Interview with historian Yezid Sayigh "We find a symmetry of radical discourse in Hamas and certain Israeli ultra -nationalists"

By launching an unprecedented attack on Israeli territory, commit killings against civilians and taking hostages, what objectives was aimed at Hamas? The Islamist movement could not ignore that it would trigger a massive Israeli military reaction against the Gaza Strip whose Palestinian population would be the main victim, says historian Yezid Sayigh, researcher at the Malcolm H. Kerr center for the Middle East of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

This new phase of clashes in the Middle East replaced the Palestinian issue at the center of the diplomatic scene when it had been relegated to the background for two decades. And in particular by the Western countries which have ignored the work of the undermining carried out by Israel to hinder a solution to two states.

What objectives did Hamas pursue when he decided to commit the attack and killings of October 7?

Given the magnitude of the attack on the military level, my reaction in the very first hours of October 7 was to think that the objectives of Hamas were to be very ambitious. Even if one of his goals was to obtain the release of the 5,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, a subject which has a deep emotional resonance in Palestinian society, it could not be the only one. Because even supposing that Hamas ends up obtaining such a massive release, it would always be in charge of the Gaza Strip and the 2.3 million people who live there, still besieged.

As we have gone when we learned the reality of the killings of Israeli civilians committed by Hamas and others, I understood that, whatever the goals pursued by the movement, they would be impossible to reach, And that the consequences would inevitably be terrible for the Israelis and for the Palestinians. For me who has been for many years a negotiator of the peace process, which was also involved in the Israeli-Palestinian and Judeo-Palestinian dialogues, I had the feeling that all for which I worked came from be destroyed.

Subsequently, the morally repugnant rhetoric of some Hamas officials who tried to hide, put into perspective or justify the death of Israeli civilians led me to ask me if Hamas had really developed long -term goals.

How could a movement that pretend to be the Palestinian national leadership missing at this point of capacity for political analysis on the situation in Israel, on the balance of power in the world, on the reaction of public opinion, especially in Western countries, Faced with such killings? The effects of the October 7 attack are dramatically clear: the Israelis opposed to the peace process have been reinforced in their conviction that there is no partner for Palestinian side negotiations. And some have even withdrawn from it a suspicious satisfaction in the register "We told you well".

In the past, the violence committed by Palestinian armed groups against Israeli civilians already pushed Israel to negotiate?

Such acts have never favored the peace process, on the contrary. Whether it was rocket fire from Jordan or Lebanon in the late 1960s against Israeli localities in the Jourdain valley or in Galileo. Or bomb attacks against buses, hostage -taking in line planes in the 1970s. Or, of course, later since the 2000s, suicide attacks and other types of bloody attacks.

Is Hamas really convinced that he can get the disappearance of Israel?

Hamas is not a homogeneous or static movement. It has a pragmatic wing, if not moderate, which today lives in exile, especially in Qatar, and a radical wing, embodied in particular by the military leaders who are in Gaza. The pragmatic branch, embodied by Ismaïl Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of the movement, has long proposed a compromise which would consist that Hamas did not recognize the jure Israel, nor its right to exist, but de facto established a truce of very long, ten or fifteen years.

However, the incessant blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip by the government of Benyamin Netanyahu ended up making this compromise proposal for the management of Hamas. And yet until October 7, Benyamin Netanyahu's policy explicitly aimed to maintain the Islamist movement in power in Gaza to divide the Palestinian national leadership, as many Israeli media have confirmed it. But after the 2021 war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the military branch took the ascendant within the movement, as the attack on October 7 proves.

I add that beyond the division between pragmatics and radicals, there are millennarist currents within Hamas who think that the end of the world is approaching. Some of their representatives said after the attack on October 7, that they described as "victory", that Hamas was going to beat Israel in Gaza and then release the whole Palestine.

This form of thought, totally detached from reality, is not very far from that of certain Israeli Israeli Jews from the far right who refuse the Oslo agreements because they want to carry out the mission that, according to them, God has Entrusted to the Jewish people to control all of Judea and Samaria, that is to say the West Bank and Jerusalem. These extremists, who include an important ultra -nationalist current represented in the current Israeli government, are convinced that the attacks of October 7 offer the opportunity to expel millions of Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza to the rest of the world.

The symmetry of certain radical speeches in both camps is found on another register. In an interview with a Lebanese media on October 24, Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas political bureau, said that the Palestinians have been victims for so long that all the acts that the Islamist movement is justified. Some Israelis are expressed in identical terms, believing that given the magnitude and nature of the killings of October 7, all the military actions of Israel in Gaza and in the West Bank are now justified.

The attacks committed by Hamas on October 7, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the center of the diplomatic agenda replaced. Why had he almost disappeared before?

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process started in 1993 with the Oslo agreements signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (OLP). This process provided for the establishment of an interim administration in part of the occupied territories, then the holding of negotiations on the so -called "final" status of the territories, which were to start at the latest in 1999.

But this process collapsed in July 2000 in Camp David, in the United States, with the failure of negotiations between Yasser Arafat, president of the PLO, and Ehud Barak, Israeli Prime Minister, at the invitation of Bill Clinton , President of the United States. A failure in which Israeli and Palestinian leaders have their respective share of responsibility.

Since then, despite attempts to relaunch it, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has gradually disappeared from the diplomatic agenda, despite the commitments made by Western countries. In Berlin in March 1999, for example, the European Council made an unconditional support declaration to the right of Palestinians to have a state. She specified that if the Council hoped that such a State was due to the day via good faith negotiations, the right of the Palestinians "to self -determination, including the right to create a State" was neither conditioned to negotiations nor negotiations or negotiations or negotiations at the approval of Israel.

However, almost twenty-five years later, it is clear that no European state has placed this requirement at the heart of its policy in the Middle East. Similarly, in 2002, the United States, under the chairmanship of George W. Bush, voted for resolution 1397 of the United Nations Security Council which supports the solution to two states. However, at the end of the attacks of October 7, it took two weeks for Joe Biden, followed by other US officials, simply begins to mention the need to relaunch a negotiated process around this solution.

In reality, since the mid-2000s, Western governments have chosen to ignore what Israel has done on the ground, in particular the expansion of colonization in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as the endless seat of Gaza . It is a moral and political failure of which we see the tragic consequences.

Hamas is obviously responsible for the atrocities he committed on October 7 against Israelis, but this moment in history does not come from nowhere. It has been sixty years since the problem of Palestinian refugees existed because of the creation of the State of Israel and that any form of recognition, compensation and obviously return has been refused. It has been their-six years since Israel has occupied the West Bank, Jerusalem East and Gaza. And if, in 1993, the Israeli government undertook to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians by the peaceful route, it continued to create the facts accomplished on the ground which hindered the solution to two states.

Western governments have failed to create incitement mechanisms that would have forced successive Israeli governments, right or left, to be honest with their public opinion: it is impossible for Israel to have everything at the same time, on the one hand , peace and security, and on the other hand, the incessant expansion of the colonies.

However, incentives of this type worked in the past: in 1991, American president George H. W. Bush had threatened to retain $ 10 billion in real estate loans, guaranteed by Israel to the United States, in order to force the Prime Minister of right lasts at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, to agree to attend the Madrid peace conference.

What are the respective responsibilities of Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the failure of the OSLO process in the early 2000s?

Between the start of the process in 1993 and the negotiations qualified as "finals" in 2000, Israeli governments, whether they were supporters of the Oslo agreements, like the cabinets led by the Labor Party, or that they Or oppose, like the firms led by Likoud, did not interrupt a single day colonization in the West Bank, whether by creating new colonies or by extending existing colonies.

Such a policy has of course been perceived by the Palestinian population as a desire to create facts accomplished on the ground, to change the terms of the final negotiation on the status of the territories even before it begins.

Consequently, the deliberately provocative visit of Ariel Sharon, then head of the Israeli opposition, on the esplanade of the mosques on September 28, 2000 spontaneous demonstrations of Palestinians, without instruction of the OLP, while the services of Israeli security had strongly warned Ariel Sharon against his visit. The Israeli authorities reacted very violently, opening fire on demonstrators and killing several of them, but also by closing the West Bank, cutting the cities of each other. What was felt very hard by the inhabitants of these regions who needed to go from one area to another or to Israel to work, to earn a living.

When this violence exploded, Yasser Arafat, who was not the promoter, decided to use it opportunistic by giving the green light to his party activists, the Fatah, to take part. He hoped to tear additional concessions from the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, in future negotiations. This was a major strategic error, a completely counterproductive decision that I criticized during the time1, because it fueled the rhetoric of the Israeli right and settlements of settlers who were hostile to the Oslo process.

And, on the Palestinian side, it made the game of Hamas, also hostile to the Oslo process. After the election of Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel in February 2001, the Islamist movement launched a series of suicide attacks in major Israeli cities in order to demonstrate to the Palestinian population that it was more patriotic than the Palestinian authority.

It was soon imitated by Islamic jihad and even by Fatah, which did not want to be overwhelmed by Hamas. All this has obviously made the game of opponents of the Oslo agreements within Israeli society and has explained largely the longevity in power of Benyamin Netanyahu since 2009.