Between guarding the walls and the sword of Jerusalem.. a battle of knowledge between Hamas and Israel

The Jerusalem Intifada 2021 is a renewed call to the epistemological/value dimensions of the conflict. In its renewal, it is based on eight elements:

First: the label

“Guarding the walls,” this is what the Zionist entity called its attack on Gaza in May 2021, while the Palestinian resistance called its campaign “The Sword of Jerusalem.” The two names have many connotations for us and for them: the resistance is in a position of initiative, while the entity is in a position of defense and protection. The resistance realizes the symbolism of Jerusalem and its epistemological / value importance to the conflict, and then Hamas undermines Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem, in contrast to the meaningless walls, as they are deaf buildings without history, and the important thing is to protect and guard them because they are the only residence.

Operation Guarding the Walls was another round in the unequal conflict between them. This contrast also applies to the objectives of the operation. While Hamas's goals were political and knowledge, Israel's goals were military

The combat doctrine of “guarding the walls” is based on deterrence, i.e. “defending Israel,” while the “Sword of Jerusalem” is based on the initiative. In the first, it is required to preserve the body from killing. It preserves the physical structure because it is the purpose and philosophy upon which the entity is based. “Operation Guardian of the Walls: Tactical Victory, Strategic Defeat”, “Operation Guardian of the Walls” ended, but did not take place, and the Arab uprising of 1948 “an existential threat to the entity”, but in the second the criterion of victory is to keep your show and your money Your home and your sanctities, even if your body is destroyed, in the first you are mortal, and in the second you are a martyr, and the martyr is alive with his permanent testimony against the people of the cause, and here the result becomes “The Gaza war ended and the problem of Hamas remained, while “Hamas achieved nothing but the destruction of Gaza.”

This is the essence of the conclusions of the strategic inventory that he produced after following up on what was written by the Begin Sadat Center “BESA” (BESA) and the Institute for National Security Studies “INSS” (INSS), which are two of the most important Israeli think tanks over the period from Last May 10 to the 26th of it, which contained more than 20 articles, a position assessment, a strategic assessment and its codification for the experts of the two centers.

Second: The gap of achieving goals between quantitative and qualitative.. Palestinian versus Israeli

The essential observation on this point - which we will discuss according to the Israeli perspective and based on the studies we referred to in the previous paragraph - is that despite the Israeli strategic mind’s awareness of the widening of the fronts in the last round of the conflict to include the West Bank, Gaza and the Arabs of 48, in addition to the Palestinians of the Diaspora, Arab and Islamic public opinion and some Sectors of Western public opinion, there is a persistent attempt to reduce the matter to a conflict with Hamas, and the reasons are understandable, including covering up this expansion, including changing the nature of the issue from being a people and a land looking for their rights to becoming an issue of “Islamic terrorism” that many countries are united in fighting it, whether For most of the Arab regimes or the various countries of the world and their audiences as well, what is meant is the demonization of Hamas. Do Hamas supporters in the West really know what this organization represents? The truth is that Hamas is not a liberation movement looking for a Palestinian nation, and instead seeks to destroy Israel and establish an Islamic state on its ruins.

Nevertheless, “the current conflict between Israel and Hamas has many old and new features,” and from the approach of the new and the old, the goals of the two parties to the conflict, Hamas and Israel, are discussed, as if the rest of the Palestinians who moved on every level did not exist. “The operation of guarding the walls was another round in the unequal conflict. Between them, this contrast also applies to the objectives of the operation, as while Hamas’s goals were political and knowledge, Israel’s goals were military.”

As for the results, “Hamas achieved its goals with the beginning of the campaign. The organization established itself in the Palestinian arena as a defender of Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, and launched rocket-propelled grenades deep into Israeli territory, which disrupted routine civilian life and caused the death of 12 people and a lot of destruction, and incited the unrest between Arabs and Israelis in mixed societies, triggering violent demonstrations in the West Bank and on the Israeli-Lebanese border, and proving that he was the only player (unlike Hezbollah and Iran) willing to confront the most powerful army in the region.”

While Israel's goal was primarily military "to achieve a long-term security calm, and to postpone the next round of the conflict, it was hesitant to set a strategic goal to fundamentally change the situation or at least set new rules of the game with Hamas, in an attempt to reduce the connection between the two arenas: the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem." and Arab public opinion in Israel.

At this point, the discussion moves to evaluate the combat doctrine of the Israeli army, which has undergone a change at the beginning of the new millennium, and to move it from the clear decisive victory of the opponent to deterrence by “emphasizing the heavy price of its aggression (meaning Hamas), weakening its military power and harming its ability to rebuild, and attacking leaders, neutralizing the underground backbone of the organization, and minimizing damage and surprises to the Israeli home front.

If the strategic goals of each party are formulated in this way, it becomes necessary to evaluate them. While Hamas achieved the goals that it set for itself at the beginning of the campaign - which is to present itself as a defender of Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem and to lead the Palestinians in the struggle against Israel - Israel has not liberated itself from the logic that guided its actions in Previous rounds of conflict with Hamas focused on strong deterrence.

The strategic goal that the Israeli government had to formulate - as suggested by one of the studies - is to control the conflict arena and prevent its expansion to additional arenas, with a focus on weakening Hamas and preventing it from controlling the Palestinian arena, reducing its military capabilities to its lowest level, and restoring the Palestinian Authority to a position The exclusive representative of the Palestinians, looking forward to the next day for Abbas.

Part of the strategic inventory of this round of conflict is for Israel first and foremost to restore calm in Jerusalem and in cities and towns with a mixed Arab and Jewish population, weakening the link between the two arenas, in addition to preventing further escalation in other conflict arenas in the north and the West Bank, and in addition Therefore, Israel enjoys the support of the United States and the recognition of the international community that it is not the aggressor, and it has been forced to defend its citizens with the means available to it.

In several Israeli studies, what we can call the “goals perception gap” between the Palestinian and Israeli parties on the one hand, and between the Israeli leadership and its public on the other hand, was discussed. The declared strategic goal of the Israeli government - as presented by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - is that “Hamas You'll think twice about the next time before you shoot us."

However, this goal does not challenge Hamas' goal of reaching a leadership position in the Palestinian arena as a whole, and its willingness to pay high prices in order to dictate the terms of a ceasefire on Israel from a position of strength.

The strategic goal that the Israeli government had to formulate and advance was to deal with the goals that Hamas aspired to achieve: controlling the theater of war, and preventing its expansion to additional arenas, with a focus on weakening Hamas, as one study suggests.

Conclusion: While Israel’s thinking during the fighting showed a quantitative-tactical logic, Hamas’s thinking was strategic and qualitative. This was evident in the internal Israeli discourse, which focused on the quantitative achievements of the campaign, such as the number of targets that were targeted, the number of dead “Hamas terrorists” and the number of rockets fired. Or destroyed, how many tunnels were destroyed, how many multi-storey buildings were destroyed, and so its quantitative tactical logic not only prevented Israel from reaching a clear and indisputable military result, but Hamas used a completely different logic that focused on systematic strategic goals.

This is what one Israeli study concluded, adding that, “For the first time, Hamas succeeded in luring the entire Palestinian political body (in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Israel) to an outburst of terrorism and violence, and thus it undermined a major Israeli approach, one that succeeded for a remarkable period: it drove a wedge between Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Moreover, Hamas launched its campaign from a broad regional and international perspective, unlike the previous rounds, where the “siege” on Gaza was the center of the fighting and its goals before. In this round, Hamas turned Jerusalem into a symbolic focus, and thus Hamas assumed the leadership of the camp of terrorism and “resistance.” Regional, even at the expense of Hezbollah, which had to acquiesce in the firing of rockets into Israel from Lebanese territory by the "rebel" Palestinian factions (which could become an ongoing phenomenon).

Third: The third wave of the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring - in its two waves - was and still is a change in the internal rules of the game for the benefit of the peoples of the region, in preparation for a transformation at the regional level and in their relationship with the international system, in return for that there was a counter force that invested its surplus power and wealth in the dynamics that exposed and exposed it this spring to reshape the region And changing its rules in favor of a vision that opposes the essence of the Arab uprisings, which is a search for a new social contract by which the national state will be rebuilt with new elites. This contract is based on three components: freedom/democracy, social justice/equitable distribution of resources, and liberation of the national will from regional and international domination, This dream is its driving force, new generations of young people with a predominantly female presence.

There are many similarities between what is happening in Palestine and the two waves of the Arab Spring, the first mover: young generations and a dominant female presence that preceded the organizations in their movement, while transcending the old mechanisms of action and the opposing dualities of peace/armed, the two-state solution, and political and organizational differences towards a common national goal against the Zionist occupation In the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem

In the relationship of the Jerusalem Intifada with the Arab Spring, there are many faces that need to be detailed - we may dedicate a separate article to them, but we refer here to some aspects of convergence whose essence is the completion of the fourth aspect of the Arab social contract, despite the escalating Arab popular response to the Palestinian uprisings in the first decade of the new millennium It was one of the basic premises of the Arab uprisings. The Palestinian cause, for reasons - which there is no room for detail - has witnessed a decline over the past decade, the age of this spring.

The ongoing uprising is a restoration of popular interest in the issue again, and the restoration of one of the components of legitimacy in the Arab political systems, but with a new awareness that transcends the experience of nationalist regimes in the sixties and beyond, which employed the issue to confiscate the peoples' demand for freedom and political participation, "no voice is louder than the sound of battle."

There are many similarities between what is happening in Palestine and the two waves of the Arab Spring, the first mover: young generations and a dominant female presence that preceded the organizations in their movement, while transcending the old mechanisms of action and the opposing dualities of peace/armed, the two-state solution, and political and organizational differences towards a common national goal against the Zionist occupation In the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem, and racial discrimination in the Green Line, the use of social networking sites (the Tik Tok generation) as tools for mobilizing, mobilizing, documenting violations and presenting the case to the world, and also as a cognitive and value model characterized by networking, decentralization and creativity in action with the speed of initiative.

Here, it is appropriate to point out the main weakness of the Arab Intifada model, as embodied in its two previous waves, which is the inability to institutionalize. It announces the end of the old nomadic form of its inability to generate appropriate responses to the new challenges, but at the same time, it has not yet been able to crystallize into a broad national project that mobilizes its base. The social aspect behind it, which represents a fundamental challenge for this intifada, is its ability to renew the Palestinian national project.

Fourth: Palestinian lives matter

Since the beginning of the third millennium, we have witnessed various struggles and protests that have taken the nature of waves that escalate at times and fade at other times, in which the demonstrators express their anger at police brutality, corruption, crony capitalism, the arrogance of those in power, the manipulation of politics, the weakness of political institutions in representing people, and their collective marginalization. Exacerbating inequalities in wealth, income and opportunities, the list goes on and on, but what unites them is a "global human demand for dignity, justice and freedom."

The ongoing intifada is part of this global demand, so the global support for it has increased, even if it has many faces, between the human rights defender, based on the fight against racial discrimination, as emerged in the Human Rights Watch report, and the ethnic based on purely American grounds, as it appeared among the progressives of the Democratic Party. The Israelis are the white oppressors. The Palestinians are the "brown and black" victims.

These traits have emerged over the past few years, particularly among the BDS movement that began making loud comparisons after the 2014 Ferguson riots, and became a feature of the rhetoric of the Nation of Islam and Black Lives Matter. Task".

(See the Israeli view on the subject in this article), but this is now more fully expressed as a cultural and political issue, due in large part to rising American concern about “race” after Floyd, and the incompetence of the new Biden administration in dealing with this. file yet.

Democrat Ilhan Omar, a Democrat in the US Congress, went further, calling Israel an "apartheid government," while Representative Ianna Pressley said, "As a black woman in America I'm no stranger to police brutality and state violence, we've been criminalized because of the way we appear in world, Palestinians are told the same thing as black people in America, there is no acceptable form of resistance."

"The struggle for black lives and the struggle for Palestinian liberation are intertwined," Representative Cory Bush said on social media. "We oppose our money going to fund military police, occupation, regimes of oppression and violent trauma, we are against war, we are against occupation, and we are against apartheid."

Fifth: Presence of religious/cultural symbols

It has not been absent at any moment from the conflict, but there has been an overwhelming use of it in recent years. The normalization agreements are called “Abraham” in relation to Abraham - peace be upon him - with the aim of partially marketing them as a renewed religious rapprochement between Muslims, Jews and Christians, and the Judaism of the State of Israel has become a reality. In Laws and Policies: Israel’s “Nation-State Law” (formally known as the Basic Law, which took effect in 2018) defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, constitutionally entrenching inequality and discrimination against non-Jews.

The “Sword of Al-Aqsa” is the name of the armed resistance of Hamas, and the Islamic religious authorities and the masses of Muslims are provoked by the attack on the third holy mosque during the days of Ramadan and Laylat al-Qadr.

The use of religious symbols in mobilization and mobilization is understandable, but for the Palestinians it raises the necessity of forming a broad national mix that allows for a creative formulation of the components of the issue that combines religious, national, human rights and racial segregation into one fabric, which ensures broad national consensus and Arab, Islamic and international support from a human rights and values ​​approach.

Sixth: The erosion of the deal of the century formula

This deal was based on three foundations: normalization agreements, recognition of Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel, and the possibility of peace with the Arabs without recognizing the rights of the Palestinians. And I put forward a new concept of peace in the region based on the formula of economy and security, that is, a purely materialistic formula based on the instincts of hunger and fear.

In January 2020, President Donald Trump presented the “Deal of the Century” to resolve the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict. The plan’s framework was presented as a new model for conflict resolution and a new architectural design in the Middle East based on an Arab-American-Israeli alliance.

The plan upends the principles of the political process between Israel and the Palestinians over the past three decades. It challenges the assumption that time is on the side of the Palestinian national endeavour, and that over time the international community will force Israel to accept Palestinian terms for an agreement, and presents economic interests as a way to reformulate and condone Palestinian rights.

As for Netanyahu and his governments - which have avoided pushing peace negotiations with the Palestinians - he started claiming the possibility of moving towards normalization with Arab countries without moving forward in the political process with the Palestinians.

Numerous Israeli studies point to this fact: “For years the UN and EU peace industry ignored regional developments, and continued to spread lies that only the creation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines could bring stability to the Middle East and accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. ".

The 2021 Jerusalem Intifada brought the issue of Jerusalem back to the fore as one of the most important components of the conflict, dropped the philosophy on which the Abraham agreements were based, and emphasized the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the face of the occupation

Another study concludes, "However, they still mistakenly refer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the "Middle East conflict", and view peace between Israel and the Palestinians as the key to stability for the entire region."

We wonder: Were the agreements an attempt to restore Peres’ concept of the new Middle East that he put forward in the 1990s, targeting an Israeli leadership in the region based on economic/material formulas and transcending any moral considerations based on the Palestinian right on the basis that it is based on benefiting from Israeli technology, Gulf money and cheap Arab labor ?

The Jerusalem uprising in 2021 brought the issue of Jerusalem back to the fore as one of the most important components of the conflict, and dropped the philosophy on which the “Abraham agreements” were based, and emphasized the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the face of the occupation. The policies of the family, that is, their integration into the entity that confiscates their rights, and most importantly, they cast a thick shadow on the possibility of the Zionist entity being part of the collective security arrangements in the region, and confirmed the conclusions of the various Arab opinion polls from Israel as the first threat to the region as perceived by its peoples.

Seventh: Repercussions and Effects

The conflict in Gaza, as one Israeli study sees, changed this reality, and strengthened supporters of identity politics within Gaza, and between Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians.

Instead of being just another tactical round between the two sides, the recent confrontation in Gaza was a strategic clash between different schools, approaches, worldviews and camps. “Hearts now have the upper hand against economic pragmatism,” and Hamas was able to make itself an important strategic player outside the Palestinian arena. It has succeeded in undermining the pragmatic economic model of the Deal of the Century, provoking conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and giving terrorist groups in the region a valid reason to continue confronting Israel.

Any effort to confront this emerging trend requires, from the Israeli point of view, first and foremost, an understanding of the true significance of the recent war, and in particular its true consequences.

Thus, many Israeli studies realize the epistemological/value dimension of this round of conflict. These achievements aim to "shape perceptions regarding Arab unity, and puncture Israel's strong regional position."

Hamas tried to expand the deterrence equation with Israel by linking Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and it was daring to issue a warning to Israel and fulfill its threats.

Therefore, it becomes necessary to “reduce the achievements of Hamas in recent years, and the entrance to the reconstruction and improvement of civilian life in Gaza, which leads to the erosion of its domestic and international legitimacy that it sought to establish, and instead strengthens its image (at least for many publics, especially in the West). ) as a terrorist organization that holds civilians hostage for its unruly policies."

And the Israeli assessment of the results of the tour continues on Hamas, "It should be clear that Hamas suffered a severe blow to its military capabilities and, consequently, to its political position, and that the challenge it poses to the Palestinian Authority's hegemony over the territories and Jerusalem has been weakened in the wake of the recent campaign."

Internationally, Israel has reported that Hamas is the aggressor who planned and launched this campaign, and that it acts as a terrorist organization in every way, blindly directing its weapons at the civilian population.

As for the Arabs of 1948 and the Palestinians of the West Bank, some of whom may have pinned their hopes on Hamas as the leader of the Palestinian national struggle, he conveyed to them the message that "Hamas' failure in the military campaign may undermine the hopes of that extremist minority that was tempted by the organization."

Eighth: Arabs 48.. Jihad inside Israel

On the Israeli discussion on this point, there are 4 main observations:

The first: the view that the Arabs of 1948 have become an existential threat to the Zionist entity, "which made this latest conflagration particularly shocking to Israeli Jews."

The second: the failure of the formula to integrate them as an ethnic minority from the perspective of the nation-state (or rather, their "familialization", that is, their conversion to Israeli citizens) as if Israel were a natural nation-state.

The third: The discussion brought up the reasons and motives that led to their uprising. The main motive for them was not the problem of discrimination, but rather moral, not material, motives, which one study called “the rise of a national (and Islamic) that does not stem from a lack of rights or opportunities, but from rejecting the status of the minority,” and considering the hegemony of the minority. The Jews in Palestine are illegal domination by a foreign invader who must replace him, so the eruption is inevitably coming and becomes inevitable according to one of the studies “and we hope that it will be in the distant future, and it is likely that we will see the cities mentioned above (meaning Lod, Umm al-Fahm, Ashkelon, etc.). ), as well as the main transportation routes - especially Wadi Ara - and the areas adjacent to Arab towns and villages once again become major battlefields if weapons are not confiscated.

One study indicates that their rejection of their minority status has not diminished, but rather intensified with the rise in their economic and political wealth, as well as their opposition to the Jewish state as such. In the mid-1970s, one in two Israeli Arabs renounced Israel's right to exist, and by 1999 were 4 of All 5 are doing it.

Another study extended this understanding to its integrity, stating that "the explosion of mass violence by Arab Israelis against their Jewish compatriots is nothing less than a religious war, and it must be dealt with as such."

She explains that there are, of course, legions of commentators who will attribute the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in general, and the continuing explosion of violence by Arab citizens of Israel in particular, to regional, national, economic, civil or legal reasons, yet they overlook the deeper and more intractable cause, which is Islam's absolute rejection of the right of the Jews to establish a state.

The last note: Evoking historical memory in the relationship of Arabs to Jews on the land of Palestine since the beginning of the 20th century and in the first half of it “This is what happened in the violent revolution of 1936-1939 throughout Palestine when Arab criminal gangs joined the radical Islamists - the ideological predecessors of Hamas and the Islamic movement The Israeli - to kill about 450 Jews, along with 180 British soldiers and policemen and thousands of Palestinian Arabs.

Some studies trace the reasons that led the Arabs of 48 to revolt, and attribute them to the accumulation of several reasons, “in fact, which led to an increased challenge to the state, its policies and values. It was not deprivation, rather, it was the continuous extremism of the Arab-Israeli society over the past decades. This process was facilitated through Increasing wealth and education, it also pursued a political logic of its own.

Another study adds, "For fear of being left behind, the Arabs of Israel steadfastly rose to their national demands. Now such ideas have been put forward that cannot be said so far, such as that Israel must be dissolved and transformed into a bi-national state, that is, an Arab state in which the Arabs are not replaced, but the Jews are in their place as a minority. ".

Other factors also contributed to the deterioration of the situation, “the first being the rising power and influence of the Islamic movement, which injected into the conflict a religious element that has largely been dormant since 1948, and the second is Israel’s illusory embrace of Oslo despite the PLO’s brazen and continuing mockery of its obligations under the 1993 agreement. The third is the growing trend of “post-Zionism” among educated Israelis, through which the impression of a worn-out society ready to pay any price for comfort was created, and finally encouraged the most radical elements on the Arab side to dream of a final blow.

We conclude by saying that the Israeli strategic mind was more aware of the epistemological/value dimensions of the Jerusalem uprising 2021 than the Arab mind, which needs an in-depth dialogue about the Arab uprising model launched by the Arab uprisings over the past decade, and confirmed by the recent Jerusalem uprising, as the conflict is in part a competition for cognitive models A different value, the essence of which is bias towards the human / the secret - in the words of our professor Abdel Wahhab Al-Masiri, may God have mercy on him - as opposed to the human / matter, and each of them has a different perception of life and the nature of society with its network of relations, and this produces a discourse and practice of political, social and economic perceptions and imaginations, and from which norms, traditions and institutions emerge. Language and perception of the self and the other expresses itself in laws, legislation, constitution and production relations.