Gaza’s defiance spurs hope – World

FINALLY, a ceasefire in Gaza is in place as of 0800 local time this morning as a result of a peace deal that, Qatari interlocutors say, is the same as the first one agreed to by Hamas last May and from which Israel walked away.

The only major difference between May last year and January this year is Donald Trump. President Joe Biden’s tell-tale CBS interview in his final days in office clearly spelt out how helpless he, a self-declared Zionist, was in the face of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence.

Do watch/ read that interview for useful insights on why the Democratic president continued to support the Gaza genocide by funding, arming and enabling Israel. When the peace deal was finally agreed to, Biden, flanked by Vice-President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, spoke to the media.

The president was visibly irritated and responded with “Is it a joke?” when a journalist asked him if he should get more credit for the peace deal or president-elect Donald Trump. This was not half as severe as what a couple of journalists subjected Blinken to during his farewell briefing at the State Department, calling him out for his support to the Gaza genocide and violations of international law.

Today belongs to the Gazans who have sacrificed everything — homes, schools, universities, hospitals, life and limb — to keep alight the torch of freedom.

It is true that Trump and his transition team with the Middle East point man, the property tycoon Steve Whitkoff, in the lead did some serious ‘arm twisting’ to get Netanyahu to agree. Media reports suggested Whitkoff arrived in Israel on Jan 11 and demanded to meet the prime minister. He was told it was Sabbath and that the prime minister would see him the following day. But he insisted, against protocol and accepted practice, on seeing Netanyahu that very day and forced a meeting, before flying off to Doha where the final sessions of negotiations were underway. Observers say this meeting proved critical to the conclusion of the deal.

Trump’s role needs to be seen in its proper perspective, otherwise it could give rise to misplaced optimism. During his last stint in office, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, greenlighted new West Bank settlements and, crucially for Netanyahu, abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran, which was seen as one of his predecessor’s, Barack Obama, major foreign policy wins.

Last but not the least were the so-called Abraham Accords signed — in 2020 and 2021 — between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan for ‘normalisation’ of relations between OIC members and the Zionist state. These accords, some analysts say, may have been the trigger for the Oct 7, 2023, attack by Hamas.

Hamas sources have told journalists more than once that the Abraham Accords were viewed by the group with alarm as they sidestepped the demand for a two-state solution and effectively recognised Israel’s occupation of Palestine as a fait accompli. The four Muslim countries joined Egypt and Jordan that had established relations decades ago.

Saudi Arabia was reluctant to abandon the two-state demand because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is reported to have privately told the Americans that without the two-state solution he’d find it difficult to sell it to his people as there would be great anger.

But, with the Biden administration continuing the ‘normalisation’ push where Trump had left off, the Hamas leadership feared that the issue of Palestine, the occupation, and a homeland for the Palestinian people had fallen off the global agenda, especially if the Saudis too were ready to agree to formal normalisation as that would be a cue for other reluctant nations within and outside the Muslim world.

It decided to force the issue by planning and executing the events of Oct 7, 2023, to bring the forgotten Palestine occupation and statehood issues back on the regional/ global agenda from where Hamas feared it had been forced off by ‘normalisation’ attempts — as in the form of the Abraham Accords.

The Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, may have sanctioned attacks against Israeli civilians, who constituted the bulk of the Oct 7 victims, and hostage-taking but he knew well what thousands of Palestinians under occupation and in Israeli prisons faced every day. He had himself served a 20-year prison term.

Hamas, which was tacitly backed by Israel, which wanted to drive a wedge in resistance unity as it challenged the PLO’s primacy as the only credible representative of the Palestinians, ended up doing what the PLO and its lead member Fatah had not managed in years: putting Palestine and its freedom back on the agenda.

Yes, it has taken the blood sacrifice of thousands of Gaza Palestinians, the bulk of them non-combatants including women and children, to remind freedom-loving people across the world that the Zionist apartheid state is a brutal occupation force whose victimhood claim is now hollowed beyond doubt, while the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause is being acknowledged by millions in the streets of Western nations whose own governments have supported the genocide.

Tomorrow is another day; how regional and international politics is played out is anybody’s guess but today belongs to the Gazans who have sacrificed everything — homes, schools, universities, hospitals, life and limb — to keep alight the torch of freedom.

Their sacrifices, the staggering dedication of their healthcare staff and doctors to the Hippocratic Oath even under direct fire and bombardment, and their defiance of the chokehold applied by the apartheid state, shows what the human spirit is capable of.

One can be sure that with the Greater Israel plan already underway and the so-called Axis of Resistance led by Iran considerably weakened, those who defy the occupation and oppression face uphill challenges.

But the failure of the Israelis to bring the Gazans to their knees despite a 21st-century genocide beamed live on our smartphones thanks to local journalists, 200 of whom were murdered, and bypassing the compromised and biased international Western media, should be cause for hope. No matter how faint.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2025