Some 800 Palestinians were killed in a strike on a Baptist clinic in Gaza on October 17. The bloody atrocity has set the whole world in turmoil, as the warring parties accuse each other of this crime, providing weighty arguments. The Israelis blame a failed Qassam rocket launch by Palestine with a subsequent detonation of either oxygen cylinders or an underground ammunition depot. The Palestinians attribute the tragedy to an aircraft bomb.
An investigation by an independent American journalist has convincingly exposed a glide bomb blow at the building, which is also evidenced by the amount of damage caused.
A wave of anti-Israeli protests has been sweeping throughout the Muslim world. In "prosperous" Europe, things look blue as well. Protesters burn flags with the Star of David, chanting anti-Jewish slogans. In Turkey, rioters even broke into the Consulate General of Israel…
The visit by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Saudi Arabia ended in nothing, while head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Mahmoud Abbas refused to meet with him at all, as well as with King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Ultimately, the same fruitless was President Vladimir Putin’s voice contact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is set to annihilate HAMAS’ military infrastructure in the Gaza Strip instead of heeding the Russian leader’s warnings. Which came as no surprise, by the way.
The Internet is spangled with headlines about Israel’s having signed its own death-warrant, the Muslim world’s desire to make the Jewish state stop to exist — you name it.
What should we expect of this armed conflict any further? Its endurance.
It is going to be uncompromising, hateful, bloody, highly barbaric towards human beings and driving both hostile parties into a deadlock.
The Jewish authorities are currently in a zugzwang, unable to either abandon their plans given public hatred of the Palestinians, or further escalate things in the face of inevitably appalling human losses. But with Israel needing a new territory with additional gas fields in the Mediterranean, its government's historic decision to seize the Gaza Strip defiant of losses would be put right with the future generations. After all, none of Israeli Jews dare accusing the authorities of appropriating Syria’s Golan Heights or creepingly annexing the Palestinian Authority.
Yes, the Muslim world is seething with rage. Perhaps for the first time in their history, the Sunni Arabs have converged in an unprecedented anti-Israeli ecstasy with the Persian Shiites in the wake of this much-hyped bloodbath. And still, the warring parties have been actively looking for excuses of what is going on.
Will the Arab world butt heads with Israel?
No, it won't. And Tel Aviv is perfectly aware of this. The only thing they loath is government dismissal over army and civilian casualties. Therefore, Netanyahu's key task in the course of Joe Biden's visit to Israel was to convince America of the need for its direct intervention, given the ongoing conflict’s momentous character.
The only forces to potentially side with HAMAS are Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, with limited support from Shiite militia units of Iraq. The Arabs will traditionally limit themselves to harangues, at best trying to declare an embargo on oil and gas supplies to the United States or Europe. But that is highly improbable. The holy grail of Israel and the Anglo-Saxons is driving Iran out of confrontation for years to come, in a single military campaign.
But Americans are uncomfortable about engaging in an unpredictable regional game. A victory over Iran would disrupt all the plans by Russia, China, Turkey and a number of other states, and the monarchies-led Arab world gradually drifting away from the US orbit would be back in thrall to Anglo-Saxons. But Washington doubts that the Israeli-American adventure proves bloodless to the Pentagon. And Iran, faced with an existential threat, would go above and beyond even without nukes, using all the conventional means available to irreparably damage American troops in the Middle East.
Also, nobody knows how Russia would behave in case of a real security threat to its military assets in the region, the need to commit to allied obligations and avert losing its military and political clout in the Middle East. Victory in a direct military conflict with the Russians is not in the cards for the US, and they do apprehend this pretty well.
Israel’s ground operation in the Gaza Strip is still quite possible, with Netanyahu and his supporters hardly going to stop in doing so. Further developments are anyone’s guess.
However, all the claims that Israel and its people may perish are exceedingly far-fetched. The Jewish people, despite all the thousand-year-long hardship and persecution, has repeatedly risen from the ashes like a Phoenix. And its present-day ordeal is typically brought about by its greedy and selfish politicians.
