The suffering of the people of Gaza today is the result of the failure of Palestinian democracy. Getty
We are all aware that October 7 is a turning point in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the history of the entire region, and perhaps even in the history of the world.
An event like this, in which a huge amount of martyrs’ blood is shed today, also sheds a huge amount of ink, and this is just the beginning.
In the face of the epic - the tragedy that Gaza has been experiencing for six months - there is a “reading” of the heart, as we witness the devastation, random killing, and criminal starvation. These are the feelings that we experience every day: sadness in the face of all this tsunami of pain, anger in the face of the failure of the Arabs - governments and peoples - and the inability of the international system to stop the massacre, and pride and pride in the face of the heroism of the invincible people.
All these feelings will be reflected in our vision of this war. Knowing that the latter has multiple readings, it must be present in our minds so that the tree does not obscure the forest from us.
Palestinian intelligence
They are different but complementary viewpoints, including:
Intelligence reading: I imagine that all the intelligence services in the world today mock the Israeli intelligence, which has deluded the world - especially itself - that it knows everything. There is no doubt that the latter will try by all means to restore its image, for example through more assassinations. But if a glass cup is shattered, it is impossible to restore it. There is no doubt that the rest of the international agencies are in the process of in-depth study of Palestinian intelligence, how it overcame what was supposed to be the pinnacle of cunning and cunning, and what lessons must be learned to modernize its concepts and organization.
Military reading: It is certain that the strategic planning centers in many countries are reviewing their combat doctrine, and the “Al-Aqsa Flood” demonstrated the ability of a small combat group to stick the nose of a nuclear state into the ground, and what lessons must be learned in this field as well.
Strategic political reading: If we consider that the American-Chinese conflict, specifically, and the Western-Russian-Chinese conflict in general, are the focus of today’s global conflict, then there is no doubt that senior analysts are in the process of assessing the severe damage to the West. As a result of his blind support for the Israeli aggression and his inability to stop it, and how he is about to lose the battle for the minds and hearts of millions of Arabs and Muslims to the Russian-Chinese duo, which is considered the biggest victor in this war; As a result of his position on this aggression.
Historical reading: There is no doubt that there was a before and after the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and that historians are in the process of preparing theses about this pivotal moment in the history of the conflict between Zionism and the Arab nation.
There are many other readings, such as the reading of the extremists and their return to the theory of the clash of civilizations, or the economic reading to investigate the consequences of the war after the fragility of trade routes became clear.
Add to that literary reading, as there is no doubt that a great deal of poetic, narrative, and intellectual creativity will result from all the pain experienced by the invincible people, and all the sons and daughters of the oppressed nation who love them.
What I want to present in this article is a chronically democratic and unrepentant reading of the epic tragedy.
The matter is not related to the concerns of a researcher in political science, but rather to the concerns of a politician who believes - perhaps rightly and perhaps wrongly - that one of the reasons for our peoples’ disasters is their failure to build a stable, effective political system that is the least bad of the systems. That is, the democratic system, which has been engaged for decades in the struggle for this system, and is obsessed with an important question: Is October 7 the final blow to a dream and a project that has been reeling since the victory of tyranny over the peaceful democratic revolutions that were called the Arab Spring?
The question within the question: What do the events we are living through teach us about democracy, and even to what degree is it responsible for what is happening under our eyes?
Key players
To deal with the problem, the state of democracy must be reviewed in relation to the main players. That is, the Israeli, Palestinian, Arab (specifically Egyptian) and Western (mainly American) players.
Regarding the first player, it must be remembered that Israel is governed by the strangest political system in the world. It lives under three political systems that should be impossible to combine.
It is a country governed by a classic Western liberal democracy like the one in Britain or America, but only for Jews.
It is a country that lives under a clear and explicit apartheid system, as it defines itself as a state for the Jews. That is, non-Jews - who constitute a quarter of the population - are second-class citizens. Imagine that America legislates with complete clarity that it is a country primarily for whites, and France that it is a country for Christians above all else.
It is also a colonial state, as evidenced by its occupation of the West Bank despite international law, and a tyrannical state, as evidenced by its policy of killing, imprisonment, and dispossessing lands outside every law except the law of force.
What democracy is this that guarantees first-class citizens their rights and freedoms, while protecting and financing the occupation of another people?! We are faced with a lame democracy, where there is no true democratic system without its basic values: equality of the entire population with the same legal protection and freedom for all.
But the dilemma of democracy in Israel is not only its attack on the basic values of democracy. It is also a procedural result of the proportional voting mechanism in parliamentary elections. This electoral system that appears to be the pinnacle of democracy is in fact its murder. Wherever it has been tried, the result has been either political instability, or minority control over the majority, as governments are formed only with difficulty.
Small and marginal parties can blackmail major parties to impose their policies. This is exactly what is happening today, as the continuation of the war cannot be understood without understanding the role of the electoral system in Israel, which brought in the likes of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, who are able to impose their extremist agenda, and continue the war in Gaza and settlement in the West Bank.
So it can be said; The nature of Israeli democracy - in its denial of the basic values of democracy and its electoral system that enables the minority to impose its opinion on the majority - is one of the reasons for the Gaza tragedy, especially since, after the clear and explicit rejection of the two-state solution, it only presents the entire region with the choice between permanent war and eternal war.
The failure of Arab democratization
What now about the Arab and Egyptian player specifically?
We all know that the crossings were open during the rule of the martyr President Mohamed Morsi, and that if he had continued in power, the pressure would not have reached the terrible level that led to successive wars, including the last war.
We all know that the Egyptian regime is the one who can lift the siege on Gaza, and it has not done so since the summer of 2013 until today.
Would Israel have dared to do to the Palestinians what it is doing, if there was today a democratic regime in Egypt, and let us dream, in most countries of the region?
Were such imaginary democratic regimes able to normalize, besiege, and open land crossings for Israel after closing the Red Sea to its ships, when the overwhelming majority of people reject such policies?
It is obvious that this war is the result of the failure of Arab democratization and the consequences of the liquidation of the Arab Spring, and that it is part of the terrible bill that the people paid in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Sudan.
We come to the American actor
How strange that Western and American discourse focuses on: To justify blind support for Israel, on the pretext of the right of a nuclear state that has one of the most powerful armies in the world to defend itself, and there is no talk about the right of an occupied people to defend themselves, which means that they must accept the siege in Gaza, settlement in the West Bank, and apartheid within the 1948 borders, otherwise they will be stigmatized. terrorism and anti-Semitism.
It remains to ask: How can the first democratic state provide all this unconditional support to a rogue state that defies all international norms and laws, commits reprehensible massacres every day, and is being prosecuted before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide?
Naturally, there are many reasons for this support, but the most important reason in the current issue is what the American political analyst Finkelstein, who is Jewish, confirms when he says: Biden's problem is his fear of losing his campaign's Jewish funders and his unconditional support. In search of this support.
Here we are faced with a general problem that afflicts democracy everywhere, which is its dependence on money, the media, and lobbies, and the ability of these forces to blackmail it.
Last but not least is the Palestinian player
As a secular, democratic, human rights activist, I have never believed that (political) Islam is the solution. But I have always said to my secular friends in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Palestine, if the Fund decides to give power to the Islamists, let them rule, for we are the ones who won them to democracy, not them who won us to political Islam. If they succeed, their success is for the entire nation, and if they fail, the fund that brought them will deport them. If they refuse to submit to the rules of the game that brought them to power, then there is civil resistance.
Miserable situation
Unfortunately, some of the secularists - whom I know - are like a football team that is ready to play provided that it wins, otherwise it does not recognize the rules according to which it entered the game. Rather, it can be said; Their fear of the success of the Islamists was even stronger than the hope of their failure, and hence their suicidal strategy that led them to join tyranny in order to be subjected to the torture of the Islamists.
Imagine if Abbas accepted Hamas’s victory and left it to rule, would Israel have monopolized the West Bank and Hamas to tame the former and liquidate the latter?
The suffering of our people in Gaza today is also the result of the failure of Palestinian democracy.
From this quick reading, we can conclude that democracy has a central role in the Gaza tragedy, albeit with different mechanisms and approaches, whether by aborting it in Egypt, killing it in Ramallah, corrupting it in Israel, or blackmailing it in America.
The question now: What is the impact of the war on democracy when it is in such a miserable situation?
US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, did not make a mistake in saying: Israel is becoming more and more a religious fundamentalist state, which means that even the lame democracy in Israel may end, and with it the myth of the oasis of democracy in the Middle East will end, as will the myth of the invincible army, and the Mossad that counts the ants on Mars.
It is also certain that this war adds to the difficulties of democracy in the process of spread and mastery in the Arab world. What the American administration does not seem to have taken into account is that its position in support of the Israeli aggression contributes to weakening the chances of democratization in the Arab world - if we consider the matter to be part of its strategy - because democracy is still in the minds of most Arabs linked to the West, and from there it is a blow to the West’s credibility. It is a blow to the credibility of democracy. Which means that the policy of blind bias towards Israel is, in the medium and long term, the best gift for the spread of the Russian or Chinese model of governance, and a blow to what America wants to export what it sees as part of its power. That is, the democratic system.
Does this mean that this war has definitively ended every democratic dream of making the Chinese-Russian option more attractive to the new Arab generations, not to mention their conviction that there is no point except armed resistance and the example of Hamas?
Collapse of tyranny
All of this is possible, but there is a ray of light in all this darkness. On the one hand, there is the clear failure of the counter-revolution in all Arab Spring countries and the collapse of the image of tyranny. As a result of his cowardice and inaction in the face of the Gaza tragedy, which means that the revolutionary movement will return to the scene soon with stronger ire against regimes in which it can be said: “A lion is against me and an ostrich in wars.”
There is the western street, which is full of demonstrators, and there is not a fascist racist among them, but they are all Democrats, and among them are many Jews who do not buy false goods: anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
The biggest supporter of Gaza today are the democratic forces in the West that have been demonstrating for months in the streets and in major American and European universities. This has important implications, as it indicates that democracy is not just mechanisms for conducting the peaceful transfer of power, but rather common and deep human values that prevent the transformation of power. The conflict between an occupying country and an occupied people turns into a racial or religious battle that makes matters worse and obscures the true essence of the conflict.
The most important conclusion that we must seek to instill is that if we do not want our tragedies to be repeated, we must have a democracy that is not corrupt, not susceptible to blackmail, and has mechanisms that do not overturn the tools of its killing. And the day we have such a democracy that makes us peoples of citizens, not peoples of subjects, and the day we can build democratic states that can build a union like the European Union between them, we will not have another Gaza, and no woman will scream in any inch of the Arab world without a thousand people rushing to her aid. Moatasem.
Allow me to conclude this article with some personal memories.
In June 2012, upon the arrival of the martyr President Mohamed Morsi to the presidency, I said that now I could fulfill my dream of visiting Gaza as President of Tunisia, but all of my advisors rejected the idea. Because visiting Gaza alone may anger Ramallah, and may involve us in internal conflicts that we wanted to end, not fuel. As for the gathering to also go to Ramallah, it was out of the question due to the necessity of passing through the Israelis.
So I abandoned the idea with much regret.
In the summer of 2015, as a citizen, I decided to take the risk of boarding the Swedish “Freedom Ship,” which was carrying a group of activists to try to break the siege. At sea at night, in a Hollywood scene, a commando squad attacked us and led us the next day to the port of Ashdod, and from there a car took me to Tel Aviv Airport to take me on the first plane heading to Paris.
Here I am, more than ever, longing for Gaza. I dream that the inevitable death will not come before I kiss its wealth, pray for its martyrs, visit its sick and disabled, and ask for its forgiveness for the failure of a nation that is still suffering from the shock of all its failures, and to thank it for raising Our heads, and more than ever before, they are a symbol of all pride and a role model for generations.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.