Eric Danon, French ambassador to Israel from August 2019 to July 2023, is now retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Arriving in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2019, he returns to Paris in the summer of 2023. Freed from his duty of reserve, he talks about how surprised he was by the massive Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on Saturday October 7: “JI don’t know anyone who wasn’t deeply surprised and shocked. Even those who, like us, had been saying for a long time that tension was growing between Israelis and Palestinians, could not imagine an attack of this type.”
The diplomat recognizes that the chancelleries and the intelligence services had clearly seen the warning signs, “but it’s easy afterwards”he admits. “That’s the problem with weak signals. Your difficulty is to detect the one that will become a strong signal.”
“A weak signal is small indications, that there was, for example, a few weeks before, a meeting in Beirut between Iranians, people from Hamas and people from Hezbollah. You receive reports of this or that such a meeting, this or that movement, this or that type of agitation and you don’t really know what to do with it.”
Eric Danon, former French ambassador to Israelat franceinfo
“The Israelis are quite vigilant about all these little signals and usually they check everythingcontinues the former ambassador. And I think that there, they checked things a lot. But a second phenomenon has been added which often happens in these cases, it is the escalation towards the political authorities and the way in which they consider the subject. As there are dozens and dozens of signals, all the intermediate levels have filtered what seems to them the most important or the most probable among all the possibilities. And there, there is a first bias: you leave aside what seems totally improbable to you and what, in this case, will happen. And then, when it reaches the top, up to the political authority, the latter may have a tendency to treat it in a political way, that is to say with another type of cognitive bias. All this is an assessment policy which, there, showed an error.”
Israel’s technological fetish
By evoking “cognitive biases”, Eric Danon evokes in chosen words a superiority complex on the part of the Israelis who have minimized Hamas’ strike force and overestimated their capacity to deter and defend themselves. “There was a trust in technology, which is always a mistakeexplains the diplomat. This technological fetishism that I saw in Israel is one of the elements of the security gap. This is not to say that Israel did not have human intelligence. Simply, they were more in contact with the political branch of Hamas than with the military branch. You also have this idea that, ultimately, the IDF, the Israeli army, is invincible.” Confident that he recently spoke on the phone with one of the actors of the hit series Fauda – which tells the life and operations of a special unit of the Israeli secret services, infiltrated in the Palestinian territories – he also mentions a decline in vigilance in Israel: “He told me: ‘Fauda, it gave us confidence. It’s a series that gave confidence to the Israeli people by saying that in the end, we win. It deadens confidence and it deadens vigilance.”
After these massacres, Israel launched a massive campaign. The Israelis say ‘this is on par with the cruelty of what we experienced’. It is also the deadliest campaign ever carried out by the Israeli army: “What is happening in Gaza is a horror, but it is war. I do not want to justify anything of what is happening and I think there would be other methods. But given the violence of the attack, cruelty, massacres, etc., Israel fell into the trap set for it by Hamas. Probably, it could not help but fall into this trap. 50 years ago, there was an attack in Munich which led to the death of Israeli athletes on the Olympic team. Israel said: ‘everyone who participated in this attack will be dead within four years’. Indeed, that was the case. But this is not the case. was not possible to do something like that because the number of fighters facing them was massive. If the government had said to the Israelis: ‘listen, we are giving ourselves 10 years to kill everyone who did this’, it was not possible not at all up to the task. It was also necessary to prevent Hamas from being able to say that it had won something. This is also why after the first humanitarian truce, the fighting resumed even stronger than before. before to prevent Hamas from saying that it had gained something from this truce.”
Humiliation in geopolitics is paid in cash
Eric Danon, former French ambassador to Israelat franceinfo
As the fighting continues, Eric Danon warns of the importance of thinking about the post-war period. “Currently, for one terrorist killed, two are createdconfides the former ambassador. For children, everything will depend on the perspectives we offer them. There are ways to end wars that prevent children from feeling so resentful that they want to eternally avenge their parents. We saw it in Germany, Japan or Italy, although, of course, there is always trauma. Where there is always a desire for revenge is when the war ends in humiliation. Humiliation in geopolitics is paid in cash. We need two things: the first is to offer a political, but also economic and social perspective to the losers. And the second thing is that a certain number of symbolic acts must be performed to seal reconciliation. And that is extremely complicated. De Gaulle and Adenauer, Mitterrand and Kohl in a cemetery holding hands allow, on both sides, to feel that the Other is no longer an enemy. This type of gesture is very difficult to accomplish after wars because passions are so tense.”
The key role of Saudi Arabia
Convinced that it is impossible to leave Israelis and Palestinians alone, face to face, to resolve this almost century-old conflict, the former ambassador appeals to the whole world. “The Palestinian Authority has never been weakerbelieves Eric Danon. Rebuilding, from this entity, suitable governance that allows us to build a country is difficult. With all due respect, I don’t think they can do it on their own. The Arab countries have never done anything to stop this conflict because they have an interest in it lasting. These countries don’t like each other very much at the government level, so what unites them is the rejection of Israel.”
“Eight years ago, a very senior Algerian official told me in the corridors of the UN in New York that ‘the Palestinians are the useful idiots of the cohesion of the Arab world.’ Then, imagine for a moment that the conflict Israeli-Palestinian is resolved. Israel no longer has any obstacle to becoming the regional, economic, political superpower, etc. And that is not very bearable by the Arab countries.”
Eric Danon, former French ambassador to Israelat franceinfo
“So who will help the Palestinians?asks Eric Danon. I think that the United States is no longer credible in the eyes of the Palestinians. Russia and China are out of the game. The European Union will help economically but not politically, it has no influence. Of all the Arab countries, the only one that has clearly shown its wish to help the Palestinians is Saudi Arabia and before the war Crown Prince MBS said: ‘first step, normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as a continuation of the Abraham Accords. Second step we create a Palestinian state and I take charge of everything’. The involvement of Saudi Arabia as a trusted third party between Israel and the Palestinians is an interesting element. Last point for there to be Peace: Israel must feel secure.”
Before a Palestinian state, a country with limited sovereignty
Beyond an end to conflict, a political perspective implies an institutional project. The United States, the countries of the European Union and some Arab-Muslim countries support the two-state solution. But for Eric Danon, this recommendation must be rethought and adapted to current circumstances and to History: “My personal conviction, now that I am no longer at the Quai d’Orsay, is that the two-state solution cannot be implemented with the parameters associated with this solution, that is to say the borders of 1967, Jerusalem capital of the two States or the settlement of the refugee question… We are going to enter into something which is very controversial, and I can already hear people screaming. I ask the question: what are the Palestinian people? Before the 60s, you had Palestinians who were people born in Palestine. But for all that, they were not a people. You had tribes, families, clans. And slowly, because of the creation of Israel, the consciousness of Palestinian nationalism emerges. Yasser Arafat obviously embodied him as a dominant figure.”
According to Eric Danon, “the strategic error at the time was to have wanted to unite all the Palestinians into a people on the basis of a profoundly negative value which was the fight against Israel and against the Jews beyond. Later, of course , Arafat sent his letter to Yitzhak Rabin saying that he was going to make a new, different charter. But in the Palestinian imagination, the question of the fight against Israel remains central in terms of values. You cannot build Peace when you are in this system of values. You must therefore move into a system of positive values which revolves around Culture, History, a feeling of belonging. It exists, of course, but at individual levels as shown very well by the exhibition ‘What Palestine brings to the world’ put together by Elias Sanbar at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. It shows that, precisely, there are exceptional Palestinians. We therefore need a step-by-step solution, via a country with limited sovereignty: for a time, there will be no army, no border control, no control of the sky and probably no control of the currency. And with countries that would help the Palestinians to conquer these elements of governance that they cannot provide today, after a while, you would have transfers of these blocks of sovereignty from a country with increased sovereignty (Israel ) towards the country with diminished sovereignty (Palestine). In two generations, you can make a real country.”
The diplomat said to himself “fairly confident because other countries have found the method: these are the Gulf countries. If a country like Saudi Arabia, helped by the European Union or by other financiers, is ready to hold on for one, two or more generations, to send Palestinian children to learn how to build a real country on real values with real development, there is no reason why it should not work. But you will have obstacles of two kinds. The first, this are the Palestinians who will still not want to give up the fight because they have built themselves through adversity. And on the Israeli side, those who, whatever happens, do not want to let go of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria [NDR : appellation biblique de ce que les Palestiniens nomment Cisjordanie]. I believe that some of them will have to return to Israel, as was the case for Gaza. For this to happen, the current government must obviously no longer exist. Perhaps it will also take a lot of outside authority. And then there are the settlements which are against the border line and near Jerusalem. These ones, I don’t think they will move anymore. But it is part of a future negotiation.”