By Brij Khindaria
GENEVA, Switzerland — CIA Director Bill Burns may travel in coming days to revive truce talks on Gaza after a three-week pause but beleaguered Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s “absolute victory” over Hamas’s barbaric terrorism is continuing to slip away.
Importantly, Netanyahu has begun to lose political acceptance by most of the world nations of Israel’s military methods of exercising its inalienable right to self-defense. More so, because it is oppressing Palestinians beyond its United Nations-approved borders in areas that the UN and almost all countries see as occupied territories.
Following Burns’ talks with Israelis and Qataris late last week, full negotiations may happen this week including Egyptians and Hamas to halt the Gaza war temporarily and create conditions for freeing the hostages.
Even if he succeeds, Burns faces bigger challenges since Netanyahu must, above all, ensure that a terrorist outrage inside Israel will never again happen. That requires not only the definitive end of Hamas but also all potential terrorism against Israel from Gaza and the West Bank.
Even if the IDF succeeds in thoroughly destroying Hamas’s military capacities this year, a central problem will remain since Israel is losing sympathy among the world’s non-European countries which are by far the majority of the UN’s 193 member States.
They recognize that Israel has genuine existential imperatives but have turned cold because of the immense suffering its heavily armed IDF is causing to Gaza’s civilian children, women and men.
Unlike most Europeans, the billions of people in those countries do not have a history of contact with Jews and their millennia-long oppression in the West culminating in the Holocaust. They are finding it hard to accept that Jews, with so many Nobel laureates and profound culture, had to destroy the entire habitat of some 2.3 million Muslims to track and kill 30,000 terrorists.
President Joe Biden may also find it harder to rebuild steadfast trust in non-European countries because of his unstinting supply of weapons that Israel has used against Gaza’s civilians.
Yet, he desperately needs their trust to confront global security threats from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Israel also needs to regain trust to have friends in the family of nations.
This war was Israel’s response to the heinous attack on October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists killed nearly 1,200 innocent Israelis and abducted about 245. Some 130 of those hostages are still captive in Gaza but 33 are thought to be dead.
Even Biden, Israel’s only genuine ally, may have to be more cautious if the war continues for another 6-12 months. The US will have trouble sustaining the cost of its huge support efforts while also providing more aid for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and deterring China from further coercion against Taiwan.
A major problem for Israel is that people everywhere are witnessing in real time a Western Jewish country allied to the US and with kinship to most European nations transforming a narrow strip of territory crowded with non-Europeans into an uninhabitable wasteland littered with thousands of unexploded bombs.
Important US allies, including France, Belgium and Spain, are backing the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. And Norway, Ireland and Spain have decided to recognize statehood for Palestine despite Netanyahu’s rage.
Israel’s isolation is underlined by the very large majority of 143 countries in the UN General Assembly that affirmed Palestine’s eligibility for UN membership as a State despite a Biden veto in the Security Council.
This does not augur well for Israel’s desired “absolute victory.” Its main unconditional supporters, the US and Germany, are embroiled in a proxy war of attrition together with European allies against Russia in Ukraine. Russia is a quasi-military ally of China, which is an overt military rival of the US.
Russia and China, both formidable nuclear powers, are tightening military ties with Iran, a threshold nuclear power and leading supplier of lethal weapons for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
A resolute enemy of Israel, Iran is a major producer of short-range armed drones, precision missiles, mines, explosive devices and small arms that it supplies to anti-Israel proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq.
Moving forward, it may be impossible to suppress covert weapon supplies to anti-Israel terrorists from the anti-US axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, thus prolonging denial of peace and security to Israelis.
The China-led axis will use any means to keep America entangled in Israel and make the suffering of Palestinians a tool to pry non-Western countries away from Washington’s global leadership.