Palestinians Need Breathing Room for Recovery, Reconstruction, New Strategy

By Argiris Malapanis

After 15 months of a genocidal war Israel launched on Palestinians in response to the grotesque October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks, the first phase of a ceasefire went into effect in Gaza on January 19. At the time of posting this article, the ceasefire has held for a week. Hamas has released seven hostages in exchange for nearly 300 Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel.

It is now clear that Israel has made strategic gains, emerging from this war in a stronger position than when it began. It has substantially weakened its main adversaries in the region, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the regime in Iran. With ceasefires in place in both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel is now refocusing its military might in dealing new blows to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

UPDATE

Events in both Gaza and Lebanon on Sunday, January 26, underscored the fragility of the ceasefires in both countries.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians trying to return to their homes in northern Gaza were stranded along two north-south highways. Israel said it would not open up a key corridor or permit more than 1 million displaced Palestinians to return north until Hamas released an Israeli civilian it said should have been freed. Late on Sunday, a way forward was announced: Hamas is to release 29-year-old Arbel Yehud and two other hostages before Friday, January 31, and Israel is to allow Gazans to return to northern areas beginning today.

In Lebanon, the day previously set as the deadline for the withdrawal of Israeli and Hezbollah forces from the country’s south, the Israeli military killed at least 22 people in the area and wounded 120 others, according to Lebanese officials. This made Sunday “the deadliest day in the country since the war ended in November,” according to the New York Times. The White House issued a statement later on Sunday indicating that the initial 60-day truce would be extended until February 18. There was no immediate comment from Israel, the Lebanese government, or Hezbollah.

In a potentially ominous development over the weekend, U.S. president Donald Trump announced he wanted Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinian refugees as part of a plan to “clean out” Gaza.” This is a new proposal by Trump, and one previously advocated by ultra-rightists in Israel.

Trump told reporters Saturday, January 25, he had spoken with King Abdullah II of Jordan about the idea, which Abdullah and other Arab leaders have rejected in the past.

“I said to him, I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess,” Trump said. “I’d like him to take people. I’d like Egypt to take people.”

In the past, Arab governments have publicly opposed the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. That view was expressed clearly shortly after October 7, 2023, in an opinion piece by the Egyptian ambassador to the U.S. Any move in that direction now would deal new blows to Palestinian national aspirations.

— Argiris Malapanis

The Palestinian people, meanwhile, face the biggest challenges in decades in their quest for national self-determination. During the war, they earned widespread worldwide sympathy for their historic determination to achieve freedom in the face of relentless Israeli aggression. But the death and destruction the Israeli military rained down on them was devastating.

Palestinians now need the breathing room a cessation of hostilities in Gaza provides — even if temporary — for recovery, economic and social reconstruction, and to determine a new strategy.

NEWS ANALYSIS

“The war isn’t over,” noted an article in the January 19 Wall Street Journal. Israeli prime minister Benjamin “Netanyahu, under fire from far-right coalition partners, is stressing that Israel can resume the fight after the cease-fire’s first phase. Israel and Hamas began accusing each other of reneging on details of the deal even before the first Israeli hostages returned home from Gaza,” on January 19.

“Much could hinge on whether [U.S. president] Donald Trump, whose Middle East priorities include normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, maintains the pressure to end the fighting,” the Journal continued.

“Despite Israel’s massive firepower and tactical dominance of every battle in Gaza, it has struggled to eliminate Hamas,” the Journal said, “or break its control over the population. Hamas militants have regrouped in one city after another as Israeli forces pummeled them, then moved on. By this winter, Israeli troops had cleared Hamas out of some neighborhoods three times.”

The Israeli military has killed thousands of Hamas fighters and most of the group’s senior commanders. But Hamas has continued to find plenty of new recruits among Gaza’s large population of young men. This is due to revulsion at the ferocity of Israel’s war that many feel requires action to counter it. Another factor is the access to basic necessities, such as food, that joining the group allows. It is also a consequence of the lack of a viable political alternative to Hamas that can inspire young fighters with a more effective strategy of struggle.

“Their level of training is likely poor, but little skill is needed for planting bombs or keeping the population in check,” the Journal commented. “In the most recent battles in northern Gaza, Hamas continued to take heavy losses but killed dozens of Israeli soldiers.”

“Hamas in Gaza are badly beaten but not broken,” said Yuli Edelstein, a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud party who is also a member of Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

Hamas’ survival a problem for Israel, detrimental to Palestinians

Israel has not accomplished its stated goal of destroying Hamas. The latter falsely claims victory by dint of merely surviving Israel’s inferno. A pyrrhic victory for Hamas — at best. The overall outcome of the war has been a disaster for the Palestinian people.

The survival of Hamas is a problem for Israel, but its political role in Gaza is one of most significant obstacles to the prospects of national liberation for the Palestinian people. Its strategy of offering up the entire population of Gaza as martyrs to Israeli aggression has failed by any objective standard.

Nevertheless, Hamas maintains deep roots and continuing support in Gaza, despite growing opposition to its leadership from many Palestinians due to the devastating consequences of the war. The release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, as a result of the ceasefire deal, could further boost its standing.

The implementation of the ceasefire deal “is only strengthening Hamas at present and expediting its renewed takeover of the Strip,” commented Amos Harel in an article in the January 25 Israeli daily Haaretz.

“This is particularly true regarding the return to the organization of civil powers in Gaza, but the situation is also starting to serve indirectly the recovery of its military strength as well,” Harel continued.

“As part of the agreement, Israel authorized the entry of 600 aid trucks a day into Gaza (at the moment, there is a practical difficulty of reaching such a high figure) and the transfer of 12,000 liters (3,170 gallons) of fuel a day, funded by Qatar.

“The food and fuel go directly to Hamas and are partly sold to the population at exorbitant prices, enabling the government to enrich itself,” Harel claimed. “That’s the result when you adamantly refuse to allow any alternative to Hamas.”

Harel was referring to Netanyahu’s implacable refusal to permit the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to play any current or future role in administering Gaza. Or to agree to any other alternative governing power.

Hamas suffered severe setbacks through the killing and imprisonment of thousands of its fighters and Israel’s decimation of its leadership. But it was dealt knock out blows by Israel on other fronts, where Hamas’ allies in Iran’s reactionary “axis of resistance” suffered a string of setbacks.

The all-out regional war on Israel that Hamas’ former chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, dreamed October 7 would trigger never materialized. Instead, there was a fiasco for which the entire civilian population of Gaza has paid the price.

Hezbollah was battered last fall when Israel destroyed much of its leadership and arsenal of weapons, followed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invasion of Lebanon on October 1 at a great cost to the Lebanese people.

The theocratic regime in Iran also absorbed direct blows from Israel.

“Iran engaged in its first direct exchanges of fire with Israel but came off worst in the aerial barrages,” the Wall Street Journal noted. “Two large-scale Iranian missile salvos against Israel did little damage, while Israeli planes destroyed much of Iran’s air defenses. Worse still for Tehran, Hezbollah’s drubbing by Israel led indirectly to the surprise downfall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Iranian forces retreated from Syria and lost not only an ally but their overland supply route to Hezbollah as well.”

There is no evidence that Israel was behind the overthrow of Assad. Israel dealt blows to Hamas and Hezbollah, which were also felt in Iran. Tehran was weakened as well by the overthrow of its ally in Syria but that was not the result of Israeli action. The IDF immediately sent its troops into Syrian territory, where they remain, despite the repeated objections of the forces now running that country.

‘Iran is afraid of Israel’

Iran’s weakened position also helps explain why it did not carry out its threat to retaliate following the last Israeli military strikes at the end of October. The Iranian regime likely recognized that another round of mutual barrages would probably harm Iran more than Israel.

Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian-American scholar and author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine, reinforced this point in a December 13 interview with the New Yorker Radio Hour.

“I don’t think the Iranians wanted to… get involved in a war with Israel,” Khalidi said. “They’re terrified of Israel, as is every country around Israel, by the way, and have been for decades, since 1948. In fact, Arab countries have been scared of Israel. Israel has bombed seven Arab capitals, and most of the wars have been fought on Arab soil. Arab governments are very afraid of Israel, and I think Iran is afraid of Israel with… good reason.”

In another recent videotaped interview, available on YouTube, Khalidi also debunked the myth that Iran’s “axis of resistance” had anything to do with Palestinian national aspirations.

“There was an axis,” Khalidi said. “It was esentially created by Iran as a deterrent to protect the Iranian regime… That was what their alliance with Syria was for, that was what their support for Hezbollah was for, that was what their support for Hamas was for, and that’s why Iran supported Assad and the so-called Houthis in Yemen. Each of those actors had a degree of independence, they weren’t Iranian clones or controlled by Iran, but Iran supported them, massively, at a huge cost,” he explained.

The $30 billion Tehran lent the now deposed Syrian dictator had the same purpose, Khalidi said, adding that Assad’s tyranny was “the worst regime in the Middle East.” The Iranian people would love to get that money back, “but they’ll never see that money,” he commented.

Tehran did this to advance “the interests of the regime in Iran,” Khalidi insisted.

“They created deterrents to protect Iran against American hostility and hostility of other regimes in the Middle East. And that had no connection, in my view, no connection to a Palestinian national interest,” he continued. “It wasn’t designed, the so-called axis of resistance, to help liberate Palestine or to help the Lebanese liberate the bits of South Lebanon that Israel controls along the Mount Herman frontier with Lebanon. And it disappeared and Iran is more vulnerable. It has nothing to do with the Palestinians,” he said.

“It served that purpose until Israel showed it was infinitely stronger, stronger than a lot of fools believed that it was, by doing what they’ve done in Gaza, by doing what they’ve done in Lebanon, by doing what they’ve done to Iranian air defenses — completely wiping them out — by destroying Iran’s capability of producing new ballistic missiles for at least a year,” Khalidi concluded.

The war has harmed Palestinian national aspirations

The war has further set back Palestinians’ prospects for achieving national self-determination, which had already grown dimmer over the last 25 years.

Hamas’s attack on Israel and the Israeli ferocious response led to the leveling of much of Gaza and nearly 47,000 reported deaths in the enclave. That number will almost certainly rise significantly as more bodies are found in the rubble. Most of the dead are civilians. The death toll represents about 2% of Gaza’s prewar population, or one in every 50.

Another 110,000 have been wounded, over a quarter of whom now suffer from life-changing injuries, including amputations, major burns, and head wounds.

A Visual Guide to the Destruction of Gaza, an article in the January 18 edition of The Guardian, a British daily, powerfully documents this devastation.

About 1.9 million people have been displaced since the war began, amounting to 90% of the population, with many of them forced to move repeatedly. Hundreds of thousands are living in tent cities and severely overcrowded shelters with poor sanitation and access to little clean water.

Nearly 40,000 Palestinian Children Orphaned by War in Gaza was the headline of a January 22 article on DropSite. “Palestinian families have stepped in to take care of children not their own, but the volume of children orphaned by the war is staggering,” its subhead added.

Palestinians now mourn their heaviest death toll in the century-old conflict with Zionism and its imperialist sponsors.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian national cause — which Hamas demagogically claimed it aimed to revive, with itself at the head — faces a genuine political crisis, as Khalidi has repeatedly explained. Despite widespread international solidarity and sympathy, the Palestinians are more divided internally, more isolated in the region, and face an Israel that stands even more firmly against a Palestinian state.

“The Palestinian movement is fragmented,” Khalidi stated in his December 13 interview with the New Yorker Radio Hour.

“There’s no unified Palestinian national movement. There are two discredited factions,” he added, referring to Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, “neither of which it appears to me today has a viable strategy. So, the Palestinian national movement, for the better part of two decades has been, in my view, in terrible shape. It’s in just as bad or worse shape today.

“The Palestinians are in worse shape today, because what’s going on in the West Bank is almost invisible. The rolling annexation, the rolling theft of land, the rolling expansion of settlements, the ongoing incorporation of most of the West Bank into Israel, whether it’s formally annexed or not, and that process is about to commence in Gaza, it started in 1967.”

Another ‘Nakba’

The last 15 months registered another Nakba for the Palestinians, on par with, if not worse than, the 1948 war. Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, is the Palestinian term for the harrowing violence, mass expulsions, and expropriation of indigenous Palestinian land by the Zionist armies during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A war that resulted in a colonial settler state in Israel.

It is also instructive to compare some of the context surrounding these two historic events separated by three-quarters of a century. Most of the 750,000 Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes and land in 1948 still expected to return at some point. Their “right to return” was a major demand of the Palestinian national movement at the time and for many years following 1948. Today, Palestinians in Gaza are barely exercising their right to return to their homes, most of them ruined, with the prospects of reconstruction uncertain at best.

“On the morning of October 7, I fully realized that Hamas has led us into a dark tunnel,” Dina Muhammad, a mother of three children from Gaza, told the Wall Street Journal. “The idea behind October 7 is the worst thing to happen to the Palestinian cause since its inception. It was reckless.”

From its founding in 1987 at the initiative of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas tried to rebrand the Palestinian struggle for a homeland from a mass, secular national liberation movement to a religious crusade. It advocated a holy war that would lead to the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamist Palestinian state, in which Hamas’ interpretation of Islam would be the state religion.

Hamas’ main rival, the secular nationalist Fatah party that controls the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, is tainted by years of corruption, authoritarianism, and collaboration with Israel’s occupation forces.

“Palestinians are poised between a leadership representing paralysis on the one hand and a leadership of destruction and suicide on the other,” said Hussein Ibish, a journalist born in Beirut, Lebanon, who is a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C.

The PA, aiming to show the U.S. and Israeli governments that it should be involved in governing Gaza, in recent weeks waged a battle against local Palestinian fighters in Jenin’s refugee camp, long a point of resistance to the Israeli occupation. The security forces of the increasingly unpopular authority achieved little beyond cementing their image as Israel’s deputy sheriff.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas “is in a difficult position, and his actions in Jenin were an attempt to gain Trump’s approval,” said Mustafa Ibrahim, a Palestinian political commentator.

West Bank: A powder keg

Israel is now taking over the offensive in the volatile West Bank, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could next boil over. Israel’s economic restrictions in the occupied territory have caused unemployment to soar and left the Palestinian Authority struggling to pay salaries, including for its security forces. Rising violence by Zionist settlers is also destabilizing the territory, fueling support for Palestinian groups pursuing armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.

With cease-fire agreements in both Lebanon and Gaza, the Israeli government has now added the defeat of what the Wall Street Journal described on January 22 as “surging militancy” in the West Bank, as an aim in its war against the Palestinians. Israeli forces from the IDF, police, and internal-security service raided Jenin’s crowded refugee camp on January 22, with drone strikes and armored vehicles. At least 12 Palestinians have been killed as a result of the IDF-led military operation there, which Israel dubbed “Iron Wall.”

Violence by Zionist settlers has also spread across the West Bank.

“The settler attacks erupted almost immediately after the ceasefire began, with members of Israel’s far-right reportedly targeting some of the villages where released Palestinian women and child prisoners had homes,” reported Al Jazeera on January 23. “Other Palestinian homes appear to have been randomly targeted.”

“The West Bank, a senior IDF officer tells Haaretz, is now ‘a keg of dynamite that is threatening to blow up,’ far beyond what is happening in Jenin,” Amos Harel reported in the January 25 edition of the Israeli daily.

“Jewish terrorists are also running wild, both as revenge for attacks and to try to disrupt the hostage deal, which will release into the West Bank hundreds of security prisoners,” Harel continued.

“The freeing of the [Palestinian] prisoners is triggering old fears among the settlers. Many of them are apprehensive that the Palestinians will try to reprise the October 7 massacre in West Bank settlements as well. The settlers’ local councils are continuing to distribute firearms to everyone who is eligible to bear arms,” Harel said.

“It’s doubtful that these weapons will be used only for defensive purposes,” he commented. “It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which a Jewish terrorist opens fire at the release of Palestinians in the West Bank in order to halt the implementation of the coming stages in the hostage deal.”

As World-Outlook noted in its news analysis last October, Israel Out of Lebanon and Gaza – End U.S. Aid, “The most immediate step necessary is an end to Israeli aggression starting with the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and Lebanon. Those supporting the Palestinian quest for self-determination should also demand an end to U.S. aid to Israel — aid indispensable for the war the IDF is escalating in the region….

“Above all, the Palestinian people need both breathing and political space that is precluded today by the war. That space is needed for economic and social reconstruction as well as for developing a new leadership and new strategy.”

A permanent cease fire in both Lebanon and Gaza could make this possible. Whether the current ceasefire in Gaza will ever reach its projected second phase is unknown. But even a temporary cessation of hostilities is preferable to the continuation of the daily slaughter.

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