A year has gone by since the two damned days, but we have yet to hear a single serious and profound reassessment of what happened. Where did the men behind the two operations go wrong? Could they both have been averted? What is to be done now after the fact? Is a retreat that allows us to avoid incurring more losses than we already have as a result of this catastrophe? This is the silence of corpses.
Worse still, even worse than our intellectuals, Hamas and Hezbollah continue to insist that they are winning and to boast that they will keep fighting. When the latter seemed somewhat ready to face the tragic truth, Iran’s foreign minister came to visit and proclaimed that things could not have gone better.
In fact, politics, which the Palestinians and Lebanese desperately need, is among the most prominent casualties of the past year.
Israel, in its response, chose to follow the doctrine of raw force or the religion of force, which shuns politics, killing, destroying, and displacing indiscriminately. Under Netanyahu's leadership and amid partnership with the religious parties, "the day after" has become taboo, much like the "Palestinian state." Meanwhile, the Israeli public, whose sense of security was shaken by the operations, supports this course of action and calls for more of the same.
We thus saw the culmination of the march backward that had begun in the mid-1990s, with the two opposing sides- the nationalistic and religious right in Israel and the police state and Islamist regimes in the Arab Levant and Iran- opposing the project for peace that had begun in Oslo and agreeing to kill it.
On top of that, Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Jerusalem has become a manifestation of the violent Israeli excesses that negate politics. Until the foreseeable future, Netanyahu's leadership, which has been given a new lease on life, and settlement projects (both those that have been realized and those that could be implemented in the coming days) will continue to weigh heavily on the chest of politics, to say nothing about the repercussions of the ongoing war situation and its psychological ramifications on both sides of the conflict. Moreover, we could see the emergence of a new status quo in Gaza and South Lebanon that is unlikely to inspire confidence among those betting on politics or alleviate their fears.
As for us, particularly in Gaza and Lebanon, our immense pain is accompanied by opportunities, but it is unclear how these opportunities will be managed, while historical precedents encourage caution. It is true that the Iranian empire recommending that we all die has suffered fractures that are now public. And since the blows dealt to Resistance Axis forces, theories advocating violence as a solution to the conflicts- whether through resistance or otherwise- have been standing on shaky ground. However, regimes and militant groups that rejected political solutions and embraced (whether sincerely or not) calls for "total liberation" have consistently been on the receiving end of such blows since 1967, the year Nasserism and Baathism’s “Naksa” (setback). In 1973, the idea that warfare, rather than politics, would lead to "total liberation" was dealt another blow. While Anwar Sadat chose politics, Hafez al-Assad chose to rhetorically champion "total liberation," turning the Levant into a breeding ground for civil war and the dominance of militias. Later on, in 1982, the idea of armed resistance from outside Palestine was defeated, and in 2003, with the fall of Saddam Hussein, the police states and military regimes, as well as their exploitation of calls for "total liberation" and similar slogans, began to be defied.
Meanwhile, however, Iran’s effort to inherit the dead and kill the living was gaining steam. Iran invested in the collapse of the Saddam regime as it had in the failures of the PLO, and it turned one country in the region after another into a militia state. It was only natural that this project, which Iran pursued in partnership with the Syrian regime, would coincide with the thwarting of every attempt at reaching a peace deal, whether by Palestinians, Jordanians, or Lebanese, and with the persistent demonization of the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement that allowed Egypt to take back its occupied land.
But Iran seems to have bitten off more than it can chew, and we now find Iran vomiting it all out as it all vomits out its regime, making the transition to a new era- one in which we put the various forms of unbridled radicalism behind us- theoretically possible.
Nonetheless, there are reasons to doubt that this opportunity will be seized, turning theory into reality, especially if Netanyahu maintains his obstinate opposition to the emergence of a Palestinian state, continues to facilitate settlement, and sticks to rhetoric that presents "changing the region" as a punitive measure. All of this fuel illusions about the need for more violence and conflict, though it is suicidal.
Even if we do find ourselves in a situation where Iran is incapable of dragging us back into disaster, the omens of destruction remain vigorous and dynamic in several levels of our lives. Rotten communal relations throughout the Levant have been aggravated further by militias, meaning that internal implosions are much more likely than reinforcing cohesion and solidarity. An implosion is made even more likely by the mass displacement resulting from the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and before them, the war in Syria. Such a development not only changes demographics and redraws geographic lines; it also has repercussions for national affiliation as such, and for the political tools needed for that end. In light of an economic scarcity that exacerbates the suffering of victims and lowers their horizons, there is reason to fear that civil strife could sharpen. Indeed, tattered militia-like and mafia-like organizations grow on the margins of displacement, especially if it is prolonged.
But first and foremost, capable states, whether in Lebanon or Palestine, remain elusive. No party can take the reins and make decisions, ward off Iranian influence, unify the people behind it, and negotiate with the world on their behalf. Politics, under these circumstances, seems to be lying on the ground waiting for someone to pick it up, as a late Russian politician famously once put it.
