Israel’s “campaign of revenge” and the anxious question: What comes next? “The threat of terrorism in Switzerland could increase”: security expert warns of escalation

A week has passed since the day that will go down in history as “Israel’s September 11.” The terrorist attack by the radical Islamic Hamas, which was able to reach Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip with virtually no resistance, claimed approximately 1,200 lives. That is about half as much as during the Yom Kippur War fifty years ago.

At the time it almost only affected soldiers, now it mainly affects civilians. In addition, there are approximately 150 hostages who have been abducted to Gaza. Israel has vowed retaliation and carried out numerous airstrikes. A ground offensive is being considered. The Israeli army wants to ‘eradicate’ Hamas and its leaders once and for all.

That’s easier said than done. The Gaza Strip is approximately the same size as the two Appenzells and is very densely populated with more than two million inhabitants. There is an extensive tunnel system and many other shelters. It is an open secret that Hamas’s command center is located in Gaza City’s largest hospital.

How could that happen?

The Israeli hostages will also likely be held in different locations. Liberating them by military means is difficult, if not impossible. Mediation efforts are underway in the background, involving Turkey and probably Qatar and Egypt. Switzerland would also mediate, but its influence would likely be minimal.

It is a high-risk task with an uncertain outcome that Israel and its armed forces face. Even as the Jewish state focuses on this, the process of coming to terms with the Hamas terror, which has traumatized the country like no event since the Yom Kippur War, has already begun. Everyone is wondering: how could this happen?

Netanyahu’s murderous illusion

In addition to the failure of security forces and secret services, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is criticized. He has not only deeply divided the country with his right-wing religious government. He won the election on the promise that only he could guarantee Israel’s security. Now this promise has been exposed as a murderous illusion.

It is a revenge that Netanyahu was content with managing the conflict with the Palestinians. At the same time, he tried to make as many agreements as possible with Arab states in the hope of ‘steering’ the Palestinian conflict. Not without success. Even a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia seemed possible.

Hamas has deliberately tolerated this

Israeli leaders believed they could “isolate Palestinians in ghetto enclaves indefinitely,” author and political analyst Omar Rahman said on CNN. This gave the Palestinians neither hope nor a political perspective, but rather confronted them with “a future of permanent subjugation.”

Journalist Tal Schneider even accused Benjamin Netanyahu in the Times of Israel of deliberately tolerating and strengthening Hamas to weaken the autonomous authority in Ramallah. He accepted limited military strikes to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, even if only in the West Bank.

“A total lose-lose situation”

The illusion that this potential for hatred and violence can be suppressed and ignored has been drowned in blood and tears. Now the question arises: what comes after the ‘revenge campaign’? Tal Schneider sees black. Both sides are trapped in a “blood cycle” with no clear way out: “It’s a total lose-lose situation.”

The writer Thomas Meyer fears that Israel will become “even more militant and even more right-wing.” A peaceful solution is also difficult to imagine in the West Bank, where more than 400,000 Jewish settlers live. Some of them were attracted by cheap housing, but many are religious fanatics who want to annex the biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’.

The end of the two-state solution

The 2002 Saudi peace plan, which promised Israeli diplomatic relations and security guarantees in return for a withdrawal behind the borders before the 1967 Six-Day War, has therefore become as unrealistic as the 2003 Geneva Initiative, which outlined a plan for a two-state solution.

The then Minister of Foreign Affairs Micheline Calmy-Rey played an important role. The plan “cannot be implemented in reality,” she acknowledged in the “Tages-Anzeiger.” It advocates one federal state for Israelis and Palestinians, with the Palestinian territories as a kind of cantons. In this state model, Israelis and Arabs would have the same rights.

Confederation as a way out?

Such a ‘one-state solution’ is not well received in Israel, because the Arab population is growing faster than the Jewish one. Jossi Beilin, co-architect of the 1993 Oslo Agreement and the Geneva Initiative, outlined a different approach in an interview with Spiegel: a confederation based on the two-state solution.

This concept, according to Beilin, could allow all Israeli settlers who want to live in a future Palestinian state, and, conversely, the same number of Palestinians in Israel. In practice, however, implementing such an idea will probably be very difficult, also because of the willingness to use force on both sides.

Solution only with another government

The question is also what will happen next to the Gaza Strip, which has been controlled by Hamas since 2007. The best option for Jossi Beilin would be for the Palestinian Authority to take over. “Temporary control by the Arab League or an international body is also conceivable.”

Implementation would also be difficult in this case, as Beilin knows. “Removing Hamas from power is important,” he says. If she remains in power, he is proposing exactly what Netanyahu supposedly wanted to prevent: a West Bank-only peace deal. It is therefore clear that a solution is only possible with a different government.

This could be the least of the problems, as Bibi Netanyahu will hardly be able to hold on. Everything else remains extremely difficult after decades of violence and hatred and the fait accompli of settlements that violate international law. There was never a shortage of good ideas in this conflict. Its implementation is the heart of the matter.