Is the ghost of Bin Laden resurfacing to coax Washington into giving Israel a free hand in Gaza — and to bury once and for all the Palestinian dream of statehood? Just as the two-state solution edges back onto the international agenda, America — like everyone else — must start asking some very hard questions.
1. The October 7 as a “coup of erasure”
Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, was intended, from the Israeli perspective, to seal the death warrant for the idea of a Palestinian state:
Palestine equated with terrorism.
The argument of “no credible partner”.
The expunging of the “two-state solution” from the international agenda.
2. The paradoxical return of the Palestinian question
Yet, the longer the war drags on and the human toll mounts, the more the two-state solution reemerges as a central topic in the international discourse (UN, EU, even Washington).
Recognition of Palestine as a state—which had once seemed fringe—is today reclaiming political and symbolic ground.
This mounting diplomatic pressure forces Israel to confront a question it believed long settled.
3. The instrumentalized dissonances inside cognitive war
It is in this context that, within a single week, two events emerge to reinforce Netanyahu’s security-based argument—closely aligned with the Zionist ambition of a “Greater Israel” (perhaps the Golan Plateau):
- Dissonance 1: WMDs / Iran
Reinserts an existential threat into the global security arena. - Dissonance 2: AQPA / Bin Laden
Repositions Gaza within the spectrum of absolute terrorism in the eyes of Americans. - Dissonance 3: Shahed Ghoreishi / State Dept (Added on 08/21/2025).
Turns Trump’s deliberate ambiguity into Rubio’s radical clarity — shifting the weight from Washington to Tel-Aviv. Subject of my latest note “Marco Rubio: du flou au gris”.
Though these narratives appear incoherent (Shiite vs. Sunni), they resonate to produce the same effect: positioning any recognition of a Palestinian state, or the return to the two-state paradigm, as an existential—and possibly suicidal—risk for Israel.
4. How this undermines remaining scruples
👉For Western decision-makers:
Compassion for Gaza collides with innate security reflexes.
“Recognizing Palestine now—isn’t it like handing the trophy to Bin Laden or the ayatollahs?”
👉For Israel, the objective benefit is clear:
These narratives serve to neutralize diplomatic pressure.
They legitimize a policy of de facto annihilation.
In summary: if these dissonances were indeed intentionally manufactured, calling into question their origin, they become useful resonances. They transform mounting pressure into a tangible threat, and turn recognition of a Palestinian state into a survival risk for Israel and its Western allies, drawn into an increasingly troubling configuration.
Indeed, if we consider that the international agenda—and the agendas of Iran, Palestine, and even Hamas, which on Aug. 18–19, 2025 declared it had accepted an Egypt-Qatar ceasefire proposal with a phased hostage release, while Israel has not yet agreed and operations in Gaza City continued—these movements place Israel under unprecedented pressure; the timing seems striking.
We must legitimately ask whether the first narrative is designed to overshadow Iran’s WMD ambitions—a peril everyone remembers only too well from Iraq—while the second, reviving the ghost (or doppelgänger) of Osama Bin Laden, is meant to secure blind American solidarity, assuming the U.S. public doesn’t grasp « the Complicated Orient. »
>He really has an “Orient Compliqué” to play on.
En attendant la Renaissance 