On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters broke through the barrier outside Gaza —the world’s largest open-air prison — that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had erected. Hamas fighters killed some Israelis and took over 250 hostages. The initial news greatly exaggerated Israeli deaths and attributed every single casualty to Hamas.In truth, many Israelis were killed by the IDF itself as per the Hannibal doctrine, to prevent hostage taking. Israelis killed by the IDF exceed those killed by Hamas, from the 1,100 Israelis who died that day. Internationally broadcasted news even went as far to cook vile but false stories of 40 babies being beheaded by Hamas — a gruesome lie repeated by even POTUS Joe Biden.The news was aimed to demonize Hamas and garner support for the Israeli overreaction.
Israel received global sympathy and support for retaliation. The stated goal of the IDF was to avenge the 1,100 Israeli deaths by killing the Hamas and Hezbollah leadership and decimating its fighters. Negotiating the return of the 250 hostages was also a stated Israeli agenda. Yahya Sinwar was the Hamas chief and the chief architect of October 7, 2023.The IDF martyred him in October 2024.The IDF had maintained that Sinwar was a coward hiding in a bunker with the hostages as human shields, surrounded by bombs, and protected by Hamas fighters.
The truth was revealed when he heroically died in combat fatigue. Alone, fatally injured and starving for three days, he fought till his last breath.Sinwar became globally revered posthumously for his bravado, once the IDF released footage of his final moments. Earlier, the IDF had already struck across the border in Lebanon. In mid-September, Israel killed thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon by exploding the pagers in their use. Hezbollah had unwittingly ordered 5,000 new pagers from a company in Hungary, which was actually a front for undercover Israeli intelligence operatives.Israeli intelligence produced pagers containing batteries laced with small quantities of the explosive PETN (Pentaerythrite Tetranitrate) — designed to detonate after specific encrypted messages were sent to them.
By the end of September, the IDF had killed Hassan Nasrullah the head of Hezbollah in an airstrike on the group’s underground headquarters. Two of the three stated goals of the IDF were hence achieved in October 2024. The resistance leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah and thousands of their fighters were dead. Meanwhile, over 200 hostages had already died in the carpet bombing of Gaza.
Amongst all this, innocent civilians in Gaza are facing unspeakable horrors, even as over 40,000 Palestinians have died from IDF attacks, mainly women and children.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is still continuing the Palestinian genocide. All out American support is oxygen for Israel’s genocide. A complicated mix of religious zeal and economic interest makes the US support Israel with its warships, fighter jets, weapons and troops in addition to unconditional diplomatic and media support.
The Israel lobby is very strong in the US and Christian Zionists like POTUS Biden have their own religious reasons to support Israel. However, above all these factors lie the US’ geo-economic interest in the Middle East, which compelled it to mediate for the signing of the Abraham accords.
After the Abraham Accords, Arab states were warming up to Israel. Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE normalized relations with Israel in 2020. Saudi Arabia was all set to follow suit. This diplomatic normalization was aimed to facilitate trade. At the G7 summit in India in September 2023, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) was inaugurated. The US facilitated IMEC as a counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). IMEC would extend from India through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, onwards to Europe. The IMEC’s Eastern Corridor links India to the Middle East, and the Northern Corridor connects the Middle East to Europe.
IMEC is an alternative to existing maritime and land-based transport routes, such as the Egyptian Suez Canal, China’s BRI and the International NorthSouth Transport Corridor (INSTC) of Iran through Central Asia and Russia to Europe. This is what brought together the Arab states and Israel under the Abraham Accords.
On September 22, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map at the United Nations General Assembly, that placed the West Bank and Gaza within the boundaries of sovereign Israel. Aside from territorial expansion, there is liquid gold in Gaza. The eastern Mediterranean Levant Basin has discovered oil and natural gas resources. Israel’s Haifa port and Gaza Marine fields are the sites. The Gaza gas reserves are estimated to hold one trillion cubic feet of gas but the 2.5 million residents of Gaza stand in the way of the oil and gas reserves. Domestic energy security is very important for Israel as its power generation has previously been heavily dependent on unstable, costly, and polluting imports of coal and diesel oil as well as natural gas.
However, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Houthis from Yemen pose a threat to Israeli offshore energy infrastructure. This is why Israel is carpet bombing Gaza, and making air strikes in Lebanon and Syria.Iran is the power backing all these groups and Israel wants to neutralize all of them with US assistance.
This Israeli goal did not arise from October 7, 2023. Netanyahu first pursued it in 1991 with the first Gulf War and has kept pushing the US administration ever since. In 2001, the US administration made plans to attack Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. This was infamously revealed by General Wesley Clark, the former supreme commander of NATO forces in 2004.Except for Iran, all other countries stand devastated today.
The brainchild behind these US wars was Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who used the US to further his own political agendas.The source of Netanyahu’s profound influence on the US establishment is certainly not his personal charisma. POTUS Bill Clinton had famously fumed after being lectured by Netanyahu during their first meeting in 1996.
Netanyahu has a long history of angering US Presidents, especially those from the Democratic party, not prone to Christian Zionism. So far Evangelical Christians and America’s pro-Israel Jewish minority have ensured that Israel is given unconditional diplomatic and military support, and is forgiven for any missteps.
The holocaust which resulted in Nazi concentration camps and the deaths of six million Jews was a direct consequence of anti-Semitism of Christian Europe. The US was not complicit in the holocaust and the allied forces from the US liberated the Jews from the Nazis. However, Israel needed more from the US. The US was founded on the Protestant Christianity and early Zionists roped in US support by manipulating American religious sentiments.
First published in 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible has converted Americans into dedicated Zionists; Christians turned into Zionists once they were taught by Cyrus I. Scofield that only the establishment of the state of Israel can usher in the second coming of Jesus Christ (PBUH). In 1992 John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI).Hagee said that “50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel.”He was referring to the Scofield Bible, which states: “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgement.”
Beginning with public radio prominent Christian preachers turned tele –evangelists, they all drive home the point that the creation of Israel is central to the second coming of Jesus Christ (PBUH). Although Israel is a secular state, Christian Zionist American presidents such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan, George W. Bush and Biden are sympathetic to Israel due to the teachings of the Scofield Bible.
The carefully constructed narrative peddled by the Israel lobby controlling the media, demonized Muslims as a whole. Israel has enmeshed itself with the US academia, the US police, Hollywood, the tech giants in the US and the US media, etc. All these bodies go out of their way to support Israel in any and every way. Social media has been a game changer when it comes to public opinion. A handful of citizen journalists from Gaza managed to cause a paradigm shift in how Palestinians were perceived by the western public. Mass protests erupted across western capitals protesting the genocide, but had little to no effect.
Student protests beginning at Columbia University and spreading across the US and Europe resulted in the Ivy League schools divesting from Israeli universities. However, the laudable and commendable stance of the American college students was eventually untenable. South Africa filed a case at the ICJ against Israel for genocide. Finally, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. This move has only caused diplomatic embarrassment for Israel, as the US has threatened the ICC if it acts on these warrants.
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was recently evicted from the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations summit amid objections of a number of delegations participating in the meeting. Israel’s country credit rating has been downgraded multiple times.
The tech sector and the defence sector is the mainstay of the $500 billion strong Israeli economy, however, both have taken a hit due to the costly ongoing war. Israel has a reservist army drawn from the same pool as its tech industry but tech experts have been fleeing Israel, thanks to their dual passports from western countries. Israel is paying a heavy price for conducting a genocide.Despite a death toll of over 1,000 and thousands of critically injured within the IDF, Netanyahu’s persistence has paid off.Israelis are celebrating the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Israeli voices critical of the Palestinian genocide are few and far between.One notable exception is the Israeli left leaning prominent English language newspaper Haaretz, which criticized Israeli actions against Palestinians and was swiftly sanctioned by the Israeli government.
Israel is currently sustaining its year-long assault on Gaza by using US supplied weapons.The Israel lobby in the US ensures a steady supply of cutting-edge US military hardware and financial aid.However,Israel is a superior surveillance software and weapons supplier in its own right. Israel’s military industrial complex uses the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology.Israel then uses the sales pitch of being battle tested by showing footage of use in Palestinian territory on civilian targets, when it sells its wares to foreign governments.
Israel weaponry has traditionally been sold to despots in Romania, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, South Africa, South Sudan, etc. Israeli spyware and surveillance technology is used by countless democracies and dictatorships alike.These include Rwanda, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and India. Israeli weapons enabled the Myanmar army to murder thousands of Rohingya Muslims. Israeli Heron drones fly over Kashmir and Palestine. Israeli drones are used by the European Union to monitor and drown illegally arriving refugee boats in the Mediterranean.
The June 2023 tragedy of over two hundred Pakistanis drowning off the shores of Greece is one such use of Israeli technology.Tanvi Madan, the director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution said that Indian elites have an “operational envy” of Israel since India cannot retaliate against nuclear armed Pakistan, similar to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
The foreign governments that buy Israeli military hardware and surveillance technology invariably become tacit supporters of Israel at best or accomplices at worst with their actions.
Atheistic Europe carries the guilt of the holocaust.European states hold the opinion that the task of leaving the past behind us is best accomplished by defence deals with Israel. Germany not only established the military industrial complex of Israel but it is also a buyer of Israeli weaponry. Germany extends unconditional diplomatic support to Israel, be it in the UN or the ICJ.Germany has banned public recognition of the 1948 Nakba and criminalized any solidarity with the Palestinian people.
To answer the question why Israel is not ending the invasion of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, we must understand the national aspirations of Israelis.
Both “religious and secular rightwing nationalists” in Israel have peddled the concept of “Greater Israel,” based on religious interpretations of the “promised land.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party has dominated Israeli politics since 1977. Territorial expansion which culminates in “Greater Israel” remains the central ideological goal of Netanyahu’s political party.
This is why the ‘Nation State of the Jewish People’ law, passed in 2018, promotes Jewish settlement as a “national value” and affirms the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right” to all parts of the land, including the West Bank, referred to as “Judea and Samaria”.
In 2019, Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich sparked controversy when he advocated the expansion of Israel’s borders to Damascus in the documentary “In Israel: Ministers of Chaos”. Smotrich further claimed that Israel would eventually include Palestinian territories, as well as parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.
As of now Syria has fallen to revolutionaries.Firstly, as a result of the weakening of Iran’s proxies’ Hamas and Hezbollah and secondly, due to a lack of Russian support owing to the Russia-Ukraine war.
Netanyahu publicly took credit for the fall of the Asad regime and Israeli forces swiftly took control of the Syrian territory of Golan Heights. Israeli territorial expansion in Syria is a feather in Netanyahu’s cap. However, diplomatic normalization with Arab states as perthe Abraham Accords has now been rendered untenable.This is mainly owed to the rising anti-Israeli public sentiment in the Arab and Muslim world.
That said, the IMEC will possibly proceed unhindered. The Israeli economy will partially recover its military and tech sectors, in part due to help from the Israel lobby in the US.However, the days of free-flowing US financial aid will not likely resume.
This is due POTUS Trump’s protectionist policies, which have already caused a capital flight in the Indian stock market.As for the people of Palestine, Trump’s anti-war stance may end the genocide and give the Palestinians respite for the next four years till Allah SWT creates for them a way out, Inshallah.
