The Olive Branch and the Fighter's Rifle

The Olive Branch and the Fighter’s Rifle

The current episode of war between Palestinians and Israelis is distinguished from previous ones by the audacity shown by the Palestinian resistance in the conception and conduct of the operations of October 7 and the unimaginable scale of the human, political and psychological losses inflicted to the State of Israel in a few hours.

Regardless of the degree of ferocity of the Israeli response, the extent of the damage that will affect Gaza City and its inhabitants or the extent of Western support for the State of Israel, the Palestinian cause is already emerged victorious.

What meaning, then, can be given to the words of a dazed Netanyahu constantly repeating: “We will win this war”? He has undoubtedly lost it, and what he does will not be a matter of military art, but of the irrational reaction of a wounded animal. It will not be a war, but a blind, cruel, inhuman revenge, the media effects of which will turn against him and his extremist government.

Even if only one Palestinian man and one Palestinian woman were to remain alive after the apocalyptic response announced by Israeli officials, the Palestinian cause will rise from its ashes, grow back from the rubble of the Apocalypse and reconstitute itself as it did after the last war, the penultimate or the previous ones going back to 1947.

What the world has observed, however, after each episode of the Israeli-Palestinian war is that the Palestinian resistance learned from its experiences and its failures to return to the assault better organized and better equipped. This is what it did on October 7 and will do again cyclically because its war goals are not to annihilate the Israelis as Netanyahu wishes for the Palestinians, but to obtain their historic rights ratified by international law by form of UN resolutions and bilateral agreements.

On November 13, 1974 Yasser Arafat spoke for the first time before the UN General Assembly meeting in New York under the presidency of Algeria. After a brief reminder of the history of Palestine between 1917 (Balfour Declaration) and 1947 (UN resolution dividing Palestine into two sovereign states), he uttered his famous sentence to the international community: “ I came here holding the olive branch in one hand and my combat rifle in the other. Do not let the green branch fall from my hand.” In this speech, Yasser Arafat recognized, also for the first time, the right to coexistence of the two peoples within a common, democratic and secular state.

Those who, in the course of time, signed their signatures on the Oslo Accords (1993-1995) which outlined the limits of the two States were in turn assassinated by Israel, while the “international community” and the “international law” would only have eyes and concerns for the interests of Israel.

In the meantime, the Palestinians were radicalizing around the “fighter’s rifle” in Gaza or champing at the bit in Ramallah by cultivating the “green branch” in the same way that cannabis is cultivated, authorized here and prohibited there. The territories granted to them by the Oslo Accords were shrinking from one day to the next while Israeli arrogance and provocations multiplied under the complicit gaze of the “international community”.

The belief dear to the Israeli extreme right that force is superior to faith in a legitimate and legal cause has once again been denied in this biblical land where the frail David once won his fight against Goliath. The military force used by David Ben-Gurion and his successors to deny Palestinian rights has just been discredited forever.

If the Israelis really want to win the war against the Palestinians once and for all, they have the choice between two solutions: eradicate them to the last one or agree with them to resume the peace process marked by UN resolutions and the Oslo Accords. If the first is impossible, they still have the second. But the Palestinians may be at the origin of another outcome of the conflict: making sleep and life impossible for Israelis in Palestine. The new course taken by history in recent days gives plausibility to such a scenario. They will then leave on their own.

It remains that the real culprits in the Palestinian affair, those responsible for the current impasse and the blood that flows daily in Palestine and Israel are Zionist radicalism boosted by the Masada complex and the cowardice of the “international community” which reneged on his commitments, broke his word and forfeited his signature.

This explains, in this issue and others, why more and more non-Western countries are seeking solutions to their problems in the emergence of a new “international community” and an “international order” which is the use of all, unlike that developed by the West which, for example, says on the same subject “yes” to the Ukrainians and “no” to the Palestinians. Although what has saved Ukraine so far is not so much “international law” as the money and equipment placed unconditionally at its disposal by the West.

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