Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon says Israel will not have security until the Palestinians have their own state, and called on the Israeli authorities to release Marwan Barghouti to guide negotiations towards creating a state for the Palestinians.
Ayalon, a retired admiral who commanded the Israeli Navy and was wounded in one of the battles, explained in an interview at his home with the British newspaper The Guardian that destroying the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is not a realistic military goal, and that the current war in Gaza may lead to consolidating support for Hamas.
He added that Hamas is not just a militia, but “an ideology with an organization, and the organization has a military wing. You cannot destroy the ideology using military force. Sometimes you will help root it deeper if you try, and this is exactly what we see. Today, 75% of Palestinians support Hamas.” “Before the war, support was less than 50%.”
The Palestinians have nothing to lose
Ayalon added that it is not possible to deter any party, person or group, if it believes that it has nothing to lose, and that the Palestinians believe that they have nothing to lose.
He said that most Israelis believe that all Palestinians are Hamas or supporters of Hamas, do not accept the concept of Palestinian identity, and do not see the Palestinians as a people, because if they did, they would cause a big problem in the concept of the State of Israel.
Regarding the release of Barghouti, a Palestinian imprisoned since 2002 who is serving a life sentence for murder after leading the second intifada, Ayalon believes that this will be a vital step towards meaningful negotiations.
The only leader
The former Shin Bet head pointed out that Palestinian opinion polls show that Barghouti is the only leader who can lead the Palestinians to a state alongside Israel, “because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he earned his legitimacy by sitting in our prisons.”
He said that Barghouti’s support reflects the fact that current Palestinian support for Hamas is not due to the ideology of this movement, but rather because the Palestinians feel that Hamas is the only faction that is fighting effectively to establish a Palestinian state.
He admitted that the current political climate in Israel is not conducive to accepting his views, as his views are not very popular, noting that whenever he says that hatred is not a plan and that it is not a policy, he finds widespread dissatisfaction with the Israelis.
The absence of a Palestinian state
Ayalon explained that the move away from violence adopted by the Fatah movement has lost its credibility due to the repeated failure of diplomatic efforts to establish a Palestinian state, which is dangerous for both Israelis and Palestinians.
He noted that his Shin Bet position required that he meet regularly with Palestinians, including visiting the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and that he made friends with Palestinians including Palestinian Authority security chief Jibril Rajoub and Sari Nusseibeh, a philosophy professor from Jerusalem who can trace his family’s presence there to the seventh century. .
Ayalon asked, “Can I tell Sari Nusseibeh, ‘Well, this land is my land and you are just a visitor? This is nonsense.'”
He stressed that attempts at normalization in the region – in which the Palestinians do not have a state or much hope for a single state – were one of the factors in Hamas launching its attack on October 7.
What Sinwar wanted
Ayalon explained that what Yahya Sinwar wanted to do was to tell everyone in the Arab and Islamic worlds, the international community, America and Europe, that they would not achieve anything in the Middle East unless they put the Palestinian issue on the table.
He concluded by saying that the only thing that almost everyone in the international community agreed on – Israel’s enemies and its allies, from China to the United States and Russia to the regional powers – is the need for a two-state solution, adding that the other option is to continue fighting at a time when wars have become more violent and “the enemy has become “More strict.