Had the dead of Majdal Shams been Jewish...

Had the dead of Majdal Shams been Jewish...

Gilbert Achcar

Imagine if the dead of Majdal Shams had been Jewish instead of Druze: all hell would have broken loose, not only in the State of Israel, but also among its allied governments, led by the US government, and in Western media in general. But Majdal Shams happens to be the largest of the agglomerations on the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied for 57 years. Local people insist on their Arab Syrian identity, refusing to be annexed to the Zionist state, as they clearly showed by demonstrating against the malicious visits to Majdal Shams by the neo-Nazi minister Bezalel Smotrich and some of his peers from the current government, all the way up to the neo-fascist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The locals accused all those unwanted visitors of being child killers and war criminals themselves, and of bearing full responsibility for Saturday’s massacre, regardless of the origin of the shell that caused it.

The Zionist government naturally strived to use the massacre in its propaganda drive aimed at portraying those it is fighting, whether Palestinians or Lebanese, as barbarians, and itself as being engaged in a “clash between civilization and barbarism” as Netanyahu put it in the idiotic speech that he delivered before the US Congress a week ago. This came during a session that will go down in history as an additional sign of the decadence of US institutions, a session during which a majority of the attending members of Congress stood up and sat down at a pace that made them look like participants in a collective aerobic exercise!

The White (and Blue) House rushed to condemn the Majdal Shams massacre, describing it as “horrific” and accusing Hezbollah of carrying it out. Washington’s official position in this case goes beyond the usual hypocrisy that leads it to mourn every Jewish child killed by fire coming from an Arab source while almost turning a blind eye to the 15,000 Palestinian children killed so far by Israel’s bombs, a major part of which Washington supplied to its ally. What goes beyond the usual hypocrisy this time is that Washington has shared the Zionist government’s treatment of the Golan Heights as if it were Israeli territory, while it is occupied Syrian territory according to international law and in the view of all countries of the world, except for the Zionist state and its US godfather.

Washington was in line with the international consensus since 1967 until Donald Trump, a close friend of the Zionist far right, came to power and decided to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan in March 2019. It is worth noting in this regard that the Biden administration decided to maintain this blatant violation of international law and support for Zionist expansionism. This position, along with Biden’s backtracking on the promises he made during his 2020 election campaign to reverse Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel and to move the US embassy there in line with this recognition, as well as Trump’s decision to close the Palestinian representative office in Washington, were foreboders of Washington’s subsequent collusion with the Zionist aggression on Gaza, and a first instalment offered by the “proud Irish-American Zionist” to the “proud Jewish Zionist”, as Netanyahu described Biden and himself in celebrating their “forty-year” friendship during their recent meeting in Washington.

The Arab identity of the natives of the Golan Heights (Zionist settlers have almost equalled them in number, which is what the Zionist far right is trying to achieve in the West Bank) and the clarity of the legal status of the plateau in the eyes of the entire world, except for Israel and the United States, these two characteristics made the Israeli condemnation of the Majdal Shams massacre too an unusually hypocritical condemnation, quite pale indeed compared to what would have happened had a similar massacre occurred against a group of young Jews, whether within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Israel or even among settlers in the Golan Heights.

It is therefore probable that Netanyahu will content himself with a painful but limited retaliatory strike targeting Hezbollah and that he won’t launch a comprehensive war against Lebanon, knowing full well that it would be more severe on the Israeli interior than the Zionist war on Gaza. The likely limitations of the upcoming strike were indicated by the abstention of the two neo-Nazi ministers, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, in the vote to authorize Netanyahu and War minister Galant to manage the retaliation, especially since Smotrich had called for seizing the opportunity of the Majdal Shams massacre to kill Hezbollah’s Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah.

The Zionist government will not launch a comprehensive attack on Hezbollah before ending its aggression on Gaza, and unless it secures unconditional US support in a confrontation that may well include Iran and turn into a regional war. In other words, the Zionist government will not launch a comprehensive war on Hezbollah unless Donald Trump wins the US elections next November. Otherwise, it will content itself with resorting to painful but limited strikes, which is what it has been doing since last October, and will limit its demands to what is consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 1701 adopted in the wake of the 33-day war in 2006, as it has done until now, knowing that it is the limit of what is internationally supported.

Translated from the Arabic original published in Al-Quds al-Arabi on 30 July 2024. This article was written before Israel's Beirut attack on the evening of the same day. Feel free to republish or publish in other languages, with mention of the source.