Your book takes as its starting point the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. Where is this conflict?
Israel achieved a double tactical military victory. They destroyed Hamas's strike capacity and killed its three main leaders (Yayah Sinouar, Ismaël Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif). In a way, they washed away the insult of the October 7 attack, which took Israeli intelligence by surprise and shamed Prime Minister Netanyahu. Then, by decapitating Hezbollah and killing its secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, Israel deprived Iran of its shield and sword in the region. Thanks to Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic could threaten the Jewish state, while using it for its protection. For what ? Because if the United States had ever wanted to fire on Iranian nuclear sites, Hezbollah would have fired on Israel first, as a preventive measure. Today, Iran no longer has the ultimate deterrent weapon that Hezbollah represented. And Hamas is no longer operational.
Has Israel really neutralized their military capabilities?
Yes, even if Hezbollah still has the capacity, from southern Lebanon, to fire rockets at Israel and kill many Israelis, military or civilians. The downside of all this is that the Israeli army probably killed nearly 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza and several thousand Lebanese. There are also two million refugees in the Gaza Strip and 1.5 million in Lebanon. Many people, including in Israel and Europe, believe that this goes too far, that the Israeli Prime Minister is following his own agenda to prolong the conflict, even though the military objectives have been achieved, in order to ensure his political survival. and judicial. And not having to give accounts for October 7.
Does this deadly conflict have a chance of finding a solution?
There are two very important issues relating to this question. First of all regarding Iran. Does this country still have the capacity to strike Israel? What state is its anti-aircraft defense system really in, after the Israeli response of October 25? Some say it is completely destroyed… Finally, after the suspicious death of the former radical president Ebrahim Raïssi, is there not a part of the Iranian military elite that is ready to change the regime and to find an agreement with Israel? A similar approach has been launched for other Gulf countries, notably Saudi Arabia. Finally, there remains the Trump factor. If he appears to be the unconditional supporter of Israel, he does not want to have a war on his hands in the Middle East. He told Netanyahu: “I want peace.” However, the latter does not want it. It's still too early to say for sure, but when I spent ten days in the United States during the elections and met with people close to the president-elect, if they indicated that America supported Israel, they do not necessarily consider that Netanyahu's policy is that of the USA. This is the big question mark hanging over the future of the conflict.
A conflict that shook the world order?
Yes, this is what I explain in my book and which I will address here in Pau. With the Israeli offensive in Gaza, we have seen the mobilization of an entire “Global South”, which explains in particular that the Hebrew State is not legitimate and that the real genocide in the history of humanity is what do the Israelis in Gaza, hiding the Holocaust during the Second World War. We are in fact witnessing the replacement of the old opposition between the West and the East with a new one: “Global South” against the North, described as evil and accused of colonialism, which would be the major crime and of which Israel would be the outcome. Upheaval that we find in our own societies, with the polarization of identity – as in France between the National Rally and France Insoumise – around the issues of immigration, Islam, etc. This is also what led to the election of Donald Trump, who was elected on the basis of hostility to immigration and the fight against wokism.
To the point of leading to a globalized conflict?
Maybe not yet. Russia, an ally of Iran, wanted Trump to win because it hopes he will be more willing to negotiate a deal forcing the Ukrainians to cede territory it occupies. But it remains economically weak and its general situation is not good. China, for its part, is trying to regain a decisive role against the United States, but its growth is at half mast. etc. In short, all these countries which form this kind of conglomerate that we call the Brics (with other countries) and which try to create a sort of alternative from the South to the countries of the North, are still full of contradictions…
“The book is the freedom to reflect and think! »
“As someone who has been a university student all my life, I see that one of the biggest current problems in our societies is the collapse of reading, particularly among young people, and its replacement by social networks, which are much more suited to the diffusion of ideology and emotion, only to reasoning, deplores Gilles Kepel. And the difficulty for young people today to realize that books are freedom! The freedom to reflect, to think! This is why I am very happy to come to Pau, which is a place where books are at the heart of everything. And besides, there are many readers, who are not only people older than me! “.
