Penny Wong is well-suited for all these roles, alternating between the higher-intensity Peking opera, the low-intensity Kabuki form, and the diplomatic shirtfront. Thus, she said she was disturbed by China’s confronting behaviour in the South China Sea, concerned about China’s human rights abuses and “shocked” by the suspended death sentence meted out to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun for allegedly spying.

Having got that off her chest, she was also pleased that relations between Australia and China had “stabilised” under the Albanese government, enabling the resumption of what diplomats call a high-level foreign and strategic dialogue. That process had fallen into disuse under the more combative and, as it turned out, less constructive approach taken by the previous Australian government.

As for Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister provided a relatively enigmatic foil in his public encounters with Australian leaders, including Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese. In private, he will no doubt have given as good as he got: as a long-serving foreign minister he is no stranger to difficult encounters triggered by China’s  assertiveness.

Wong and Wang won’t have neglected the implications of an extremely unstable global security environment for regional peace and stability. While they may not have dealt directly with a possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, it will have been part of their calculations about what lies ahead.

Offstage we had a staple of Peking opera, with a villain in the shape of Paul Keating, whose meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was portrayed in some excitable media quarters as treason. In a world of high-stakes diplomacy in which one of Beijing’s stocks-in-trade is divide and prevail, the meeting with a former prime minister who is a critic of Australia’s China policy will have served a symbolic purpose.

What was achieved by all this activity?

The answer is straightforward. The Wong–Wang meeting served both countries’ interests. For Australia, it demonstrated that relations with its cornerstone trading partner are in mutually beneficial shape. For China, it suggested Canberra had not moved irredeemably into Washington’s orbit.

The encounter was realpolitik writ large in preparation for a visit to Canberra later this year of Chinese premier Li Qiang. To use a phrase borrowed from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it had a win–win outcome for the two countries, though not for Australia’s China hawks.

Much of this movement, including an easing of restrictions on Australian exports to China, would have been off limits under Scott Morrison’s government — a time when Australia’s trade minister could not get his counterpart on the telephone.

In the eighteen months since Labor took office, bilateral encounters have occurred monthly at least, and with increasing frequency more recently. Contrast this with the paucity of meetings, invariably restricted to encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings, under Morrison.

Absent from Wong’s remarks about the relationship on this occasion was the bromide that Australia would disagree with China where it must, and agree where it can, or words to that effect. Increasingly, we now have Wong saying that Australian wants a “stable and constructive” relationship with China “in the interests of both countries.”

This might be bad news for those critics of China who have put us on a “red alert,” as a febrile newspaper series in Age and the Sydney Morning Herald described it last year. A “constructive” relationship would seem to be in Australia’s own interests, though it shouldn’t be at the expense of Australia’s treaty arrangements, its national interest or its values — a fact that shouldn’t need to be repeated ad nauseum.

In their quite lengthy talks Wong and Wang will have dwelled no doubt on a trading and people-to-people relationship that has rebounded since the Covid crisis subsided. Goods and services exports to China gained 13 per cent to A$203.5 billion in the 2022–23 financial year, with China accounting for a shade over a quarter of total exports. Service exports to China were up 27 per cent as a result of the return of students and tourists. The country is far and away Australia’s biggest export market.

If there is an impediment from China’s point of view, it is the obstacles facing Chinese enterprises attempting to gain a foothold in Australia’s investment market by the Foreign Investment Review Board. China’s investment stock in Australia stands at just A$44 billion, or 4 per cent of total foreign direct investment. It ranks sixth among foreign investors, far behind the United States, the European Union and Britain.

Among jarring aspects of Wang Yi’s visit, and one that raised questions about China’s willingness to engage more broadly, was the foreign minister’s unwillingness to avail himself of the opportunity to answer questions from the Australian media. Wang and his advisers won’t have overlooked the hostile tenor of some of the reporting ahead of his visit, and the near certainty that this hostility would have permeated an encounter with an Australian media loaded for game.

In all of this, participants in the diplomatic jousting will continue to play their roles for both a domestic and a wider audience. Senator Wong is proving quite good at it. The question, as always, is how much substance is there behind the shadow play. •

The post Shadow play appeared first on Inside Story.

We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the  Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic  interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.

In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

The post Too little, too late appeared first on Inside Story.

Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

Most tellingly, the vote demonstrates a fracturing in what has been a fairly solid wall of support for Israel’s war against Hamas among its allies, led by the United States.

Given the tormenting scenes emanating from Gaza of civilian casualties pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings it is surprising, even unconscionable, it has taken countries like Australia as long as it has to say “enough.” Prime minister Anthony Albanese has been under considerable pressure from within his own party to detach Australia from the United States and Israel on this issue. That he managed to do so in partnership with two of Australia’s close allies — Canada and New Zealand — gave him the diplomatic cover he no doubt wanted.

In effect, Australia averted its eyes for too long from Israel’s slaughter of civilians in response to the pogrom conducted by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October. No reasonable argument can be advanced to deny Israel the right to wreak vengeance on those responsible for that heinous crime. However, what are the limits on Israel’s war against Hamas? How many non-combatant Palestinians, including children, need to die to satisfy Israel’s declared aim of “eradicating” the terrorist group?

In other words, how much longer will Israel persist in its efforts to eliminate Hamas, and at what cost to a civilian population that has been displaced in its tens of thousands, and traumatised? And is it even possible to kill off a movement and an ideology, however repugnant?

After weeks of some of the most intense bombing of civilian areas since the second world war, another question presses in: where lies the exit strategy for Israel once the guns fall silent?

Unless they are inhabitants of another planet, members of Israel’s war cabinet can’t be unaware of Washington’s increasing uneasiness over Gaza’s civilian casualties, made more pressing by the horrendous images playing out on the nightly television news.

At a 2024 election fundraiser this week president Joe Biden voiced some of his strongest criticism of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza. He warned that Israel was beginning to alienate Europe and the rest of the international community. Although his remarks were made at a private function, they have been reliably reported. He is also quoted as saying that Israel can’t continue to say no to a Palestinian state.

Biden’s intervention on the twin issues of Israel’s disproportionate use of force and its reluctance to embrace a Palestinian state will be troubling for Israel and its supporters globally. While the United States voted against this week’s General Assembly resolution on grounds it didn’t condemn Hamas, its diplomatic support is weakening. Whatever might be said by Israeli hardliners and their friends in the West, Israel can’t afford to alienate Washington, which provides both diplomatic cover and armaments.

In all of this a reasonable question arises: could Biden and his national security team have done a better job managing a highly combustible situation? The answer is not simple, and comes in two parts. Biden responded well to the risks of a wider conflagration by quickly bolstering a US naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf to deter a regional spillover. But his embrace of Israel’s strategy — literally, for he travelled to Tel Aviv in October and hugged Israel’s prime minister on arrival — relayed a message to the region that Washington would indulge Netanyahu’s war aims and practices.

That this was a mistake has become increasingly obvious in recent days as Israel continues a merciless bombing campaign that has reportedly killed more than 15,000 Gazans, including thousands of children. Casualty numbers are imprecise, but may well exceed 20,000, including those buried in rubble and not recovered.

Having given Netanyahu the impression that the United States was offering virtual carte blanche to Israel, Biden is now trying to rein in the Israeli leader. This will not necessarily end well.

Of course, Israel will be hoping it can capture key Hamas leaders, including political supremo Yahya Sinwar and military commander Mohammed Deif, either dead or alive, to parade before the international media as evidence of the success of its mission.

All of this leaves unresolved the fundamental conundrum: what happens once the guns fall silent and the bombing campaign and other offensive measures have run their course?

No one, not the American president, nor the United Nations, nor Arab states, nor the international community more generally, and certainly not Israel itself, has come up with a realistic way forward. The reason is simple: no clear-cut avenues exist for resolving an Israel–Palestine dispute vastly complicated by the devastation wrought on the people of Gaza.

Central is the question of who will take responsibility for managing Gaza in the war’s aftermath, assuming Hamas has been disabled. Would it be a UN trusteeship using the organisation’s humanitarian resources? Would it be the Palestinian authority, currently governing the West Bank? Would Arab states fill a vacuum until the devastated Strip could be rebuilt? Or will Israel remain in Gaza as a garrison occupier much as it did in South Lebanon after its invasion in 1982 to rid that country of the Palestine Liberation Organisation?

On the face of it, none of these options seems particularly attractive, or even plausible. Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have warned Netanyahu that they won’t tolerate an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza or Gazans being forced to leave. They have also made clear that Israel needs to engage meaningfully with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s response has been to say he won’t deal with the Palestinian Authority in a Gaza context and that he is against a two-state solution in any case. This is hardly encouraging. But if there is a glimmer of hope in all of this, it is that Netanyahu himself will not be a spoiling factor.

Israel’s leader is living on borrowed time, and will almost certainly be pushed aside after the war ends. This is not the least of the reasons why it remains in his interests to continue to prosecute a war that is proving devasting for Israel’s support among its close friends and allies, including Australia.

Israel and its supporters would be unwise to misread the message emanating from the UN General Assembly this week. Global patience, including that of the United States, is wearing awfully thin. •

The post A turning point for Gaza? appeared first on Inside Story.

From the 7 October Hamas pogrom against Jewish residents on the borders of the Gaza Strip to the obliteration of much of the civilian infrastructure of North Gaza by Israel in retaliation, this is a merciless conflict. How will it end so that the “day after” question can begin to be answered?

The short answer is no one knows how this war will end, nor how many will be killed beyond the 1200 Israelis who have perished and, according to Gaza’s health ministry, the 11,000 Palestinians. These are the raw numbers, but they hardly reveal the extent of the destruction of a Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people in a narrow strip of land on the Mediterranean, and nor do they account for the extent of the trauma experienced by both sides.

The day after will not simply involve a reckoning of casualty figures or physical destruction, but will also leave a traumatised Palestinian population in Gaza and an Israeli population haunted by what happened on 7 October. These are wounds that will not be healed for generations, if at all.

All wars end sooner or later, even the Hundred Years’ war, but in the case of the Gaza war it is hard to envisage how this conflict can be brought to an end in a way that will avoid further conflict in that conflict-ravaged space between the Jordan River and the sea.

Israel’s stated aim is the complete destruction of Hamas, its leadership inside Gaza, its military infrastructure and indeed its ability to reconstitute itself as a viable player. Whether this is achievable remains to be seen, since Hamas is not simply a military organisation to be defeated in the field. Like the Irish Republican Army it has a political wing and, most definitely, an ideology, whatever we might think of it.

The Israeli government has said repeatedly that what happened on 7 October means it won’t deal with Hamas, not now and not ever. What it has not made clear is the sort of arrangement that might satisfy it in Gaza once the shooting stops.

Will Israeli forces occupy Gaza and oversee the toxic aftermath of war? Will a global community shocked by the ferocity of the conflict mount a peacekeeping operation under a United Nations supervised trusteeship or some other such arrangement? Who will be responsible for the enormous cost of reconstruction that will run into billions of dollars?

Only those with direct experience of a war-ravaged wasteland pulverised by the most intensive bombing campaign since Richard Nixon’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 can have any idea of the extent of damage wrought by modern weaponry. Would Israel, in any case, be prepared to hand over the governance of what remains of Gaza to a depleted and discredited Palestinian Authority in faraway Ramallah in the West Bank?

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel won’t be yielding responsibility for Gaza to the PA. He deflects questions about the circumstances in which Israel would remain in Gaza.

In any case, it is unlikely that any of this will be within his control. Politically, Netanyahu is a dead man walking given the degree of disapprobation with which he is regarded by Israelis, who blame him for security failures that enabled the 7 October attack in the first place.

PA leaders have said they won’t be reasserting responsibility for Gaza in present circumstances, weakened as they were by the election there in 2006 and having yielded control altogether to Hamas the following year. They have said they will certainly not be re-entering Gaza on the “back of an Israeli tank.”

Then there is the overarching question of whether the savagery of the Gaza conflict will bring about a full-on attempt, backed by the United States, the European Union, Arab states and the United Nations itself, to force-feed a political settlement more broadly to Israelis and Palestinians?

Here, we are talking about a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would be granted a state of their own behind secure borders in exchange for peace. This was the aim of the Oslo process of 1993–95 that delivered an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation designed to lead to a permanent settlement after a transitional period.

The breakthrough agreement was consummated in 1993 by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat in the presence of US president Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. Two years later, before the Oslo process took root, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians. That terrible moment, whose main political beneficiary was Netanyahu, effectively killed a nascent peace process.

In the generation since, attempts have been made by successive presidents to re-energise the peace process, Clinton at Camp David in 2000; Barack Obama in the early stages of his presidency before he foundered on Israeli obduracy and Palestinian fecklessness; George W. Bush, half-heartedly, at Annapolis in 2007; and Donald Trump with his “deal of the century” that was no deal at all as far as the Palestinians were concerned.

The Trump administration’s strategy was to persuade Arab states, principally Saudi Arabia, to make peace with Israel. The Palestinians would then be left, the strategy proposed, with little choice but to fall into line — in other words, to accommodate themselves to whatever morsels were left to them. This process was marketed by Trump as the “Abraham Accords,” as if the memory of the revered Jewish patriarch would cast a biblical spell over the region.

Among Hamas’s clear aims on 7 October was to derail that process. In that regard it has succeeded for the time being, but in the longer term it may have galvanised an international community to actually try to do something about the issue beyond mouthing empty platitudes about a “two-state solution.”

The next question is why Hamas chose to attack Israel in the way it did in the certain expectation that retaliation would be brutal and the civilian population of Gaza would bear the brunt. The answer is complex but might be explained by a nihilistic terrorist mindset that pays less attention to the consequences than to the act of terror itself.

Hamas’s branding of its military operation by reference to the violation of Jerusalem’s  Al-Aqsa mosque by an extremist member of Netanyahu’s cabinet underscores the jihadist component of what took place. But beyond all this is the possibility that Hamas may have hoped to provoke a regional conflict involving Israel in a several-fronts war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Syria in the north, and may even have believed Iran could be drawn into the conflict.

None of this, apart from fairly desultory rocket salvos from Hezbollah in northern Israel, has come to pass. US president Joe Biden’s decision to deploy two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region was aimed at forestalling a wider conflict. It appears to be working, for the time being.

As Israel continues to dismember what is left of the northern section of Gaza, which had been home to one million Palestinians, we come closer to the existential question: what next when, and if, the guns fall silent over a wasteland?

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, having reported from Israel and the occupied territories and having written a book about Israel–Palestine, I find it hard to be optimistic about a resolution of the longest-running conflict in modern history. For the sake of argument, though, let’s consider a scenario that harks back to the lost opportunities following the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist, as dramatised by the Rabin–Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Under this optimistic, even improbable, scenario, America would lead a comprehensive process to impose a settlement on Palestinians and Israelis that would enable the two sides to accommodate each other in separate states living in relative harmony side by side. The contours of such an arrangement were negotiated up hill and down dale in the 1990s, with territory to be set aside for land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for Jewish settlements contiguous to Israel that could not be dismantled under any reasonable circumstances.

An agreement with the Palestinians would have four main pillars: the putative state of Palestine would be demilitarised, Palestinians would not have the right of return to Israel proper among families displaced in 1947–48, settlements on the boundaries of Israel would remain in place and, tackling the thorniest issue of all, East Jerusalem would be the Palestinian capital under a shared sovereignty with Israel over the Holy places. Jerusalem would be left for “final status” talks, in other words the concluding chapter of a peace settlement.

When those bare-bones details are exposed, what becomes apparent is how difficult, if not impossible, a comprehensive settlement would be. The above was more or less on the table — without the Jerusalem issue being close to being resolved — at Camp David in 2000 and in a final desultory attempt by the Clinton administration at Taba in 2001 before Bush was inaugurated.

What has happened in the meantime to further complicate the picture? Quite simply, a very great deal has transpired to make realising a two-state solution even more complicated, if not impossible. This might be described as the multidimensional Middle East Rubik’s cube.

For a start, Israel’s settlement-building in territory occupied in the 1967 Six Day war has continued apace. By 2022, Israel had 199 settlements and 220 outposts in the West Bank with something like 500,000 settlers on land occupied in 1967. Under international law those settlements on territory seized by Israel in 1967 are illegal; even Israel itself regards many of the small settler outposts as renegade establishments.

On top of that are the 250,000 Israeli residents of East Jerusalem. That adds up to three-quarters of a million Israelis who would be anxious about, if not bitterly opposed to, any peace settlement that involves relinquishing those areas.

Under present circumstances Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subject to military rule and don’t enjoy the same civil and political rights as Israeli settlers. Human rights groups describe this as apartheid.

This is the reality of 2023. It is one of the main reasons why there are many advocates for what is described as a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in a single state with equal rights. This is not an outcome that would be favoured by most Israelis, and certainly not those on the nationalist settler right. It is not idle to say that the country would risk falling apart on the concessions that would be required to secure an honourable settlement.

Here it might be useful to clarify a misunderstanding surrounding the failure of Camp David in 2000. Arafat got, and deserves, much of the blame for its failure; the Palestinians were deeply divided on the concessions required for an agreement. But blame should also be attached to the Americans for poor preparation of the process, and to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one at Camp David.

What is often overlooked is that it was not in Barak’s gift to deliver an agreement without strings attached. He had undertaken to take the Camp David II formula to a vote of his compatriots with no certainty of a positive outcome.

If the lessons of Oslo and the other attempts at Middle East peace tell us one thing, it is that no positive outcome will come without American leadership, and not simply leadership but a willingness to take control of the process in partnership with its allies, including Arab states fearful of further destabilisation in the region.

Does America have the time and energy for such a process given challenges it faces from China in the Indo-Pacific and from Russia on NATO’s western flank, not to mention a domestic political environment that could hardly be less stable.

America and its allies have always been at pains to say it is up to the protagonists to make peace. A settlement cannot be force-fed. In light of what has happened since 7 October the question becomes whether the West in partnership with Arab states can afford to allow the situation to continue to fester.

American supporters of the Israeli settler right would certainly mobilise against a process that involved widespread dismantling of settlements. Yet no agreement will be possible without a comprehensive arrangement that respects Palestinian sovereignty, removes impediments to freedom of movement in a West Bank desiccated by settlements and, most likely, creates a secure and elevated transit route between the West Bank and Gaza that itself would need to be open to the outside world.

Only a supreme optimist would believe that all this will come to pass in very many days after the guns fall silent, and certainly not “the day after,” but it is the only plausible scenario that has emerged so far. •

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