The War on Gaza: Internal and Foreign Roles

Benevolence and honorable intentions have undoubtedly played an important role in driving students and legal professionals around the world to raise their voices against the genocide in Gaza. Such efforts, if they are fated to succeed, could correct some imbalances in our region and perhaps across the globe, or at least reduce them.
However, honorable intentions do not solve problems alone, they do not suffice for inaugurating the legal or student consciousness as a guide to politics. The key issue, regardless of whether the student/legal intervention succeeds in changing the "West," is the presence of an internal force ready to receive foreign support and turn it into an element of the solution. It is not an exaggeration to say that local dynamics are pushing in a direction opposite to what is intended. There is no strong political body in Palestine today that makes its own decisions and has the capacity to develop independent strategies, while Hamas remains outside every realm of political acceptability. Since the ongoing war is one of multiple fronts, civil strife within the Levant, including Palestine, exacerbates weaknesses and compels us to ask: How can a war be global and less than national at the same time?
Experience tells us that domestic dysfunction deprives a just and legitimate cause of the capacity to translate itself into similarly just and legitimate politics. This is exactly what we saw from the Palestinian cause for decades. Despite being undeniably just, that cause has been associated with civil wars, the militarization of the region, fodder for military regimes, and the specter of splits within Levantine societies, as well as Iran’s dominance in the Levant and the establishment of a Hamas regime that one would not wish on their enemy.
Functionally, foreign support is progressing much more slowly than Israel’s brutality. Ten months on, the outcome speaks for itself: Gaza has been destroyed and the situation in the West Bank is worrying. Indeed, as the Israeli government’s vengeful campaign rages on and Israel continues to show contempt for the entire world, its settlers continue to seize territory and expel residents.
Meanwhile, the Levant is being consumed by its militias and schisms, which encompass disputes over the Gaza war itself. That is not a detail plastered onto this question, it is the heart of the matter. The war of the Jewish state on Gaza has coincided with two others: an Israeli-Iranian war and an Iranian war on the states and societies of the Levant. These conflicts create two obstacles to foreign support. This first is Tehran’s role, and the second is the uninviting consciousness of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis with their "curse to the Jews," and both threaten to dissipate much of the impact of this foreign support.
This evaluation claims to be premised on an assessment of reality, rather than a "right-wing," "left-wing," or "liberal" worldview. It focuses on the havoc wreaked on the Levant, particularly by Iran and its patronage, because the capacity of local forces to sacrifice Gazans at the altar of Israel’s slaughter is far greater than foreign aid’s capacity to save their lives.
Disregarding the local and dismissing interest in it as parochial and frivolous, while focusing solely on developments in the West and their repercussions for Israel, reflects the influence of a colonial consciousness. Even when we see it in an anti-colonial context, it implies that developments in the "colonies" are inertial and ephemeral.
Because the catastrophe of this genocide has become two catastrophes as a result of the failure to capitalize on the foreign support, there emerged a sense of frustration that overstates achievements abroad and presents them as a treasure trove that compensates for all that we lack, turning a famous Christian axiom on its head: lose yourself as long as you gained the world.
Such a situation leaves those involved in a strange position, especially those who oppose and despise the Resistance Axis. Under these circumstances, they become enthusiastic proponents of a cause but not its forces, its history, its alignments, or its narrative about itself and others. The concern is that this estrangement from the forces of the cause- those who, whether we like it or not, are the ones actually fighting for it- contributes to blowing the influence of external factors out of proportion. Thus, we find ourselves confronted with an outsider discourse that repeats moralistic or quasi-religious rhetoric about a cause that has been idealized and detached from everything around it.
While the foreign support shown by students, courts, and judges in the West might seem unprecedented, it is certainly not the first instance of Palestinians and Arabs receiving foreign support.
Once upon a time, measuring by the moods and forces of that era, the Soviet Union and its camp, along with the "national liberation movement" that included China and India, both rising powers armed with independence, revolutions, and decolonization (which we are beginning to realize had never been achieved!), were aligned with the Arabs. At the time, Arab communist parties were the staunchest proponents of the role played by our "Soviet friends-" the communists were the most outsiders of our political forces, and their militants had just been released from the prisons of the so-called "nationalist" military regimes. However, in a matter of days, we brushed the discourse of "Soviet friendship" and "open-ending conflict with imperialism" aside, turning our attention to "self-critique after the defeat" and the vilification of the domestic forces that had fought the war, chief among them Nasser, after criticizing him taboo.