What is the history of Hamas? What diplomatic and political issues in the Middle East have been called into question by the attack by the Islamist movement? What keys to understanding allow us to place the Hamas attack in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Now an editorial writer for Le Monde, our former correspondent in Jerusalem and Washington, Gilles Paris, answered your questions.
Your question refers to the map of international reactions that we published, inspired by the geopolitics site Le Grand Continent. As with Russian aggression in Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a fault line between a Western bloc, enlarged to Asian countries (South Korea, Japan), and South American (Argentina), and a “global South » which judges the reading of events by this Western bloc to be partial and biased.
This is the double standard often criticized: whether recently regarding the question of welcoming Ukrainian refugees in contrast to those from other countries in the grip of wars, or regarding the distribution of vaccines against Covid-19. But this double standard thrived initially on the non-application of United Nations resolutions concerning the fate of the Palestinians. After the shock that the discovery of their relative isolation in Ukraine constituted for Westerners, the latter assured that they wanted to convince the countries of the South. The ongoing war and the unreserved alignment, for the moment, of Western countries alongside Israel risks, on the contrary, widening this divide.
The Abraham Accords in 2020 were indeed a turning point in the history of Arab-Palestinian relations. Previously, the majority of Arab-Muslim countries camped on the line drawn in 2002 by Saudi Arabia, with the Arab Peace Initiative (proposed by Abdallah, then regent), which subordinated the recognition of Israel for all these countries to the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders (Gaza and West Bank).
This initiative gradually withered away, for several reasons: the division of the Palestinian camp, political and geographical from 2007, distrust of Iran’s growing influence among certain Palestinian factions, including the Hamas, as well as the arrival to power, notably in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, of a new generation of leaders without any sentimental link with the Palestinian cause and attracted, on the contrary, by Israeli economic and technological successes.
These countries, like the majority of Western countries after the failure of the peace process, adhered to the thesis of a status quo, which made it possible to ignore diplomacy and the inevitable disappearance of the Palestinian national movement. The final blow to the Arab Peace Initiative was to be delivered by his nephew, Mohammed Ben Salman, with normalization between Israel and the Saudi kingdom. It has been postponed for the moment, but nothing says that the dynamics of the Abraham Accords will not resume when the necessarily precarious calm returns. Let us point out that the countries which have established relations with Israel have never actually been at war against the Jewish state, and that the step is therefore much easier to take than the peaces concluded with Egypt and Jordan.
The economic and humanitarian aid paid by the United States, the European Union and even certain Arab countries is the price of their guilty conscience in the face of the disappearance of the prospect of the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. . Aid which in Gaza results in infrastructure regularly destroyed during Israeli operations is a striking allegorical summary of international impotence.
All the experts who have looked into the matter, as evidenced by the numerous reports from the World Bank, conclude that economic development is dependent on a political framework. That development aid can only play its role with guarantees concerning the movement of goods and people. But Palestinian development has always been subordinate to Israeli security concerns. The development sometimes mentioned fuels, on the contrary, frustration and anger, which provide obvious breeding ground for the most radical Palestinian organizations.
We have to wait for Emmanuel Macron’s intervention to be clear. The joint press release published Tuesday morning by five Western countries, including France, however, testifies to a reading of the conflict which seems to be behind traditional French positions. The only sentence about the Palestinians that does not refer to Hamas is: “We all recognize the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and support equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians. »
The “legitimate aspirations” are not named, nor is what stands in the way, largely Israeli colonization in the West Bank. As for that aimed at “equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians”, they ignore the reality of a situation in which both live in diametrically opposed conditions. This press release has the right words to describe the horror of the Hamas attack, but it does not open up any medium or long term political perspective.
The picture after October 7 is very bleak indeed. Hamas, already considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the Europeans, has emerged from the ambiguity it sometimes maintained by evoking a “long-term truce” with Israel, or even, as in 2017, a temporary recognition of a Palestinian state within the borders of 1967. Fatah, the backbone of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority, is totally ossified and clearly incapable of reforming itself. This context distracts Palestinians from existing political structures. The fact remains that one day the question of the status of the five to six million people who live in Gaza and the West Bank will have to be answered. The “Gaza model”, whose increasingly deadly failure we see for the two populations concerned, is in fact the alternative solution to the absence of a State.
If rationality prevailed between Israelis and Palestinians, the latter could agree on a territorial division which would ensure peace and security for two peoples, which would stabilize the region, which would deprive Iran of the pretext to pose as an interested champion of the Palestinian cause. Past failures have shown the futility of unevenly distributed pressures. Disarming internal resistance, both Israeli and Palestinian, would require enormous international investment, both Western and Arab, with no guarantee of results. But the sum of past failures has led to the search for solutions that bypass the Palestinian question, such as the Abraham Accords, the result of which we see today.
It is difficult to measure the degree of popularity of Hamas in Gaza, as well as the level of support for its action. Since the particularly brutal ousting of Fatah in 2007 (which had just as brutally repressed Hamas in the preceding years), the movement has reigned unchallenged and without any transparency, as one imagines. Hamas has long benefited from the aura ensured at its origins by the establishment of charitable institutions.
We see that the deaths and destruction that accompany each Israeli military intervention are always blamed on the Jewish state and never on its own. Thinking that these operations can turn the Palestinians in Gaza away from Hamas has never been verified, even during the worst offensives. It is often difficult for the Western public to understand what can result from confinement which will soon be measured in decades, and the constant deterioration of living conditions. Regardless of the power in place, this situation is, given the weight of the constraints, totally unmanageable.