Abu Bakr Hussain has analysed the past 12 months of atrocities and concluded that If Israel doesn’t escalate, the war will come to a natural conclusion. Israel will face a reckoning for its actions and there will be a reconfiguration of the world. He warns we should fear any other outcome.
Every day, be it in Gaza, West Bank and now Lebanon, there is a new litany of horror. Within this constant, incessant bombardment of new stories which demand our attention, it is difficult to pull out and take a longer view. This is perhaps beneficial to the perpetrators as this firehouse of information can paralyse us while the genocide continues unabated. So let’s review where we are.
Some facts.
- Premise: Gaza is now effectively uninhabitable. A report 6 months ago from the UN stated over 70% of all housing in Gaza is already destroyed or damaged. This percentage will now be undoubtedly higher. There are over 40 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza. The work to remove this will likely take decades, complicated by the fact that much of this rubble will contain human remains. Compounded with un-exploded ordnance and the carnage left behind by total war, the landscape of Gaza should be better thought of as the battlefields of the First World War known as ‘zone rouge’ which to this day remain largely uninhabited.
Conclusion: The survivors of the Gazan genocide will need housing. This problem can be deferred as long as the war is ongoing, but ultimately, it will need a resolution.
- Premise: Mass graves (120 so far recorded) are abundant in Gaza. This is an incontrovertible fact which the world is pretending not to notice. In addition there are an untold number of bodies held inside Israel itself. Sde Teiman detention facility for example has 1,500 known bodies, with autopsies not carried out. Our estimates such as one from Lancet estimating perhaps 186,000 deaths are only hazy at present and hence deniable. Real substantive investigation will have to be carried out to ascertain the final death tolls.
Conclusion: Whatever the final figure, the findings will cause irreparable harm to the image of Israel as a modern western-style nation-state. However, as with premise 1, this issue can be deferred as long as the war is ongoing.
- Premise: There has been no real state-level intervention against Israel at the time of writing. Even Iran, which has launched missiles against Israel, deliberately launched them as a deterrent with well-telegraphed salvos that were limited in scope. Arab and Muslim countries which had been presumed to be natural allies of Palestinians have stayed largely on the sidelines. There has been some performative issuing of communiques, but no boots on the ground or intervention as yet.
Conclusion: Paradoxically, this poses an issue for Israel. If it does not escalate, the war will eventually come to a natural conclusion and it will face a reckoning for premises 1 and 2.
Result: There is a narrow path to victory for Israel on its terms. Escalation delays the inevitable yes. This is both beneficial to Israel, and the political survival of Benjamin Netanyahu who is by all accounts deeply unpopular within Israel. However, if the world does not respond the way Israel wishes it to, it will continue to escalate. If it succeeds in what I believe it is trying to do, i.e. escalate so much that it’s existence is under threat, it will succeed in getting further western military support.4
Israel has already received substantial support, but under existential threat, the West will become fully invested in ensuring Israel’s endurance. After all, countries such as Germany have stated that part of the reason Germany exists is to ensure Israel’s survival, a ‘staatsräson’. And so, if the Western world becomes fully complicit in Israel’s war crimes, through this narrow path, the West will have no interest in investigating the mass death Israel is responsible for.
Knock-on result: Escalations by their nature cannot be controlled. The world is so fearful of such an eventuality as the knock-on effects are unknown. However, there are some possibilities we can hypothesize. An escalation for instance could result in the expulsion of Palestinians out of the West Bank and into Jordan, a scenario which has been explicitly touted by figures such as Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich.
An escalation could cause fundamental ruptures in the Arab and Muslim world as populations revolt against their quiescent governments. We already witnessed the Arab Spring once, the effects of which are still ongoing. But much like Russia which had a failed revolution in 1905 and a successful revolution in 1917, often times, wizened by experience, revolutionaries succeed after multiple attempts. It is utterly unknown what the end-results of these revolutions would be.
They could cause descents into anarchy such as in Syria or other undesirable outcomes. Within this vacuum, a country such as Israel desirous of having a weak neighbourhood would undoubtedly have a vested interest in keeping things that way.
The nature of reality is that time constantly unfolds before us. None of these results are set in stone, history is constantly moving. The second and third order effects are effectively unknowable. This genocidal phase of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has now lasted one year. When the First World War started started, no one thought it would last four.
It escalated year upon year and resulted in a complete reconfiguration of the world. Due to the path Israel has chosen as well as the responses of the world so far, I’d put the chances at greater than 50/50 this current conflict lasts more than 2 years. Israel has no choice but to continue to escalate till it achieves its desired outcome.
Fear this outcome.
Abu Bakr Hussain has worked with international NGOs doing charity work and fund-raised for countries such as Haiti, Syria, Palestine, Myanmar, Yemen and India. He pioneered a detailed accounting of war crimes committed by Israel with ‘Unearthed’ White Papers. He has since consulted on the establishment of numerous collectives to continue and build-out this vital work of documenting and archiving. Find him on twitter @KintsugiMuslim
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