It is not over, because it is never over.
However, there is at least hope for a pause. After less than a fortnight, in which nearly 250 people have been killed, Hamas and Israel late on Thursday agreed to hold their fire, each crafting a victory story to tell the world and themselves.
For Hamas’ leaders and fighters, the narrative is simple enough. Despite being caged in a tiny terrain, and with a fraction of their foe’s resources, they managed to surprise the enemy and strike at its civilian heart. They unleashed a torrent of missiles, more sophisticated than what they previously had, some of them breaching Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and landing not only on Israel’s peripheral towns, but also its central city of Tel Aviv.
Hamas can claim, ahead of its Fatah rivals in the West Bank, to be the guardian of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. Additionally, it watched with satisfaction as a hole was ripped in Israel’s social fabric, with the country’s Jewish and Arab citizens attacking each other on streets they once shared.
Israel’s generals are saying that Operation Guardian of the Walls degraded Hamas’ military capacity, that most of those killed were Hamas fighters, and that more has been done in the past 10 days than the equivalent offensives of 2009, 2012 and 2014 combined.
However, they are not fooling anyone. Israel knows that it has endured a strategic disaster, the “most failed and pointless border war” in its history, said Aluf Benn, editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The country did not see the Hamas attack coming, and its vulnerability under fire has likely been noted by Hezbollah to the north, which holds a much more powerful arsenal, and by Hezbollah’s patron in Tehran.
Still, the bigger failings predate and go beyond this latest eruption. Israel told itself all was quiet on the Gaza front. More than that, it thought it had stilled the Palestinian issue altogether, convinced that its “Abraham accords” with Gulf states and others had made the Palestinians all but irrelevant. It has now seen the folly of that delusion.
Which points to the other strategic danger for Israel: It could presume that the international attention span is short and that people might soon scroll on to the next big issue.
However, plenty of credible observers wonder if a turning point was reached this last fortnight in the way the Israel-Palestine conflict is perceived around the world and especially in the West. For a loud and influential segment of opinion, it is being reframed not as a national conflict of competing claims, but as a straightforward matter of racial justice. Note the placards at last weekend’s demonstration in London: “Palestine Can’t Breathe” and “Palestinian Lives Matter.”
Framed that way, #FreePalestine could be on its way to joining #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter as an issue that a global generation regards as of paramount importance, championed not just by politicians, but by the leading lights of popular culture, from athletes to singers to fashion influencers with millions of followers. The clashes between Jews and Arabs inside Israel reinforce that reading, with incidents of police brutality or discrimination in the criminal justice system that seem to map neatly onto the BLM template.
Those with a strong connection to Israel scratch their heads at this, wondering why, of all the appalling things going on in the world, this is the one that brings huge crowds on to the streets of European capitals, filling up social media timelines.
They note that people who have barely stirred at the detention of 1 million Uighur Muslims in China; who have not so much as reacted to a tweet about the tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims murdered by Myanmar; who are rarely agitated by the 200,000 civilians butchered in Syria or by the 130,000 killed in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen; and who might be wholly unaware of the 52,000 estimated to have been killed in the Ethiopian-Tigray conflict since November last year, have nevertheless been filled with fury by events in Gaza.
Much of the explanation is that the Israel-Palestine conflict is simply more visible, with media coverage on a scale unmatched by any of those other catastrophes. When 6,700 Rohingya Muslims were killed in a single month, the major broadcasters did not fly out their presenters to anchor coverage on the spot or nearby. There are no hourly updates of the death toll in Ethiopia, and few interviews with or photographs of the grieving relatives of Yemen.
A former Associated Press (AP) reporter in Jerusalem has written that he was one of more than 40 staff journalists covering Israel-Palestine, which was then “significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.”
The effect, he wrote, signals to readers that Israel-Palestine is “the most important story on Earth” — and, by implication, that the wrongdoing there is worse than anything else on the planet.
You could fill many doctoral dissertations asking what explains this intensity of focus. It cannot be the number of deaths, because significantly greater numbers have been killed in those other places. It cannot be the fact that Israel is a favored Western ally; so is Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it is simply that the Israeli occupation has endured for 54 years, although Turkey, a NATO member, has waged a war on the Kurds nearly as long.
In a way, the search for an explanation is secondary. More important are the consequences. Jewish communities know they must brace themselves every time violence erupts. This latest episode brought a sixfold increase in reports of antisemitic incidents in the UK, the Community Security Trust said. Of course, most pro-Palestinian campaigners stress that they have no grievance against diaspora Jews. Yet the fervor stirred up by this conflict can get so hot that it is not always easy to control.
As for Israel, for its leaders to complain about the scrutiny they receive is, as the old line has it, like a sailor complaining about the sea. Instead, they need to adjust to the fact that they could soon face a new strategic reality in which the politics of their closest ally, the US, is changing. No less striking than US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez branding Israel an “apartheid state” was this week’s move by longtime pro-Israel Democrats in Congress to delay the transfer of an arms package to Israel.
At the moment, it is easy to dismiss this as a passing fad — even if Capitol Hill in the US might be shifting, plenty of continental European politicians are heading in the opposite direction, becoming more, not less, sympathetic to Israel.
However, Israel should read the warning signs. Those of us who have long condemned the occupation always asserted that if Israel did not do the right thing and end it, the country would eventually be branded a pariah state. If the past two weeks are anything to go by, that day is getting closer.
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