On a War No One is Likely to Win Absolutely

“America is Alone”: was the headline of this newspaper’s piece on what happened recently in the Security Council. The US was indeed alone when it used its veto. No country in the world supported it. Even Britain was content with abstaining, while France voted the other way.
This dire outcome tells us that Israel’s war can only be won by force, and wars cannot be won absolutely through force alone. With this characteristic, victory resembles the beast trumping humans and muscle trumping everything else. This is not to downplay the significance of force but to highlight its persuasive and ethical limitations and its inability to win over new allies, which ultimately leaves it confined to itself while the victor seems despised, imperious, and conceited.
How could things be any different when Israel has gone on an insane killing spree accompanied by disregard for public opinion anywhere in the world, as well as obvious contempt for people’s humanity and extremely unequal and discriminatory valuations of their lives, to say nothing about the perpetual flood of lies?
That is how the Israelis have come to seem alone today, and who would dare to join them, even if they wanted to, on such a barbaric project - its most prominent images are the killing of children, mass displacement, and the destruction of homes?
However, this hemorrhaging of allies feeds on other factors that the protests we are seeing in capital cities around the world point to, as do so of its educational and media institutions. Israel has not supplemented its war effort with any policy or proposal for a solution, and the broad hostility towards it is part of hatred to the US and the West because it identifies itself with them. In turn, the memory of the Holocaust is waning and eroding, especially after Israeli leaders persistently exploited it. This comes amid a shift in the global mood that has left the world incapable of tolerating silence in the face of national suffering, especially the suffering of Palestinians. Moreover, this mood has left the world enamored of defeated victims, just as it had been enchanted by strong victors decades ago. Added to the rising prevalence of an aversion to violence (though this aversion is somewhat selective) is that social media has made all forms of speech readily available, ending the days when traditional media owned by wealthy institutions filtered and curated the content that reached their audiences. Finally, especially with immigration and the demographic changes it has given rise to, the contradiction between democracy and democracies’ foreign policy leaves politics liable to being held accountable, and examining “colonial history” has become widespread, rivaled only by all kinds of identities waking up to their particularity and the erosion of the universality contained in the values of the Enlightenment.
However, when these factors are brought together as part of a single whole, it muddles the waters. While it has afforded the Palestinians many allies, there remain fears that the Palestinian national project and its specificity could be suffocated by this abundantly intense embrace. As many reject the idea that the project could coexist with the Syrians’ pursuit of liberty, which is supposed to be the struggle closest and most similar to that of the Palestinians, some have made Palestine into a symbol for gender equality, opposition to Columbus’s discovery of America, rejection of neoliberalism, those pursuing a cleaner environment, those who want to Islamize the world, and those who want to remove the burden of religion from the world's shoulders.
Within these “social movements,” we find those who claim to want to right the wrongs of history, faulting geography because it has been marred by colonialism and the region’s borders and political entities were drawn up by the colonizers. We also find those who want to re-impose obedience on women, as well as those who want women to enjoy the freedom they claim women are denied by a blend of consumerism and reactionary values... Like ideas and worldviews, borders are also jumbled together around Palestine. Thus, Yemen, where a civil war is raging and Iran dominates, is being relied upon to save Gaza by plunging the region into a regional or perhaps global war. Meanwhile, the Lebanese fear the war spreading to the country every day, and such a development, which would supposedly be intended to support Palestine, could potentially light the fuse of a struggle fraught with sectarian strife that steals some of the limelight from the Palestinian cause.
It is feared that, in the end, we could see a more expansive repeat of Arabs’ traditional use of the “central cause” as the cause of everyone and no one at the same time. This is time, though, "everyone" refers to the whole world.
The fact is that there are many indications that it will be difficult to turn this noise into a policy program that impacts decision-makers and institutions. Bringing down Joe Biden, for example, can only end with Donald Trump in the White House, provided he manages to avoid conviction. Meanwhile, denying the Labor Party a victory in Britain would allow the Conservatives to maintain power, and the same is true for France, where Marine Le Pen is an incomparably more likely successor to Emmanuel Macron than Melenchon.
This brings to mind the observations of some scholars of anti-neoliberal movements made after this opposition was left without a strong social class like the working class and its unions, as a result of the technological revolution and robots. As a result, those who are not involved in production and are not part of a social class take on this task, raising slogans which are both reactionary and progressive as its practical impact declines.
In turn, the many questions of the Palestinian cause should be contained and cut down so that Palestinians’ unique voice remains heard more clearly. Otherwise, this abundance would become a source of weakness for the Palestinians, just as scarcity is a source of weakness for the Israelis: one party is left isolated and the other lost in the crowd. And for this reason, any talk about sweeping and total victory, any victory, looks lacking credibility.