Opinion What Gaza needs
Moving from fragile truce to long-term settlement will require Netanyahu to summon sincerity and vision.
Moving from fragile truce to long-term settlement will require Netanyahu to summon sincerity and vision.
Every renewal of the cycle of violence involving Israel and the two Palestinian territories of Gaza and West Bank brings on a dispiriting deja vu. The current chapter began with the killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, allegedly by members of Hamas, that led to the arrest of several Palestinians and the murder of a young Palestinian. This triggered the barrage of rockets that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have been launching at Israel from Gaza, which in turn brought on extensive strikes by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) that have left more than 200 dead in the Gaza Strip, most of them civilians. The collapse of the Egypt-brokered ceasefire on Tuesday — which the Israeli cabinet accepted but Hamas didn’t — has made a speedy return to at least the uneasy truce that ended the “mini-war” of 2012 now look difficult.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza by force since the violent fallout with rival Fatah in 2007, has a track record of indiscriminately firing rockets at Israeli cities and stockpiling weapons in densely populated civilian areas that has long ceased to surprise. But this could be the moment for Israel to face up to the larger question: how long does it expect to continue this chain of violence that neither secures Israelis nor delivers a state to the Palestinians? Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has stared down his cabinet colleagues from the far-right arguing for escalation and a reoccupation of Gaza. But does he have a plan to put the two conflict-ridden peoples back on the road to peace? Each new IDF assault revives Hamas, whose influence on Gaza’s population was weakening because of its inability to govern and Egypt’s closure of the tunnels that allowed goods and weapons to be smuggled in.
Israel cannot solve this conundrum without going the extra mile to resume direct talks with the Palestinian leadership. Israel’s hard-won peace and economic growth once more look vulnerable. And the IDF’s overwhelming force doesn’t help Israel’s diplomatic case. Netanyahu has a narrow window before Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s position is completely untenable. The ball is in his court. He must move from this sequence of fragile truces to a settlement that lasts.
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