Security myths

Time after time, resisting Palestinians have made a mockery of Israel’s security myths. The resistance in Gaza has exponentially grown in its capabilities, whether in preventing the Israeli army from entering and holding positions in the Gaza Strip or its ability to strike back at Israeli towns and cities. Israel’s effectiveness in winning wars and keeping its gains has been greatly hampered in Gaza, as Israel’s efforts have also been repeatedly thwarted in Lebanon in the last two decades.

Even the iron dome – an ‘iron wall’ of a different kind – proved to be a failure in terms of its ability to intercept crudely-made Palestinian rockets, with Professor Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) arguing that the success rate of the dome was ‘drastically lower’ than what the Israeli government and army have reported.

Even the Israeli ‘villa’ was compromised from the inside, as the popular Palestinian uprising of May 2021 has demonstrated that Israel’s native Palestinian Arab population remains an organic part of the Palestinian whole. The violence, at the hands of the police and rightwing militants, that many Arab communities inside Israel have endured for taking a moral stance in support of their brethren in occupied Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, indicated that the supposed ‘harmony’ within Barak’s ‘villa’ was a construct that shattered within a few days.

Still, Israel refuses to accept what otherwise should have been obvious and inevitable – that a country’s existence which is sustained through walls and military force, will never be able to find true peace and will continue to suffer the consequences of the violence it inflicts on others.

A public letter issued by the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Aviv Kohavi, on September 4, in response to the widespread criticism over the killing of the Israeli sniper, further highlighted one of Israel’s major national fault lines. “The readiness to sustain loss of life is crucial to national resilience, and that resilience is vital to the continuation of our very existence,” Kohavi wrote, an assertion that sounded alarm bells throughout the country, leading to a political controversy.

This controversy was compounded with the news of six Palestinian prisoners escaping Israel’s most secured Gilboa prison on September 6. While Palestinians celebrated the daring escape, Israel plunged into yet another major ‘security’ crisis. This single act by Palestinian freedom fighters seeking an escape from the Israeli gulag that lacks the minimal requirements of justice or the rule of law, was treated in Israeli media as if the very collapse of the security state. Even the recapture of some of the prisoners hardly altered this reality.

Israel’s iron walls are falling apart at the seams and the fortress is crumbling, not only because Palestinians never ceased resisting, but also because the militaristic mindset through which Israel was conceived, constructed and sustained was a failure from the very start.

Excerpted: ‘From the ‘Iron Wall’ to the ‘Villa in the Jungle’: Palestinians Demolish Israel’s

Security Myths’

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