IEvents occur in history that are both surprising and predictable. Such was the attack by Hamas against Israeli localities in the “envelope” of the Gaza Strip. Surprising by the timing, the unprecedented scale and audacity of the operation and the devastation it caused, as well as, on the Israeli side, by the total negligence of military and civilian intelligence (Shin Beth) and the initial disarray defense forces.
Nightmare scenes: fighters perched on pick-ups equipped with automatic rifles, Islamic State style, who cross without firing a formidable barrier erected with billions of dollars and bristling with state-of-the-art technological sensors; armed terrorists who walk for an hour, without meeting anyone on their way, to invade towns and kibbutz; men, women and children killed at point blank range in the street or in their homes, taken hostage by the dozen and taken across the border, where social networks show them exhibited, beaten, insulted; families who are suffocating in their shelters and whose radios echo desperate calls for help; a Gazan radio reporter who transmits live (!) from the courtyard of a building where the terrorists operate; and, when the army finally arrives, fierce fighting street by street, house by house, throughout a day, a night and another day…
Predictable
Surprising, yes. Because finally, how can the most powerful army in the region, one of the first in the world we are assured, how can such efficient secret services be able to locate a terrorist leader on the third floor on the left in a building which counting thirty, were they incapable of seeing the blow coming, then of preventing it?
This is where the second term comes in: predictable. Because what we have just suffered is not a decree from heaven. It is the result of a conjunction of two factors: a fanatical Islamist organization whose declared objective is the destruction of Israel; and an imbecile Israeli policy to which successive governments have clung and which the last one brought to incandescence.
Over the years, a balance of power has developed between Israel and Hamas, where the latter has ended up securing a sort of right of initiative. It was he who decided the height of the flames, depending on the evolution of his interests. So, if Qatar, its financier, was not generous enough, or fast enough, all it took was a salvo of rockets to drag Israel into a spiral from which the inhabitants emerged bruised. But he got what he wanted at the price of a necessarily ephemeral ceasefire.
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