Time is working against Israel

The unprecedented genocidal attacks that Israel launched against the people of Gaza under U.S. support and oversight have reached their 78th day. Though we say U.S. support, the picture, which grows ever clearer, shows that the real aggressor is the United States and that Israel is its trigger-man. Of course, the trigger-man too has its own reasons for taking on so intense a load of crimes against humanity.

When it launched its first attacks on Gaza, Israel had declared two main goals: finishing Hamas and rescuing the Israeli hostages in its hands. Each passing day not only shows that these goals have not been reached but also reveals that reaching them is impossible. With every move it makes to reach these two goals, Israel suffers defeat before Hamas and is disgraced before its own people and the whole world. Time passing works against Israel. That is why all forecasts show that the objective situation is such that Israel cannot sustain this war, and therefore that the aggression may end very soon and that Israel will be forced to come to an agreement with Hamas, recognizing Hamas and on terms that it will determine.

Accepting that it is under this compulsion and agreeing to sit down to an agreement on these terms is close to suicide for Israel. But it has no other choice either. Its losses grow with each passing day. These losses are not only that its super-technologies are left helpless and suffer defeat against the primitive weapons of the Qassam Brigades alone, or that it takes military casualties. The real loss is the unique opportunity that Hamas and the Qassam Brigades have seized, as the war continues, to introduce themselves to the world. The Al-Aqsa Flood that the Qassam Brigades launched into Israel carries the Palestinian cause to the whole world as the world's most legitimate, most reasonable, most rightful cause.

Every move Israel is making right now to destroy Hamas works against itself and in Hamas's favor; the destruction caused by every bomb it drops razes its own image across the whole world and over the course of a long history. It swallows like a black hole all the narratives of enlightenment, modernism, progress and development that have so far been told to the world in the name of Western civilization.

In the West, critical consciousness against the ruthless system of exploitation that all these values conceal has found a new foothold, a new spirit, a new motivation. The Palestinian cause against Israel gives new and fresh inspiration not only to victimized, oppressed Muslims but to all system opponents in the world, to the left movements as well.

The resistance in Gaza and the determination in this resistance, and the highly consistent, faithful and powerful theoretical outlook underlying it, expose also the open or implicit power relations that dominate today's world order. It is inevitable that this exposure will launch new and powerful critical movements. In a talk at the Islamic Thought Institute, Ayçin Kantoğlu expressed very strikingly the reality that this critical possibility reveals: "Contrary to what appears today, the whole world outside Gaza is under occupation."

On the contrary, Gaza is the only people, the only place able to choose to resist, risking everything. Moreover, from the moment they chose to resist, to rebel, the Gazans also lit a torch of salvation by showing under what kind of implicit occupation the whole world is. At this moment, the price of the comfort from which those who survive and lead their lives, for better or worse, with some stability all over the world benefit in one way or another, is their freedom and their remaining blind and deaf to the truth. Otherwise our world is occupied in all its dimensions by the oppressive rulers of the world order, and most of us, at the price of giving up our own will, have fallen into step, in foot and mind, with this occupying power's shopping order.

As long as Israel's bestial attacks on Gaza continue and it displays its genocidal savagery, a very great intellectual effort is not even needed to ground this critical thought. The plain facts already thrust all the justifications necessary for this critical stance into humanity's very eyes.

On its 78th day, Israel has reached none of the goals it declared; perhaps its only success is the massacres of civilians. And this is not an achievement that can be proudly defended on any ground. On the contrary, it is recorded as a result that must be accounted for on every ground and is a cause for shame.

For Israel, the objective situation requires the war to end as soon as possible. However, it does not seem possible for the end of the war to produce any bill other than Hamas's absolute victory and its own defeat. For this reason the aggression we have witnessed lately is also in part the result of a desperation brought about by this situation.

Indeed, Israeli and international newspapers are focused on the possibility of the war ending soon, and all of them point out that the Israeli army's only success is that it has managed only to slaughter civilians and destroy their infrastructure.

In the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, the well-known journalist Nahum Barnea, predicting that the intense phase of the war will end soon, says that the Battle of Khan Yunis may be the last violent period before the war moves to a less intense phase. According to Barnea, the army at the same time "feels that the end is near and is trying to consolidate its achievements before declaring a ceasefire."

In an article published in the Jerusalem Post, Jill Jacobs said that those who care about Israel and are committed to its welfare should call for ending the war in Gaza through negotiation. Jacobs also says that doing so "may be the most pro-Israel and even the most Jewish stance a person can take."

In the British Financial Times, an analysis made by experts based on satellite images taken of the cities of Gaza and Khan Yunis also showed that the Israeli army "carried out one of the largest bombardments in history in the besieged Strip."

These are only a cross-section of the examples showing that things in the Western media too have turned completely against Israel.

These images show that the terror and ISIS image that the Zionist occupation and its supporters have tried to build against Hamas from the outset has not stuck, and that, with the emergence of the images of those killed and wounded by the occupation's bombs and the images of destruction and ruin in buildings, institutions and hospitals, it has turned to the exact opposite. What is now seen by the great majority of the world is nothing other than that the Israeli occupation is a war criminal, an enemy of humanity and of life.