Israel Lets Down Its Arab Allies

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Israel failed to eliminate the Lebanese resistance in the July War, so it tried its luck in the Winter War against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, but it failed there too in destroying the resistance. The objective was clear, and hopes had been pinned on the Israeli army to rid Israel of the resistance surrounding it, which forms a formidable obstacle in the path of efforts to liquidate the Palestinian cause. But the course of the fighting did not go as Israel, or those Arabs and non-Arabs who expected a clear-cut victory from it, had wished. Israel’s army failed to achieve its state’s objectives, which by war’s end had shrunk down to a mere agreement with other states to prevent arms smuggling into Gaza.

A number of Arab regimes provided Israel with moral and intelligence support during the war on the Lebanese resistance, and provided even more explicit and far-reaching support during the war on Gaza, yet the harvest was nothing but disappointment. These regimes and their accomplices found in these two failures no occasion to reconsider their alliance with Israel; instead, they set about desperately searching for justifications to convince people that the resistance movements of Lebanon and Palestine had been defeated, and that it was Israel that had triumphed. Rather than face the truth, they still insist on grinding down people’s morale, and on affirming that the path of negotiation is the path to one’s daily bread, even if freedom is lost and rights are squandered along the way. There was, and still is, an opportunity to reunite Arab ranks on the basis of an unwavering insistence on rights, but no hope or sign of that looms on the horizon.

Objective reality indicates that Israel’s fighting capacity is in decline, while the resistance’s capacity is on the rise. Israel used to conduct simultaneous air and ground operations, and its wars were a stroll in the park. Now Israel is wary of committing its ground forces, relying first on air power to pave the way for a ground advance. And yet its ground advance failed in Lebanon, where Hezbollah remains present in the villages and border areas of Lebanon, and it failed in Gaza too, where the resistance remains present on the ground and continues to threaten Jewish population centers. Israel is no longer able to do what it once did, and neither is the United States; it is clear that the era of Arab “flight” from the battlefield has ended, and it appears that the era of the Arab soldier raising his hands above his head in surrender to the Jew has passed. This is now a phase of steadfastness, and soon it will be a phase of offense, and the wars of resistance will transform from static wars into mobile wars.

If Israel is failing in its ground advance now, what will it do once the Arab resistance possesses effective anti-aircraft weapons? What if the resistance manages to shoot down Israeli aircraft? And I am convinced it will manage exactly that. Will the Israeli army hold its ground, or will it be forced to retreat? Israel’s army will be routed in the confrontations to come, particularly on the Lebanese front, which means that some of Israel’s settlements in the north are candidates to fall as captured territory.

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The Increase in Israeli Power. Israel gains more destructive power with each passing day, but the other side gains, with each passing day, a greater ability to absorb blows and neutralize them. The balance of power in the Arab-Islamic region has shifted, and this will inevitably impose new relationships at every level. Every balance of power dictates the kind of relations that correspond to it, and the region is now witnessing transformations, and will witness more of them in the future.

Israel is no longer the state that can be relied upon for discipline, deterrence, and occupation; its leaders are no longer those leaders, its army is no longer that army, and its people are no longer the people who once emigrated, endured, persevered, and built the state. Israel is now debating how to change its military strategies and alter the military tactics it has followed until now, hoping and praying it might succeed in wars to come. A number of Israeli writers, too, have begun asking whether Israel is even capable of holding on and enduring. Of course, I do not mean by this to say that Israel is finished, but rather that its star has begun to fade and that the countdown to its existence has begun. Israel was once able to overrun Arab states in record time, at the maximum speed of its tanks, but now it cannot even control the Gaza Strip, a territory of a mere 362 square kilometers, and has had to content itself with besieging it in cooperation with Arab regimes. In any war to come, Israel will grow even more savage, will kill thousands of civilians, will destroy villages and cities, and may well use tactical nuclear weapons — but it will not win.

Betting on Israel is a losing bet, and betting on America will not pay off either, and whichever Arabs bet on the two of them will find themselves among the losers. It is important that we see the truth and return to ourselves, so that we may stand together in confronting our enemies and reclaiming our rights. Arab regimes siding with Israel only worsens internal Arab conditions, and offers those regimes no guarantee whatsoever that Arab resistance will vanish and its influence disappear. The sound-minded person is the one who bets on his own capacities, on his own two arms and his firm, free will; whoever bets on the enemy will reap nothing but disgrace and shame.

One may disagree with Hezbollah, with Hamas, with Islamic Jihad, with the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, with the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, with the Jibril Brigades, with the Popular Resistance Committees, or with the al-Nasser Brigades, but such disagreement remains a disagreement within the house. An alliance with the enemy, however, is a disagreement over the house itself, one that in the end can only lead to internal fighting in which the enemy alone comes out the winner. Let no one imagine that if he decides to abandon his rights or give up his home, the people will go running after him selling and conceding along with him; and let no one imagine that donor-country money is capable of erasing a memory that the long years themselves could never erase.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “إسرائيل تخذل حلفاءها العرب” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.