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