لحظة ادراك

 Blue — Yellow — Red — Gray

Four colors — and certainly not green; green is absent, replaced instead by gray. That alone says everything about the cost of moving from one shade to another, a passage fraught with all the apprehensions you would expect from the machinations of the world’s devils. The Israeli army moved from the Blue Line to the Yellow — and in numbers, from control of 75% of Gaza’s area down to 53% — and published lists of Palestinian prisoners it intends to release. There is no mention in those lists of the six senior figures, nor of those who staged the flood-like events.

Gazans breathed a small sigh of relief during this season’s migration northward from the south. They returned to neighborhoods and homes that resemble everything except what they were less than a month ago. The combatants sent several messages: Netanyahu summed up the stance by saying that the seventy-third hour without releasing forty-eight of the living and dead hostages is a breach of the agreement. Katz says he has ordered the army to prepare to destroy the tunnels after the hostage deal is completed. The people of the Flood and their allies issued a statement between the Blue and Yellow lines, saying that the day after will be an entirely Palestinian scene in all its details; they hurriedly deployed internal security personnel whose faces were partially hidden by scraps of masks from the COVID-19 era. They insist there will be no handover of Hamas’s weapons under any circumstances.

None of the mediators or guarantors respond to the belligerents; their attitude seems to be: let them empty their fury into a barren valley. The caravan sponsored by the emperor of business and show will not be stopped. Multi-national operations rooms have been set up in Israel and Egypt to manage the anticipated and unanticipated chain of crises. The would-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate — who was never a genuine candidate — prepares to visited the Knesset to patch up what Israel’s king of the 21st century damaged: his own image and, more importantly, that of his ally Israel. He will ask to be pardoned from his judicial trials in exchange for everything he achieved in striking the rubble-and-rust axis, insisting he remains the preferred choice until he finishes his wars on seven fronts. Yet his bid may be altered after the jeers heard last night in the prisoners’ square in central Tel Aviv when Steve Witkoff merely mentioned Netanyahu’s name. The Trumpian approach must now balance between the pressing need to clear the stage for a new Middle East and the choice of a figure to market it as a facade of peace — and that figure will not be Netanyahu. What is still needed are a few air sorties over Lebanon to confirm what is already obvious: that Hezbollah is a spent factor in the peace-and-war equation; the same goes for the Houthis, with pronouncements that the last bullet will be ours. As for Iran’s nuclear program, joint sorties will be enough to assert that under no circumstances will it be tolerated. As for the people of the Flood, all options remain open.

In Sharm el-Sheikh, a protocol can be signed for an ongoing operation on the ground, as long as it is ceremonially celebrated by a crowned king atop hills of skulls and severed limbs, homes, schools and universities that once hosted life. That is the logic of deals in the Spider Kingdom. The logic of Paris and Riyadh has not yet ripened; reconciling the two still depends on cleaning the stage of certain stubborn problems, however symbolic. Hezbollah’s arsenal, Hamas’s weapons, Houthi missiles and Iran’s nuclear program — even if they no longer feed or satiate anyone — are things to be fanned when needed. In such a register, the Hive Kingdom must step aside in favor of the Spider Kingdom: the malignant disease planted and cultivated across the Arab world under global imperial care requires a filthy antidote — one that only its planter can supply. Those who sowed these tools in the Arab region and nurtured them since 1979, the day the French Boeing landed the successor to the caliph, Ayatollah Khomeini, are the only ones capable of ending them.

The night before last, Mousa Abu Marzouk could not bear a question from an Al-Ghad presenter asking whether the October 7 operation, if planned by Hamas, could have liberated territory. He replied that no sane person would expect 1,500 fighters to accomplish that, then snapped at the host for posing a “respectful” question and fled the interview after five minutes. The presenter closed by saying this reveals the mentality of Hamas leadership. Either Abu Marzouk is unprepared to answer such questions plainly, or he lives on another planet entirely — it is inconceivable he did not hear Muhammad Deif’s proclamation at the start of the flood: “We launched a liberation operation,” he said, calling on Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and free people worldwide to join, employing every method of struggle from rifles to cleavers to bulldozers to vehicles to the march toward Jerusalem and prayers for victory. In that case, either Deif is, in Abu Marzouk’s words, “not sane,” or Abu Marzouk is not telling the truth.

Liberation has become a bounded map whose maximum edge is a gray buffer surrounding Gaza on three sides; the sea is forbidden to those who live day to day on meagre rations. Prisons have multiplied their detainees fivefold, with conditions that defy humanity. The Al-Aqsa issue, settlement expansion in Jerusalem and the West Bank — the list goes on. Which mentality can steer such a conflict of this complexity and historical sensitivity other than the occupier’s criminality? It is as if the occupier discovered a panacea — one that was not hidden from anyone except Hamas’s leadership and its cheerleaders, unaware of the tectonic changes unfolding before them.

The direct killing has paused temporarily; now the battle is over wills and cementing political results on the ground. If a movement that could not secure the release of six key captives and hundreds of participants in October 7 — and the bodies of those who created the flood — cannot extract even that while still holding its only leverage, how can it deliver the remaining nineteen clauses of the Trump plan when barren of gains? As the saying goes, messages are read from their titles: the yellow line where occupation forces now sit is only minutes from the blue line from which they previously withdrew; the Yellow Line may be the last withdrawal line for years, from which forces will operate for targeted missions as they do in the West Bank, with total control of the air, sea and aid convoys.

Tony Blair (candidate to head a peace council for Gaza) met Deputy Palestinian President Hussein al-Sheikh in Jordan — a meeting of high importance. Both know each other’s positions and both urgently need to facilitate each other’s tasks. Blair knows his mission cannot succeed without legitimacy from the official Palestinian representative who holds the keys to representation; likewise, Palestinian representation cannot be active without someone marketing it to the Trump administration, and Blair, for now, may be the only one able to do that.

Egypt’s efforts to unite the Palestinian position under one banner — the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its political aspirations and international commitments — are indispensable. Through that path, many of the intractable problems that Netanyahu aims to create via the Trump plan could find approaches: the issue of weapons, dismantling Hamas’s governance structures and interim civilian rule in Gaza are all topics that could be approached through such coordination.

Bottom line: The Palestinian scene cannot be corrected frankly and clearly unless Hamas reviews all its political and military approaches from eighteen years ago to today, and disentangles itself from axes outside the house of Palestinian legitimacy. The Palestinian scene cannot tolerate much more. A million and a half Palestinians are now exposed and in dire need. Let us at least grant them a part of their right to an ordinary human life.