We may think we have been here before, but we haven’t. The images of escalation are the same: exhaust tracing through Israeli skies; Gazans frantically picking through rubble; Israelis glued to their televisions, reduced to observers of spectacle, some poised to run for shelter but most affecting readiness, protected by rocket science and probability, fascinated by the deadpan proficiency of military officials whose mission may confuse them but to whom they suppose they owe their lives.
And the circular ultimatums are the same, as are the grim tallies that supposedly establish advantage: we stop bombing if you stop launching, we stop launching if you stop laying siege, we stop the siege if you give up your missiles, we can’t give them up as long as you occupy us and have the means to bomb us. As in 2008, the I.D.F. is prepared for a ground invasion. About fifteen hundred Hamas targets have been hit by Israel, more than five hundred largely homemade Qassam missiles have been launched by Hamas, and more than two hundred and twenty Palestinians have been killed. Just since yesterday morning, more than a hundred rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel, the vast majority intercepted by the country’s Iron Dome defense system. One Israeli man was killed at the border. The fresher grievances turn the older ones vague: three hitchhiking Israeli teens were kidnapped, two protesting Palestinian youths were shot dead two weeks before, there was a revenge murder by a rogue group of Israeli fanatics—you can unspool this vendetta back to the Balfour Declaration, in 1917.
Yesterday morning promised a break in the cycle, but this, too, seemed merely familiar. At Secretary of State John Kerry’s urging, the Israeli government announced that it had accepted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s terms for a ceasefire, which looked a great deal like the terms offered by President Mohamed Morsi in 2012, which the Israeli government accepted at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s urging. Both sides, according to the latest Egyptian terms, would stop their attacks; indirect talks, to be held in Cairo, would take up opening Gaza crossings to Egypt, though the agenda for such talks is vague; and Hamas would restrain underground groups like Islamic Jihad. Again, Hamas would seem to have achieved nothing for the Palestinian lives lost, which is why it rejected the deal and why Israeli planes resumed bombing.
Familiar, finally, is the posturing and the doublespeak, Hamas’s Big Lie countered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s half-truths. A senior Hamas official told Haaretz, “When Israel started operating against our people, some decided it was time to act and show that we are one people and one nation that must defend our people in the West Bank.” As if Hamas defends its people by provoking luridly photogenic attacks on Gazans; as if launching Iranian-made missiles, acquired through its Sinai tunnels, does not appear to justify the Israeli siege that Hamas says it is trying to break; as if Hamas has not consolidated an occupation regime of its own, plunging Gaza into a parochial horror in which almost ninety per cent of adults live in poverty.
“The difference between us is simple,” Netanyahu says. “We develop defensive systems against missiles in order to protect our civilians, and they use their civilians to protect their missiles.” That’s a good line, and even a true one. But it’s also true that the Israeli government knew the kidnapped teens were almost certainly dead when, in an alleged desperate effort to save them, it began a crackdown that resulted in hundreds of Hamas supporters being thrown in prison. More plausibly, it took this opportunity to crush Hamas as a political force. Netanyahu and Israeli military tacticians openly consider all homes of known Hamas officials or fighters to be part of Hamas “infrastructure.” Bombing these homes every few years—“mowing the lawn,” as one commander put it before earlier Gaza operations—demonstrates that Israel will not shrink from inflicting hundreds of random civilian casualties, through which it hopes to discredit Hamas. If you don’t think this is a war crime, talk to your Palestinian friends.
Everything about this violence seems familiar, yet imagining an end to it is more difficult than before. Another ceasefire may well be imminent—if there isn’t a ground invasion instead—just a matter of the I.D.F. prompting Gazan fury against Hamas with bloody aerial attacks. But Gazan fury is even greater, obviously, against Israeli bombers. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert once told me that he launched his 2008 Gaza operation in part to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, with whom he was advancing two-state negotiations. But Hamas’s military loss is not Abbas’s political gain, not since the Kerry-led peace process was “paused.” Abbas made a last-ditch effort to outmaneuver Hamas, impoverished since Morsi’s fall, by forcing it to acquiesce to a unity government of technocrats. (Revealingly, one of Hamas’s current ceasefire demands is payment for the forty thousand people who work for its government in Gaza.) Now Hamas threatens to reclaim national leadership from Abbas simply by remaining standing if and when the ceasefire comes.
If Hamas is left standing, Netanyahu loses, too. His right flank may secretly welcome the discrediting of the man whose reciprocal ideas for a Palestinian state threaten the settlement project and the consolidation of Greater Israel. Netanyahu unsurprisingly declared that Hamas missiles prove that Israel could never surrender control of the West Bank, though Abbas has offered security coöperation that would make the placement of missiles there virtually impossible. But a Channel Two poll shows that fifty-three per cent of Israelis oppose a ceasefire. Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s Foreign Minister and erstwhile partner, is cynically clamoring for an invasion to bring down Hamas entirely, playing the part Netanyahu did when Olmert, who is now preparing to appeal a six-year prison sentence, was calling the shots.
Olmert told me that his Gaza operation was an attempt to change the strategic dynamic, to retake the southern Philadelphi corridor—the strip of land between Gaza and Egypt—and destroy the tunnels that Hamas uses to smuggle missiles (or their components). It was left unfinished because the price in Palestinian lives grew too high for the world to tolerate. Netanyahu has said that “no international pressure will prevent us from acting with all force against a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy us.” But the corridor, Netanyahu must know, abuts heavily populated neighborhoods, and a presence there would make Israeli soldiers sitting ducks. You go in, spill blood, and there is no clear way to exit a fight to the finish. This is why the I.D.F. seems poised to attack the north. (Abbas, still straining to assert leadership, has reportedly offered Sisi a large contingent of troops from the Palestinian Authority to police the corridor, which could help open the border, and Netanyahu has not refused him.)
Because so much is familiar, tragically, each side is being pulled into a spiralling war in a region that is more explosive than it was just a couple of years ago. For Hamas, it is do or die. Netanyahu feels unprecedented pressure to not allow the familiar conditions that prompted this round to lay the ground for the next. One can only hope he sees that Israel’s problem is no longer just Ban Ki-moon and CNN. Since 2012, the streets of the West Bank have grown more volatile; a new generation, as distrustful of the two-state peace process as Israeli rightists, has come of age. Jerusalem is witnessing mob violence on both sides of its divide. Israel cannot bomb civilians and expect that students in Hebron and Ramallah will only vent their fury on Facebook. Bassem Khoury, a Palestinian entrepreneur and former economics minister, wrote to me this morning that the pressure on Abbas to sign the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, pushing Israeli leaders toward facing the sanctions of international law, has become irresistible. Wherever Abbas goes, Khoury writes, “cries of ‘either sign or leave’ are being heard amongst the disgruntled, particularly the youth.”
If the West Bank explodes, Israeli Arab cities could, too, as ordinarily calm places like Umm al-Fahm and Tira did last week. In the absence of a credible peace process, which Netanyahu has preëmpted, the consequence of this war will be, in effect, the consolidation of a Jewish state in which the Arab minority will stop imagining a place for itself. And how long will Hezbollah stay out of the fray? On Friday, two missiles were launched from Lebanon. The Israeli Air Force bombed the Syrian Golan Heights.
Another grave danger is Jordan. The country’s state apparatus—army, police, teachers, bureaucrats—is dominated by members of Bedouin clans loyal to Abdullah, the Hashemite king. They number about two million. It has made a social contract with a civil society dominated by roughly three million Palestinians, eighty per cent of bustling Amman. This includes a wealthy bourgeoisie but also two million people living in bands of shabby housing around Amman, where Islamist ideas have taken hold. So there is a new Islamist state on Jordan’s eastern border (which is porous) with an incipient Islamist movement at its heart. If Netanyahu thinks he can quash a new Palestinian uprising without forcing King Abdullah to repudiate Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel, he is mistaken. Imagine the quicksand Abdullah would be on as he tried to put down demonstrations against it.
What the Obama Administration seems unable to grasp, or finds inconvenient to admit, is that the peace process cannot just be paused; to say that the parties to the conflict must want peace more than Americans is to condemn them to leaders who, in the short run, benefit from conflict, and hand Americans, and everyone else, an insufferable future. Obama reiterated, this week, that the status quo is unsustainable. But what is he prepared to do about it, other than offer Kerry as a mediator? Kerry must persist in demanding a ceasefire, of course—but, if he gets one, he must seize the moment to finally publish an American plan for a larger peace.
Such a plan, endorsed by all world powers, can at least temporarily redeem Abbas’s leadership by giving hope—what Obama has called a “horizon”—to young Palestinians who, watching Gaza but not only Gaza, are thinking apocalyptically. Netanyahu says he will stop the operation when he can be assured of “quiet,” which sounds reasonable enough. But it is morally reckless to think that peace is the same thing as quiet, which can be purchased, if only temporarily, with intimidation.
Photograph: Abed Sha’at/Reuters
