Israel: Fighting Six Wars, Plus One: A Civil War
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
From the Israeli Declaration of Independence, May 14, 1948
"The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
It is most unfortunate that, from the beginning (see the Nakba, 1948), the State of Israel has never honored this clause of its Declaration.
I have been reading the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, whose beat is the Middle East with an emphasis on Israel, for quite some time. In earlier years, I did not agree with him much. But more recently, I find myself very much in agreement with him, especially over the past couple of years when he has been writing about Arab/Palestinian-Israeli relationships, and how Israel is eventually going to have to bite the bullet and accept some sort of "two state solution."
(As it happened, in a recent speech President Biden himself came out clearly and forcefully for the establishment of the "two-state" solution as a major factor in ending the long-time Israeli-Palestine-and-allies conflict, that goes back to the original UN resolution of 1947 that divided the then Palestinian Mandate administered by Great Britain into Jewish and Palestinian Arab sectors. I cannot recall any U.S. President doing that for quite some time now.)
If one looks at a map of the land that was originally granted to the Jewish interests by that 1947 resolution it is obvious, to this observer at least, that a country defined by it could not long survive. However, through a series of wars, the major ones of 1947, 1967 and 1973 having been initiated by one or more Arab nations, Israel grew to its present size and shape. And without going into the details here, the refusal of successive Israeli right-wing governments to carry out the provisions of the "Oslo Accords" of 1993 has led to the present horrific situation. (Horrific that is for the Israelis who were slaughtered in the Oct. 7 attack by the Shiite Arab organization, Hamas, for the hostages of several nationalities who are being held by Hamas, and for the primarily Sunni residents of Gaza who are being bombed daily by the Israeli air force and are running perilously short of food, medicine, fuel, the electrical power that is dependent on fuel, and, most recently, the means of communication with the outside world.)
I have written previously that the primary objective of both sides in the current war, being run predominately by Israel, is the prevention of the establishment of the "Two-State Solution" the framework for which was set forth in the aforementioned Oslo Accords, and now strongly endorsed by President Biden. Establishing a two-state solution, as mentioned, in recent years has been slow-walked (really slow-crawled) by successive Israeli center-right coalitions.
This one, with the prominent role being played in it by the far-Right Religious Zionism Party, has formally established as a goal the annexation of the West Bank to Israel. (Note that in the news item linked in the last sentence that goal is spelled out in detail.) This fact has not gotten much publicity, at least in the United States. But further, without any formal agreements with anyone, The Religious Zionism Party, presumably aided by other right-wing organizations in Israel, has slowly and surely been carrying out this policy, by creating what for decades Israeli politicians have liked to call "facts on the ground."
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Which brings us up to the present day, and the projections of Mr. Friedman's latest column, which is entitled "Israel: From the Six-Day War to the Six-Front War."
Briefly, the "Six Wars are:
1. "[a] full-scale war against Hamas in and around Gaza, in which, we can now see, Hamas still has so much residual capacity that it was able to launch a seaborne attack on Israel on Tuesday and on Wednesday fired long-range rockets toward Israel's southern port city of Eilat and northern port city of Haifa."
2. "Israel against Iran and its other proxies. That is, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Islamist militias in Syria and Iraq and the Houthi militia in Yemen."
3. "The third front is the universe of social networks and other digital narratives about who is good and who is evil. When the world gets this interdependent, when thanks to smartphones and social networks nothing is hidden and we can hear one another whisper, the dominant narrative has real strategic value." (E.g., who bombed the hospital; in Gaza?)"
4. "The fourth front is the intellectual/philosophical struggle between the international progressive movement and Israel. I believe that some elements of that progressive movement, which I realize is big and diverse, have lost their moral bearings on this issue. For instance, we've seen numerous demonstrations on American college campuses that essentially blame Israel for the barbaric Hamas invasion, arguing that Hamas is engaged in a legitimate 'anticolonial struggle.' These progressive demonstrators seem to believe that all of Israel is a colonial enterprise not just the West Bank settlements and therefore the Jewish people do not have the right either to self-determination or self-defense in their ancestral homeland, whether it's within post-1967 borders or pre-1967 ones. . . But here is what's also intellectually corrupt: buying into the Israeli right-wing settler narrative, now being spread far and wide inside Israel, that Hamas violence is so savage it clearly has nothing to do with anything settlers have done so more settlements are just fine."
5. "The fifth front is inside Israel and the occupied territories. In the West Bank, right-wing Jewish settlers are attacking Palestinians, while disrupting the efforts of Israel's military to keep a lid on it in collaboration with the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas. We must remember that the P.A. has recognized Israel's right to exist as part of the Oslo accords. It would be terrible if that front explodes into a confrontation between the P.A. and Israel, because then there would be scant hope for ever enlisting the authority's help in governing Gaza."
"But there will also be no hope for that if Palestinians in the West Bank and around the world do not insist on building a more effective, non-corrupt Palestinian Authority. That is long past due and it is not just Israel's fault that it has not happened. Palestinians have agency too."
6. "The sixth front is inside Israel itself, mostly between its Jewish citizens. That front has been papered over for the moment, but it lurks just beneath the surface. It is the clash driven by Netanyahu's enduring political strategy at home: divide and rule. He has built his whole political career on pitting factions of Israeli society against one another, eroding the kind of societal unity that is essential to win the war."
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And so, where does Israel go from here? Forgetting for the moment about the irreconcilable differences between successive right-wing Israeli governments who want a One-State Solution for the West Bank and Gaza as well, there are the major Palestinian organizations that Israel would be presumably have to defeat on the battlefield at some time in the future (and that is what the Netanyahu Government is trying to achieve now). There are deep-seated political, economic, and social differences within Israel which have actually been there since before the founding of the State, between the Right-coalition, which is now firmly entrenched in the government and the left coalition (which does include the several Arab parties). Currently the Netanyahu holds power in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) by four seats. But patently, his coalition is holding firm. If, on the other hand, it were to lose just those four seats, things could change in Israel very quickly. But there are no hints of that happening now.
And so, the Israeli Right does continue to hold complete government power, and it continues pursuing its present policies, on the West Bank, in Gaza, and in Israel proper, that picture seems designed to perpetuate the present war. That means increasing deaths of Israelis (mainly in the military, if the "Iron Dome" holds up, more widely spread if it doesn't). It also means, major Israeli civilian displacements --- as along the Northern border facing Hezbollah, another right-wing, Iranian-sponsored group --- as are happening now. It also means a more frequently and forcefully asked "where is this all going" question, aside from the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank, both inside Israel and in the world at large.
Well, right now there seems to be, from the news reports we're getting, fairly full support among the Israeli people for the present war policy. But if the war drags on, and the Israeli military and civilian casualties begin to mount up, as well as some, real, if limited, physical damage done by the Iran-led Shia coalition, and as the reputation of Israel begins to slide even further in the world, there could be some mounting opposition to the policies of the Right-Wing government (which holds power presently through a majority of just 4 seats in the Knesset).
Given the facts on the ground, that is that the vaunted Israel Defense force cannot win a military victory, unless they more-or-less completely destroy the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, but they keep fighting and keep losing armed service personnel, plus equipment, at what cost with the money coming from where (???), opposition within Israel will build and keep on building. Were new elections be forced by one means or another on Netanyahu, the anti-war forces might be able to take over the government. BUT, and it's a big but, the anti-war forces might not be a be able to win a next election, fair-and-square. (Just sayin', but the Israeli Right certainly has close connections to the Republican election-fixers in the United States.) And then, following the example of who(?), if they actually lost, they might, by one means or another, keep the government from changing hands.
In my view, that could lead to a Seventh War for Israel (following the Friedman mode of analysis). That is a civil war within Israel itself. How would such an event play out in actual facts on the ground? I have no idea. But I am sure that there are plenty of members of the active IDF, the reserve IDF, and the retired IDF who have absolutely no interest in dying just so that the Israeli Religious Right can reestablish the Biblical "Land of Israel," that is "Judea and Samaria," which includes much of the present West Bank. As it happens, right-wing "settlers" have been in the process of stealing the land from the Palestinian residents for some years (and now, using arms provided to them free, by the Netanyahu government they are actually killing Palestinians who "get in their way"). No how, no way.
Of course, one fervently hopes that it doesn't come to that. And if I were a praying man, which I am not and never have been (nor praying child either ---- I was brought up in a thoroughly secular, thoroughly Jewish-in-the-ethic, household), I would pray that such a conflict does not happen. But given the hardness of the Israeli Hard Right, it surely could.