The ceasefire in Gaza is riddled with tripwires that look almost deliberately designed to fail. It is a tactical muddle that will bring brief respite – and serves only the long-term strategies of Israel’s prime minister and his enemies in Hamas.
Gaza’s militant leadership launched their campaign of atrocity and murder on 7 October 2023, knowing that any Israeli government – but especially one led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s in political hock to the Israeli far right – would respond with staggering violence.
Yahya Sinwar, then the leader of the militant group that rules Gaza, is reported to have considered the tens of thousands of Gazans killed by Israel to be “necessary sacrifices”. He’s now among the dead, but would no doubt feel nothing for the 46,700 others who have perished – according to the Palestinian health ministry – under Israel’s air, land and sea attacks.
Hamas’s agenda was to drive the Palestinian cause – and issue – to the top of the global agenda after years in the doldrums of news. Netanyahu used those quiet years to drive ahead with normalising relations with Arab and Islamic countries that once despised his country.
The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco all shrugged off their long-term support for Palestinian freedom from Israel’s occupation, in bilateral agreements that Donald Trump’s administration midwifed during his first term in the White House.
A deal with Saudi Arabia looked close before Hamas launched its attacks and offered up Gaza’s population to Israel’s wrath.
“... the timing of Hamas’s attack was no accident. Israel’s growing integration in the region – the prospect of normalisation with Saudi Arabia – posed an existential threat to Hamas’s power, its ambitions to dominate the Palestinian political landscape... its raison d’etre, which is the rejection of two states and the destruction of Israel,” the US secretary of state Antony Blinken said this week.
After 15 months of war in Gaza, Israel now stands accused of acts of “genocide”, with warrants issued by the International Criminal Court. Its generals must think twice before travelling out of the country for fear of arrest.
Antisemitic attacks – and sentiments – have soared around the globe. Sympathy for the cause of the Palestinians is back.
At the same time, Israel’s right to exist is now being questioned by those with extreme mindsets. This juvenile discussion slides all too easily into Hamas’s long-term policy to annihilate the Jewish state altogether. That’s a Hamas victory.
Hamas may have been tactically and militarily smashed, but it’s strategically more powerful than it was before its 7 October operations. Blinken believes that Hamas has recruited “almost as many people as it has lost” in the course of the latest war with Israel.
Netanyahu’s government, meanwhile, has long made no secret of its desire eventually to annex the occupied West Bank – taking the land, but cutting the Palestinian people out of the Israeli body politic.
Many Israeli settlers support Israeli cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich in his belief that it is necessary for Israel to occupy Gaza, and that perhaps half of its Palestinian citizens could opt for “voluntary migration”. The UK’s Middle East minister, Hamish Falconer, said that this would be illegal and would scupper any hopes of peace in the region.
A mass movement of Palestinians out of Gaza is now more likely as there’s hardly anywhere left to live and war could restart at any moment. No medical facilities are intact and Israel has banned UNWRA – the international agency responsible for Palestinian refugees from previous conflicts – from operating in the occupied territories.
So there will be hardly any schools or jobs to keep Palestinians in Gaza once it’s possible to escape.
A mass “voluntary” exodus of Palestinians from Gaza, and indeed from the West Bank, would delight the Netanyahu government – even if its members insist they’re not, actually, directly driving such a policy.
Yet the Palestinian prime minister insists it “will not be acceptable” for any entity other than the Palestinian Authority (PA) to run the Gaza Strip in the future.
The newly announced Gaza ceasefire requires Hamas to release 33 hostages in groups over several weeks. In return, Israel must free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and initiate a phased withdrawal of troops. Israel will control border access to Egypt.
After 42 days, the next phase of negotiations is supposed to begin – but Gaza will be entirely ringed by Israeli military steel.
This phase will, apparently, focus on who will rule Gaza. The PA, which has a security agreement with Israel and rules the West Bank, is the international choice to take over. The US says it should be “revitalised”.
The last legislative elections for the PA were in 2006 (and were won by Hamas). Hamas has run Gaza since then, after driving Fatah, the biggest party in the West Bank’s authority, out of power there by force. But Israel and its allies will not accept Gaza being ruled by Hamas.
The opportunities here for Hamas to literally blow the chances of peace away are almost endless. The chances that it won’t are almost nil. These days, for Hamas, chaos is victory.
Hamas and Netanyahu’s government agree that they don’t believe a deal that establishes two states, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians, is possible – in the medium or even long term.
Hamas lays claim to all of Israel’s territory. Netanyahu’s own party, the Likud, argues for Israeli sovereignty from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean.
Most Israelis and Palestinians would, ultimately, accept a “two-state solution” if it looked viable. But neither Hamas nor Israel’s political right wants to see that happen.
So, a messy ceasefire offering opportunities for more fighting is unlikely to hold – because extremists on both sides think they’re winning.
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