Toufan al-Aqsa: what can iron do against the wind?

Fausto Giudice, Basta Yekfi !, 7/10/2023

At 3:30 a.m. GMT, at dawn on the Sabbath, Palestinian fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched an all-out attack on Israel from Gaza: while hundreds (between 2,000 and 5,000) of rockets rained down on Zionist settlements, motorized fighters forced their way through the "iron wall" encircling Gaza, others forced their way through the sea barrier and still others landed in Israel aboard motorized paragliders (ULM). According to the Israeli army, 60 Palestinian fighters entered the territory. Some 40 Israeli soldiers and settlers were taken prisoner in the first few minutes, while the number of dead and wounded on the Zionist side remains unknown. The operation has been dubbed "Toufan al-Aqsa", the flood or storm of Al Aqsa (toufan is the Arabic-Persian word that has entered every language, and is the origin of the English word "typhoon"; it is also the name of a series of Iranian missiles).

It's a historical truth: if you want to attack Israel, you have to do it on a Saturday morning, when the Jews are at rest. That's what the Egyptian and Syrian armies did on October 6, 1973, when they crossed the Suez Canal and entered the occupied Golan Heights. In 1973, it took the Zionists a week to wake up, stunned as they had been by the surprise attack, and go on the counter-offensive. Who won the Ramadan/Kippur war? That's up for debate. What is certain is that this war sounded the death knell for Israeli Labor, the Zionists with a human face, the Ashkenazi variant of Mitteleuropean social democracy. It also put an end to the "The Glorious Thirty" and triggered the first "oil crisis". Of the powerful images from this period, two stand out for me: that of European freeways completely empty of cars, and that of the Queen of the Netherlands bringing out her carriage and horses to get around. For the Arabs, '73 had almost erased the humiliation of '67. Ten wars later, where do we stand?

The Palestinians are more fragmented, divided, separated than ever, between four portions: Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem transformed into Bantustans besieged by soldiers and settlers, the Palestine of 1948 and the worldwide diaspora, from Lebanon to Chile. They have been definitively betrayed and abandoned by all the Arab states, fought by the USA and the European Union, bamboozled by the UN, and can now only count on Iran,  Qatar's petrodollars, the encouragement of Hezbollah and the intermittent solidarity of world opinion.

The Palestinian resistance has as many faces as the colors of the rainbow, but with a strong common background: the feeling and awareness of belonging to one and the same people. Each Palestinian family is a mini-parliament, and this is the anthropological underpinning of a future pluralist democracy. Once the main obstacle has been removed. An obstacle called Zionism.

The Israelis: a motley conglomerate that neither politics, nor economics, nor culture, nor even religion can hold together. Only war and its essential component: fear of the enemy. As we can see today, the army reservists who had proclaimed themselves to be fighting against the Zionist system's proposed legal overhaul immediately announced that they would be joining their units to confront the common enemy. No more Kaplan Street rallies. All united against Gaza, and forward to Operation Swords of Iron.

How long will this new war last? A week? A month? Nobody knows.

What is certain is that the fighters in Gaza will negotiate dearly for the release of their prisoners. With 4,900 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, a deal on the basis of "one for a hundred" would make sense.

Neither "iron swords", "iron walls" nor "iron domes" can stop the typhoon wind.