لحظة ادراك

 Weaker than the Spider’s House

A busy week packed with everything the media and media people crave — the airwaves overflowed with materials and images, political analysts and opinion writers covered it exhaustively. Between Tel Aviv and Sharm El-Sheikh, and the scene of events in Gaza that has occupied the world for two years, the heavy detonations and mass death fell silent, and the most dangerous episode in the Palestinian cause began to unfold.

The maker of hopes and illusions, Donald Trump, visited Israel. He received a welcome the likes of which no occupant of the White House has ever known, hailed as a victor and celebrating the greatest prime minister of war, asking for clemency for his partner in victory. Nobody omitted to thank him; not least Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress, whose money funded the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He said everything politicians might say and much they would not. Meanwhile the rest of the world waited — not offended by his late arrival, for his wealthy backers would wait for him however long. As for some of those he called “the poor,” whose return tickets home had been booked, they would leave without emotion; they do not ride aboard the presidential Boeing.

He signed vague executive papers for a plan that arrived ambiguous by design: its opening act was precisely defined in minute detail — that is the crux — and then nothing follows with clarity. It was built on that kind of deliberate obscurity. In the best case, twenty Israeli hostages would be released — cash-and-carry, and without the previous trappings of pride and power — breaking one of the major impasses that had blocked earlier initiatives. A total withdrawal from Gaza together with the release of the final hostage would see the “people of the Flood” turn inward — the preferred playing field of brute force. Their opponents possess no planes, tanks or even simple sticks: they kill en masse in accordance with the legitimacy of the gun, with no investigations, no trials — only intelligence reports from the era of gossip, smearing whole families over acts that may have occurred or may not. The U.S. president lauded the events as if he had allowed them, then hours later warned Hamas to stop killing innocent civilians. Between Venezuelan-style gangs and innocent citizens, Trump’s time is for those who finally whisper in his ear and will have the deciding word.

Netanyahu competes with the “people of the Flood,” having at last breathed a sigh of relief at securing one of his core stalemates. This time the narrative is the matter of decomposed bodies after two years of war; his language is “I will fight you to the last corpse and the last rusty pistol.” The other side replies, “That’s all the bodies we can hand over.” Beyond that lies need for advanced equipment, bulldozers and Turkish, Qatari and Egyptian teams — to which Netanyahu answers that Rafah will not be opened until the last corpse is handed over, nor until the last piece of weaponry is surrendered. No difference will be made; no equipment will enter — use the picks and shovels you hid them with. Trump adds further threats to the “people of the Flood.” Some bulldozers move under Al Jazeera’s cameras, claiming “we are doing everything.” Within hours corpses began to appear in turn, far from the ruined bulldozers in Hamad City. That is the state of each clause of the king-for-the-Middle-East’s plan: whoever adopts slogans “weaker than a spider’s house” must accept the full rules of the spider’s house.

If you could read the intentions of the main players in the Gaza theatre and its aftermath, you would see astonishing things. Netanyahu only entered this game under American pressure, after allies warned that his continued war would drag him into conflict with the whole world. Even in the U.S., the new generation is uneasy about Israeli control over American policy and the unlimited U.S. backing for Israel. The tacit agreement between them is that Netanyahu should wait until the initiative and its mechanisms come through and he can then continue with his military apparatus — otherwise he has free rein to act and will blame the other side; he knows the other side will try desperately to stop him and will find a thousand reasons to restart his military machine to finish what it began.

As for the approach of Netanyahu’s guarantors — the Qataris and Turks and, to a lesser extent, the Egyptians — their idea of turning armed factions into unarmed political actors will collide with deep internal resistance within Hamas’s ideological base and its fighters. That resistance will produce countless pretexts; Netanyahu cultivates these to push them away from any engagement with the initiative. Will the guarantors do more than they have done so far? That remains uncertain.

To answer that, one must analyze the behavior of the two hard-right elements in Netanyahu’s coalition, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, who chose to stay in his government and align with Trump. Netanyahu convinced them not to rush: the war will resume its former course when needed, based on a precise reading of how his long-time adversaries think. He also won a U.S. promise to give him what he needs if events do not go his way. For the ideologues of the “Flood,” their rhetoric still signals some red lines: the issues of weaponry and governance will trigger a cascade of sterile questions — who, how, why, where, and when — each sufficient to explode the bones of any compromise, because Israeli responses run a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction from what the other side could accept. That is what Netanyahu waits for, burning with impatience, before the tanks cool off.

The yellow line on which occupation forces now stand is only minutes from the previous blue line. It may be the last withdrawal line for years, from which forces will launch local missions as in the West Bank, with full control of the air, sea, aid convoys, reconstruction and movement. Tony Blair — nominated as executive director of a peace council to manage Gaza — met Hussein al-Sheikh in Jordan; the meeting matters because both know each other and need to facilitate each other’s tasks. Blair understands that his mission cannot succeed without legitimacy from the Palestinian representation that holds the keys, and that representation cannot play an effective role without someone to sell it to the Trump administration. In today’s reality, only Blair seems able to do that.

Egypt’s effort to unify the Palestinian position under the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is indispensable: through the PLO’s political legitimacy and international commitments, many of Netanyahu’s obstructions in the Trump plan could be addressed. Questions of weapons, dismantling Hamas’s governance structures, transitional rule in Gaza — these are topics potentially amenable to arrangements via such an Egyptian-led effort.

In short: the Palestinian scene cannot be corrected without Hamas reviewing all its political and military approaches since the 2007 takeover and its alignment with external axes outside the legitimate Palestinian house. The situation cannot bear more of this. One and a half million Palestinians are now exposed and need everything. Let us at least grant them a fraction of their right to a humane life.

(Note: I had nearly finished these words when the bombardment of Gaza resumed.)