INTERVIEW WITH JEAN-PIERRE FILIU: “We must come out on top with a mobilization commensurate with the tragedy”

By Hala Kodmani, Luc Mathieu and Sonia Delesalle-Stolper

In his latest book, “How Palestine was lost and why Israel did not win”, published this Friday, historian Jean-Pierre Filiu traces the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and recalls that despite an overwhelming balance of power, Israel's victory or security is not assured until a two-state solution is achieved.

The October 7 attacks in Israel constituted an atrocity and all feelings about it are acceptable, except surprise, estimates historian Jean-Pierre Filiu in an interview with Libération. For the researcher, university professor at Sciences-Po, this violence by Hamas and that of the unprecedented reprisals by Israel which followed in Gaza find their genesis in the cancellation in 2021 by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas , elections. The selfishness of Arab countries, the blindness and lack of commitment, over the decades, of Westerners during poorly prepared peace processes also explain the critical situation in which the region finds itself today. For the historian, author of How Palestine was lost and why Israel did not win published this Friday February 9 by Editions du Seuil, only total commitment and the imposition of a two-state solution, quickly, through international community, and in particular the European Union, can offer hope of the beginnings of a solution.

Your book comes out four months after the conflagration of October 7.

I had already been working on this book for a long time but, in view of current events, I offered to submit it earlier. I was thus able to better absorb the trauma, as it is all trying, especially when you have friends and relatives on both camps. After decades of working on this subject, I sought to renew the perspective and the interpretation, because if we do not obtain the right answers, it is perhaps because we are not asking the right questions. I try to deconstruct the chronology rather than tell the story we all know about different dates, different turning points and lost opportunities.

Why were they lost?

First there is the Palestinian defeat and the balance of power which allowed this defeat. But the dominant party did not necessarily win, because the specificity of this conflict means that, even with an overwhelming balance of power, not only is Israel's victory not assured, but its security is not guaranteed either. not guaranteed. This is obviously the most tragic message of the bloodbath of October 7. The paradox is that the expression “peace process”, polite, elegant, consensual, has in fact always meant the negotiation of the conditions of Palestinian defeat. However, the negotiation only focused on interim arrangements and never really came to fruition. We therefore remained in an in-between war and peace which could have given the strongest the illusion of an indefinitely manageable situation. However, I have said it consistently for years: the status quo is untenable.

You write it: the events of October 7 are an atrocity, a nightmare, a tragedy. But the only thing we can't say is that it was a surprise.

All feelings are indeed legitimate, except surprise. Which obviously does not mean that the event was in itself predictable in its climax. This is indeed a turning point, but within a long-term and already very busy trend. I wrote in 2014 that banking Israel's security on the permanent insecurity of Gaza was a tragic illusion, but above all a strategic mistake.

Why didn't the Israelis want to see the alerts?

It’s always the same, it’s the ideological blinders. That is to say, the dominant fails to recognize his victory because he cannot, even intellectually, put the vanquished on an equal footing, even within a framework of victory and defeat. The sequence leading to October 7 actually begins when Mahmoud Abbas cancels the Palestinian elections in April 2021. This is fundamental.

What is the connection ?

This is where everything changes because the political path is closed by a Palestinian decision, by Abbas who refuses to consider his own succession even though he had committed not to run again, while Hamas had committed not to present a candidate. There had been no presidential elections since the election of Abbas in 2005, no legislative elections since the victory of Hamas in 2006. With these two elections planned for 2021 for the presidency and the Parliament of the Palestinian Authority, we would emerge from such a lack of popular legitimacy. It was the only way of hope. But Abbas ultimately went back on his word. And the international community wiped its brow and said “Phew!”, when it should have said to itself: “Catastrophe!” The United States, Europe and donors were so panicked by the idea of an Islamist victory that they preferred not to have elections.

How then does the gear engage?

In May 2021, a month after this closure of political space, there was a sequence of violence by Sheikh-Jarrah and Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem [explosion of violence after the forced eviction of Palestinians, editor's note], then Gaza and communal riots in Israel. These unrest contribute to the arrival of the supremacists in third position in the following Israeli elections, therefore to Netanyahu's return to power at the end of 2022. In the meantime, Yahya Sinwar, to whom Israel gave the keys to Gaza – we must still call things by their name –, is the first leader of Hamas to control both the political and military branches, because the Al-Qassam brigades are acquired by him. When does planning for the operation begin? Perhaps we will know precisely one day, but it began very early on within the Hamas shock troops [special forces unit], the Noukhba.

But what was the aim of the October 7 attack?

My guess is that Hamas was hoping for the big deal: all their hostages for all the Palestinian prisoners. They had already tried this in return for soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, when they did not obtain the release of Marwan Barghouti [who is still serving several life sentences], the most popular figure of Fatah and the Liberation Organization of Palestine (PLO), but that of more than a thousand prisoners, including Sinwar and activists mainly, without being exclusively from Hamas.

You explain that Israel's blindness resembles ideological blinders, the feeling of being, historically, the strongest?

What is striking when we read Zionist literature, even in its origins, is that it talks very little about Arabs. This is what we call the hidden question, hence the first reflex of Zionist leaders, whoever they may be, which is to corrupt, to buy land from absentee owners, to buy complicity. When we buy, we maintain a relationship of domination. And the idea persists because Palestinians agree with it. They divide and allow themselves to be bought. We must never forget that the corrupter could not corrupt without a corrupter. I try to explain it by Palestinian factionalism. We have to see how entrenched these divisions are, it’s incredible.

When you talk about factionalism in the villages, does this go back to disputes over land or between families?

It is more of an anthropological construction. And, when we arrive in the 20th century, Palestinian nationalism is paralyzed by the quarrels between the supporters of the Husseini and the Nashashibi, the two great families of Jerusalem. The Zionist movement has certainly not stopped growing, but all the while establishing a Jewish people, proud of it, on its land. A national movement can be more or less factional, without calling the nation into question. We come back to the ideological blinders of the Zionists and then the Israelis, when they say: “As the Palestinians are divided, in fact, they are not a people with national rights.” And they add: “We will be able to buy Hamas like we bought the Palestinian Authority.” Buying in this case meant granting work permits to the inhabitants of Gaza.

Is this what happened to Gaza?

In addition to the ideological blinders, there is also a constancy that I will call the Fauda syndrome [from the Israeli series]. It is the idea that we can know the Palestinians from afar, that we can control them through a riot of cutting-edge technology. But Israelis have lost the meaning of Gaza, they talk about it without the slightest idea of its realities. I didn't follow the fourth season of Fauda, but the third on Gaza was largely a fantasy. It does not refer to anything about the way Gaza works, whereas, on the West Bank, the directors had real documentation, real experience. But there is no Israeli who has entered Gaza other than in a tank or as a hostage since 2007.

Conversely, Hamas knows much more about Israel?

In Gaza, we are under the control of Hamas day and night. The territory is gridded. And then there is the fact that the majority of Israelis do not speak Arabic, even in the army, even in the intelligence services, while the majority of Hamas leadership speaks and reads Hebrew. Many learned it in prison, where they all ask for books to study Zionist thought. Thus, in the balance of power which is nevertheless overwhelming in favor of Israel, the knowledge differential is in favor of the weakest. We have been bombarded with the omnipotence of the Mossad, the omniscience of the Israeli services, but this is partly a myth.

There is also the reality that Gaza is at the heart of Palestine, a reality that most Palestinians themselves have found difficult to accept. My book, History of Gaza, which dates from 2012, was translated into English and Turkish, but never into Arabic, because it embarrassed both Fatah and Hamas too much. When Abbas lost Gaza in 2007, he could have returned but he told his loved ones: “Good riddance!” But Gaza is Palestine. In 1948, the Gaza Strip is what remains, that’s literally it. There are 77% for Israel, 22% annexed to Jordan, and there is this 1%, neither for one nor the other, administered by Egypt which refuses to annex it. And of this 1%, there is a quarter of the Arab population of Palestine. Ben-Gurion understands immediately, he says: “I have to annex and move.” He proposes to resettle 100,000 Palestinian refugees in Israel. Obviously, Egypt refuses this annexation. Since then, Gaza has been the key to the Palestinian question.

You point the responsibility to Christian Zionists. For what ?

They are the real warmongers, the real hawks. We know little about them in Europe even though it is undoubtedly the only ideology of the 20th century which has achieved nothing but success, for a simple reason: it has never had direct control over the Holy Land. This series of victories began with the “reunification” of Jerusalem in 1967 and, ten years later, the defeat of Labor against Likud, which advocated the undivided ownership of the “land of Israel”.

What is their thesis?

For these evangelicals, the return of the Jewish people to their land is part of the fulfillment of the prophecies and will open, after seven cycles, that of the kingdom of God. This evangelical vision of return nourished, from 1917, the Balfour Declaration of British support for the Zionist project in Palestine. These believers are convinced that their salvation, whether they will go to heaven or hell, depends on the refusal of any territorial concession. And it was to satisfy them that Trump moved the United States embassy to Jerusalem in 2018.

How do you explain the abandonment of the Palestinians by Arab countries?

The Middle East is structured around the Palestinian question, even if by default. The first Israeli-Arab conflict completely eclipsed the first Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1948. We focused on this conflict between states and, in the end, all the Arab regimes agreed that the Palestinians would not have representation. The tragedy of Palestine is that it is Arab enough for Arab countries to claim it, but too Palestinian for them to really defend it. Yasser Arafat's Fedayeen will try to attract Arab countries into their confrontation with Israel. They will succeed, and it will be the rout of 1967 [the Six-Day War]. They will never be self-critical and will continue on the theme “revolution until victory”.

Then there was the cycle of Palestinian-Arab wars…

Yes, the two most violent will be those of Hafez al-Assad against Arafat, in 1976 and 1983 in Lebanon. This exhausted the Palestinian movement. It took the first intifada [1987-1993] to bring the PLO back to the Palestinian territory proper, while the Islamists had never abandoned it.

Has the two-state solution paradoxically become possible again since October 7?

Since the imposition of the British mandate on Palestine in 1922, there have been only two solutions: either a binational state or two states. Today, Israelis are demanding separation, which is a cause for optimism. We must return to simple things, there are the borders of 1967 and the separation must be with the other. Peace will be an Israeli victory anyway.

Who, on the Palestinian side, will negotiate with Israel?

We must go beyond the static observation to trigger a dynamic which will see the emergence of partners for peace. But this can only work under two conditions: a peace treaty without an interim period and an internationally imposed solution. The European Union will have a fundamental role to play, because its fate is also at stake in Gaza. Indeed, if Netanyahu clings to power and manages to elect Trump, Putin triumphs in Ukraine. If this is not enough to motivate Europeans... The situation is unprecedented, with such intensity of suffering on both sides that it is imperative to find a solution. The United States is reluctant to agree to a quick settlement, which Europe, on the other hand, favors, because it is necessary to come out on top with a mobilization commensurate with the tragedy. Let us not forget that the historic first Oslo Accord was a mutual recognition agreement between Israel and the PLO. From there, anything is possible.