The Israeli massacre of civilians sheltering in tents in Rafah, comes at the end of a week in which the Chief prosecutor of International Criminal Court applied for warrants of arrest of Israel’s top two leaders and the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to immediately halt its attack on Rafah and to allow aid to enter Gaza. The state that for decades has been accorded impunity by the West, as the “only democracy” in the Middle East and one sharing “our values”, now faces near certain indictment as a criminal state. It has been a long time coming.
Prior to October, the Israeli political class was confident that it had removed the Palestinian issue from international concern and was on the cusp of ending its diplomatic and economic rejection by most of the Arab world. It was looking to secure a series of US sponsored agreements with neighbouring countries, scripted as the Abraham Accords. As a first step, in September 2020, Israel agreed with UAE and Bahrain to normalize relations. By way of disguising that the kleptocrats of two Gulf states were colluding with the US-Israeli objective of undermining the previous collective Arab negotiating position (already weakened by Egypt’s and Jordan’s separate peace deals with Israel), the agreement included Israel halting its settlement expansion in the West Bank. Israel violated this commitment immediately and repeatedly but the big prize remained tantalizingly close: the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, enabling Saudi investment into Israel and, in turn, opening the lucrative Saudi market to Israel’s high-tech sector. “A momentous partnership, capable of elevating and stabilizing Israel’s status,” enthused The Times of Israel (24 May 2024). The plan was to end Israel’s regional isolation and make it the top cop of a pro-US regional military and economic bloc…
