A Palestinian child holds a slingshot. Photo: Al-Carmel/File photo.
By Abdul Jawad Omar – Oct 14, 2023
The occupier took more than four days to restore its presence on the border with the Gaza Strip and limit the capacity and intensity of the [Resistance] infiltration operations. We have entered the second phase of the war, a destructive phase waged against the Gaza Strip on multiple levels.
The primary goal of the occupation is an attempt to restore the balance of forces. To do so, the occupation has invoked US military power in the region as a deterrent force and to enhance the entity’s missile defense capabilities, especially against ballistic missiles, and to mobilize additional aerial capabilities if other fronts become involved. Furthermore, the occupation intends to unify the internal occupation front by establishing an emergency government that presents the Zionist entity as united before friends and foes alike. Lastly, the occupation is responding clearly to confrontations from other fronts, especially from northern Palestine, which subsequently led to the martyrdom of Hezbollah mujaheddin.
In recent days, we have witnessed an unprecedented escalation in racist and fascist rhetoric from the leaders of the Zionist entity. They implemented a siege which includes cutting off essential supplies like food, water, electricity, and medicine. It aims to weaken the will to fight in Gaza and enable bargaining over Zionist prisoners currently held in the Resistance’s prisons. Structurally, this siege resembles sieges from the Middle Ages. The occupation is also conducting an ongoing destructive aerial campaign targeting infrastructure and residential buildings, attempting to implant the idea in the Palestinian consciousness that every success they achieve will be followed by immense devastation and death. This campaign, which has claimed many lives, falls under what Israelis call the “Balance of Terror” in response to the death of 1,300 occupiers.
In this campaign, the occupying power has obtained media legitimacy and significant Western support. Today, Western media outlets circulate fake news and play a direct role in spreading false claims about events in the settlements near Gaza. This propaganda is directed towards garnering sympathy and providing an open space [for the occupation] to unleash revenge without restraint. The media barrage has also contributed to building internal and collective will among the occupiers, emphasizing the necessity of engaging in a broad and lengthy war that requires more sacrifices from the Zionist forces in Gaza on the domestic front and, possibly, even on the northern front.
The occupation is currently counting on two things: first, the ability to deter the allies of the Resistance in Gaza and, second, the possibility of eliminating the Resistance in Gaza without the intervention of its allies. This is a difficult goal, resembling the objectives set by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2006 when he aimed to eliminate Hezbollah in Lebanon. Therefore, the Zionist entity is talking about a large-scale war that will take weeks and months to expel the Resistance forces from the Gaza Strip.
The question remains: Is there any logic in the current madness, or is it just an expression of psychological imbalance?
The enemy is trying to turn back the clock to before Saturday, when the Resistance eliminated the military defensive line separating the Gaza Strip from [occupation] settlements. It aims to transfer the battle to its opponents, and it does so amidst rhetorical exaggerations and unclear propositions, indicating that we are dealing with various forms of confusion and infighting regarding the decisions being made. We can imagine the heated debates occurring between military and political leaders about what is possible in Gaza. What they have in common so far is that Gaza will pay a high price, and various levels of air power will be employed. Firstly, to bring about the collapse of all existing social institutions, secondly, civilians in Gaza will pay a heavy price, which is an integral component of the strategy. Thirdly, an attempt to strike the [Resistance] military infrastructure and open new corridors, paving the way for the ground invasion.
Amidst these goals, there is skepticism about the ability of the occupation to conduct a successful ground campaign and observations that entering Gaza might lead the occupation into more problems. In the world of strategic studies and war, we usually work under the assumption that our opponents seek some form of benefit or gain. Meaning that there is an objective behind every military or political move made by an enemy or a friend, whether those objectives are a mixture of material interests, power and dominance, security, or restoring balance. When the motives of a political actor become clear, their actions are usually more predictable, making it easier to formulate our own strategies in response. What interests us is the relationship between madness and motives, because madness is also a temporary suspension of the ability to read the adversary and comprehend its will to fight. The madness of the occupation is not, as it claims, because of the deaths of civilians, but rather because its army on the Gaza front has been destroyed along with its many layered defenses.
Since the world has decided to embrace Zionist propaganda as part of a strategic communication campaign aimed at providing ample room for maneuvering, madness is also the current strategy of the Zionist entity. It seeks to silence all opposing voices and intimidate supporters of Palestine worldwide. Because there are interests in the Arab world that want to eliminate Gaza, the Zionist entity enjoys a wide space for action and freedom of movement, including military actions based on “exception” and suspending the previous rules of war, which aimed to delimit the magnitude and scale of the massacre by using precision missiles and advanced warnings. In other words, today we are facing a massacre without rules, or, at least, this is how it appears.
At the moment, the occupying power is following a purely vindictive logic, aiming to claim the lives of as many innocent civilians as possible to establish a new blood balance, shedding more Palestinian blood than that of the Zionists. This problem is one of the main issues highlighted in this confrontation. In its initial stages, the high number of casualties among soldiers and settlers helped create a “hysterical moment” as part of a strategy of intimidation, boosting morale on the domestic front and reviving the will to fight that was absent due to a lack of trust at multiple levels, affecting the relationship between Zionist society and the political and security elites.
The [occupation’s] madness creates a situation in which the ghosts of the past reappear among Palestinians. These ghosts include memories of displacement and massacres. In the current psychological war, there is much confusion between what is realistic and what is possible; i.e., the opening of history generates this horror as well, especially when it is accompanied by an aerial campaign in which the occupation dropped 4,000 tons of explosives on the besieged Gaza Strip. In other words, in response to the destruction achieved by the Resistance against the occupiers, the occupation needs to create a destructive experience that evokes the ghosts of the Nakba and the possibility of systematic displacement.
The Ground Invasion of Gaza
The United States and Europe have decided to give time for the occupying state to retaliate and regain some of the lost deterrence by giving it a blank check to confront the Resistance. For this purpose, a false propaganda campaign has been launched, including conflating ISIS and the Hamas movement and exaggerating the events that took place in the settlements around Gaza with accusations of rape, beheadings, and the killing of children. These claims will rebound internally when the truth of what happened in the Gaza Strip begins to leak into Zionist society: the decision to kill hostages along with the Resistance, and its decision to expedite the process of controlling the Gaza Strip at the expense of its citizens, as reported by Saleh al-Arouri, a member of Hamas’ political bureau. However, all of the options currently available to the occupying state are difficult.
In essence, it seeks to change the equation imposed by Gaza—to turn [the Resistance’s] initial victory into a defeat. This requires the occupation to neutralize other potential fronts and focus on the Gaza Strip, making the level of pain and destruction sufficient to weaken the Resistance’s power in the sector and force it to yield to aerial, artillery, and naval strikes. All this while planning the possibility of a large-scale ground invasion into Gaza.
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However, can the occupying state fulfill its promises to its allies? Can it eliminate the Resistance through a ground or aerial campaign? The main difficulty facing the occupying state is that it may theoretically be able to destroy Gaza, but it will have great difficulty in destroying the Resistance. This equation makes any ground invasion a decisive crossroads in the history of “Israel”even more decisive than the initial Resistance operation—because it also opens itself, with this decision, to the possibility of turning the initial defeat into an even greater defeat if it carries out a ground invasion and, despite inflicting losses on the Resistance, fails to eliminate it.
The occupying state suffers from the tyranny of history; it is used to turning an initial defeat into victory, and it is used to possessing enough power to achieve that. This is what it was able to achieve in the 1973 October War by bypassing the initial Egyptian breach of the Bar Lev Line and turning defeat into victory, forcing Egypt to the Camp David Accords. Faced with the broad alliance that was prepared for war with it before the setback, it was able to launch a preemptive strike using precise intelligence. It effectively neutralized the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Golan Heights with its ground army.
The tyranny of history causes it [the occupying state] to make incorrect calculations. First, it feels confident in the possibility of defeating the Resistance in Gaza without intervention from other fronts and re-establishing deterrence in the Eastern Mediterranean. Secondly, [it feels confident] that it can carry out a ground offensive and win.
It has four options now:
First, absorb the Resistance’s first strike and, after a harsh air response, create a long-term policy aimed at strangling the sector economically and socially. Second, target the Resistance infrastructure directly, which requires a decisive ground entry with large numbers of troops and exposes it to a new defeat before the world and before its friends and enemies. The third option is to initiate a comprehensive war that strikes multiple fronts and other regional powers in an attempt to demonstrate its strength, which would take the battle to its maximal limits. There is a final option, which is to take the madness as far as possible and render Gaza completely uninhabitable.
All of these options have significant costs.
The risk of entering a ground war is enormous, because the occupation army is not used to ground wars. Despite its claims of being the best urban warfare military force in the world, it will enter under multi-layer air support—small drones, helicopters, suicide drones, and advanced aircraft that continue the bombing process and contribute to linking combat units with multiple layers from air support. The enemy will use chemical weapons in an attempt to destroy the viability of the tunnels. All of this and more.
However, it is important to point out two things: firstly, that the ongoing battle that led to the fall of the Occupation’s Gaza Brigade also means that the Resistance has acquired valuable intelligence about the options available to the entity. This intelligence reinforces what it already has.
Secondly, the resilience of the Resistance after the war will cost the occupying power a great deal politically and psychologically and completely disrupt political opportunities. Relying on its allies at this moment will make it more vulnerable to broader extortion from the Euro-American axis and subsequent concessions after the war.
The army will enter with international logistical support, overwhelming destructive capabilities, armored vehicles of various types, and, perhaps, with the participation of some other countries in the operation. It will have the ability to use poisonous chemical bombs in an attempt to destroy the tunnels and infrastructure of the Resistance.
However, Gaza is seriously prepared to meet the invaders. Perhaps its first strike last Saturday may even be part of a greater deception to drag the occupation to defeat itself.
Conclusion
Although some consider our defeat eternal—and there are those who are in love with defeat itself, and have become a ghost lost in it, while others regret their participation in the first dream based on the hope of liberation—history will prove that the end of the idea of “Israel” began the moment that the downtrodden learned the lessons of the Arab states and those who preceded them in the journey to freedom.
What we see of madness and hysteria in the enemy only confirms the fact that the strong, when exposed as weak, go mad. And the madness here is destruction without a clear political objective.
Translated by Orinoco Tribune
OT/DZ/SL
