WHAT IS A JUST WAR WITH ISRAEL EYES ON WEST BANK? By Mohammed Kabir ILYASU; FIBDFM
WHAT IS A JUST WAR WITH ISRAEL EYES ON WEST BANK?
By
Mohammed Kabir ILYASU; FIBDFM.
Every Nation has a guiding spirit. Israel has “Altruism, Truth, Justice and Peace”.
How ironic!
Prior to the ongoing war between Israel and Iran, many political pundits suspected that the threat of force, not necessarily one strength that Israel could muster, in conjunction with calls to apply sanctions in addition to foreign pressure would lead to change of Iranian regime’s behaviour to settle for early transition? and avoid inflammatory comments.
A chaotic era always seemed to appear before history undergoes a major change. Will Israel-Iran war be a game changer? We are in the dark time. Is war the only way to unite people? If people are saved from war, will this cause any problem in history?
Sad enough, America always get sucked in the whirlpool of time. Today is a friend, tomorrow is an enemy and vice versa, until it loses the sight of where it stands and where it it is meant to go. Why won’t we try to change the history so that history may change the future for us?!!
Israel is claiming to fight Iran to avoid total annihilation from Iran’s nuclear capability. It has remained dogmatic that Iran’s nuclear capability is a “threat to its existence”. So as far as the state of Israel is concerned, its military confrontation is “Justified”. This brand is totally bought by the US political leadership and her allies, prompting them to support Israel in deed and in kind.
Everybody has the ability to be convinced of a different truth. So how do you make a decided mind to change its direction? How do you get them to not only believe your narrative, your agenda, your truth, but depend on it? Make your rules the rules to live by.
But “truth” is the conclusion based on one’s subjective being. It is a concept that changes with how one interprets reality. This makes it feel like a spell. This may seem that their “truth” only works on STUPID. How is it possible both to know something is true and yet to convince oneself that it is false? Wouldn’t the falsehood be palpable and thus unbelievable? We are so familiar with self-deception, and we all practice it so often, that we often forget how perplexing a phenomenon it is.
Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza is, as already known to be “unsustainable” for nearly 60 years, yet it goes on. By the year 2030, that’s 30 years since the Oslo II accord of 2000 that divided the West Bank into its current patchwork of Areas A, B, and C, it is worth nothing that this awkward arrangement, has lasted longer than both the British mandate for Palestine and Jordan’s control of the West Bank. It is, in fact, the longest lived governmental system for this area since the Ottoman era. But at what cost to human lives?
THE DIPLOMATIC COST OF A TWO-STATE SOLUTION
What makes this arrangement so unsustainable? It’s morally wrong to deny Palestinians sovereignty in their own land and enforced occupation erodes the moral character of Israel, the occupier.
Specifically, a critical element of the status quo is Israel’s sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit commitment since 1967 that, under the right circumstances, with the right partner, with the right guarantees, and with the right countervailing benefits, it would withdraw from some, most, or even nearly all of the Palestinian territory. That was the bargain at the heart of UN Security Council Resolution 242, on which all subsequent Arab-Israeli diplomacy has been based. That was the bargain that helped fuel the post-1967 U.S-Israel strategic relationship and Israel’s transformation into Western strategic partner in the Middle East.
And this was a critical element of Israel campaigns and the bargain that produced the relative stability in the West Bank over the last twenty years of the administration of Mahmoud Abbas.
If there are any doubts about the relative stability of the last twenty years, just look at the numbers deposed by Robert Satloff who is the Segal executive Director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and its Howard P. Berkowitz chair in U.S. Middle East Policy. He said, in the eighteen years between 2005 and 2022, before Hamas’s October 7 attack reverberated in the West Bank, Israel suffered a total of 334 deaths from such attacks. By comparison, in the eighteen-year period from 1968 to 1985, before any withdrawals, the total was 542; and in the fifteen years between 1986 and 2000, before the explosion of the second intifada, the total was 472. These figures are by far negligible compared to the lives of the Palestinians lost in the same periods. According to google search,
Total Palestinian casualties for this period stood at 144,963, including 66,789 fatalities.
Timeline chart
Palestinians killed from 2008 to September 2023.[74]
RIGHT TO SELF DETERMINATION
Even though the so called international community have selective memory and vision on identifying war criminals; some government and individuals are giving license to murder millions against international laws and get away with it. We cannot all pretend that there is no solution to Palestinian statehood; is it not right; democratic and fair to ask Israel what it wants. Why the gang up to deny Palestinians their right under international law?
The right to self-determination, a fundamental principle of human rights law,(1) is an individual and collective right to “freely determine . . . political status and [to] freely pursue . . . economic, social and cultural development.” (2) The principle of self-determination is generally linked to the de-colonization process that took place after the promulgation of the United Nations Charter of 1945. (3) Of course, the obligation to respect the principle of self-determination is a prominent feature of the Charter, appearing, inter alia, in both Preamble to the Charter and in Article 1”. (KAREN PARKER August 2000 http://www.guidetoaction.org/parker/selfdet.html)
Who is the aggressor? “He” the Palestinian that is asking for his legitimate right under human right and international law or “He” Israel that is imposing falsehood on us and million of defenceless Palestinian people?
The criticisms of international law are familiar and, in some sense, impossible to deny: that, it is too weak, that, it is selectively applied, that, it is merely an extension of state power. We are all prisoners of this horizontal system, where states have to keep each other in check, and that will inevitably fall subject to politicization.
Yusra Suedi, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, was quoted to have said; “It is essentially an opt-in system: weak states that flout its directives are called pariahs or rogues; powerful states that do so are called hegemons”.
For critics of the field, the problem is not just that law doesn’t stop wars or protect civilians, but also that it offers a vocabulary for states to justify the unchecked use of force. Breaches are not the exception but the rule. For instance, international humanitarian law restricts the use of certain kinds of weapons, such as cluster bombs, that are “indiscriminate by nature, capable of causing harm without distinguishing between combatants and civilians”
Robert Satloff asks the question, thus; “Does anyone believe the impressive bipartisan support for Israel in American politics would be nearly as strong and resilient if Israel declared that it would never, as a matter of principle, withdraw from an inch of Palestinian territory, even if the Palestinians were led by a triumvirate consisting of the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr.?”
The answer to this questions, of course unambiguous. And therein lies the conceit at the heart of the US hypocritical efforts in the ongoing Iran-Israel war. America would continue to support and use Israel to advance its agenda that may be inimical to the interest of the region. Looking at the map of the region informs that peace remains precarious with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan under siege.
The invasion of Iran by Israel is for the forceful acquisition of West Bank from the Palestinian Authorities. PERIOD!
If we are to remove the hypothetical potential of territorial compromise, the status quo that defines the current situation would no longer exist. It would be something different that Israel would say; “We’re here to stay, Come what may. Deal with it.” Indeed, the attack on Iran is functionally the first hint of an Israeli decision to annex the West Bank outside of a negotiation agreement with the Palestinians. It is a policy antithetical to the post-1967 consensus, ambiguous as it may be, that gave the essential ingredient to Israel a level of acceptability in the comity of nations. The attack on Iran and Americas strike on its nuclear facilities were to camouflaged the territorial designs on West Bank and Gaza.
Of course, some will reconcile themselves to this reality while others won’t. What is certain is that, it is this reality, the comfort, satisfying, and surprisingly tacit American support that Israel enjoys which Iran was/is able to challenge and America is so desperate to protect. After all President Trump was quoted to have offered to buy GAZA to develop it into Real Estate.
It has been said that we make life meaningful by living it in its fullness, in an open and productive way. This path may not lead to paradise but it brings the most exciting and creative life that a human being can experience. Such life transforms people into creators of their world and masters of their lives.
Let me repeat this quote as posed by a Historian Richard Hofstadter as it is high time that Israel must not continue to allow itself to fit the description of a paranoid state, with an outlook animated by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial tendencies, focussed on perceived threats to it”. Israel must not remain a child. Respect begets respect.
30/06/2025
