Only a few dispersed and reluctant voices were raised in opposition to the “Trump Plan” for ending the Gaza war. It is not that the voices believe in the plan, nor that its flawlessness exonerates it from rebuke. If the plan is indeed susceptible to being challenged, and it is, then far less problematic proposals would, in the past, be ridiculed and derided as reminders of the suffering that “white man” had caused us over a long and dark era.
Naturally, it is difficult to slander a plan that presents itself as a path for ending the carnage when we know that the horror of Israel’s relentless genocide has not prevented its perpetuation. It is also difficult to slander that which a clear majority of Palestinians humbly values and clings to. Nonetheless, those who would typically overlook the loss of life in the name of “the cause” in the past, or rather light the fire of “the cause” with the desired corpses, paying no consideration to the wishes of the Palestinians, have been behaving noticeably differently this time around.
We can rule out the assumption that preventing more deaths compelled these people to remain silent, or to even announce their approval, based on what we know about most of them, their sentiments, and the way they think. The more likely explanation is that “the cause” as such has, given the balance of power that has taken shape, become so frail that its recovery seems all but impossible. One ramification is that defending Hamas’s presence in Gaza has become an impossible task, as even some of its friends have concluded, since the world and the region essentially unanimously agree that there is a need to get rid of this presence. The Rejectionists, who are now ones to promise or shy away from demagoguery, have acquired the virtue of muteness as a result of losing their capacity to speak, let alone pursue any kind of plan or strategy.
Reaching rock open was aptly made possible, almost exactly two years ago, by the "flood" of the seventh of October 2023, whose many admirers already glorified; breathing life into “the cause" was not the least of their characterizations, and "liberating Palestine from the river to the sea" was not the greatest.
We now find humanitarian themes at the forefront as political themes atrophy and recede. In fact, we might now be before a Palestinian population without a Palestinian cause- that is, a devastated and tortured population who deserve to lead lives fit for human beings and for the sword of Israeli murder to be lifted off of their heads. Arab and international political efforts to establish a Palestinian state will certainly continue, but achieving this goal has, since and because of October 7, become immeasurably more difficult than it had been before.
It seems that this "glorious day" was more like the hideous culmination of the darkest trajectory of “the cause:” the dimension of the cause that associated it with civil wars and armed resistance, while associating this resistance with Arab nationalist or Islamist, but always tyrannical, regimes. Meanwhile, the political trajectory of “the cause,” which culminated in the Madrid and Oslo conferences, was constantly vilified and demonized.
Accordingly, just as the 1967 defeat replaced the slogan "erasing the traces of aggression" with the slogan "liberating Palestine," the erosion has resumed, with the "humanitarian" replacing the "political" and Gaza replacing Palestine.
As for “the cause" that remains, it is “the cause" of the Iranian regime, which must now confront the world without the belt of the "Palestinian cause.” Iran has, alongside its Lebanese and Yemeni subordinates, itself become its only and last line of defense. This state of affairs is enough to demonstrate that the plan developed by the Iranian revolution and its regime has shattered, and that the billions and the immense effort put into this pursuit have come to nothing.
The shift from the previous phase of quasi-internationalist and revolution-exporting glut, a phase that first emerged with the Iran-Iraq War, to the current state of affairs wherein the "revolution" is practically confined to one country, will probably have major repercussions that Iranian domestic politics cannot escape.
In turn, Israel might be made, should the American plan succeed, to pay a price that, though it would not eclipse Israel’s military victory, does not overlook its political and public opinion defeat. In this event, with or without elections, Benjamin Netanyahu, along with the extremist religious parties and settler mobs, looms as the potential price to be paid.
In any case, we stand before a future that remains far more obscure than it is discernible. What is certain, however, is that October 7 and its repercussions urge us to make radical reassessments that have yet to begin, and to adopt policies and slogans imbued with some modesty and consideration for the balance of power. More than that, the entire Levant seems to be in the grips of an existential and civilizational crisis pounding it from top to bottom. Israel’s violence and the ramifications of this violence are one dimension of this crisis, but another prominent dimension is "the cause" that had molded the resistance operation against Israel on October 7.
