Israel seems determined to persist in its war of genocide in Gaza, or at least it has shown no intention to end it.

Its aims are not limited to this narrow strip of territory since they also encompass the entire Middle East. Israel’s goal is to subject key regional powers to its predominance and to assert its military superiority over the rest of the region owing to its access to the latest military hardware, logistics and security facilities, and intelligence, all furnished by the US-led West.

The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation carried out by Hamas on 7 October last year delivered a stunning blow to Israel’s security strategy towards the Palestinian people and its regional environment, one that rests on the four components of deterrence, early warning, defence, and decisive victory.

 The strategy is a defensive creed that Israeli strategists base on various premises, among them Israel’s limited geographical area, its self-definition as a “Jewish state” that aims to “take in” Jews from around the world, and its view of its environment as overwhelmingly hostile and seething with hatred and anti-Semitism that no amount of peace agreements will ever eliminate or contain.

Of course, Israel knows full well that its belligerent and criminal behaviour fuels this hatred, but it shows no desire to change.

While the Al-Aqsa Flood hit all four components of the Israeli security strategy hard, the deterrence factor was the hardest hit. It also stirred the greatest amount of controversy inside Israel.

The basic idea of deterrence in international relations is to prevent an adversary from carrying out an action harmful to the welfare of the party wielding the deterrent. The Al-Aqsa Flood exposed the vulnerability of Israeli deterrence, which had devastating implications for all the proudly vaunted intelligence, high tech, and pre-emptive aspects of that capacity.

As a result, since 7 October debate in Israel has focused on reducing the reliance on deterrence and early warning and instead increasing the reliance on “pre-emptive prevention,” by which is meant using force to forestall a threat instead of waiting for the threat itself to play out. Otherwise put, it means opting for the use of active force rather than just the threat of force.

Deterrence has never worked against the resistance, of course. It did not prevent the resistance fighters from carrying out the strikes, and nor did it work against the Arab states after 1967. Barely had the 1967 War ended than the War of Attrition had begun, culminating in the October 1973 War.

It is also a historical fact that Israel has relied on aggression since before its inception. It used massive force to expel the Palestinians in 1948, and it persisted in its acts of ethnic cleansing to pave the way for Jewish settlers and to create and perpetuate a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Violence has always been and remains the main constant in Israeli strategy. Even so, there was a lot of touting of Israeli deterrence power before 7 October. Hamas would never dare to initiate an attack against Israel, it was said, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence encouraged this kind of thinking.

The ongoing Israeli assaults against the Palestinian refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm, Tubas and elsewhere in the West Bank for the first time in nearly 22 years can be seen in this light, in other words as part of the recourse to pre-emptive violence.

Ostensibly, the idea is to prevent the West Bank from becoming another front in the war, adding an additional burden to the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) that are preoccupied with the Gaza and Lebanese fronts.  But it is noteworthy that the assaults coincided with a Knesset vote to repeal the provisions of the 2005 disengagement law and to approve renewed and intensified settlement expansion in the West Bank.

This is not to suggest that the West Bank was calm before the present assaults. Settler violence and attacks against Palestinian persons and property have been escalating exponentially. But with the war on Gaza ongoing, Israel seems to have thought it expedient to silence the West Bank front before it blew up.

The Israeli aggression against the West Bank is based on the premises that it is an easy catch, that “victory” there would compensate for the failure in Gaza, and that the international community is too preoccupied with Gaza to notice what is happening in the West Bank.

However, this strategy can easily backfire. The densely populated West Bank may conceal more weapons than Israeli intelligence knows about, and the resistance there is not limited to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, since it also includes the owners of the land. The West Bank enjoys recognised international status, and Israel cannot level the accusation of “terrorism” against the internationally recognised Palestinian Authority (PA).

As a result, Israel’s continued brutality there will meet with regional and international censure, all the more so as it has not been provoked by a specific incident that could supposedly be used to justify it – not that Israel has ever needed justification in order to go on the attack.

 In this case, Netanyahu has once again opted for aggression in order to satisfy the Israeli extreme right, which has long thirsted to seize the whole of the West Bank, clear it of its indigenous inhabitants, establish life there under a Jewish theocracy, and, of course, eliminate the possibility of a Palestinian state.

As he presses ahead with the genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu wants to reshuffle the cards by dragging others into a regional war. His plan is to set the Palestinian cause back to zero, to destroy the Iranian nuclear project and eliminate Hizbullah, and to block any horizon to a negotiated peace based on the two-state solution.

He sees an opportunity in the form of the US fleet that has moved into the region with the declared aim of protecting Israel and preventing escalation to all-out war. But Israel has lost its deterrent power and is locked in wars of attrition on both its southern and northern fronts. Its need for US protection is evident as a result. Yet, Netanyahu and the extreme right in Israel think they can take advantage of this as they drag the region into a wider war and close the doors to diplomacy and a negotiated solution to the conflict.

Israel will pay the price for its folly sooner or later. What the Palestinians must do is end their divisions and reactivate the frameworks and institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the vehicle for the Palestinian resistance.

 

The writer is an Arab affairs expert at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly