Will the war between Hamas and the Israeli military provoke a deepening of an internecine conflict fuelled on both sides by religious and ideological extremism, or is there a glimmer of hope that it might it be a turning point towards a better future?
Two minor episodes within 48 hours of the ceasefire which last week ended Israel’s conflagration with Hamas illustrate the fork in the road to which the most devastating military onslaught on Gaza since 2014 has brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After most of the worshippers had quietly left Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque after Friday prayers, armed Israeli police clashed once again with stone-throwing young Palestinians who had remained outside on the plaza, raising their national flags and singing pro-Hamas songs. It still isn’t clear how the violence started, and it was much briefer than the confrontation which a fortnight earlier had helped to ignite 12 days of warfare, leaving 245 Gazan Palestinians and 12 Israelis dead. But when he failed to mention the Gaza casualties in his weekly homily, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein, had been shouted down by worshippers, who angrily accused him of being a stooge of the unpopular Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Then in Tel Aviv the next evening, several thousand peaceful demonstrators heard calls for cross-community partnership from speakers including Ayman Odeh, secular leader of the predominantly Arab Joint List party in the Knesset, and David Grossman, the country’s most celebrated living novelist, whose son was killed in the Second Lebanon War in 2006 during his military service. “We are the hostages of the various extremists,” Grossman told the demonstrators. He urged Israelis to recognise that “the time is over in which our power can force a reality that’s convenient for us and only for us”.