In an article for Le Monde published the day after October 7, 2023, I wrote that this cataclysm was "likely to upset regional balances." An easy prediction. What I couldn't imagine was that, 12 months later, we'd still be here, only worse. Israel now faces seven fronts. Seven fronts! In the south, we're up against Hamas, in the north against Hezbollah, in the east, in the West Bank, against an as yet unnamed intifada, in Syria and Iraq against a myriad of terrorist groups, further afield against the Houthis in Yemen, and finally against Iran, the master of them all. It took a strategic genius to find ourselves in such a bind.

Let's move on quickly to the question of who is responsible for what. I said a bit about Benjamin Netanyahu's responsibility in the aforementioned article. As for Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and the late Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, their jihadist ideology blinded them to the realities of their adversary. The former is a perfect Hebrew speaker, the latter prided himself on being an expert on Israel, but both understood nothing of the country's power and drew false conclusions from its momentary weaknesses. In a famous speech, didn't Nasrallah declare that Israel, despite its nuclear and air power, was "weaker than a spider's web?" A quarter of a century later, the spider's web finally suffocated him.

That said, the only valid question is this: Can we still climb out of the quagmire into which the barbaric assault of October 7 plunged the region? Yes, provided we bear three facts in mind. The first: a return to the status quo ante is impossible. Obscured by Netanyahu's toxic personality, his destructive policies and the composition of his government, the root cause of the situation we're struggling with is the presence on Israel's borders of over-armed proto-states whose ultimate goal is its elimination. It's all very well to laugh at Netanyahu's promise of "total victory," i.e. the annihilation of Hamas and Hezbollah once and for all. But there is no doubt that they must be deprived of their power to cause harm, in other words, of their power at all.

Turning the table

The second fact concerns the modalities of this paradigm shift. Force is undoubtedly one of them. After October 7, the systematic dismantling of Hamas's military and political structures was inevitable, as was the abrupt change in the face of Hezbollah. Once again, we have to ask ourselves why, for two decades, coinciding with Netanyahu's time in office, Israel has allowed these two jihadist entities to grow in strength and acquire full-fledged armies. In any case, the massacre of October 7, the daily barrage of fire on the Galilee and the 100,000 or so displaced Israelis scattered across their own country have forced the Israeli government to turn the table.

You have 54.71% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.