“If You Blow on a Fire It Will Light — But You Blow on the Ashes”

- The Palestinian people will heal their wounds and will attain their freedom and independence by their struggle and with the support of their base among the Arab peoples, the Islamic peoples, and the peoples of friendly countries of the world... and they will remain defenders of themselves and their nation, no matter how much the official Arab system lets them down.

* It is clear that the assassination incident of the Deputy Head of the Islamic Resistance Movement "Hamas," Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri, in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital, in Beirut, in the first days of the new year... which was painful, ... confirms, as with previous assassinations in other places, that the Mossad apparatus, primarily, and according to expectations and the sequence of events, enjoys an auxiliary presence, with eyes and ears... recruited on its behalf from residents on the ground in the country where the target was located. I believe that military technology alone is not sufficient to ensure precise surveillance of the place, movement, and timing of the target from a distance, since the human element, whether individuals, or groups, or organizations, or local security agencies, is important and vital and indispensable... whereas we do not see that any Arab or Islamic state has managed to recruit Israelis on its behalf... except for a very small amount.!

- Israel, primarily through the Mossad, and within an Israeli policy from the highest levels, moved to distance the Palestinian people and their leadership from carrying out the tasks of struggle against Israel. In the past the hand of the Mossad reached by assassinating Palestinian leaders in Europe and elsewhere in the world. In the distant past, for example, a Zionist terrorist group planted explosive devices in the cars of the mayors of Nablus, Ramallah, and al-Bireh; two of them exploded, which led to the amputation of the legs of Bassam Shaka’a (Mayor of Nablus) and the leg of Karim Khalaf (Mayor of Ramallah), while Ibrahim al-Tawil survived on 2 June 1980. This was one of Israel and its agencies’ attempts to remove the Palestinian national leadership from leading the struggle of the Palestinian people under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Events followed... and then the First Palestinian Intifada occurred in 1987, which detonated the Palestinian struggle with stones and civil disobedience. Israel assassinated the Palestinian leader, the martyr Khalil al-Wazir Abu Jihad, in 1988, who had founded the First Palestinian Intifada, which was powerful and had Palestinian mass support, terrifying and besieging the Israelis in front of world public opinion in an astonishing way! The occupation’s concern was to assassinate the head, or the heads, orchestrating this Palestinian Intifada in order to eliminate it—according to their belief—so the martyr Abu Jihad was assassinated in Tunis, where the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was located... in an operation drawn up by Israel with the aim of clipping the wing of the Palestinian resistance represented by the First Intifada... Years passed... Palestinian leaders were assassinated during those years of struggle, whether military Palestinian leaders, or diplomatic, intellectual, or scientific Palestinian leaders, and others, in Europe. The latest of these assassinations of resistance leaders occurred a few days ago, in the first days of this new year 2024, as we noted earlier, Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri was assassinated, along with a number of commanders of the al-Qassam Brigades and some of his cadres. Such an operation aimed to eliminate the momentum of the Palestinian resistance, this resistance... which remains progressing strongly, especially after Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023!

- Palestinians—women, children, and the elderly—in Gaza cry out for help from their Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters: "Where are you, Arabs?" "Where are you, Muslims?"... Our hearts break in pain upon hearing this plea...! The Arabs are engaged from first to last, each in his own way, as if they are hostile brothers... with their silence and their refusal to take any action that would express a serious and sincere intention to stop the firing and open the Rafah Arab-Sovereignty Crossing to allow aid to flow to the Gaza Strip, where life has been obliterated... This silence violates all the rules and principles on which generations have been raised in the Arab homeland—that Arabs and Muslims are the children of one nation. Even the ministerial committee emanating from the Arab-Islamic summit conference, which was belatedly held in Riyadh on 11/11/2023 (35 days after the outbreak of the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip), we did not hear what this committee achieved in terms of stopping the genocide, the starvation, the killing, and the destruction... nothing... Indeed, one member of this ministerial committee, the Palestinian Foreign Minister, was prevented from speaking to the press and media on the pretext that the visa of the Palestinian Foreign Minister issued by the American authorities does not entitle him to speak to the press!! And he remained, in our view, prohibited despite the American authorities denying that...! ... Rights were lost and their pursuit forgotten over time, and attention jumped to the stage after the end of the war!

- 2024 is a new year, and the war of extermination, being waged by the Nazi Israeli occupation army, has been ongoing for more than three months...against the lives of civilians—women, children, and the elderly—and against what pertains to their lives: food, drink, and shelter. And starving them...even to the point of burying the wounded alive with bulldozers....where more than 30 thousand martyrs were exterminated, above ground, in buildings, and under the rubble..resulting from the destruction and leveling of homes to the ground, and more than 60 thousand wounded.. Children, women, and the elderly died before our eyes, as we followed the events on television screens

- One might say, hinting from another side, that the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), which is one of the targets of the Israeli occupation army that has been annihilating everything for more than 3 months, does not maintain friendly ties with some Arab and Islamic countries. Rather, it is listed on the international terrorism list... and on some lists derived from the main list issued by the United States of America. And Hamas, even if it is not classified as a terrorist organization by some Arab countries officially, it is prohibited from being dealt with at the level of the security agencies of those countries, and travel to and from those countries—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others—is restricted, apart from the matter of the Palestinian division since 2006 and its painful repercussions. The Palestinian National Authority classifies the Hamas movement as being outside Palestinian legitimacy... (a reference to Hamas’s bloody coup in 2006 against the Palestinian National Authority, considering it the legitimate authority of the Palestinians and emanating from the Oslo Agreement of 1993...) And therefore... hearts are full, .. knowing that many Arab countries condemned Hamas for what it did on 7 October 2023 as an act of terrorism...!

- By contrast, I recall a little in the past when Saudi Arabia hurriedly wanted to gather the leaders of the Arab and Islamic countries when former U.S. President Trump made his first visit abroad to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after his success in the presidential elections and his assumption of the White House on 20-1-2017, and how Saudi Arabia gathered for him the great and notable leaders of the Arabs and Muslims, even the former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who was wanted by the International Criminal Court. They all came... handed themselves over... and rendered the duty of congratulating the new U.S. President Trump at that time... in the city of Riyadh!

- But, lest we forget, a word by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter—according to the press—when he commented on the extent to which Arab leaders raised or discussed the Palestine issue during his visit to the White House during his term: that no Arab leader, in his private talks with them at the White House, ever brought up such an issue at all!

- You may recall what happened in the past to explain what is happening now of Arab and Islamic fragmentation... Let us look back... Since ancient times, and even before the establishment of Israel in 1948, secret ties were established between Zionist officials and several parties or Arab personalities. The Mossad (Foreign Operations), which reports to the office of the Israeli Prime Minister, was the one undertaking this effort and is responsible for it!

The Mossad’s efforts extended...afterwards they branched out, and reached several Arab countries, including some ruling regimes, and these relations remained shrouded in secrecy...despite the principle of the three noes, which was adopted at the Arab Summit Conference in Khartoum in 1967...and which remained an openly protective umbrella...raised by Arab leaders, against the winds and rains of normalization...with Israel. And which were being conspired in secret, over the years, with some Arab regimes and figures...knowing that there are many Arab countries...that never ceased secret communication, in several fields...with Israel. Since before its establishment in 1948...then the degrees of abandoning that secrecy rose...and showing it publicly...when the Camp David Accords were signed, a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, in 1979...., then followed by Prince Fahd’s peace initiative in 1981...which was the first Arab initiative... calling for public recognition of Israel, and normalization of relations with it, by all Arab countries,...then the Madrid Conference...in 1991, then the Oslo Accords and what followed...which had a major impact on the course of secret and public relations between Israel and the Arab countries.! Then Prince Abdullah’s initiative —the Arab Peace Initiative in 2001, which was the second Saudi peace initiative proposed two decades after the first initiative......then the string of Arab solidarity and integration unravelled, as the region witnessed in recent years large developments that ultimately led either to official normalization, as happened in what is known as the Abraham Accords, or to a deepening of the secret relations that had existed from the start between Israel and other Arab parties.

Secrecy was one of the characteristics of Israeli-Arab relations, and even of relations with Islamic countries. And the incident of the old secret meeting that gathered Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Ali Amini, Prime Minister of Iran (Prime Minister of Iran during 1961-1962), in the Shah’s government, then Amini said to Ben-Gurion: “Relations between Iran and Israel cannot be public; let us keep them secret in this way, our relationship is like a true love between two unmarried people.” But Israel — with historical developments in the world and in the region — gradually managed over many years to transcend the relationship of secrecy and become a public partner. (According to a study by the Middle East Center for Strategic Research, by Ahmed El-Gendy dated 30-9-2022).

Also, cooperation between Israel and some Arab countries in the field of intelligence exchange reached the point where the Mossad provided some Arab countries with images of encrypted telegrams intercepted from the networks of other Arab states, and also provided them with recordings of telephone conversations that took place between Arab officials, which included matters of interest to other Arab officials that Israel cares about ! More than that, Israel provided one Arab country with the minutes of a secret meeting that took place between a defense minister of a second Arab country and the head of intelligence of a third Arab country..!

This Arab-Israeli cooperation grew especially openly after the Madrid Conference in 1991, which was attended by all the Arab countries.. Where the Madrid Conference was followed by peace agreements between Israel and the PLO, and Jordan, and then by a number of other Arab countries that are members of the Arab League.

We note here, for example, that one Arab country, Jordan, according to what the press reported, when there was an assassination attempt on the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Mr. Khaled Mashal, on 25 September 1997, in Amman, the Jordanian capital, by the Israeli Mossad, and under the instructions of the Prime Minister at the time Binyamin Netanyahu, using a special poison...and when the operation failed, after the members of the assassination team were arrested shortly after injecting this poison into Mashal’s body, the late King Hussein bin Talal asked Israel to provide him with the antidote that immediately neutralized this poison, and threatened that if Israel refused to hand over this antidote..the King would close all the Mossad’s offices in Jordan..all of them!

However, the Mossad failed in many tests of confrontation in external operations with the Palestinians, in the European arena..to repel the attacks of Israeli agents and capture them...despite the cooperation of foreign security services, including regional security agencies, with the Mossad.!