Steve Eason
From the Israeli government’s perspective, the wars against Hezbollah and Hamas are going well. Most of Gaza is under control and the northern third is slowly being cleared of Palestinians. There is plenty of talk of Jewish settlers moving in before long and it seems accepted that Gaza will be garrisoned by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for years to come.
As for Hezbollah, Israel has managed to successfully assassinate most of its leadership and substantially damage its extensive weapons stores. Meanwhile, Israel has warned Lebanese that any breaking of the current pause in fighting will be met with massive force directed not just against Hezbollah but also against Lebanese society more generally.
Beyond Gaza and Lebanon, Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are being expanded – while Palestinians’ rights across the territory are subject to ever closer control, with thousands arrested and hundreds killed. Any resistance is met with considerable force and harsh punishment.
Israel may have seen its international status suffer but that is of little concern to the government, given that the US is fully supportive and is backed up loyally by the UK. In any case, with Trump’s presidency barely a month away, Israel’s longer-term position seems as safe as it can be.
If only it was that simple for them, but the bigger picture is so much more complicated. When the fighting eased a week or so ago, at least 60,000 Israelis were still cut off from their homes and businesses close to the border. Few of them headed home when fighting eased. Instead, they stayed put.
For the much larger numbers of displaced Lebanese north of the border, the move to return home started at once despite IDF warnings to stay away. For Hezbollah and its supporters what counted was survival – they were returning while the IDF was, as many of them saw it, retreating back to Israel. Hezbollah may have been very badly scarred, but it had not been defeated.
There is some history to this. Back in 1982, the Israeli government mounted its largest operation in Lebanon initially to stop Palestinian refugees close to the border from firing rockets into northern Israel. That rapidly expanded into the siege of West Beirut, followed by Israeli forces occupying much of southern Lebanon.
That prompted growing resistance from the majority Shi’a communities and the rapid growth of the Hezbollah movement. Such was its effectiveness that the IDF suffered hundreds of deaths and many more seriously wounded during the 1980s with most Israeli forces withdrawing by 1990.
A further IDF intervention in 2006 failed to achieve its aims and it is now becoming clear that IDF ground force operations across the border in the past month have been far short of an occupation. One factor behind the current Israeli withdrawal has been the impact of a long war on the IDF, mostly a reserve army after all, with the urgent need to rest, re-equip and regroup.
Meanwhile, the destruction and killing in Gaza continue, malnutrition and starvation loom and child health deteriorates still further. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers and IDF units make life appallingly difficult for the Palestinians as the apartheid state expands.
In terms of the international standing of Israel more than half a century ago, the contrast is stark. In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was popularly seen in the UK and much of the West as a courageous David fighting the Arab Goliath and winning against all the odds. Israel was a pioneering country building a thriving democratic new state in the wake of the appalling Holocaust. It was a new state that was even able “to make the desert bloom”. That also gave a substantial boost to the numbers of people from western states in their late teens and early twenties going to work in a Kibbutz.
Now, the situation and the way it’s perceived globally, is so very different.
Last week, London saw yet another huge peaceful pro-Palestine demonstration of tens of thousands of people, the twenty-second in a series stretching over 14 months. On occasions, the crowds have been numbered in the hundreds of thousands. In larger towns and cities right across the UK, there are pro-Palestinian meetings and demonstrations at least every month.
This is rarely covered by the mainstream media but widely reported elsewhere and is one part of a much wider change in attitude towards Israel in the UK, much of Europe and even more so across the Global South. It is reflected in last week’s deeply critical report from Amnesty International and even the way in which the huge suffering in Gaza is at last seeping into the mainstream media in the West.
It will take years or even decades for Israel’s standing in the world to recover from its current status as a pariah or even a rogue state. Israel is not so much making deserts bloom as just making deserts.
Even that radically changed reputation is not the worst political consequence for Israel. That concerns the future and stems from the inevitable response of hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians who, over at least the next two generations, will endeavour in countless ways to respond to what has been done to them and their families.
The war has given rise to innumerable tragedies but there is one that will only slowly become clear – it is that Israel is, by its actions, slowly but surely making itself less secure.
Source: Open Democracy
