Early on Saturday morning, the terrorist organization Hamas, which rules Palestine, carried out an attack on Israel, and in the ensuing fighting in Israel and Gaza, at least 500 people are said to have died and thousands were injured.
Among other things, the attacks were directed at Jerusalem, where Israel expert Anders Persson, who is a researcher at Linnaeus University, was on Saturday.
– We experienced about five flight alarms, where we had to run and get to safety in the hotel’s stairwell, he says.
Western attack in 50 years
The attacks, whose epicenter was about an hour south by car from the hotel, are, according to Anders Persson, unprecedented in Israel – at least since the so-called Yom Kippur War, which took place almost exactly 50 years before this attack.
– Hamas in Gaza has never done anything even close to this. Their worst attacks before against Israel have been maybe one percent of what we saw yesterday.
The roots of the conflict between the countries, however, stretch much further back than that, and in modern times at least to when the Ottoman Empire lost the area to Great Britain after the First World War in the early 20th century.
Britain was tasked by the international community with creating a Jewish state in Palestine, which then had a Jewish minority and an Arab majority, leading to tensions between the two groups.
And after the number of Jewish immigrants rose dramatically in the following decades to escape persecution in Europe, and the UN resolution for a two-state solution failed in 1947, Britain left the area – which Jewish leaders instead proclaimed Israel.
“Massive collapse” of Israel’s intelligence service
This was the starting point for a protracted conflict between Jewish Israelis and Arab Palestinians, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes and which, among other things, culminated in the so-called Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Most Arab states backed Palestine, but Israel proved to be militarily superior, and in 1987 the organization Hamas was created as a political group with military capabilities, with the aim of annihilating Israel.
Since then, several peace talks have been held, all of which have failed, and recently tensions between Israel and Palestine, which have been kept isolated in the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt since 2007, have risen again.
But despite this, Anders Persson believes that Saturday’s surprise attack took both assessors and Israel’s leadership to bed, and the fact that Israel was not prepared for the development Anders Persson describes as a “massive collapse” for Israel’s security service and military intelligence.
– But I think you should see the rocket fire as a side maneuver to shift the focus from what was really the big thing, and that was the invasion of about twenty communities in Israel.