“Imagine an apocalypse. You look to the right, to the left, all you see are destroyed buildings, damaged by fire, by missiles, everything. It’s Gaza, right now.” Yuval Green, 26, an Israeli reservist, answered the call to arms in the wake of October 7th, but decided to call it a day and explained his moral reasoning to the BBC. He understood that the war is no longer about hostages or Hamas. And, after contemplating the apocalypse, perhaps a colleague told you: Netanyahu, the warlord, intends to stay in Gaza.
The Netzarim Corridor, about 7 km long and wide, cuts across the Gaza Strip from the Mediterranean to the Israeli border, just south of Gaza City. Satellite images show that Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of buildings located along the corridor, creating 19 bases and dozens of military posts. The warlord has a post-war plan: turn the clock back to before 2005, when Israel withdrew its forces and settlements from the Gaza Strip.
Just in September, a coalition of 57 Arab and Muslim countries offered sustainable peace. “We all want to guarantee Israel’s security in a context of ending the occupation and allowing the emergence of a Palestinian State”, explained the Jordanian Foreign Minister. There would be three stages: 1) end of the war and return of the hostages; 2) an international coalition hostile to Hamas supports the installation of a Palestinian Authority government in Gaza; 3) Israel joins a regional security agreement designed to contain Iran.
The warlord ignored the offer. Why? The right answer did not come from some left-wing activist who hides his anti-Semitism in the utopia of the “single binational state”, but from Moshe Yaalon, Minister of Defense between 2013 and 2016: “The path they are dragging us along is to occupy, annex and promote ethnic cleansing.”
Netanyahu has more than the proverbial seven lives. The offensive against Hezbollah opened a path to partially recovering its popularity. The ceasefire in Lebanon allows it to focus forces on “occupying, annexing and promoting ethnic cleansing” in – but also on boosting settler aggression against the Palestinian population of the West Bank. The warlord officially denies it, but in practice pursues the strategy dictated by the supremacist ministers in his cabinet. Trump’s triumph only encourages him to advance on the path to disaster.
A double disaster – for the Palestinians, now, and for Israel, on the historical horizon. Months before he died, in 2018, writer Amos Oz gave a seminal talk (). He reiterated that he was never a pacifist, noted the general failure of the experiments of multinational states and turned on the warning light.
Without two states, he explained, what will emerge will be an Arab state, “from the river to the sea.” The interval until such an outcome could be filled by an Israeli dictatorship over the Palestinians or terrible violence or a stage of apartheid. But the conclusion would not change – and the Jews would return to the status of a persecuted minority in a foreign land. In the end, demographics rule.
The alternative lies in the Arab peace proposal, the one against which the warlord is waging his war.
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