Gaza cease-fire exposes fragility of the West; Erdogan-led Turkey loses respect

Given the track record of the United States-led Israel one cannot predict that the temporary cease-fire with Hamas, and even for that matter, Hezbollah will last long. Yet what will remain ingrained in the popular imagination of the global citizenry is the resistance of the Palestinians, who enjoyed the support of two other non-state actors.

The international media address all of them—Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansarallah (Houthis)–as proxies of Iran, whose role itself, for now, has been marginalized after the developments in Syria in the first week of December 2024, which led to the overthrow of its brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

There is near unanimity among the independent military experts that Israel did not achieve the objective of eliminating these three militant groups, especially Hamas, though the Zionist state suffered thousands of casualties and lost hundreds of tanks, armoured cars and other weapons.

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Houthis still at war

Houthis
Houthis


Though Gaza was decimated so was South Lebanon, yet it is also a fact that never in any war in the last 77 years of its existence Israel was so much militarily, materially and industrially devastated. The far-off Houthis, however, are still successfully firing missiles deep into Israel almost every day. Not only that, they have virtually blocked all the vessels of the Western allies and Israel from entering the Red Sea. Yemenis continue to target US warships and even aircraft carriers.

The fact is that Shia Iran kept the resistance of Palestinian fighters (who are overwhelmingly Sunnis) alive for so many years. Isn’t it a fact that Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, was killed in Tehran on July 31 when he went to attend the oath-taking ceremony of its new President?

The Sunni world had already left the Palestinians in the lurch long back. Turkey, which tries to boast itself as the leader of the Muslims across the planet, allowed the shipping of Azerbaijani oil to Israel throughout the 15 months of butchery by the Zionist state in Gaza and South Lebanon. Oil-rich Shia-dominated Azerbaijan is the best friend of Sunni Turkey in the region. The oil is sent through the pipeline to the coast of Turkey.

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Iran may have committed strategic mistakes and all the actions of Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis cannot be approved, yet it is a fact that they did not betray the objective and forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept such a humiliating cease-fire with those whom he vowed to wipe out.

If the Western media reports are to be believed all this was possible because of the direct pressure on Netanyahu from none else but US President-elect, Donald Trump. This fact confirms the truth
that the outgoing President Joe Biden was leading the war in the Levant, and Netanyahu was just a tool that was used for the larger interest of Western imperialists. This has been going on ever since
19th century when the United Kingdom, France, and later America, planned a new state carved out from the Ottoman Empire. They exploited the European Jews, who were facing untold miseries, as cannon fodder to achieve this purpose.

New scope for Iran


Notwithstanding the temporary setback to Iran, the fact is that its close economic and military ties with China and Russia have come as a big challenge to the West. China, which had in 2023 imported 150
million barrels of oil from the US and was its second highest importer, has now decided to stop buying fossil fuel from Washington. Beijing will now import oil from Iran, Russia and Venezuela, all three countries on the hit list of the American Deep State. But if the entire might of the United States, its Western allies and Israel could not finish off a few thousand fighters of Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansarallah will they ever dare to directly attack Iran?

This Chinese move has come as a big blow to the US which has been imposing tariffs on its goods.

The US wants Europe to rely less on Russian oil and buy more from it. This is causing a rift within the West. Russian pipelines going to Europe through Ukraine have been closed, though the latter had to suffer economically. The Russia-Germany pipeline was reportedly blown up by the CIA in the initial months of war with Ukraine.

The new Trump administration has its formula to get out of the Middle East and Black Sea mess.

Changing scenario


History has its strange way. In the last 16 months, the whole scenario in West Asia has changed drastically. A month after the idea of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor was mooted at the G-20 Summit in New Delhi on September 9, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Soon Hezbollah and then Ansarallah joined the war.

Ever since the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent exit of Americans from Iraq the Iranians have been using the Iraq-Syria-Lebanon corridor to send arms to Hezbollah and also Hamas. For this the regime in Tehran–fully knowing the tyranny of Bashar al-Assad–did not antagonize him. As the objective was certainly to fight the bigger enemy Israel and the United States, the rulers in
Iran ignored some of the ground realities in Syria. This gave the West and its Muslim allies in the region an opportunity to launch baseless and false propaganda that Bashar was surviving only with the support of the Islamic Republic. The fact was that it was Russia with which Syria had old military ties since the days of the Soviet Union. It still has its bases in Syria and the new regime led by Ahmed al-Sharaa did not want to disturb Russians. The Iranians only got involved during the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, initially said to be an American creation. Now Iran is approaching the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led government to allow it to use the corridor to help its allies. But there appears to be less chance of Iran getting this permission as the regime in Syria is strongly controlled by the West as well as Turkey.

Difficult to predict


It is not easy to foretell what will happen shortly to Gaza yet the fact remains that in private Muslims across the world—90 percent of them Sunnis—have given credit to Iran so far lending support to the cause of Hamas concerned. It is the ruling class of these Muslim countries who are dancing to the tune of the West. Given the choice between Israel and Iran, these tinpot dictators and monarchs of the region would opt for friendship with the former.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have temporarily won in Syria, but his image has been tarnished . This has largely been because he chose to side with the West at such a crucial juncture, when the US-led Israel was losing on all fronts.

No, nobody is shedding any tears for the exit of Bashar even in Iran now. Articles have started appearing in the Iranian media as to how Bashar did not lend his ears to the advice from Iran to talk to rebels. Rather, he was more assured of help from Russia, which too gave up.

Had Erdogan not been a party with the West in the regime change in Damascus at this point in time he would not have been singled out for criticism. He was not much concerned over the genocide in Gaza but was more involved in Ukraine-Russia theatre. He offered only occasional lip service to the Palestinian cause.

Another paradox


A similar paradox can be traced a century back, when Ottoman Turks, unlike now, were on the other side of the fence. No, the anti-imperialist forces supported the Ottomans not out of love for them. They got support even from Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, which launched the Khilafat Movement in the early 1920s because the British played a dirty game.

The British and French instigated and fully supported the Arabs to stage a revolt against the Ottomans in Hejaz, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Palestine just a few months after the Allied forces suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Turkish army in Gallipoli in 1915.

It was not that the grievances of Arabs against the ruling Turks (like against Bashar in Syria now) were not genuine. Still, it was because of the timing of the revolt and the help they sought from the British and French that today hardly anyone appreciates their position.

Those in India or elsewhere in the world, who launched a movement favouring Khilafat, were well aware that it cannot be saved from extinction. Yet they wanted to expose the hypocrisy of the
British and French colonialists, who left behind a state called Israel—the fountain-head of all the problems.

More than 108 years later, Arabs are still blamed for joining hands with Lawrence of Arabia, a British spy whose role in the disintegration of the last Muslim empire is enormous. The Arabs would have earned a lot of goodwill had they struggled against the Turks on their own much later, not at the time when the Allied armies were on the verge of collapse.

Decades down memory lane, the heroic struggle and sacrifices of Gazans, and the support they got from Iran, Hezbollah and Ansarallah would go down in history. And the betrayal of fellow Sunni Arab States will also not be forgotten. The irony is that the Turks have not learnt any lessons from the past.

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