In a shocking scene, early in the morning of the seventh of October, Qassam fighters were "trampling" the heads of Israeli soldiers after crossing the security fence separating the besieged Gaza Strip from the occupied Palestinian territories. No one understood what was going on at first, neither in terms of scale, nor in terms of the repercussions. There were scattered scenes of fighters storming Israeli settlements in various ways, until Muhammad Deif, commander-in-chief of the Qassam Brigades, announced the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. A few hours after the first spark, the number of Israeli dead and prisoners began to appear in unusual numbers, and with them appeared videos similar to what we usually see in video games, which constituted a real shock to the Israeli interior, and to the West that supports the occupation. A shock prompted a writer (1) in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to describe Operation Iron Swords" as "Operation Falling Pants" as the best name for the operation launched by the occupation army in response to the Al-Aqsa flood.
What happened was a unanimous Israeli intelligence, security and military failure, the only Western consensus that accompanied the consensus that Hamas was a "terrorist organization" that should be eliminated and that it bears "responsibility" for the outbreak of war. The incident carried a set of paradoxes, not similarities, that no one should overlook, as it came exactly 50 years after another intelligence failure of the occupation in the October 6, 1973 war, and the most ironic irony is that this strike, which is compared to the "crossing" war, came from the large prison that Israel has been monitoring by air, sea and land for 16 years, monitoring heavy weapons, espionage and surveillance techniques that were marketed as one of the best in the world, or perhaps the best. At all.
The main difference between the two wars is that the first was a deliberate war that eventually led to the establishment of "peace" with Israel by a regular army supported by a state budget, while the war that is taking place today comes from resistance groups that the Western media sees as nothing more than an organized militia, and seeks to end the existing occupation, or weaken it to the maximum extent possible by achieving qualitative and strategic gains that change the equation of conflict imposed for decades.
This incident led a number of Western newspapers, magazines and study centers to research the reason behind the Israeli intelligence failure, as the former ambassador of Israel to the United States described through an interview (2) he conducted with Foreign Affairs magazine that what happened is a failure in the entire Israeli intelligence and military system. All this took place in light of a conviction that seemed firmly established in the Israeli intelligence assessments that Hamas would not take a similar step, especially since its "assumed" interest lies in a long-term truce agreement, and that the movement will not start fighting on a large scale as it did, because it inevitably knows the price it will pay.
However, most of the analyses did not refer to a major dimension that implicitly directed the proposed Western solutions to what the West likes to call the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, analyses that have always been absent from the essence of the problem, expressing a systematic flaw that we will try to review and reveal in the next lines.
Everything is negotiable. and purchase
"Adults die and little ones forget"
(Golda Meir)
Almost 4 years ago, in a scene worthy of a workshop in Silicon Valley for a handful of businessmen hungry for wealth, Jared Kushner, adviser to US President Donald Trump, stood in the heart of the Bahraini capital, Manama, to lecture to a group of Arab officials and businessmen to market the deal of the century, which Kushner described as "the opportunity of the century."
Everything was knitted par excellence according to the rules of marketing and public relations. Who will miss this glamorous title: The Opportunity of the Century? The stated goal was to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict", and who does not want to resolve this "conflict"? As for how, it is the gateway to the economy. "Imagine a vibrant economic center in the West Bank that brings prosperity to the people of the region" by offering an attractive climate for investors to the Middle East, and announcing that he is aiming to raise $50 billion over 10 years to achieve his dream. These were the outlines of the "opportunity" that did not catch its breath for more than the duration of the show during which it was marketed, and ended by the end of the workshop.
Almost 4 years have passed without a reflection of this deal / opportunity on the ground, especially since the Palestinians, the owners of the cause, rejected it in all their spectrum, and were not part of that workshop. Regardless of the details, what was striking was the philosophy on which the idea was based: money for weapons and stolen land, economic development in exchange for recognition of Israel as a fait accompli with a Palestinian state that is demilitarized and sovereign but contains towers and investment opportunities.
This mentality driving the deal was similar to that of the international mentality that allowed Hamas in 2006 to enter the Palestinian legislative elections, with the expectation that the movement would not achieve a landslide victory, and that what would happen to the young movement is exactly what happened to Fatah after the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority by domesticating it with the burdens of politics, while possessing a number of gains that it will seek to preserve. Hamas won a sweep that qualifies it to form a government, while the international system did not recognize the results, and Hamas's control of Gaza in 2007 led to the Israeli occupation declaring the application of a complete siege on the Strip. A year later, the first major wars on Gaza began, and since then, there has been an implicit perception that imposing the blockade in parallel with successive wars will make the people utter Hamas and "disbelieve" it, and make the armed resistance unable to develop its capabilities, which will fail its military and political project at the same time.
Despite the discussions that took place in Palestinian political circles about the feasibility of Hamas holding the reins of power and the extent of its impact on armed resistance, these discussions did not follow an approach identical to the Western perception, which believed that the weapons of resistance could be adapted and domesticated, and that the siege would force the residents of the Gaza Strip, and behind it Hamas and the rest of the armed factions, to accept the fait accompli, and then accept proposals similar to what Kushner put forward in Manama.
As all these estimates were wrong, the blow of the "flood" was perhaps the heaviest so far in the strategic mistakes of the occupation, and behind it the system of Western countries and Arab normalization countries, in their understanding of the nature of the conflict, and the nature of those fighting in this protracted battle, in which the "young" did not forget what happened to the adults after their death.
The Dogmatic Fighter: The Unexplained Nightmare of Western School Dreams
The doctrinal fighter sees no objection in his death towards the cause in which he believes, as he attends the eschatological dimension as a decisive factor in his formation, which makes this world a mere bridge to an afterlife with which he promises paradise and bliss. (Getty Images)
Perhaps the Western intellectual system was unable to appreciate what the ideological fighter who formed a large part of the resistance organizations in Gaza and elsewhere in the Palestinian arena meant, and the role of religion in shaping the culture of resistance. For decades, the organized religious dimension has been present in the mosaic of Palestinian resistance action, from resistance to British colonialism in the Great Revolt, to the formation of Fatah in its early days, to armed formations representing a broad segment of the resistance spectrum in Gaza. Based on Ibn Khaldun's nervousness (3), on which powerful groups are formed, Gaza fighters are present with a set of pillars that form their nervousness, such as religion, land, blood, and common destiny, and they are grouped within ideological/doctrinal frameworks within tight, disciplined, and clearly defined structured organizations.
By the way, the doctrinal fighter is not a value description, but a scientific characterization based on a set of elements that define and shape the nature of this fighter, or what the American sociologist Eric Hoover calls "The True Believer" (4). His most important characteristic is that he sees no objection to dying for the cause he believes in. However, the difference between the ideological and ideological fighter (such as the communist) is that he transcends worldly mobilization as the main driver of his action, as he attends the eschatological dimension as a decisive factor in his formation that makes this world a mere bridge to an afterlife that he believes is immortal, and promises paradise and bliss with it.
As for the reason for the inability of Western thought to understand the reality of this fighter, although he is able to describe his behavior in an attempt to frame him and capture the engines of his action, just as sociology and man began according to a colonial view (5) that sees that the final development of humanity is embodied in the Western human model, it is due to the fact that the religious dimensions of the doctrinal gradually displaced from the Western imagination and from the motives of behavior, the value system that has been established in the contemporary Western consciousness is based on a set of cultural determinants, the most important of which is that nationalism Europeanism completely replaced God in the consciousness of daily practice, and the church, and the Christian religion in the West in particular, according to the economy and the state, became neither ahead of them nor parallel to them, especially with the dominance of the Protestant trend over Christian thought. By analyzing the discourse of a number of Christian religious radio stations in the United States, you will get the image that God has become like a "friend", that religious practices are limited to the limits of the monk's Sunday virtue, accompanied by a set of ceremonial rituals, and that the deterrents of religious behavior have become limited to being kind to people, and that the subsequent manifestations of individualism are done as a matter of choice rather than obligation.
In an article published in the Washington Post titled "Marketing Christ" (6), she noted that the Christian lifestyle industry has become a business that generates more than $4 billion a year (at the time of publication, 2004), so religion is nothing more than culture. But this culture is still being used politically to form a unified view of issues and events and mobilize feelings to achieve Western interests, just as the US senator appeared on Fox to declare that this is a religious war. According to Foreign Affairs, there are two clear currents among Christians today, one fully committed to the gospel and isolated from engaging and influencing public reality, and the other Christian who treats religion as a culture, who shape the religious space in the West.
The return of the Jews to Palestine, as Hamdan sees in his book, is not a Talmudic, biblical or religious return, but a return by rape, and thus colonialism in a strict scientific sense. (Social Media)
Considering that Europeans are specialized in transforming every local issue into a global issue, this awareness has formed a pillar of the European view of the other based on the centrality of European thought itself, and this extended by extension towards their view of the philosophy of conflicts, and based on what we mentioned above, the perception that the inclusion of the violator in a political/economic system necessarily means domesticating him; everything becomes negotiable, and can be moved by the media towards a system of interests that pour into one of these two titles "win for all" or "survival of the strongest." Both headlines clearly indicate that there is no stability in the value system, although the methodology of Western political engagement is dominated by the rule of survival of the strongest, but it is wrapped in an elegant suit and resonant titles capable of giving the other party a false feeling of winning in this relationship.
As for what links Christianity and Western thought to what is happening in Palestine, there is a historical fact that is usually overlooked, which is that the occupation state is a continuation of the colonial movement and an extension of Western thought, even if it appears this time in the form of "Judaism" and in Hebrew. It is neither an exaggeration nor a reduction to link Western thought to the Zionist thought that founded the Jewish state, which is manifested in what is known today as Christian Zionism (7). In his book "The Strategy of Colonialism and Liberation", Jamal Hamdan argues that Zionist colonialism is "client colonialism", as "it was impossible to achieve it without the full assistance of the powers of global sovereignty, as colonialism is what created Zionism through politics and war, and it is the one that provides it with all means of life, including weapons and money, and it is the one that guarantees its survival and protects it publicly."
The return of the Jews to Palestine, as Hamdan sees in his other book, The Jews Anthropology, "is not a Talmudic, biblical or religious return, but a return to Palestine by rape. It is an invasion and aggression of strangers, and thus colonialism in the strict scientific sense, and anthropological studies confirm that the Jews now in Israel have no connection to any ancient Palestinian Israeli origins. Jews today are relatives of Europeans and Americans, and they are mostly part of them flesh and blood, even if religion is different."
According to these shorthand premises and perceptions of the nature of religion and religiosity, and the belief in the ability of the media and the temptations of the economy to adapt religious rites into more "tolerant" systems, the Western system, along with Israel, did not imagine that all those years of siege and "tempting" offers were unable to dissuade the ideological fighter from accumulating force according to every available means, and that system believed that the resistance ideology, even if it existed, would remain in a state of passive dormancy, in light of the state of diaspora and weakness. that surrounds the political scene in the Middle East. This system was not able to comprehend that the spirit of resistance would move from throwing stones that may not have scratched the helmet of the heavily armed soldier, to making missiles, drones and parachutes capable of transporting the ideological fighter from his great prison to a wider space in this world, or to more spacious and immortal spaces after his death, data that if Kushner and Netanyahu had understood it, they would not have thought that such a cause could be bought with a handful of money, even if it was worth billions!
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