Who won the Gaza war?

After Donald Trump’s meeting this week with Benjamin
Netanyahu, there are fears that the long-term human tragedy for
Israelis and Palestinians looks set to continue unless the issues at
the root of the conflict are addressed

The regional conflict triggered by the savage 7 October attack by Hamas has certainly resulted in some major regional strategic gains for Israel – but how long-term these will prove to be is not yet clear. Hezbollah has been substantially weakened, as has its poisonous grip on Lebanese politics. Iran’s vulnerabilities have been exposed, including its inability to protect a key regional ally – Bashar al-Assad – when Turkey, sensing the moment of opportunity and in pursuit of its own anti-Kurd agenda, backed the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in its move on Damascus. The Abraham Accord countries – the Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco – although severely embarrassed by the extent of the destruction wrought by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza, have not walked away from their new relationship with Israel.

The display of Israeli intelligence and military capabilities – in particular the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Operation Grim Beeper in Lebanon and Syria followed by the IDF airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – went at least some of the way to restore Israel’s deterrence credentials (damaged as they had been by the 7/10 attack), and will no doubt have impressed those in the Gulf who are interested in a link to Israel in their struggle to combat Iranian attempts to extend Tehran’s influence in the region.

Few would currently suggest that Israel should give up the Golan, whatever the status of those Heights in international law, given the uncertainties about who will be calling the shots in Damascus in the decades ahead. But it is also arguable that, at a more local level, it is Hamas that has emerged as the strategic victor from the latest round of Gaza fighting and the current uneasy ceasefire deal. Just by surviving this long – despite the loss of figures such as Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar – Hamas has shown that it can successfully challenge the Israeli state’s military might. It has demonstrated that it cannot be “eliminated”, however much the Israeli government might have wished otherwise. It has further sidelined Fatah and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, and gained important support in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and elsewhere, particularly – and dangerously – in Jordan; it has reignited support on the Arab street for the Palestinian cause; and it has succeeded in kicking a possible IsraeliSaudi normalisation deal into touch, at least for the moment.

By securing the release of several hundred Palestinian prisoners which the ineffective Mahmoud Abbas could never have dreamed of negotiating by peaceful means, Hamas has shown that violence works. The latest round of fighting has exposed the depth of the tensions and contradictions in Israeli society as well, while spotlighting the limits to the support for Israel in western countries (and even, to a degree, in the US). It also highlights the persistence of dark antisemitic shadows in those societies, although the basic problem Israel faces is that a growing proportion of western opinion does not accept its claim to be the frontline of democratic values as long as it remains an occupying power, however complex the background to that occupation and however much Israelis may argue that it is the Palestinian side which has said “No” every time a deal has been on the table. And if Hamas – whatever some of its spokesmen may say and the ambiguous wording of its 2017 charter – does have a long-term agenda to destroy Israel, then it has made a step in this direction by putting a further nail in the coffin of a two-state solution.

The peace camp in Israel has been effectively marginalised, with many on the left in Israeli society now asking themselves if a Palestinian state is such a good idea: after all, what if such a state in the West Bank (and even East Jerusalem) were to elect a Hamas government?

Netanyahu has a case to answer

Israel’s mission impossible

Of course, much depends now on what happens next, not just in terms of whether the fragile ceasefire agreement will hold but on what the predictably unpredictable President Trump will want to do in the longer term and on whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will hold out for a meaningful Israeli-Palestinian political process as the price for any movement towards normalisation. What is intriguingly clear is that it was pressure from the new Trump team – albeit working closely with their outgoing Biden administration counterparts – that persuaded Netanyahu to accept what looks basically the same deal as has long been on offer.

Why? Is Trump promising Bibi that the quid pro quo will be Washington turning a blind eye to settler violence (he has, after all, now lifted US sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers) or even to an Israeli annexation of the West Bank? Or that the US will now use its best efforts to secure Israeli-Saudi normalisation (which would have to be separate from the Abraham Accords, given that the Saudis would not join a grouping with such a strong Emirati label)? Or firm US action to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, or at least ensure it never results in a successful bomb? Or the undertaking to press Egypt and Jordan, and other Arab states, to take in Palestinians now living in what Trump has described as a “demolition site”? Floating such a proposal has re-aroused Palestinian fears that the Israeli – and perhaps now the US – agenda remains a repeat of the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”) when many Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in the war that followed the birth of the State of Israel, adding to the trauma caused by the scale of the IDF offensive on and in Gaza.

At the same time, the atrocities of 7 October reawakened traumatic memories of the Shoah among Israeli Jews and Jews worldwide, stoking deep-rooted fears that Palestinians and the Arab world generally still harbour hopes of expunging the Jewish presence between the river (Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean). Both sides are locked in victimhood narratives which have their roots in both deep and more recent history. But the proposal to relocate a large number of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan is strategically incomprehensible. It would risk destabilising the two countries with the longest history of relations with Israel: the Egyptians have quite enough problems with the Muslim brotherhood (of which Hamas was an outgrowth), even if they would like a large slice of Gaza reconstruction contracts as life support for their ailing economy; and Jordan’s government has long worried that the Israelis see their country as the future Palestinian state, believing too that neither the Israelis nor the West generally have given the Jordanians the credit they deserve for their security cooperation with Israel and their long-time stabilising role in the region.

Trump however returned to this idea when he met Netanyahu in Washington this week – the latter becoming the first foreign leader to be received in the White House by Trump in his second term – adding the wholly unrealistic idea that US could take over Gaza and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Whatever happens next, I remain worried that the long-term human tragedy looks set to continue, although I hope that if the agreed pause holds (I find it difficult to imagine we shall get beyond a patchy phase one) an intelligent effort will now be made to address the core issues rather than simply to stick plasters on the problem until the next round of fighting, even if the ceasefire deal says nothing on this front.

If there is to be any significant effort to resolve the long-running Israeli-Palestinian issue, I believe the Saudis hold the key, on the basis of what would have to be an updated version of the 2003 Saudi-born Arab Peace Initiative underpinned by intelligent and coherent international support. But it would need huge pressure from the US to persuade the Israelis down such a track, and it is almost unimaginable without a change of Israeli government. There is, as previously noted, very little appetite in Israel to contemplate a Palestinian state, and many will argue that there is no need to do so given that for the moment at least the existential threat from Hezbollah and Iran is significantly diminished. Why try to tackle the more subtle existential threat represented by the Palestinian issue, with the risk that doing so might tear Israeli society apart?

Many Israelis have concluded that all they can hope to do is to continue to live day by day, without thinking too far ahead. It’s an approach that has served them well enough since the start of the Zionist project. “First we live and then we see,” the Jewish saying goes. Moreover, a growing number of commentators are reaching the view I have long and reluctantly held – that while it might once have met the needs of two valid nationalist movements, the window for the two-state solution closed some time ago, given inter alia the political trends and fault-lines in both societies and the scale of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with the weight the settler community now has in the Israeli political landscape. So unless there is some radical fresh thinking, the most likely scenario is that we shall continue to see the gradual consolidation of a “one state space” (not “solution”) between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, where the issue will indeed become the apartheid one, and with no guarantee that it will be either stable or sustainable.

No quarter in Jerusalem

The ugly sisters

The long list of questions about the way ahead includes what will now happen on the Palestinian political front. The continuing grip by Hamas on Gaza looks firm even if there were reports during the fighting of at least some Gazans protesting at Hamas’ failure to foresee how Israel would react to the 7 October attack. But I doubt – if the ceasefire deal holds – we will see any significant body of opinion emerge in Gaza critical of Hamas for bringing such destruction down on the heads of the occupants of the Strip, although it will be interesting to see whether Hamas might be ready to allow a more internationally acceptable figure, such as UAE-backed Mohammed Dahlan, to play some kind of frontman role in Gaza. Some in Israel may think that in “out-crazying” Hamas by the massive scale of IDF action, Israel has at least ensured that Hamas will think twice before launching a similar offensive. Should the UK and the EU now line up to pour money into the reconstruction of Gaza? An international conference looking for such pledges is inevitable, if the ceasefire holds.

It would surely be madness to put any taxpayers’ money into Gaza reconstruction unless there were some kind of cast-iron link to a wider political process – and what on earth could that be? I note too that the ceasefire deal says nothing about the deployment of any kind of international force to oversee it. Were that possibility to be on the table, the government should hesitate before offering to deploy any British troops on such a mission. Bitter experience suggests that even when such forces are welcome on day one, by day two they are everybody’s target … 

Sir Tom Phillips is a former British diplomat who served as ambassador to Israel from 2006-10 and as ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 2010-12. He was Commandant of the UK’s Royal College of Defence Studies from 2014-18.