ARROGANCE, OIL AND CLIMATE
The Israeli underrated the suffering of the Palestinians, contends Dayo Sobowale
It was in William Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’, that we were told that ‘when the blast of war blows, in our ears then imitate the action of the tiger . .. disguise fair nature with hard favored rage.” I see Israel’s enraged Prime Minister in this light when he declared unequivocally that ‘Israel is at war’ when Palestinian fighters infiltrated Israel’s beleaguered border with Gaza on Yom Kippur Day. Precisely 50 years after the 1973 Yom Kippur or Oil war in which Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Hafez Assad of Syria caught the Israeli army and state pants down and crossed the Sinai into Israel in a blitzkrieg of armor and surprise, Hamas has done something similar a few days ago.
Later in 1973, the Israeli army encircled and isolated Egypt’s elite Red Army and was about to wipe it out in the desert but for the intervention of the Americans under Richard Nixon as president and the wily diplomat Henry Kissinger as American Secretary of State. A certain Israeli commander Ariel Sharon pictured with his head bandaged in blood almost refused his superiors’ orders to retreat and was heading to take Cairo, Egypt’s capital, before he was stopped by superior orders. Sharon later became a PM of Egypt and he died in a coma on the eve of his party winning a general election in Israel on a platform of peace. A great irony indeed for the war monger of the war of 1973 . History though is about to repeat itself as the Biden Administration is about to give full support to Israel in spite of the personal differences between the present American president Joe Biden and Benyamin Netanyahu now the fuming Israeli war minister .
The 1973 Arab- Israeli war led to the Arab states of the Middle East placing an oil embargo on oil sales to Europe and the US because of American support for Israel then . That singular action made clear to western nations that their energy and oil needs were in hostile hands. Just as Russia showed recently, after it cut off its oil and energy supplies to Europe when NATO and western nations sanctioned it economically for the invasion of Ukraine about a year ago. It was the Arab embargo and the European concomitant economic and environmental suffering especially in winter that gave rise to the hostility against fossil fuel and that fuelled the campaign to discredit fossil fuel use as energy globally . This is in spite of the merit or demerit of promotion of climate change and the use of alternative green and clean sources of energy besides carbon which raises the temperature of the earth and its ecology, and is a threat to the future of humanity as the battle cry against oil for energy goes on today
So, the 1973 Yom Kippur war created a watershed on the use of oil as the main global energy and shocked Israel’s perception on the invincibility of the Israeli army which was still glowing under the euphoria of the 1967 Six Days war when Israel seized the Sinai from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria within less than a week of war . The arrogance of the 1967 war that led Israel to the humiliation of the 1973 war also called the October War of 1973, is now repeated 50 years after with Hamas killing what the Israeli Defence Minister has called the highest number of Israelis in any war since the first war establishing the state of Israel in 1948 . Obviously the Jewish state and its leaders are very ignorant of an African adage that says you do not go to sleep in a house with thatched roof with fire on it . Even after 50 years .
That was what Israel did. It underrated the suffering it has inflicted on the Palestinians and relied on its Iron Dome Technology to deflect the thousands of rockets fired daily into Israel from very contiguous surroundings from a people deeply aggrieved and indignant to their treatment by the state of Israel and its support by the mighty USA . The Palestinians knew and know they could not defeat Israel in a conventional war but they never gave up and know that the saying is true indeed that ‘ every dog has its day’ .That was the day and time that Hamas seized and it is ready for the consequences . A people that regards suicide bombing as a strategy of war is not easily deterred by mass bombing of its civilians as fatalism is at once its creed, belief and unshakable armour and succor .They are like the fearless gladiators of ancient Rome in the arena who faced their death by the fatal salute to their murderous oppressor –‘Hail Caesar , We, who about to die , salute you!’
It is necessary to dwell on the political scenario in Israel before the Hamas strike that has shaken Israel to its security foundation . Mass political demonstrations and protesters in their thousands on a weekly basis. As if democracy is an end in itself and not a means to an end. Democracy thrives in a peaceful environment and the Israelis know on a daily basis, from, and at the ancient holy sites and disputed mosques, shrines and synagogues of Jerusalem, that there was no love lost between them and the Palestinians whose lands they have occupied since 1948 . Yet Israelis were denouncing their government or defending their courts on the streets of Tel Aviv without let or care . Military and security personnel both serving and retired were threatening not to serve in case war broke out with Palestinians, confident in their unshakeable , but now very mistaken belief, that the Palestinians were forever incapable of turning the apple cart of Israel’s security invincibility. Now the security chickens and political gaffes have come home to roost and Israelis must rally round the same PM who was a whipping dog of democracy a few weeks ago . Surely the Israelis are learning a bitter lesson that in any environment , for justice to prevail , especially in a charged political environment like Israel and the entire Middle East , those who live in glass houses , should not throw stones .
Sobowale is a news analyst with Arise News
