CROSSFIREARABIA – Israelis will not rest if the Palestinians don’t get their independent homeland and statehood to live free just as was the case before 1948 when Israel was forcibly created.
This present Israeli war on Gaza has shown that clearly.
While the Israeli war machine may have destroyed, nay, obliterated the whole of the enclave, the strip continues to be filled with resistance fighters who move above and below grounds with their weapons fighting their enemies.
Israel, its leaders, politicians and military, long propped up by American weapons have long known that but they continue to destroy rather than own up to Palestinian aspirations and the fact that the incessant conflict will not end otherwise.
In this war, slaughter, genocide – going into its second year now and shows no signs of stopping but on the contrary moving northwards to Lebanon – there developed a sense of equilibrium and proportionality although on a much smaller scale judging from the vast different of the protagonists.
Israel used massive bombs on civilians and sent them into a whirl of displacements, while Hamas continually fired rockets and missiles on the settlements and military bases surrounding Gaza and further beyond.
The immediate effect of that was the mass evacuation of the Israeli population from all these settlements, in effect as soon as the Israeli big guns started to ‘hammer’ the cities, town, villages and hamlets of northern Gaza soon after 7 October, 2023.
Displacement
Today, the Jewish settlements, more likely big towns and cities with high tech infrastructure stand empty; their populations have long been moved to hotels and guest houses by the extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu, for their safety.
They still wait their return but there is no end in sight as to when will this happen. The late Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, just before he was killed by Israel, said the occupation entity will not rest in peace, neither will the Jews return to their homes, until the bombs on Gaza stop.
Hezbollah had taken up the fight with Israel soon after 7 October as a support to Gaza through rocketing its northern parts with missiles. This process also set off a mass drove of Israelis to leave their homes, like their counterparts in the south, to be housed in a hotel accommodation away from the bombs and raging fires.
As the war genocide on Gaza continued in the following months, the return of these settler Israelis to their homes continued to be foggy, unknown. Many of these settlements and conurbations like Kiryat Shmona and Maalot today stand empty like ghost towns.
In Gaza around 2 million people out of a population of 2.2 million were forced into internal displacement, continually moving between areas from the north of Gaza to its southern border.
Likewise, the number of Israelis that were displaced was, initially estimated at 400,000 people with an extra 60,000 forced to leave when Hezbollah increased their missiles on the north after June 2024.
While they have been living in hotel accommodation many Israelis have been trying to get out of the country over the past months with the figures ranging from 500,000 up to a million.
Further to that about a quarter of Israelis polled by the Kan official channel, say they are truly thinking of leaving the country and 14 percent of them are supporters of Likud and the extremist rightwing parties. Indeed, soon after 7 October, the Ben Gurion Airport became filled with travelers as Hamas rockets started to land on Tel Aviv.
The airport is filled again today with travelers because of incoming missiles from Hezbollah from the north and the occasional ballistic missiles coming all the way from Yemen by the Houthis and/or the fright Israelis got from the recent incoming 200 missiles they saw in their skies from Iran.
There is no doubt that ordinary Israelis are under a lot of strain with sirens going off and on, all the time signaling for them, to go into the underground shelters. Video clips see them running asunder to the shelters, and who wouldn’t be scarred?
After all, the people of Gaza and now Lebanon are experiencing it all the time. For them however, there are no sirens, no warnings of 2000-pound bombs being dropped on their heads with no questions asked; their slaughter appear to be “manageable” foe western states who sell weapons to Israel.
The war can stop anytime. Hostages, around 110 from the original 250, can be returned anytime if there is a ceasefire but the Israeli prime minister is stuck on bringing them home by force, or so he says.
Meanwhile Israelis are literally running. One videoclip in a Tel Aviv mall show people moving hastily to ahead, no doubt, to the underground shelters as the sirens blast all over.
Thus, there is a military equation that is being played out here: ‘You bomb us we will bomb you’. The Israeli army must realize that this is what is happening, and the stakes of the war game just keep getting higher and higher with Israel headed by Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, being lead to the abyss.
CrossFireArabia
Dr Khairi Janbek
