By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –
Dr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan
Hamas inflicts a strategic defeat
The strategy planners in the Washington and Tel Aviv imagined a windfall opportunity in Hamas’ successful Resistance, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, on 7 October 2023 that broke through Israel’s military cordon sanitaire around the monstrous concentration camp, Gaza. They claimed the moral high ground on the back of alleged Palestinian atrocities committed during the Operation but later proved to be crude fabrications.
Tel Aviv threw caution to the wind; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ratcheted up Israel’s more than 7-decades long Nakba (Catastrophe), scheming to deliver the coup de grace, the Final Solution, to the Palestine Question. He claimed victimhood and unleashed his self-declared “moral” army touting the “right of self-defence”; and set three major goals: crush Hamas’ armed resistance; shatter Hamas’ civilian backbone; and either kill or drive out the Palestinians, dehumanised as “human animals” by then Defence Minister Yoav Gallant (in the tradition of the German Nazis despising Jews as “vermin”).
The former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had famously and sanctimoniously explained Jewish victimhood, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” Former US President Bill Clinton strongly echoed the deceitful narrative: speaking at a Kamala Harris election rally in October 2014, he maintained Israel was in the Holy Land “first” and has been “forced” to kill Palestinians in Gaza. (Could Clinton’s alleged links to the Epstein Affair have left him vulnerable to Tel Aviv’s “influence”?)
However, October 7 and Netanyahu’s genocidal aggression in its aftermath flipped the long-flogged Jews (“David”) vs. Arabs (“Goliath”) false narrative. They confirmed the grotesque reality well known for decades among the non-West Global Majority (87%): the combined US-NATO-Israel behemoth (“Goliath”) is at war against the diminutive Palestine (“David”).
If, as alleged by some observers, Tel Aviv knew in advance of the Operation but let it unfold to justify the Final Solution, Jewish Zionism gravely miscalculated the consequences.
Conservative, pro-Israel podcasters routinely sought to limit the damage; they intimidated guests on their show, demanding: “do you condemn Hamas for October 7?” The more perceptive observers not only limited their condemnation to the deliberate killing of civilians by either side; they also reached back to Frantz Fanon’s analyses, in his Wretched of the Earth, of the role of violence in emancipating the colonised mind. They defended Hamas’ Resistance as the necessary defensive violence by colonised Palestinians against the aggressive Israeli settler-colonialism.
The ANC leader Nelson Mandela’s dialectical approach to Resistance, in his Long Walk to Freedom, encapsulates the logic of the Palestinian movement for self-determination: “it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.” He contextualised non-violence not as an immutable, lofty principle but as a strategy, contingent upon the violence inflicted by the oppressor.
Liberals often fail to grasp this nuanced view and impute a false equivalence between the violence of aggression and the violence of resistance (as in the interventions by Peace, Conflict Resolution and Policy Alternative “activists” in Lanka).
US-NATO-Israel vs Palestine
US and its appendage, NATO, shovelled almost unlimited finance, munitions and military supplies, conservatively valued at around $35 billion and counting, to Tel Aviv since October 7. The joint US-Israeli military onslaught, lubricated by US-supplied intelligence, carpet-bombed and destroyed homes, schools, hospitals, water and electricity supplies, and made Gaza virtually unliveable.
The killing spree during the last 2 years (from October 7) of the relentless Nakba put to death a varyingly estimated 80,000 to 100,000 civilian Palestinians, including about 20,000 toddlers and children. Starvation of Palestinians is widely used as a weapon of war.
The Global Majority increasingly drew stunning parallels between German Nazi’s holocaust in Occupied Europe and the Jewish Zionism’s “plausible…genocide”, as ruled by the International Court of Justice in January 2024, in Israeli-Occupied Gaza.
Together the US and Israel are burying International Humanitarian Laws and Geneva Conventions under the blood-drenched rubble of Gaza. Their obvious strategy is to swiftly complete the extirpation and present the physical elimination of Palestinians to the world as a fait accompli.
Yet the Palestinian people’s determined resistance, backed by Hamas, refused to yield; they stood unbowed. Men, women, children and the aged, both Muslims and Christians, didn’t abandon their homeland; they resolutely walked, crawled or dragged themselves back to their destroyed dwellings during each break in the fighting and rebuilt their homes.
Hamas, though damaged, is largely intact; the organization’s support among the iron-willed Palestinians is undiminished, if not grown stronger. The near global revulsion of Israel’s unbridled aggression and South Africa’s effective legal challenge in the ICJ overwhelmingly influenced the International Criminal Court. The ICC issued arrest warrants in November, indicting Benjamin Netanyahu and (former) Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza.
The following day, Eurointelligence analysts floundered: “For us Europeans, this warrant exposes a real dilemma between international law, which is our law, and our foreign policy’”.
Cornered and unmasked, the Collective West jettisoned the vestiges of the pretence of Rule of Law. Washington with the connivance of the rest sanctioned Francesca Paola Albanese, the widely respected UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, for exposing Israeli crimes as well as four judges of the ICC in 2025 for issuing the warrants that supposedly committed “transgressions against the United States and Israel.” Every member-State in the Global Minority (13%) or Collective West, from Canada to New Zealand, acquiesced in Washington’s sanctions probably because the ICC’s indictment implicated their regimes, whose politicians materially enabled and/or diplomatically protected Israel’s crimes. Unsurprisingly a US Senator backed the sanctions and anxiously claimed that the ICC could “come after the United States one day”.
The October 7 Operation thus irretrievably shredded the Collective West’s tattered civilizational façade, bloodied by five centuries of colonial plunder and settler-colonial genocide in vast swathes of the lands of the Global Majority.
On Israel’s western values
The Jewish Zionists’ claim that Israel, the self-proclaimed bulwark of Western Civilization in West Asia, shares the same “western values” is beyond dispute. October 7 performed a historic task by shining a spotlight on the gruesome replay in Palestine of the Collective West’s settler-colonialisms in real time.
Pope Alexander VI’s May 4, 1493 Papal Bull defined the “Doctrine of Discovery“, which stated, “any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be ‘discovered,’ claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers [who included the Pope]”. The Doctrine foreshadowed genocide and “became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion.” The US Supreme Court’s unanimous 1823 ruling, in the case Johnson v. McIntosh, further held “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” In short, ethnic cleansing and land theft are programed into the settler-colonials’ political DNA; and the Supreme Court opined: “American Indians had only a right of occupancy, which could be abolished.”
Abolish, they did. In the US alone Christian Zionists – the “Pilgrim Fathers” and their descendants – led the killing en masse with a Bible in one hand and armed with a Winchester Repeater in the other while chanting they were “Rescuing the Land for Christ”. A conservatively estimated ten million indigenous peoples, in reality many more, were murdered mostly between 1860 and 1920, barely five generations ago; it is arguably the largest genocide in modern history. Christian Zionists in the Collective West’s other settler-colonies followed suit.
Jewish Zionists practicing the same “values” similarly slaughter Palestinians while absurdly waving the Old Testament as Israel’s divinely ordained exclusive “title deed” to Palestine. (The minority of extremist Sinhalese-Buddhists may observe some similarities to Lanka here.)
Benjamin Netanyahu’s tailored his July 2024 address to please the descendants of White Christian Zionists warming the seats in the US Congress. Israel’s illegal occupation and military aggression in Gaza, he explained, is a “clash between barbarism [Palestinians] and civilization [Israel & its enablers]”. That was no doubt music to the ears of the progeny of European settler-colonialists, who had similarly dehumanised the colonised indigenous peoples in the US as “savages”.
The adoring Netanyahu aficionadas gave almost interminable standing ovations to his racist rants and solidly backed Israel’s emblematic of settler-colonialism, its land grabbing and ethnic cleansing in Occupied Palestine.
Israel’s destruction of the Palestinians’ homes in Gaza and their expulsions from the West Bank are for descendants of settler-colonials in the Anglosphere – US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – no doubt a nostalgic stroll down memory lane on “How the West was Won” and a vindication of their primitive Social Darwinism.
Hamas torpedoes Imperialism’s Abraham Accords
The October 7 Operation torpedoed the Abraham Accords, the stated political aim of which is to “normalise relations” between Israel and key Arab countries. During Trump’s first presidential term Washington had painstakingly crafted the Accords’ first phase to “encourage” several Sunni Arab States (UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan) to fortify Israel.
The unstated strategic objectives are a) to bury Palestine’s right to self-determination and b) entrench US Imperialism’s vassal, Israel by enticing/coercing Arab States on Israel’s border and in the immediate region to pay obeisance to Tel Aviv.
However, Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood wrenched the Palestine Question and the right to self-determination back to centre stage; that constitutes another strategic defeat inflicted on October 7. What’s more, the renewed global focus on the combined US-NATO-Israel war against Palestinians enraged most Arab peoples.
The terrified Arab rulers froze the negotiations to finalise the Abraham Accords; Saudi Arabia, hesitating on the fence, declared the establishment of a Palestinian State is a pre-condition for its participation in the Accords.
(To be continued)
*The author is an independent scholar who read for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge. He was Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies and taught World History at Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration. He is an award-winning filmmaker. email: commentaries.ss@gmail.com
