Benjamin Netanyahu plunged headlong into the trap set for him by Hamas in Gaza with the terrorist massacre of October 7, 2023. It is clear that Israel only managed to eliminate one key Islamist leader, Ahmed Al-Ghandour, the military commander for the northern Gaza Strip. While Gaza City in the north is already half destroyed, the Israeli steamroller continues to sow destruction and death in the center and south of the Palestinian enclave.
Significantly, the map distributed by the Israeli army to define the target areas whose populations will be asked to flee at very short notice is based on a document that is half a century old. In fact, it was developed in 1971 under the direction of Ariel Sharon, then commander of Israel's Southern Military Region.
The ambitious general, crowned with military exploits in 1956 and 1967, faced a low-intensity Palestinian insurgency that his predecessors were unable to contain. Sharon had chosen the forceful approach of demolishing entire sections of residential neighborhoods to open access routes for Israeli armored vehicles.
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The eternal restart
Such brutal reconfiguration of urban space led to the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians within the Gaza Strip, a figure that was considered exorbitant at the time. Today, extreme violence has forced nearly two million of the Palestinian territory's 2.3 million residents to leave their homes, sometimes several times. Sharon, who was elected prime minister in a landslide victory in 2001, once again faced the ongoing challenge of Gaza thirty years after the success of his counterinsurgency campaign in 1971.
This time, in 2005, he decided to evacuate the eight thousand settlers who, under the protection of the Israeli army, had monopolized a quarter of the land in a yet overpopulated Palestinian enclave. This unilateral withdrawal, even as it ended the direct occupation of the Gaza Strip, left Israel in exclusive control of the territory's air and sea space as well as its land access (in cooperation with Egypt to the south). Such a retreat only gave the appearance of a retreat, as Sharon soon launched a bombing campaign against Gaza under the telling name “Eternal Beginning.”
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