Israel and Sinwar’s War

At this stage, nothing happening anywhere in the Middle East is more important than the war in Gaza, its internal and regional developments, and the specter of a regional conflict between Israel and Iran. The positions of the world's major powers and their officials’ statements, the initiatives for a ceasefire and end to the war, and the extensive media coverage, all confirm nothing happening right now is more significant than this brutal war in Gaza.
Netanyahu rejects the Oslo Accords, which had granted the Palestinians some of their rights and allowed for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority on the land of Palestine, not outside it. The agreement opened the door to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. Netanyahu's opposition is both political and ideological. He does not want any Palestinian state alongside Israel and is striving to erase the Palestinian struggle. When Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip through a bloody and violent coup in 2007, Netanyahu was pleased, as the move imposed intra-Palestinian political division. At the time, he allowed billions of dollars to flow into Hamas through Israeli banks, ensuring its survival and consolidating this split.
Between 2007 and October 7th, successive Israeli governments maintained this approach to dealing with Hamas in Gaza. Meanwhile, Hamas used its rule in Gaza to impose its political agenda on the Palestinians, rejecting both the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization. During this period, Hamas would provoke Israel to launch a campaign that destroys parts of the Gaza Strip every five years or so, which the movement would leverage to assert itself regionally and negotiate with global powers.
US President Biden is optimistic that an agreement between Israel and Hamas is imminent after months of arduous negotiations held between Doha and Cairo. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had promised to visit Gaza, and if the negotiations succeed, all the Israeli hostages will be released in exchange for the release of some Palestinian prisoners. Netanyahu, however, is stalling in order to destroy more of the Gaza Strip in a campaign that began just two months shy of from a year of intense and destructive war on the Strip.
Political analysts who incorporate ideology and unseen supernatural forces into their analysis discredit themselves and their audience. Without ideology and reference to the unseen, what happened on October 7th can only be called an act of political idiocy by any measure. After months of war, Ismail Haniyeh, who had been the leader of Hamas before his assassination, was compelled to announce that the movement accepts the two-state solution, which the Palestinian Authority had agreed to- and every Arab country had supported- three decades ago. But at what cost? The announcement was made only after Hamas had solidified its control over the Gaza Strip and built regional alliances that have done nothing to help the Palestinian people or their cause.
The destruction in the Gaza Strip is immense and unprecedented, setting it back many years. By what military standard could what happened be called a victory? To secure the release of some Palestinian prisoners, over forty thousand Palestinians were killed; by what political standard could this be called a victory? The political analysts who supported what happened on October 7th do not have the courage to admit that they had made a mistake. Those following their media appearances and work today find evasive responses crouched behind vague and incoherent notions of politics to avoid revealing their ideological bias. This evasiveness is evident in all of their arguments, no matter how hard one tries to overlook it.
These analysts are the supporters of the so-called Resistance Axis in the Arab world, which has become notorious for having soaked its blood in four Arab countries’ conflicts. The number of Arab casualties who have fallen at the hands of this axis is nearly as high as those of war with Israel. Those who are not aligned with this Axis in the region are aligned with the fundamentalism camp, which is led by a major regional power and supported by some small Arab states and all political Islamist movements. This camp is no less dangerous than Israel or the Resistance Axis. It has a comparable capacity to destabilize states and undermine their security and stability. The disastrous so-called "Arab Spring" is just one example of the magnitude of the threat that it poses.
The extremists are colluding. If Yahya Sinwar had not given him justification to do so, Netanyahu would not have managed to destroy Gaza and kill forty thousand Palestinians. He and his country would have been met with unprecedented international condemnation. The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip has been the strong man there for years, and he recently became its leader after the assassination of Haniyeh. He kidnapped dozens of civilian prisoners and then hid in tunnels, allowing Netanyahu and his army to burn Gaza, its people, its trees, and stones.