War between Israel and Gaza, on the one hand the horror of the terrorists on the other Bibi’s action plan: analysis
Clearly, faced with the eruption of the conflict between these two entities, Israel and Hamaseach singular within its type, are manifested two attitudes and two associated lines of action. Each admits some even notable variations, but the identity, the internal coherence of the two remains distinguishable in any case. The first notes with bewilderment, horror, indignation at the enormity of the evil committed by Hamas terroristsequaled only by the Nazi persecutions against Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
Don’t try to justify these atrocious crimes with the suffering that the Israelis have inflicted on the Palestinians for more than half a century! Naturally, one could try to point out that explaining the formation of a terrorist group with the pariah state in which Palestinians are kept does not at all mean justifying the atrocities committed on October 7th.
But this observation does not clarify, it does not illuminate, on the contrary, it annoys, offends and outrages. The ontological order of the crimes committed by Hamas terrorists is infinitely greater than the supposed harassment suffered by the Palestinians. THE Hamas terrorists have embarked on an aberrant undertaking, the exit from humanity. They have been reduced to beasts, or rather worse. Our task as bystanders would be to grieve, to let the enormity of evil pass through us, and possibly hold the idea of it within us, but with no practical purpose: to let ourselves be transformed into statues of salt.
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Yet the state of mind described often has well-defined practical conclusions, those indicated by the Israeli Prime Minister and the American President. The actions of Hamas were appallingly evil, and evil beyond belief are those who carried them out, the members of Hamas. They must be exterminated, annihilated or, in more cautious language, “neutralized”. But Benjamin Netanyahu is not cautious: “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” he announced. It obviously follows that you can’t negotiate with them. First they will remove themselves from existence with a series of surgical operations: bombing them, launching thousands of missiles at them a day, if necessary searching for them and killing them one by one in the underground tunnels where they cowardly hide. If during this process it was also possible to get rid of the two million Palestinians concentrated in Gaza by having them flee to the Sinai, then Bibi’s re-election for another decade or more would be assured.
It would really be a masterstroke, and it is not excluded that Bibi is already working on it, even if it seems that Egypt doesn’t want to know about it. In any case, talking about the future of Israel and Palestine will only be possible after the extermination or annihilation (a Heideggerian term!) of Hamas. How does Biden differ from Bibi? Biden argues that a distinction must be made between Hamas and the Palestinians: Hamas would not represent them.
But Hamas represents them much more than the Palestinian National Authority established in the West Bank, greatly weakened by the fact of collaborating with the Israeli police, and even more by the fact of having signed the Oslo Accords, which the Israelis have violated from the beginning systematically encouraging and defending the occupations of their “settlers”. Bibi will be very busy for some time attending to his massacres. Biden will negotiate (or is already negotiating) con Hamas using intermediaries. But of course the conditions of the negotiation will not be independent of how Israel and the US manage the “elimination” phase of Hamas. If with the brutality that Bibi promises, there will be no negotiation, not even secret ones.
Those who opt for the second line they dare to argue that although the intermediaries can be very useful in the first phase, sooner or later it will also be necessary to deal with Hamas, because it is currently more no less representative of the PLO and the other groups that support the Palestinian National Authority. For a long time some states, with greater or lesser success, have distinguished between Hamas as a social movement and political party and its terrorist fringe. If it does not agree to negotiate, Hamas will have to continue to carry out attacks, to carry out and make its people suffer further massacres.
It could instead continue to govern as he did in Gaza, perhaps in a slightly less autocratic way. It cannot be ruled out that he accepts. Some objects of the negotiation are obvious: the release of hostages, the exchange of prisoners. The other issues would be re-founding, or foundational, and the negotiations would also have to include the UN and the PLO, which could emerge revitalized from this turning point: after all, the path to negotiations and the two-state solution was opened by the PLO. The settlers should evacuate the West Bank, or at least the homes and lands obtained through violence, deception and fraud, Israel should renounce its claim to make East Jerusalem its capital and leave it to the new Palestinian state.
Mario Giroa talented political scientist and expert in international affairs, believes that 1) negotiation is necessary, but 2) the unavoidable condition of recognizing the State of Israel must be placed on Hamas first. This brings us back to Oslo Accords, where the PLO negotiated for the Palestinians. In that case the recognition of Israel, which Hamas immediately attacked, was one of the objects of the agreement, not a condition for starting negotiations. The PLO may need a new leader, and, Mario Giro rightly reminds us, it has one universally esteemed, even by Hamas: Marwan Barghouti, who is “the only one who has the right reputation to lead a government of national unity : a very tough, very severe person, …, who however is secular and not ideologically extremist.” He could be the Palestinians’ Nelson Mandela. In fact, he has been in prison in Israel for some time, sentenced to five life sentences.
In the end, let’s see how the EU dealt with the problem of sudden and terrible conflict. It did not choose one of the two lines, because it remained too distant from the facts. In her first statements and during her prompt visit to Tel Aviv, which no one had asked her to undertake, von der Leyen seemed to carelessly and fully adhere to Netanyahu’s murderous positions and intentions. So much so that numerous MEPs immediately protested against her, accusing her of having spoken in a personal capacity and not as a bearer of the European line. Josep Borrell, the official representative of the EU’s foreign policy, was fortunately the author of some very dignified interventions. I will remember two particularly significant ones. The first is from October 14th (one day after von der Leyen’s outpourings in Tel Aviv.), “Israel’s plan to evacuate over a million people from northern Gaza in a single day is absolutely impossible to implement, because imagining being able to move a million of people in 24 hours in a situation like that of Gaza can only be a humanitarian crisis to be avoided”.
There must have subsequently been a stormy conversation, I suppose, between him and von der Leyen, because on 17 October Borrell returned to office: “The position ofEuropean Union in the Israeli conflict is clear: Israel has the right to defend itself, but this defense must take place in compliance with international laws and, in particular, humanitarian laws, because even war has its laws.” This position was adopted with surprising ease by von der Leyen in some statements of October 18th.
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