Dominique de Villepin: About the most dangerous traps set by Hamas for the West

Aisha Al-Basri

In an interview with Radio Monte Carlo International following the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, launched by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) against Israel on October 7, 2023, the former French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, put his finger on the most dangerous traps into which the West fell as a result of this. The unprecedented attack. The right-wing diplomat and writer said, “Hamas set three traps for us: one trap of military violence, another that isolated the West, and a third moral one.” While de Villepin’s analysis indicates the danger of the West falling into these traps, one after the other, he does not go far in assessing their effects on the future. The Western system is at a critical period in human history.

De Villepin says at the beginning that the West, by which he means the Israeli occupation and its sponsors (Euro-Americans), fell into the military trap set for them by the Hamas movement, as it lured them with the violence of its attack to the maximum level of violence and terror, while the army cannot solve an issue as serious as the Palestinian issue. 

What the former diplomat did not dare to admit here is that the sweeping Hamas attack humiliated Israel and its supporters, and made them all lose their ability to control the West’s unbridled brutality, to the point that leaders of Israel became unable to hide their intention to annihilate the entire Palestinian people in Gaza.

The Al-Aqsa Flood Operation humiliated the mighty occupying state, and exploded in its society a volcano of crime, revealing its true face to the world, which began to see it as a genocidal state, killing children, bombing civilians, and an unjust nuclear state that had exhausted the reserve of Jewish oppression that it had been feeding on since World War II. Through its absolute diplomatic, military and media support for the Israeli extermination campaign, this appears to be a branch of that tree, and Israel is nothing but a descendant of the European settler occupation that committed genocide on indigenous people from Australia to America, before heading to its last and greatest kiss in Palestine.

The West’s support for the genocide campaign waged by the occupation in Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories constitutes a comprehensive violation of all the laws, rights, freedoms and international justice on which the Western system is based.

Speaking about the second trap, De Villepin said that the October 7 attack cornered the West into a bloc that became confrontational with the international community, after the West had had influence in the world for more than five centuries. Here too, the French diplomat did not go so far as to acknowledge that the support of Western governments and their media machinery behind Israel’s crimes today and yesterday is what isolated the West from the rest of the countries. If the Ukraine war had united it in the face of Russia, and created a clear rift between it and many countries, Asian ones in particular, His rapid slide into Israel's trenches gave it the green light for a genocidal campaign, which widened this gap and prompted his isolation even more than before.

One of the consequences of the absolute Western support for Israel's fifth war on Gaza and its rejection of international demands for a ceasefire is that it may further reduce its political and economic influence in many parts of the world in favor of China. While the Gulf and Middle Eastern countries are increasingly open to China, Russia and other Asian powers, the project has faltered. The American plan to link infrastructure in India to the Middle East and Europe via Saudi Arabia and Israel, in light of Saudi Arabia’s freezing of the normalization project with Israel, thus making US President Joe Biden’s dream of blocking the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative out of reach.

The third trap that the October 7 attack set for the West is moral, according to De Villepin, who believes that the problem of double standards has emerged very sharply, and has made the West the focus of urgent questions such as, “You condemn what happened in Ukraine, but you are very shy in confronting the Gaza tragedy.” In fact, this trap goes beyond double standards, and mainly concerns the collapse of the international system (meaning the Western one) based, at least in theory, on law, basic freedoms, and human rights. A regime that Washington and those within its orbit are still using as excuses and bragging about, while they are arming a nuclear occupying state to attack a people who have been suffering under the most horrific occupation in human history for about 75 years.

De Villepin's analysis points to the danger of the West falling into Hamas's traps, and does not go far in assessing its effects on the future of the Western regime

The West’s support for the campaign of extermination waged by the Israeli occupation in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories constitutes a comprehensive violation of all the laws, rights, freedoms, and international justice on which the Western system is based. This causes the West to lose its credibility and rings the end of a human rights system that Washington has been trying since its war on Iraq to replace with rules derived from The law of the jungle, and she calls it the “rules-based international order.”

The Israeli-Western war on Gaza showed that the blocs that were formed within the framework of an international system based on the rule of law after World War II, led by the United Nations, had eroded and reached the peak of their inability after the Security Council turned into a rhetorical platform incapable of issuing a ceasefire resolution. To bring in humanitarian aid, let alone prevent the first televised genocide in human history.

It is true that the October 7 attack on Israel brought calamities on the residents of Gaza, but it may also provide opportunities unless the Hamas resistance stops clashing with the extermination forces, and unless the residents of Gaza are forcibly displaced to the Sinai desert. This is because it forced the countries sponsoring the occupation to talk about ending the occupation and the two-state solution, albeit as an attempt to absorb international anger, and to rely on Israel to return to its genocidal plans as soon as the smoke of cannons and incendiary phosphorus bombs cleared from the skies of Gaza. 

Turning talk about a two-state solution into a political gain depends primarily on the Palestinian people, and the extent of their ability to unite their forces, renew their leadership, and formulate a national project that can be negotiated with the internationally collapsing West, in the name of the resisting Palestinian people.

From Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed