middle east
Ceasefires in Gaza follow a well-known trajectory. The death toll rises as bodies are dug out of the rubble of homes destroyed by the Israeli armed forces. Families trudge back to the streets they fled from, to discover the whole area resembles an earthquake zone. And diplomats set about trying to find ways to stop a new war erupting.
The current ceasefire looks more fragile than in the past. The scale of the devastation – more than 1,860 Palestinians dead including 400 children and damage estimated at $5 billion (Dh18.4bn) – cries out for a new initiative that would prevent a fourth war since 2009. But that prospect hangs by a thread.
For Israel, which lost 64 soldiers, the war cannot be counted a victory. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had made clear that he was not going to “eradicate” the Hamas government despite the siren calls of his right-wing rivals to do so.
The proclaimed goal of the operation – destroying all Hamas rockets – was militarily unsustainable. Hamas may have thousands of these home-made rockets, but they proved so ineffective and their explosive charge so small that eradicating them was not worth the lives of more soldiers. The objective was then changed to blowing up the tunnels that Hamas has dug as a defensive measure and a way to infiltrate Israel. But these tunnels were long known about and had never before been considered an existential threat to Israel. The army has learnt a lot about the tunnels, at some cost. The main lesson is that overwhelming firepower does not lead to victory in a battleground such as Gaza. In the end it was an expensive exercise – in terms of international reputation – in “mowing the lawn” as Israel calls its regular invasions of Gaza.
By contrast, once the war started, Hamas’s goal was strategic: to lift the blockade imposed by Israel and more recently by the government in Egypt. Faced with more effective Hamas resistance than they expected, the Israelis threw the full weight of their bombs and artillery shells at Gaza. The devastation has inflamed opinion around the world. Clearly Israel’s standing continues to decline in Europe, and to a certain extent in the US. But the big question is how sympathy for the Palestinians can be turned into a lasting change on the ground in Gaza.
The first difficulty is Egypt. In the past the Egyptian government has represented the interests of the Gazans. But that link is missing now. It sees Hamas as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which it has declared a terrorist organisation and is repressing with the full force of the legal system.
The Egyptians appeared to be semi-detached in the conflict until their pride was piqued by John Kerry, the US secretary of State, embracing Turkey and Qatar in place of Cairo as interlocutors with Hamas. Without Egypt doing the heavy lifting, the chances of a lasting outcome are slim.
The Israelis are not short of ideas. Moshe Feiglin, a deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, has written to Mr Netanyahu to demand that the civilian population of Gaza be driven into desert encampments so that Israel can kill all the Hamas militants. Mr Feiglin was been described as “clownish” by a writer on the US Foreign Policy website. But his brand of ultra-hawkish religious nationalism is a rising force in Mr Netanyahu’s Likud bloc. Indeed, Mr Netanyahu is now a dove in his own party – a position that the late Ariel Sharon found himself in when he was toppled, in 2005, as party leader by Mr Netanyahu.
The foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a rival to the prime minister, has proposed that Gaza come under UN control and be demilitarised on the lines of Kosovo, which achieved independence from Serbia under international tutelage. The comparison, however is false. Palestinians will never accept that the West Bank and Gaza should be separated. And any suggestion of demilitarisation at a time when Israel has the strongest armed forces in the region is not going to work, unless the Palestinians of Gaza are shown a clear path to freedom. As the Palestinian scholar Hanan Ashrawi has said: "We are the only people on earth asked to guarantee the security of our occupier."
President Barack Obama has said Gaza cannot be permanently closed off from the world, and the Palestinians need to have the possibility to create jobs and economic growth. These are fine words, as far as they go, but Mr Obama’s fine words rarely change the world. His disinclination to get involved in Middle Eastern conflicts is exacerbated by a division among his regional allies. Saudi Arabia and Jordan, for example, are fiercely opposed to Hamas while Turkey and Qatar have come forward to break Hamas’s international isolation. There is no sign of Mr Obama bashing the heads of his allies together. Indeed, the focus of the Nato alliance is the danger of a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, while minds in the Arab world are fixed more on the violent collapse of Iraq, Syria and Libya.
These very real threats should not distract attention from Gaza. There is a possibility for breaking the impasse: the revival of the Palestinian unity government between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank which was established in June.
This unity government was never accepted by Israel, whose goal for years has been to keep Gaza and the West Bank separate, ruling out any prospect of a permanent reconciliation. With Hamas talking of victory, the chances of success for the unity government are slim. But if the unity government were bolstered by European Union monitors at Gaza’s crossing points and a major donation drive to rebuild infrastructure, it could be a new start. It would be criminal to let the situation drift back into business as usual, which means regular war.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter: @aphilps
