The only thing Israel succeeded at: massacring civilians

It is becoming harder and harder to ground the goals of Israel's attacks, now in their 21st day, in any logic even from Israel's own standpoint. Moreover, the course of the war is making meaningless even our guess, in our last article, that with its ceaseless aggression, its ruthlessness that recognizes neither borders nor ethical limits, and its insolent displays of the technological means at its disposal, it was trying to show something, to prove something.

In starting this war Israel had set itself a few very clear goals. 1. The complete breaking, if possible the ending, of Hamas's effectiveness. 2. The elimination of the missile or rocket power in Gaza. 3. The complete collapse of the infrastructure of terror. Israel thought it could settle all of this with operations lasting only a few days. Yet at the end of 21 days it finds itself much farther from all of these goals than on the day it began.

At the Damascus stop of the "From Istanbul to the Golan, I Am Here Too" convoy, launched at the weekend on the initiative of Hüsnü Kılıç, Muhammad Nazzal, one of the Hamas leaders, meeting with a group of the organizers, said with great self-confidence that Israel had failed utterly in all the areas it had declared, and that it was becoming harder with each passing day for it to admit defeat.

Israel's defeat in Gaza is turning out to be even more bitter than its 2006 defeat in Lebanon, because although Gaza was seen, and declared, to be a much "easier morsel", the now certain difficulty, even impossibility, of swallowing it seems set to subject all of Israel's so-called charisma to a complete trauma. Because Israel cannot bring itself to accept this reality, to delay the revealing of this reality it bears down even harder on the one field in which it is successful. That is the killing of the innocent, the unarmed, those who are in no position to protect themselves. When he said "In this field they are truly very successful", Nazzal expressed with a meaningful embarrassment the irony born of the sufferings of war. "This success is itself a moral rout!"

Nazzal explains that the war has inflicted no casualties on Hamas's organizational structure. Moreover, in the eyes of the people, affection for Hamas grows greater with each passing day. It is seen that these attacks have not driven a wedge between the people and Hamas at all. Despite so many attacks, the missile power in Gaza has not been destroyed; just yesterday 30 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israeli targets.

In return, the one field in which Israel is successful is the best thing it can do by making use of the possibilities technology provides: massacres of civilians, mostly children and women, and the destruction of the city's infrastructure. With phosphorus and cluster bombs, by bombing hospitals, cemeteries, aid convoys, ambulances and shelters, attacking the points that should be left least untouched in a war, it achieves mass death. All these successes become the expression of an open loss of reason, an open madness.

In the end it is Hamas that drives Israel mad, that is true.

But how right is it to blame Hamas for this? That in Turkey or elsewhere some know-it-alls hold Hamas's unnecessary resistance responsible for the savagery, the inhuman images and the unconscionable use of force brought out by Israeli aggression is yet another example of shamelessness... All they understand of peace is nothing but a dishonorable surrender. If you say let no one die, let nobody's nose bleed, you can put forward no value other than dishonorably bowing to every kind of occupier, thief, murderer and blackmailer. If you are going to propose that, what business do you have among people?

In Syria the Turkish convoy is met with tremendous excitement. In front of the Syrian Parliament, before the eyes of the Speaker of Parliament as well, Turkish, Palestinian and Syrian youths, waving Turkish and Palestinian flags with excitement, shout "Turkey-Syria, one country" ("Belde vahide"). We are witnessing a real exercise of the ideal of removing borders among Islamic countries that our dear Hakan Albayrak has voiced for years. Whatever Israel wants to do, its deeds lead to the exact opposite result.

Al Jazeera, Iran's IRIB, al-Dunya, Syria TV and a good many other TV channels are conveying these scenes to their viewers with great excitement. When a Syrian journalist, asking about what has been going on, mentions the name of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he is overcome with emotion and cannot keep from weeping; after swallowing a little, he says "May God be pleased with him".

One of the TV channels asks one of the Turkish demonstrators: "Do you have a message for Gaza?" The demonstrator answers without any hesitation: "What message could we have for Gaza? It is actually the people of Gaza who have a great message for all humanity, and we are trying to respond to this message. We are trying to receive and understand the message of resurrection. Heeding the call of this message, we are trying to say that we are here too, we exist too. We are trying to receive and convey the message of their honorable resistance against shameless onslaughts, the message of human existence."

An aunt in her seventies, having wrung permission from her husband but without having been able to settle accounts with her children, caught up with the convoy and joined it. Along the way she becomes a figure of sheer affection on one of the buses. "Thank God I have been on the Hajj too, but I pray that God may grant me one day to go to Damascus as well," she says. The young man sitting next to her, who along the way is taken to be her foster son (Lütfi), says, "But we are already going to Damascus right now." The aunt reacts as if a bird of fortune had landed on her: "What! Is Damascus in Syria?.. A thousand thanks to God, He has granted this too!"