“The reactions recorded since the Hamas massacres as well as the major trends of this conflict allow us to sketch what the day after could be like”

2023-10-18 15:45:03

Two peoples who have been in conflict for decades have never been so angry with each other. Unprecedented terror spread by Hamas on October 7, unprecedented in the history of Israel; Palestinian anger accumulated for years, which the Israeli offensive in Gaza, inevitable and massive, will increase tenfold; each one indignant at everything that can be perceived as a mirror image, locked in their immeasurable sorrow, in a mourning that is for the moment unpredictable. This Israeli response is far from having reached its climax and a regionalization of the conflict remains a possibility, but the reactions recorded since the Hamas massacres as well as the major trends of this conflict nevertheless allow us to outline what the day after could be. .

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers Israel-Hamas war: Joe Biden improvises a high-risk visit to Israel on Wednesday

A lasting international re-engagement must be ruled out for the moment. The most active over the last half century, the United States, has finally subcontracted the Palestinian question to Israel. Joe Biden’s impromptu visit, Wednesday October 18, is limited to management of the current crisis. Europeans are divided, like Arab countries, and those of the Global South who have chosen equidistance between the two camps hardly have the will to exert influence. In this hypothesis, Israel will remain master of the game with a strategy based on unilateralism and the metronomic use of force, as we have seen since the turning point of the evacuation of Gaza by the settlers in 2005 and the wars that followed. ‘ensued.

The original sin of the Israeli withdrawal was, however, this unilateral nature. It deprived the Palestinian side, recognized in 1993 by Israel with the Oslo Accords, of a benefit likely to legitimize its renunciation of violence. While Mahmoud Abbas, architect of Oslo on the Palestinian side, had placed this at the heart of his election, a few months before the evacuation of Gaza, to turn the page on the second Intifada, the credit for this withdrawal from the territory was , on the contrary, attributed by Palestinian opinion to the armed struggle, therefore to Hamas. Thus doped, the latter then triumphed in the elections in 2006, the first step in his takeover of the territory, a year later.

Also read the decryption: Article reserved for our subscribers Israel-Gaza: Hamas, Israel’s best enemy since 1987

Wall presented as impassable

After this shift, the occasional use of force by Israel was favored to regularly weaken Hamas (” to mow the lawn “, in the vulgate of counter-terrorism). Weaken it without making it disappear, for lack of being able to write a new page in the counter-insurgency manuals, since the movement, hybrid since its creation, combines a military-terrorist wing and the para-state structure which manages Gaza. These uses of force and the reflex of solidarity that they trigger in fact more surely destroy the Palestinian Authority, reduced to impotence by unilateralism, while preventing the emergence of a Palestinian political alternative.

You have 52.34% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.