In candid video statements, Danny Ayalon, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., has asserted that Israel will obliterate Hamas regardless of the Palestinian civilian death toll or Gaza’s devastation. In an interview with senior Indian journalist Karan Thapar for The Wire.in website, Ayalon, who has also served as Israel’s deputy foreign minister, says that “the (death toll) numbers are irrelevant to our aim of war”, while also insisting that Hamas, not Israel, should be blamed for the toll.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1lszSfhgKg&ab_channel=TheWire
Debates on who is to blame will not alter the reality for relatives who may survive the contemplated destruction of Hamas and Gaza, or for those in Israel whose loved ones were killed or taken hostage on 7 October.
When, during the interview, Thapar spoke of demonstrations in the U.S. and the U.K. demanding a ceasefire, Ayalon dismissed them, claiming that only Muslims participated. All who’ve seen the demonstrations with their eyes or on a news channel know this to be untrue. Thapar pointed out to Ayalon that in the U.S. many Jews are among the large number of non-Muslims demanding a halt to the indiscriminate bombardment in Gaza.
Horror at the continuing bombardment is in fact pretty universal. Many if not most of the 120 nations whose votes on 26 October caused the UN General Assembly to call for an “immediate and sustained humanitarian truce” in Gaza do not have Muslim majorities. Nor do all those 120 countries belong to Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. European France, for instance, also voted for a ceasefire.
Even if only Muslims were to ask for a ceasefire, would that make obliteration or ethnic cleansing in Gaza acceptable? Are the world’s Muslims to be turned into the 21st-century equivalent of Europe’s Jews of the 1930s, whose silencing was accepted at the time by much of Europe and the U.S.? “Only Black slaves protested” or “Only the untouchables were unhappy” – or “Only Muslims are troubled” – is a feeble argument in today’s world.
Ayalon also told Thapar that the whirlwind tour that Anthony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, has just made of Israel, Iraq, Jordan, the Palestinian “West Bank” territory, and Turkey was successful because Hezbollah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon, has been dissuaded (presumably by threats of consequences) from aiding Hamas in its conflict with the Israel. The Israeli diplomat also expressed his reliance on Sunni-Shia rivalries and on what he sees as the Sunni dislike of Shiite Iran, Hamas’s most vocal regional ally.
But will Shia-Sunni differences, and the competitive politics of the Middle East’s Muslim nations, outweigh the world’s shock at the scale of Israel’s reprisal after 7 October? Will they offset the world’s alarm at Israel’s apparent willingness to go to any lengths to respond to the condemnable cruelties of Hamas’s intruders of 7 October -- and to the blow to Israeli pride from Hamas’s success on 7 October in eluding Israel’s supposedly foolproof defences?
Moreover, will Shia-Sunni dislike and rivalry between Muslim states survive the elimination, expulsion, or silencing of significant numbers of Gaza’s two million suffering men, women, and children?
In his interview with Thapar, Ayalon seemed to suggest that just as the world accepted in the 1940s the destruction of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, it will today accept a wholesale destruction of Gaza.
This may prove to be a highly questionable assumption in November 2023.
We should recognize the recklessness, not to say insanity, that exists today. After Israel’s minister for heritage, Amichai Eliyahu, suggested (5 Nov.) that nuking Gaza was “one option”, it appears that while Premier Netanyahu suspended the minister from cabinet meetings, he declined to remove Emiyahu from office.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-771766
As Israeli air strikes intensify, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has warned that Gaza is becoming a "graveyard for children". Asking for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, Guterres has also condemned Hamas’s use of civilians including children as human shields and demanded the release of hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R_rYqdaL3c&ab_channel=SkyNews
As of now the thinking of the common people of the world appears to be in advance of what is on the minds of rulers. The people are more likely to agree that humanity is one, that every human is entitled to dignity, that cruelty against the helpless is a gross offence, and that no group, race, community, or nation should seek to humiliate, subjugate, suppress, injure, destroy, or expel another group, race, community, or nation.
The people of the world may also agree that (like Israelis, Americans, Germans, the French, the Brits, Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese, Nigerians, Brazilians, and others) Palestinians too, whether they live in the West Bank, Gaza, or elsewhere, are entitled to an independent and secure state of adequate size which they themselves govern, and which is not sliced into numerous parts.
Life and dignity are precious not only to every Israeli, they are precious to every Palestinian.
Who will bring these truths home to a region that gave birth to Judaism, Christianity and Islam?