A pause in Gaza — but how will this war end?

The war between Israel and Hamas is entering its eighth week. With the exception of the 1980s and 90s, when it invaded Lebanon, Israel has never been at war for so long. The pause in the killing allows for the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. It also opens a route for desperately needed supplies into a territory of more than two million people under siege.

It is a brief moment of relief, of quiet, weighed down by dread and foreboding of what comes next.

There is something surreal in the scenes at the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Masked Hamas gunmen in green bandanas hand over frail and bewildered Jewish grandmothers and silent children to the Red Cross. Every moment is captured in the harsh glare of world attention.

The banal phrase “it’s like a movie” keeps being uttered, as if the only way these shocking events can be processed is to view them through the other side of a lens. The dignity of the newly released old people and children, who have been through hell, was deeply moving. Etched in their faces is the resilience of a nation that has been at war with its neighbours ever since it came into being 75 years ago and before that, as a people, forever.

The rest of us, wherever we stand on this cataclysm, watch, debate, trying to comprehend the enormity of what is unravelling, what it means for those caught up in it and what it presages for the future.

Or perhaps we’re becoming desensitised as the weeks roll on. Israel/Gaza no longer routinely tops the news schedules. The next “episode” is the next hostage release. Like that other contemporary wartime spectacle, Ukraine’s fight for survival against the Russian invader, we switch channels when life intervenes or it just gets too much.

When this war ends – if ends is the right word – the tiny strip of land called Gaza will be, literally, in ruins. Much of it is already looking like wartime Dresden or Coventry. So far more than 12,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them children, under Israeli bombardment and blockade. More will die. Malnutrition, disease, the lack of water, fuel, medicines and baby incubators will take their toll.

Hamas hides in tunnels, absorbing this onslaught, biding its time, while above ground entire generations – in many cases several generations of Palestinians from grandparents to great grandchildren — are wiped out, obliterated. For them there is, literally, no future.

Lord Cameron, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, as well as the Americans, say too many civilians have died. But how many is too many? True, Hamas hides in plain sight among civilians. But some of this is beginning to look like revenge by a powerful and badly wounded adversary filled with rage and grief.

Out of this soil drenched in blood a new generation implacably opposed to Israel will emerge. If Hamas’s intention, with its barbarous attack on October 7, was to provoke an Israeli response so fierce that it sinks any future hope of peace between Arab and Jew, then it’s done a pretty good job.

Israel is in shock. A national trauma, laced with anxiety after the massacre of more than 1,200 of its citizens on October 7, has replaced a tragically misplaced sense of security, encouraged by the deeply flawed policies of an arrogant and inept government.

There is no room for anything other than grief or for the other side’s pain. Jews the world over and especially in Israel live in the shadow of the Holocaust. Killing Jews for being Jewish, as Hamas did, summons up the spectre of another.

On the other side, the devastation endured by Palestinians, the rising death toll but also the crushing prospect of having to rebuild their world, not for the first time, leaves, for now, no room for a conversation let alone talk of lasting peace.

We in the West are not immune. This may seem like a small far away war. But the fate of Israel and the Palestinians resonates like no other. Many in Britain, Europe and the US have relatives and friends in Israel and Palestine, or both. The suffering fuels simmering culture wars, especially where Jews and Muslims co-exist.

Streamed live onto every smartphone and social media hub around the globe, the war has provoked an outpouring of anger, spite, grief, hate and protests around the world, perhaps not seen since the Vietnam war half a century ago.

Anti-Semitism, never far from the surface, is back with a vengeance. Jews have been assaulted. Social media are awash with anti-Semitic tropes. Jewish buildings and businesses defaced. Jewish day schools have cancelled classes. Synagogues have been locked. It may sound hyperbolic to the rest of us, but Jews in Britain, rich or poor, don’t feel safe anymore. That is a shocking thing.

More than 100,000 people marched against anti-Semitism yesterday in London, in a counterpoint to successive pro-Palestinian marches.

Meanwhile, an airport in Russia’s Dagestan region was stormed by a mob looking for Jews on a flight from Tel Aviv. Racism is ugly at the best of times. This was chilling.

Islamophobia too has spiked in many countries. Rage at the brutality of Hamas is bundled up with support for Palestinians, hatred of Islam and brown-skinned immigrants – women in veils, mosques, Muslim culture – deepening a yawning cultural divide.

Dismissing the largely peaceful pro-Palestinians protests as “hate marches”, as some in the British Government have done, is foolish and politically inept. It seeks to establish a hierarchy of suffering in which Israel’s is higher in the pecking order.

The Gaza conflict is an earthquake with aftershocks reaching around the globe. These need to be handled with care not exploited for short-term political gain.

Where does this leave us?

The events of October 7 will have profound consequences as Hamas intended. The normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world has stalled. Israel, once it emerges from this nightmare, will change. The deeply unpopular Benjamin Netanyahu has led his country up a blind alley after 15 years of increasingly extreme right-wing rule.

Whether Israel will move further right, or revert to the more measured approach characterised by leaders like Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Perez and Ehud Barak, is not yet clear. What is clear is that if it wants peace it has to find a new paradigm.

The uncomfortable fact is that the appalling events of October 7 and the subsequent crushing of Gaza in search of Hamas were preceded by decades of false optimism.

The peace between Israel and Egypt, the Oslo accords and the more recent agreements between Israel and the Gulf states mattered. But with hindsight they were displacement activity. A side show.

At the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict was, is and will remain the Palestinian issue. Full of missed opportunities, Arab and Israeli leaders have pursued a self-serving diplomatic process.

For the Arab world, largely autocratic and corrupt, the suffering of displaced Palestinians, and even the call to regain the holy places in Jerusalem, was never really more than a means to other ends, not least clinging to power.

For successive Israeli governments the threat of Palestinian terrorism has provided cover for a relentless expulsion of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem and the creation of innumerable illegal settlements. Nearly half a million settlers now live on the West Bank and a further 200,000 in East Jerusalem. This is annexation in all but name.

The West Bank looks like a jigsaw of Jewish and Arab Bantustans. Jewish settlers continue to bulldoze Palestinians off land often held for generations with the tacit approval of the occupying army. They kill Palestinians with impunity. Many claim the land was given to them by God, which is not an easy argument to counter. Religion, as it so often does, poisons the well.

The widely-despised Palestinian Authority is too weak and corrupt to intervene, bribed and bullied into submission.  In some cases it collaborates with the occupying forces. It literally doesn’t know which way to turn. Israel’s West Bank policy of divide and rule has neutered the Palestinians. But it’s a short-sighted mess.

There is enough blame to go around on all sides. But blame is what led us to October 7. Blame is not argument nor is it a mood conducive to dialogue.

Talk of a renewed push for a two-state or a two-territory solution – from the US, from Britain, from Europe — is dismissed as pie in the sky. That’s understandable in the heat of battle. But amid the horror and complexity there are two inviolable facts.

The first is that without a proper home for the Palestinians Israel will never be at peace. How much longer must successive generations live like this?

The second is that unless Palestinians are prepared to recognise Israel’s right to exist side by side with them, the Jewish state will never make peace.  It’s as simple and horrendously complicated as that.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.