In a forum at Monde published the day after October 7, 2023, I wrote that this cataclysm was “likely to upset regional balances”. Easy forecasting. What I couldn’t imagine was that, twelve months later, we would still be here. Worse. Israel now faces seven fronts. Seven ! We face Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north, in the east, in the West Bank, an intifada that has not yet spoken its name, in Syria and Iraq a myriad of terrorist groups, and further afield the Houthis of Yemen. , and finally to Iran, patron of all others. It took strategic genius to find yourself stuck in this way.
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Let’s quickly move on to the question of everyone’s responsibilities. I said a word about it in the aforementioned forum regarding that of Benjamin Netanyahu. As for Yahya Sinouar, the leader of Hamas, and the late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, their jihadist ideology made them blind to the realities of the adversary. The first is a perfect Hebrew speaker, the second prided himself on being an expert on Israel, but both understood nothing about the sources of this country’s power and drew false conclusions from its momentary weaknesses. In a famous speech, did Nasrallah not declare that Israel, despite its nuclear power and its air force, was “weaker than a spider web” ? A quarter of a century later, the spider’s web finally suffocated him.
That said, the only valid question is this: can we still emerge from the quagmire into which the barbaric assault of October 7, 2023 plunged the region? Yes, provided you keep three facts in mind. The first: a return to the status quo ante is impossible. Obscured by Netanyahu’s toxic personality, his destructive policies and the composition of his government, the root cause of the situation we are struggling with is the presence on Israel’s borders of over-armed proto-states whose aim is its elimination. We can make fun of the “total victory” that Netanyahu promises to his fellow citizens, namely the annihilation once and for all of Hamas and Hezbollah. But there is no doubt that they must be deprived of their power to cause harm, that is to say, of their power itself.
Flip the table
The second fact concerns the modalities of this paradigm shift. Strength is one, undoubtedly. After October 7, 2023, the systematic dismantling of Hamas’ military and political structures was essential, as was the sudden change in the situation facing Hezbollah. Once again, we must ask ourselves why, for two decades, which coincided with Netanyahu’s presence in office, Israel allowed these two jihadist entities to gain power and acquire real armies. Still, the massacre of October 7, 2023, the daily barrages of fire on localities in the Galilee and the approximately 100,000 displaced Israelis scattered across their own country forced the Israeli government to turn the table.
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