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Israel’s atrocities have destroyed its reputation and its security

Amid the destruction of Gaza, the children starving to death, and the hundreds of people killed and wounded each week, Israel is at long last coming under pressure from some Western governments. Emmanuel Macron yesterday announced that France will recognise Palestine as a state later this year, becoming the first G7 country to do so.

Yet Western arms and equipment continue to flow to Tel Aviv, as does intelligence support. A false impression is given that this is Israel’s war, but in reality, it is a joint US-Israeli war supported by allies such as the UK, whose RAF Akroti military base in Cyprus is used for Israeli intelligence-gathering.

The US was at the heart of the recent attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, and even now, is maintaining forces in the region at considerable strength. This includes aboard its hugely powerful carrier strike groups (CSG), two of which are now back in the Middle East after one briefly left following the Iran operation, and even within Israel, where US personnel operate the key long-range X-band radar station on Mount Keren.

While he still has the backing of Donald Trump, Binyamin Netanyahu feels safe to do as he pleases. His ultimate aim is still to ethnically cleanse the whole of Gaza and turn it into a high-tech wonderland for Israelis. For now, he believes he can continue to ignore criticism from UN agencies, some Western governments and scores of non-government bodies and push ahead with his ‘security strategy’ of crowding Gaza’s Palestinians into a small slice of land in the south of the territory, with little in the way of food, water or medical supplies.

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As to the conflict itself, Israel is falling back on its Dahiya Doctrine, which is straightforward enough if extreme. The doctrine follows that if an insurgency can’t be defeated by direct military means, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) will instead use disproportionate force against civilians to turn them against the insurgents. It is a standard IDF tactic that has been used in Lebanon and previous wars in Gaza, but the current operation goes way beyond that, amounting to the wholesale destruction of Palestinian society.

While all this is going on, in the occupied West Bank, many more Jewish settlements are being built with Palestinian villages erased in the process. There are now 800,000 Jewish settlers there, and that number will likely grow to a million within a year.

Even in Israel itself, many of the two million Palestinians with Israeli passports feel under heavy pressure. Indeed, one of the Palestinian members of the Knesset, Ofer Cassif, has been suspended for two months by the Knesset Ethics Committee after MPs “complained about his criticism of Israeli troops fighting against Hamas in Gaza”.

Beyond its immediate borders, Israel also feels safe to take whatever military action it thinks necessary to keep itself secure. IDF troops remain in several locations in southern Lebanon, have occupied the Israel/Syria buffer zone on the Golan Heights, established bases in Syria itself and frequently use airstrikes to suppress any paramilitary groups. They also attack Houthis in Yemen while engaging in patrols over Iran, and, if there is a further crisis with Iran, Netanyahu can be confident that the US will come to his aid.

In short, in Netanyahu’s view, it is all so certain: Israel is in full control, and little can change as the powerful messianic elements of its government will see to that. Gaza will be cleansed of Palestinians, and the millions of them in the occupied West Bank will be under constant pressure from aggressive and well-armed settlers. Ultimately, many will be forced to leave.

In the wider Middle East, the IDF will maintain security control through airpower. Israel, with the support of the US, will be the region’s superpower and will finally be truly secure, at a huge cost to the Palestinians and many others.

Yet it is all a chimaera.

The reality is that Israel is facing a very uncertain future and will most likely destroy its own security. My recent columns for openDemocracy have alluded to this, but more is being revealed by the week.

In Iran, Israel has failed in both its war aims of terminating the theocratic regime and destroying the uranium enrichment programme.

It is highly likely that large quantities of Iran’s 60% enriched Uranium have survived, which can be used for inefficient but still powerful nuclear explosions. And while Israeli and US missiles and bombs undoubtedly did much damage and killed over a thousand Iranians, the Iranian missile forces managed to repeatedly evade Israeli and US air defences, striking five well-protected IDF and intelligence bases. This was despite the US using as much as 15% of its entire inventory of THAAD missiles, stocks that are likely to take two years to replace.

All of this means that as far as Israel and the US are concerned, Iran’s military potential remains unfinished business, so expect further conflict.

Moreover, on the ground in Gaza, Israel has simply not succeeded in defeating Hamas – a fact that few in Israel will admit, though it is reportedly common knowledge in military circles. Major General Itzak Brik, a long-serving IDF infantry soldier who went on to lead the IDF military colleges, is a notable exception to the silence. In an op-ed published in Israeli newspaper Maariv last month, Brik said that Hamas has already replenished the huge numbers of paramilitaries it has lost in the war.

It is certainly the case that Hamas remains highly active and is regularly killing and wounding IDF soldiers, despite having only a limited supply of arms to Israel’s strike aircraft, helicopter gunships, armed drones, all manner of warships, tanks, armoured personnel carriers and the rest.

But the group does have a weapon of another form: the IDF as a recruiting sergeant to its cause.

Young Palestinians in their teens and early twenties have witnessed their friends and families killed and maimed in appalling numbers, and are now seeing young children being starved to death.

Close to 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza so far and tens of thousands more wounded. The suffering of those who have survived has often been made far worse by Israel’s destruction of hospitals and health centres, severe shortages of anaesthetics, drugs and even basic surgical dressings, as well as the killing of doctors and paramedics.

The impact of that far exceeds the Nakba of 1948 and will be an inspiration for resistance that will last and last. The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 was a huge shock to Israelis, but the IDF’s far more violent actions since will ensure that Israel will never be secure until the underlying reasons for the conflict are addressed.

For now, Israel is becoming increasingly messianic and will work rigorously against such reconciliation, with any ceasefire short-lived. Whatever Israelis think they are getting through this conflict, it is certainly not security. Instead, it is the image of a skeletal child that will be remembered across the world for generations.

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