The violence in Palestine has somehow ended after ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. When a country armed with land, sea and air weapons agrees to a ceasefire with a resistance organization, it can be called nothing but defeat.
It is a defeat that has befallen Israel militarily as well as on all the non-military fronts that help nations win wars. For example, the law front, the morality front, the political front, the media front, and the global public opinion front. This is the first time in history that Israel has been defeated on all these fronts.
If we take a brief look at this general defeat, it is clear that Israel was fully confident on its Iron Dome – an air defense system designed to block projectiles launched by nearby enemies. Israeli citizens were assured by their government that the Iron Dome would provide them with complete protection.
But the cracks in the dome have now robbed every Israeli citizen of a sense of security. Militarily, it doesn’t matter how many rockets the iron dome intercepts and how many reach their targets. Because it was not a battle between two regular armies, but a battle between an elephant and an ant.
Significantly, this whole multi-billion dollar project was broken not in the form of technology but in the form of “simplicity”. As a result, the superiority of technology is once again embarrassed. The other thing to consider militarily is that Israel did not dare to use ground forces this time.
Three days into the situation, international analysts said that the insurgents’ strategy seems to be to persuade Israel to send ground troops, and that if the troops enter Gaza, the situation would be dire. So even in this regard, the military and psychological superiority were not with Israel but with the Palestinians.
If we look at the casualties and their effects, Israel’s eleven deaths seem to outweigh the Palestinians. However, its tyranny has been exposed to world public opinion. And in demonstrations in almost every major and minor capital of the world, the voices were raised for not eleven Israelis, but for about two and a half hundred Palestinian martyrs.
Another major defeat for Israel was on the social media front. There are two sides to this defeat. The first is that the Israeli atrocities that the world media has always been covering, this time was brought by “citizen journalists” to the world through social media. And citizen journalism played a key role in awakening global public opinion.
Another important aspect of Israel’s defeat on the social media front is that many Jewish social media activists and journalists in the United States also spoke in support of Palestine, which gained worldwide fame overnight. And now they are being interviewed on the mainstream media. And the same thing defeated Israel on the moral front.
The impact of the defeat on social media can be gauged from the 11-minute interview that CNN took from Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. He used the phrase “Israel is losing the media war despite its connections” at the beginning of the interview.
For the next ten minutes, CNN female anchor was tired of trying to persuade Shah Mehmood by convincing him of “anti-Semitism”. This clip of Qureshi’s interview has been uploaded by the Tel Aviv newspaper Jewish Chronicle on its YouTube channel with the title of anti-Semitism. However, 99% of comments on it are based on the support of Qureshi.
Israel has suffered the most significant defeat on the political front during the recent aggression. And the biggest indication of this is that very influential members of the US Congress are calling on their government to stop military aid to Israel because the country is using it for serious human rights violations.
Unlike in the past, international analysts with a keen interest in Middle East politics see the move to force Israel to an early ceasefire as a significant shift in US policy. Senior US analysts are reporting that President Joe Biden has asked Netanyahu to call a ceasefire immediately because global pressure is becoming unbearable for him. They can’t ignore it.
Similarly, another major political defeat for Israel this time is that the Palestinian issue has now become a humanitarian issue rather than a “Muslim issue.” As long as this issue was only for Muslims, it was very easy for Israel to win the political sympathy of the West. But as a result of the humanitarian crisis, support for the Palestinians has increased exponentially, but Israel has gained nothing but a deficit.
Last but not least, a major defeat for Israel itself is that whenever Israeli atrocities were criticized, Israel painted them as “anti-Semitic.” But this time, American Jews themselves have posted on social media that it is wrong to paint criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. Judaism is one thing and Israel is another.
And the debate has now shifted from social media to mainstream media, where the same opinion is being strongly voiced. The world scene of the last ten to fifteen days is a clear indication that the days to come will prove to be more difficult for Israel.
It will now face a global political resistance to Palestine that would make it even more difficult for it to maintain its previous stance. And there is no doubt that its effects will extend to Kashmir as well. Thus, this defeat will prove to be an extraordinary defeat. A defeat whose effects will be far-reaching.
