This is the third time in five years the Israelis have attacked Gaza with the announced goal of killing Hamas’s leaders and smashing the rockets they have developed. To outside observers, the conflict is both shocking – with its high civilian casualties and terrible pictures such as the Palestinian children killed on the beach – and depressingly repetitive. We have seen this all before. How is it different this time?
From Benjamin Netanyahu’s point of view, the answer is simple. Not very different. His terms for ending the onslaught are the same as ever: “quiet for quiet”. That means Israel living in peace, Gaza blockaded by the Israeli army and Gazans living in their open-air prison.
This has several advantages for Mr Netanyahu. Gaza remains separate from the West Bank, thus ensuring that the Palestinian movement is divided. The Palestinian unity government announced on June 2 is unlikely to survive the conflict. The impotence of Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president, sitting in Ramallah during the bombing of Gaza, will not endear him to Gazans.
But that is not the whole story. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has moved to a new stage, and in some aspects changed out of all recognition. The fact that the efforts by John Kerry, US secretary of state, to force the two sides to a peace deal ended in failure was no surprise. Now Mr Netanyahu has ruled out any Palestinian state in historic Palestine, declaring: “There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” Was he ever serious in accepting a sovereign Palestinian state? It seems unlikely.
After the failure of the Kerry plan, things are clearer. Greater Israel is the policy. Mr Netanyahu is hardly an outlier in Israeli politics. The political centre seems to be with him, given that he is accused by right-wingers of weakness for not invading Gaza and the inactivity of the peace camp.
At the same time, Israelis have managed successfully to convince much of the Western world that their country’s existence is under threat. Of course that is not true: home-made Palestinian rockets are not going to destroy the state of Israel, whose security is assured. It is the existence of a state for the Palestinians in their land that is at stake.
The salvos of rockets launched from Gaza have caused no fatalities in Israel (though one civilian died from a mortar round just outside the Gaza border). But the Israeli message that their country is under attack has found a more willing audience abroad than before. Pro-Israeli commentators have noted with some surprise that the world – Western governments at least, if not activists – appears indifferent to the fate of the Gazans.
By launching rockets at Israel indiscriminately, as they have no technology to guide them, Hamas has contributed to this Israeli PR victory. So why do it? The only answer is another question. How else can they attract attention to the plight of 1.6 million people, short of drinkable water with no possibility of travel or development? The Hamas government had pinned its hopes on Egypt. Since the army’s removal of the Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, that bet is lost. In the end it is only Egypt that can help the Gazans.
All Hamas has to offer to show the Arab world it exists and is still resisting Israel are its rockets, technically feeble and diplomatically counterproductive as they are.
As Daniel Levy, a former adviser to the Israeli government, points out, Mr Netanyahu’s ceasefire terms contain perverse incentives to resistance. “In Gaza, Palestinian quiet is met by a continued Israeli siege. In the West Bank, cooperation is welcomed with more Israeli settlements.”
Only an extreme optimist would imagine Mr Netanyahu offering to lift the siege of Gaza. He has ingrained in the Israeli consciousness the idea that concessions equal incoming rockets. And now that he has confirmed his Greater Israel policy, he can also point to Israel’s three-tiered anti-missile defence of which the lowest tier, Iron Dome, has shot down some of the Hamas rockets.
The choice before the Palestinians is neatly encapsulated in a short phrase by Jeff Halper, veteran anti-occupation activist and director of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions: “Submit, leave or die.”
Mr Netanyahu wants business as usual, in the hope that the friendless Gazans will submit to live under his terms. But it is worth looking at the broader context of the Middle East.
The energy of Arab youth these days is with the jihadists of the Islamic State who are making gains in Syria and have come close to dismembering Iraq. What if this spirit infected Gaza?
Previously this was unthinkable given the sophistication of the Palestinians. But if they are trapped behind barbed wire, and no one gets to study abroad or meet a real Israeli, what will their world view be? The Israelis might then look with nostalgia at the besuited Hamas leaders.
There is another possibility: the jihadists of the Islamic State may succeed in setting up a rogue emirate on the borders of Syria and Iraq which would destabilise Jordan.
Mr Netanyahu’s comments about not giving up territory should be read closely: no land for Palestinian sovereignty west of the River Jordan. Clearly, this leaves open the possibility of a Palestinian state east of the River Jordan, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The old Likud mantra – “Palestine is Jordan” – is being revived by some on the Israeli Right.
Option two for the Palestinians – for a significant proportion to be forced to “leave” – could come about only in the case of some huge regional catastrophe. With no prospect of a Palestinian state and chaos reigning in the Levant, that previously unimaginable catastrophe may become a possibility.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter @aphilps
