Yom Kippur; New players.

Last weekend's Hamas incursion into the Israeli mainland took the Zionist entity by surprise. A surprise the entity experienced exactly 50 years ago in 1973. Then the governments of Hafez Al Assad in Syria and of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, going for their respective geostrategic objectives, went to war. Egypt was able to make a few gains in Sinai; the gains which it cultivated for the final cession of escalation with the entity. Syria to date could not get back the Golan Heights, lost in 1967 during the Six-Day War.

The two surprises were different on many counts. Obviously, the finales are bound to be different. It can be safely forecast that the stakes now are much higher and consequent scale of destruction and the radius of war cannot be predicted to be 'manageable'.

The 1973 Yom Kippur was a payback orchestrated by the two Arab governments who were humiliated in June 1967, when their air forces were devastated while still parked on the respective tarmacs. In 1967, much was lost by Jordan, Syria as well as Egypt at the hands of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Making use of the surprise element as well as the overconfidence of the IDF, the Arab forces were able to make some gains.

That ongoing Yom Kippur, October 7, is different or can be different, provided the key players, stakeholders remain on the 'scene', kill disinformation, shun an apologetic posture and go beyond 'routine'. For the resistance axis, the stakes are more critical. Mere lip service will prove to the Palestinians that they are not different from the previous franchise leaders. If anything decisive comes out of the uprising, the resistance narrative might be saved for another day, otherwise another global plan like Oslo will be tabled for further compromise

Here it may be pointed out that the Arab governments were structurally incapable to strike Israel as they could have. They left much of the job to the foreign operations sections of their elite intelligence agencies. Their job did not go beyond a few hit-and-run guerilla operations without any decisive value. The modus operandi of the intelligence outfits was like that. They would maintain an operational cadre for these operations, preferably in Lebanon. The local handlers would be lured into the trap on the promise that fallen heroes would be compensated. The poor and destitute sections of Lebanese society and the Palestinian diaspora, already living in subhuman conditions, were easily lured by these incentives.

For...