The conflict between Israel and Hamas has continued for two years now, which began on 7 October 2023 with the attacks of the Palestinian organization and resulted in an invasion by the Jewish state in the Gaza Strip. The recent bordering of the Global Sumud Flotilla has increased global attention to this conflict, which far from being a point event has very ancient origins and an extremely complex story that is marking the dynamics in the Middle East especially by the Second World War. We interviewed Andrea Gaspardo, military and geopolitical analyst and our collaborator, to reconstruct the events and key concepts that led to today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its degeneration, which in these days has caused vast protests throughout Europe and a proposal for a peace plan presented by the US President Donald Trump.
ATTENTION: the Israeli-Palestinian question is extremely complex and delicate and we are aware that every type of synthesis risks omitting information; Therefore this article must be seen in the set of content that we have proposed and that we will propose in the next few days. We therefore invite you not to lose them: you can find everything in the Israel-Palestine war category of our site. Know that our purpose is to make the geopolitical situation understand with the utmost neutrality and stimulate interest for further insights.
Let’s start with the foundations, that is, the geography of the territory: what is Palestine from a purely geographical point of view?
To understand what we are talking, we have to go to the Middle Eastern region, between the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Akkra, the Red Sea, the Sinai peninsula and the rest of the Great Middle East enlarged. What until 1948 was the “British mandate of Palestine” today is divided into two large entities: the state of Israel, which owns most of the territory, and the Palestinian territories, divided into the Gaza Strip and West Bank (West Bank), an internal area crushed between Israel and the kingdom of Jordan.
As a geographical and cultural entity Palestine has a very long history, which dates back to millennia ago. But the idea of a “Palestine” as a state or nation is much more recent. So, when these two parts were born in this territory, and how?
The name Palestine dates back to the era of Emperor Adriano, who in 135 DC created the province of Syria-Palestine, also to erase the fact that the Judean had existed before the memory of the local populations, that is, a territory in which the Jews had lived. The name Palestine has resisted over time, and then became famous as a “Holy Land” at the time of the crusades. Modern Palestine was born with the British mandate, which traces the boundaries of the dispute on which Israelis and Palestinians battle. The National Palestinian consciousness was born relatively recently: when in 1948 the state of Israel was proclaimed there was no strong national self -awareness that instead the Israeli Jews had as they were alphabetized, as Europeans who had been transplanted to the Middle East. Today it is clear that the Palestinians have a geographical idea of their placement and also a national idea as a group.
Is there a precise date in which the conflict between Israel and Palestine was born? And how did it develop during the twentieth century?
The clashes between the colonies and the local Arab populations began at the beginning of the migrations of the first socialist pioneers in 1881. Until the beginning of the twentieth century things remained very under track. This phase was followed by one of more violent onset that began with the establishment of the British mandate; Especially in 1916 with the Balfur declaration the British encouraged the Jewish hearth in those lands. In 1948, with the birth of the state of Israel, the phase of the national wars between Israel and the Arab countries allied of the Palestinians began. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a phase of intifada and terrorism then reaching today’s conflict.
The 1993 Oslo agreements proposed a two -state solution, but did not solve the situation. What were they and why the solution has not been put into practice?
The agreements represent the last phase of a process of approaching decades. Already in 1967 with the physical conquest by Israel of the Striscia and in the east of Jerusalem and the West Bank it was understood that to reach a balanced conclusion of the conflict there should be a division of the lands. But the 1993 agreements left a series of issues that were fundamental: the fate of refugees (i.e. how to manage Palestinian diaspora abroad), the final status of Jerusalem, the boundaries and the safety conditions of Israel and other issues. Over time, the weight of these unsolved issues and the propaganda use of the agreements for electoral purposes by the two leadership led to the shipwreck of the peace process.
The other party in the conflict is Hamas. How is this organization structured?
Hamas was born in the 1980s, on an unprecedented date. The main architect of this event was the Sellio Yassim, the first chief of Hamas until he was killed by the Israeli army. Hamas is often described in a hasty way as a terrorist organization, but it is more: it is a political organization, an army, a business lobby, a criminal organization. Like a piovra he put his tentacles in every aspect of life in Palestine: that’s why it is so difficult to uproot it from that territory or find an alternative. Recall that Hamas was born in the strip how to counter the Olp (organization for the liberation of Palestine) of Yasser Arafat, dominated by the Fatah party, a party that is now by Abu Mazen. Originally, the Israelis thought that Hamas would errish the consent that the Olp had in the strip. This strategy has allowed Hamas to be incisted in the strip territory to the point of physically taking control.
The strongest blow in these tensions came on October 7, 2023. What happened that day and what were the objectives declared by the Israel government?
On October 7, 2023 he raised lobster of the clash at a level never seen so far. Everything started with the “Flood of Halaxa” operation by the military forces of Hamas, who unhinged the Israeli containment device around the strip obtaining a military victory that surprised several geopolitical experts. The indiscriminate massacre followed against the Jewish communities that lived in the Kibbutz located around the plane. Israel was not long in coming, and the government stared as ideal objectives of the military operation the elimination of Hamas leadership and their military skills, as well as the liberation of the hostages. Over the course of these two years the war has degenerated into something quite different, compared to the clashes seen previously, something on which the international community is currently questioning.
In fact, there is talk of genocide. Here, what is meant by genocide and what acts does it include?
The definition in a broad sense of genocide, that is, total elimination or in most of an ethnic, religious or cultural group, was coined in 1943 by Rafael Lemkin who had to invent a term to describe the Shoah. He used what happened in the Ottoman Empire against Armenians in the First World War as happened. To define an act of mass crimes such as genocide, the intentionality of the part that commits the act of wanting to annihilate and cancel the receiving part must be assessed and verified. To do this, it is always necessary to undertake a tortuous path of historical research and which from the legal point of view has intended an international process against the part that the genocide is committing. This means that over time only four events of this type have been identified as genocides: the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Shoah, the Cambodian genocide of the 70s and the Rwandese genocide of 1994. There are also others that will enter this list in the future as historical research will allow us to define them such.
As for what is happening in Gaza, it is obvious that a total destruction of the material life of local populations is underway. 93% of the buildings are destroyed or seriously damaged, there is the total destruction of the local cultural heritage and an attempt – at least in the official rhetoric of the Israeli extremist right – to promote and create the land for the expiry of the mass of the Palestinians from the strip. All these acts constitute in a clear way even in the absence of genocide, for which we will have to wait for the end of the events and a more full -bodied research in this area, even if the amount of news and facts that reaches us suggests that the analysis process will probably be very rapid in this case. Net of everything, to date 10% of the Palestinians have been seriously killed or injured: it is a number that weighs as a boulder compared to the guidelines of the government of Tel Aviv and impose serious reflections to the international community.
The Israeli government has been taking place for two years actions that have violated international laws and humanitarian law. What importance and what role does international law has in all this?
The effectiveness of international law lies in the will by the international community to make it respect. It is a question posed numerous times in the past, not only regarding today’s conflict. In this specific case, the fundamental problem lies in the fact that one of the two parts enjoys total support from the USA, which are strongly interpenetrated with Israel on an economic, military and political level. Israel also has a story of important relationships with the whole West and an important position in the economic, technological, military, cultural, medical research and so on. It is not easy to cut these profitable relationships formed over the decades. Lastly, thanks to his unformed nuclear arsenal, Israel has a no small force and kinetic capacity. Spain, Slovenia and Turkey began to take the first steps towards non -well -defined regimes of penalties in Israel, but if an erratic leadership such as that of Benjamin Netanyahu were put to the wall with a regime of total sanctions by the West including the USA, how could it react to the nuclear weapon available? It is an important scenario that is taken into consideration. The moves awaited to make Israel and his leadership from the policy carried on must be calibrated in order not to degenerate an already serious situation for the Palestinians and for Israel himself, who risks becoming serious for everyone.
In this sense, what did the international community do, including the Arab countries, in the face of this conflict?
The reaction of the international community came late, given the previous experience of the conflicts that had been there. Between Hamas and Israel it was believed that the war would last long and that it would not degenerate to this point. The Arab countries have taken condemnation positions with respect to the Israeli work, but for the Palestinians they did nothing but approve an ineffective humanitarian aid plan, since the control of the flow of aid passes through Israel. Today the Arab countries, especially on the impulse of Saudi Arabia, are trying to increase political pressure towards Israel. But the US have relationships with these countries and Arab countries want to protect them. In the past, the Arab countries have been criticized for not having taken Palestinian refugees with them. But it is a criticism in bad faith: once the last Palestinians who remained from the strip, they will not return, as happened in 1948 with Nakba, or in 1967 with the six -day war. If today it was said yes to the evacuation of the millions of Palestinians of the Striscia, they will no longer be able to return. That’s why the GazaWi must continue to stay there and receive aid to be able to survive and start living again.
