The war between Israel and Hamas is a new kind of situation. Never in its history Israel has been so ridiculized by an enemy. Even in the Kippour war which has been the most threatening Israel never had this impression to have been put in this situation.
The Netanyahu government will have the historical responsibility of this disaster. It is in a way a good thing an extreme right government will bring this burden. The feeling of superiority the Israeli forces showed and allow Hamas to prepare quietly its monstruous attacks is a sign of arrogance which is a traditional sign of extreme right parties. Never the Israeli people should look the same such a government with such ideas. It led them to a historical disaster. The Hamas and Iran played a very smart game, building this attack in the long run, creating a devastating strategy with very few means compared with their opponents. Of course the ideology of the Hamas must be one of an enemy, but the Hamas leader played a lot smarter than the Israeli ones.
Such an attack must interrogate the phase of the society we live in, even beyond Israel and the Middle East. The rise of intolerance and communautarism is probably an indirect consequence of globalization. However it is even more important to fight those ideas and go back to classical values.
First it looks important to support more dialog between Judaism and Islam, beyond the case of the Israelo-Hamas conflict. The dialog between these two great religious traditions are necessary to build more peace in the long run. In very religious societies as the Muslim Middle East and North Africa and the Jewish Israel, engaging for more religious dialog can be an efficient underground process. Creating religious organizations to promote more dialog is a necessary process. That is the reason why it is necessary to defend those values in the Western world as well. Religions, as politics, have many different ‘ideologies’ and it looks necessary to defend those who promote dialogue, interpretation and not the pretention of having the truth, oecumenism… Those approaches may have positive consequences.
Second the politicians should engage more to bring peace. Misfortunately the conflict of interests, especially economical, have a lot of detrimental consequences in the Middle East, with all the human drama associated as in Gaza. The European Union for instance looks to be too often associated with conflict of interests in this context. The scandal of the Greek deputy corrupted by Qatar is an example of that. This is the reason why is looks necessary to denounce this approach and to promote dialog. Moreover problems of migrations often stem from impoverished regions of the world partly because of imperialistic economical interests. This has to be fought as well. There are other solutions to succeed in the long run than exploiting less developed regions of the world ; on the contrary building real winning-winning partnerships should be more beneficial for everyone at the end of the course.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas must not be forgotten in the following years, even if the conflict is ending. There will be messages to take into account in the long run that should not be occulted.
The observer 