HAVANA, Cuba.- On Monday of this week (which is October 7) marks one year of the attack carried out by Hamas terrorists against the State of Israel. This is an infamous anniversary (if there ever was one).
But, to make a analysis more objective and comprehensive, it is appropriate that, when addressing this issue, we begin with a reference to the existing situation in that area of the turbulent Near East a day before: October 6, 2023.
Already in that contextThe first thing that should be noted is that, on that date, peace reigned in relations between the Hebrew nation and its neighbors. It can be argued that this was not a fully just peace; that the rights of the Palestinian people to have their own independent State had not received adequate recognition or been reflected in reality.
It can also be argued that some of the blame for the existence of that situation can be attributed to the Israeli governments; in particular to those of which fundamentalist parties are part, as is the case of the current one, chaired by Benjamin Netanyahu. But if we accept this approach, then, in order not to be unfair, we must also recognize that not all of these blames fall on the hebrew side.
We already know the popular Cuban saying: “The room next door is for rent.” And in placing responsibilities for the lack of progress in the solution of the historic confrontation between Israel and its neighbors, the responsibilities that correspond to the Arab leadership (in particular, to the PLO or Organization for the Liberation of Israel) are not small. Palestine).
We can go back to the final decade of the last century, to the time when the leadership of the PLO was still exercised by Yasser Arafat. In Tel-Aviv, the Premiership was held by Yitzhak Rabin, a former Army Chief and excellent soldier who, however, staked his political destiny on a war of a very different nature: what he himself called “the war for peace.” .
The generous concessions that Rabin was willing to make, or the more limited ones that (after his assassination by a Jewish arch-conservative in 1995) his successor Ehud Barak was willing to grant, were rejected by Arafat.
The controversial leader Palestinian acted, in that matter, in a manner similar to that adopted by the Castro-communist leaders of the day: If the Vietnamese, after having suffered millions of deaths in a devastating war with the United States, managed to normalize relations with their archenemies of yesteryear, the Havana leaders have chosen the opposite. In this way today, after sixty years, they continue to present themselves to their people and the world as victims of a supposed “blockade” with which they try to justify all the disasters caused by the ruinous socialist system.
Something similar, I insist, happened with Arafat and his successors in the Palestinian leadership: they preferred to continue presenting themselves as victims of intolerance. Israeli rather than reaching an agreement that, through mutual concessions, would allow progress towards the desirable normalization of relations between the two neighboring peoples and the recognition of the independent Palestinian State.
It is the case that peace, even imperfect and even unjust, is preferable to a war conflict, with the deaths and destruction that are inherent to it. And it is necessary to make it very clear that it was the Palestinian authorities in Gaza (to be exact, the Hamas terrorists, who have established their absolute power in that strip of territory) who put an end to the precarious peace and began the current period of hostilities.
This should be made very clear, because the sworn adversaries of the West, of freedom and democracy, close their eyes to the aggression perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 of last year. This is what, for example, Yeilén Delgado Calvo writes in the newspaper Granma: “It seems that Gaza, a year after this brutal escalation of Zionist extermination against the Palestinian people began, the rest of humanity continues to see it out of focus.”
Not a single word about the aggression of Hamas that started it all. And it is necessary that this essential aspect of the facts be remembered, that it be internalized. So that public opinion is aware of the incredible degree of cruelty with which the terrorists acted, who did not hesitate to murder more than a thousand civilians (many of them burned alive) and who charged towards their hideouts in the Gaza Strip, with hundreds of hostages whom they continue to subject to abuse of all kinds, and whom they use as human shields against possible retaliation from the Israelis.
It is also important that we keep in mind that Israel It is the only democratic State that exists in the turbulent region. Even in the midst of the current hostilities, demonstrations in which citizens of that country openly express their disagreement with the policies of the Netanyahu government are not uncommon. This is something that is unthinkable in its neighboring territories; especially in the Gaza Strip, subject to the fierce dictatorship established by Hamas. Let us hope that in the future some way will be opened to achieve the cessation of hostilities and the return of the Israeli hostages to their homes.
