BEIRUT, Lebanon, Oct. 7 (UPI) — On Oct. 7, 2023, the world woke up to a new reality in the Middle East: Hamas staged a daring attack against Israel that quickly went out of control. And Israel responded with utmost and disproportionate brutality against Gaza and then Lebanon, and the region turned upside down.
One year later, the Gaza war remained unresolved, with no cease-fire in place, an official death toll close to 42, 000 people and large destruction of the besieged Strip. Hamas is still fighting, firing rockets into Israel and holding 97 out of 250 Israeli hostages and prisoners it captured.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still far from achieving his Gaza war objectives: eliminating Hamas, securing the release of the Israeli captives and ensuring that the destroyed Strip does no longer constitute a threat to Israel’s security.
Instead, Netanyahu went on destroying Lebanon’s Hezbollah, trying to push the United States into war with Iran and boasting that he is reshaping the Middle East.
Imposing a new regional order, a new Middle East without solving the 76-year-old Palestinian conflict, would put the region on top of a volcano and turn it into a space for more violence and conflicts, analysts said.
The daring, spectacular “Al-Aqsa Flood Operation,” masterminded by Hamas hunted leader Yahya Sinwar last Oct. 7, aimed at imposing a prisoner swap, stopping the “Abraham Accords” that led to a new normalization trend between Israel and some Arab countries, and bringing back world attention to the Palestinian cause.
“It is true that the Palestinian question is back [to the forefront], but it is back within the framework of a second Nakba,” Ziad Majed, an associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Paris, told UPI. The Nakba [Catastrophe] refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
The ongoing war on Gaza and the full siege imposed by Israel have even more devastating consequences: at least 41,909 people, mostly civilians, killed; 10,000 feared to be buried under the rubble; 97,303 wounded and some 1.9 million people – or about 90 percent of Gazans – have been displaced internally at least once.
The destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and universities, as well as starvation and widespread multidimensional poverty, are leading to a full-fledged humanitarian catastrophe. The Strip turned into an “unlivable” space.
On the Israeli side, about 1,200 people have been killed, including about 800 civilians and 346 soldiers, while 90,000 Israelis remained internally displaced, according to the Foreign Ministry.
Most importantly, the attack “shattered the sense of security that Israel supposedly provided for its citizens, reinforcing a preexisting sense of perpetual victimhood that evokes historical memories of violence and persecution,” Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi wrote.
The “Al Qqsa Flood” operation also caused a big change inside Israel that, in all its past wars, could not tolerate a high number of casualties and captives, according to Rami Rayess, Lebanon’s director of the Institute for Palestine Studies.
“Such a transformation was the result of a competition between the far right and the more extremists … even those limited voices who used to call for peace do not exist anymore inside Israel,” Rayess told UPI.
Hamas probably underestimated such a change in Israel.
Rayess explained that Israel, supported by the US and its other allies, justified the excessive use of force against Gaza on the basis that it was facing an “existentialist war and needed to defend itself.”
“That came with reviving Greater Israel’s plan, starting with the attempt to push the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip, expand settlements in the West Bank and force its people out to Jordan, as well as with promoting building settlements in southern Lebanon,” he said.
“Expulsing the Palestinians from their land is an old plan that reemerges to revive Greater Israel’s dream.”
What Hamas possibly has achieved — though at a very high cost — was the realization that the Palestinian question cannot be ignored anymore, Arab normalization with Israel stopped and Israel’s global reputation damaged with mounting calls on the U.N and International Court of Justice to investigate its “crimes against humanity and genocide.”
However, it couldn’t prevent Netanyahu and his far-right allies in the government from “seizing the opportunity to start a full-scale war on the Palestinians, not only in Gaza where they are trying to impose a change in demography, but also East Jerusalem and the West Bank with accelerated plans to increase settlements and colonization budget,” Majed said.
“This is part of their approach for a final solution in which they will end the Palestinian project of a state, aspirations for self-determination,” he said, also referring to a Knesset vote last July rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state, thus the two-states solution.
The announcement a few years ago that Israel is a Jewish state has made the one-state solution even more difficult, Majed said.
According to Rayes, “peace options are diminishing” with Israel rejecting all settlement proposals.
So what’s left for the Palestinians?
Probably the only good outcome was the resulting global outrage provoked by the “genocide” committed by Israel in Gaza and a new political awareness in the West about the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Majed explained that a “new political culture” is starting to shape the minds of students and a new generation of people not only in Western countries, but also around the world “about the notion of justice, freedom, self-determination and interest in international law.”
“This is new, and this is in contradiction with the fact that international law is less and less respected by international actors,” he said. “Something might change, but it will take lots of time …. The hope is in this new generation, the new culture that is emerging at a tragic moment in the region.”
The Palestinians have tried over the years every possible means from armed resistance, Oslo peace treaty, multiple Intifadas (uprisings) to Hamas-like armed resistance, with the hope of winning a state of their own, but to no avail.
“It will not take long before the Palestinians invent new ways and means for resistance,” Rayess said. “At the end, they have no other option but to resist in the absence of a viable path toward a lasting, sustainable peace.”
Moreover, Netanyahu’s new Middle East plan is unlikely to succeed even if Israel achieves a military victory.
“It is an aggressive plan, built over the bodies of the Palestinians and Lebanese. It will not work and would just lead to a new cycle of violence, more instability, more frustration and to more reactions that will also go out of control … unless there is a political solution and the question of impunity and international law is addressed,” Majed said.
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