Juan Cole
Informed Comment / July 1, 2024
Ann Arbor – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again rejected the Biden peace deal on Sunday, vowing complete victory. After Biden’s performance in the debate last Thursday, Netanyahu is apparently more assured than ever that he can defy Biden without facing any consequences. The woolly-mindedness of the president in turn perhaps helps account for Biden’s strange passivity and insouciance in the face of Israel’s war crimes, and in the face of Netanyahu’s impudence toward his superpower patron, given that Bibi rebuffed Biden’s plan without hesitation from the beginning.
Despite Netanyahu’s bluster, and no one is better at bluster than he, there isn’t any evidence that his goals are realistic, as the Israeli army spokesman recently admitted.
The Israeli military has pummeled the Gaza Strip since last October, subjecting it to heavy air strikes and artillery fire. It has destroyed the majority of domiciles and inflicted heavy damage on civilian infrastructure.
The Israeli military is now involved in a land invasion of North Gaza, from which troops had withdrawn, declaring Hamas defeated there. Hamas has not been defeated there.
The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports a truly remarkable statistic: “Various areas of the Gaza Strip witnessed intense battles, inasmuch as violent clashes broke out between brigades of the Resistance [Hamas] and the forces of the Israeli army in pivotal points of the attack. The Resistance has implemented during the past 24 hours 4 operations involving entering into clashes, and bombarding [with rocket and mortar fire?] assemblages of military equipment and Israeli forces.
If the Israeli military is still fighting intense battles with Hamas in North Gaza after nearly 9 months and if Hamas is still able to pull off 4 operations in 24 hours, it underlines how unrealistic Netanyahu’s objective of wiping out Hamas by planes and tanks really is.
Actually, Hamas leaders have said they would disband if a Palestinian state were granted. That should be easy. A Palestinian state was granted by the terms of Oslo in 1993. Israel would just have to stop reneging on all the pledges it made then.
The story on Sunday was Israel’s intensification of its bombardment of the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, which lies east of the city center and once had a population of some 100,000 people (about the size of Fayetteville, Arkansas) and was the site of the Strip’s biggest market for clothing and household goods. Israeli warplanes launched several strikes on the neighborhood.
VIDEO : “Israeli assault on Gaza’s Shujayea continues as civilians remain trapped in panic”
“The Israeli soldiers stormed our home and threw gas bombs all over the ground floor and stun grenades. They smashed the door and opened fire on us. We kept screaming that we are all women and children. We raised white flags but no response. The Israeli soldiers kept shooting and shouting at us nonstop.” – Al-Jazeera.
Likewise, Israeli armor pummeled Tel al-Sultan in the west of Rafah, as well as two districts in the east of Khan Younis. Some 48 corpses and 111 wounded were received by hospitals in a 24 hour period.
Since, as Biden admitted, Netanyahu has personal reasons for wanting to prolong the Gaza war, and since on the evidence of his performance last Thursday, Biden can probably no longer understand the geopolitical damage being done to the United States by Israel’s Gaza campaign, there is little hope that the intense bombardment of the Strip will cease any time soon, or that the aftermath will be wisely arranged (Netanyahu refuses to give specifics of the day after lest doing so lead to further pressure to end the campaign).
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
