Palestine has become the axis of a greater international-humanitarian movement, and that the struggle of its people has become a symbol of a global struggle aimed at liberation, justice and fairness, and that it is fed up with the crimes of fascism and Zionism.
October 7 is enough to show the invalidity of the effects of the "intelligence arm," which is insurmountable in a mission, geographically and "far away," after the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip accomplished the greatest "strategic deception" operation
Before and After the Flood
It was not expected from Gaza and its resistance to record a "decisive victory" over Israel, it was enough for it to pull the cause of its people out of the shafts of rejection and marginalization, and to raise it to the forefront of the world's attention and agendas.. It was enough for it to break the barrier of fear, overcome the complex of the "invincible army", end the "illusion" that Tel Aviv lived, and many Arab regimes and governments tried to enshrined a "knot in our minds".. The invincible army conquered in Gaza, and turned tens of thousands of its officers and soldiers into mentally ill and suffering from "post-syndrome" Shock," and dozens of them fired "mercy" bullets at heads and hearts that did not know mercy with "non-Jeers."
October 7 is enough to show the invalidity of the "intelligence arm" that is insurmountable in a mission, geographically invincible, and "far away," after the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip completed the most complex "strategic deception" operation of allied and cooperative intelligence services, some of which are of the most important in the world.
It is enough that the resistance of Gaza has managed with a surprising degree of efficiency a psychological and media war against a powerful enemy, and the result was a clear victory for the Palestinian narrative and narrative. It is enough that the flood has afflicted Israel with a chronic disability, and that the "Gaza Syndrome" will haunt the occupiers generation after generation, and that Israel after it will never remain the same as it was before it.
The history of the Palestinians with a replacementary abolitionist occupation did not begin since that day, as it was preceded by bloody pages of wars, uprisings and confrontations, each wave of which was more fierce than the previous ones, and who insist on looking at this issue from this "perspective"He must recall how the Palestinians were on October 6, and what were the consequences that awaited their cause, from a sector that is subject to the most horrible types of unjust collective sieges, to a West Bank whose land is swallowed up, whose inhabitants are chased by the army and settler herds, to Jerusalem that is subject to Israelization and creeping annexation, and holy sites desecrated by the "barbaric foot" in the morning and evening, and residents who have become strangers in their city, who have been turned into "ghettos" fenced off by bypass roads and checkpoints, and outposts spread deep into their neighborhoods and alleys.
It is enough to recall the question that made us stand confused and embarrassed every time it was posed to us by a journalist or diplomat: Where did your Palestinian cause end, and is there a way out of this absence and marginalization, and did the Palestinians content themselves to live under the bayonets of apartheid, siege and permissibility? It is enough to recall the images of the "normalization train" moving from one Arab station to another, waiting for it to arrive at "and what the situation of the Palestinians would have been if the Abrahamic process had reached its desired conclusions, without resolving the Palestinian issue, and even without taking a "meaningful path" towards this solution.
Suffice it to recall how Netanyahu repeated his statement with a sense of humor, that he succeeded in pushing Palestine, the cause and the people, to the margins of the Middle East book, after convincing Washington and some Arab and regional capitals that Israel is a "reliable ally project," that Iran is the real threat to the region, and that the time has come for the establishment of a Middle East alliance, with Tel Aviv at its head, under American auspices, to confront the threat of Tehran and its "proxies," and that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is no more than a "small detail," diminished in the face of major conflicts which are being built in the region.
All of this is behind our backs, this is how the majority of the Palestinian people speak, despite the heavy price they paid on the altar of steadfastness and confronting aggression that is devoid of any legal, moral and humanitarian shackles. It is true that October 7 did not stop the settlement in the West Bank, increased the siege on Gaza, and did not save the holy sites from the abomination of violations, but it is also true that the flood succeeded in making the costs of these practices a calamity for the Israelis, from their image, narrative and status on the regional and international arenas, and to turn Israel from the " A potential ally" for Arab and Islamic countries that are weighing in on an "existing threat", and more precisely, the successes of the flood in the political and strategic sense are far greater than its humanitarian, economic, and social costs, and its major repercussions will be more evident in the medium and long term.
In its quest to avenge its collapsed deterrent image, Israel found nothing but targeting civilian structures and objects, to destroy the incubators of the resistance and incite them against them, before it began to discover that wars are not won by killing civilians and targeting children and women, that murderers are losers even if they win, and that deterrence is not repaired by these more degenerate tools, and that generations of those determined to take revenge and revenge for those who have left, will carry the banner and continue on the road, after it is assured that its enemy has left it with no choice but to bury the grave or Exile, and that the saying that a good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian, no longer expresses the view of a minority of Israelis, but rather the mouthpiece of the vast majority of them.
It was not expected from Gaza and its resistance to record a "decisive victory" over Israel, it was enough that it had pulled the cause of its people from the shafts of rejection and marginalization, and raised it to the forefront of the world's attention and agendas. It was enough that it broke the barrier of fear and overcame the "invincible army" complex.
Wrong and right. Profit and loss
In the balance of profit and loss, the question is not whether the "flood" has brought the Palestinians closer to the "two-state solution" or distanced them from it, as most of them were aware that this was an "illusion of a solution" and not a "solution," and that it was nothing more than a mirage or a smoke thread, aimed at giving Israel the time it needed, at the lowest price, to "resolve the conflict" and destroy any chance of establishing a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.
The Palestinians realized this before October 7, and their conviction of it was strengthened after that. The most important question from the perspective of profit and loss is: Will the Palestinians continue their struggle with their enemy, from a stronger position or from a weaker position?
There is no doubt that there are no solutions of any kind on the horizon, unless it comes in measure of the outcomes of the Israeli solution, and it disenfranchises the minimum legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians, which is "A scenario that we can feel in the "humiliating adjustment" that the PA is making in preparation for it, through the process of "re-engineering" the Palestinian regime.
In the balance of right and wrong, it can be said today that Hamas's bets on the West Bank revolution and the Green Line intifada were based on the moment of the "Sword of Jerusalem", the intifada of the cities and towns that underwent the first occupations in 1948, and the emergence of the generation of the Brigades, Brigades and Al-Areen, the generation of the third millennium in the West Bank. This bet failed as it turned out, and it turned out that three reasons for this failure were not taken into account:
1. That there is a desirable dimension to this bet.
2. Lack of awareness of the magnitude and nature of the transformations that have taken place in the situation in the West Bank, since the "Fayyadiya" era and the Dayton-Blair plans, through the promotion of the generals of the "Sacred Security Coordination" to the ranks of the first command and decision-making centers in the PA.
3. Hamas has not sufficiently studied what Israel has learned from the "internal intifada" and what it has developed as a precautionary strategy to ensure that the experiment is not repeated.
Hamas's mistake in estimating the reactions of Tehran and its axis came only partially and relatively, as the axis did not stand silent, but entered a bitter war of support on the side of Gaza and its resistance, and paid for it a cost that no one could have imagined before, especially in Lebanon. Perhaps the "succession of arenas" instead of "their continuity and synchronization" was a major mistake in the axis' calculations, and a miscalculation mainly due to Tehran.
However, if it were not for the "support" of Gaza, the flood would not have collapsed into the June 2025 and February 2026 wars, which will in turn rise as a witness to Israel's failure to restore deterrence, and the United States in imposing hegemony, after Iran persevered, entered an unprecedented war with the rest of the axis parties, and ended with a memorandum of understanding, which came in favor of Iran, and it would not have been so, if the US-Israeli alliance had succeeded in achieving its goals.
There has been a long debate on this particular point, which continues to this day, but opinions, no matter how conflicting, converge on one point, which is that the wars between Washington and Tel Aviv against Tehran, Lebanon and Yemen, some of which affected Iraq, did not begin at the moment of their outbreak, but were an organic extension of the flood and support, and there is much that has been said and can be said about a flaw in tactics or an imbalance in the strategy of the axis.
Neither we, nor Hamas, nor any of the other observers and actors would have predicted that Israel's criminality, brutality and brutality would reach these limits in targeting people, trees and stones.
Because we simply did not imagine that the "rush" had reached this amount in the performance of the Palestinian Authority and the organization, and that the "deterioration" that afflicted the official Arab and Islamic regime had been deposited under the gendarmerie, with which it was unable to provide a morsel of food, medicine and a drink of water for the children, the elderly and its women, and we are not talking here about supporting its resistance, because it is a thought that we did not have or even in our rosy dreams, if some want to blame Hamas and the button of "miscalculation and estimation", they can do so, but it is shameful to download The resistance, and a position that oscillated between helplessness, collusion and conspiracy, dropping the remaining mulberry leaves with which this regime hid its accumulated shames.
As for the international community, the official and I mean the Western democracies, the citizens of the civilization of human rights, its complicity has risen to the level of scandal, for which its leaders are paying the price at the ballot boxes in their countries these days, but our only consolation is that this West still has living peoples and vigilant societies that know what is wrong from right, and it has begun the journey of rewriting history and narrative, and it is likely that it will continue on this path, which promises Israelis only more isolation, rejection and contempt.
The Palestinians are aware of all these facts, and more than that, and the picture for them after a thousand days of the war of encirclement, cleansing, and extermination has become clearer, and they are expressing them in successive opinion polls, with multiple sources and identical results. The majority of them, despite the high price of October 7, still maintain a positive opinion in support of the flood, believe in the weapons of the resistance, and still express their support for Hamas and the resistance, in contrast to a small minority that expresses their support for the PA, its choices, its practices, and its presidency.
It is natural to see a disparity in the positions of the Palestinians, between inside and outside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in times of intense fighting and times of relative calm, but most importantly, that the Palestinians have not lost faith in their national project, the legitimacy of their struggle, and the future of their cause, and most importantly, that they are still clinging to their homeland, which has no other homeland, and that they are able to sort out the fat from among their ranks, as the conflict continues for decades and generations, and there are rounds between the people, and the Palestinians after the flood and thanks to it, will resume their struggle, which has never ceased, from the position of Higher, and with greater confidence, whatever the forms of this conflict and no matter how many tools of struggle it may have.
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Oraib Al Rantawi
Jordanian writer and political analyst
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