Experts and analysts have agreed that the petition of Israeli reserve officers in the Air Force represents a change in the Israeli internal position towards the continuation of the war on the Gaza Strip and reflects a refraction of the consensus which prevailed at the start of the war.
Yesterday, Thursday, the Israeli chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, believed the decision to separate senior leaders and approximately a thousand reserve soldiers of the service, after having signed the calling message at the end of the Gaza War, describing this to the dangerous question.
Convert
According to Israeli political researcher Yahawaf Stern, the petition signed by about a thousand soldiers from the Israeli Air Force said that the time had come to conclude a prisoner exchange agreement with the Islamic resistance movement (Hamas).
Stern added – during the “Path of Events” program – that everyone in Israel understands that it is useless to continue this war, even if more Hamas leaders were murdered, because Israel has lost strategic results in this war.
And he agreed with him, an Israeli business expert Muhannad Mustafa, noting that the consensus which was in October 2023 was broken after the temporary cease-fire, stressing that the consensus is now in Israel to restore Israeli Gaza prisoners.
Mustafa explained that it is not a secondary question for Israeli society, but rather a problem that determines the identity and the relationship of the State with its citizens, and determines the social contract between them.
The Minister of Defense, Yisrael Katz, firmly rejected the message of the members of the reserve with the Air Force, considering that it is an “attempt to touch the legitimacy of the war which he described as just”, as he claimed.
Rejection extends
Stern said that the protest movement is largely taken in the light of the conversation on other petitions prepared in Israeli intelligence and others.
He added that this government is working to continue the war for close internal and political reasons, without there being a strategic objective.
As for Mustafa, he warned that this petition presents itself in a broader context, because the Israeli government takes advantage of the war in order to provoke judicial and constitutional changes in Israel, weaken political institutions and give more power to executive authority.
Stern said that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is continuing this war, noting that the two ministers, Etamar Bin Ghafir and Bamliel Smotrich in months ago, would be withdrawn from the government if Netanyahu did not continue the war.
After the emergence of the petition, the newspaper “Yediot Aharonot” reported that 550 Israeli doctors had also published a statement in which they considered that “the continuation of the war in Gaza serves political and personal interests”, a sentence that began to hesitate among the Israeli elite.
For his part, the professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Meyir Masri, considered that the petition was “without expression”, noting that 90% of the signatories are not at the service of reserves.
Stern replied that these soldiers and officers are authorized as citizens to hear their voices and tell the government that they must choose another course.
A historic precedent or a frequent diagram?
On the question of whether the petition represented a precedent in the history of Israel, Mustafa said that it was not a precedent, because there were petitions in the past for Israeli soldiers, including the pilot petition in 2003.
He added that the difference is that the number of pilots active in the air of this current petition is 60, while the number in 2003 was around 27, in reference to the presence of a double number of pilots who signed the last petition.
Mustafa stressed that Israeli history has witnessed the petitions of soldiers and officers for reasons which he described as a “conscience”, but the current petition opposes the Israeli government for various political reasons.
Western position transformations
Regarding the external context, Mustafa stressed that the extermination of the Gaza Strip a year and a half ago in practice has broken all Israeli cases on the moral that Israel was promoting in the world.
In this context, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that his country could recognize a Palestinian state next June, at an international conference on Palestine which will be chaired by France, in collaboration with Saudi Arabia, in New York.
Experts and analysts have considered that Macron’s recent declarations reflect a change in European positions towards the Palestinian issue and embarrassment with Israeli occupation policies.
According to the writer and researcher on international affairs, Hossam Shaker, Macron’s statements came to express their support for the maintenance of the Palestinian problem as a subject on the table with a specific horizon, and in response to pressure on the French street which rejects massacres and climbs every weekend.
Shaker stressed that there was an embarrassment on the European side of the tendencies of Israeli determination and the return to war.
The development of French discourse
Shaker explained that everyone knows that the occupation project is now the project to end the Palestinian issue, and it is clearly identical to the American line at the time of President Donald Trump, who supports the possibility of liquidating the Palestinian issue according to the interests of the occupation.
He added that France has entered a different phase in terms of verbal discourse, in which he tries to say that he respects his vision and the project of the two countries, and that he aspires to resolve in the region, and will not be affected by the occupation stages on the ground, not even the declared American trends.
In turn, Mustafa saw that the recognition of a Palestinian state, even if it does not change much on the ground, is boring for Israel, because it again restores the Palestinian problem with the roof.
According to Mustafa, Israel is largely struggling with this phenomenon and accuses European governments of having anti-semitic tendencies because of its recognition of the state of Palestine.
Tension with Trump
Mustafa added that Israel is trying to expand the idea of anti-semitism to fear Europeans and countries to recognize the Palestinian state, as it was conceived as “a threat to the Zionist project and a threat to Israel”.
For his part, Hossam Shaker said that the main problem was to support each other to the Palestinian people, expressing their conviction that Paris is able to “stop the Gaza Genocide War if he pretended to be a single punishment”.
According to his opinion, the atmosphere of tension with Trump can help Europe to move forward, explaining that this position could not expect Macron if we were at the time of former American president Joe Biden, but there is a feeling today that the one who nourishes the occupation is “the traumatic approach”.
The Palestinian state officially recognizes around 150 countries out of 193 member states in the United Nations, and last May, Ireland, Spain, Norway and Slovenia recognized the Palestinian state.