It is a truce which, for the moment, is more of a calculated pause than a real weakening of the Israeli government’s hard-line strategy. To free as many hostages as possible without giving up on “eradicating” Hamas in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is playing for time. In this, he is in line with public opinion, which, according to a poll commissioned by the Israel Democratic Institute, overwhelmingly wants these two ultimately incompatible objectives to be achieved. The same goes for Hamas in the posture of the victim, which, negotiating a respite that it clearly needs, makes itself even more popular in the occupied territories with the release of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Fragile and sinister collision of interests.
That the truce is extended is obviously good news. For the Gazan civilians, and then for the hostages who are released. Except that after more than 50 days of bombing on Gaza, following the massacres of October 7 in Israel, this cannot be enough. We must ensure that this truce leads to a ceasefire with, as a result, the opening of real political peace talks. For the truce to amount to a simple parenthesis in the fighting would constitute a tragic failure. The United States and a good number of Western countries, including Canada, continue to resign themselves to the Israeli argument that a ceasefire ultimately only serves Hamas terrorists. Not content with thus putting the humanitarian catastrophe into perspective, they find themselves supporting the highly questionable thesis according to which it is possible to militarily eliminate the Islamist movement once and for all. In another conflict, in 2006, Israel proclaimed its determination to “eradicate Hezbollah”. See the result.
Some want to believe in the renewal of political classes on both sides, as if the noise of violence, once silenced, would somehow rid the landscape of its extremist diktats and make dialogue possible with a view to creating a Viable Palestinian state despite decades of Jewish colonization. Go for hope. There is so much accumulated – and exploited – resentment to overcome between these two peoples, that of the Palestinians towards Israeli Jews and the no less visceral resentment of Israeli Jews towards the Palestinians. While this resentment is not impossible to undo, defusing it requires overcoming enormous obstacles. The indestructible Netanyahu will finally have to strike his Waterloo and take with him the extreme right, which is arming and poisoning political life. It will be necessary for the Palestinian Authority, rid of the corrupt, authoritarian and delegitimized president Mahmoud Abbas, to go through a profound process of democratic renovation – and for Israel to give the Palestinians the right to carry out this renovation by ceasing to criminalize lesser expression of Palestinian solidarity and nationalism. The tragedy being, precisely, that secular and moderate voices are today as stifled in Israel as they are in the West Bank and Gaza.
Constructive and ambitious proposal as the one presented on the Ideas page by political scientists Charles-Philippe David and Julien Tourreille, who put forward the establishment of a transitional administration in Gaza based on the UN model which was applied in 1999 to East Timor. Understanding that the international community – which includes this central actor that is Saudi Arabia – will have to invest in a more proactive manner to get the Israeli-Palestinian conflict out of its historic impasse.
To the extent that a lasting solution requires sensible international competition and a series of domestic political unlocking, the case of Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned since 2002 in Israel for terrorism crimes, is telling. His incarceration illustrates in a way Israel’s refusal to allow a political solution to emerge. Neither angel nor demon – “neither pacifist nor terrorist”, in his own words – Barghouti has always advocated “peaceful coexistence” between Israel and Palestine, as “equal and independent states”. A critic of the corruption that plagues the Palestinian Authority, he is still considered today as the most popular and unifying figure in Palestinian opinion, capable of building bridges. Many, both abroad and in Israel, have called for the release of the so-called “Palestinian Mandela”. Mr. Netanyahu, who does as he pleases, has always refused.
Which means that in 2011, when Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, hostage of Hamas for five years, was finally returned to Israel, Netanyahu refused to allow Barghouti to be among the thousand Palestinian prisoners released in exchange. The current leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinouar, alleged mastermind of the October 7 massacres, was on the other hand among them. A choice with dire consequences.