What Does Peace In Gaza Mean?

One of the problems about reading history is that you know what is going to happen next, while the people you are reading about don’t. But they do know a lot of stuff that you don’t. It’s very hard to work out people’s decision making in this context. This isn’t a problem that troubles us much day to day. But every now and again something happens that feels sort of historic, and we have the same sort of problem working out what its significance is.

I have just got in from a drive where I heard on the radio news that aid was beginning to go into the Gaza strip where the population has been starved for the last couple of months. There seems to be some kind of relenting of the Israeli military operation. I don’t know if this is going to stick – the fighting, or rather the killing given that the population of Gaza is unarmed, might resume. I don’t know what the state of the Gazans is given that reporting is limited and there are no reliable figures of even estimates of the levels of death, damage and injury. But nonetheless it is clearly going to go down as a big event and is likely to be referred to for years to come and will influence how people think about the political setup in the middle east.

So what is going on in the minds of the various actors at this point. The Israelis have had the problem since they decided to attack Gaza that they had to end it at some point. This was always going to be difficult for them. The way they have prosecuted the war has made it especially so. When they stop military operations, peace will be restored. There is no way for it not to instantly become obvious that they are the ones responsible for how long it has continued. Israel was never seriously threatened by Hamas, but Hamas still exists. I imagine that the publicity has helped with their recruiting and fundraising. All the bloodshed has not made Israel even slightly more secure.

I imagine that Hamas are as surprised by the ferocity of the Israeli reaction as the rest of us. But they have achieved their goal. The biggest threat to them is Israel becoming a normal country that is fully accepted by the rest of the world. Israel had been making good progress on that. By luring them into distinctly abnormal behaviour, Hamas have scored a strategic victory – albeit it one whose cost is almost too high to comprehend. But they no doubt would regard even this as preferable to the gradual extinction of the Palestinian nation under occupation.

As to the rest of the world, it’s always easier to ignore other people’s problems. That’s certainly my preferred course of action. I’ve been aware of the injustice that the Palestinians suffered when the Israel colony was set up. Like anyone who has ever looked at the map, I’ve always assumed that it would eventually go the same way as all other colonies have. It has won quite a few wars. But it has to win every one. It has so far had the support of a superpower. But polls show that the war in Gaza has led to a huge fall in public support for Israel. The longer it has gone on, the more support has fallen. Of course, public opinion isn’t the main factor determining government policy. But it is definitely better if policy and opinion line up. And in any case, the circumstances that leads the US to support Israel both consistently and generously will not prevail forever.

The ordinary Gazans are the big losers. They’ve lost most of their infrastructure and a lot of their possessions. I imagine that a lot more lives have been lost than have been reported so far. They remain for now under occupation by Israel. It’s probably not much consolation that the events of the last 659 days have probably hastened the end of Israel.