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Courting Israel

The killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders went unreported in most of the Arab media, and there was no official condemnation of Israel for its cowardice acts.

By Fazzur Rahman | November 2024


October 7, 2024, was the first anniversary of Hamas’s invasion of Israel-occupied land across Gaza, killing around 1200 Israelis and taking 250 hostages, including both civilians and armed personnel. What Hamas did on October 7 could easily constitute an act of terror only if one willingly tends to ignore the atrocities and humiliations Palestinians have faced for decades, which even a minimalist sanity would define as the worst sort of apartheid system. Like every state that has practiced the apartheid system and indulged in acts of genocide, Israelis, too, with an additional claim of being “biblically chosen,” tends to dehumanize Palestinians in the process of their obliteration.

Late Israeli Prime Minister Begin had once addressed the Palestinians as a two-legged beast. For another Israeli belligerent, Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinians were no more than grasshoppers who could be crushed and most recently, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, after October 7, had said that Israel was fighting human animals, referring to the Palestinians. The loud noise of antisemitic advocated by Israel for post-Holocaust decades to sustain the momentum of sympathy for themselves now seems to have given way to a new dictum, the “right to self-defense,” which accords the Jewish state an unbound liberty to roll out its weaponry even against its most minor enemy.

One has the right to believe that Hamas’s incursion was an act of terror. Still, by no means can there be an equivalence between what Hamas did in its three-hour-long operation on the morning of October 7 and what Israeli defence forces are doing in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, and one is not sure if the Israeli tankers and bombers would not reach Iran. The US President not only pledged all support to Israel after October 7 but declared himself to be a Zionist. In the last year, he has already given the US $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel. With this massive consignment for military assistance and various economic packages, one should not doubt that the US could be anything but a serious mediator or influencer.

The state of Israel has been planted in the region as a military outpost to the oil wealth of the Arab world for the US and Europe. According to the doctors serving on the ground in Gaza, around lakh have been killed and five lakhs injured apart from the complete devastation of Gaza where no school, no hospital, no refugee camp, no mosque and church, no university, and no public place has been left undamaged.

Israelis are not merely fighting the war of self-defense, but they are waging the current war to occupy more and more territories across Gaza, West Bank, and Lebanon and to consolidate its apartheid mechanism with the Zionist motto, depriving the Palestinians of anything they could claim their own.

Amidst the geographical expansion of war with all potentials of morphing into a full-fledged regional war or World War, many are asking what makes Netanyahu so powerful and maverick that all efforts have failed to prevent him from his current military aggression. Why did the repeated US and global calls and dozens of UNSC resolutions seeking immediate ceasefire fail to move Netanyahu? Not only did these institutions fail to deter Netanyahu’s rolling war machine in Gaza, but the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against him for his war crime was unable to stall his war tanks or F-35.


Many people say that while he (Netanyahu) is the most humble, he compares himself with Winston Churchill, and perhaps his past actions prove his assessment of himself correct. Possibly, Netanyahu is the first Prime Minister in the history of Israel who knows how and when to coerce or induce the US policymakers to achieve what Israel desires. He also knows, apart from the limit of the US pressure tactics against Israel, how to manipulate the Democrat-Republican rivalry for his political survival as he reached the high point of his power under the tenure of both the Democrats and Republicans.

Netanyahu is the only head of state in the world to address the US Congress four times, and the latest in the series was his July address. While he was talking about protecting the civilized world through the Gaza war, his brutal army was immersed in the act of genocide. In today’s chaotic world, the US is the only nation that could intervene militarily on behalf of other countries, as it is doing for the sake of Israel today. In such a given political reality and an all-out dominance of political realism as the only philosophy, expecting any nation to reign in Netanyahu or his military onslaught through armed action or economic coercion would be too ridiculous an ambition.

There are reports of exponential growth in Israel-UAE and Israel-Egypt trade since the inception of the war in Gaza.

After decades of the US-Israel’s successful drive to marginalize the cause of Palestine, the Arab state subsequently succumbed to the US pressure, and today, their diplomatic actions end with the issuing of occasional statements of criticism and a call for a ceasefire.

In the last five decades since the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt (1978-79), no Arab nation has waged any war against Israel. But one Arab country after another continues to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, and all for the benefit of Israel, and every act of negotiation or agreement with Israel seems to have expedited the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Though the strong Arab states have waged many wars for the sake of Palestine in the past, they were also the first ones to capture the Palestinian territory, and the story of secret collusion between King Abdullah of Jordan and Israel in 1948 to divide Palestine is well-documented.

After Egypt befriended Israel through the historic Camp David Accord, Palestine lost its biggest military ally, and soon Palestine lost Jordan too when they later recognized Israel in 1994; this was the beginning of the de-Arabisation of Palestine. Depriving Palestinians of their empathy with the Arabs and driving a wedge between wealthy Gulf nations and the Palestinian leaders have been an indissoluble part of Israel’s regional policy. Eventually, they achieved it by signing the Abraham Accord in 2020 with countries like UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

The Abraham Accord was preceded by an open embrace of defeat by Arab nations when they maintained conspicuous silence over President Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital and the shifting of the US embassy there from hitherto Tel Aviv. The US also convinced the Arab rulers that their only enemy was Iran. Their political and military interests lay with Israel, and the notion of the Arab world must be discarded. The growing intimacy with Israel was all evident when the Egyptian foreign minister at a Munich Security Conference, like his Israeli counterpart, refused to consider Hamas as a representative of Palestine or the petition of South Africa in ICC against Netanyahu failed to receive visible support from countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There are reports of exponential growth in Israel-UAE and Israel-Egypt trade since the inception of the war in Gaza.

While the last few months have witnessed a race among several non-Aran nations to recognize the state of Palestine, Abraham Accord signatory nations, even a token of respect for the innocent blood, failed to call their ambassadors back from Israel. The killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders (Haniyah and Nasrullah) went unreported in most of the Arab media, and there was no official condemnation of Israel for its cowardice acts as well. Israel is not likely to stop with the Abraham Accord, but it will continue its aggression against all those who harbour any sympathy for Palestine, and its current anti-Hamas and anti-Hezbollah war is a loud statement about Israel’s fundamental objectives in the region.

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