VSt has been more than half a century since successive Israeli governments have, more or less consciously, played into the hands of the Islamists in the Gaza Strip. It all started in 1973 when the occupation authorities sponsored the inauguration in Gaza of the mosque of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, already head of the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel then successfully relied on Islamist militants to counterbalance the nationalist supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
This bet continued after the PLO launched the unarmed uprising of the Intifada in 1987, dedicated to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the famous “two-state solution”. . The Muslim Brotherhood responded by transforming itself in Gaza into Hamas, the Arabic acronym for the “Islamic resistance movement”, which advocated the destruction of Israel. It took the electoral victory, in 1992, of the “peace camp” in Israel for Yitzhak Rabin, who became prime minister, to sign a historic agreement between Israel and the PLO the following year with Yasser Arafat.
Gaza surrendered to Hamas
The two years in which Rabin and Arafat worked together for lasting peace and thus collaborated against Hamas represent the only exception to the decades-long streak of Israeli appeasement toward Gaza’s Islamists. After the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish terrorist in 1995, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked to sabotage the agreement concluded with the PLO. In 1997, he even freed Yassine from Israeli prisons where he was serving a life sentence. The triumphant return to Gaza of the founder of Hamas seriously complicated Arafat’s task, until the second Intifada, in 2000, this time marked by suicide attacks.
It was Ariel Sharon, head of the Israeli government, who crushed this armed uprising, eliminating Yassin in 2004 and besieging Arafat, who died shortly after. Sharon ordered, in 2005, the withdrawal of the army and settlers from the Gaza Strip, a withdrawal which he refused to negotiate with Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, which paved the way for Hamas, soon to be master of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian enclave.
For more than sixteen years, from 2007 to 2023, Gaza was cut off from the West Bank and the rest of the world, due to a rigorous blockade imposed by Israel, in collaboration with Egypt on the southern border. Such a blockade allows the Islamists to consolidate their control over Gaza, where they track down and repress all forms of opposition. Benjamin Netanyahu, who returned to the head of government in 2009, also decided, two years later, to release numerous Hamas “hawks”, including Yahya Sinouar, while he refused the release of declared supporters of the solution. to two states.
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