It does not matter exactly whether Thursday’s episode in northern Gaza City, which left more than 100 people dead around a humanitarian aid convoy, was more of a deadly stampede for a pittance, as the Israelis say, or a cold-blooded massacre against unarmed civilians, as the Palestinians say.
This episode is added to an uninterrupted string for almost five months. It cruelly shows, once again, not only the horror imposed on the Palestinians, reduced to a choice between bullets, hunger and being crushed under a truck, but also the impasse of Israeli strategy. Strategy whose maximalist logic – eliminate the enemy, wipe it off the map, destroy the traces of its presence – is both part of the conflict as a desire… and inapplicable, unless we resolve to the ultimate crime of genocide.
Eradicating Hamas while sparing civilians seems impossible. The imbrication of this movement in Palestinian society – through internal terror or the real support of a fraction of society in the face of a hated oppressor – is such, under current conditions, that the eradication of one means the eradication of the other.
This does not amount to exonerating Hamas, even less to celebrating this radical militia party, ferociously misogynistic, implacable towards the internal opposition during 17 years of rule, fully aware of the act that triggered the current tragedy. Yahya Sinouar, local leader of the Islamists, knew very well what he was doing when he indirectly sent to martyrdom – this religion adores martyrs – tens of thousands of compatriots, thus hoping to advance the cause.
But we must clearly see that the destiny of Hamas and that of the Palestinian people are, for the worst, inextricably linked. Westerners who claim in abstracto separating the wheat from the chaff, and at the same time resurrecting a discredited Palestinian Authority, stories are told.
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There is the tragic Hamas-Palestinian couple. There is also the infernal couple Hamas-Israel. Despite their mutual hatred, the Hebrew State and the Islamists of Gaza, with Qatar as a shadow financier, were also “enemy brothers”. For years, they agreed – in a tacit, unstable (with occasional explosions) and reversible pact – to reduce their common adversary to insignificance: Fatah and the Palestinian Authority of the unfortunate Mahmoud Abbas.
This is now done, to the point that – regardless of the Western refrains on this theme – there is no longer any alternative solution on this side, while the war has become total and apocalyptic.
Netanyahu understood this well, refusing any hypothetical “post-war plan”. Not only does he tactically need a prolonged war to maintain himself, but he especially does not want a return to the “two-state solution”, effectively sabotaged since he was in politics (1990s, the “two-state years”). of Oslo”), and today reduced to an empty slogan.
This vagueness of the Israeli leader cannot hide the real alternative, the real solution – final, unspeakable and unspeakable -, but it emerges in the repeated speeches of his “ultra” ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the settlers of the west bank of the Jordan: “emptying” the Palestinian question, but in the literal sense. By taking back the entire West Bank, village by village (since October, around fifteen have been literally cleansed by terror), and by destroying Gaza, its culture, its monuments, its inhabitants.
“For Israel, Gaza embodies the enemy “body” that must be destroyed,” said Peter Harling in an interview with World published Saturday. He claims that Israel is engaging in “urbicide” by methodically demolishing Gaza.
Meanwhile, a significant portion of Israeli media no longer self-censors. Commentators on mainstream channels openly call for the expulsion (in the Mediterranean or Egypt), or even the extermination of Palestinians, as the only way to restore security. “We need as many incredible bodies as possible,” in the words of security expert Eliahou Yossian, to Channel 12.
It’s going well.
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