We suspected that Hamas was bringing together barbarians, extremists, in short, bastards. His 1998 program, revised in 2017, explicitly expresses his hatred of Israel. As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated on Thursday: “Hamas has only one goal: to destroy Israel and murder Jews.”
For this reason, Hamas is considered a terrorist organization in most Western countries. And yet, for more than fifteen years, the Israeli authorities have chosen to let the organization govern the Gaza Strip, tolerating rocket fire and balancing retaliation: from a few targeted bombings to a few days of outright war.
In Tel Aviv they certainly knew that their tunnels were effective, as new rockets were sent into southern Israel every year, like on holidays or birthdays. We had to bring them here, the parts, put them together, these missiles, and learn how to install them, aim them, and fire them.
Everything has been said about Israel’s intelligence failure of biblical proportions and the possibility that Egypt informed Israel that something more sophisticated was going on underground in Gaza, and the opposite.
To be Palestinian or not
The debate we don’t seem to want to have is: “What do we do with the Palestinians?” » After last weekend’s rampage, Israeli officials decided to eliminate the threat of rabid Hamas once and for all.
They will roll out their tanks and march their soldiers into the overpopulated enclave, breaking the back of Hamas so that it will never have access to power again. But if not her, who else? In 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a tough guy, knew exactly what he was doing when he withdrew his troops from the small area: Gaza is ungovernable.
For his part, Benjamin Netanyahu, who served as prime minister between 2009 and 2021 and then returned to power at the end of last year, has worked to systematically discredit and thereby undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority, the potential alternative to Hamas.
FOR LACK OF BETTER WE CHOOSE THE WORSE
With no hope of improving their living conditions, we are faced with increasingly radicalized young people in Palestinian camps and West Bank towns – and it will soon be the same in Gaza – who swear no allegiance to the moderates in the West Bank nor to the barbarians of Hamas .
At the same time, we are feeding a fear, a deep-seated fear, among Israelis that will continue to encourage a sufficient number of them to vote for a government made up of extremists, a government that will pursue ever more restrictive policies toward more and more Palestinians. more inactive and disillusioned. These Palestinians will end up throwing themselves into the arms of the most radical in their community, thus re-starting the vicious circle of extremism.
There is undoubtedly a relentless reaction to Hamas’s orgy of violence last weekend. And then ? What do we do with the Palestinians?
