Emaddedin Baghi
For a human rights defender, the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza is more important from the point of view of war and peace and the future of peace in the region and the world than from the point of view of politics, and he follows it from this angle.
After the end of the ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, it is certain that after this war, we will face another world, a world in which new seeds of hostility and destruction of world peace have been sown.
The war has expanded in a wider sphere, the validity of international rules regarding war and peace has been lost, and trust in the values claimed by Western nations has been undermined. In the region, enmity with Israel has deepened, and hatred of Zionism is more prevalent in the world than before.
The intense bipolarity that resulted from the war between Hamas and Israel shows the severity of the issue and the high capacity of the Palestinian issue to spark difficult-to-solve international disputes. That government, which itself is part of the problem, cannot resolve it.
Not only the gap between the Western world and the Islamic world, which was smoothly decreasing, deepened, but the gap between the public sphere and the political sphere in the West itself widened. I will mention only a few examples.
Right after Biden entered Israel at the height of Israel’s heavy attacks on civilians, he said, “I have come to Israel to announce a message. You are not alone. You are not alone. If Israel did not exist, we would have had to invent it.For decades, we have ensured Israel’s qualitative military edge. And later this week, I’m going to ask the United States Congress for an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense.
US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “Israel is a bulwark for us… It’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.” It’s our oldest ally. If Israel disappears, Russia, China, and BRICS+ countries will control 90% of the oil in the world, and that would be cataclysmic for the US.
The Jews of New York City occupied the Central Railway Station during the busiest hours of traffic and demanded a truce. They chanted, we gathered here not in our name but to support the Palestinians living in Gaza.
A Reuters poll conducted after the October 7 attack shows that only 20% of Gen Z in America support Israel and only 34% blame Hamas. In the bipolar atmosphere created after the war, a significant portion of them sympathize with Palestine.
Ann Boyer, the literary service secretary and Pulitzer Prize winner, resigns from the New York Times and says: Whitewashing of Israel’s crimes during the 75 years of occupation is enough.
NATO members are conflicted. Erdogan, the president of Turkey and a member of NATO, says: “Hamas militias are Mujahideen who defend their country,” and Emmanuel Macron called for the formation of an international coalition against Hamas.
While the French government strongly supports Israel, David Guiraud, a member of the French parliament, says: This so-called “world’s most moral army” forced a 9-year-old Palestinian child to open a bag suspected of having a bomb on their behalf. This is called a human shield.
And again, in the same France, a French international lawyer gathered 300 lawyers from all over the world to sue Israel and defend the rights of the Palestinian people. He told the people of Gaza: You had no one to protect you, but now you have an army that can protect you in international and national courts.
During their visit to Egypt, the Prime Ministers of Spain and Belgium called for the “recognition of the Palestinian state” while criticizing the “destruction of the Gaza Strip,” and Tel Aviv summoned the ambassadors of Spain and Belgium, saying they support “terrorism.”
According to Euro News, Israel’s war with Hamas affected the political arrangements in European countries. In Spain: the rift between the socialist prime minister and his ally; in Britain: Dissension within the Labor Party in Ireland; Shin-Fein’s request for the end of the “occupation of Palestine”; in Greece: The Gap in Syriza; in France: Deepening the rift in the leftist camp.
These contradictions have reached even within the family. For example, Angelina Jolie, an American actress, accused Israel of “deliberate bombing of the population trapped in Gaza,” but her father, Jon Voight, severely criticized his daughter’s views and accused her of publishing “lies” in social networks. He accused her and said in response that his daughter believed “lies,” and the reality is that Israel “protects its own land and its people.”
Therefore, the world has turned back miles and moved away from peace, the two-state idea, which has always been proposed as the only way to peace in the region (and according to the author, can still be proposed), has been questioned, and according to Kennedy’s recent interpretation that the West has embedded Israel as its gendarme, the idea has arisen that the idea of two-state means institutionalizing a permanent conflict in the region. The weakening of the two-state idea in the Middle East is the cause of a wider conflict between Westerners who support Israel and the people of this region.
This note is an introduction to another note about the preconditions and necessities of peace in the region and between Israel and the Palestinians.
*****
The editorial of Sazendagi newspaper, Thursday 9 Azar, 1402, page 1, which was published with the title: “The Backward of the World”, was then republished on the author’s website.