The Israel-Hamas zero-sum war will have no winners

The argument that any concessions look like weakness only leads to more war. There can be no half measures this time.

I have been following events in Israel and Palestine for some 50 years, most of the life of the State of Israel, from growing up in north Manchester close to the Jewish community there, a Parliamentary and Ministerial career, and now working with NGOs and think tanks – all involving many visits. Much of that time has been suffused with dashed optimism, hoping that the root of so much conflict in the region would finally be resolved, that the various notorious dates and places associated with war, violence or failed negotiations might be superseded by a successful concluding event.

No diplomat ever lost face by intimating that, however bad things looked at any particular point in the unending conflict, they could always get worse. Indeed, as I write, embassies are busy urging evacuation of their nationals from Lebanon, as the Middle East awaits the next phase of retaliation – or worse – following the recent assassinations in Beirut and Tehran. Hopes are pinned again on diplomatic efforts to prevent escalation by agreeing the ceasefire deal to see hostages returned and Israeli troops withdrawn, but at any moment another incident could derail negotiations and plunge the region into something even worse than the last ten months.

So, it seems almost perverse to make a case that looks to suggest anything at all positive might emerge from the catastrophe which has engulfed Israel and Gaza, in the aftermath of the atrocities of 7 October, the Israeli reprisals which followed, and the context in which both are set.

But we must make such a case. Firstly, we are where we are because of the failures of the past, the moments in negotiations when things got “too difficult”, and efforts related to a peace process ended.

Secondly, we must have reached the end of the “eye for an eye” doctrine. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been lectured that it was a dangerous neighbourhood, that any concessions looked like weakness, all as a prelude to yet more actions and retaliations which have delivered precisely what? A militarised region which engulfs its young people in conflict on one side or the other, teaches them to hate each other and promises its mothers more anguish and suffering to pass on to the next generation.

So I am with those who believe not just that the current events are so awful that they must, this time, be the final chapter but that there are some grounds for thinking that time and opportunity now exist to deliver what the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh hoped for recently in the New Statesman – not just a ceasefire or truce, but a “comprehensive resolution to the century old conflict”.

No one believes that there is any return to 6 October. There had existed a false status quo which had sought to marginalise the Palestinian issue in many capitals over recent years, but it was already peeling away. The Occupied West Bank, which had seen a significant rise in Palestinian deaths and arrests in the past two years, is seething, with the violent and deadly attack by settlers in Jit just the latest rampage directed towards Palestinian villages. And East Jerusalem is tense: from the threat of more Palestinian house demolitions now that the power to execute such decisions was granted to far right minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir on 25 July, to continued fears that the precarious religious agreement governing the Al Aqsa compound is endangered by Israeli radical extremists, whose latest incursion into the area on 13 August was condemned even by the US State Dept as “unacceptable”.

The scale of destruction in Gaza is also such that no billion-dollar reconstruction is possible without some guarantee that it will not happen again in a few years. Papering over the conflict is therefore unthinkable as an outcome.

On the positive side, if the economic future of the Middle East is to be realised, in the form of the many new visions being presented around the Gulf and beyond, and if Israel is to be part of it as envisaged by the Abraham Accords and continuing discussions between it and Saudi Arabia suggest, a regional conflict would be catastrophic. This realisation led to efforts in previous couple of years to de-escalate the area’s tensions, as a number of Gulf states, ignoring Washington, reinstated their diplomatic links with Iran, but without so far resolving the unanswered question of what really to do with a state involved in so much of the instability caused by their proxy armies. That question cannot be avoided for long.

The attack on 7 October derailed the efforts to forge a new Middle East. It cannot be overstated what a pivotal and polarising moment that and the following ten months have been on Arab public opinion, where to the consternation of regional leaders, the only winners have been Iran’s so-called axis of resistance to Israel, and where the context of decades of occupation and seeming double standards of the West has been articulated as never before. It would be a mistake to brush these sentiments aside as in the patronising “Arab Street” jibe of the past, of a people angry but quickly distracted.

The renewed efforts to redefine the issue in international courts cannot be unrelated, and will force countries like the UK, correctly, to make decisions that challenge Israel’s relative impunity, as over its settlement policy, support an international rule of law, and resist efforts by Israel to define all criticism as essentially “anti-Semitic”. Paradoxically, Israel will be stronger from this, seen as accountable where it had not been, and charges of double standards will be harder to maintain. Gaza has changed everything

But nor must the trauma to Israel caused by the horror of 7 October,and still desperately raw, be brushed aside either. The turmoil surrounding Israel’s Prime Minister and government – the colossal failure of their political, military and security policy in relation to Palestine exposed, the doubt over the priority of recovering the hostages so wickedly taken and the realisation from its own experts that Netanyahu’s policy of destroying Hamas militarily and ideologically was unachievable – all have sparked calls that a different Israel must emerge from this catastrophe.

So this time, no half measures, and no resiling from the difficult negotiations to come. A safe and secure Israel, no ambiguity from Arab states to ending an ideology committed to Israel’s destruction, in return for ending the Occupation and committing to Palestinian statehood. It is commitment to this political horizon which is desperately needed and may avoid further catastrophe beyond all we have yet seen.