Events, comments on the situation in the Middle East (source: ČT24)
“The intentions of Bibi Netanyahu are not clear even to the Israelis,” said musician Jordan Haj about the Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip and the subsequent plans of the prime minister of the Jewish state. In the artists’ debate about the situation in the Middle East, film director and producer Václav Marhoul admitted that the real situation in the region is unclear to him, but Israel’s goals are clear. They talked about the issue of the conflict in the program Events, comments.
At the beginning of the debate, Haj stated that the seventh of October shook him. The Israeli army was not in Gaza that day, nor for the following days, indeed weeks. “At the time, I was in utter shock at what had happened. I gradually learned which people I knew through classmates, we lost,” he describes. “I found out that my classmate’s brother died right at that techno party.”
The artist has ancestors in Israel, his father was an Israeli Arab, but Jordan Haj went to a Jewish school and spent his adolescence in Israel.
From his point of view, the Czech-Israeli says that there is no clear equation between the action and victims that the Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip brings, and between the “tremendous humanitarian crisis” in the region. “That there’s some direct equation between what’s going on there, how that action is going, and that it would lead to both the release of the kidnapped people and a real dismantling of the functioning of Hamas in Gaza.”
In Israel, the issue is said to be the agenda that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has prepared for the moment when the war ends. “I often get the answer – ‘let them release the hostages.’ Nowhere, no one in Israel said that the army would leave the Strip when the hostages were released. She is not there because of the hostages, there is a regular operation, which has several tasks, quite clear,” he pointed out.
Marhoul believes that the situation in the Gaza Strip is “completely clear and legible”. “Israel’s goal is clearly defined, Israel is somehow realizing it, and it is the destruction of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the release of the hostages,” he judges. According to him, the only thing that has become unclear is the real situation in the area.
He also mentioned the February petition of several Czech personalities. This is supposed to support the position of the domestic government, which Israel supports. Among its signatories are psychoanalyst Martin Mahler, columnist Pavel Kosatík and Marhoul. With this activity, personalities react to an anti-Israel petition, passages of which the director perceives as untrue.
For the anti-Israel petition, Marhoul criticized “juggling with numbers”. “The second paragraph talks about thirty thousand victims, in the fifth it is forty thousand victims, without the authors or signatories thinking that there is a little difference between thirty and forty,” he said.
Haj says he has yet to come across a petition that “has an amazing plan for the Israeli government to do now.” “Bibi Netanyahu’s intentions are not clear even to the Israelis,” he claims. The de-escalation of the situation or the “neutralization of Hamas” is not clear either, which he says is an abstract concept. “Hamas is from the employer of the girls who work in the kindergarten, to the pharmacist, to the person who builds the traffic lights. This is actually Hamas in the territory of Palestine,” he says.
Nevertheless, he believes that the terrorists are neutralized to the maximum extent that it can be. “With how much of a leaky network it is, I don’t think it’s possible to do much more than that.”
