Scenarios such as the two-month truce between Hamas and the IDF that leaked to the US media are only a temporary solution. Vestnik Kavkaza talked with Israeli political scientist Lev Spivak about how the state of affairs looks from Israel's point of view.
- In your assessment, what are Israel's interest in a two-month truce with the IDF, which has been reported by the New York Times sources?
- Israel is not interested in a truce at all. We understand perfectly well that a truce will benefit our enemy, since it will give the enemy the opportunity to reform, reorganize, introduce new weapons, or, in other words, prepare for the next phase of the war.
However, we are ready to accept a truce on the condition that the captured men are returned to us. On October 7, a huge number of Israeli civilians were kidnapped and are still held hostage in Gaza. We are ready to go to great lengths for their release.
- What are Israel's approaches to the prospects for the development of the situation in the Gaza Strip?
- This is the most difficult question now. The fact is that Israel has no options of its own for what to do about the situation in Gaza. From our point of view, it is as follows: during its 20 years of rule, Hamas has physically destroyed all opponents in its Arab environment, and today there is no alternative to them. Literally, the entire population of Gaza is Hamas.
We see this every day. For example, Israeli intelligence reported this morning that even in the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which has 13,000 employees in Gaza and an annual budget of almost $1 billion, employees are members of the Hamas leadership's families and the Hamas militants. It turned out that 12 employees of this agency - in fact, UN employees - participated in the October 7 attack on Israel and the taking of hostages. This says a lot.
Because of this, Israel has no options for any continuation of the situation with Gaza without the help of the international community. At the same time, we see that no one, either in the region or outside it, wants to deal with the fate of the Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip. Absolutely no one. Egypt has already refused to work with this problem, although once it was once Egypt's territory, and when signing a peace treaty with Egypt and returning the Sinai Peninsula to it, Israel offered to take Gaza too. But Egypt refused even then because it did not want to deal with this territory. Neither Jordan nor any Arab country in the world wants to deal with Gaza.
It turns out that Israel is in a hopeless situation. After all, we cannot simply destroy these people. We also don't want them to be under our military control. We don’t need these problems, but no one is offering us any other options. Neither US analysts nor anyone else is able to come up with a scheme for resolving this issue. Therefore, it is simply impossible to predict anything in such a situation.
- The same New York Times article talks about a possible change in the leadership of Palestine. In your opinion, can the resignation of Mahmoud Abbas help to calm the situation?
- No, it will do the opposite thing. Mahmoud Abbas once ruled Gaza, and his ousting from Gaza led to today's situation. We definitely do not want extremists to come to power in the West Bank, because then the situation in Gaza will repeat there.
Yes, Mahmoud Abbas is evil, but it is the lesser of two evils, much better than the evil that will replace him. As I've already said, there are no positive political forces among the Palestinian Arabs today. They have been simply physically exterminated by Hamas.
