Pedro González
Journalist
There are wars that cannot be lost because the defeated, with very rare exceptions, will never have the chance to retaliate. Israel knows this and is so aware, individually and collectively, that its very existence is at stake in each of the wars it has fought since 1948, that all problems, disputes and differences of internal order instantly disappear in order to deal unanimously with the defence of the country. There is almost certainly no other people in the world, which, having wandered through it, endured all kinds of humiliations, exclusions, exoduses and expulsions, has maintained its sense of belonging and identity, conviction in its leadership role and determination to achieve its destiny.
If there is one example right now that defines it all at once, it is the instantaneous mobilisation of reservists, who have been embedded in their posts and units with impeccable precision. Many of them, especially the volunteer fighter pilots, had been resisting training sessions to demonstrate, like tens of thousands of Israelis, their opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government’s reform of the judiciary, protests that had now reached forty weeks uninterrupted in the face of what they see as an extremely serious attack on democracy and its characteristic principle of the separation of powers. Netanyahu himself put aside his misgivings and reticence and offered his main opponents to form a national emergency government: Yair Lapid, leader of Yesh Atid, and Benny Gantz of the National Unity Party.
Israel, through its spokesmen, is appalled “by this unprecedented terrorist attack in which civilians have been indiscriminately targeted, murdered and kidnapped”. Tal Itzhakov, spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Spain, visibly shaken and moved by having friends and relatives among the victims of the infiltrators, insists on Israel’s “inalienable right to protect its citizens” while accusing the kidnapping and murder of Israelis by Hamas terrorists of “war crimes”.
Triggered this time by the largest mass rocket attack and with the largest infiltration of commandos from Hamas’ armed wing, the Al Qasam Brigades, the war against the overcrowded enclave of Gaza has now spread to the Israeli-Lebanese border, where Hezbollah militias have also begun firing their mortar fire at northern Israeli towns. There is little doubt that both Hamas and Hezbollah are funded, equipped and armed primarily by the Iranian regime. The Mossad, now severely criticised for allegedly failing to prevent Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, had warned several months ago of Iran’s strategy of activating several simultaneous fronts against Israel, apparently convinced by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Ebrahim Raisi and the regime’s top ayatollahs of the weakness of an Israel embroiled in internal feuds, which they assumed would undermine the country’s will and determination to defend itself. This was communicated to me both in Israel itself and through conference calls by Mossad spokesmen, who added that, to ensure that nothing was missing, they did not rule out infiltration and attacks from Syria at the same time.
Interestingly, the start of this war bears many similarities to the Yom Kippur – or Ramadan, according to the Arabs – half a century ago, when Egypt and Syria, convinced that Israel could not resist them, also launched a simultaneous surprise attack on several fronts, a war that Israel certainly did not lose, but at the cost of showing certain vulnerabilities, compensated since then by the agreement between Israel and the United States, never publicly acknowledged, to maintain Israel’s superiority over its Arab neighbours through its nuclear capabilities. This time, Egypt is not among Israel’s enemies, but an Egyptian policeman has already joined the offensive on his own by killing two Israeli tourists in Alexandria.
This time Iran, which is clearly the main inspiration for this war, has waited for Israel to conclude the chain of important celebrations in its calendar: Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year; Yom Kippur, the Feast of Atonement, the most important in its calendar; and Simchat Torah, or Tabernacles, which concludes with the Sabbath. That Tehran is behind it seems to be demonstrated by Revolutionary Guards General Yahya Rahim Safavi, who, in statements reported by the ISNA news agency, expressed Iran’s support for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, “of which we are proud, and which we are sure the Resistance Front also supports”. This is Iran’s standard expression for Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian movements close to Iran and opposed to Israel.
As seems obvious, the Hamas operation upends the new status quo that was being forged in the Middle East. The planned normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, for which Riyadh demanded compensation for the Palestinian people, suffers a major setback. Tehran also warns that no one can rule it out of the Middle East geopolitical chessboard, and that it has the capacity and will to manage the groups and militias it commands.
The United States, whose first declared foreign priority is the rise of China, is now also obliged to pay more attention to what is happening in and around Israel, now that it has, in addition, the setback of tensions within the Republican Party, the main international consequence of which is that the flow of financial and military aid to Ukraine could be cut off. This could be exploited by Russia, as the vice president of its Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, hinted, who told “the United States and its allies to look for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of interfering in Russia’s affairs by providing military aid to Ukraine”.
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