Benyamin Netanyahu rushed, headlong, into the trap set for him by Hamas in Gaza with the terrorist carnage of October 7, 2023. Seventy days after the start of an offensive dedicated to eradicating Hamas, an offensive suspended for a only week of truce, it is clear that Israel has only managed to eliminate one important Islamist leader, Ahmed Al-Ghandour, military commander for northern Gaza. While, in the north, Gaza City is already half destroyed, the Israeli steamroller continues to sow destruction and death in the center and south of the Palestinian enclave.
Significantly, the map distributed by the Israeli army to define the targeted areas, whose population is ordered to flee with very short notice, is based on a document half a century old. It was in fact developed in 1971 under the authority of Ariel Sharon, then commander of Israel’s southern military region.
The ambitious general, crowned with his feats of arms in 1956 and 1967, was faced with a low-intensity Palestinian insurgency, which his predecessors had failed to contain. Sharon had opted for the strong approach of demolishing entire sections of residential neighborhoods, in order to open access routes for Israeli armored vehicles.
The eternal restart
Such a brutal reconfiguration of urban space led to the forced displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians within the Gaza Strip, a figure considered exorbitant at that time. Today, nearly two million of the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Palestinian territory have been forced by extreme violence to abandon their homes, sometimes several times. Sharon, elected prime minister by an electoral landslide in 2001, was once again faced with the persistent challenge of the Gaza Strip, thirty years after the success of his 1971 counter-insurgency campaign.
This time he decided to evacuate, in 2005, the eight thousand settlers who, under the protection of the Israeli army, monopolized a quarter of the land of a Palestinian enclave that was nevertheless overpopulated. This unilateral disengagement, even if it put an end to the direct occupation of Gaza, left Israel with exclusive control of the territory’s air and maritime space, as well as its land access (in collaboration with Egypt to the south). ). Such disengagement only represented an appearance of withdrawal, since, shortly after, Sharon launched a bombing campaign against Gaza under the evocative name of “Eternal Beginning”.
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