2023-10-10 05:01:00
Ezequiel Kopel is a journalist and writer who divides his time between the Middle East and Argentina: he has lived more than 10 years in Israel, the West Bank and Egypt, and speaks Hebrew and understands Arabic. The problems of the region are the focus of his work in books such as “Middle East, common place: seven myths about the hottest region in the world” (2021) and “The dispute for control of the Middle East: a century of conflicts, from the Ottoman Empire to the present (2022)”, both in Capital Intelectual publishing house.
–You know the border between Israel and Gaza well. It is surprising how easily hundreds crossed and re-entered.
–The number is not really known. They attacked with drones and rockets, disabling Israeli radars and observation posts. Then they went to the electrified wire fence and planted bombs. They entered by sea, land and water. They used vans, trucks and even horses. After the military elite, ordinary Palestinians entered who surely knew nothing about that secret operation. There are always Israeli snipers on a hill less than a kilometer away. This time they weren’t there. For me, it was an operation planned for years and that required months of watching Israeli stocks, seeing how they move. There were failures of the caliber of those of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when there was a warning from the Jordanian king to Israel, which went unheeded. Today an Israeli newspaper published that Egypt had warned of suspicious movements in Gaza. Israel has most of its battalions in the West Bank.
–Hamas has no chance of winning this war. Why did you launch this attack?
–There are four points. Since 1967 Jews have been able to visit the mosque Al-Aqsa of Jesuralem but they cannot pray, according to the agreement of the past. But there are more and more videos of Jews praying and the police turn a blind eye, because the Minister of Police is the most extreme right-wing person in all of Israel. One would say, why can’t Jews pray there? The agreed status quo is like this: Jews pray at the Wailing Wall and Palestinians at Haram al-Sharif. These videos are a large part of the conflict and are seen by Palestinians on TikTok. It is thought that Palestinians do not see the same thing as the rest of the world on their phones. The second point is the record of violent actions by Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians. The last two years have seen the most Palestinian deaths since the Second Intifada. The third point is Hamas’s goal to overshadow the power of the PLO.
And let’s stop at this: when Hamas shows videos of extreme cruelty, many in the West ask: “Don’t they care about the image they give in the West?” And no, they are not interested. One of the causes of the attack they carried out was intended to target the internal Palestinians and displace the PLO, which always cared about what was thought of them abroad but did not achieve a Palestinian State. Hamas has had a pyric victory, because what Israel is going to do in Gaza is going to be very hard. The fourth point is not the most important for me: Hamas seeks to put the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel on standby. In 2002, it was the strongest terrorist attack in the country’s history against Israeli retirees in a hotel, months after the Arab League offered a peace treaty to Israel. That implied a change in the status quo and Hamas stopped it like this: they themselves admitted it.
–There will also be a proposal to exchange prisoners. Without a doubt it is another reason.
–Yeah. In 2011 Israel exchanged an Israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinians, some with murders on his back. Now they have a hundred. For Hamas it is impossible to hide them all: Israel has all of Gaza studied. They are going to offer Palestinian informants a lot of money to find them. Today there was a terrible clarification from Hamas saying that, if the Israelis do not give advance notice before bombing a building, they will kill a hostage per attack. And they are going to film it. At some point, they will try to exchange women and children first.
–Is there an Iranian hand behind the attack?
–Yesterday there was a publication in this sense by the Wall Street Journal, which cites few sources. But there is nothing concrete to think that. Perhaps there will have been a call from Hamas to Iran saying, “we are going to attack in a minute.” Iran actually has influence over Hezbollah in Lebanon, on the other side of Israel. Hamas knows that Iran is infiltrated by the West. They killed Iranian General Soleimani with information that came to them from inside Iran. I don’t think they told the Iranians until the last minute. There may have been training of Palestinian commandos by Iran on a general level, but I don’t think Iran knew about this operation.
–From an Israeli perspective, this is an act of terrorism, the worst since the time of the Nazis. How will the attack be perceived from the Palestinian perspective, taking into account the diversity among them? For many of them—I don’t know how many—it is a rebellion against the oppression of having to live in a ghetto blocked and besieged by a powerful enemy.
–It’s difficult to know. I know few Palestinians that I could talk to. There are some who do not cheer this because they find it horrible and they also know that they are the ones who are going to receive the fire. The Hamas leaders are going to be locked five stories underground and nothing is going to happen to them. There have been some celebrations, just as there are Israeli celebrations when the Palestinians hit them hard. But I’m not so sure that the entire Palestinian society will cheer. I only saw isolated cases in the West Bank. What Hamas has done seems to me to be a terrible and cowardly act. I do not deny the right to resistance, even violent, of Palestinians against soldiers who occupy a territory. Now, the big problem for the weak when they resort to violence is that for it to work, it has to be limited. Because later you can turn it around.
–Israel is going to repeat “in revenge”—according to Netanyahu—the crimes of Hamas in an exponential way, with the difference that it will be from the air and by an official army. He also told Gaza civilians to leave because they will destroy “every corner” of the enclave. But where are they going to go if they are like prisoners in a strip of 365 km². And they have decided to kill Palestinians out of hunger and thirst—they cut off their water and electricity—something prohibited by the Geneva Convention. This leads to a no small semiological debate: Militias or terrorists? Soldiers or terrorists?
–There is a famous phrase from the Israeli documentary Gatekeepers, where a Shin Bet boss — Yuval Diskin — says that “One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” As a journalist, I have to set a limit and that is the attack on civilians: that is terrorism. For me, the attack was an act of terrorism, something that harms the Palestinian cause for the purposes of its objectives. If we talk about an attack on a military post, it can be classified as a guerrilla act. But 100 riddled bodies have just appeared in the Beeri kibbutz. And when the Israeli Defense Minister says that he is going to close all food and water passages in a desert where there is no river, what is that? At a minimum, a collective punishment and a war crime.
–Is Israel going to stop because of the hostages or is it going to sacrifice them as pawns for reasons of state?
–I think Israel is going to fight the war as if there were no hostages. First, because she doesn’t know where they are. And second, because adapting your military advance to them would tie their hands: they don’t know where they are, they have no way of taking care of them.
–The conflict enters a new stage. What’s coming?
–I think there will be a total change. Because Israel had, in one day, a death toll that it had never had in any of its wars, more or less a thousand. It is the same amount they had in the Second Intifada that lasted five years. Netanyahu’s position is: “The conflict has no resolution, so let’s handle it.” He believes that we should not talk to Hamas but rather deal, because an agreement cannot be reached. Israel’s policy is to maintain the status quo, which to me, is the worst thing for Israel. This is a temporary calm before the new war.
–Yizak Rabin said “let’s negotiate with the PLO because Hamas is worse.” There are suspicions that Yasser Arafat was poisoned and Rabin was killed. Today Israel is governed by an extreme right that is going to become even more radical. I fear a semi-extermination of Palestinians. There will never be peace like this. This will generate more and more deaths, also in Israel. A peace agreement is impossible and the Palestinians do not seem to be giving up.
–Could be. I don’t think an extermination is coming, but a lot of blood is going to flow. And after that, they will end up with an exchange of prisoners, who will be held hostage for years.
–You have a critical view of both Jewish and Islamic extremism, distancing yourself from the binary view with which the world is usually divided between “good” and “bad”, “civilized” and “barbarians.” Where should we stand in the face of this?
–We must stop at preserving the lives of civilians. I know I seem like a dreamer. But in all this madness, those who are going to pay the most on both sides are going to be the civilians. On the other hand, the leadership on each side never pays it. It seems to me that what has to matter is to start preserving the lives of civilians, whether they are Palestinians harassed by the violence of Jewish settlers, or Israelis massacred by Hamas, although they are not equivalent: there is someone who occupies and someone who is busy. Not everything can be allowed, neither on one side nor on the other.