The thesis of “permanent revolution” was launched on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917-1918 by Leon Trotsky, a colleague of Lenin. He later disagreed with Stalin and went into exile, where he was assassinated in Mexico in 1940.
The “permanent revolution” was mentioned in parallel with the current rise of the “permanent war” thesis that is currently being promoted after the war between Israel and “Hamas” and the front supporting “Hamas” by the Iranian-backed militant organizations in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. The general impression in the Arab world and internationally is that the ongoing war was and still is a tragedy that is difficult to comprehend or endure its pains even for us, the viewers, so how about the residents of Gaza, who have been afflicted with tens of thousands of victims, wounded and disabled and a million or more residents of the Strip, who have been displaced from one side to another dozens of times during the ten months. In addition, there are one hundred thousand Lebanese who have left their homes in southern Lebanon, about six hundred dead, and about three thousand homes destroyed.
It is natural that after this brutal war there would be an Arab and international consensus on the necessity of stopping the war to save lives, treat the wounded, and bring food and medicine into the Strip. Ambitious and peace-loving people hope that the ceasefire will also be an opportunity to think about the future so that the war does not renew indefinitely. This requires moving towards resumed negotiations to establish an independent Palestinian state in accordance with international resolutions and the Arab Peace Project proposed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the Beirut Summit in 2002. However, radicalism brings or calls for radicalism. In contrast to the Israeli Prime Minister’s efforts to continue the war on “the seven fronts,” as he said, calls are escalating from Arab and Islamic radicals for permanent war as well.
In these absolute and categorical demands, which are increasingly relied upon by both parties on religious assumptions, there is no room for peace, but rather for permanent wars until one party exterminates the other! Strategists look at war from two different perspectives, one of which says that war is the end of politics, while the other says that war is the continuation of politics.
Neither view is absolute. It is true that when negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis became complicated, wars broke out more frequently, especially after Hamas’s separation from Gaza in 2007. However, the concept has always been that wars are pressures to return to negotiations and listen to the terms of peace. In the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Israelis gave up the ideology: from the Euphrates to the Nile, and the Palestinians gave up the thesis: from the river to the sea. The concept that two states are possible on the land of Palestine appeared. However, there is no doubt that the radicals, especially the Israelis, finally no longer accept the solution whose logic is to avoid excess and deficiency. This dead end is the result of denying the existence of the other human, political, and religious (!)
It actually means permanent war, most of whose victims are women, children and civilians in general. This is a strategy that no sane person would approve of because it means wars of extermination in the name of religion or land or both, which would destroy the region, its infrastructure and its people. The Palestinians are an oppressed people, and the division between Fatah and Hamas has increased the inability to achieve a unified national will. We were optimistic when the two parties went to Beijing a few weeks ago and agreed on a national path based on working together to establish a national state on the 1967 borders.
Every day it gets harder, but permanent war is not a solution. The radicalism of ideology is now being witnessed by Israelis, who are taking them out of the world of human life, something we have witnessed before in the name of Arabism or Islam. It is not in the interest of the Palestinians or the region to repeat the delusions of ideology.
*Professor of Islamic Studies – Mohammed bin Zayed University for Humanities.
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