Al-Qalam 
WILL ISRAEL’S IMPUNITY MAKE ITS ENDGAME PREVAIL?
By Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool
In the current iteration of conflict between Israel and Palestinians, it is almost one year since Hamas’ breach of the Israeli border. A year later, we must still insist that history did not start one year ago. The original sin can be traced to 1948 and is culminating in a genocide, the massacre of Palestinians, and a patriacide, the killing of a Palestinian state. Ironically, Hamas’ desperate bid to scupper the normalization between the Arab Abrahamic Accord signatories and Israel became the fig leaf of victimhood for Israel to launch its total strategy towards achieving its endgame.
For this, Israel received from its Western patrons both a license for impunity and superior weaponry to achieve the endgame. From its Abrahamic partners, it received a combination of submission and permission. As usual, the various Palestinian movements provided it with the necessary fragmentation. It is this shift in the Balance of Power that made a push for the endgame so alluring, especially since it is accompanied by a USA election in which neither parties nor presidential candidates can afford even the mildest rebuke for a genocide or patriacide.
And given Netanyahu’s tenuous hold on power in Israel, Netanyahu has nothing to lose and everything to gain from the brinkmanship in grasping opportunistically at the October 7 incursion. Israel’s narrative of victimhood, coupled with the USA’s historical antipathy towards, and Arab fears of, Iran, emboldens Israel to fight and provoke on multiple fronts: decimating Gaza, populating the West Bank with almost one million Israeli settlers, confronting Hizballah in Lebanon, repelling the Houthis in Yemen, and provoking Iran with targeted assassinations.
This brinkmanship is calculated. If Netanyahu can entice Iran into open conflict, he can draw his western patrons into a regional war, either directly or as their mandated proxy without the strategic ambiguity, a la Ukraine. The Israeli rhetoric is all about Iran, Hamas and Hizballah as Iranian proxies and the axis of resistance. Iran must be the glue that binds the West and the Abrahamic partners to Israel and the siren song that reinforces victimhood, behind which conflagration unfolds the total strategy that achieves the endgame to reshape the Middle East.
But Israel has had to contend with a few unexpected speedbumps. Firstly, the Hamas incursion on October 7 impeded the conclusion of “normalization” between the Abrahamic Accord partners, a critical precondition for the endgame. Secondly, South Africa’s charge of genocide, reinforced with a televised and reported footage thereof, landed on fertile soil in the International Court of Justice and even in the International Criminal Court, where its Western patrons can bully but not veto. Thirdly, the ICJ ruling stirred the street against the palace and the campus against the White House as the narrative transformed from Israel as a victim to the perpetrator and from a moral beacon seeking peaceful coexistence to a vengeful brute prosecuting an apartheid occupation. Finally, despite the provocations of over 40 000 Palestinians massacred, extra-judicial assassinations outside Israel’s jurisdiction, and incursions into Lebanon, the strategic stoicism of Iran and Hizballah to not be provoked beyond the symbolic is a sign that they may have learnt the greater impact of soft power against an enemy who has a monopoly of hard power provided by its patrons. All of these have now forced Israel to pursue its endgame without a cloak of morality.
So, what is Israel’s endgame amidst other competing visions for the region? The endgame is one not of chess but of cheese. There are four competing visions for the region. Two of these are variations of a cheddar cheese – a single Palestinian state from the river to the sea. The first is one harboured by Hamas, in which Palestine is reunited as an Islamic Civil State with Jews who remain incorporated as a religious minority. The second is gaining traction among progressive supporters of the Palestinian cause – despairing that the two-state solution is dead in the water given the ‘facts on the ground’ established by Israel – and, therefore, posit a single, united, democratic state that is rights-based, with possibilities for group rights (possibly with binational features) in addition to the individual rights of each citizen.
The third contending vision is the two-state one of a Colby Jack cheese, with fairly equitable streaks of yellow and cream, accompanying the 1948 establishment of Israel and modified at Oslo. Genuine supporters of peace have held onto this solution as the only compromise, which it may be if it goes back to the 1967 borders. However, this has become the instrument to placate Palestinians and the world whenever virtue-signalling is required to offset Israeli aggression. The only beneficiaries of clinging to the perverted and discredited remains of the two-state solution are those who have been reduced to becoming the gendarmes for stability and the receivers of remittances.
Finally, Israel’s cheese of choice for its endgame is the Swiss cheese: A single, undivided, apartheid, Zionist state with Palestinian holes or enclaves, a formula it learnt from apartheid SA’s Bantustan system in exchange for nuclear capability. This is Israel’s vision from the river to the sea. It is being achieved through ‘facts on the ground’: The decimation of Gaza into a Bantustan with controlled access and the effective disarming and decimation of any resistance through Israeli militarized buffers and surveillance; the accelerated population of the West Bank by Zionist settlers with water and agricultural resources diverted to them; the encircling and confinement of Palestinians in the West Bank through ever-narrowing networks of walls and Jews-only roads; and the securing of Israel’s population through militarized buffer zones alongside its borders, especially with Lebanon.
Unfortunately, the Swiss cheese seems the very likely outcome from the current conflagration.
Ebrahim Rasool is the former Premier of the Western Cape and former SA Ambassador to the US.
