Remember what we were hearing just a few weeks ago. Ever since the United Arab Emirates and then Bahrain had signed peace treaties with Israel and Saudi Arabia had tacitly approved them, we had heard everywhere, even between the lines, that there was no longer a Palestinian problem, that they had lost and would no longer have any weight on the international scene.
The reasoning was that the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict imposed the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but however isolated they were, the Palestinians had not disappeared from Israel and the Occupied Territories. It was therefore enough that Mr Netanyahu gave free rein to his far right in the hope of reconstituting a government for the ensuing provocations in Jerusalem to set off a Palestinian reaction and for a new war to break out so quickly.
This is the first lesson of this umpteenth chapter of a centuries-old conflict. Nothing and no one will be able to reconcile Palestinians and Israelis in the long term without a peace agreement creating a Palestine alongside Israel. This is an inescapable fact which it is time for everyone to recognize, but there are three others that are just as important for the future.
The Islamists of Hamas, who had long been in the minority against the secular party Fatah, the creator of the Palestinian national movement, are now largely in the majority. They did not win because the Palestinians would have rallied to the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood, but because Fatah failed to turn the Oslo Accords into the long-awaited peace agreement, sank into failure and corruption, and because Hamas has been able to rain down on Israel some two thousand missiles that could have destroyed entire neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv had the Israelis not had such an effective interception system.
Militarily challenged by the Palestinians as never before, Israel resolved to decimate and destroy Hamas. This explains the intensity of the bombing of Gaza, but whatever the blows that have been dealt to them, the Islamists have imposed themselves as obligatory interlocutors of the Israelis, who must already negotiate with them through the intermediary of the Egyptian services.
This is the second lesson of this war and the third is that the three Palestine: the one in the Gaza Strip, the one in the occupied territories of the West Bank and the one that makes up 20% of the Israeli population, is now united in the same will to oppose the Israelis with a united front.
It will not necessarily last but, third lesson of these days, Israel is suffering a severe political defeat here at the very moment when its internal divisions are dangerously deepening between secular and religious, Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Russian, right and left, supporters and opponents of a compromise with the Palestinians.
As for the fourth lesson of these fights: Israel cannot eternally rely on its military advantage. If the Iranians had been able to bring into action the weapons they have amassed in Syria and southern Lebanon, Israel would have suffered immense human and material losses from which it would have had difficulty recovering. Peace is an urgency, for Israel especially.
