Tanuj Goswami
(tanujuri03@gmail.com)
The one and only Jewish state with an ancestry of well over 3000 years passed through turbulent phases of history before finally getting legitimised as an independent sovereign state on May 15, 1948, through the UN Resolution. With its historic capital, ‘Jerusalem’, the state of Israel stands tall, hemmed in by hostile forces of evil kind in the Middle East. A small state with nearly nine million strong people comprises different nationalities, many of whom immigrated from across different parts of the world with a firm commitment to building a strong homeland. Israel is a democratic, secular, and free modern nation populated by 74% Jews, while others are mostly Palestinian Muslims, Arab Christians, Druze, and the ancient wandering tribes of the Bedouins, etc.
Since the time of its independence amid hostile surroundings, most of the Israeli Prime Minister and their government have made innumerable peace efforts for peaceful co-existence and cultural assimilation with the Palestinians as good neighbours, but the Arab community has always repaid with treacherous attacks on Jews with bullets, missiles, bombs, and terror activities killing, murdering, and maiming Israelis brutally.
It is unfortunate that a host of Arab countries that started the war with Israel in 1949 even refused to arrange shelters for Palestinian refugees, and it was the UN General Assembly that created the UN Relief and Works Agency exclusively for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) through Resolution No. 302, which was meant to be a temporary one, but gradually it transformed into a mega organization with worldwide yearly financing of billions of dollars. As the aim of this organization got overrun with serious charges of spinning and harbouring terror cells, the latest incidents in Gaza unfolded.
Some rouge nations affiliated with Iran with a theocratic mindset and a rabid fanatical attitude have been seriously roiling peaceful human co-existence between the Israelis and Palestinians and foiled the ‘two-state solution’ fomenting and cultivating seeds of hatred, murder, kidnapping, and all sorts of dehumanizing activities befouling the sacredness of the historic ‘Temple Mount’, the site of the world’s three major monotheistic religions in the Middle East.
The hatred, animosity, and annihilation of Jews became the state policy of many Arab countries, and it has been the biggest roadblock to a peaceful solution. The latest peace deal in the form of the Abraham Accord, 2020, was brokered by the Trump administration, with a few Arab states like Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco suffering terrible blows because of the relentless pressure of sabotage and the pulling of strings from behind by some hostile nations. But it was none other than the Palestinians themselves, who have suffered immensely for the last 78 years, and there is no end to this scenario until it makes a truce with the Israelis.
The ongoing raging conflict between Israel and Hamas (a hardcore Palestinian terror outfit) was ignited following the unprecedented brutal massacre of hundreds of innocent Jewish men, women, and children on October 7, 2023, that precipitated a situation of grave humanitarian crisis, resulting in the loss of more than 36,000 Palestinian lives and apocalyptic death and destruction all around the Gaza Strip. Hamas never bothered about civilian causalities, as they were trained and indoctrinated to act as human shields, and hence their lives were easily expendable with Sellers’s no remorse at all.
Meanwhile, the Iran-backed proxy groups, the Hezbollah of southern Lebanon and the Houthis of Yemen, have been muddying up the waters. As a show of support and solidarity for the Hamas, they have been routinely firing barrages of ballistic missiles and drone attacks, adversely impacting Northern Israel and forcing it to evacuate 80,000 of its citizens. On the other hand, the Houthi attacks (an Iranian proxy) have almost grounded international trade and merchandise on the ever-busy international trade route through the Red Sea.
The IDF (Israeli Defence Force), having completed its assigned and committed tasks in southern and central Gaza, has been concentrating on the Rafa City areas bordering Egypt. The IDF has to fight a very hard battle, flushing out and eliminating the remaining Hamas battalions, taking maximum care and precaution to avoid unnecessary loss of life for common citizens with the use of high-precision technological and surveillance military equipment.
Israel, having vowed to rescue the remaining kidnapped hostages (now around 120) and crush the surviving Hamas terror groups, is zeroing in on dismantling and destroying the huge network of underground tunnels, depots, government buildings, mosques, etc. used to stockpile large catches of drones, missiles, and other lethal arms, ammunition, smuggled goods, and cash.
Bolstered by sophisticated armoury like powerful Fatah ballistic missiles, UAVs, and explosive-laden drones supplied by Iran, and with a large pool of well-trained Hezbollah militants, Lebanon has been turned into a powder keg to be exploded violently very soon. Hezbollah, a major proxy of Iran, a sub-state in Lebanon, rules and controls the southern part with fundamentalist principles that are writ large there. The core of Middle East unrest has been Iran’s high ambition to be the most powerful and dominant nuclear powered nation and to be a ‘Caliphate’ propping up radicalised and highly fanatical proxy terror groups across the region, thwarting the presence of US bases and their allies too.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the key branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, have fanned out terror groups like Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Army, and many other Islamic outfits elsewhere to thwart world peace. The venom spewed and repeatedly quoted by Ali Komeini, the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to annihilate Israel totally in 25 years is deeply worrisome, perilous, reprehensible, and irresponsible behaviour at worst.
Israel had to confront multiple fronts at a time against proxy terror groups armed to the teeth and patronised by Iran, and very lately in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Iran-backed Palestinian terror groups and Hamas are preparing to launch another covert attack on Israelis, so a Gaza-like situation there too cannot be ruled out.
Palestine’s unreasonable and highly provocative agenda and chanting of “from the river to the sea, Palestine is free’ is unfounded and a blatant travesty of historical reality and a stark form of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that rocked many US educational campuses recently.
The existential threat posed by Israel has to be neutralised and let this small, highly innovative, free, secular, and the only democratic nation in the Middle East flourish and grow with peaceful coexistence. The raft of incidents in the Middle East that keep happening seems to carry some prophetic significance, and only time will tell. It is an undeniable fact that Israel possesses extraordinary prowess, being unparallel in terms of innovation, scientific research, medical science, superior air defence power, and all manners of both offensive and defensive mechanisms for the security of their homeland.
The Arab Muslims who are living in Israel are enjoying all the goodness of ife, liberty, and free will, whereas their counterparts living elsewhere in the Middle East are deprived of the basic quality of a decent ife. A nation facing existential crisis from the day one of its existence until now is the most misunderstood state, and even the UN has lately failed to do justice to this tiny state and do the honour it richly deserves.