I am betting on Hamas and the resistance of the Palestinian people to win, if not immediately in the next few weeks, then definitely in the near future. I think so, not just because of the demonstrated strength and sustainability of the Palestinian armed resistance that surprised us all on October 7th, not only because the smokescreen of an Israeli ethical, invincible military power has dissipated forever revealing its barbaric reality, not only because regional dynamics have been shifted by the earthquake, but because, as Einstein put it, “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
The level of consciousness that allows Israel to exist as a Jewish state is violent domination. I am not referring here to the anti-Semitic trope or idea of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, which has been around since the thirteenth century and has been used to justify discrimination and violence against Jews. I am referring to the domination of Palestine and the Arab region by Jews.
There may be no evidence to support the claim of an international Jewish conspiracy for world domination, but there certainly is plenty of evidence to support Jewish domination of Palestine and the Middle East region as a whole.
I refer you to the Dalet Plan that was requested by the Jewish Agency leader and later first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion, and developed by the Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias in Palestine, which was involved in several massacres of Palestinian civilians and unarmed soldiers.
When the Zionist Jewish leadership declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948 after the British gave the Jewish immigrants to Palestine the green light as long as doing so did not prejudice the civil and religious rights of the Arab non-Jewish majority, i.e., the indigenous Palestinians, they deliberately did not announce its borders. The borders of Israel are yet to be entirely settled, thus keeping the door open for a “greater Israel,” for more Jewish colonies, for more ethnic cleansing.
Plan Dalet called for the conquest of Palestinian towns and villages inside and along the borders of the area allocated to the proposed Jewish State in the UN Partition Plan, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 29, 1947. It laid out in detail a blueprint for the forcible depopulation and destruction of Palestinians. In case of resistance, the population of conquered villages was to be expelled.
Sounds familiar? That’s the “level of consciousnesses” that inhabits both Israel and the US. It is not a level that will ever “solve the problem” of Israel as a settler-colonial entity and it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to arrive at this conclusion.
Einstein believed that we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. In other words, we need to experience a jump in consciousness to find the answers we need. It’s a call to action for people to think outside the box and to approach problems from a new perspective. So far, the US’s “new perspective” is to kill more softly and to rejuvenate the lie of a “two-state solution” with a new and “revitalized” Palestinian Authority.
For both Israel and the US, the strategy continues to be Israel’s domination and subjugation of the Palestinian people and theft of their land and resources.
And there’s the rub. The Palestinian people refuse to succumb to this and have been refusing for decades. Because the only language Israel understands, as Senior Hamas Representative Osama Hamdan said, is that of violence, the miracle of the Palestinian armed power is what will ultimately win the game.
It’s a very costly game of blood and unspeakable suffering for Palestinians. Israel is betting that this high price it continues to inflict, if not its brutal and vengeful power (its “ring of fire”), is what will force the armed resistance to give in. But such logic is misplaced, and the opposite is true. This enormous cost in precious blood is a motivation for the resistance to continue to defend Palestine, even more ferociously. The resistance is defending both Palestine’s “living martyrs” and its prisoners.
Thinking outside the box for the US and Israel will begin only when Israel’s army is renamed from Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
Martin Luther King believed justice is indivisible; it is a unified concept and cannot be divided into separate parts. For that reason, Palestine cannot be partitioned.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
Note: First published on Medium.
