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.

Even now, as Israeli forces push deeper into southern Gaza, the exact purpose of Israel’s approach is far from clear. Although Israeli leaders claim to be targeting Hamas alone, the evident lack of discrimination raises real questions about what the government is actually up to.

Is Israel’s eagerness to shatter Gaza a product of the same incompetence that led to the massive failure of the Israeli military to counter Hamas’s attack on 7 October, the plans for which ended up in the hands of Israeli military and intelligence officials more than a year earlier? Is wrecking northern Gaza and now southern Gaza a prelude to sending the territory’s entire population to Egypt, as proposed in a “concept paper” produced by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry?

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel’s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel’s approach is doomed to failure — and indeed, it is already failing. Mass civilian punishment has not convinced Gaza’s residents to stop supporting Hamas. To the contrary, it has only heightened resentment among Palestinians. Nor has the campaign succeeded in dismantling the group ostensibly being targeted. Fifty-plus days of war show that while Israel can demolish Gaza, it cannot destroy Hamas. In fact, the group may be stronger now than it was before.

Israel is hardly the first country to err by placing excessive faith in the coercive magic of airpower. History shows that the large-scale bombing of civilian areas almost never achieves its objectives. Israel would have been better off had it heeded these lessons and responded to the 7 October attack with surgical strikes against Hamas’s leaders and fighters in lieu of the indiscriminate bombing campaign it has chosen.

But it is not too late to shift course and adopt a viable alternative strategy for achieving lasting security, an approach that would drive a political wedge between Hamas and the Palestinians rather than bringing them closer together: take meaningful, unilateral steps towards a two-state solution.

Since the dawn of airpower, countries have sought to bomb enemies into submission and shatter civilian morale. Pushed to their breaking point, the theory goes, populations will rise up against their own governments and switch sides. This strategy of coercive punishment reached its apogee in the second world war. History remembers the indiscriminate bombing of cities in that war simply by the place names of the targets: Hamburg (40,000 dead), Darmstadt (12,000) and Dresden (25,000).

Now Gaza can be added to this infamous list. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has himself likened the current campaign to the Allies’ fight in the second world war. While denying that Israel was engaging in collective punishment, he pointed out that a Royal Air Force strike targeting Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen killed scores of schoolchildren.

What Netanyahu left unmentioned was that none of the Allies’ efforts to punish civilians en masse actually succeeded. In Germany, the Allied bombing campaign, which began in 1942, wreaked havoc on civilians, destroying one urban area after another and ultimately a total of fifty-eight German cities and towns by the end of the war. But it never sapped civilian morale or prompted an uprising against Adolf Hitler, despite the confident predictions of Allied officials. Indeed, the campaign only encouraged Germans to fight harder for fear of a draconian postwar peace.

That failure should not have been so surprising given what happened when the Nazis tried the same tactic. The Blitz, their bombing of London and other British cities in 1940–41, killed more than 40,000 people and yet British prime minister Winston Churchill refused to capitulate. Instead, he invoked the civilian casualties in rallying society to make the sacrifices necessary for victory. Rather than shattering morale, the Blitz motivated the British to organise a years-long effort — with their US and Soviet allies — to counterattack and ultimately conquer the country that had bombed them.

In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against its own government. The United States has tried the tactic numerous times, to no avail. During the Korean war, it destroyed 90 per cent of electricity generation in North Korea. In the Vietnam war, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam. And in the Gulf war, US air attacks disrupted 90 per cent of electricity generation in Iraq. In none of these cases did the population rise up.

The war in Ukraine is the most recent case in point. For nearly two years Russia has sought to coerce Ukraine through wave after wave of devasting air assaults on cities across the country, killing more than 10,000 civilians, destroying more than 1.5 million homes and displacing some eight million Ukrainians. Russia is clearly shattering Ukraine. But far from crushing Ukraine’s fighting spirit, this massive civilian punishment has only convinced Ukrainians to fight Russia more intensely than ever.

This historical pattern is repeating itself in Gaza. Despite nearly two months of heavy military operations — virtually unrestrained by the United States and the rest of the world — Israel has achieved only marginal results. By any meaningful metric, the campaign has not led to Hamas’s even partial defeat.

Israel’s air and ground operations have killed as many as 5000 Hamas fighters (according to Israeli officials) out of a total of about 30,000. But these losses will not significantly reduce the threat to Israeli civilians, since, as the 7 October attacks proved, it takes only a few hundred Hamas fighters to wreak havoc on Israeli communities. Worse, Israeli officials also admit that the military campaign is killing twice as many civilians as Hamas fighters. In other words, Israel is almost certainly producing more terrorists than it is killing, since each dead civilian will have family and friends eager to join Hamas to exact revenge.

Hamas’s military infrastructure, such as it is, has not been meaningfully dismantled, even after the much-vaunted operations against the al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli military alleged Hamas used as an operational base. As videos released by the Israel Defense Forces show, Israel has captured and destroyed the entrances to many of Hamas’s tunnels, but these can eventually be repaired, just as they were built in the first place.

More important, Hamas’s leaders and fighters appear to have abandoned the tunnels before Israeli forces entered them, meaning that the group’s most important infrastructure — its fighters — survived. Hamas has an advantage over Israeli forces: it can easily abandon a fight, blend into the civilian population, and live to fight again on more favourable terms. That is why a large-scale Israeli ground operation is also doomed to failure.

More broadly, Israel’s military campaign has not deeply weakened Hamas’s control over Gaza. Israel has rescued only one of the 240 or so hostages taken in the 7 October attack; the other hostages freed have been released by Hamas, showing that the group remains in control of its fighters.

Despite large-scale power shortages and extensive destruction throughout Gaza, Hamas continues to churn out propaganda videos showing civilian atrocities committed by Israeli forces and intense battles between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops. The group’s propaganda is distributed widely on the messaging app Telegram, where its channel has more than 620,000 subscribers. By the count of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (which I direct), Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has disseminated nearly 200 videos and posters every week from 11 October to 22 November through that channel.

The only way to deal a lasting defeat to Hamas is to attack its leaders and fighters while separating them from the surrounding population. That is easier said than done, however, especially since Hamas draws its ranks directly from the local population rather than from abroad.

Indeed, survey evidence shows the extent to which Israel’s military operations are now producing more terrorists than they are killing. In a 14 November poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank conducted by Arab World for Research and Development, 76 per cent of respondents said they viewed Hamas positively. Compare that with the 27 per cent of respondents in both territories who told different pollsters in September that Hamas was “the most deserving of representing the Palestinian people.” The implication is sobering: a vast portion of the more than 500,000 Palestinian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are now ripe recruits for Hamas or other Palestinian groups seeking to target Israel and its civilians.

This result also reinforces the lessons of history. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most terrorists do not choose their vocation owing to religion or ideology, although some certainly do. Rather, most people who become terrorists do so because their land is being taken away.

For decades, I’ve studied the most extreme terrorists — suicide terrorists — and my study of 462 people who killed themselves on missions to kill others in acts of terrorism from 1982 to 2003 remains the largest demographic study of these attackers. I found that there are hundreds of secular suicide terrorists. Indeed, the world’s leader in suicide terrorism during that period was the Tamil Tigers, an openly anti-religious, Marxist group in Sri Lanka that carried out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad — the two deadliest Palestinian terrorist groups — combined. What 95 per cent of the suicide terrorists in my database had in common was that they were fighting back against a military occupation that was controlling territory they considered their homeland.

From 1994 to 2005, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups carried out more than 150 suicide attacks, killing about 1000 Israelis. Only when Israel withdrew military forces from Gaza did these groups abandon the tactic almost entirely. Since then, the number of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has grown by 50 per cent, making it even harder for Israel to control the territories in the long run. There is every reason to think that Israel’s renewed military occupation of Gaza — “for an indefinite period,” according to Netanyahu — will lead to a new, perhaps larger wave of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.

Although the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has many dimensions, one fact helps clarify the complex picture. Virtually every year since the early 1980s, the Jewish population in the Palestinian territories has grown, even during the years of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. The growth of settlements has meant the loss of land for the Palestinians and increasing concerns that Israel will confiscate more land to resettle more Jews in the Palestinian territories. Indeed, Yossi Dagan, a prominent settler and member of Netanyahu’s party, has urged the creation of settlements in Gaza, where the last settlements were removed in 2005.

The growth of the Jewish population in Palestinian territories is a central factor in fomenting conflict. In the years immediately after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the total number of Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza numbered only a few thousand. Israeli–Palestinian relations were mostly harmonious. No Palestinian suicide attacks and few attacks of any kind occurred during this period.

But things changed after the right-wing government led by the Likud Party came to power in 1977, promising a major expansion of settlements. The number of settlers increased — from about 4000 in 1977 to 24,000 in 1983 and to 116,000 in 1993. By 2022, about 500,000 Jewish Israeli settlers lived in the Palestinian territories, excluding East Jerusalem, where an additional 230,000 Jews resided. As the settlements grew, the relative harmony between the Israelis and the Palestinians dissipated. First came the creation of Hamas in 1987, and then the first intifada of 1987–93, the second intifada of 2000–2005, and continuing rounds of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis ever since.

The near-continuous growth of the Jewish settlements is a core reason why the idea of a two-state solution has lost credibility since the 1990s. If there is to be a serious pathway to a Palestinian state in the future, that growth must come to an end. After all, why should Palestinians reject Hamas and support a supposed peace process if doing so means only more loss of their land?

Only a two-state solution will lead to lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is the only viable approach that will truly undermine Hamas, and Israel can and should unilaterally press forward with a plan, taking steps on its own before negotiating with the Palestinians. The goal should be to revive a process that has been dormant since the last negotiations failed in 2008, fifteen years ago.

To be clear, Israel should couple this political approach with a military one, engaging in limited, sustained operations against the Hamas leaders and fighters responsible for the atrocities of 7 October. But the country must adopt the political element of the strategy now, not later. Israel cannot wait until after some mythical time when Hamas is defeated by military might alone.

Those who doubt that a two-state solution can ever be reached are right that immediately resuming negotiations with the Palestinians would not reduce Hamas’s will to fight. For one thing, the group is an avowed proponent of eliminating Israel. For another, it would be one of the biggest losers in a two-state solution, since a peace deal would almost certainly involve the prohibition of armed Palestinian groups aside from Hamas’s main internal rival, the Palestinian Authority, which would likely enjoy renewed support and legitimacy if it secured an agreement that the majority of Palestinians supported. And even if a two-state solution is achieved, Israel will still need a strong defence capability, since no political solution can completely eliminate the threat of terrorism for years to come.

But that is why the goal now should not be to immediately put forward a final plan for a two-state solution — something that is simply not in the realm of political possibility at the moment. Instead, the immediate objective should be to create a pathway for an eventual Palestinian state. Although sceptics claim that such a pathway is impossible because Israel has no suitable Palestinian partners, Israel can in fact take crucial steps on its own.

The Israeli government could publicly announce that it intends to achieve a state of affairs where the Palestinians live in a state chosen by Palestinians side by side with a Jewish state of Israel. It could announce that it intends to develop a process to achieve that goal by, say, 2030, and will lay out milestones for getting there in the coming months. It could announce that it will immediately freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank and forgo such settlements in Gaza through to 2030 as a down payment that demonstrated its commitment to a genuine two-state solution. And it could announce that it is willing and ready to work with all parties — all countries in the region and beyond, all international organisations, and all Palestinian parties — that are willing to accept these objectives.

Far from being irrelevant to Israel’s military efforts against Hamas, these political steps would augment a sustained, highly targeted campaign to reduce the near-term threat of attacks from the group. Effective counterterrorism benefits from intelligence from the local population, which is far more likely to be forthcoming if that population has hope of a genuine political alternative to the terrorist group.

Indeed, in the long run, the only way to defeat Hamas is to drive a political wedge between it and the Palestinian people. Unilateral Israeli steps signalling a serious commitment to a new future would decidedly change the framework of and dynamics in the Israeli–Palestinian relationship and give Palestinians a genuine alternative to simply supporting Hamas and violence. Israelis, for their part, would be more secure, and the two parties would at long last be on a path towards peace.

Of course, the current Israeli government shows no signs of pursuing this plan. That could change, however, especially if the United States decided to use its influence. For instance, the White House could apply more private pressure to Netanyahu’s government to curtail indiscriminate attacks in the air campaign.

But perhaps the most important step that Washington could take now would be to jump-start a major public debate about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, one that allowed alternative strategies to be considered in depth and that brought forth rich public information for Americans, Israelis and people around the world to evaluate the consequences for themselves. The White House could release US government assessments of the effect that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is having on Hamas and Palestinian civilians. Congress could hold hearings centred on a simple question: is the campaign producing more terrorists than it is killing?

The failure of Israel’s current approach is becoming clearer by the day. Sustained public discussion of that reality, combined with serious consideration of smart alternatives, offers the best chance for convincing Israel to do what is, after all, in its own national interest. •

The post Israel’s failed bombing campaign in 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. •

The post The day after appeared first on Inside Story.

Deterrence’s conceptual framework developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war given the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.

Israel also practises nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is for potentially hostile governments to be aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.

For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas operating out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored. It is more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. Unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.

It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and may never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.

WHY DETERRENCE?

Before it became so dependent on deterrence, Israel sought to control threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence proved too high.

In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation, having been kicked out of Jordan, took up residence there in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally entered its territory to push the guerilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving north until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (with some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (in which it failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.

The Israeli Defence Forces, or IDF, eventually withdrew to a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak decided the presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory and a result of its constant harassment.

Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, decided as prime minister that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained at an inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. In the face of protests from their residents, the IDF closed down the settlements. (Sharon suffered a stroke and went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank.)

The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes didn’t last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.

With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling supplies and getting fighters into Israel.

DETERRENCE BY DENIAL OR PUNISHMENT

With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.

Deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it will be unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent, and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.

Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. But the fences couldn’t stop rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system — the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also use air raid shelters to protect them from rockets that get through.

The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids on the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.

The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political figures or military. Israel’s many “targeted killings” may have disrupted the enemy’s command structures and operations in the short term, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Other commanders step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee they will be less capable or effective.

Second, the IDF targets the military assets that make the attacks possible. Again, this can make a difference in the short term but in the long term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug and more fighters recruited.

Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately near schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the name of self-defence and military necessity, it is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.

But intense strikes against military targets, especially involving tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings or individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often hard to discern.

Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats can’t be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working, there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.

DOES IT WORK? (I) HEZBOLLAH

In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two abducted to Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. It responded instead with air and artillery strikes, against not only Hezbollah military targets but also Beirut airport and other civilian targets. It launched a land attack against well-prepared Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon that turned out to be costly and difficult.

Eventually the United Nations arranged a ceasefire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to twelve of his commanders and went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.

On the question of whether Hezbollah’s operation would have proceeded if it was felt there was “even a 1 per cent chance” it would lead to a war like the one that eventuated, he responded, “I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.” Israel had been waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, he added — yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that deterrence can perhaps work.

But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is less so than Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese political system. While it is the most substantial force in that country, it still has to be responsive to factions and persuasions that are less interested in its feud with Israel, and to present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and still being run by a caretaker government, it is in no position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.

This is not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. It sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, for example, where they worked (not particularly effectively) with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad.) It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. It has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.

DOES IT WORK? (II) GAZA

The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory, the periods of calm on the border have been few. Clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. Each case involves rocket fire by Hamas (and its junior partner, Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes by the Israelis; the casualties are starkly asymmetric, with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially for civilians.

The suffering of Palestinians in these flare-ups leads international organisations, governments and campaigning groups to denounce Israel for acting disproportionately. Other than in 2021, when unrest spread to Arab communities in Israel, supporting protests have been held in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. After weeks of fighting, a ceasefire of some sort has been struck and nothing much has changed once the fighting subsided.

The regularity of the clashes suggests that deterrence has worked poorly in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective the priority has mainly been to show that it is not rattled by provocations and will respond forcefully each time. These responses were described by some Israelis as “mowing the lawn,” a phrase capturing the idea of an indefinite conflict containable by occasional forceful action.

Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that its approach was working, to the extent that it was starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. Islamic Jihad was a problem, but Hamas didn’t seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was a failure not only of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.

The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity. Many individuals connected with Hamas and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. Despite Hamas’s original provocation, this has led to international anger and demands for a ceasefire.

We can question whether deterrence was ever operating effectively, but it certainly isn’t now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it never has the capacity to do so.

But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. The latter’s network, including the Houthis in Yemen, has been busy. So far, much of that has been largely posturing, with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that the deterrence offered by Iran/Hezbollah has failed because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war, though they might claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.

If Hezbollah did want to get involved, it would have had more effect if it had done so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This doesn’t mean Hezbollah won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to worry its leadership. But the key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue with which to take on the United States. A tweet from Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — “Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action” — suggests that no decision has yet been made.

The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have already “normalised” relations with Israel or were preparing to. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.

NEXT STEPS

Israel’s land invasion of Gaza was undertaken despite US misgivings and Saudi objections — one a country on which Israel relies, the other that it has been courting. The foreign ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the ceasefire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to UN secretary-general António Guterres because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on Israel’s people and the ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.

Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against Islamic State and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop will only grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars, it will be resisting pressure for a ceasefire until its objectives have been achieved.

Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy, so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still potential mediators, including in efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.

Israel has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory, but that is not a serious option. This is where the other flaw in Israel’s deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza were turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.

Given how Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if it is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world, and regardless of what happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate and to return to power if there is no alternative government in place.

There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans, and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of its constantly provoking Israel into attacks that it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept, corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.

If Israel can’t find a government for Gaza, someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the United States. This seems to be what many analysts anticipate happening after this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, given the job of coming up with a viable government for Gaza and managing the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks and look to possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.

In principle, this process could be confined to Gaza, but Arab governments are unlikely to cooperate unless the future of the West Bank is also tackled. The trade that Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the “two-state solution” is put back on the agenda. Most Western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.

Netanyahu has been around long enough to know that dismissing the two-state solution out of hand isn’t realistic, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea. That’s why he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote.

All one can say is that this war changes a lot. When the two-state solution has come up, as it did for example in the prewar talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea and pointed to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to show why progress is impossible.

But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas out of Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this, Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. If there is to be any resolution of the current conflict, the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel. •

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Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamas’s recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assault’s surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a “total system failure on Israel’s part.” Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for “a ragtag band of terrorists” to beat the “mighty” Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, “was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israel’s two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, “the most extreme ever,” downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies — which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison” — Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with “defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping.” Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there. Haaretz editorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as “the IDF provided security for every settler whim.”

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be “erased.” This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a “pogrom.” A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrich’s comments as “irresponsible… repugnant [and] disgusting.” Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”

Last August, Netanyahu’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his family’s right to move around the West Bank “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s nominal partner in any “peace process.”

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, commented recently that Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahu’s policy to “nearly topple” the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamas’s “sense of impunity and capability.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israel’s inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion “as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.” Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a “strong reaction” around the Arab world. President Biden’s whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamas’s military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamas’s embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israel’s bombardment — 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 —  suggested that “the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.”

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces’ Major General Ghassan Alian declared that “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamas’s rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the New York Review of Books Fintan O’Toole wrote that “Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s.” That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its “atrocious war crimes.” He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marles’s claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was “poorly briefed.”

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval “complete siege” of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. “A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas’ sins.”

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war, “parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.” Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, “Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israel’s main cities.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the question of “what now?” only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price. •

The post Netanyahu’s war appeared first on Inside Story.

Bowker is the “dean” of an exceptional group of Australian diplomats who dedicated their careers to understanding the region. That description comes from Nick Warner, a wise owl of Canberra foreign policy, defence and intelligence, who says Bowker throws much light “on the history of our relationship with the Middle East, where we have gone wrong and right, and what we should do now.”

The book’s title — Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World — gives a taste, in several senses. Bowker explains that the apricot prophecy is a Syrian saying similar to “pigs might fly.” The hope for apricots, he writes, “captures an unquenchable, droll optimism which, together with the deep appreciation of culture and hospitality, ranks highly among the virtues that define what it means to be Arab. It also reflects an abiding scepticism towards the pretensions of those in positions of authority.”

In just 300 pages Bowker offers two books. The first traces his career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, as a Middle East specialist, after he joined as a diplomatic cadet in 1971. The second, “Reflections,” is an analysis of the big issues confronting the region.

The two-in-one package is a fine blend of the personal and the policy, describing a fifty-year journey: thirty-seven years with DFAT and twelve years as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments and an academic at the Australian National University.

“Being an Australian diplomat in the Arab world was more than a career: it was an adventure,” Bowker writes. “In many ways it was my life.” He reminds us that former prime minister John Howard labelled himself a cricket “tragic” because he was tragically in love with the game. Bowker embraces the hopelessly-in-love thought, titling the first half of the book “The Career of a Middle East Tragic.”

It’s notable the book starts with that light-hearted reference to Howard, because one of the great policy fights of Bowker’s career was Howard’s shifting of Australian policy on Palestinian self-determination to lean towards Israel. The diplomat notes he was “trumped by the prime minister” and “went down in flames.”

A great scene in this flame-up has Bowker locked in a shouting match with the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser at the annual conference of the Zionist Federation. Howard was sitting only metres away, preparing to address the conference dinner. His breach with Canberra is an example of Bowker’s observation that the policy choices the Middle East must live with are divided between bad and much worse.

Tragically in love with the Middle East in all its tragic complications, Bowker offers great yarns, finely told. He has an ear for the telling quote and an eye for a good scene.

Heading off for his first overseas post as a third secretary only seven months after joining the department, he records the three pieces of advice given him in the conversation that amounted to his consular “training”: “Never take possession of a corpse. Never take possession of a madwoman. Use your common sense. And that was it.”

At his second post in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, his struggle learning Arabic is illustrated by his regular visit to a roadside stall: “I later realised that when I thought I was asking, in terrible Arabic, for a freshly cooked chicken, I was actually asking for a fresh wife. The stall owner didn’t seem to mind.” But Bowker’s “colloquial Levantine Arabic” had uses beyond talking to stallholders and taxi drivers. To impose ceremonial pain on Sudan’s president for atrocities by his tribal proxies in Darfur, the ambassador gave “my speech on presentation of my credentials in Arabic.”

A gem of a chapter entitled “Touring Tobruk by Moonlight” captures Libya’s “blend of chaos and impenetrability under the Ghaddafi regime” by describing Bowker visiting, as the non-resident ambassador, as scout for a visit to the war cemetery by the Australian defence minister. Two Libyan minders drive Bowker from Benghazi in a car that “sounded very sick indeed” to visit a range of war cemeteries — British, French and German — but can’t find the Australian site until the moon is out.

At the end, the minders have an animated discussion about the report they must file “on why the ambassador chap had been scoping out the port area and surrounds of Tobruk, especially the high ground overlooking the harbour, quizzing the locals about the layout of the urban area, and doing so in execrable Arabic.” When they got back to Benghazi at 1.30am, one of the minders “shook my hands and planted kisses on both my cheeks. When you are kissed by a Libyan security official, you know it is time to go home.”

Writing of his time in Syria in the 1970s, Bowker recounts a local quip: “Saudi Arabia exports oil, Iraq exports dates, Egypt exports jokes and Syria exports trouble.” The three-line description of president Hafez al-Assad, the late father of the incumbent, is a miniature masterpiece of disdain: “his smile was like moonlight on a tombstone,” he had a “penchant for delivering historical lectures” and he dominated meetings with “his awe-inspiring bladder control.”

Bowker’s sad conclusion is that the Assad family — Hafez and now his son Bashar — has become the regime that outlasted its country. The bedrock of Bashar’s rule is its brutality, he writes, and father and son always avoided “questions about the appropriate relationship in Syria between state and society.”

Among his reflections, Bowker considers the department that made his career, lamenting how the role of Australia’s diplomats in Canberra has changed, “and not for the better.” DFAT, he argues, gives priority to trade and consular crisis management ahead of the research and thinking needed for effective foreign policy planning and advocacy. Policy is made in ministerial offices, with the department seen as mere implementor. “This is a deeply problematic direction for any government, or government department, to take.”

DFAT no longer debates with itself and the rest of Canberra through despatches and cables: “The final decade or two of my time in the department saw a shift to reporting by cable that was prone to be concise rather than nuanced. It was directed in its brevity towards immediate briefing needs, rather than the evaluation of trends and their consequences for Australian interests.”

Under the Howard government, he notes, the lengthy despatch from an overseas post became a thing of the past: “By the time I retired it had become almost unthinkable to reflect on broader issues, let alone to challenge policy settings, in cable traffic.”

In this second half of the book Bowker considers three core questions:

• “How do you build peace between two peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — with compelling national rights, human rights and historical narratives, but who have a clear imbalance of power?”

• How do you connect the present, the past and the politics of Palestinian identity? This is an intellectual who twenty years ago wrote a book called Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. As a diplomat, he offers the answer (“if there is one”) of negotiating on interests, because beliefs are “organic, structural and fundamentally non-negotiable.”

• How does the Arab world confront its demographic fate (a Middle East population of 724 million people by 2050) and its economic and social challenges while preserving its Arab and Islamic identity? “None of the current leaderships of the major Arab states and Iran have answers to the problems of legitimacy and governance,” Bowker writes. His fear is that governments will “grow more authoritarian, transactional and violent in their instincts and behaviour.”

Defending privilege and predictability, rulers have found that repression works for them, arguing that “freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division rather than bread and social justice.”

The Arab outlook, Bowker observes, feels like being on the bridge of the Titanic smelling the ice. It took the Titanic a long time to sink, though, and the modern Arab world has no way to stop the drivers of change, which are “generational and societal as well as political.”

On the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Bowker declares that the two-state approach pursued since the 1990s is “dead.” He pointedly calls it a two-state “approach” because no solution is in sight. If that option is mired in fundamental conundrum, the path to justice is by “building a foundation for Palestinian rights and dignity among Israelis.”

Israel can facilitate a new, more positive future for Palestinians and Israelis, he says, without raising existential questions for Israel: “The absence of sovereignty is a legitimate grievance for Palestinians, but in practice it is the absence of dignity and economic security that matters much more.”

If the two-state vision/solution is dead, as Bowker avers, then Palestine’s dream of independence must fade. As the Economist observed recently, the Palestinian diaspora has “begun to call for a one-state solution, where Jews and Arabs between the Jordan rivers and the Mediterranean would live together in a single democratic state — and where Arabs would have a slender overall majority.”

For Israel and the Arab world, demography should meet democracy, and history must reconcile with geography.

Bowker concludes that the fun and frustrations of his life as a Middle East tragic have forced him to accept key realities. Middle East policy is not a morality play; expediency shapes decisions: “The logic of strategy is not always consistent with the logic of politics.”

Diabolical complexity rules. It is in the nature of the Middle East for problems to linger and become more complex: “We must accept that views, interests and values within Arab societies are more likely to differ from our own: any apparent synchronicity of views should be cause for caution, as well as celebration.”

The final sentence of this tragic’s meditation on his life’s works reads: “And, despite almost fifty years of exposure to the Arab world, I remained free of tribal delusions, except where Collingwood is concerned.”

Ah, the Melbourne conundrum of the Collingwood Football Club — the only passion running through this fine book that (in the tribal view of this reviewer) does not bend towards truth and logic. •

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World
By Robert Bowker | Shawline Publishing | $24.95 | 307 pages

The post Memoirs of a Middle East tragic appeared first on Inside Story.

Now the questions are very different: have we entered an altogether new era of violence, more akin to past conflicts in Yugoslavia or Rwanda than to any of Israel’s? And never mind who started it, who can make it stop?…

Read the full article here

The post A thousand frontiers appeared first on Inside Story.

If Netanyahu was contentious then, he is even more so now. Two Sundays ago he achieved another first as prime minister, appearing in a courtroom on corruption charges, having felt no obligation to resign from office and having announced his intention to annex large swathes of West Bank territory previously earmarked for an eventual Palestinian state.

Perhaps not surprisingly, events in Israel have caused a shift within Australia’s 120,000-strong Jewish community, and it has been reflected in the formation of their delegation to the World Zionist Congress in October. The five-yearly congresses are an important opportunity for political representatives from Israel to hear how diaspora supporters of Israel as a Jewish homeland feel about their policies.

In a consensual process just completed, eight members of the small Australian delegation (just thirteen out of 500 congress delegates) will be representatives of “progressive” or liberal Jewish organisations, either secular or from the like-minded religious streams known as “Reform” and “Conservative.” The other five delegates will speak for the Orthodox religious stream and groups like Friends of Likud, which generally support the steady push by Netanyahu and his Likud party for Israel to fully absorb the West Bank areas they call by their Biblical names of Judea and Samaria.

A notable new voice in the progressive majority is a secular coalition calling itself Hatikvah (“The Hope”), the title of the nineteenth-century poem that became the lyric of Israel’s national anthem. It wants Israel to “fulfil its destiny as a just, free homeland for the Jewish people” that also “lives in harmony with its neighbours and upholds the rights of all its citizens.”

Hatikvah has managed to pick up two places in the delegation. Leading the push for support during the formation of the delegation were Liam Getreu and Maddy Blay, respectively from local groups Ameinu, which is aligned with the Labour Party in Israel, and Meretz, aligned with the greenish-secular Meretz party. Behind Hatikvah is a new voice in the Jewish community, the online magazine Plus 61J, established in April 2015 and edited by liberal journalist Michael Visontay. Strongly focused on the Israel–Palestine question, Plus 61J declares itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro–human rights” and supportive of a two-state solution.

Joining the Hatikvah ticket was the Melbourne venture-capital entrepreneur and longstanding supporter of Israeli–Palestinian contact, Ron Finkel, who modelled the push for places at the World Zionist Congress on a Hatikvah ticket for the big United States delegation organised by his American friend Kenneth Bob, long active in Ameinu and a board member of the American liberal Jewish group J Street.

Finkel says that the Jewish community in Australia, “or at least a large chunk of it,” had begun to “tune out” from Israel because of alienation from the values shown by the Netanyahu government. “The drift has been clearly in the direction of non-engagement,” he tells me.

That was not the Jewish voice heard by the wider public, however. “You have those who are dyed-in-the-wool Israel über alles and they seem to have by and large effective control of communal institutions,” says Finkel. “They are the voice you hear through the ECAJ [Executive Council of Australian Jewry], through various state councils, and if that is all that there is you would come to the very rapid view that these sentiments reflect ‘the Jewish community.’”

A group of Jewish Australians decided they wanted to promote a different viewpoint. “We have got to make it clear that there is a voice in the community that reflects core progressive Zionist values, that they’re still relevant,” says Finkel, “even though progressive Zionists don’t have much say in Israel at the moment. And that’s good because it’s the first time in a long time that progressive Zionists of all ages have decided to stand up and say: this is what’s going on.”

As well as sending representatives to the congress, Hatikvah wants to work in a more engaging, structured way to gain a voice within the Jewish community. “We don’t want to be outside the tent pissing in. We want to be inside the tent and being part of the shaping of communal strategies.”

Already the group has put out two statements, one on climate change and one on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. “We are not trying to replace organisations that are active in this space, but we want to make it clear these are issues that speak to us, that are important to us as Australian progressive Zionists, and we’re involved,” says Finkel.

All this is encountering some resistance among some older, established community figures. “They can’t grasp, they can’t get their heads around the idea that you can be critical of policies of the current government of the state of Israel, fight for the rights of oppressed minorities in Israel whether they be Ethiopians or different segments of the Arab populations, or point out Israeli soldiers can do obnoxious things,” says Finkel.

He believes these sentiments are understandable, especially in Melbourne, which had the highest postwar concentration of Holocaust survivors, per capita, outside Israel. “You can’t blame them when your family has gone through the horrors and as a young person in 1967” — during the Arab-Israeli war — “you thought there was a likelihood that a new holocaust was going to be perpetrated on the state of Israel.”

After the past year’s three Israeli elections, each of which resulted in a stalemate, Netanyahu is still in power. He has stared down his rival, former defence chief Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party, and persuaded him to accept second place in a governing coalition. So precarious is the political balance that the government includes fully thirty-six ministers and sixteen deputies, some with invented portfolios and no clear responsibilities, in a Knesset of only 120 members. Crucially, Netanyahu retains control of the law-related portfolios.

Israel’s High Court allowed Netanyahu to stay in office while being tried on charges of receiving gifts and favourable media coverage in return for political favours, partly because of the presumption of innocence and partly because prime ministers, unlike ordinary ministers, are not explicitly prohibited from doing so.

“A situation in which a defendant charged with serious ethical crimes forms a government and heads it raises a public and moral problem whose magnitude is hard to overstate,” said Justice Menachem Mazuz in his judgement. “Such a situation reflects a social crisis and a moral failure by both society and the political system.”

Still, Netanyahu is doubling down, announcing he will start annexing some 30 per cent of the West Bank, including many of the Jewish settlements there, on 1 July. Gantz has acquiesced as part of the coalition agreement. Cynics believe that Netanyahu, while advancing the Israeli right’s perception of an ancient destiny, also hopes to project himself in court as a heroic statesman rather than a slippery politician.

The start on annexation may be more token than real. While the American right and its evangelical component might support the aim, even Donald Trump’s administration seems to be telling Netanyahu to slow down. It wants presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “peace plan” — land for Israel, cash and connecting freeways for the resulting Palestinian enclaves — to stay in play.

Formal annexation would sever Netanyahu’s new dialogue with conservative Arab governments and possibly set off a new Palestinian intifada. It would not be recognised by most European nations, nor by Washington if Joe Biden becomes president.

Hatikvah still holds the hope that the two-state solution can be revived. “What’s happening in the trajectory of both sides has been a continuous path of delegitimisation to now, unfortunately, many elements of dehumanisation,” says Finkel. “And so that chasm is getting bigger, so we have to try and bridge it, and the only way to bridge it is bringing people in touch with each other so they can realise that not every Palestinian is a murderous terrorist and not every Israeli is a bloodsucker. The need to inject humanity into the relationships is paramount.”

Palestinians would find “an incredibly receptive” audience in Israel if they changed their discourse to frame their aspirations as a civil society alongside Israel, Finkel believes. At the same time, Israel should restrain its “messianic” expansion. “All these steps towards colonisation or the settlement enterprise are a cancer on Israeli society,” says Finkel. “They are really going to put a stake through the heart of the Jewish future in Israel if they don’t step back from it.

“But I am an optimist and I certainly believe we can get to a two-state solution,” he adds. “You’ve got to have the will in order to find the way.” •

The post Can the drift be stopped? appeared first on Inside Story.

But the tentacles of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute spread right across the Arab and Islamic world, and any efforts to resolve it, well-intentioned or otherwise, could have significant knock-on effects.

Now into the second half of his term, Trump has systematically shaken the props behind the “rules-based world order,” even though he has failed to find anything better to replace them with. In the Middle East, he has clearly decided to trust a new generation of players who seem set on remaking the rules.

Ideally, in his view, these players would be the Saudis plus other key Gulf states, who would then take on Iran and those Arab states willing to act as Iranian proxies in alliance with Russia. But he is oscillating between the hawkish scenarios promoted by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security adviser, John Bolton, on the one hand, and the more sober assessments of his generals and diplomats, on the other.

Most American presidents would avoid bouncing around like this, but Trump lacks thought-through plans of his own. His instinctive tool is “disruption”; he has no patience for history or theology. We may well be at the most critical phase of his attempt to sweep old paradigms off the table and see what can be picked up from the floor in the way of new “deals.”

By deliberately courting disorder, Trump is abandoning the logical thinking that might be expected of the leader of a superpower and allowing himself to be manipulated by a new figure in the Gulf, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, who has adapted the customary Saudi formula of an aggressive form of Sunni Islam backed by profligate oil funds.

MBS’s role is amplifying the difficulty of resolving the stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians. Rivalries across the Gulf go back thirteen centuries and still define the way the Sunni–Shia divide is perceived. Most outsiders have long seen the divide as something to stay well clear of, conscious that the tensions have largely been kept in check since the middle of the eighth century by leaving small theological differences to theologians.

Instead of working through issues patiently and cautiously, though, and at least paying lip service to international mechanisms, Trump wants to try it his way. In the process, the United States is being sucked into disputes its president neither comprehends nor has patience for.

The current confrontation in the Gulf is largely a result of Trump’s willingness to do Salman’s bidding, and secondarily Israel’s bidding, by attempting to reduce Iran’s role in the region and ditch the exactingly negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, rather than build on it. The JCPOA got in the way because it was working. Its other members — China, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and Britain — have been bypassed and even threatened with secondary sanctions for actions that are essentially legal under anyone’s law except Trump’s. The signal is clear: only Washington makes the international framework from now on.

Underneath this heap of disruption lies the compost pit that is the Israel–Palestine problem, with its huge overburden of UN and human rights resolutions. Trump has abandoned the traditional role of helping, or at least ostensibly helping, to unpick the issues between the parties, and has instead embarked on a course of serial disruption designed to replace UN resolutions and international law with disorder based on an impossible paradigm.

This week’s Bahrain meeting furthers that plan. In playing along with MBS’s vision of a Middle East in which Saudi Arabia is Trump’s deputy sheriff (or is it vice versa?), Trump has accepted another breathtaking leap of Salman’s logic. The same logic delivered an unwinnable war in Yemen, tried to hold a Lebanese prime minister to ransom and had a regime critic hacked to death in a backroom in Istanbul. On these performance parameters, Saudi Arabia’s chances of persuading scores of Arab League and Islamic states to accept Israel’s 1948 takeover of Palestine as a fait accompli are slim indeed.

The Bahrain plan is not only overwhelmed by the drama in the Gulf. In Jared Kushner’s hands, it also shows every sign of poor design and clumsy execution. Even if a brace of Arab states can be summoned to Bahrain to endorse a new economic “plan” for Palestine, little can be done unless Israel commits to lifting its blockade of Gaza and its stranglehold on the West Bank. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now so beholden to extremists that any hope of coopting him appears remote, even if some would find tempting the prospect of banishing the Palestinians to a series of Arab Bantustans and closing down their access to Jerusalem.

Middle-power countries like Australia have always argued that this dispute will only be resolved by a rules-based approach. Their interests lie in avoiding the nastier complications caused by disruptive tactics with no defined outcomes. Australia may be faced with difficult choices if Trump seeks support for hastening the dismantling of the JCPOA, or in endorsing the Bahrain game plan as a way of bypassing many decades of support for a two-state solution in Palestine. To join the disruption game is to put at risk structures that have largely served Australia’s interests well.

Scott Morrison’s ill-informed lurch towards the recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem last year was a foretaste of what life might be like if we rely on deals in the age of America First. Australia has maintained a policy of engaging with Iran, for example. It is perhaps ominous that Pompeo is currently in the Gulf pressing a range of countries to join a “global coalition” against Iran — “a coalition,” to use his words, “not only throughout the Gulf states but in Asia and in Europe.” This is a deal-making game Australia would be well advised to stay out of if it doesn’t want to find itself a victim of Pompeo and Bolton’s dark obsessions. •

The post American disruption, Saudi logic appeared first on Inside Story.

In 2012, I wrote that “US policy responses to recent events [in the Middle East] appear to be incoherent. There is, however, a much deeper problem underlying these specific failures: there is no clearly defined US national interest at stake.” At that time, the US administration was:

• debating how much support to give to a Sunni insurgency against Bashir Assad

• cautiously endorsing the overthrow of longstanding, and dictatorial, US ally Hosni Mubarak and his replacement by a democratically elected government

• continuing its support for the government of Nouri al-Maliki, who had demonstrated his credentials by defeating anti-American Sadrist militias

• pressuring the regime in Iran, seen as the primary adversary of the United States in the region

• uncritically supporting whatever policies the Israeli government chose to pursue.

Although Washington’s policy was criticised from a variety of perspectives, the predominant theme was that it was not doing enough, particularly in relation to Iran. Senator John McCain was among the strongest critics, rejecting any notion of engagement with the Iranian government.

Two years later, everything has changed, and nothing. The US administration is now:

• debating how much support to give to Assad against the Sunni insurgents, now dominated by the ISIS group

• quietly accepting the emergence of an even more brutal military dictatorship in Egypt

• engineering the replacement of Maliki by new leaders who can mobilise the support of the Sadrists, needed to fight ISIS

• effectively allied with Iran as the main supporter of the Iraqi government

• uncritically supporting whatever policies the Israeli government chooses to pursue.

And, as before, the criticism is primarily that the Obama administration is not doing enough. McCain is yet again calling for military intervention, this time in effective alliance with Assad and the Iranians. Others are suggesting that if troops had not been withdrawn from Iraq (despite the refusal of the Iraqi government to countenance any extension of the schedule agreed with George W. Bush) the United States would somehow have been better able to impose a government of its own choosing. And, of course, the marginal qualifications of Washington’s support for the Netanyahu government have been the subject of bitter condemnation.

The current policy failures continue a long history, stretching right back to the early postwar era, when the United States inherited the poisoned chalice of Anglo-French imperialism, reflected most notably in the secret Sykes–Picot agreement (partitioning the area into British and French spheres of influence), the Balfour declaration (promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine) and the McMahon–Hussein correspondence (promising the same land to the Arabs).

The United States had some apparent successes along the way: the CIA coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected nationalist Iranian prime minister; the Camp David agreements between Israel and Egypt; and the first Iraq war. But these only paved the way for greater disasters to follow: the overthrow of the US-installed Pahlavi regime by the Iranian ayatollahs, decades of failure on the Israel-Palestine issue and, most of all, the second Iraq war.

How could it be otherwise? A rich and militarily powerful country has taken it upon itself to govern the affairs of millions of people on the other side of the planet, of whom it knows nothing. Its emissaries routinely elevate particular individuals, ethnic groups, religious sects and political parties as favourites, then just as quickly dump them in favour of new friends. Its tools vary randomly from overwhelming force to plaintive exhortation, with no clear or consistent rationale.

Unsurprisingly, the United States has no genuine friends in the region. The one constant beneficiary of US support, the Israeli government, correctly views the US state with contempt, recognising that Israel’s political powerbase within American domestic politics means that it need take no account of US national interests or of any attempt by Washington to maintain its long-discredited position as an “honest broker” in the dispute with the Palestinians.

Along with support for Israel, the only constant element in the US approach to the Middle East is a concern to maintain control over the flow of oil (even though the United States is effectively self-sufficient and European oil users are far more concerned about Russia). Both of these seem perfectly calculated to arouse the hostility and suspicion of the vast majority of people in the region.

The horrors now being perpetrated by ISIS on ground prepared by the 2003 invasion of Iraq are such that it is, effectively, impossible for the United States to stand by and do nothing. But its current actions are already producing the de facto partition of Iraq widely advocated a decade ago. A coherent strategy for intervention in Syria is as far off as ever, as is any constructive contribution to the Israel–Palestine dispute.

The best policy option for the Obama administration in the short term would be to stabilise the front lines in Iraq in a way that confines ISIS to Sunni strongholds. Assistance to the less extreme components of the Syrian resistance might also be tried, though this is unlikely to succeed for the reasons set out by Juan Cole.

The ideal follow-up would be an announcement that, from now on, the people of the Middle East would be left to sort out their problems for themselves. In particular, it would be useful to state that the United States has no strategic concern with Middle Eastern oil, and that energy policy is a matter for individual countries to determine according to their own priorities.

Given domestic political constraints, it would be necessary to maintain a commitment to defend Israel against any armed attack. But, as a lame-duck president, Obama could do a great service by honestly admitting that the United States has no capacity to promote a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine. Of course, it would be necessary for his successor to repudiate this admission. But once the truth was stated, it would be impossible to unsay.

In Australia, rather than pretending that we have any genuine concerns of our own in the Middle East, we ought to admit that the only question at issue is whether it makes sense to go to war whenever Washington calls us, and if so, how much we need to spend on this. There are good arguments on both sides, but the need to pretend to be something more than a client state means that they are never made openly.

The trillions of dollars and thousands of lives the United States and its allies, including Australia, have spent trying to direct events in the Middle East have produced nothing but bloodshed and chaos. Rather than waiting for today’s allies to become, yet again, tomorrow’s enemies, it’s time to let the people of the region make what they can of it, with whatever assistance the usual forms of foreign aid may be able to provide. •

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By any conventional measure, Hamas should now be more than ready to agree to a ceasefire in its bitter war with Israel. Since the bombardments started on 8 July 2014, Israel has expanded its airstrikes on targets concentrated in heavily populated areas, leading inevitably to a gradual increase in casualties, the vast majority of them civilians. The damage to infrastructure in an already weak economy adds to the misery.

Hamas has continued its rocket attacks on Israel. Israel is intent on destroying Hamas’s launchers and munitions stores as well as its “infiltration tunnels.” It has the means to do this, given time; its military capacity is huge, it is the most powerful state in the Middle East, and it enjoys both close cooperation with the United States and technical reliance on its advanced weapons and radar systems.

Hamas has little external support, at least at state level. It is adamantly opposed by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt; Syria and Iran have also withdrawn much support because of Hamas’s backing of Islamist movements. Qatar may remain an ally, but a more cautious one.

All this makes for a reasonable assumption that Hamas must be getting desperate and will shortly sue for peace, perhaps on terms falling far short of its aims. There may well be a ceasefire in the coming days, but the assumption nonetheless has two deep flaws. These must be grasped if any search for a tolerably stable peace is to be grounded in reality.

Israel’s troubles

The first is that Hamas, though facing great problems in Gaza, does not appear to be losing support among the population as a whole. There, Israel and of course the United States are being blamed for the destruction. There is also an upsurge in public support for Hamas across the region, enhanced by coverage of the war on Al Jazeera and other TV channels and the many social-media outlets. These show the human suffering and destruction in Gaza at a much starker level than the largely self-censoring Western media.

The second is that aspects of the conflict are very troubling to Binyamin Netanyahu’s government in ways that are just becoming apparent. Israel’s great projection of power, for example, has not stopped rockets from being fired; one even evaded the missile-screen to land in the Yehud suburb of Tel Aviv close to Ben Gurion airport. The airport was then closed on safety grounds to some of the major carriers (including Delta, US Airways, Lufthansa, Alitalia and Air France). The government immediately opened Uvda airport, north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat, to more traffic.

Ben Gurion airport may reopen to many foreign carriers, but the psychological impact of even a short closure is substantial, especially because many Israelis look much more to their contact with the world beyond the Middle East rather than the region in which they actually live.

The airport closure, as well as affecting national morale, has also damaged Israel’s tourist industry. This is one of the country’s main foreign-exchange earners, and losses are already estimated at $200 million. Here is a powerful symbolism: an impoverished, densely populated and hugely constrained community with hardly any external support was able to put together crude weapons that can affect the economics and psychology of a hugely more powerful country convinced that it can ensure its own security.

The only winners

Another particular worry for Israel is Hamas’s use of the infiltration tunnels it has built. The early phase of Israel’s direct military intervention has been a real shock to the army, for it has revealed a network of tunnels of astonishing complexity – far more wide-ranging than expected. In addition, the fact that Hamas paramilitaries could use a tunnel to penetrate Israeli territory at the height of the war is profoundly disturbing for Israel’s military and government.

Their concern is deepened by the level of casualties being inflicted as the army tries to find and destroy the tunnels. Much of the impact has been on the elite Golani brigade, one of Israel’s five regular army brigades, whose role dates from February 1948 and the war of independence. On a single day, 20 July, thirteen members of the Golani were killed, including a battalion deputy commander; the brigade’s commanding officer, Colonel Ghassan Alian, was wounded.

By late on 23 July, Israeli forces had identified twenty-eight tunnels with sixty-eight entry points, six of which had been demolished. But there were reported to be far more, and it will not be hard for Hamas paramilitaries to utilise many of them in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. If demolition is the only option to prevent further attacks, it also means the risk of continued occupation and more casualties.

Israel is now facing considerable pressure even as it intensifies the war. In a hard military sense this is not surprising: a force with overwhelming firepower facing entrenched urban paramilitaries will use that firepower rather than expose its soldiers. The result is almost certain to mean more civilian deaths and injuries, and greater opprobrium.

Israel is also turning its attention to Hamas supporters elsewhere. That includes destroying their houses on the West Bank, enhancing its existing program of demolitions. The result is more likely to increase than reduce backing for Hamas and hatred of Israel, even among Palestinians who would not normally be sympathetic to the movement.

Binyamin Netanyahu is now facing an unforeseen dilemma. He has both raised expectations of an end to the rockets and insisted that the tunnels must be destroyed; yet it’s almost certain that his armed forces cannot achieve this without recourse to a long-term occupation of Gaza. Such a move, however, would increase casualties on both sides and invite further condemnation.

In this situation, Israel may well accept something short of its own aims. John Kerry may therefore be in a stronger position than supposed. That makes a ceasefire possible within the next week. But even if it is, the greatest beneficiaries of the conflict will be the extreme Islamist movements in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. A continuation of the war would serve these movements’ interests even more. Israel’s actions, as so often, are aiding its worst enemies. •

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By now, one thing is obvious: there is no single story of Israel–Palestine. In the broad sense, what we have are two competing narratives: Israeli and Palestinian. There is the War of Independence and there is the Nakba – the Catastrophe – and there is all that unfolds from each of these radically different perspectives. The conflict at the core of the creation of a Jewish state in what was Palestine elicits powerful, personal, often heartbreaking responses among Jews as well as Palestinians, whether they live in the region or not.

In 2006, Antony Loewenstein published My Israel Question, his open repudiation of Israel as an Australian Jew. As an American-born Jew with family links to the pioneering Zionists whose history I was researching, I had come to agree with Loewenstein’s position, and penned a long review of his book during Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in that same year. For non-Jews, especially those who have struggled to overcome their prejudices in the light of the Holocaust, these stories can seem impenetrable. What is at issue? Israel is a modern miracle, the Middle East’s only democracy, Western civilisation’s bulwark against Islamic extremism. What’s to argue? they will ask.

Inside Israel, the spectrum of opinion has been wider, the controversies more nuanced. There are human rights groups like B’Tselem, Machsom Watch and Breaking the Silence; and there are the West Bank settlers, supported by the government and, brutally, by its army, yet blatantly contravening international law (the Abbott government’s position notwithstanding). But as Israel’s existential predicament becomes ever more apparent, as its internal contradictions become sharper, Israelis have retreated into what its critics have dubbed “the bubble,” a technocratic, hedonistic, consumerist sanctuary where Palestinians are unseen and attitudes have hardened.

Ari Shavit is such a critic, if not an unsympathetic one. A leading public intellectual, he has been a civil rights activist and is a regular contributor to Haaretz, Israel’s left-of-centre newspaper. My Promised Land is a remarkable book, one of the best to come out of Israel, up there with Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete, Susan Nathan’s The Other Side of Israel, and the trenchant works of Jeff Halper or Ilan Pappé. Unflinching in its revelations, highly readable, it has been warmly received in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, barometers of shifting American liberal opinion. Like Loewenstein’s book, it is a memoir that breaches the parameters of the genre with a patient, detailed exposition of Israel’s history. It remains idiosyncratic, of course, and Shavit has omitted whole swathes of opposing interpretation, which I will come back to later.

Shavit begins by identifying intimidation and occupation as the two key factors that inform Israeli policy and determine the kind of state Israel has become. In May 1948, by the very act of unilaterally declaring itself a state, it became a colonial power, the Catastrophe for the displaced Palestinians and an affront to the surrounding Arab nations. Its enemies vowed to “push into the sea” this mere sliver of land on the shore of the Mediterranean. Tempered by spells of truncated negotiation, Israel managed to maintain a fragile peace in what might otherwise be characterised as an ongoing state of war. Victorious in the Six-Day War of 1967, when Shavit was a boy of nine, Israel occupied yet more Arab land. Retaining the occupied territories was initially justified as a way of securing peace but, as Shavit concedes, it has only intensified the sense of intimidation: “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear.” It might have been exacerbated by years of Israeli intransigence, but the Israeli feeling of being intimidated cannot be denied. It is buried deep in the Israeli psyche and that of many Jews in the Diaspora.

ZIONISM began as a reaction to nineteenth-century European anti-Semitism and the parlous condition of the Jews in tsarist Russia. It had significant support among English evangelical Christians, men like Lloyd George who saw Hebrew irredentism in Palestine as both a just resolution of Jewish statelessness and a means of establishing a British foothold in the Levant (a similar, though in many ways strikingly different, championship to that of today’s American Christian Zionists). In April 1897, four months before the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Ari Shavit’s great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, participated in a fact-finding tour of Palestine charged with reporting to the Congress. A prominent London solicitor and pillar of the Anglo-Jewish community, the fervently Zionist Bentwich was blind to the pastoral runs, the tenant farms, the mills, the fields, the olive groves and villages dotted through the land. Instead, he saw backwardness and emptiness. When he emigrated to Palestine years later, he joined in what had already become a dedicated colonial project.

By 1920 that project was in full swing. With the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Palestine was now ruled by Britain, mandated to provide the Jewish people with “a national home,” though not to the “detriment” of the existing inhabitants. American Zionists bought a large swathe of land in the lower Galilee known as the Je’ezreel Valley, and there the Gdud HaAvoda, or Labour Brigade, a roving collective of Jewish pioneers, began replacing local farmers. The Gdud drained the swamplands, built the roads connecting the Galilee with the coast, and set up their kibbutz, Ein Harod, at the base of Mount Gilboa. Ein Harod represented the socialist Zionism of the Third Aliyah – in Shavit’s reckoning, the true “genesis of the Zionist adventure.” But British complicity in wholesale Jewish immigration and the consequent removal of Arab tenant farmers from their holdings provoked riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929. As a result of the last incident, the British introduced quotas for Jewish immigrants, at the very moment when the threat to European Jews was deepening and countries like Britain, Australia and Canada were closing their doors.

Patiently, courageously, Shavit tells his story. It is not a pleasant one. Even in the 1930s, when the British Mandate economy was finding its feet, with the citrus groves of Rehovot and Petah Tikvah carving out an English market for their “Jaffa” oranges, tensions between the colonists and the Palestinians sharpened. A reprise of the 1920s riots, but far bloodier and more widespread, segued into an outright revolt that lasted three years, from 1936 to 1939, on the brink of the second world war. The Arab Mufti aligned himself with Hitler, and as Rommel achieved his early successes in North Africa it looked for one truly frightening moment as if Palestinian Jews would share the fate of Jews in Europe.

It was that fate, the industrialised murder of six million Jews, that clinched it for the Zionists. On the one hand was a determination that such a calamity would never be repeated, that the Jews would have a refuge; on the other was the guilt of the entire Western world. It is no little irony that the Holocaust made the state of Israel possible. After the British washed their hands of Palestine (and its seemingly irreconcilable internecine conflict, largely of their own making) the member states of the new United Nations proposed a partition. The Zionists were content with almost half the loaf, but the Arabs were appalled that with three-quarters of Palestine’s population they were being asked to forfeit so much of it. A civil war erupted. In the following year the Zionists unilaterally declared the independent state of Israel and the United Nations voted its support. The surrounding Arab states came to the aid of the Palestinians but failed in their mission in the face of Israeli resolve. The driving belief among the Zionists was that, while Palestinians could find a home in neighbouring Arab countries, the Holocaust was undeniable proof that, when push came to shove, Jews had nowhere else to go.

NINETEEN FORTY-EIGHT: Israel’s War of Independence; Palestine’s Nakba. These are the opening chapters of the two narratives that have shaped the region’s history. Shavit negotiates between them fearlessly and fairly. For a long time Western understanding held that Israel lost its innocence with the occupation, but historians with access to the archives have knocked that notion on the head. There was no innocence in 1948. Though we don’t like the term applied to a country like Israel, ethnic cleansing was there at its inception. Shavit doesn’t deny this. To illustrate what happened, he focuses on the destruction of the Palestinian city of Lydda, a modernised city of 19,000 that enjoyed the boom of the 1930s, and the forced dispersal of its inhabitants. But he doesn’t claim that Lydda was unique, a single unfortunate incident. The Jewish National Fund, which I contributed to as a teenager, helped plant the pine forests that cover what remains of hundreds of obliterated Palestinian villages. As it is in so many settler societies, the landscape of modern Israel is a palimpsest, with its barely suppressed layers of pain and bitterness.

But having acknowledged this, what does Shavit make of it? Or of the occupation, approaching its forty-seventh year? The reason his book has been so well received in quarters where you’d expect these unpleasant facts to be denied, and excoriated in those you’d expect to applaud his acknowledgement of them, is that Shavit believes they were necessary. It was necessary for Jewry to settle in Palestine because of Russia’s Jewish Pale and its pogroms, and because of the strident anti-Semitism gathering force in Europe. It was necessary to remove Arab peasants from their holdings to make way for the kibbutzim. It was necessary to discriminate against Arabs when the very existence of Jews was at stake. It was necessary to refuse to negotiate with “terrorists.” It was necessary to bomb Iraqi and Syrian nuclear reactors, as it’s been necessary to nip Iran’s nuclear capacity in the bud, if not by outright bombing then by assassinating its nuclear scientists. Only the illegal West Bank settlements may have been a mistake, but now that they exist they are just another fait accompli, another “fact on the ground” that cannot be undone. Threaded throughout Shavit’s narrative is his own blind acceptance that all along the way Zionist intransigence was necessary. There was no choice and, however sadly, it must ever be so:

The Jewish state does not resemble any other nation. What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge. The adrenaline rush of living dangerously, living to the extreme.

The trouble with all this is that it’s far from the whole story. Shavit omits the Zionism that, right from the start, was eager to find a homeland in Palestine but wary of establishing a Jewish state. He ignores those who gave voice to the necessity of a binational state, and were jailed for their views. Theirs was the road not taken, but it’s salient to realise that there was such a road. The push for a specifically Jewish state came from Theodor Herzl and the political Zionism that was essentially his creation. It was opposed by a Zionist thinker we rarely hear of these days: Ahad Ha’am, or Asher Ginsberg, whose cultural Zionism had a significant following in Zionism’s early years.

Shavit’s selectivity is particularly marked in his chapter on the Gdud HaAvoda’s work in the Jez’reel Valley and its kibbutz Ein Harod. I know about this because of my research into the life of a great-aunt who was a member of the Gdud, and Ein Harod was only part of its story. The Gdud split into factions, only one of which was involved in the settlement at Ein Harod. The rest preferred to proceed as a roving collective, and after leaving the valley they took what jobs they could get, mining potash by the Dead Sea, lending a hand in building Tel Aviv. They took a stand against the exclusion of Arab workers in the Histadrut, Labour Zionism’s Jewish trade union, and were crushed for their socialist views and Arab sympathies. A group of them became communists and were jailed by the British for supporting the Arab riot of 1929. The jurist Judah Magnes spoke out strongly for a binational state, as did the philosopher Martin Buber, but they too were sidelined.

It’s important, if tragic enough, to recognise that these strands of Zionism existed. And it’s arguable that had that road been taken, the conflict Shavit claims can only be resolved by further war might have been dealt with differently. Despite that alternative, however, critics like me are invariably reminded that Israel, the Jewish state, has been in existence for nearly seven decades, and is an undeniable “fact on the ground.” But this has always been political Zionism’s way, right back to the 1890s: bit by bit, establishing these “facts on the ground.” It is the way today with the West Bank settlements, which Ariel Sharon encouraged by offering cut-rate mortgages to prospective buyers when he was demoted to housing minister after the disgrace of Sabra and Shatila. The combined effect of the settlements, with populations nudging half a million, and of Sharon’s “security wall,” which sliced off even more bits of occupied Palestinian land, is to render any future Palestinian state unviable, even as it’s finally been accepted in principle and promoted as a means to peace by Israel and the Western powers. “Israel will never be the ideal nation it set out to be,” Shavit writes, “but what has evolved in this land is not to be dismissed.”

The supremest irony is that it looks as though the single-state proponents have won the day after all. Israel, along with the occupied territories, or Judea and Samaria, or Greater Israel, as the right wing is disposed to call it, or Israel–Palestine as it is in more leftist parlance, does in fact comprise one state. Only it’s an apartheid one. Moreover, flanked by unstable regimes in danger of succumbing to Islamic extremism, its fate is uncertain, to say the least. Instead of contemplating giving Palestinians and Jews equal rights within a single political entity, Shavit would have Israel revert to the pioneering zeal of old – the macho militarism that put backbone in the Zionist struggle and made of its dream the nation it is today – and fight to the death for it. For what could be the result if one way or another Israel were overrun, or if Israel–Palestine were no longer essentially Jewish?

The answer is to be found in Shavit’s introduction. It is his profoundest belief, shared by many, that were it not for Israel’s existence, Jewishness as we have known it was destined to fade away. In a sense, what kept it going was the ghetto, the very ghetto we sought to escape. In reality, though, most Jews have found their freedom in English-speaking countries like Shavit’s great-grandfather’s, and of course here and in America. But Shavit seems to fear assimilation more than he does war, and only in the Jewish state has the erosion been halted. But if that is its raison d’être, the question to ask is whether the price is too high. Is assimilation really the danger, the lamentable alternative Shavit makes out?

The truth is there has never been a single Jewishness. Rather than our disappearing into a Jewishless space, think how we have made that space Jewish, with our Yiddishisms, our humour, our talents and cuisine, and how such a culture could enrich rather than deny the Palestinian one, and vice versa. Even WASPS eat bagels now, and Jews love hummus. Yes, we’ve had a tragic history; but bending may well be our most humane, our bravest option. Far, far better than defending another ghetto, and blowing up the Middle East in the bargain. •

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THESE days, any Israeli story can also be an Australian one. The case of Ben Zygier, the Australian Jew who migrated to Israel, took out Israeli citizenship and ended up working for Mossad, the Jewish state’s notorious overseas intelligence unit, puts this in high relief. Despite the fact that fighting in Syria is illegal for Muslim Australian citizens, Jewish Australians can volunteer with impunity for service in the Israel Defence Forces.

Yet there’s a deep reluctance to address such anomalies, for reasons that aren’t too hard to find. In the decades after the second world war, Australia had the highest per capita concentration of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. The Holocaust legitimised Zionism as had no other event in Jewish history, giving tragic credence to Herzl’s warning fifty years earlier about the lethal results of European anti-Semitism. In that light, to criticise Israeli policies or even to question the wisdom of opting for a Jewish-dominated state in the Middle East is tantamount to heresy in the mainstream Australian Jewish community. While claiming that all Jews ever wanted was to have a nation like any other, with its own respected legitimacy and undisputed territory, Israel and its supporters maintain that the Jewish state is special, that it is not bound by the laws that hold for other countries, and they defend this position with a combination of denial, indifference and that specifically Jewish sophistic argumentation that has its origins in the Talmudic tradition of pilpul.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the ongoing refusal to acknowledge that the rights of the Palestinian people – the majority in British Mandate Palestine – have been ruthlessly and cunningly abrogated. After the opening of archives on the 1948 war of independence, or what Palestinians remember as the Nakba, Israeli “New Historians” such as Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev and Benny Morris drew on the record to revise the official history. Yet almost as soon as the archives were opened they were closed again. Pappé, effectively in exile now at a British university, has been ostracised for his work on the expulsion of Palestinians, including those who were forced from their homes but were able to stay within the 1948 borders. Segev has moved further towards a binational narrative. Of the three, only Benny Morris has recanted, accepting that Jewish forces did commit atrocities but claiming they were justified.

It is perhaps in Israeli fiction that the existential complexities of the legacy of 1948 have been most sensitively dealt with. A caveat here: I can no more keep on top of the fiction than absorb the wealth of historical material. But there aren’t many recent novels I’ve come across (though I confess to a reliance on books written in English or translated) that haven’t exhibited concern for the Palestinians.

A case in point is Edeet Ravel’s 2003 Ten Thousand Lovers, the first in a trilogy that was completed in 2005. Born and raised on a kibbutz in the Galilee, Ravel divides her time between Israel and Canada, and writes in English from a Canadian perspective.

Lily, the narrator of Ten Thousand Lovers, is also half-Canadian, a student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who hitchhikes on weekends to Tel Aviv. She’s picked up by Ami, a well-paid ex-actor who is immediately upfront about his job as an interrogator of war prisoners. Lily makes clear her uneasiness:

We should try a little harder to make peace. We should withdraw unilaterally from the territories for a start. It’s the least we can do. A Palestinian state would solve everything. It’s only fair.

As they get closer Ami reveals to Lily that it isn’t the army he belongs to but Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, though the work has become increasingly difficult for him. “This is what we’ve decided,” he says, trying to justify it. “We’ve decided torture is OK. Detention is OK, war justifies everything. We’re doing this to survive, to avoid repeating our history.” Yet when he makes a crucial decision to reject that life, it’s a Palestinian friend who will play an important role in the novel’s resolution.

The most celebrated recent Israeli novel – and possibly the most celebrated of all time – is David Grossman’s Woman Flees Tidings, published in 2008 and published in English as To the End of the Land. Near the novel’s beginning, after a prologue set in the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel won what we call the occupied territories, the heroine, Ora, takes a taxi ride. It is now July 2000, the time of the Second Intifada, and the Israel Defence Forces are mobilising. Ora is accompanying her soldier son to the Gilboa region, where the forces are meeting. Their Palestinian taxi driver Sami, who has driven for the family for decades and is almost, in the way of these things, considered part of it, came without question when Ora called, but is quieter than usual. Fixated on what she feels is the certain loss of her son, Ora overlooks how Sami might feel about this journey. Israel is a tiny country for such overwhelming considerations, and a taxi ride from Tel Aviv to Gilboa is no great distance. But the road, a convoy now, is crowded, and no one, not even Ora, can fathom where it might actually lead.

Both these novels have Israeli Palestinian characters who are central to their themes yet remain somehow peripheral. Perhaps there’s a limit to how much Israeli Jews, even the most sympathetic, can afford to arrogate to themselves the sensibility of the “other.” It’s not that they may not comprehend it, though that is too often the case, but writers can be reluctant, even when empathy does exist, to usurp that sensibility for their own aesthetic purposes. Whatever the limitations, though, these fictions were an advance on much of what preceded them.

WE MIGHT expect that the latest fiction would move forward from that position. If we’re to read Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid for signs of this, though, we can only be disappointed. There are hardly any sympathetically portrayed Palestinians in this book. In fact, there are few sympathetically portrayed characters full stop, although their stories, perhaps for that very reason, do elicit compassion. They are narrated by each of the three protagonists: Lea, Yael and Avishag, born in 1983 – adolescents when we meet them, women in their twenties at the novel’s close. The subject of their stories is the rite of passage they share with all Israeli Jews, male and female, aside from the orthodox, after they graduate from secondary school. That is to say, their stints in the army.

It’s noteworthy too that the women come from Mizrahi or Sephardic backgrounds, the children of Jewish immigrants hailing from Middle Eastern countries, one step above Israeli Palestinians in the peculiar Israeli pecking order that has had the European Ashkenazim as its aristocracy. Only Lea, with a German-Jewish parent and “European looks,” has access to this privilege, pitifully played out on the high school playground where other girls clamber round her for acceptance. But Lea’s claims are compromised by her other, Moroccan parent, and consignment to this dusty ghetto-like village, dangerously close to the Lebanese border and peopled for the most part by Mizrahim and struggling single mothers. “A whole town of crazy bitches,” a teenage boy casually, cruelly, remarks. Avishag’s family has been shattered by the suicide of her older brother Dan. Yael, whose first-person voice opens the novel, has been in love with Dan, yet so much of the tragedy is buried under that special brand of toughness Israelis have cultivated since the earliest pioneer days and which, by the 2000s, has spread to every corner of society.

Everything is blanketed by the ubiquitous presence of war. Both Lea’s and Yael’s mothers work for companies making machine parts that one way or another end up in planes. Soon enough the girls are in boot camp, suffering the standard, sanctioned humiliations. Then they are given postings in the army proper.

For Yael it’s on Route 433, close to a Palestinian village, where she is a weapons instructor. Discovering that boys from the village have managed to steal her helmet, a colleague observes, “These boys are like rats… they’d steal the entire base if they could.” Next, the boys take the “closed military area” signs off the base fence, and then the bullets from target practice. Then they are shot at.

Apart from the ramped-up tensions with Israeli Palestinians, Israeli society has been increasingly separated from West Bank Palestinians ever since the building of the wall. Lea is sent to the military police, guarding the Hebron checkpoint, in a year when Israel “closed the sky” for other foreign workers and needed Palestinians for construction work again. “We needed them, but we were also a little afraid they’d kill us, or even worse, stay forever. These were both things the Palestinians were sometimes into doing. That’s why I existed.”

In both these instances, the girls’ interaction with Palestinians takes place through a military barricade; for neither of them is it possible, as it is in previous Israeli novels, to begin to know Palestinians as people. Palestinians, separated by the roads and the wall, are now entirely “other.” In Avishag’s case, down at the Egyptian border, Sudanese refugees appear as mere pixels on her green computer screen.

Shani Boianjiu was born in Jerusalem in 1987 and is the youngest-ever recipient of the American National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. That means she’s younger than her characters, though Yael, for one, appears to be at least partly autobiographical. As well as this first novel, released in the United States last September, she has published stories in the New Yorker and other US literary journals, making her something of a wunderkind, especially when the fact that she is writing in English rather than her native Hebrew is taken into account.

The reviews of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid have been mixed, the book frequently panned for the very reasons I like it. Its terse, colloquial prose, the irony, its shifting tenses and points of view all lend the novel a rhythm that overcomes the anomie to which her characters seem condemned. That many parts of the narrative betray their origins as stories might bother some but poses no problem for me. Yet I admit that my interest in this novel has as much to do with how it demonstrates what has happened to Israel over the years, especially since 1977 when Likud first came to power, as it does with my passion for literature.

SO WHAT has been happening? Diana Pinto’s Israel Has Moved charts these developments from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider. She describes herself as an intellectual historian and policy analyst, and comes across as a kind of Jewish-intellectual Eurocrat. Based in Paris, she’s been associated with London’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research and has spent many years studying the place of Jews in post–cold war Europe. Most pertinently for us, she relates how she told an Israeli friend that “I had never personally considered Zionism to be a valid life choice for me, that I criticised Israeli politics, but at the same time I could not conceive of a world without Israel.”

Pinto argues forcefully that Israel is thumbing its nose at its European benefactors and at this juncture is even prepared to ignore the United States. The reasons are manifold, but largely derive from the creeping Jewish settlement of Palestinian land since 1967, the changing demographics within the Jewish population, and the current engagement with the non-European world through Israel’s new emphasis on consumerism and developing and marketing its cybertechnology. In other words, like the rest of us, Israel is looking towards Asia, and especially China.

But Pinto delineates a paradox. As Israel looks ever outward, away from its European origins and the boiling Middle East tensions, its gaze is inward in a way it has never been before. Again, both the cause and expression of this – Israel’s “autism,” as Pinto calls it – are complex. The old Ashkenazi attachment to the land, manifest symbolically and materially in the kibbutz and its agricultural base, has all but disappeared, while the strident if often cynical militarism born from the need to protect the land has grown exponentially in size and power.

When the children and grandchildren of the generals who fought in Israel’s many wars are conscripted for their mandatory two years’ service they are not to be found on the frontline posts where Boianjiu’s characters serve, but in the elite branches of military command and civilian intelligence where Ben Zygier sought to make a name for himself. But, as Pinto tells it, Israel isn’t all that interested anymore in Diaspora Jews making our aliyahs. Our role is to remain where we are in order to better defend her, though Israel is making it harder than ever to do so, and many, like me, have given up pretending.

Yet this fascinating group of essays gripped me throughout. Pinto is skilled at plucking out details of everyday Israeli life and highlighting their significance – noting, for instance, the efflorescence of intricately decorated skullcaps (kippot) on more and more male Jewish heads, even those of secular Jews, or walking the streets of the Muslim quarter of old Jerusalem and seeing “young ultraorthodox women with their strollers coming out of houses that seem to contain no visible sign of previous Jewish life.” She writes of the roads that separate Jews from Palestinians, among them Route 433, where Boianjiu’s Lea is stationed, the route that “incarnates perfectly the schizophrenia of Israel’s history.”

Pinto’s text is crowded with intriguing symbols – the menorah, the Hill of Evil Counsel, the bubble, the tent. And if in one sense they are telling, and in another their very abundance can unmoor their separate meanings, the argument is clear. The Oslo Accords are dead; the “two-state solution” is merely the rhetoric of Western politicians. Israel is going its own way, global in its economic orientation while ever more insular in its politics, with the Palestinians ever more invisible in this evolving outlook.

Israel Has Moved is depressing and oddly futuristic in its outlook. “Israel’s old agronomy,” Pinto writes,

the one of much-heralded orange and avocado miracles, sang the praises of an ever deeper rooting in the nation’s soil, whereas the military values of the young state were all based on the notion of defendable terrestrial borders. The new technology instead is all about mobility and flexibility, with little, if any, anchoring in any soil or with any clear national identity. Can this change hearken back to the Middle Ages when the Jews, before their emancipation, incarnated these same values in the financial and commercial realm?

With the proliferating start-ups having global transnationals like Google as their clients, Pinto asks, “Does this strategic choice echo in its own way the old Jewish tradition of dialoguing with kings rather than their people?”

If this, indeed, is the future, it threatens to be as scary as the past. But the fact remains that the old agrarian Zionist solution has borne its own crop of bitter fruit. •

The post Israel’s shifting moorings appeared first on Inside Story.

GÜNTER Grass has done it again: he’s put himself on the front page and at the head of the evening news bulletin by styling himself as the lone voice defending the truth and speaking out against an injustice.

On 4 April, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Italy’s La Repubblica and Spain’s El País published a poem in which Grass articulated his concerns about Israel’s arsenal of atomic weapons and criticised Germany for selling it a submarine capable of firing missiles armed with nuclear warheads. For more than a week, the poem, or rather the outrage it triggered, dominated the German print and electronic media. Never before in the history of the Federal Republic had a work of poetry caused such a storm.

Most of the response in editorials and from politicians, fellow writers and other public intellectuals was damning. Outside Germany, the reaction was overwhelmingly unfavourable, ranging from irritation to outrage. The Israeli government went so far as to blacklist Grass and ban him from entering the country. Only the government in Tehran, predictably enough, was delighted by his intervention: “I read your literary work of human and historical responsibility,” deputy culture minister Javad Shamaqdari was quoted as telling Grass in a letter, “and it warns beautifully.”

Ordinary mortals who want to voice their concern, indignation or outrage resort to writing to the letters pages of their local paper or to calling talkback radio. They might share their views on blogs, via Twitter or on Facebook. Those more confident of their standing might issue a press release. The eighty-four-year-old author of The Tin Drum and other highly regarded novels, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, poet, sculptor and graphic artist, a man often portrayed as “the conscience of the German nation” – who is also (and this is important for understanding the response to his words) a former member of the Waffen-SS – penned his thoughts in the form of a prose poem, “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be Said”) . He would have known that whatever German broadsheet he approached, the poem was going to be printed in full, appear on the front page, and capture Germany’s full attention.

While the text’s content has been controversial, there has been no dispute over its merits as a poem. “A literary mortal sin,” prominent songwriter Wolf Biermann found. A professor of aesthetics, Bazon Brock, believed Grass’s scribbles gave poetry a bad name. Fellow Nobel laureate Herta Müller called Grass a megalomaniac for sending his text to three newspapers in different countries, and said it contained “not a single literary sentence”. Wordy, clumsy and overly didactic, “What Must Be Said” would have to rate among the worst of Grass’s poems. Reminiscent of the didactic poetry of Bertolt Brecht, but without the latter’s rhythm and economy, it is little more than an unedited stream of consciousness. Obviously the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a highly regarded liberal broadsheet published in Munich that has one of Germany’s best arts sections, hadn’t made the decision to publish on the basis of its merits as a work of art.

In the poem, Grass takes issue with the delivery of a German-built submarine to Israel. He objects to the arms deal because the submarine is capable of carrying nuclear missiles which could be used to attack Iran and “wipe out the Iranian people.” He criticises what he regards as the West’s hypocrisy: insisting that Iran not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, while condoning Israel’s nuclear capability, which, Grass claims, “jeopardises an already precarious global peace.”

Grass devotes much of the poem to pondering his failure to speak out earlier. He says that a German who criticises Israel is likely to be punished, not least by being labelled an anti-Semite. But, in what reads like an act of heroism, he has decided to “break his silence” because the matter is urgent and because “we, who as Germans are already sufficiently encumbered, / could become accessories to a crime / that is predictable, which means that our complicity / could not be erased / by any of the usual excuses.”

Grass has been taken to task, rightly, on several accounts. He misrepresents the situation in the Middle East. The Israeli government has indeed considered a pre-emptive strike against Iran to foil that country’s nuclear program. These plans have been hotly debated in Israel itself, and have engendered critical responses from Israel’s allies. “What must be said,” the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev noted in Tel Aviv’s liberal Haaretz newspaper, “did not have to be said because it has already been said by many others, in Israel as well.” Such a strike would almost certainly target Iran’s nuclear facilities rather than its people. And the rationale for an Israeli attack would be the declared intention of the Iranian leadership to wipe out the people of Israel – something Iran could conceivably do quite easily once it has built an atomic bomb.

Grass also suggests that it is impossible to criticise Israel in Germany. If by “Israel” he means the Israeli government, then such a claim is patently wrong. German politicians and intellectuals have long criticised Israel for its policies in the Occupied Territories, in particular. In February last year, Angela Merkel called Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu to remonstrate with him on account of Israel’s dilatory approach in its negotiations with the Palestinians. In December, Germany, together with three other members of the UN Security Council – Portugal, France and Britain – condemned Israel’s settlement policy. After a visit to Hebron only last month, the leader of the Social Democrats, Sigmar Gabriel, opined on Facebook: “This is an apartheid regime which cannot be justified by any means.” Gabriel was roundly criticised for this comparison and eventually apologised, but his comment nevertheless is evidence that Grass’s insinuation of a taboo against such criticism was not justified. Incidentally, Gabriel has been one of only a handful of prominent German politicians who has stood by Grass in the current controversy.

GABRIEL’s intervention may have been prompted by loyalty as much as by sympathy for the sentiments expressed in the poem. Grass has long been associated with the moderate left and has often campaigned for the Social Democrats. As a prominent public intellectual of the left, he is intensely disliked by many on the right. The poem presented his political opponents with a golden opportunity to remind the public of Grass’s achilles heel.

In 2006, Grass published his memoirs, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (published in English as Peeling the Onion). A few weeks before the book’s eagerly awaited release, he gave an interview in which he revealed that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the elite military units that were formally the armed wing of the Nazi Party and which existed alongside the regular army. While the Waffen-SS was not in charge of concentration camps, some of its units were responsible for war crimes; after the war, the SS as a whole was declared a criminal organisation.

The interview may well have been designed to raise the public’s anticipation ahead of the memoir’s publication. But it set off a discussion about Grass’s war record which also ensured that the 479-page memoir is known mainly for an episode that Grass explores in a little more than a page.

The mere fact that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS should have mattered little. He was born in 1927, and drafted for the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old. He did not join the Waffen-SS as a volunteer (although he had volunteered to join the regular army as a fifteen-year-old). He was not involved in any war crimes.

In Peeling the Onion, he doesn’t try to reinvent himself as a seventeen-year-old anti-fascist: “There is nothing carved into the onion skin that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror… I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent.” Nor is he professing innocence: “Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.” When he was taken prisoner by the Allies, Grass didn’t hide the fact that he belonged to a Waffen-SS unit.

The reason that the revelation in 2006 caused a sensation was because it came so late. For sixty years, he had chosen not to own up to the fact that he had once belonged to an organisation that was instrumental in the Holocaust.

Mathias Döpfner, chairman of the board of the Springer Corporation, the publisher of the tabloid Bild and one of Grass’s perennial targets, would have taken pleasure in denouncing Grass in an opinion piece titled “The Onion’s Brown Core,” which appeared in Bild the day after the publication of the poem. His opening sentence identifies why he (and many others on the political right) dislike Grass so strongly: “Günter Grass likes nothing more than to remonstrate with the Germans and appeal to their conscience.” Döpfner draws a connection between Grass’s self-confessed silence before the publication of the poem, and the silence that preceded Peeling the Onion: “‘But why did I remain silent thus far?’, Grass writes. One is inclined to ask in return: Why did he remain silent for sixty years about his membership of the Waffen-SS?… ‘Peeling the onion’… Grass has now arrived at its very centre. And the onion’s core is brown and stinks.”

The claim that Grass forfeited the right to speak out because he was coy about his Waffen-SS membership may be a vengeful ploy by those who have long borne the brunt of Grass’s moral indignation, and a cheap attempt to match the poet’s self-righteousness. But Döpfner and others have also accused Grass of being a Nazi and anti-Semite, suggesting that the seventeen-year-old and the eighty-four-year-old shared a hatred of Jews and a fondness for Nazi ideology. Their argument is anything but subtle: whoever criticises Israel by failing to distinguish between the Iranian aggressor and the Israeli victim is guilty of anti-Semitism.

Yet the suggestion that Grass’s poem reeks of anti-Semitism shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. The poem is remarkable not so much because of its ludicrous claims about supposed Israeli designs to annihilate the Iranian people, but because of its insinuation that a taboo prevents Germans from speaking out against Israel and that anybody violating that taboo would be accused of anti-Semitism. Such an argument is reminiscent of the claim that there is a taboo preventing, say, non-Aboriginal Australians from criticising Indigenous people, or Americans of European descent from criticising African or Native or Asian Americans, and that any violation of such a taboo triggers accusations of racism. It resembles the tactic of the racists who introduce an odious statement with the preamble, “political correctness prevents me from saying this,” and then go on to say exactly what they think. A variant of the “but one of my best friends is Aboriginal/ African American/ …” line also appears in “What Must Be Said”: Grass refers to Israel also as “a country I am and always want to be close to.”

While Grass is no anti-Semite, his poem gestures towards the vocabulary and the mindset with which he grew up. Nazi ideologues successfully conjured a Jewish conspiracy that thwarted legitimate German ambitions and could therefore be held responsible for German ressentiments. Grass does not blame Jews or Israel for feeling resentful – but there is no doubt that his views about the legacy of the Nazi past, both Germany’s and his own, are tainted by resentment. He resents the fact that he has to live with “it” – be it guilt, responsibility or shame – “for the rest of [his] life.” In the poem, he is concerned about potential German complicity in an Israeli pre-emptive strike because the burden Germans have to carry is already heavy enough. Raphael Gross, director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London and of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, has rightly pointed out it is so difficult to overcome National Socialism precisely because of the failure to recognise the longevity of Nazi mentalities and morals.

Günter Grass is one of the greats of postwar German literature (although, in my view, he does not come close to being the greatest). His reputation as a writer shouldn’t be mixed up with his standing as a public intellectual. In his latter capacity, he did play an important role on many occasions, not least because he could be counted on as somebody who wouldn’t shy away from speaking out in the face of a seemingly overwhelming consensus. Thus he criticised the rushed process of reunification, and he resigned as a member of the Social Democrats when his party agreed to the so-called asylum compromise of 1992, which led to a change of the German constitution’s guarantee of a right of asylum. In both those cases, it was courageous of him to take a stand.

But when it comes to his own past, he has been a troubled soul. And since he has long been convinced that his views deserve a broad audience, the readers of his books and the public at large have been privy to his inner conflicts. Much of his writing, while purporting to be about Germany (or, in the case of “What Must Be Said,” about Israel), is in the last instance about his own demons. It is telling that his controversial poem begins with the words, “Warum schweige ich,” “Why do I remain silent,” and thus with the writer’s “I” (rather than with Israel, which is mentioned only twenty-eight lines later).

The publication of “What Must Be Said” was not the first time that Grass got into trouble in Israel. Only six months ago, in an interview with Tom Segev, Grass opined that “the madness and the crime were not expressed only in the Holocaust and did not stop at the end of the war. Of eight million German soldiers who were captured by the Russians, perhaps two million survived and all the rest were liquidated.” The use of the verb “liquidate” and the (incorrect) reference to six million dead German POWs could be read as saying that there was a German equivalent to the Holocaust and that Germans were as much victims as Jews. At the time, Segev himself excused Grass, saying that the figure of six million German victims came up “in the heat of the moment.” That was a kind interpretation, but perhaps one with more than just a grain of truth to it.

In the poem, Grass refers to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a Maulheld, a loudmouth. It is one of Grass’s mistakes in the poem not to take seriously the man who wants to wipe Israel and its people off the map. If there is a Maulheld in this story, it is Grass himself. He has the tendency to pontificate at the top of his voice, to speak before he thinks, and to exaggerate first and qualify later.

NOTWITHSTANDING his prominence, Grass’s recent intervention, much of it politically silly and artistically of little merit, should not have preoccupied the German opinion pages for many days. Neither should it have prompted Israel’s government to declare him a persona non grata (which then prompted Grass to liken Israel’s interior minister to Erich Mielke, the East German minister responsible for the Stasi, who once banned him from visiting the German Democratic Republic). It is unfortunate, too, that the controversy failed to raise a few issues that are probably worth more consideration than the Nobel laureate’s ill-chosen words.

First, Grass actually made a suggestion in his poem that is worth further discussion: namely that an agency ought to have the right to inspect Israel’s nuclear facilities. In an ideal world, that agency would also have unfettered access rights in all countries, including the United States and Russia.

Second, the spectre of anti-Semitism, raised by Grass himself, deserves closer attention. What is the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, particularly in Germany? And what is the link between anti-Semitism and the rabid pro-Zionism that has long been advocated by the Springer Corporation via Bild?

Third, the controversy over “What Must Be Said” has been remarkable more because of the response to the poem than because of the poem itself. What moved so many of Germany’s public intellectuals to rush into print or onto television shows to distance themselves from Grass? What does it mean when fellow writer Rolf Hochhuth told Grass in an open letter, “I am ashamed as a German of your preposterous silliness”? Did he seriously believe his reputation would be tarnished by Grass’s intervention?

German newspaper editors and talkshow hosts seem to have concluded that this particular debate is over. All those who conceive of themselves as opinion-makers have said their piece. If it was a contest then Grass’s critics seem to have won it convincingly. Besides, Grass himself retired hurt; he fell silent because he was admitted to a Hamburg hospital on 16 April, apparently with heart problems. But a survey of opinion pages and of Germany’s famed Feuilleton, the culture sections of the print media, provides a skewed picture. Grass has had his backers. During the last TV debate about the poem, on 15 April, the studio audience applauded those who defended Grass (and criticised Israel) rather than Grass’s critics. The German blogosphere, the comments sections of news media websites, the letters pages and numerous non-representative opinion polls suggest that a majority of Germans sympathise with Grass’s views.

Some of Grass’s critics, such as the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen or Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung editor-in-chief Martin Vogler, noted that his views resemble so-called Stammtischparolen, opinions uninhibited by political correctness and informed by prejudice and jingoism. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the Stammtisch, the proverbial regulars’ table in the pub, came out in support of Grass, and that its views appear to be at least as much informed by a deep-seated resentment as Grass’s. Grass himself, by the way, has been surprisingly unconcerned about the applause he has been receiving from unreconstructed anti-Semites, and about the legitimacy he has bestowed on certain Stammtischparolen.

Perhaps the week-long debate, which, as many observers noted, was peculiarly German both in its tone and in its intensity, reflected a realisation that the silly claims of a self-obsessed old man have provided a glimpse of something unpalatable that has no place in how the new Germany likes to be seen by the rest of the world. Today’s Germans have tried hard – building memorials, prosecuting war criminals and paying restitution to former slave labourers – to prove that they have nothing to do with yesterday’s Germans; yet the past tends to catch up with them. Günter Grass seems to have been only too aware of the past’s propensity to insert itself uninvited into the present. “History,” he wrote in his 2002 novel Im Krebsgang, published in English as Crabwalk, “or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” •

The post Günter Grass, again appeared first on Inside Story.

THIS month’s outbreak of violence in Gaza sent thousands of Israelis into bomb-shelters and left twenty-five Palestinian militants and civilians dead. While Hamas forces in Gaza did not participate in the exchange of fire, the movement failed to rein in competing militants. Groups affiliated to the Popular Resistance Committees responded to the assassination of one of its leaders by the Israeli military with a barrage of rockets and mortars, and within hours the situation escalated. For now, it seems that Egyptian mediation has re-established a fragile ceasefire.

While Hamas’s decision not to return fire is certainly a welcome development, the internal political struggle over how the movement should position itself in relation to Israel is far from over.

As Israeli planes circled the skies of Gaza, representatives of different wings of Hamas embarked on two competing diplomatic missions. Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas political bureau and overall leader of the movement, paid a surprise visit to the Turkish capital, Ankara, a fortnight ago, briefing Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on what was described as “recent developments in Palestinian politics” and the prospects for reconciliation between the competing Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.

Meanwhile, the Gaza-based leaders of Hamas dispatched strongman Mahmoud Zahhar to Tehran. Zahhar, one of the closest aides of Ismael Haniyeh, the Gaza prime minister, thanked Iran for its “unlimited and unconditional support.” Zahhar also underlined the fact that the “principles and strategies of Hamas” – synonymous with the movement’s commitment to armed struggle and terror operations – had “not changed” despite the ceasefire.

Both diplomatic initiatives are clear attempts to rally support behind competing wings of Hamas. As such, they are only the most recent examples of a series of regional moves in the past few weeks that illustrate growing tensions within the organisation, as separate centres of power vie to determine the future course of the movement.

The contenders are the leadership in Gaza, represented by Haniyeh and his interior Minister Fathi Hammad, and the exiled overall leadership represented by Meshal. While Haniyeh maintains control of a breakaway branch of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza strip, Meshal is supported, by and large, by Hamas members from the West Bank and the Palestinian Diaspora, though he also enjoys the backing of many Gazans critical of Haniyeh’s authoritarian regime in the coastal strip.

Early assessments assume that the struggle centres on the implementation of reconciliation documents signed by Meshal and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is leader of Fatah. Agreements were ceremoniously concluded in Cairo in May 2011 and again in Doha in February 2012. Both agreements were welcomed by many Palestinians but were concluded in the face of ill-concealed opposition by Haniyeh’s Gaza branch.

The Gaza prime minister, fearing a challenge to his position in the coastal strip, attempted to torpedo the initial Cairo agreement by praising the “martyr Osama bin Laden” on the eve of the concluding ceremony. Likewise, the Gaza leadership opposed the Doha agreement by labelling it “unconstitutional” and by refusing to accept President Abbas as an interim acting prime minister, as stipulated in Doha.

The question of who will lead the interim Palestinian government until elections are held is still far from concluded. But there is clearly more at stake than personal ambition. What lies at the core of the conflict between the Hamas leaders in Gaza and the leadership abroad is a fundamental struggle over the future of Hamas as a movement. Certainly, recent shifts within Hamas suggest the possibility of a transformation from terrorist organization to legitimate political party. While the outcome remains unpredictable, signs of internal strife have escalated to a tipping point.

In December, Ismael Haniyeh embarked on a western-bound Mediterranean tour in an attempt to gather political support from post-revolutionary regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. He was granted a hero’s welcome. In mid-February, he started a second diplomatic circuit that brought him to Qatar, Bahrain and Iran. To the dismay of more conciliatory Hamas members, Haniyeh vehemently and repeatedly stressed Hamas’s commitment to “armed resistance,” “the futility of peace negotiations” and the movement’s commitment to fight “until all Palestinian land has been liberated.” Haniyeh’s hosts in Tehran reacted warmly, swiftly increasing the flow of financial support to Gaza.

Emboldened by this wave of outside recognition, Haniyeh has continued to lobby against the implementation of the reconciliation agreements. By preventing the Palestinian Central Election Commission from updating voter registers, he is effectively preventing elections that were scheduled in the Cairo and Doha agreements in order to cement his hold to power.

Haniyeh’s regional rallying of support has not gone unnoticed by Khaled Meshal. In contrast to the Gaza prime minister, Meshal silently backed “exploratory talks” between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators hosted by the King of Jordan in Amman in January. Likewise, Meshal has on numerous occasions expressed his acceptance of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – a tacit acceptance by the faction of the right of the State of Israel to exist in secure borders side by side with a future Palestinian state.

At the same time, Meshal has attempted to bring Hamas closer to the secular institutions of Palestinian political life as he pushes for the organisation’s integration into the Palestine Liberation Organization, which at the moment does not include the movement. Integrating Hamas into the PLO would close Palestinian ranks and effectively mean a formal cessation of violence from Hamas. At the same time, it would represent a further implied acceptance by Hamas of agreements previously signed between the PLO and Israel.

Meshal’s change of heart can be partly attributed to the ongoing public revolt against Syrian President Bashar a-Assad, who has hosted Hamas’s diaspora leadership since the 1990s. Assad’s violent response to an uprising that is at least partly backed by Hamas’s umbrella organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, has strained relations. Reacting to turmoil in Syria, Meshal has been forced to relocate Hamas’s diaspora headquarters from Damascus to Doha, the Qatari capital, in February. This relocation from Iran-backed Damascus to Washington’s closest remaining Arab ally in the region is an important symbolic gesture towards what Meshal may very well envisage for the movement: a comprehensive re-invention of Hamas.

Whether or not Hamas as a unified movement would follow Meshal on this change of course has been the subject of much speculation. Notably, Meshal recently expressed his outrage at Gaza’s refusal to fall “in line” by announcing he would step down as leader of the political bureau. Elections for the Hamas Shoura Council, the group’s highest decision-making authority, which appoints the movement’s leader, are due in April. It is unclear whether Meshal will ultimately follow through on this threat, as observers speculate that he could be re-elected despite his recent declaration. Alternatively, it seems he might be elected to head a new and independent Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The outcome of this power struggle within Hamas is far from pre-determined. Current developments present Western decision-makers with an opportunity to influence the outcome and to support the shift from a renegade terrorist militia to a necessary partner in what could very well be an all-encompassing peace process with Israel.

Hamas leaders such as Khaled Meshal need to be engaged not isolated. Washington has embraced moderate Islamists in Cairo and Tunis, and representatives of political Islam in the Palestinian territories should not be treated any differently. Instead of resorting to ineffective undifferentiated boycotts, Washington and European governments should engage with reformist groups from within Hamas.

While it does carry political risks, such an approach might just tip the scales in the right direction. Violent escalations such as this month’s exchange of rockets in Gaza will continue to bring suffering to Israelis and Palestinians, but will also strengthen forces from within Hamas that thrive on a political vision that fosters isolationism and extremism. •

The post The Hamas split and the future of the Palestinian peace talks appeared first on Inside Story.

THAT Australians are less well disposed to Israel than they once were is almost certainly true. Israel’s friends are no less likely to deny the truth of this than are Israel’s enemies. Identifying the turning points in public opinion is much more difficult. So, too, given the dearth of decent data, is the task of estimating the breadth or depth of the change. Even if that could be done, there remains the question of how governments should respond.

Recently, Peter Manning, the respected journalist and author of Us and Them: A Journalist’s Investigation of Media, Muslims and the Middle East, argued that the “overwhelming trend” in data compiled from various opinion polls “shows a sharp swing since the 1980s against Israel's image and actions among ordinary Australians.” This account of the polls is misleading. Manning went on to argue that since public opinion had shifted, government policy should also change. But is a swing in public opinion sufficient reason for public policy to swing too?

The trend Manning claims to have identified is in respondents’ attitudes towards the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In a 1981 McNair poll, he notes, 28 per cent said their sympathies in the Middle East were “mainly with the Jewish people” while 4 per cent said they were “mainly with the Arabs.” The poll was taken in the first two weeks of July, before Israel bombed the PLO’s headquarters in Beirut causing a large number of civilian casualties. When the question was repeated in August 2006, by McNair Ingenuity, 13 per cent said their sympathies were “mainly with the Jewish people,” while 10 per cent said they were “mainly with the Arabic people.” This poll was taken shortly after the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict had begun. This is the only clear evidence of a shift from a margin in favour of “the Jewish people” of twenty-four percentage points to a margin in favour of “the Jewish people” of just three.

But it is hardly evidence of a “trend.” We need more than two data points to show when opinion shifted. Over a quarter of century there may have been a number of movements, the earliest perhaps quite soon after the 1981 poll. And that poll may not have been the point at which opinion was most polarised.

Since 2006, the figures have continued to show roughly equal numbers of sympathisers on each side. In 2006, a UMR survey found 24 per cent feeling “more sympathy” for the “Israelis” (compared with McNair’s 13 per cent for “the Jewish people”) and 23 per cent feeling “more sympathy” for the “Palestinians” (compared with McNair’s 10 per cent for “the Arabic people”). Similar results to UMR’s were reported in 2009 and 2011 by Morgan.

The differences in the figures produced, in 2006, by the McNair Ingenuity and UMR polls are puzzling. Perhaps the answer lies in the different ways the two sides are described. The “Jewish people” (McNair Ingenuity) may not have been as well regarded as “the Israelis” (UMR), the “Arabs” (McNair Ingenuity) not as well thought of as the “Palestinians” (UMR). Ethnicities might be less appealing than nationalities. In 1981, had the question been about “the Israelis” and “the Palestinians” rather than about the “Jewish people” and the “Arabs,” McNair might have produced a closer result.

Feelings of “sympathy” are very general and rather vague. Especially where they are not strongly held, sympathies may not be a very reliable guide to how respondents judge specific circumstances. When the question of “Israel’s recent military action in the Gaza strip” was raised in the 2009 Morgan poll, fewer (28 per cent) said it was “justified” than said it was “not justified” (42 per cent). But in other polls, conducted in 2006, more respondents sympathised with Israel (33 per cent in July, 27 per cent in August) than with Hezbollah (15 per cent and 12 per cent respectively) in the fighting then taking place; the majority response was “neither,” “both” or “can’t say.”

Polls that touch on Israel and the Palestinians – and few have – often fail to produce majorities in favour of one or the other. In 1946, a Morgan poll found opinion evenly divided (44:44) not over “whether Palestine should be partitioned,” as Manning claims, but on “limiting the number of Jews who enter Palestine.” In 1967, another Morgan poll didn’t find a “large majority” supporting Israel, as Manning reports, but a plurality (44 per cent) in favour of Israel keeping “the old city of Jerusalem” rather than giving it to the United Nations to be “internationalised” (36 per cent) or giving it “back to the Arabs” (6 per cent). And in 1974, after the 1973 war, the polls didn’t report “a large majority” that was “pro-Israel,” as Manning believes; they reported pluralities whose sympathies were with “the Israelis” rather than with “the Arabs” – 44:5 in a Morgan poll, 37:5 in a Saulwick poll.

WHAT should we make of polls where opinion is not so much evenly divided as widely spread – as it has been on the general question of “sympathy” in recent times – between pro/anti, neither/both, and unsure? Of the recent items to which Manning refers the proportion typically recorded as “can’t say,” “don’t know” or “unsure” is around 20 per cent or more. Figures this high suggest relatively low levels of knowledge about the issues or engagement with them. In an online poll conducted by Research Now in May 2010, only a quarter of the respondents rated their “own understanding of the Israel–Palestine conflict” as “very good” or “good.”

Even if the results are meaningful, where public opinion treads governments may not feel compelled to follow. Manning’s depiction of a plurality or minority as “a large majority” in 1967 and 1974, and his reference to an “overwhelming trend” since the 1980s, as if earlier majorities had now become minorities, is important. His point, after all, is that rather than “snubbing” public opinion the government should change its policy. And the democratic argument for policy change in response to public opinion is much stronger when the opinion is that of the majority rather than that of a minority.

Manning frames the consequences for government of not following any shift in public opinion in terms of votes. In particular, he warns of a loss of votes to the Greens – a relatively new threat to the government, since previously “progressive voters had nowhere else to go.”

Although the balance of opinion is now less lopsided, a loss of votes doesn’t necessarily follow. None of the polls show – in fact, top-line results cannot show – whether the issue is a vote-changer. In any event, governments that judge an issue to be a vote-changer need to consider, if they are prudent, whether changing their policies might lose votes not just gain them. A shift by the government away from its present stance might please supporters of the Palestinians’ claims but anger those committed to Israel’s.

On an issue like this, where the votes of very particular minorities may be at stake, governments are less likely to consider national poll data than the distribution of sympathisers in particular seats. In marginal seats, which are going to be won either by the government or by the Coalition, “progressive” voters who shift to the Greens and want to cast a valid vote will have nowhere else to go but back to Labor; a second preference for the Coalition won’t make much sense to these voters if the opposition hasn’t shifted on this issue either. Only in the two or three seats where the winner is likely to be either the government or the Greens does the issue stand even the remotest chance of deciding the result.

If Labor were to follow Manning’s advice the government might strengthen its hold on a marginal seat like Reid, in Sydney’s western suburbs, with the fourth highest proportion of Islamic residents. But it would weaken its hold on Melbourne Ports, which has the highest proportion of Jewish voters, and where the Liberals might pre-select a Jewish candidate strongly committed to Israel, as they have done in the past.

Changing its stance could help the government retain the marginal seat of Grayndler in Sydney’s inner-West, where the threat is more likely to come from the Greens than from the Liberals. But given what happened to the Greens’ candidate for Marrickville, which takes in part of Grayndler, at the 2011 New South State election we shouldn’t count on it; the candidate embraced the BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) movement, registered a precipitous drop in the level of her support (according to a Galaxy poll) after doing so, and failed to take a seat from Labor that the Greens should have won.

Whether or not governments judge their position to be a net electoral liability, they need to weigh up things other than votes. These, in relation to the Middle East, would have to include Australia’s alliance with the United States, on the one side, and perhaps its quest for a seat on the Security Council, on the other. The merits of the issue might also warrant attention.

If a government feels the public is hostile to its position, and sees the issue as a vote-changer, it can either fall into line, ignore the polls (especially if the opposition isn’t biting) or adopt some other strategy – arguing against it, trying to reframe it or simply displacing it on the list of public concerns by talking up some other issue.

On the question of Israeli settlements, the government might well want to criticise Israel if not publicly then in private. If it did it would be in line with the Research Now poll, noted by Manning, which reports that most respondents (77 per cent) agreed that “Israel should withdraw from the settlements it has constructed on Palestinian land.” But on the question of whether Palestine should be admitted to the United Nations as a full member, the government might disagree – notwithstanding the Morgan poll of September 2011 in which the majority (62 per cent) agreed that the United Nations, in the teeth of opposition from “Israel and the USA,” should “recognise Palestine as one of its member states.”

Faced by a series of polls that appeared to show the Palestinians – not the Israelis – losing the PR battle, it is unlikely that commentators sympathetic to the Palestinian position would warn the government to heed such polls or face an electoral backlash. •

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PETER Kosminsky’s four-part drama series, The Promise, has produced the same deeply divided response in Britain, France and Australia. From official Israeli and Jewish establishment sources there has been fierce condemnation, nowhere more so than in the formal complaint to SBS, which screened the series in Australia, by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, or ECAJ. From most other sources the series has received high praise, both as a film and as a contribution to the discussion of the tragic Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The Promise takes up a problem that has troubled Jewish thinkers since the Zionist project of creating a Jewish homeland or state was first mooted. Since the world had run out of uninhabited lands, what would happen to the people who already lived in the chosen territory? The question was debated with admirable frankness and calmness, but little consensus, by theorists who did not foresee the terrible urgency that the Holocaust would one day bring to it. They asked whether the inhabitants could be lured away by bribery or subterfuge or whether force would be needed. The optimistic view, expressed in Theodor Herzl’s novel Altneuland, was that life in the Jewish state would be so attractive that the indigenous people would happily submit – Israel’s “immaculate misconception” as the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit described it to me.

That was never going to happen in Palestine, the land ultimately chosen. The Arabs believed they too had a historic right (some saw it as a divine right), and a British promise, to what an American analyst has dubbed the “much too promised land.” To the Arabs of Palestine it was already their home, where their ancestors had lived for generations, and where they had a right of self-determination as part of the Arab homeland promised by the British in return for Arab help in the first world war. When they were told that the fine print left Palestine out of the Arab promise, and that Britain would instead honour its promise of a Jewish homeland, the Arabs felt betrayed and threatened, and predictably resisted.

As the ECAJ’s complaint about The Promise notes, Arab objections to Zionist-inspired immigration go back to its beginning in the late nineteenth century. But the objection was not, as the ECAJ may expect the reader to assume, an irrational objection based on prejudice; as the historian Benny Morris emphasises, it was a well-grounded, and indeed prescient, fear that the Zionists wanted to take their country. The official recognition and support of the Zionist project resulted in acute and growing conflict during the British mandate, and open warfare when a Jewish state emerged with UN blessing. Although Israel triumphed in the wars of 1948 and 1967, and remains in military control today, the question remains: what is a just solution to the competing claims of Jews and Arabs? What could once be debated as a historical or theological problem is now an existential human problem: what is going to happen to the five million Jews and five million Arabs who today live in Palestine? They all need a home.

This is the question implicitly asked by The Promise. Kosminsky does not answer it, but he gives a powerful reminder to a readily forgetful world that the question has always been there and remains there, and that the failure to answer it has had and continues to have terrible consequences. He does this by interweaving two stories, one of Len, a British sergeant serving in Palestine in 1946–48, and the other of Len’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter Erin, who visits Israel in her gap year in 2005. Initially the purpose of Erin’s trip is to give moral support to Eliza Meyer, her Jewish school friend who is returning home to Israel to do her military service. But in her grandfather’s diary she finds a house key that Len had promised to return to its owner, and she sets out to fulfil his promise.

The interwoven stories, rich in incident, character and plot, provide two snapshots of the ongoing conflict between two peoples seeking to live in the same land. In 1948 the Jews are the people without a home, desperately seeking to create not just shelter for the wretched refugees from the Holocaust but also a refuge for all potential victims of anti-Semitism in the future. The snapshot shows the length to which desperate people will go, and shows how the conflict is starting to make Arabs into refugees. The second snapshot, in 2005, shows that Jews now have a homeland but Palestinians do not. Established but isolated in their homeland, symbolised by the Meyer family in the bubble of the coastal town of Caesarea, Israelis are ignoring the needs of the Palestinians, who see Israel taking more and more of the only land that could provide their home. Israel has a monopoly of military force and Palestinians respond with the shocking weapon of the weak, suicide bombing, to which Israel retaliates by demolishing houses.

Kosminsky has emphasised that he did not set out to take sides or offer solutions; his first responsibility was to present an image that did justice to the complexity of the situation. Historians and political commentators have written many volumes about this complexity, and the film was based on years of research. In contrast to a historian, the artist and film-maker must choose a few characters and events to capture the viewers’ attention, stimulate their minds, fire their imaginations and touch their consciences. It is inevitable that people with an existing view about Palestine will be disappointed that this or that point dear to them was not made or emphasised, but they can still be grateful that Kosminsky has put the fundamental problem on the table in a high-quality film with great human impact.

Apologists for special interests have a choice. They can be open to The Promise as one of many ways a film about the Israel–Palestine conflict could be made, they can accept its challenge to seek solutions, they can learn from it, even if some of the lessons may be painful, and they can offer competing views and interpretations and emphasise different points if they wish. Alternatively they can firmly close their minds, refuse to recognise the challenge or seek solutions, resist any lessons they could learn, and seek to suppress the film. In that endeavour they may seek to place stereotyped and demeaning interpretations on the film. Antony Loewenstein, in his 2006 book My Israel Question, was far from the first to deplore the tendency to portray criticism of Israel and its policies as anti-Semitism, a practice he saw as wrongly conflating Zionism and Judaism.

IN ITS thirty-one-page complaint, the ECAJ compares The Promise with Jud Süss, a “Nazi propaganda film” praised by Goebbels and made compulsory viewing for Nazi death squads. The complaint asserts, without particulars, that “the ancient libel that holds all Jews throughout history to be collectively guilty of killing Jesus has been segued into the equally ludicrous proposition that all Jews are collectively guilty of the wanton shedding of innocent blood.” It complains about the historical background but its major allegation is that “all of the principal Jewish characters (and thus by implication Jews generally) are portrayed negatively and, ultimately, without any redeeming virtues. They are cast as variously cruel, violent, hateful, ruthless, unfeeling, amoral, treacherous, racist and/or hypocritical... The series also panders to stereotypes about Jews being immoderately wealthy and having acquired their wealth unfairly.”

In contrast, an English reviewer for the Israeli website Eretz Acheret noted that “the Israeli characters are drawn sympathetically and realistically, with not a hint of demonisation.” The ECAJ reaches the opposite conclusion only by itself imputing unfavourable attributes to the Jewish characters, judging them by harsh and unrealistic standards, interpreting their conduct in the worst possible way, and making quite absurd comparisons. There is a striking irony in a Jewish organisation’s striving to show that every Jewish character is a demon and every Arab character a saint. One by one, the ECAJ’s submission proceeds to do a hatchet job on every Jewish character of any importance, rejecting the humanity with which Kosminsky endows each of them, and substituting an anti-Semitic stereotype of its own manufacture.

The ECAJ gives what it calls “seventy-five examples of negative stereotyping of Jews” in its complaint. I can only deal with a few here, but an extended response to the complaint can be found here. The complaint itself can be found here.

Much of the calumny is directed at Erin’s hosts, the Meyer family. The complaint says that “none of the Arab characters speaks with a raised voice, in stark contrast to the violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled Jewish families.” It is in the nature of the plot that viewers see an Arab family only briefly on the special occasions of entertaining an important visitor, when they are naturally on their best formal behaviour. In contrast, Erin is asked to treat the Meyer household as her home, and becomes a part of the family. She sees everyday family life, in which a father has heated arguments with his youthful son over politics but rushes frantically to his side when he is injured, a younger sister calls her older brother insane but has deep affection for him, a mother reacts angrily to those who blow up her son by calling them “animals,” and parents treat their daughter’s friend with great care and responsibility. Erin finds the parents “the kindest and most generous” people she has known and, despite his despair at their politics, their argumentative son agrees.

By no stretch of the imagination is this a “violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled” family. It is a normal family. Its members are human beings, neither demons nor saints. Viewers who have been confronted for the first time by someone experiencing an epileptic fit will know that when the Meyer parents are momentarily paralysed with shock when Erin collapses in front of them, they are not being shown as “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous, cruel,” in the ECAJ’s words.

It is, however, a family whose members are awkward and at a loss for words or actions when, owing to Erin’s naivety, they find Omar, a real, live Arab peace activist, in their luxurious home. Omar shows similar unease, his only conversational gambit being to needle his hostess by asking where her family came from. In its search for an anti-Semitic interpretation, the ECAJ accuses Kosminsky of using this incident as “the vehicle for conveying the alien-ness of Leah and her husband Max (and by extension all Jews) to the land, further estranging them from the audience’s sympathy,” and of portraying them as “ungracious and racist,” “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous”and “cruel.”

Such an interpretation may appeal to anti-Semites who are trying to discover an anti-Semitic meaning. They will miss the more reasonable interpretation. What the film is doing, in effect, is dramatising Benny Morris’s observation that a “mutual lack of empathy” has characterised the Palestinian conflict from the beginning. Palestinians, he says in his book, Righteous Victims (1999), “never really understood the Zionist claim to the land” and Zionists “were uninterested in the Palestinian Arabs’ nexus with the soil.” “Thus, the Zionist–Palestinian conflict, which was the origin and remains the core of the Israeli–Arab conflict, has been characterised by a crude and brutal perceptional symmetry.” The message of The Promise is that Israelis and Palestinians must get beyond this and see each other as human beings who, among other things, need a home.

The lengths to which the ECAJ will go is illustrated by its attempt to demonise the convicted terrorist Avram Klein by comparing him with the Zionist leader Dov Gruner, on whom he is loosely based. The ECAJ presents Gruner as admirable in every respect, whereas Klein is said to be portrayed as “a blinkered fanatic who could have saved his own life by appealing his sentence to the Privy Council,” who uses “words that demonstrate that he refused to do so in a vainglorious quest for martyrdom,” and who in contrast to Gruner failed to win the respect and admiration of his guards. In fact, the film depicts Klein more favourably on all three scores.

First, Klein refuses to appeal whereas Gruner refused to defend himself at all. Second, speaking to Len in a friendly tone, Klein quietly utters the succinct and dignified words, “If you kill me you’ll regret it. Every movement needs its martyrs,” whereas Gruner bombastically told the court that nobody “could sever the tie between the Jewish people and their one and only land” and that “whosoever tries to sever it – his hand will be cut off and the curse of God will rest on him forever.” And, third, whereas Gruner won the respect and admiration of his guards, Klein is given a greater accolade: he wins the respect and friendship of Len, the sergeant who is the leading British character.

The ECAJ complains that because of the lack of certain background historical detail the film “shuts off any possibility that the viewer might understand how Jews who saw themselves as fighters for a noble cause could commit atrocities.” The reverse is true. The sympathetic portrayal of the terrorist Klein has been mentioned. Eliza Meyer’s grandfather, who lost most of his relatives in the Holocaust, was also a 1948 terrorist, and explains that after the Holocaust members of his generation were determined to carve out a land that could be safe for Jews forever. The British stood in their way, so the Jews “wiped them out. It was as simple as that.” Far from shutting off the possibility of understanding his implicit claim to act in a noble cause, the film shows a concentration camp and wretched refugees. It presents Eliza’s grandfather as an ordinary, civilised human being and passes no judgement on him. It is the ECAJ, not the film or the normal viewer, who finds him “obdurate and unapologetic for his part in an atrocity” and “lacking a moral compass.” Why does the ECAJ make this harsh judgement? The case put in his mouth is the case made by the real-life terrorist Menachem Begin, who blew up the King David Hotel and was later prime minister of Israel; it is the case made by Benny Morris, a historian admired by the ECAJ, when he justifies the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinian villagers from Israel as necessary for its ethnic “cleansing” (the term used at the time).

Viewers who have lived comfortable lives in peaceful countries like Australia and never faced challenges like those faced by Jews in Palestine in 1948 may be horrified by what was done and unable to identify with the case made in support. It does not follow that they will share the ECAJ’s harsh condemnation of those involved as people without a moral compass. Rather they will see them as vulnerable human beings with strong moral compasses pulled off course by experiences of anti-Semitism, culminating in the overwhelming effect of the Holocaust and all the tragedies that went with it. They will not join the self-righteous rush to judgement of those individuals, and certainly not the ridiculous extension to Jews generally that the ECAJ postulates.

What the ECAJ seems incapable of understanding is that the film is not making or inviting judgements. It is implicitly saying that it is too late for that; here is a terrible human problem that has to be faced.

AN IRONY of the ECAJ’s complaint is that Kosminsky has gone out of his way to discourage people from drawing anti-Semitic inferences from his film. Far from trying to blacken Israel, he shows that practices for which Israel is unfavourably known have been practised, and indeed were invented, by others. He shows the gratuitous humiliation of Palestinian civilians by soldiers and political assassinations as practised only by the British, and the retaliatory destruction of houses used by terrorists as practised by both Britain and Israel.

It would have been very natural for the film to mention the history of Caesarea, where Erin is staying, and it would have helped explain why the Meyers are so taken aback when an Arab turns up in their home. The Caesarea community website records without any indication of embarrassment or regret the expulsion of all Arabs in 1948. Benny Morris adds the details that they were expelled by the Haganah (which the ECAJ invokes as a symbol of Jewish rectitude) in mid February 1948 (three months before the Arab invasion to which the ECAJ attributes the war), despite the fact that according to Jewish sources the villagers had “done all in their power to keep the peace in their village and around it… [and] supplied agricultural produce to the Jewish market in Haifa and Hadera.”

Telling this story would have been easy pickings if Kosminsky had really been out to put Israelis or Jews in a bad light. It would also have pre-empted the ECAJ’s criticism that The Promise shows a Jewish swimming pool but not an Arab swimming pool in Caesarea. Perhaps the ECAJ is unaware that in Israel generally, far fewer Arabs than Jews can afford swimming pools. In Israel 58.5 percent of Arab families (as compared with 20.7 percent of Jewish families) are defined as living below the poverty line

The ECAJ is not only ungenerous in failing to recognise Kosminsky’s restraint. It acknowledges his Jewishness by a quotation about “self-hating Jews” who “betray their own people,” and speculates that he set the film in 2005, instead of 2010 when it was filmed, so that Erin could say to the soldiers about to blow up a house in Gaza: “Don’t drive them out of Gaza.” It ignores Kosminsky’s explanation that, having done his research before 2005, he wanted to include events like suicide bombing, which had ceased several years before 2010.

IT IS reassuring that the SBS complaint process rejected ECAJ’s complaint and showed no difficulty in recognising the true character of the film. But this does not mean that no harm has been done, or that no harm would be done by similar baseless attempts to smear individuals, organisations, books or films in the future. A number of groups are entitled to feel fearful, angry or dismayed by the ECAJ’s attempt to use the smear of anti-Semitism to suppress access to this film.

First are the viewers of SBS, who watch its programs because they are distinctive and open windows on the world not readily available elsewhere; they do not want it confined by unjustified rulings and, more importantly they do not want its future decision-making intimidated by the mud that will stick from this exercise or the fear of other baseless attempts to smear it in the future.

More generally, the people of Australia want freedom of access to information, points of view, and artistic representation in all their media in order to conduct their intellectual, political and moral life, without its being confined because some people are so sensitive to criticism of themselves or their cherished interests that they will go to any lengths to protect them. As citizens they also want those who make decisions on their behalf to be able to exercise Australia’s influence in the world not only on an informed basis but also free of similar intimidation. Those who have a special concern about the achievement of just solutions to problems of the Middle East, and would like the millions of Jews and the millions of Palestinians who live there to do so in freedom and justice, uncorrupted by the temptations of power or the temptations of powerlessness, will be particularly concerned.

There are many who value the great contributions that Jewish people have made to the intellectual, moral and artistic life, and particularly to the pursuit of social justice, in our civilisation. They are dismayed to see their contributions limited and their moral compasses sometimes distorted by the acceptance of the duty of short-sighted and uncritical defence of Israel, right or wrong, which the ECAJ’s complaint exemplifies. There are many, too, who believe that it would be a tragedy if all the courage and sacrifice and idealism that has gone into the building of Israel should result only in a pariah state because of its denial of justice to Palestinians.

If it is to maintain balance among the destabilising forces raging within and without, Israel is in desperate need of trusted but frank and independent critical voices such as the Diaspora could provide. Australian Jews can play such a role only if they open their eyes and ears and hearts and minds to the messages of the writers, artists, thinkers and people of insight and goodwill in the world, rather than attempt to shoot the messengers. Fortunately more and more are doing this. •

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THE sense of crisis that preceded Palestine’s application to the United Nations for admission as a state has entirely dissipated. The issue has disappeared from the media, the familiar deadlock over construction in the Israeli settlements has returned and – with the provocative timing to be expected from the present Israeli government – new construction has been approved in the disputed area in East Jerusalem, prompting the familiar ineffective Western protests. A return to business as usual? In all probability the answer is affirmative, at least in the short run, unless Western European governments can bring themselves to take an uncharacteristic initiative.

First, what of the crisis? It has become clearer that the tension was generated mainly by Israel and the United States. Both proclaimed that a unilateral move by the Palestinians would mean an end to negotiations for a two-state agreement and both threatened to withhold much-needed funding for the Palestinian Authority – in Israel’s case, taxes that it collects on behalf of the latter, in the United States’ case, that Congress would terminate financial support provided in recent years. The Palestinians’ claim that the move was intended, rather, to place the negotiations on a new foundation was more convincing, and points to the more plausible reason for the American and Israeli reaction: the move signalled an end to the acceptance of the US role as sole mediator in the relations between the two parties; in other words, it threatened the loss of American control over the “peace process” and the privileged position, and protection, that Israel enjoys within that framework.

As soon as the application was lodged, common sense returned. It was clear that it would be self-defeating for Israel to terminate negotiations or, even more so, to withhold financial support, opening the way for more extremist forces in Palestine. These dangers could be averted by the simple device of delaying decisions in the Security Council, which also saves the United States from a hostile Arab reaction should it veto the Palestinian application.

But the crisis was not wholly artificial. If a crisis is a moment when established practices have become untenable and new approaches suddenly become conceivable, then it is a moment of rare opportunity but also of serious risks. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in May showed that the US-mediated “peace process” had become moribund, and the Arab Spring provided a favourable setting for a Palestinian initiative to place negotiations for a two-state agreement on a more favourable footing. But the move also held serious risks. If it proves fruitless the Palestinian Authority will be weakened or even wholly discredited, and Mahmoud Abbas will forfeit his newly won prestige; at worst, Palestinian frustration may lead to serious outbreaks of violence. The perception of a volatile regional environment provides a more valid reason for the Western sense of crisis, and Israel’s provocative move in approving new settlement construction shows a remarkable insensitivity to this environment.

The speeches to the United Nations by Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas did not bring much new enlightenment. Obama’s was surprisingly one-sided, highlighting Israeli concerns but not Palestinian rights, reaffirming his support for a two-state solution but reiterating the implausible contention that statehood and negotiation were alternatives. Netanyahu went further, claiming that the Palestinians wanted a state but not peace, giving no hint of endorsing Palestinian rights, and roundly condemning the United Nations for its bias against Israel. Abbas had the far easier task of presenting to a sympathetic audience the case for recognising Palestinian statehood after so many years of fruitless negotiation, but also reaffirmed his readiness to resume negotiations based on the 1967 frontiers and conditional on a settlement freeze.

Within a few hours of the debate the Quartet on the Middle East (made up of representatives of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations), which had been deadlocked during the preceding weeks, issued a statement calling for negotiations without preconditions to achieve an agreement by the end of 2012. This might be seen as undermining the argument that the Palestinian initiative ruled out negotiation, but perhaps assumed that a decision on statehood would depend on the outcome of the negotiations. The statement called on the parties to agree on a timetable within a month, to make proposals on frontiers and security within three months, and to reach substantial agreement within six months.

The statement had serious limitations, however. It omitted all reference to the “parameters” long regarded as necessary for an agreement – the 1967 frontiers, subjected to agreed exchanges of territory, each state to have Jerusalem as its capital, and adequate measures to ensure Israel’s security – and there was no mention of the settlements issue. It may be inferred that these omissions were at the insistence of the United States. The proposal was entirely to the liking of the Netanyahu government: it was committed to nothing, all the fundamentals were open to discussion, and it could engage in endless negotiation without having to move toward a two-state agreement, blame the Palestinians for obstructing agreement and continue unrestricted construction in the settlements. Not surprisingly, Israel accepted with alacrity, leaving the Palestinians to appear less accommodating by insisting on their precondition regarding the settlements.

Unless the “ community” is prepared to move beyond the Quartet’s formula, it will prove as abortive as Obama’s ill-fated call a year ago for a two-state agreement by the time of this year’s meeting of the UN General Assembly. The United States, it has become obvious, will do nothing constructive before the presidential election. The question is whether there is any other actor prepared to fill the ensuing vacuum and provide an impetus to the negotiations. In particular, might “Europe” – either the European Union or some of its leading members acting with its approval – be prepared to assume this role?

Major European interests are at stake, and European values have long been engaged. A loss of control by the Palestinian authority, desperate acts of violence by Palestinians and massive Israeli reprisals could prompt much wider disorder in the present regional environment, threatening Western economic interests (not only oil supplies, but also wider trading relations), and would make for unrest in Europe’s Muslim communities. And “European values” would appear ineffective and hollow if Europe passively watched such a process. But can it summon up the energy to intervene before such a deterioration becomes unmistakably clear? Can its leaders, under extreme pressure owing to the euro crisis, pay attention before it is too late? In the next phase, in all probability, the United States will press the Palestinians to abandon their precondition. Will the Europeans be prepared to take a contrary stand? There are likely to be frequent reminders of the dangers in the situation, such as recent acts of violence by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian lives and property.

The Israeli government’s spectacular deal with Hamas, exchanging over 1000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, introduces new complications. More than a little ironic in view of Israel’s expressions of outrage over the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah – announced earlier this year but yet to be implemented – it is seen as strengthening Hamas against its rival, and thus sending the message that violence pays. Abbas appears to be losing the initiative and may find it difficult to retain broad support for seeking a negotiated settlement. The situation surely calls for a move from outside to revive the ailing “peace process.”

The new diplomatic machinery available to the European Union under its foreign affairs and security policy representative, Catherine Ashton, provides it with the capacity to formulate policy. After a shaky start, Ashton is beginning to gain a certain diplomatic credibility. But her role could be no more than an initiator of proposals for the EU governments, and agreement among all member governments would require protracted negotiation, making for delay and lowest-common-denominator decisions. What might be conceivable would be agreement in principle to a course of action, the details to be worked out by whoever was authorised to implement the policy.

Alternatively, the initiative might come from a few members – the Libyan model – who would likewise have to seek broad agreement before taking up a position. The success of the Libyan intervention – at least as perceived by its initiators – might encourage this approach. But what might such an initiative attempt to achieve? The immediate aim, presumably, would be to overcome the present deadlock such that meaningful negotiations toward a two-state agreement could proceed.

But it would need to recognised that the Netanyahu government is fundamentally opposed to such an agreement, notwithstanding his own lip-service to it. Substantial progress is unlikely under the present coalition. It would seem prudent to focus on the first steps – the first three months of the Quartet’s schedule, and in the first place the immediate obstacle, the settlements issue. Here the Europeans would lose all credibility if they simply endorsed the American and Israeli approach.

But could a European stand, however determined, influence the Netanyahu government after it had successfully defied Obama on that issue? It would, of course, win strong support in the region, and the heightened isolation might disturb some Israeli officials, but this would not be decisive, as the recent rigidity towards Turkey would suggest. While any communication would have to be addressed to the Israeli government, its real message would have to be to the Israeli people – as always, divided but with many surely uneasy over the issue. The tone and content of such a démarche would be important, but so would its manner of presentation. A major address by a prominent European leader, delivered in the region, would have an impact of a different order from an anonymous statement issued in Brussels. It is not difficult to envisage themes that might form part of such an address: that the settlements constitute a form of aggression against a neighbouring people, the strength of feeling that they are illegitimate as well as illegal, that they have no place in the present century, that they are unworthy of a great nation, that they foster the kind of violence by extremist settlers that has recently been observed, and so forth. Needless to say, the speech would also have to be supportive of Israel’s well-being and security.

A successful diplomatic initiative would call for unorthodox thinking. Many commentators have recognised, for example, that if left to themselves, the two parties will be unable to reach agreement. The US approach, remaining in the background, favours the party that is stronger and averse to the kind of changes that any agreement would entail. A more active mediator would have to question and cajole both parties, but the logic of moving towards an agreement requiring asymmetrical “concessions” would tend to lead it to be more supportive of the party pressing for changes from the present status quo. The potential task for diplomacy is daunting. It must be hoped that, if Europe takes up the challenge, it will be equal to its demands. •

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THE current moment may reasonably be termed a crisis. A longstanding situation has become untenable but the attempt to deal with it is creating multiple tensions and prompting fears of an explosion of violence in the region. The Palestinians are seeking a radical change, Israel is resisting and claiming it would mean an end to direct negotiations for a settlement. The United States is supporting Israel’s objection to “unilateralism” and is prepared to veto a resolution endorsing a Palestinian state, even while dreading the consequences for its standing in the region. The Europeans fear that a UN vote may expose their divisions and finally discredit the idea of a common European foreign policy. Beyond these fears there is a fairly widespread apprehension that at a time of dangerous regional volatility, diplomatic moves may have entirely unpredictable consequences: unexpected outbreaks of violence, an escalation of tensions.

But could the crisis be turned into a moment of opportunity? In particular, does it not offer a chance to resume negotiations on a more satisfactory foundation, whereas the present framework, with the United States as the sole, ostensibly impartial mediator – though, at a deeper level, consistently in favour of Israel – is increasingly unable to move the “peace process” forward? The recognition of a Palestinian state does not entail the end of negotiations – a false alternative – and it should not be difficult for the Europeans to agree in pressing for their resumption, especially in view of the dangerous regional situation. The EU countries are also agreed on the “parameters” of an eventual settlement; where they differ is in their willingness to act against the wishes of the Israeli government. But even here, and in relation to other difficult choices that may arise, the diversity of perceptions and opinions may work to their advantage. It could make for more carefully considered policies than does the rather monolithic American policy “community,” which has had no difficulty in overcoming Obama’s initially heterodox intuitions in relation to the Palestinian issue – or, for that matter, in relation to Iran.

But why should Europe be able to succeed in restarting negotiations when the United States has been manifestly unable to do so? Before attempting an answer, it is necessary to examine another fundamental issue that Western policymakers and most commentators have been unwilling to confront. This is the fact that direct negotiations are bound to be fruitless if one of the parties rejects the ostensible aim of the negotiations. As Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has recently maintained, Netanyahu’s diplomacy, his earlier record, and indeed his choice of coalition partners can best be understood as indications of his basic ideological commitment to Israel’s supremacy over the whole of Palestine. Thus, his goal is to prevent the two-state solution, long accepted by Israel as well as ly as the aim of the negotiations. To express this openly would mean the loss of all support and would alarm the Israeli electorate, so Netanyahu pretends to accept a Palestinian state while putting forward unacceptable preconditions for negotiating, as his diplomacy in Washington earlier this year made clear. Western policy-makers are reluctant to see this. Their recent diplomacy has focused on seeking to persuade the Palestinians to return to direct negotiations instead of going to the United Nations (as if the one excluded the other), seemingly oblivious of the reasons why the Palestinians have come to see this as fruitless.

The fundamental weakness in Western policy has been its longstanding toleration of Israel’s relentless construction of settlements on Palestinian territory. The not-infrequent Western protests have remained verbal, with no mention of sanctions or even a willingness to engage in a diplomatic confrontation with Israel. Obama initially appeared to make this a precondition for negotiations, but acquiesced in Netanyahu’s obdurate resistance; his diplomacy returned to a more familiar and comfortable posture, persuading and pressuring the Palestinians to resume negotiations in unfavourable circumstances – which, not surprisingly, proved short-lived and fruitless. Again, most recently, enormous diplomatic efforts have been made in seeking to persuade the Palestinians to avoid a confrontation at the United Nations. This effort has now failed. US diplomacy is trapped in its contradictions. Support for Israel – for the current Israeli government, that is – negates its endeavour to support the “Arab Spring” and diminishes its standing in the region and beyond. It is sad that Obama’s diplomacy has come to this.

There seems to be no good reason for the Europeans to support the United States in this seemingly contradictory and hypocritical stance – claiming to support a two-state solution but voting against a Palestinian state. Germany’s traditional role of supporting Israel in European diplomacy might leave it with no other option, but it may be hoped that in the ensuing discussions it will cease to equate supporting Israel with supporting every wish of its current government, however devious it may be. The European Union will not be so greatly damaged by another split vote. Chancellor Angela Merkel has rightly pointed out that the important thing is what happens after the UN vote. And here, at the time of writing, the available information is far more sparse.

It is not clear, for example, whether the Europeans, or for that matter the Americans, have sought to dissuade Netanyahu from taking the kind of provocative steps that have been threatened – withholding the transfer of taxes collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, proclaiming the end of direct negotiations or even declaring that the Oslo Agreements are no longer valid. Perhaps an awareness of regional volatility might restrain even this Israeli government, but Western diplomacy should not leave this to chance. There has been no mention of this in the public reporting, but it is clear that damage limitation must be an important aspect of Western diplomacy in the next phase.

Beyond this, is there a prospect of utilising the crisis as a diplomatic opportunity? Could the moment of danger be the occasion for a diplomatic breakthrough? Could there be a return to negotiations with more favourable prospects than before? This would not seem out of the question, but it could only be achieved against the will of the Netanyahu government. It would require, in the first place, a freeze and later an abandonment of construction in the settlements (perhaps excepting those to be transferred to Israel under the proposed “territorial swaps”) and later some form of monitoring to prevent wilful obstruction – in other words, a willingness to exert the maximum diplomatic pressure.

But is this credible, and could an effective strategy be devised? If the problem of the Netanyahu government’s real goals is directly confronted, such a reorientation of EU diplomacy becomes conceivable, even though little more than tacit support could be hoped from the United States. The more difficult question is whether an effective strategy could be devised. It is difficult to suppose that persuasion alone would influence Netanyahu, or that the kinds of pressure and sanctions usually considered would be acceptable to the Europeans. But the arts of diplomacy have been greatly diminished in the Cold War era and subsequently. Earlier, it was not so much a question of sanctions and the like, but more one of outmanoeuvring one’s adversary, or counterpart, leaving him or her with no better option than to act as one sought: one devious actor getting the better of the other. Could Netanyahu be placed in a position where ambition, and even the desire to remain in office, could lead him to opt for the role of the leader who achieves a historic settlement at the cost of his longstanding commitments and his preferred coalition?

His weakness is the gap between his real and his pretended goal. The challenge to diplomacy would be to exploit this, to make proposals that he would find difficult to resist but which would push negotiations in the desired direction. It may well be necessary to grasp the nettle of the settlements issue at an early stage, and here there might be a powerful message to the Israeli public, delivered by one or more of the main European leaders in the region itself, bringing out the strength of the objections to their continued expansion, as illegitimate not only legally but even more morally. These are no more than hints at an answer. More important is the question of how to become clear about the nature of the diplomatic challenge. The Europeans may well lack the power to coerce such a government, but they have a wealth of under-used diplomatic expertise that the ad hoc personal diplomacy of its leaders, and their approach to foreign policy in terms of electoral preoccupation, have left woefully neglected. •

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WHEN ISRAEL withdrew the 9000-strong settler population from the Gaza Strip five years ago, hopes were renewed that normalisation was beginning after the five years of deadly violence that followed the breakdown of the 1993–2000 “Oslo” peace process. In New York, the United Nations commented that “the Palestinians have experienced the joy of the departure of the occupier” and “the Israelis are no longer saddled with the unrewarding, Sisyphus-like grind of securing the Gaza Strip.”

Voices in the neighbourhood were more pessimistic, even cynical. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Zvi Bar’el, a liberal political commentator, noted that “all the components of the potential [Gaza] explosion are yet to be neutralised – the highest population density in the world, terrible poverty, a huge collection of arms, and a radical leadership [Hamas].” The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published a cartoon that depicted Ariel Sharon contemptuously tossing a lean bone labelled “Gaza” onto an outstretched plate held by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who gazed longingly at a fat leg of lamb, labelled “West Bank,” grasped firmly in the Israeli prime minister’s other hand.

Five years on from 2005, the faint hopes aroused by Israel’s Gaza withdrawal have been cruelly shattered. Instead, Gaza has emerged as symbol and flashpoint of the morass that is post-Oslo and post–second intifada Israel–Palestine, of which internecine Palestinian warfare, Israel’s punitive “Operation Cast Lead” in December 2008–January 2009, and now the peace flotilla fiasco in the eastern Mediterranean are all symptoms.

Israel has long regarded the Gaza Strip as an unmanageable and dispensable liability. A few months before the first Palestinian intifada began in the Jebalya refugee camp, located at the Strip’s northern end, in December 1987, the Israel Defence Forces completed a classified study titled “The Gaza District Up to the Year 2000.” It was, in the words of the Israeli analysts Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, “one of the grimmest documents ever submitted to the Israeli establishment.” The report warned that an exponentially rising population combined with acute land and water shortages amounted to “a human time-bomb ticking away at Israel’s ear.” In their study of the first intifada, published in 1989, Schiff and Ya’ari wrote that “the Gaza Strip is a cancer that will steadily drain the State of Israel” and predicted that “Israel will soon be on its knees begging all and sundry to do it the mercy of taking Gaza off its hands.”

That prognosis proved prescient. Over the first eight months of 1993, during the famous “back-channel” talks between Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organisation representatives in Norway, the first point of in-principle agreement concerned Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. Dennis Ross, the US special envoy to the Middle East from 1989 to 2001, has written in his memoirs that “in Israeli eyes, this was a promising beginning. The Israelis wanted out of Gaza.”

In 1994 the Strip’s maze of congested townships and claustrophobic refugee camps was duly turned over by Israel to the administration of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, along with Jericho, a West Bank town in the Judean desert near the border with Jordan. Israel retained a significant portion of the Strip containing Jewish settlements, as well as control over roads linking those settlements to Israel. In 2005 Sharon took the seemingly revolutionary step of dismantling the settlements and relocating their inmates to Israel, in the face of strong protests by the settlers. Especially resistant were those in the large settlement bloc of Gush Katif, located in the south-western part of the Strip next to the teeming Palestinian areas of Rafah and Khan Yunis. Sharon defended his decision in pragmatic terms: “I am not prepared to accept the claim that leaving Gaza is the trampling of Zionism. It is in fact strengthening Zionism in areas that are much more important.” He specifically cited Jerusalem and its environs, the Galilee region of northern Israel (which has a large “Israeli Arab” population) and the Negev desert of southern Israel as the areas of high strategic priority, unlike Gaza, to the Jewish state.

It is thus more than a little ironic that Israel continues not just to bear, but also to aggravate through its own actions, the Sisyphus-like burden represented by Gaza. Fifty-four years ago, the Israel Defence Forces seized Gaza during the Suez conflict of 1956. Dr Haidar Abd al-Shafi, an eminent resident of the Strip, recalled that brief occupation many years later: “I remember Israel’s occupation of Gaza during the Suez invasion in 1956. It was clear that they were engaged in long-term planning, that they intended to stay. When the UN passed resolutions calling for withdrawal, France and Britain withdrew immediately from the canal area and Israel began to slowly withdraw from the parts of Sinai it had occupied. But they made no move to withdraw from Gaza, and when President Eisenhower sent a letter to [David] Ben-Gurion” – the Israeli prime minister at the time – “asking why Israel did not withdraw Ben-Gurion had the gall to not reply. But then Eisenhower wrote a second letter threatening sanctions, and Israel withdrew in one night. That night we went to bed to the noise of armoured cars roaming the streets, and woke up the next morning to find no trace of Israelis in the Strip. It took a president with a moral fibre to get them out.”

Alas, 2010 is not 1956, Obama – his virtues notwithstanding – is not Eisenhower, Netanyahu is definitely no Ben-Gurion, and Israel finds it seemingly impossible to extricate itself from the messy legacy of the long occupation of Gaza that commenced in June 1967. And Gaza’s inhabitants find Israeli occupation replaced by Israeli blockade.

The consistent harshness of Israeli operations aimed at Gaza, most notably in Operation Cast Lead but also apparent in the decision to interdict the activist flotilla sailing toward the Strip, may seem somewhat puzzling at first glance. Why react with such ferocity to the relative pinpricks inflicted by Qassam rocketry, and mostly on small towns like Sderot? Why risk a fresh round of global controversy and criticism by pouncing in waters on a flotilla of vessels with hundreds of people of different nationalities on board? But while the Israeli use of disproportionate force may not be justified, it can be explained.

To most Israelis, the elites and the citizenry alike, a Gaza Strip under Hamas control embodies in a concentrated microcosm the mixture of menaces that cumulatively constitute the “existential threat” to their state and society. The declaratory hostility of Hamas, a movement that enjoys the committed adherence of a very large minority of Palestinians, to the existence of Israel is one component of this existential syndrome; the unsettling physical proximity to Israel of the Hamas enclave in Gaza is another. But by themselves these two components would not add up to more than a major irritant to Israel’s sense of security.

What makes Hamas-controlled Gaza more than a neighbourhood nuisance is the movement’s links with Syria and (particularly) Iran. The hardline Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in and operates from Damascus. The Islamic Jihad group, which has long been active in Gaza and currently enjoys a relatively fraternal relationship with Hamas, has a longstanding and close nexus with Iran’s military and intelligence apparatus. Israel has a simmering “northern front” where it faces a formidable adversary, Hezbollah, backed by Iran and also Syria. The Hamas-dominated enclave in Gaza represents a live “southern front” where the same constellation of anti-Israel forces coalesces. Nor can Hamas be chased away from Gaza – or Hezbollah from Lebanon – in the manner the PLO was evicted from Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982.

It is this calculus of interlinked threats that fortifies the Israeli siege mentality. That mentality is manifested in the hammer-and-tongs operations seen in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008–09 and 2010 (and indeed in the assassinations of Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in early 2008 and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in early 2010). The Gaza imbroglio and its periodic eruptions are especially uncomfortable for the authoritarian regime of Egypt, whose suspicion of Hamas – an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement – is matched if not surpassed by the Egyptian public’s dislike of Israel’s aggressive behaviour.

In January 1995, a suicide bombing conducted inside Israel by the Islamic Jihad group killed twenty Israeli soldiers and one civilian. In a nationally televised address after the incident, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin grimly promised to “take Gaza out of Tel Aviv” and declared that this would be achieved through “a separation between us and them,” to be negotiated with Yasser Arafat. The promise to liberate the faux Mediterranean Europe of Tel Aviv from the fanaticism and violence of Gaza underlined the mixture of contempt and fear with which the typical Israeli views the festering cauldron of the Strip. And this was fifteen years ago, well before the rise of Hamas to political and strategic prominence.

THE PALESTINIANS, meanwhile, are a nation divided. The strongman-centric Palestinian Authority regime of Yasser Arafat was past its sell-by date significantly before Arafat’s death. In the post-Arafat phase Palestinian politics has, instead of experiencing a transition to a two-party system based on mutual tolerance and power-sharing between Fatah and Hamas, experienced its opposite: a bitter rift between the two major Palestinian political formations, a Hamas power-grab in Gaza and Fatah repression of Hamas supporters in the West Bank. Arafat’s legacy of corrupt, clique-based governance has of course contributed much to the unseemly fracas into which Palestinian politics has degenerated after his demise. But so has Arafat’s absence from the scene. The Palestinian polity has had trouble evolving beyond the situation in which Arafat, for all his flaws and misdemeanours, provided a focal point.

The decline of Fatah and the ascendancy of Hamas are due, above all, to one factor – the catastrophic failure of the 1993–2000 peace process. Hamas rose almost literally from the ruins of Oslo and the embers of the second intifada. As the most significant Palestinian faction opposed to and excluded from the Oslo process, Hamas stood to gain the most once most Palestinians, in the words of the Israeli observer Ron Pundak, “came to the conclusion that Israel did not in fact want to end the occupation” and became convinced that their established leadership had been tricked into a “barren process” and “historical trap.”

And gain Hamas did. Through 2005 it won a string of victories in Palestinian local elections. And not just in the Gaza Strip, the cradle and stronghold of the movement; it also won resoundingly in West Bank cities like Nablus and towns like Qalqiliya. These local triumphs were the precursor to its landslide victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election of early 2006, when Hamas took an absolute majority – seventy-four out of 132 – of the legislature’s seats. It was striking that Hamas won handsomely not only in places where it is known to have a strong base, such as religious-minded Hebron, but also in Ramallah, regarded as a bastion of secular Palestinian nationalists and leftists.

The lesson of this history is that the “problem” represented by Gaza – and Hamas – cannot be tackled in isolation, but only through a serious, sustained renewal of an Israeli–Palestinian peace process. That is a tall order. The constellation of mutually reinforcing obstacles is quite daunting.

The Palestinian polity is hopelessly disunited. Yet it is difficult to deny the argument made by Hamas specialists Beverley Milton-Edwards and Alastair Crooke that “a meaningful and inclusive Palestinian national unity is necessary for a negotiated peace” between Israel and the Palestinians. As a political actor Hamas is too significant to be ignored, marginalised or suppressed, and at the same time the “inclusion” of Hamas is fraught with complications. The possibility of indirect inclusion via the good offices of a third-party intermediary such as Turkey has receded for the time being after the flotilla fiasco and the sharp downturn in Turkish–Israeli relations. It is certain, however, that the formulaic distinction made by many influential Israelis and Americans between (acceptable) Fatah “moderates” and (unacceptable) Hamas “extremists” is a recipe for continuing deadlock.

The problem of Palestinian disunity is reinforced by the very pronounced rightward shift of the centre of gravity of Israel’s polity since the early years of the Oslo process. This shift is exemplified among many other developments by the progression from Shimon Peres to Tzipi Livni and then to Avigdor Lieberman in Israel’s foreign ministry. As for Binyamin Netanyahu, it remains to be established whether he has evolved since his previous term as Israel’s prime minister (1996–99), when he was privately described by a British ambassador to Tel Aviv as “a drunk who lurches from one lamp-post to the next.” Sixteen summers ago, it seemed feasible that Rabin and Arafat – both towering figures amongst their own peoples – would be able to deliver a lasting Israeli–Palestinian rapprochement. Harbouring such hopes with Netanyahu and Abu Mazen – lightweights presiding over deeply factionalised polities – would stretch the imagination of a fantasist. The demoralisation and disarray on the Israeli left looks unlikely to abate in the near future, and the appearance of Marwan Barghouti as a Palestinian Gerry Adams remains just a gleam on the horizon.

The geopolitics of the wider region is also challenging. The Israel–Syria antagonism cannot be mended without a resolution of the Golan Heights issue. Lebanon’s internal equilibrium is fragile, and the summer 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel a recent, ominous memory. The paranoia – partly feigned but partly real – among Israel’s political and security establishments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions is an additional source of tension and intransigence. The seriousness of the “Iran factor” has been aggravated by Iran’s internal, and unresolved, turmoil since the disputed presidential election of June 2009. The image of Iranian aid ships attempting to run Israel’s Gaza blockade is exactly the kind of picture the world’s television screens can do without.

“Only a dispassionate, fair and impartial arbiter,” according to the scholar Rashid Khalidi, “can help bring the two sides to mutually acceptable terms.” He believes that “if there is to be peace between Palestinians and Israelis the United States must begin to act in this fashion, or it must allow another [third] party to do so.”

There is clearly no plausible third party other than the United States that could possibly play a substantive role to disentangle this stalemate. At the same time, the limits to American influence with Israel became apparent in March 2010, when the United States fired a calculated – if only verbal – warning shot across Israel’s bows after an Israeli announcement of further housing for Israelis in East Jerusalem coincided with Vice-President Biden’s visit to the Jewish state and the West Bank, and the Israeli government reacted in the manner of a cornered bulldog. Will George Mitchell, the US special envoy for the Middle East – a far bigger brief than the one he creditably handled in the second half of the 1990s as the US special envoy for Northern Ireland – be able to make a difference? Can the Obama administration, disengaging from Iraq but bogged down in Afghanistan, rise to the challenge? Time will surely tell, but the portents are not promising. •

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