End-Chapter for Gaza’s War?

TWO QUOTATIONS JUMPED OUT STARKLY from this week’s news. They’re both condensed, highly concentrated summations of Israel’s war in Gaza – and they came from some notably hard-headed authorities.

First I’ll cite one of them: “Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.”  This assessment was made by a group of 600 former Israeli security officials, including military, governmental and spy-agency leaders, who chose to transmit their view in a letter sent, remarkably enough, to another country’s leader, Donald J Trump.  

Next, a similar assessment came from a current office-holder, no less than the Israel Defense Force’s own Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir (left), who said “it is possible to be flexible, and efforts must be made to reach a deal.”   He was speaking to the Israeli Cabinet in what were said to be “closed discussions,”  but his soldierly advice to the politicians was carried verbatim on the country’s Army Radio and in the right-of-center “Times of Israel” newspaper … as well as many other outlets ultimately.

Being flexible … reaching a deal … this is very obviously not Prime Minister Benyamin Netahyahu’s stance (below right). He’s very obviously pushing ahead in his determination to ramp up the military onslaught in order to achieve a complete, what he’s called total defeat of Hamas. NBC News has called the plan an occupation, and so has the BBC and many Israeli media. We should note that RE-occupation would be a more accurate term, since Israel occupied the entire Gaza Strip once before, only to give it up in 2005 as strategically unsustainable. That determination now on Netanyahu’s part to further escalate the 22-month war is so very clear,  even while he has been assuring  individual hostage families that efforts to return all the hostages through negotiation will continue “constantly and relentlessly".

The overarching hostage support group, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents a vast majority of the families, is simply not convinced -- and has said that Netanyahu, with his dedication to a military-only solution is “leading Israel - and the hostages - toward doom." Against a background of massive street protests against intensifying the military effort, the Forum issued an accusatory statement:

“Netanyahu is preparing the biggest deception. Repeated talk of rescuing the captives - while expanding the war - is nothing but public manipulation.”

The Forum’s statement went on with a damning prediction, saying: “Expanding the war puts the captives — already at immediate risk of death — in even greater danger. They will not survive another round of prolonged hell.

As international observers we are of course confronted with having to assess competing propaganda. Propaganda in wartime is rarely anything else but ugly, but the opposing juxtaposition we see now -- emaciated Israeli hostages on the one side and starving Palestinian children, also emaciated, on the other -- is proving to be especially repellent, even to those of us somewhat accustomed to dealing with highly-charged, emotive imagery and footage.

One very evident shift in the global reaction is the ever-increasing isolation of Israel, as it loses the support of once stalwart allies in the Western world – directly correlated with what UN-partnering agencies have called “the worst case scenario” of outright famine in Gaza, a prospect now registering in full.

Even our United States President, who has fairly consistently backed Netanyahu, has had to acknowledge that there is what he called "real starvation" in Gaza, even after the Prime Minister had insisted that no such starvation existed  –  that it was all pro-Hamas propaganda.

Let’s consider facts as best we can. There’s a long-standing international initiative with the initials IPC – it’s essentially a broad partnership of agencies, including UN bodies but also other independent food-related organizations (national, regional and global), and it carries the grim specialist responsibility of measuring the gradations of hunger, starvation and famine. The initials come from the arguably over-technical name, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which I got to know only too well during my decades working in and with the United Nations system.  

The IPC has stated that Gaza has been teetering on the brink of famine for two years, but recent developments have, it says, “dramatically worsened” the situation, not least because of what it has called “increasingly stringent blockades” by Israel.  A surprise move this week was Israel’s decision to loosen their blockade in a slightly odd, and very specific way – allowing a return to commercial trading in food and other vital supplies, from Israel. It remains unclear what, if any, effect on the overall hunger situation can possibly result from this involvement of business merchants.  For a start, who or how many among the besieged Gazans have the money to buy such supplies?

It’s fair to say that the videos and photos of Gaza’s starving children have contributed enormously to the major uptick in world support for the Palestinians, including for instance Britain and France now signaling that they’ll officially recognize Palestine as a state, however purely symbolic such gestures might be.  

Getting to a negotiated end of the Gaza War can seem just humanly impossible now. And there are other factors at play, too, that could be forgotten if we adopt a silo-like war correspondent’s or even a diplomatic correspondent’s viewpoint. A big factor is personal, to do with ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu himself. While all the military and political arguing goes on, let’s remind ourselves that this prime minister is being prosecuted, in a long-running trial process, on charges of corruption. Only this week his supporters in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, voted to dismiss the country’s Attorney General, who’s the prosecutor pressing the charges. You don’t have to be deeply cynical to think, as many Israelis do, that Bibi needs this war to go on - for his own political survival, and maybe to just stay out of jail.

HAMAS militants photographed in Khan Younis, Gaza

AND ON THE MOST DEEPLY opposing side, with the Hamas movement itself – what could happen to make them at all willing to resume the ceasefire talks that have gotten so deadlocked?

It may turn out to be far from a purely Israel-Palestine matter. American media as a whole didn’t pay a lot of attention this week to some diplomatically striking news from the Arab League.

All 22 member nations of the League, spanning all of the mid-East and north Africa, joined together in a call on Hamas to both disarm completely and end its rule over the Gaza Strip. Very blunt demands, you’d probably agree.

It’s worth noting, though, that three of those countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt, have exhibited a lot of clout during this war, with active involvement in what talks there have already been. For Qatar in particular to insist that Hamas give up its weapons is certainly worth our attention. This is the country, after all, that hosts Hamas’s offices in its capital Doha – and that is credited with pushing the previous talks in a more Hamas-friendly direction than ever seemed possible to begin with.

It would be ridiculously overoptimistic to think that Hamas would give in to such regional pressure anytime soon, but the pressure is a valuable reminder about the range of differing pressure points in play here, and a reminder that the Middle East is a bigger military and political chessboard than even the horribly attention-compelling charnel-house of Gaza’s hundred-and-forty square-miles.