Rarely has been the prospect of peace between Israelis and Palestinians seem so remote.
Hamas’ surprise attack on Southern Israel on 7 October marks the bloodiest assault the state has sustained since its creation in 1948. At the time of writing, the death toll on the Israeli side has reached 900. In Gaza, retaliatory Israeli strikes have left more than 700 people dead, according to Palestinian authorities, a day after the government laid total siege on the Hamas-held Gaza Strip. The Israeli army has announced it has retrieved the bodies of 1,500 Hamas fighters.
Grégory Rayko: Why did the Hamas attack take Israel by surprise? Samy Cohen: On the Israeli side, there were flaws at two levels. Firstly, there was an intelligence failure. Until now, Israel’s internal security services, the Shabak, was very well informed about the situation in the Gaza Strip. Obviously, recently, it no longer had any sources within Hamas. Its blindness is no less astonishing.
For Netanyahu and the entire Israeli right, the scarecrow of Hamas was a kind of insurance against any international pressure. Netanyahu even said one day that it was in Israel’s interest for Hamas to continue. To this end, he allowed money to be paid to Hamas, he authorised some 20,000 Gazans to go and work in Israel, and thus to bring money into the Gaza Strip so that life under Hamas would be at least liveable there.
In short, the combination of blind intelligence, due to the vision of the country’s leaders, and the absence of troops around the Strip allowed this assault to take place with the human toll that we know. To achieve this, it would be necessary to enter Gaza with tanks and thousands of men, and there would be many victims on both sides, among Gazan civilians and Israeli soldiers alike. To which we must add another factor: the hostages…
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process was already moribund; are we now looking at the final nail in the coffin? But the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been dead for a long time, at least since Ehud Olmert’s two-state peace plan in 2007. Now we’re no longer hammering the last nail in the coffin; we’re throwing the coffin into the sea. In other words, the very subject of peace has disappeared.
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