The horror in the kibbutzim. On October 7, many Hamas men entered Israeli territory, killing men and women, children and old people, along the way. At least 1,400 people lost their lives in the attack, according to a latest report from the Israeli army.
Since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, such a toll has never been reached during a terrorist attack. As a result, the IDF is relentlessly bombing the Gaza Strip, and is preparing to carry out a major ground counter-offensive, to definitively eliminate Hamas, explained the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, implying that the conflict had entered into a crisis. war of civilization.
A nationalist conflict that has become “Islamized”
“It’s more complex,” confides historian Georges Bensoussan to Europe 1-CNews. Guest of La Grande interview, the author of the work “The origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict” published by Éditions Que sais-je, calls for putting politics back into the management of relations between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
“We are initially witnessing a conflict between two nationalisms, two territorial movements which have shared the same land for around a century and a half. And from the mid-1920s, a good century ago, the conflict was Islamized by the leader of the Palestinian national movement at the time, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini,” he explains.
“No prospect of peace”
“He Islamized the conflict, that is to say he transformed this conflict from a territorial and political conflict into a religious conflict. And it is a dramatic development because as long as you are in politics, you are in negotiation possible”, continues the historian, taking the example of the handshake between Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, in September 1993 , during the signing of the declaration of principles of the Oslo Accords.
These agreements were to lay the first milestones on the path towards peace between the two nations. “These are two old enemies who shake hands,” explains Georges Bensoussan. “But with religion, you are in the absolute. And the absolute, it’s them or us. So the Islamization of the conflict wanted by the mufti of Jerusalem and which continues today by Hamas, (.. .) leaves no prospect of peace,” he believes.
From now on, “when you read the Hamas charter, we see clearly that the objective is not to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It is a question of eradicating all Jewish presence from the sea to the Jordan, therefore to destroy the State of Israel. It is in this sense that what happened on October 7 and the Hamas program itself is a genocidal type program,” he concludes, adding that It was urgent to “politicize the conflict again” to return to reason.