Unending conflict

Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrullah along with 20 of his commanders in a strike in Beirut has done nothing to sate the Zionist state’s bloodlust. Israel continues its unrelenting attacks on Lebanon, claiming the assassination of another top Hezbollah commander, Ali Karake, and an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander, General Abbas Nilforoushan, in the strike on Hezbollah’s headquarters.

The strike seems to have been aimed at a meeting of Hezbollah’s leadership, with the Iranian commander in attendance.

There are speculative reports in the media that an Iranian mole working for Israel gave away the location and timing of the top Hezbollah conclave.

As expected, Hezbollah and Iran promised revenge, but the latter is unlikely to fall into Israel’s trap of an all-out war. Retaliation, if and when it comes, and will probably be only after Nasrullah’s funeral, will likely continue the pattern of rocket, missile and drone attacks that have defined the bulk of the exchanges with Israel since October 8, 2023, one day after the spectacular attack on Israel by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has buried the Abraham Accords seeking normalisation of Israeli ties with the remaining regional Arab countries, authored and conducted by the US.

While the Middle East and wider Muslim world have condemned Israel for its latest atrocity in the genocidal war it launched last year in Gaza, and which has drawn in Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis, the solidarity of the Muslim bloc with the Palestinians and their allies remains a toothless wonder.

Protest demonstrations have been visible in Syria, Cyprus, Pakistan and other countries, but they are by and large led by Islamist parties and forces. With the possible exception of students, academics and progressive groups in the west, democratic and left groups elsewhere are conspicuous by their absence.

Israel’s obduracy in pursuing its genocidal war in Gaza, attacks in Lebanon and Yemen, and even its repression in the West Bank is owed, first and foremost, to the US’s blind support.

Second, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival is tied to continuation of this by now multi-front war to stave off, if not save him from, from the corruption charges dangling over his head. It bears reflection what does Israel really represent and what is the changed nature of the warfare it is conducting.

First, irony of ironies, the guilt of the perpetual persecution of the Jews in Europe, culminating in Hitler’s Holocaust, was shrugged off the west’s shoulders by conniving to support the Zionist lobby’s desire for a home for the Jews in the mythical ‘Promised Land’ of Palestine at the expense of its indigenous people, who were not responsible for the misery of the Jews in the west. In fact, after the Jews dispersed out of Palestine hundreds of years ago, they lived comfortably in peace with their neighbours in countless Arab and Muslim countries.

The Palestinians innocently welcomed the early Jewish immigrants until, by the 1930s, their alarm grew at the increasing deluge of Jews from Europe, aided and abetted by British colonialism. The punishment for persecution of the Jews in the west was meted out to the innocent Palestinians in the shape of forcible displacement or worse when the Israeli state was formed in 1948 by terrorist means.

The world acquiesced in this unjust horror by the UN Security Council accepting the partition of Palestine between the Zionist state and the remaining Palestinian territory, the latter handed over to neighbouring Arab states Jordan and Egypt. So for all intents and purposes, the existence of the Palestinians in their own land was wiped out by the Naqba (Catastrophe) and its aftermath.

By any canon of international law, the Palestinian resistance to this wholesale displacement and swallowing up as a people and a state was justified. All the hypocritical mouthings of the US-led west against Hamas’ brilliant and unprecedented attack on Israel could not negate the right of any people living under occupation to resist it by any and all means at its disposal.

Israel has come down to us not as any ‘just’ settling of guilt by the west for their treatment of the Jews but as (ironically, given the Holocaust) a fascist, settler colonialist, expansionist dagger in the heart of the Middle East which, precisely because of its horrific bloodshed and genocide, is at a historic tipping point into possible oblivion.

As to the nature of the warfare Israel is conducting, if not modern warfare per se, the role of technology has fundamentally altered the manner in which enemies confront each other.

Surveillance technology now allows the trackingdown of targets and their being taken out by remote missiles, drones and air power.

The resistance to this high tech warfare has comparatively less sophisticated means at its disposal such as unguided rockets. But this too is changing, in line with the history of warfare, which indicates that a technological or weapons transformation at one end inevitably produces its equal and opposite development at the other.

Guerrilla warfare, the weapon of the oppressed, will have to take account of this changed character of warfare, especially now with the weaponisation of pagers, walkie-talkies, and God knows what other hitherto innocent communication devices. Welcome to the new world.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024