The two sources of Israel's power

"Israel has no power of its own. It has only a propaganda of appearing very powerful. But today it draws the power that keeps it alive from two sources: the first is America's unlimited support. The second is the Arab countries' unlimited indifference."

The words Abdelwahab el-Messiri spoke in an interview with Ahmed Mansour, one of Al Jazeera TV's master journalists, before his death give a very good picture of another side of the genocidal Israeli terror we are living through today. We say "another picture" because no reality fits into a single picture. But before moving on to other pictures, let us look at this one a little longer.

AMERICA'S UNLIMITED SUPPORT

Because of the unlimited support America gives Israel, Israel today is putting on a great show of force like a bull that has broken its rope. Because it has broken its rope and gone out of control, the force it displays does enormous damage, but this force is no longer under its own control either. And America, which gives it this unlimited support, in its search for a multipolar order in the world, is in fact exhausting its own potential to be an axis, in proportion to the immoderate support it gives. True, expecting a different behaviour today from an America whose history includes the genocide of Native Americans, slavery-based racism against Black people, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq would mean attributing excessive meaning to the American values whose propaganda it has made. At the core of America lie banditry, genocide and war crimes, and none of them has ever been called to account.

For the US, democracy, human rights, freedoms and secularism are nothing but imperialist rhetorical devices to be smuggled into other countries as Trojan horses. Yet when there is competition within the world system, these values also gain worth as customer-attracting devices, and however much "unlimited support" it promises, no power is unlimited. It becomes clear that this power is spent when it falls from its feet.

When US Secretary of State Blinken met his Egyptian and Jordanian counterparts in Jordan and was asked about the war crimes Israel was committing before the eyes of the world, the attacks on hospitals and schools, and the resulting deaths of children, women and civilians, after shamelessly, though with considerable difficulty, stammering some evasions, he still did not refrain from repeating the rote line "Israel has the right to defend itself." These words once had a certain credibility, however slight, but now everyone, from the capital of his own country to all the capitals and other cities of the world, sees that Israel is displaying not self-defence but savage, barbaric and unjust uncontrolled aggression. They see this fraudulent propaganda in the unclosed eyes of torn-apart babies. They see it in the tiny body of an unborn child pulled from the womb of a mother killed in the bombardment. They see it in the cruelty of the wounded being targeted once again in a bombed hospital, and they are rebelling against the discourse of Jewish victimhood that has been cooking up boza at people's necks for 75 years. They are exposing the genocide machine that turned monstrous through the perception it produced by making itself pitied with this discourse.

THE ARAB WORLD'S UNLIMITED INDIFFERENCE

In return for America's unlimited support for this monstrosity, the Islamic world's unlimited unresponsiveness and indifference is also Israel's most important source of power. We are not speaking of the peoples, of course. The rulers of the Islamic world, particularly of the Arab world, regard themselves as owing their existence to the powers that also established Israel. Yet a hundred years have passed since that founding period, and the world is no longer the old world. From the standpoint of the sociology of the state, even states that began as the most dependent, even as though a colonial governor had been appointed over them, in time reach the means and spaces to act independently. But here, either those at the head of these states cannot overcome their learned helplessness, or their heartfelt loyalty to those who gave them passage continues to prevent them from acting independently. Otherwise, how could the trampling of human dignity, life and sanctities in Palestine not concern an Arab, a Muslim? Al-Aqsa Mosque is a sanctity to which no one who says "I am a Muslim" can remain indifferent. The attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque, on Jerusalem, on the children, women and civilians of Palestine and Gaza are insults, humiliation and assaults directly against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Türkiye and the whole Islamic world. That the Arab, Islamic and Turkic worlds remain this silent and indifferent in the face of this constitutes Israel's greatest power. Otherwise Israel has no power in itself.

The Qassam Brigades have been showing since 7 October that it has none. With the Al-Aqsa Flood they showed the whole world that there is nothing about Israel to be feared. On a tiny strip of land besieged for 17 years and subjected to the heaviest boycott of modern history, a very small number of people flattened all the swagger of Israel, with its huge army (and behind it America's unlimited support and the Arab world's unlimited indifference).

THE POWER THE ARAB-ISLAMIC WORLD NEEDS

The real message of this action should be to the Islamic world. If they turned the barrels of the weapons they have accumulated or developed for years, always aimed at their own peoples, toward Israel just once, everything would be very different. Never mind turning them on Israel: if they merely did not turn them on their own peoples, even that would be more than enough to deal with Israel. The power the Islamic world needs in order to stand against Israel and against America, which wrongly imagines its power to be unlimited, exists only within themselves. The Qassam Brigades showed this with their few numbers and means. They showed that Israel and those behind it are not a power to be feared.

AMERICA AND ISRAEL CAN GIVE MUSLIMS NEITHER BENEFIT NOR HARM

They also showed that they are in no position to deliver the benefit they promised either. The day has come. The day of reckoning has drawn near. In the world that has formed after 7 October, none of them will have America, Europe or Israel standing behind them as a protector they trust, and none will be able to. They will fall into their own troubles, and their own troubles will be enough for them. Right at this moment they will have seen that Israel and America, whose friendship they trusted so much, will never be friends, as indeed they are seeing now.

Abdelwahab el-Messiri, who was formerly a good Marxist and, through a change he went through, chose Islam as a way of life and thought, has very valuable works on Israel and Zionism. The title of his most important book is "Zionism and the Spider's Web."

In this book El-Messiri says that the thing that can best express Israel's power is the "spider's web." The source of the metaphor is the Surah al-Ankabut of the Noble Qur'an. The spider's house is of course the most insecure and the weakest of houses. Messiri set out not to underestimate Israel's power excessively, of course, but to know it better.

Because they believe too much in the great power attributed to it, and keep learning helplessness against it, Messiri's works are a warning to the Arab world not to surrender, showing that they more than possess the power to resist and cope with it.