Israel Acknowledges its Failure

Abdel Bari Atwan
For the Israeli Government to meet to discuss the European initiative for a 24hours truce, to say nothing about accepting it, means an admission of the inability to achieve the declared objectives from the current aggression against the Gaza Strip, as voiced by Defence Minister Ehud Baraq and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, most notably to crush the resistance and change the situations in the Gaza Strip decisively. The same thing happened in the July war on Lebanon.The EU did not act to save the Palestinians but to save itself and its security and interests and then save Israel from itself after the EU leaders realized the immediate and long term catastrophic consequences resulting from this aggression at a time when the Western world is facing losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, total economic collapse, and predictions of waves of violence and terror.

After four days of the barbaric bombardment, the big increase in the number of innocent victims, and the publication of the photos of martyred children on the newspapers' front pages and the international television screens, it has become obvious that the biggest loser from this unequal confrontation is Israel and its allies the Arab leaders who encouraged it to carry out this aggression in the hope of getting rid of the Islamic resistance movements in the Gaza Strip and removing their obstacle from their steps of normalization with it which are accelerating at an unprecedented rate these days.

The Israeli air raids did not intimidate the resistance factions and did not force them to raise the white flags in capitulation but only made them stronger and more solid. The firing of rockets did not stop at all and their danger grew when these rockets reached Beersheba and Ashdod and started to cause dead and wounded victims in the Israeli ranks.

The Israeli leadership finds itself before two options: The first is to continue with the air raids alone even after having exhausted their missions as there is nothing left to strike other than heaps of Palestinian flesh or move to land operations and give the green light to the tanks massed on the outskirts of Gaza to start the invasion.

Getting embroiled in a land war is the last thing the generals of Israel's army want because this means fighting a long-term guerrilla warfare which might entail massive human losses and a second defeat in two years following the first one in south Lebanon. This will destroy whatever morals and prestige the Israeli military establishment still has.

Ehud Baraq was saying yesterday morning that what was done so far was the first stage of this war, that there were several other stages coming, and that the war would continue until the demise and uprooting of the "Hamas" movement and other resistance factions. Two hours later, we heard Israeli Government spokesmen talking about studying a cease-fire initiative and several minutes after this humiliating backing down, the White House spokesman spoke after a long silence and talked in his turn about the need for a cease-fire.

All these parties - European, American, and Arab - do not have contacts with the "Hamas" movement because they consider it a "terrorist" one. Now they are demanding mediators to negotiate a cease-fire with it. Does not this fact indicate a change in the political equations thanks to the steadfastness on the ground and the insistence on the resistance?

The cease-fire, if accepted, should mean the opening of the crossings, including the Rafah one, the flow of humanitarian aid, the lifting of the unfair blockade, the burial of the martyrs, and the treatment of the wounded. Therefore it [cease-fire] appears to be needed to catch breath and move towards negotiations to improve the conditions of any new calm that invalidates all the former mediators and unfair and unjust clauses which resulted from the collusion of kinsmen and their obvious and deliberate deception of the Palestinian side and in favour of the Israeli one.

By a quick stocktaking of the events of the past four days and an examination of the results from the profit and loss perspective, it is possible to sum up all this in the following points:

First: Survival of the "Hamas" government and the other resistance factions in the Gaza Strip is a defeat for the Israeli-Arab plan aiming to end the resistance phenomenon.

Second: Ramallah's [Palestinian] Authority [PNA] is the biggest loser by any yardstick. It appeared to be colluding with the aggression and dealt with the West Bank people as a repressive authority when it agreed with the Israeli Government on the aim of banning the demonstrations in solidarity with their brothers in the Gaza Strip. More importantly, this PNA was marginalized at the Arab and international levels. No one is contacting it and it does not have any eective role in the war or calm.

Third: The Egyptian Government received the two biggest slaps in its history. The first was from Egypt's nationalist and noble people as millions of them sympathized with their brothers in the Gaza Strip and thousands of them came out into the streets in tumultuous demonstrations of anger and the second from the Arab peoples who exposed the oicial Egyptian collusion with the Israeli aggression when they staged protest marches towards the Egyptian regime's embassies in their capitals.

Fourth: The "moderate Arabs" lost whatever credibility they had when they dithered about holding an extraordinary summit to discuss the situations in the Gaza Strip so as to give the Israeli forces more time in the hope of completing their mission and achieving their hopes of "crushing" the honest resistance phenomenon, exactly as they did during the Israeli invasion of south Lebanon.

What we want to say here is that, whether mediation eorts to achieve a cease-fire [in Gaza] succeed or not, the past four days have confirmed that the Arab region has changed and seen an unprecedented "awakening." The peoples have defied their prison guards and raised their voices loudly against the capitulation projects and accelerating steps towards turning Israel into a friend who can be counted on to play the role of the policeman or the "muscleman" against the new enemy Iran.

Egyptian President Husni Mubarak brought us the good news yesterday that he would not allow the opening of the Rafah crossing until after the return of the PNA's forces and European observers, thus confirming his inability to benefit from the new facts imposed by the Palestinian steadfastness during the past four days and probably from the coming days. President Mubarak's statements uncover the continued collusion and the insistence on insulting the Egyptian people and dwarfing the Egyptian role, if there is anything left of this role under his policies and that is something which reminds us of late President Anwar al-Sadat's stubbornness during the last months of his rule.

The rules of the game in the region have in fact changed, but not in favour of Israel and the hypocritical West that is colluding in its aggression and which equated between the butcher and victim by justifying the aggression, embracing the Israeli barbaric methods, and closing its ears and eyes to the sight of the innocent children victims of Israeli Nazism in the Gaza Strip's hospitals.

This Israeli massacre has entrenched the values of resistance, put an end to a misleading peace process, and paved the way for the rise of a new generation of martyrdom seekers yearning ardently to avenge their brothers and fathers whose limbs were torn by the Israeli missiles.

It remains for us to conclude by saying that these noble Arab and Muslim peoples and their earth shattering roars in the demonstrations of dignity and glory against the aggression and their slogans defying the oicial Arab order's failure and its obvious bias towards the aggressors have contributed greatly to this change taking place and overturned all the equations imposed by the Israelis and Americans during their poisonous honeymoon that is almost nearing its end.