If the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so divisive in France – and elsewhere in the world – it's because there are two radically antagonistic understandings of its origin, namely Hamas's terrorist massacres on October 7, 2023. Some see it as a continuation, others as a rupture. Is October 7 a particularly horrific episode in a conflict that has been going on since 1948 and the birth of Israel, or does it mark the start of a new era that abolishes all previous parameters? The answer to this question has political, legal, historical and moral consequences.

In a historical reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict, October 7 is the continuation, atrocious but sadly predictable, of an ongoing conflict. It follows on from other massacres, notably that of the village of Deir Yassin in 1948, in which over a hundred Palestinian villagers were killed. This tragic episode is a reminder that massacres of civilians are not the exclusive preserve of Hamas. It was, among other things, by using this practice that Israel expanded its territory in 1948, as revealed by the work of Israeli "new historians."

Commentators who subscribe to this perspective distinguish between two types of action carried out by Hamas and its allies: attacks on Israeli army border posts on the one hand, and the massacres of civilians in the kibbutzim and villages surrounding Gaza and at the Tribe of Nova music festival on the other. The former operations are, they say, part of the armed resistance to Israel's total encirclement of the Gaza Strip, which consists of controlling all access to it and which, according to the United Nations, is akin to occupation.

Massacres of civilians, on the other hand, are purely terrorist acts. It should be pointed out that the vast majority of Israeli victims are civilians (815 out of a total of 1,200 dead), and the same applies to the 250 hostages. This reading of the conflict also means taking into account the dimension of international law and integrating all UN resolutions, in other words, not making October 7 a stopping point.

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