We were due to get a video message from Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, a Palestinian and an Israeli who work together for peace after both losing relatives in the conflict — Sarah’s brother died of injuries sustained in Israeli custody and Inon’s parents were killed by Hamas on 7 October. But the computer failed. A few men stared at a laptop, balefully tapping a key, until a young, bearded bloke wearing a yarmulke took the mike: “I’m Hoff. I’m the tech guy. I’m an introvert, and not very good at public speaking,” He grinned shyly: “I’m also not a very good tech guy.”

But it was just a glitch, and soon the face of a handsome man in his early fifties, with wiry grey hair, filled the large screen at the end of the room. Mo Husseini, a Palestinian-American, was speaking to Friends of Standing Together, the Melbourne branch of an organisation of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis dedicated to — wait for it — peace in the Middle East.

Founded in 2015, Standing Together stands for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories, peace and independence for both peoples, and “full equality for everyone in this land.” It has 7000 members in Israel, about two-thirds of them Jewish, a third Arab. It’s a small number but membership has more than doubled since October 2023. (It also has 250,000 followers on social media.) Standing Together has collected food and clothing for Gaza residents and protected food trucks entering Gaza from attacks by far-right Israeli groups. Israeli novelist David Grossman,  who has written powerfully about the conflict, has spoken at Standing Together rallies.

Husseini, who lives in Washington State, is a filmmaker, novelist and member of the national launch committee for Friends of Standing Together USA. A piece he published in May 2024, “50 Completely True Things,” got more than half a million reads, perhaps because he found a fresh and funny and heartfelt way to write about a conflict that has nothing fresh or funny about it. Husseini grounds his writing not in the region’s endlessly litigated history and politics but in a principle. Two peoples live on this land and both have a right to live in peace and dignity. Start there.

But starting there is difficult, a point Husseini made right off the bat when he thanked people for coming. “I don’t say that as a pleasantry, I mean it. Being involved with Standing Together when the world is rewarding people for picking a side, for the comfort of tribe, for the dopamine hit of certainty, is a choice that carries a cost,” one that was rarely acknowledged.

Husseini spoke for half an hour without notes and in the strange intimacy of Zoom, which shows every twitching eyebrow or thought crossing a face. Noticing a young boy in the front row, he apologised in advance for a few “swears.” I sensed a man not convinced of his own wisdom but feeling his way, through speech, towards his version of the truth.

“I am a Palestinian,” he began. “I am not the Palestinian. I do not speak for any Palestinians. I can barely speak for myself most days.”

His family, carried across borders “by the shifting winds of history,” migrated from Palestine to Kuwait, where Husseini grew up, then to the United States. Husseini always felt he was from somewhere else, “somewhere you can’t go back to.” Belonging was a kitchen, food, a certain accent, the way his mother said the word, “home.” “Being Palestinian is frankly a shitty gig.” But “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I carry it with pride and love, and a ferocity that sometimes surprises me.”

What profoundly shaped his thought was living in America after 9/11. As a cultural Muslim, with a name that “sounds like the names of the people who flew the planes,” Husseini felt a relentless pressure to make himself understood to people who saw him as dangerous or didn’t see him at all. A pressure to show in every conversation that he was a moderate, to condemn al-Qaeda and bin Laden, to make a “performance of harmlessness that is hard to describe unless you have lived in it.”

It was hardly the worst thing in the world, Husseini said, and he wasn’t asking for sympathy.

Nevertheless, in the looks he got on planes and in theatres, in the random body searches that weren’t random, “I learnt in my body, in my heart, what it feels like when a whole society decides that who you are matters less than your category or tribe or religion… when you stop becoming a person and become the representative of a people.”

That lesson was why he became a writer, and why he joined Standing Together. Because, Husseini said, “that same machinery, that same impulse to condense an entire people into a single dangerous silhouette,” was now being applied to Jews.

He didn’t elaborate much on what he meant, but in a recent piece he wrote of “the way Zionist has become, in some corners, a synonym for Jew… the way criticism of Israeli policy slides, sometimes by accident and sometimes very much on purpose, into something older and uglier.” Speaking to Australians while the royal commission was hearing testimony about the shocking extent of antisemitism in this country, Husseini didn’t need to explain.

Husseini said his listeners often asked him a hard question: how could he as a Palestinian extend understanding to a people that was actively oppressing Palestinians? By talking about Jewish pain alongside Palestinian pain, was he not letting Israel off the hook?

The answer was easy, Husseini said. “I’m not both-sidesing this.” The power was not equal; occupier and occupied were not on the same moral plane. “My anger at what Israel is doing to Palestinians is not diminished by one single degree… I judge the occupation, the settlements, the bombing of hospitals, the taking of land and the uprooting of olive trees, the entire apparatus of domination that has made Palestinian life broadly unliveable for generations.”

But, he said, he refused to take the next step: “that because the Israeli government is doing these things, somehow every Israeli is complicit… somehow all Jewish people are guilty.” Because that was the step that had always been used against Palestinians.

“Activists really need to hear this,” he said. “The people who want you to flatten, who want you to say they are all the same, who want to treat everyone on the other side as a stand in for the worst of the other side. You are handing the Israeli right the narrative it needs: ‘See, they all hate us, there is no partner, the only option is more walls and more bombs.’

“You don’t defeat an unjust system by becoming its mirror image, you defeat injustice by becoming the thing that injustice says is impossible — people from both sides in the same rooms refusing to be what the system needs them to be.”

Lest anyone think his vitriol ran only one way, Husseini took “careful aim” at his own side, because “intellectual honesty is not a buffet where you get to skip issues you don’t like.” The Palestinian leadership’s “corruption, authoritarianism and factional cannibalism” had catastrophically failed its people for decades, Husseini said. Leaders had refused to accept imperfect peace deals that might have saved lives. The Hamas “cult of martyrdom” that “feeds children into a meat grinder and calls it resistance” had gotten the people of Gaza killed in catastrophic numbers.

But he was not here, Husseini said, to weigh Israeli failures against Palestinian failures, misery against misery, who had suffered more — “that exercise itself is the poison, the thing that keeps the conflict locked in place.”

Instead, the path forward required “everyone to look at their own house with the same ruthless clarity that they bring to looking at the other guy’s.” Until that happened, “we are not serious about peace, we are serious about being right — and being right has never in the history of any conflict saved a single life.”

Husseini turned to the role of story-telling, and of Jews, in his life. “Before I had a conversation with a Jewish person, I had lived in Jewish stories: books, films, arts, music. They all did something no political argument could have done. They let me feel in my body what it is like to carry a different people’s history. Not to agree with it but just to understand it.”

It was through stories that Husseini learnt that Jewish people were “not performing their fear. Their fear and trauma is real, it comes from somewhere ancient and it lives in their children in the same way my trauma lives in me. A good story makes flattening impossible… you cannot reduce them to a slogan. You know they are a person.” Even a paragraph that “captures someone mid-scroll” on their phone — “that crack is the beginning of something, everything that happens in rooms like this.”

Husseini took a few questions from the room, then left with an apology and a grin: his son’s last soccer game of the season was about to begin.

A young guitarist, Samantha Levy, stepped up to sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in Arabic — words she said she had learnt from a Palestinian man. An organiser, Abe Schwarz, closed the event by pointing out that Husseini had quoted a line from Anthem, another Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” He asked us to support a project to provide food to Palestinian families in the West Bank displaced by Israeli forces. And if people wanted to stick around, he said, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian and Arab people would be meeting that afternoon in this room to talk about the conflict.

People milled around, moved by Husseini’s talk. I was, too, yet something in me resisted these sweet notes at the end. Were they a balm to try to soothe the unending bitterness of this conflict? We would leave, stirred, with Cohen’s “sacred chord” humming in our heads, when only darkness seemed to lie ahead.

Five days after October 7, 2023, Standing Together signed a statement made by twenty-nine Israeli civil society groups calling for negotiations with Hamas to free the hostages and opposing the war that was about to begin. Dozens of members left the organisation as a result, no doubt feeling its line was too soft given the barbarity of the attacks and the ongoing threat posed by Hamas. At that time the organisation and one of its leaders, Alon-Lee Green, were getting 2000 threatening messages a day, after right-wing groups published their addresses.

And when an Israeli military action freed four hostages in Gaza in 2024, Jewish and Arab leaders of Standing Together struggled to write a joint statement that struck the right balance of joy at their release with pain at the collateral loss of Palestinian life. The organisation’s rule that it presents one united position to the two communities can be hard to uphold.

While Standing Together locates itself proudly on the left, it has few friends among the global left that has so ardently embraced the Palestinian cause. The Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which since its founding in 2005 has sought to ostracise Israel in global forums, called Standing Together a “normalisation outfit that seeks to distract from and whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Speaking on American campuses after 7 October, Alon-Lee Green and another Standing Together leader, Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had the bizarre experience of white student protestors wrapped in keffiyehs telling her she was normalising Israel, and telling him to go back to Poland.

I wondered whether Standing Together’s traditional leftist rhetoric of solidarity, justice and struggle would limit its ability to grow in a country that has shifted sharply to the right since the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. But it is not the only voice calling for a middle way.

On the Palestinian side I’m thinking of Ali Abu Awwad, who founded the Palestinian non-violence movement, Taghyeer (Change), and Samer Sinijlawi, president of the Jerusalem Development Fund. In the diaspora there are the British-Palestinian blogger John Aziz, and in the United States, Ihab Hassan and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

None of these writers is blind to the torment of their people. They’ve lived it. Alkhatib has lost thirty relatives, many to Israeli airstrikes, in the war in Gaza. Awwad and Sinijlawi both spent more than four years in Israeli jails after taking part in the First Intifada. In 2000 Awwad was shot by an Israeli settler while changing a tyre in the West Bank; an Israeli soldier shot his brother dead at a checkpoint. Nevertheless, all three have chosen to work with Israelis in calling for what Sinijlawi, in one of the most moving recent articles I’ve read on the conflict, calls dignity for Palestinians based on security for Israelis.

Such voices exist on the Israeli side — probably more of them — but given how much their people are the underdogs in this conflict, the voices of these Palestinian writers leap off the page. They get a lot of contempt — John Aziz is regularly called an Uncle Tom — and are seen as naive dreamers at best, but they might be not only the bravest but the most practical people in the conflict. They work in the space between millennial fantasies on the right and left: of one supremacist Jewish state and the elimination of the Jewish state. They have their own dream, but they also have a strategy to achieve it, one that looks hopeless… and is the only hope.

Husseini said he wasn’t by nature an optimist. “I’ve spent years writing about a conflict that has not gotten better and in the past two and a half years has gotten unspeakably worse.” Yet he held onto the “stubborn, possibly irrational, delusional” idea that “two peoples have lived before on this land and can again.”

Change would come “person by person, grain of sand by grain of sand” until, when the diplomats finally met to negotiate a final outcome, they would find the foundation for peace already built beneath them. Hope was not a feeling but an action, Husseini said. “It’s rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it.”

We left feeling a sliver of that hope, not a lot but a sliver. I’ll go to another Friends of Standing Together event. Hope to see you there. •

Hiba Qasas from the Geneva-based Principles for Peace Foundation and Gil Murciano from the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies are speaking on the Roadmap to Peace in Sydney on 1 June, Canberra on 2 June and Melbourne on 4 June. Details: New Israel Fund.

The post Person by person, grain of sand by grain of sand appeared first on Inside Story.

Mark Mazower would disagree with that description. As his new book On Antisemitism: A Word in History documents and persuasively explains, experience elsewhere (especially in the United States) suggests that Commissioner Bell risks underestimating the threat the definition itself poses to “social cohesion,” free speech, and academic freedom. Mazower is especially concerned by how the widespread adoption of the IHRA’s formulation has been weaponised to conflate criticism of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people with antisemitism. “How we came to find ourselves in such a quandary,” he writes, “is the question this book tries to answer.”

Unsurprisingly, as a distinguished British-born Jewish historian based at Columbia University, Mazower insists we must view antisemitism in its historical context. The term “has been used to mean different things at different times,” he writes. “Because words do not exist outside time and place, we need to understand them in their setting.”

His observations apply equally to his own book, written in the wake of the political retribution Columbia suffered as a result of its students’ pro-Palestinian encampments provoked by Israel’s Gaza onslaught. After Trump labelled these protests as “antisemitic” and imposed significant financial and legal sanctions on the university, Mazower was forced to ask “What had happened to the concept of antisemitism? A term that began as a way to describe the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights is now used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs.”

On Antisemitism opens with a “historical sketch that looks at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chiefly European political movement” before shifting gears to analyse the origins and spread of a reframed understanding of antisemitism that originated in the 1970s, “largely as a way to rationalise growing criticism of Israel.” In other words, Mazower’s primary focus throughout On Antisemitism is not with “attitudes, symbols, or stereotypes but with political actions, theories, organisations, and outcomes.”

Mazower sees the rise between 1880 and 1914 of antisemitic political movements in Europe — then home to 80 per cent of the world’s Jewish population — as a right-wing response to their increasing civic emancipation. (The prototype for these movements was the German “League of Antisemites,” founded in 1879.) Their success depended “not so much upon persuading people of negative stereotypes about the Jews — these were common currency — but rather in getting them to believe that the Jews were a serious threat to their core social or political concerns.”

While most Jewish people welcomed their new freedoms, some were concerned greater emancipation would not only encourage increased hostility but dilute their own communal and religious solidarity as well. Still others were adherents of Zionism, a new ethno-nationalist movement which argued “freedom for Jews was impossible so long as they lived amid societies that hated them,” proposing instead the creation of their own nation-state in the Holy Land. But this distant prospect had little appeal, especially to those Jews living in Western Europe.

It was the first world war that proved to be a catalyst for a boost to the fortunes of both the Zionists — with British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s fateful pledge to support the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” — and the antisemites, with Hitler’s eventual rise to power in 1933. Nazism was originally a movement against Jewish emancipation, but once Jews were deprived of their freedoms, rights and economic opportunities the push was on to somehow rid Hitler’s ever-expanding Reich of them altogether. By 1945 half the total population of European Jewry had been wiped out, along with the antisemitic architects of their genocide.

The story of antisemitism was transformed after 1948 not only demographically — the US and Israel would supplant Europe as the epicentre of world Jewry — but geopolitically as well. Hence, as Mazower observes, Jewish life around the world would now “be shaped politically by the dynamics within and increasingly between these two poles.” One consequence of this shift was that “the concept of antisemitism acquired new political associations in new settings.”

The three million Jewish migrants entering the US prior to 1945 had immediately enjoyed full civic emancipation and were regarded racially as “whites.” By the 1920s, however, they were enduring both antisemitic prejudice as well as antisemitic ideologies promoted by the likes of industrialist Henry Ford, high-profile Catholic priest Charles Coughlin and various neo-Nazi organisations. Jewish defence organisations emerged in response, among them the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the American Jewish Committee, which were careful to distance themselves from Zionism for fear of being accused of having divided loyalties.

In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, the prevalence of antisemitic rhetoric and restrictions shrank remarkably. Hailing “the virtual end of overt antisemitism” in the US, a director of the ADL observed in 1972 that the postwar decades were a “golden age” in which American Jews enjoyed security and social acceptance to a degree unprecedented in history. This was also, Mazower adds, the period when antisemitism “was not widely seen … as something that could or should be treated separately from other kinds of bigotry or discrimination.”

Likewise, the birth of Israel neither raised suspicions of where American Jews’ loyalties lay nor inspired them to emigrate en masse to the newly created Jewish state. In fact, a number of left-wing American Jewish commentators like William Zukerman were already deeply critical of Israeli Zionists’ violent dispossession of Palestinian Arabs. Attacked by American Zionist organisations as a “self-hating Jew,” Zukerman noted, criticisms of Israel were now being “denounced not only as anti-Israel but as anti-Semitic.” As Mazower notes, “the era in which antisemitism could be discussed without reference to Israel was about to end.”

Nevertheless, there was at this time “an extraordinary tussle for power between the community notables of American Jewry… and the Jewish state and its leaders.” While Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s priority was to win over non-Zionist Jewish leaders, he infuriated them with his repeated calls for American Jews to settle in Israel. Nor were they happy that “Israeli officials had begun the practice… of discussing antisemitic incidents abroad directly with governments over the heads of local Jewish communities, as though it were in fact their primary protector.”

What transformed the relationship between Israel and American Jewry was the Six-Day War of 1967. As one Israeli historian observed, “not only was Zionism ‘Americanised,’ American Jewry became ‘Zionised.’” One contributor to this remarkable turnaround emerged from research undertaken soon afterwards by the American Jewish Committee of a Midwestern Jewish community. Their heightened awareness that the state of Israel — the one good result of the Holocaust — could be destroyed was experienced as a threat to their own security and well-being. This increased vulnerability helped to catalyse American Jewry’s increasingly impassioned political engagement with Israel.

Following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Mazower writes, a group of Third World countries “took up the Palestinian cause in the UN as part of the larger struggle against colonialism” — as did portions of the American left. This anti-Israel commentary inspired the ADL to castigate Americans’ “unwillingness to comprehend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival in the world.” The source of the problem? The radical Left’s support for a “new antisemitism” manifesting itself as hostility to Israel.

Following what was perceived as Israel’s narrow escape from defeat in the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, Mazower notes, “American Jews also started to embrace the idea of the Holocaust not merely as history but as a warning for the future and an integral part of their sense of themselves.” Hence political attacks on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and threats to Israel’s safety “were regarded by more and more American Jews as an attack on themselves.”

From this point onwards the political mobilisation of American Jews accelerated, building up “not only a widely feared lobbying apparatus to enlist politicians in support of Israel, but also a vast, sprawling network of communal philanthropic organisations.” The question was who would wield this power, how would it be deployed, and to what ends.

Beginning in the early 2000s, as Mazower documents, “a number of American Jewish organisations, American policymakers, and Israeli officials began to focus on raising international awareness of antisemitism.” The US got behind this push early. In 2004 Colin Powell announced the creation within the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe of a new bureaucracy to track antisemitic incidents and advise members on new legislation, and Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, including the “vilification of Israel.”

By the end of 2023, twenty-four or more countries had set up similar posts, “creating a new cadre of antisemitism watchdogs… Their emergence had the consequence of splitting antisemitism campaigning from the larger world of antidiscrimination activism.”

The further conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel was ensured when, in 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation, strongly backed by Benjamin Netanyahu, to define Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” despite its significant non-Jewish population. The problem for America’s leading Jewish advocacy groups was that this ethnonationalist reframing of the Israeli constitution threatened “the cherished assumption that Israel could be both Jewish and democratic.” This mattered to many American Jews who, as Mazower reminds us, “tended to be more progressive and liberal” than the leading Jewish advocacy groups, “whose leadership and main donors tended… to show deference to whichever Israeli government was in office.”

Despite its many successes, what the American-Israeli alliance still lacked in its battle against the “new antisemitism” was a clear yet nuanced definition of what exactly antisemitism is — and what it is not. “Was it ethnic prejudice?” asks Mazower. “Was it a singling out of Israel for blame? Were these conceptions related and where was the boundary between them to be drawn? And perhaps the most important question of all: Who got to decide?”

Mazower believes two forces drove the search for and enforcement of a single uniform definition of antisemitism. First, the tracking of antisemitic incidents and enforcement of race-hate crimes required one for use by statisticians and the legal profession. Second, it was important for the dominant advocacy groups to devise a definition that legitimised their preferred meanings of antisemitism and prohibited others.

A suitable definition developed by the American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern was presented around 2016 to an obscure intergovernmental agency, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. As it happened, the IHRA’s subcommittee on antisemitism was chaired by a representative of the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre. (At one time the centre’s list of the world’s top ten antisemites included Ben & Jerry’s founders alongside Hamas and Iran.) After being lobbied by a number of Israeli and American Jewish advocacy groups, the IHRA adopted Stern’s definition of antisemitism in 2016.

The IHRA “working definition” reads as follows.

A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Mazower finds this formulation imprecise and confusing, especially its use of may be, “since a definition generally tells us what something is.” Furthermore, “hatred is not the only and not necessarily even the most important expression of antisemitism.” Unfortunately, the definition’s accompanying examples only confuse things further, because they fail to define the circumstances in which they may (or may not) be considered antisemitic.

In Mazower’s view, there exist far better definitions of antisemitism, including the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism:

Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).

This declaration goes on to define explicitly examples of behaviour or beliefs that are antisemitic and those which are not. For example, it is not antisemitic to support “the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.”

However perverse it may seem, Mazower believes it’s precisely the confusing nature of the IHRA definition that recommended it to those seeking its adoption. “If organisations are told that contravening the IHRA definition will expose them to legal or bureaucratic jeopardy, and if they are unsure what exactly does contravene the definition, they will likely err on the side of caution. It is in this way that the definition threatens intellectual freedom.”

Nevertheless, the IHRA definition has been increasingly adopted by American and European public and private sector organisations in response to unrelenting pressure from both American Jewish advocacy groups and Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism. As of June 2025 more than forty governments had endorsed it, including almost all members of the European Union. The US went one step further in 2023 when Congress passed an antisemitism bill that “explicitly rules out the use of rival definitions.” Meanwhile dozens of American universities and most in Britain have adopted “the IHRA” in one form or another.

For Mazower, one of the most worrying consequences of the widespread adoption, interpretation, weaponisation and enforcement of the IHRA definition has been to legitimate accusations of antisemitism against those who are protesting Israel’s efforts to dispossess Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank as a forerunner to the creation of Eretz Israel “from the river to the sea.” As a result, some countries (notably the US) are now “attempting to dictate what their own nationals may or may not say about another country. There seems to be little precedent for this, and the potential consequences for freedom of expression are profound.”

The promotion of the IHRA’s “highly contentious and problematic” formula has come at “a time when polls have consistently shown a long-term hardening of global opinion against Israel.” This is true even in the US, especially among young Americans and within an increasingly divided Jewish community.

Inevitably, this trend has been most visible on university campuses, where student protests have attracted fierce debate and opened up a new front for Jewish advocacy groups to clamp down on what they see as “rising antisemitism.” In the US, the ADL has devised what it calls a Campus Antisemitism Report Card — to grade universities on how well they are doing — which Mazower derides as both “a gimmick” and a sign of how far it has fallen far short of its “predecessors in tackling serious issues of discrimination.”

What does Mazower offer as more promising alternatives to turning down the heat and more seriously addressing the issues surrounding the current debate over antisemitism? For a start, “perhaps we need to question whether the idea of antisemitism is sui generis and best tackled apart from other forms of bigotry.” A revival of the broad anti-racist campaigns Jewish advocacy groups like the ADL supported in the 1950s — along with more effective counterterrorism efforts — would certainly tackle the very real hatred of Jews still to be found within both the neo-Nazi right and radical Islamic fringe groups.

But in this century it is Israel’s “cycle of wars” that has been the primary driver of spikes in “antisemitic incidents.” This is why one of the leading historians of antisemitism, Steve Beller, has suggested we have been “hunting the wrong elephant.” Put simply, as quoted by Mazower, he notes that “antisemitism was historically built around the ‘Jewish Question.’ What we have in Israel/Palestine today is not so much a Jewish Question as a Palestinian Question.” Until it is resolved there will never be peace for Israelis, Palestinians, the Jewish and Arab diasporas, indeed all of us.

Our own royal commission is currently holding a fortnight of hearings, a primary focus of which will be the nature and prevalence of antisemitism. But what I hadn’t fully appreciated before reading On Antisemitism is how profoundly the sweep and force of recent international history has shaped the commission’s creation and agenda.

Australian readers of this review might now better appreciate how and why so many of the steps taken by both our federal and state governments have mimicked the responses of their American counterparts over the last two decades to the “new antisemitism.” In 2021 the Morrison government adopted the IHRA definition. Three years later Albanese appointed Jillian Segal as “special envoy to combat antisemitism,” partly in response to the plethora of pro-Palestinian protests at Australian universities.

In February 2025 Universities Australia issued its own “working definition” of antisemitism, which drew on not only the IHRA definition but also recommendations from, among others, Columbia University’s Antisemitism Task Force. Segal welcomed UA’s statement as “an important first step,” with the implied caveat that it could do better.

Then, last December, Albanese announced an Antisemitism Education Taskforce chaired by David Gonski with Segal among its members. An important item on its agenda will be the development of an antisemitism report card to grade universities on their compliance with the taskforce’s recommendations. What the penalties might be for non-compliance is not yet clear.

Meanwhile, both the NSW and Queensland state governments passed laws that, respectively, restricted the rights of pro-Palestinian groups to protest and banned the use of the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” “when used to menace, harass, or offend.” The NSW law has since been ruled as an unconstitutional assault on the “freedom of personal communication.” The Queensland law has also been appealed.

Over at the royal commission, Virginia Bell might wish — in the light of Mazower’s well-documented history — to reassess her earlier judgement that the IHRA definition was “uncontroversial.” While it may be her view that “criticism of the policies… pursued by the government of Israel… is not of itself antisemitic,” the interpretation and use of the IHRA’s hopelessly confused definition in other countries suggests it will leave the door to such conflation wide open. •

A personal coda: I’d like to acknowledge that my account of Mark Mazower’s powerful and timely work reads more like a precis than a review. Apart from limitations of time and space, this piece reflects how much I share his commitment not only to a disciplined and engaged historiography but also to providing a history that speaks to the “better angels” of his subjects as well as his readers.

This is the approach I’ve attempted to follow for six decades. And during that time I have shared this journey with a number of American and Israeli Jewish historians, whose work and humanity I have loved and respected. Principal among them was my Harvard PhD supervisor, the late Everett Mendelsohn. Everett combined the vocation of history with his tireless work as a public intellectual both in the United States and Israel, where he was a prominent proponent of the Israeli peace movement’s efforts to seek a just resolution of the Palestine question. I hope this article reflects and honours the skills and values he transmitted to me and so many others.

On Antisemitism: A Word in History
By Mark Mazower | Allen Lane | $55 | 333 pages

The post Beyond the looking-glass appeared first on Inside Story.

I don’t wish to participate in this dispute, express indignation at the censorship displayed by it, or give my opinion about the issues it raises. But I do wish to take the opportunity to mention what may seem a relatively insignificant matter, one I hope to show is germane.

This is the fact that literary events such as AWW give central importance to writers, in person, in sessions where they are interviewed and then answer audience questions. The point of the format is to provoke discussion, and these events are used by the publishers for marketing purposes. “The author” is well and truly alive in Australian literary culture.

When Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author he was not referring to the mass demise of real-life writers, but to The Author as the central organising principle of French academic literary history. This discipline, its curricula, its textbooks and its journals, produced a chronological account of the national literary tradition, the intentions and motivations of writers, and writers’ lives, literary influences and significance. Barthes’s concern was to refocus attention from the singularity of a text’s purported origin in the person onto the text itself and its dispersal in the ongoing cultural practices of its reading.

I do wish that the writers’ festivals held around this country were called “Festivals of (recent, interesting, significant…) writing” rather than “Writers festivals,” and their organisational protocols focused primarily on divergent ways of reading a well-curated selection of books. My small contribution to imagining such a change is to review Randa Abdel-Fattah’s recent novel rather than talk about the controversy surrounding its author.

Discipline is set in a community of Palestinian Australians in the early days of the current conflict in Gaza. All the characters are professionals whose careers are more or less precarious. As do many members of diaspora communities, they live between two worlds, each occupying a position on a rough spectrum from least to most problematic. The narrative consists of episodes illustrating these problems.

Ashraf’s wife has left him in order to live an exclusively Islamic life: she represents a refusal of the diasporic life. Ashraf, on the other hand, while having not entirely moved into the secular world, is the most accommodating of the characters to its demands. He is an academic, modestly successful on the usual criteria, but his career is threatened by the requirement that his work have greater impact in the society beyond academia. He gets a break, and undertakes to work on a government-funded project aimed at deflecting young people away from radicalisation and towards creative ways of expressing their identity and its conflicts.

Ashraf has a PhD student named Jamal with whom he has a trusting relationship. Jamal, however, is something of a hot-head, taking various kinds of “risks” — writing unwelcome open letters to the staff of the university, signing his online posts with his university affiliation, associating his with Ashraf’s signature, and posting apparent support for Hamas that implies condemnation of Zionism. He is instructed to take the posts down to avoid implicating his supervisor or the university at large in his opinions.

Ashraf takes a mentoring role with Jamal: “Your job is to bring people to your side,” he tells him, teaching him to “operate strategically” and encouraging him to “play the long game” so that no solitary individual has to carry the “burden of representation.”

Jamal is married to Hannah, a journalist on a mainstream newspaper. She is caught between the discursive norms of the paper and trying to write stories unshackled by these norms. Most of the book’s episodes that concern her recounting versions of this conflict, as an ever-angrier Hannah confronts senior editors who either “kill” her stories, rewrite them, or take over responsibility for the by-line.

Fayza, the sister of Ashraf’s estranged wife, is as disappointed as he is by her decision. She is the principal of an Islamic school, one of whose students has been arrested for brandishing a Hamas flag at a protest rally, bringing unwelcome media attention to the school. Though self-assured and confident in her role, she is worried about her pupils and unsettled by the potential for the attention to compromise the school’s reputation. In this, her situation echoes that of the senior management of the university.

This, then, is a very tight knit group of people, the more so as each is drawn into the others’ stories. But tight knit though it might be, the exchanges among its members are not private: they are relentlessly, publicly, conducted on social media. We read that they are “consumed by their phones.” This is the proximate cause of the problems they encounter, and it should be said that this is the source of the turmoil engulfing the author of this book. It is Abdel-Fattah’s posts, not her novel, that have disturbed the Adelaide Festival board and whoever lobbied it against her. The same was true for Antoinette Latouf and Jason Gillham.

Of course, there would be no point in arguing against the predominance of online communication in present circumstances. Its reach is such that the writers cannot calculate their discourse for specific audiences. So pace Stan Grant, who writes that we have lost the art of language, it is more pointed to say that what we have lost is the arts of rhetoric. Rhetoric taught us to do just that — calculate the relation of our communications with their recipients.

This is what the authority figures in this novel require of their juniors, Ashraf, Jamal and Hannah, yet their only way of imposing this requirement establishes a binary opposition between anger and self-restraint, the latter being characterised variously as “liberal bullshit,” “the politics of respectability,” “impartiality and neutrality,” the policing of “tone,” the language of “equivocation and obfuscation” and “point zero language.” Whereas Ashraf is advised by his dean to produce work with greater social impact, he and the others are rebuked precisely for the social impact of their posts.

This suggests Abdel-Fattah’s reasons for choosing the novel form: I assume she hoped it would reach a different audience from that of her posts. But it is a novel whose energy is devoted to purveying a message: Palestinian Australians are having an awful time. They are suffering from the fear and grief occasioned by the conflict in Gaza, and they are also, the fiction tells us, suffering from the oppression of discursive norms that cannot accommodate the intensity of those emotions. This tells us that “having a voice” is not enough: getting people to listen to it is the real issue. And this is what is dramatised in most of the episodes of the narrative.

This is an interesting and important issue, and I for one — being someone who has long taken for granted those very discursive norms — find it salutary to attend to. But I sought, and failed to find, the qualities of an effective or engaging novel. I have no doubt its message is true; what I want to know is what purpose the fiction plays. This is fiction that merely disguises its referent by inventing names for its characters and institutions; it is not an imaginative exploration of the depth of the experiences it depicts. The characters are two dimensional, having little emotional, let alone psychological, complexity — they simply have emotions. Susan Sontag said of great novels that they extend the emotional range of the reader, but the mere naming of emotions cannot achieve this.

Furthermore, Discipline has no plot: good plotting relies on a structure in which an initial situation is disturbed by a complicating event, this complication or disturbance being thereafter resolved by the intervention of some action or other factor. The complication is a knot, its resolution a dénouement (this French term means an “unknotting”). This novel consists of a string of episodes that demonstrate a repeating situation.

There is, however, a candidate for an ending:  Jamal and Hannah decide to “fight” in less direct, more creative ways. We don’t see this in action, so it remains programmatic. An alternative reading would be that this ending represents the author’s own decision to write a novel. I would like to be able to conclude that as a novel it is a successful intervention into the situation she describes, or indeed into the literary field; but I cannot. I need it to engage me, to leave me with emotions and understandings that I didn’t have before reading it; I need to care what happens to the characters and to think about how I would respond to the difficulties they face. I want to admire its writing — to be surprised by its insights — I want to be carried by its rhythms. But I was not.

I can only speculate about what impelled the decision to invite Randa Abdel-Fattah to AWW, but I suspect that it was to perform the (kind of) controversy she depicts. The fact that she was cancelled made it all come true. Unfortunately, there is no sense of an ending. Next week in Adelaide is to be held a rebel gathering of writers. We can expect it to stage a further episode of the same sorry drama. •

Discipline
By Randa Abdel-Fattah | University of Queensland Press | $34.99 | 256 pages

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What should have been a peaceful communal gathering became a scene of terror, reminding us how quickly belonging can unravel when hatred is allowed to grow unchecked. In moments like this, Australians rightly demand action. The question is not whether racism and antisemitism must be confronted — they must — but how we do so without eroding the democratic and social foundations we are trying to defend.

The government’s response to the antisemitism envoy’s report gets important things right. Strong hate-crime laws, clear consequences for incitement to violence, better data, education and protection for vulnerable communities are all essential. Antisemitism, like Islamophobia, corrodes our democracy and must be named and challenged early. But enforcement alone will never be enough.

History shows that lasting peace and social cohesion are not built through punishment and surveillance alone, but through sustained investment in civil society — in the institutions that allow people to meet one another, work together and rebuild trust over time. Northern Ireland offers a lesson worth remembering. Peace there did not emerge simply from political agreements or tougher policing. It was made possible by decades of patient investment in grassroots organisations, cross-community initiatives and shared civic spaces — the quiet, difficult work of helping former adversaries encounter one another as human beings rather than abstractions.

That belief has shaped our shared work. More than a decade ago, alongside Palestinian and Israeli partners, we helped build Project Rozana, which aims to connect Palestinians with appropriate medical training and healthcare, on a simple conviction: that caring for another human being can open doors that politics alone cannot. Over years of often unseen effort, this work has brought Israeli and Palestinian doctors, nurses and health leaders together — not to argue, but to heal.

We have witnessed it in small, human moments: an Israeli nurse training alongside a Palestinian colleague after an exhausting shift; a child from the West Bank receiving specialist care that would otherwise be out of reach; professionals crossing checkpoints most of us will never see, not in denial of the conflict, but in defiance of its most dehumanising logic.

In the years since, those same principles have guided our work here at home. We have applied the lessons of that experience to Australia’s own social fabric — building relationships across communities, absorbing criticism and backlash, and insisting that social cohesion is something that must be constructed deliberately, not assumed to endure on its own. This work is slow, relational and often uncomfortable. But it is precisely this kind of sustained engagement that makes it possible for people to encounter one another not as symbols or threats, but as neighbours with a shared stake in the future.

This work is not symbolic. It is civil-society infrastructure — practical, relational and fragile — and it requires protection and growth. That is why the Australian government’s decision to invest in Rozana’s health diplomacy matters so deeply. It recognises that social cohesion, here at home and abroad, is built not only by condemning hatred, but by funding cooperation. At a time of deep polarisation, this kind of investment is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

We are speaking out now because moments like this demand more than condemnation. They demand courage, restraint and a willingness to invest — patiently and deliberately — in the conditions that make hatred harder to sustain. Our shared future depends on whether we choose to keep building the bridges that allow us to meet one another not as enemies, but as neighbours — and, most importantly, as Australians. •

This article is republished from the Jewish Independent under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

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Sunday talk show anchors this week pressed Democrats on “How much credit does President Trump deserve for this deal,” if the cease fire was “a clear win” for Trump, and if “this peace deal came together now because President Trump was more effective at pressuring Prime Minister Netanyahu than former President Biden.”

We will learn nothing from a cramped debate designed to flatter one man’s ego and buoy his hollow, self-indulgent quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. And we will steer attention away from the far more tragic yet instructive strategic failures on all sides that produced so much needless death and suffering and have likely set back the cause of peace for decades.

That Trump gets some credit for the ceasefire agreement is not even something in dispute. All reporting indicates he successfully leaned on a reluctant Netanyahu to accept Hamas’s offer to release the twenty remaining living Israeli hostages in exchange for Israel’s release of far more Palestinian prisoners, without any broader peace agreement in place or commitment by Hamas to disarm.

But the value of that credit is limited. Finalising such a deal after two years of ruthless war that left Gaza in rubble and Hamas with depleted negotiating leverage is not exactly a diplomatic feat on the order of the Camp David accords. No trust has been built between Israelis and Palestinians; no vision of permanent peaceful coexistence has been offered, let alone given lip-service. The longstanding presumption that Israel still sought a two-state solution has been extinguished by the statements of those now in power. At the micro-level, freedom for individuals in captivity is worthy of celebration. At the macro-level, what is there to cheer?

According to Gaza health ministry statistics, Hamas’s decision to attack Israel two years ago led to nearly 70,000 deaths of its own people, about 3 per cent of the Gazan population. Among the dead were six members of Hamas’s own leadership. Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble and, according to the United Nations, about 90 per cent of the population has been displaced, often multiple times. The most optimistic estimate from the UN for how long reconstruction will take is sixteen years, and the most pessimistic eighty years. From the Palestinian perspective, the 7 October attack was an unmitigated disaster.

But this is no zero-sum game that requires christening Israel as the winner by default. The 7 October attack that killed nearly 1200 Israelis was a massive military, intelligence, and security failure on the part of a complacent Israeli government uninterested in the peace process yet unwilling to believe their own peace could be so easily shattered. Clear signs of a pending assault were known yet repeatedly downplayed and dismissed.

The brutally overwhelming military response from Israel decimated Hamas and rolled back its allies Iran and Hezbollah, but at enormous cost to civilian human life and Israel’s global reputation and support for its right to exist, and to unity within the Jewish diaspora. The notion that Hamas or other Palestinian groups will now be kept at bay by Israel’s military might flies in the face of the decades-long history of Middle East strife, in which military victories are eventually reciprocated by asymmetric terrorist attacks.

The seeds for irrevocable mistrust and ongoing conflict have been deeply planted. Without even a trace of hope in the near future for a two-state solution, we should expect them to grow for more decades. There were no strategic choices by Israel or Hamas that anyone in the future should ever want to replicate.

And Trump? Yes he secured this ceasefire agreement… seven months after he failed to maintain the ceasefire agreement struck by Biden in January. But Trump is never interested in protecting the “wins” of others. He loves to do just enough to organise his own ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Now he can assert that his agreement portends the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” even though there is no reason to believe that’s true — unless you think that Israel can and should persevere indefinitely by militarily subjugating Palestinian territories, without much global support, and that somehow amounts to a new dawn.

There is nothing in Trump’s record to show he has any understanding of the complex, multifaceted policy approaches required to strike not just a temporary agreement with a handshake but a lasting peace fortified by hard-earned mutual trust, political compromise and economic co-dependence. There is nothing in Trump’s record to suggest he cares about what may happen to any temporary agreement beyond his time in office, or even beyond the initial photo-op.

The question “is Trump more effective at pressuring Netanyahu than Biden” is extraordinarily narrow. Even if the answer is yes, does that mean Trump has superpower diplomatic skills that will be deployed to do the necessary follow-through work? Of course not. We all know Trump wants to do just enough — or be perceived as doing just enough — to get his medal, and that’s it.

We who live on Earth are stuck with Trump for another three years and three months. I understand the incentive for other world leaders to genuflect in hopes of surviving. But the rest of us need not fall over ourselves to narrow our fields of vision and place Trump at the centre of every story. The lesson to learn from the 7 October attacks and the subsequent Israel–Hamas hostilities is not how a vainglorious blowhard can channel his thirst for validation into tenuous ceasefire agreements. It’s how the dark thrill of self-righteous violence in the short run can easily lead to devastating consequences in the long run. •

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There is much in the Trump plan that is implausible, contrived and, as with many Robinson cartoons, more than just a bit absurd. We might applaud the American president for bringing a pause to the slaughter in Gaza and for the return of Israeli hostages. Quite possibly, no one else could have done that right now. Remember, though, it was the second Trump administration which continued to underwrite that slaughter, providing massive amounts of lethal materiel to Israel.

We should certainly applaud the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for not giving this year’s award to the Trump. At a stretch he might be a more credible contender in 2026, though that should depend on what happens with his twenty-point plan.

And the plan is just the problem. At best, it offers a respite in Gaza. It is not a blueprint for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. For two million–plus Gazans it might move the dial of daily hardship from starvation to subsistence. But it overflows with empty assertions, with the term “will be” worked to the point of exhaustion.

Are we meant to be comforted that a “Board of Peace,” under the direction of Trump and Tony Blair, will oversee the creation of “New Gaza”? Trump’s erratic behaviour and Blair’s dubious record as a Middle East peace envoy aside, this still amounts to an “unmistakable colonial framework,” in the words prominent Middle East experts Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares. And there is not a single reference in the plan to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, home to three million Palestinians who are subject to constant harassment from 450,000 Israeli settlers, long aided and abetted by the Netanyahu government. (Another 230,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem.)

As for “New Gaza,” Trump’s new plan at least populates that devastated territory with Palestinians. Point 12 states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza.” Those who wish to go will be free to do so and to return. Contrast this with Trump’s remarks in February 2025 that the United States would take “a long-term ownership position” in the territory, expelling Gazans to “a fresh piece of land” in either Jordan or Egypt and creating a “Riviera of the Middle East… something that could be so magnificent.”

Point 19 of the Trump plan deals with Palestinian statehood as follows: “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the Palestinian Authority reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” As ever, statehood is held out as a reward for Palestinian good behaviour. Bad behaviour by others that affects prospects for Palestinian statehood is somehow irrelevant.

And who will judge if and when Palestinians have met their obligations: Donald Trump, with a record of capricious behaviour second to none; Tony Blair, whose lies about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are a matter of record; and possibly Benjamin Netanyahu, whose life’s mission has been to deny to Palestinians what Israelis regard as a birthright — a state of their own?

The plan’s first point deserves a motherhood award for aspiration: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.” How this might happen can be gleaned from point 6, which gives amnesty to Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence, and point 13, which excludes Hamas from any role in the governance of Gaza.

The critical question is who will make it happen? The answer, in point 15, is a temporary International Stabilisation Force, or ISF, which will “immediately deploy in Gaza” to train and support vetted Palestinian police in consultation with Jordan and Egypt. The ABC’s Middle East correspondent, Eric Tlozek, has commented that this will be one of the most crucial and difficult parts of the plan, with the makeup, legal status and rules of engagement yet to be defined. He quoted Andreas Krieg from the School of Security at King’s College, London, as saying that without a UN Security Council mandate the legitimacy of such a deployment would be contested and that Arab/Muslim contributors would be wary of being seen as subcontractors for Israel. A potential further complication, of course, is Trump’s poisonous relationship with the UN.

One worthy element of the plan (Point 18) deals with changing “mindsets and narratives,” long recognised as major obstacles to peace-making in the region. Dehumanisation of the other through racist and incendiary rhetoric infects Israelis and Palestinians alike. In his fine book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, the prominent Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi wrote of the thorny issue of weaning Israelis from their attachment to inequality and “a reflexive dogma of aggressive nationalism whose tenacious hold will be hard to break.” Palestinians too, he wrote, needed weaning from a pernicious delusion — rooted in the colonial nature of their encounter with Zionism and in its denial of Palestinian peoplehood — that Jewish Israelis are not “real” people.

Israel has pulverised Gaza, killing some 70,000 Palestinians (the majority of them women and children) and Hamas’s top military leadership in the territory. The greater the pulverisation, the greater the formal support for a Palestinian state from countries who previously might have lacked the courage to make the call. By mid-October 2025, when Trump declared the “end” of the Gaza war, 80 per cent of UN members had formally recognised a Palestinian state, the newcomers including Belgium, Canada, France, Portugal, and Britain as well as Australia.

Ami Ayalon, a former leader of the Israeli Labor Party and one-time head of the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet, commented recently that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would not end until “we achieve a political agreement that ends Israel’s occupation and creates two states side by side.” Many now rightly question the viability of a two-state solution but struggle to come up with better idea.

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in early 2024 the late Martin Indyk, twice American ambassador to Israel, argued that 7 October had resurrected the “allegedly dead two-state solution.” The explanation, he said, was simple, a lack of possible alternatives: the Hamas solution was the destruction of Israel; the Israeli ultra-right solution was annexation of the West Bank, dismantling of the Palestinian Authority and deportation of Palestinians to other countries; the “conflict management” approach long pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu was aimed at maintaining the status quo indefinitely and the world had “seen how that worked out.” Added to this list was the idea of a binational state, in which Jews would become a minority, thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. None of those alternatives, Indyk wrote, would resolve the conflict — at least not without causing even greater calamities. If the conflict was to be resolved peacefully, “the two-state solution was the only idea left standing.”

Now that Australia has formally recognised a Palestinian state, what will it do to help create it and build the structures of statehood? Are there lessons from Australia’s leading role in the 1990s peace-making in Cambodia — including communications and election management — that might apply to Palestine? Are there NGOs that can marshal important expertise that could help the Palestinians?

In the mid-1990s prominent Australian lawyers, working under the auspices of the Australian International Legal Resources NGO, helped draft guidelines for the operation of the Palestinian legislative council and also helped create a forensic laboratory. Could Australia engage more closely on Palestine with regional countries — including Indonesia, which is already involved in Middle East peace-keeping? Its president, Prabowo Subianto, recently offered another 20,000 troops for UN peace-keeping operations, including in Gaza.

The only certainty in the days ahead is more talk. Much of it will be empty, and posturing won’t bring peace. Perhaps Australia, with its current bid for a non-permanent UN Security Council seat in mind, can at least work to focus the debate on action? •

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“We’re brothers, we help one another,” the Israeli prime minister replied. “You recognise a truth that everybody should recognise, but few governments have so far — that this has been our capital for 3000 years, since the days of King David.”

According to Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, “we have an alliance of believers between Jews and Christians, based on deep faith and biblical roots. We are opening a new, historic chapter in our relations.”

Fiji’s recent diplomatic support for Israel contrasts with international condemnation of Israeli policy in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Just before Rabuka inaugurated the embassy, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. And he’s far from the only Pacific leader to throw their support behind Israel.

Netanyahu’s welcome to Rabuka highlights his own international isolation since the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader. Successive US presidents have welcomed Netanyahu to Washington, and he has been feted by congressional leaders, yet his arrest warrant alleges “war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

So why do so many Pacific island leaders stand with a man accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, and a nation at war with Palestinians and itself?

Rabuka was in Israel the week after the fifty-fourth Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting. Gathered in Solomon Islands between 8–12 September, regional leaders had adopted a declaration recognising the Blue Pacific as an “Ocean of Peace.” The concept was first proposed by Rabuka, who reiterated the importance of regional solidarity, non-alignment and collective security in a 2023 address to the UN General Assembly.

As he welcomed the launch of the Ocean of Peace Declaration in Honiara on 10 September, Rabuka stressed: “The world knows that we, the Pasifika people, mean business and it starts here with us.” But for many Pacific church and community leaders, this rhetoric is undercut by support for Israel’s unremitting attack on Palestinians, even though US president Donald Trump has called for an end to Israeli military operations in Gaza under a new peace deal announced this month.

During the Forum meeting, the Pacific Conference of Churches, or PCC, called on Pacific governments to “safeguard civilians; support an enforceable ceasefire and humanitarian access; pursue accountability under international law and refrain from actions that pre-judge final status issues; recognise Palestine; and invest in a just peace worthy of our Ocean of Peace.” The PCC unites thirty-five national denominations and eleven National Councils of Churches across the region.

“We have to be clear,” says the PCC’s general secretary, Reverend James Bhagwan. “If we are to be gathering at a time talking about an ‘Ocean of Peace,’ we cannot talk about peace in our region and then support people who do war, do murder and do harm on others.”

Palestine is not high on the Forum’s agenda, but after the Hamas attacks and hostage-taking of 7 October 2023, the debate could not be avoided.

Pacific leaders gathered the following month in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, at the 52nd Pacific Islands Forum. Mobilised by the early reports of civilian casualties during Israel’s reprisals in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Cook Islands women rallied outside the November 2023 Forum, with a banner calling on Pacific leaders to “please condemn the killing of displaced Palestinians and God’s innocent children in Gaza.”

Israel retained widespread community support after 7 October 2023, drawing on historic traditions of Christian Zionism. Since then, however, civil society groups across the Pacific islands’ region — from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands to Fiji, Tonga, Sāmoa and New Caledonia — have protested against the Israeli massacre in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Through petitions, vigils and rallies, activists have condemned Israel’s attacks in Gaza, and criticised the death of Palestinian civilians and non-combatants. Though small, the diversity, reach and passion of these protests is unprecedented in the islands, as elsewhere across the globe.

For Reverend Bhagwan, the crisis in the Middle East has been a moral turning point, in a world torn apart by geopolitical competition and government attacks on human rights and international law. “We grieve every life taken and reject every hatred — antisemitism, anti–Arab racism, and Islamophobia. We pray for and accompany Palestinian Christians and all communities affected by violence. Peace requires justice, reconciliation requires truth, security requires equal rights and the end of collective punishment and occupation.”

For many years, Western powers followed US policy to defer recognition of Palestine, but Israel’s massacre and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and provocations in the West Bank have broken the dam. At last month’s eightieth session of the UN General Assembly, ten Western states (France, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Andorra and Belgium) announced recognition of Palestinian statehood.

While welcoming their belated decision, many civil society groups have pushed governments to back their rhetoric with concrete action, through sanctions on the Netanyahu government and an end to arms sales to Israel. But such sentiments are often a minority opinion across the Pacific islands.

Support for Israel among conservative Christians has been boosted by groups such as the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. Established in 1980, the ICEJ claims to represent evangelical Christians around the world “who stand with Israel and the Jewish people based on biblical principles and promises.” ICEJ has branches in ninety countries, including five in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Sāmoa and Cook Islands).

PCC’s James Bhagwan acknowledges the support for Israel among many Pacific Christians, but says: “The Pacific Conference of Churches is very concerned about the narratives around Christian Zionism that are being pushed, to gain political traction around the Pacific for the support of Israel. But it is wrong theology — it is theology being twisted for political purposes. It’s the same when theology gets twisted for ethnonationalism, for racism, or as an excuse to neglect or even harm the marginalised communities in our region.”

Across the region, only Vanuatu has formally recognised Palestinian statehood. Other states have provided diplomatic support to Israel for decades. For some governments, this public commitment has deep roots: in line with US policy, the Federated States of Micronesia has not cast a single UN vote critical of Israeli policy in the past ten years.

As he was sworn in to office in September 2025, Sāmoa’s incoming prime minister Laaulialemalietoa Leuatea Polataivao Fosi Schmidt said Sāmoa was founded as a nation under the “God of Israel.” Leuatea wore a scarf with the colours of the Israeli flag, and held a shofar, the ram’s horn used in Jewish rituals. Years ago, Leuatea was baptised in the Jordan River and, assuming office, he pledged: “I stand for Israel, the land of God. It doesn’t matter if the entire world is unhappy about it, that’s up to them, but Sāmoa will stand with the land of God.”

Some governments have also cracked down on pro-Palestine protests. In Fiji, police have refused permits for Palestine support rallies, even as marches for Israel have been approved. The carrying of Palestinian flags and symbols has been banned at some events.

At a time of diplomatic isolation, Israel has welcomed the votes of Pacific governments in the UN General Assembly. At the start of the current crisis in October 2023, the vote on a General Assembly resolution for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians passed 124–14. Six of the fourteen No votes came from Pacific Island states. A resolution in June 2024 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was overwhelmingly approved, with 149 countries voting in favour. Of the twelve states that voted against the resolution, seven — Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Tuvalu — were Pacific nations.

In February this year, Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Filipo Tarakinikini delivered an oral submission to the International Court of Justice urging the court refuse a UN General Assembly request for a non-binding ruling on the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Fiji’s former Labour prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry, deposed in a 2000 coup, noted that “Fiji is the only country, aside from the United States, to lend support to Israel in the current proceedings. To end this decades-old conflict, majority world opinion favours the Palestinians getting their occupied territories back, with full recognition as an independent sovereign state.”

On 12 September, the UN General Assembly voted 142–10 to adopt a resolution on the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine  and the implementation of the two-state solution. Following the usual pattern, six of the ten No votes came from Pacific island states, with Fiji and Sāmoa also abstaining. Less than a week later, prime minister Rabuka flew to Jerusalem to open Fiji’s embassy.

Palestinians have long argued that East Jerusalem should be the capital of an independent Palestinian state. The status of Jerusalem has been contested under international law since Israel occupied the city during the 1967 war. In 1980 UN Security Council Resolution 478 reaffirmed that East Jerusalem is an occupied territory and called on all UN member states to withdraw diplomatic missions from the city.

This policy was maintained until 2017, when Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv. The Trump administration was isolated in a 14–1 vote at the UN Security Council, but the resolution that criticised the decision was vetoed by America’s then UN ambassador Nikki Haley.

In a subsequent emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly — a rare occasion — UN members voted 128–35 to ask nations not to establish diplomatic missions in Jerusalem. Only seven other countries joined the United States and Israel to vote against the resolution, including four island nations. Papua New Guinea voted in favour of this resolution — only to change its policy six years later. In 2023 PNG prime minister James Marape announced that his nation would open an embassy in Jerusalem, recognising it as Israel’s capital.

“For the first three years, the nation of Israel is paying for the cost of the embassy,” Marape told the ABC. “But going forward, they’ve indicated land available for us and we look forward to proceeding, setting up our permanent mission there.” The PNG government had made a “conscious choice,” he said. “This has been the universal capital of the nation and people of Israel. For us to call ourselves Christian, paying respect to God will not be possible without recognising that Jerusalem is the universal capital of the people and nation of Israel.”

In October 2024, the Israel Knesset legislated to prohibit consulates rather than embassies being established in Jerusalem. By then, the United States had been followed by Honduras, Guatemala, Kosovo, the Czech Republic, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay to open embassies in Jerusalem.

First floated at a 2023 meeting between Rabuka and Netanyahu, the Fiji government’s decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem sparked anger amongst church and civil society groups. Fiji’s NGO Coalition on Human Rights said Rabuka was “callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza that is being deliberately orchestrated by the state of Israel.” Leading feminist Shamima Ali, chair of the NGO Coalition, condemned the Fiji delegation for standing alongside Netanyahu, “who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, including starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity.”

Rabuka, in turn, condemned her remarks, but also took aim at the leading daily Fiji Times for reporting them: “It is unbecoming of the major newspaper of an emerging power in the Pacific.” Editor-in-chief Fred Wesley responded: “While many people in Fiji venerate Israel and Mr Netanyahu, it is very important that we all understand that much of the world does not see them in a good light. Much of the world agrees with the view that the NGO Coalition has expressed. It is important that we all know this fact and reflect on it.”

Israel is one of six nations that has an application pending for Dialogue Partner status with the Pacific Islands Forum (a relationship that currently links twenty-one countries — the United States, China, France and Japan among them — with the eighteen-member regional organisation).

Alongside Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, Israel wants the partnership status that gives access to the annual Forum summit of regional leaders. But all Dialogue Partner applications were frozen in late 2023, pending a new partnership policy that would determine which countries actively support Forum policies and priorities, compared to those mainly hunting for UN votes.

As the diplomatic tide turns, and the International Court of Justice continues its investigation into presumed genocide in Gaza, the Netanyahu government is expending diplomatic capital to reinforce the shrinking number of countries that will support it in the United Nations. In a statement on 21 August, Israel’s foreign ministry announced that Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel will prepare an official tour of Pacific Island states, including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and Tonga, which support Israel and the United States at the United Nations.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar said his deputy “will lead the delegation to engage in discussions aimed at deepening and advancing Israel–Pacific relations in a wide range of bilateral, multilateral, and strategic fields.” Scheduled for this month, the tour reflects “Israel’s profound appreciation for the Pacific Island states and underscores Israel’s commitment to strengthening cooperation with them.”

This debate will continue until there is a ceasefire and political settlement in Gaza, and civil society organisations across the Pacific will maintain their pressure on their governments.

“Regarding the plans by some Pacific countries to shift embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, we counsel restraint,” said PCC’s Reverend James Bhagwan. “Such moves sit uneasily with our Ocean of Peace vision and with international law. We urge governments to avoid steps that pre-ajudge Jerusalem’s final status or normalise ongoing violations. Keep missions in Tel Aviv until a just and negotiated settlement is reached.” •

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They do so from positions of authority. Both authors, one on the American side and the other on the Palestinian, have been embroiled in peace efforts for more than a generation. Each in his own way has concluded that talk of a two-state solution in present circumstances is unhelpful since it conveys an impression that constructive efforts towards peace are being made when, at best, the issue is being fudged.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Malley says that “at bottom, the US spoke one language but did not really put its effort where it said it wanted to go” when it sought to promote Middle East peace. Agha, in the same interview, was more direct, describing the pursuit of Middle East peace as a “fake process” doomed by “a combination of illusions, delusions, lies, noise, missteps [and] misreadings.”

Given their respective roles — Malley as an adviser in Bill Clinton’s Camp David process, Agha on the Palestinian side — their individual and joint disappointment is understandable. They have reluctantly concluded that until and unless an American administration commits itself to a peaceful outcome there is little or no chance of a breakthrough. Indeed, things may get worse, if that is possible.

In other words, a two-state solution will remain an illusion fostered by Western leaders as a bromide for the hard decisions required to force a settlement.

Looking back to the Oslo process in 1993, which momentarily raised hopes of a breakthrough in Israeli–Palestine relations, the utterly depressing reality is that peace is now more distant than ever. The handshake on the lawn of Clinton’s White House between Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was a high point in Middle East peacemaking.

That was September 1993, thirty-two years ago.

Under Oslo, the two sides were to work towards the creation of a Palestinian state, but Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace effectively put an end to a chapter in which a two-state solution might, just conceivably, have become a reality.

It is impossible to exaggerate the role of Rabin’s death in the rise of the Israeli nationalist settler right, and on the Palestinian side in the emergence of Hamas and its affiliates as a destructive element in a blood-drenched equation.

In hindsight, Rabin’s death should have put an end to illusions about Middle East peace based on the Oslo formula. But the illusion persisted, fostered by Clinton himself, who believed that by force of his own personality he could bring the parties together at Camp David in 2000, and again at Taba, Egypt, in 2001. Those efforts foundered for lack of will on both sides, along with poor preparation by Clinton’s Middle East team and divisions within the Palestinians leadership.

A quarter of a century after the last of those efforts, the world remains stuck in a two-state paradigm, even if circumstances could hardly be less propitious, with Israel proceeding with its war of annihilation in Gaza and its undermining of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and an American administration more aligned with Israel’s expansionist aims than its predecessors.

This invites the question: what is the point of the coming week’s UN debate, in which multiple countries, including Australia, will recognise Palestinian statehood and proclaim their commitment to a two-state solution? Such gestures will sound noble, even principled, but what will change in practice?

The short answer is not much, if anything. Countries like Australia will content themselves with having entered a protest against what is happening in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers are running riot.

In response to UN pressures, Israel and its Washington ally may well use international opprobrium to push even harder for a process that forestalls any hope for the Palestinians, even as Israel continues to pursue its annexationist policies in territories occupied in war. While this plays itself out it will become even clearer that references to a two-state solution are, if not illusory, then a pretext for avoiding difficult decisions that could exert real pressure on the protagonists.

Mention of a two-state solution obviates a need to talk about economic sanctions or restrictions on transfers of the military equipment that enables Israel to continue its destruction of Gaza, street-by-street, building-by-building, enclave-by-enclave. Leaders of countries like Australia will return home having lent their names to resolutions that will do little or nothing to alter the status quo.

If it does anything, the week will draw attention to various failed Middle East peace initiatives that litter the historical landscape like rusting ordnance in the desert — going right back to the British government’s Peel Commission in 1937, which first formulated a “two-state solution.”

The Peel Commission actually recommended two-and-a-bit states, one Jewish, one Palestinian, the “bit” being an enclave under international supervision that would incorporate the holy places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Its plan was laid to rest by Britain in 1938 after a furious reaction from the Arab residents of Palestine under the British mandate.

Key moments since then include the 1947 UN partition plan, with its fateful consequences for world peace; UN Security Council Resolutions 242 in 1967 and 338 in 1973, which effectively defined two states by calling on Israeli to withdraw to its pre-1967 war boundaries; the Palestine Liberation Organization’s tacit acceptance of Israel’s existence via its acknowledgement in 1988 of various UN resolutions; the Oslo process of 1993, which involved explicit PLO recognition of Israel’s right to exist; and, as mentioned, Clinton’s stumbling 2000 Camp David peace efforts.

In Tomorrow is Yesterday, Malley and Agha offer little hope that anything approaching peace might be in prospect. They canvass various possibilities, including a binational state in which Jews and Palestinians reside as equals within the same territory. This is about as likely to happen as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the UN’s outspoken rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, becoming reconciled.

Another suggestion they canvass is for a Palestinian territory to join — or re-join — Jordan in a federation. This would involve a highly unlikely return to the future, since Jordan relinquished its claims to Palestine in 1988.

The bleak conclusion is that until and unless a US administration force feeds a peace process not much constructive will happen. Of course, this will not prevent leaders of Western democracies like Australia proclaiming their adherence to a two-state solution as the holy grail of the Middle East peacemaking in the absence of a better idea, or worse, as a substitute for tackling the issues involved. This would include accepting a UN report that Israel is breaching the terms of the Genocide Convention in Gaza.

You can be sure this is terrain, stretching all the way back to the Oslo Accords of 1993, that Anthony Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong will be reluctant to traverse. As Robert Malley puts it “something has gone terribly wrong in the [past] thirty-two years.” •

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Sosnowski is based at Melbourne University’s Law School and engaged in a study of “the legal afterlife of war and revolution.” Her work brings law and anthropology together in ways that challenge the assumptions of both disciplines. Her new book, 58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution, is both analytic and deeply personal.

Any review of this book must acknowledge that it is partly a confessional story, and one that deserves a personal response. In fact, it is a more challenging and innovative book than the subtitle suggests — though “58 facets” gives us a clue. Essentially a string of short episodes and observations, it is held together by Sosnowki’s deep involvement with the Syrian opposition to the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was overthrown last year, but also by her willingness to explore her own traumas and uncertainties.

At the same time it is an exercise in family history, for Sosnowski, like many of us, is in Australia as the result of Nazi persecution. Her grandfather arrived from the Netherlands in 1947, having escaped Europe only to be imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in Java before finally landing in Brisbane. Others of her family settled in Israel, one of them governing Gaza for a short time.

Reading 58 Facets is to be confronted by the parallels between Europe in the 1930s and the Middle East today. It is Sosnowski’s strength as a writer that she lets the reader draw these parallels as she recounts her own experiences of working with exiled Syrians and hearing their hopes for a better future.

What her experience of Syria suggests — and by extension what the sad story of dispossessed Palestinians bears out — is that revolution is complex, messy and at once personal and political. “Revolutionary acts can happen at any time, any place,” she writes. “They can sneak up on you in online meetings or over lunch with a friend. This is because in every place, in every society, the law and violence are inextricably conjoined, and revolution is, in turn, inextricably looped into this triumvirate.”

I thought of these words following the weekend of neo-Nazi demonstrations in Australian cities, which highlighted the precariousness of liberal-democratic assumptions in the face of direct confrontation. Of course the thugs in black who took to our streets needed only slight bravado; the Syrians who resisted Assad risked torture and death.

There are moments of anguish in this book, as well as moments of hope it moves towards Assad’s overthrow and the unknown future facing Syrians. Sosnowski writes about the reality of camps, whether the death camps of the Nazi extermination or the moveable camps of Israel’s war in Gaza. As I read this I thought of the new moves by the Australian government to pay once again for detention camps in Nauru.

As a lawyer, Sosnowski is very aware of how our lives depend on producing the right paperwork. She gives a fascinating account of how the Syrian resistance created their own records of births and residence in preparation for a post-Assad government. Although she doesn’t refer to the United States, the increasingly brutal immigration raids under Trump only highlight the universality of her argument.

As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Sosnowski is attuned to how traumas carry across generations and how they are experienced by so many Australians, beginning, most obviously, with members of our First Nations. “We are all wounded,” she writes. “Pulling large sacks of despicable acts tied with invisible threads behind us like a ball and chain. But, she adds: “Bringing the ball and chain above the horizons of history allows us… to open our hears to the woundedness of ourselves and others, to how similar our stories really are, to the great potential we all carry for acts of everyday revolution.”

I am saddened that so many of my fellow Jews, traumatised by the legacy of the Holocaust and shocked by the Hamas attacks of October 2023, have lost the ability to see the human suffering of Palestinians, as if even young children deserve to die in retribution. There are Knesset members who have proclaimed that all inhabitants of Gaza are guilty and deserve to be killed.

Back in 1956, the year Israel colluded with Britain and France in the Suez invasion, the Knesset adopted a Names Law, essential for denying Arabs who had fled during the 1948 war while allowing Jews like me, with no connection to Israel other than a set of Biblical stories, to enter and claim citizenship.

Central to the most important ceremony of Judaism, the Passover seder, is the expression, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Some years ago I wrote an article in which I said I could not say those worlds without a sense of horror at the hypocrisy involved. Sosnowski, who is more of a practising Jew than I, has a different view: “When we say ‘Next Year in Jerusalem!’ it is not something to be taken literally… That ‘Jerusalem’ will always and ever be ‘next year.’ That the journey is the important part, not the destination.”

I wish I could share her optimism. The original UN plan for a “special international regime” for Jerusalem — a holy city for three monotheistic religions — has long vanished. Both the Netanyahu and Trump regimes see the city as firmly and forever under Israeli control.

58 Facets is a short book but a profound one. My ambition for it imagines a reading group of Palestinian and Israeli partisans who might inch towards an understanding of the common humanity without which no solution to this ongoing tragedy is possible. •

58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution
By Marika Sosnowski | Melbourne University Press | $29.99 | 199 pages

The post Everyday revolutions appeared first on Inside Story.

That remaining group of respondents would then be asked an “open” or “free-answer” question, allowing them to voice viewpoints that might otherwise have been overlooked. Only then, he suggested, should they be asked a question that required them to answer “yes,” “no” — or “no opinion.” Their answers to the earlier questions would allow pollsters to see whether a “no opinion” response was based on ignorance, indifference, confusion, or the respondent’s wrestling with conflicting considerations. A “yes” or “no” would be followed by questions designed to discover why a respondent held this view.

Finally, respondents would be asked about the intensity with which they hold their views. In Gallup’s original polling manifesto, intensity hadn’t mattered: if a poll was a “sampling referendum” designed to guide legislators, as Gallup argued, then every “vote” should count equally, regardless of how strongly or weakly held. But if voters were indifferent to an issue, they would be unlikely to turn out for a referendum. And in the absence of a referendum, legislators would be less likely to be guided by opinions that were wishy-washy than by opinions that were firm — opinions that might induce a change of vote.

In a preface, Gallup also emphasised the importance of the “split ballot” technique as a way of monitoring the impact of different ways of writing the survey questions (though not different kinds of response alternatives). The American Institute of Public Opinion had deployed the split-ballot, he said, since 1938.

Against Gallup’s five-point plan, how does Australian issues polling — as opposed to voting-intention polling — measure up? Pollsters are asking issues questions all the time, but the comparison is more revealing when they all pose questions about the same issue at roughly the same time. The question of Palestinian recognition is the most recent — and, as it turns out, quite revealing — Australian example.

Depending on which poll you look at, the federal government’s decision last month to recognise Palestine at the September meeting of the United Nations was supported by almost half of the Australian public, or by no more than a third, or by just a quarter.

A nationwide poll taken by DemosAU on 31 July suggested that Australia’s recognition of “a Palestinian state in the present circumstances” would be supported by 45 per cent of respondents. But a Resolve poll, conducted on behalf of Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, that went into the field on the day of the government’s announcement (11–16 August), found the move to recognise Palestine was supported by just 24 per cent. Then came an Essential poll, conducted a week or two after the announcement (20–26 August), which reported that the decision was supported by a third of its respondents — fewer than the DemosAU poll but more than Resolve’s.

None of the polls — all of them conducted online — were based on a sample drawn from a list of all voters. Instead, they drew from panels into which potential respondents had mostly opted in. So, the quality of the sampling offers no obvious reason for preferring one set of results over either of the others.

At the May election, Resolve’s estimate of the parties’ vote shares was more accurate than the estimates ventured by Essential or DemosAU by around a percentage point. But on the Palestine question we are not talking about a difference of one or two percentage points, as we usually are with election forecasts; we are talking about differences of as much as twenty-one points.

Resolve’s sample for the Palestinian poll (1800 people) was bigger than either DemosAu’s (1079) or Essential’s (1034), but that’s unlikely to explain much of the difference either. The DemosAU poll, conducted in a single day, was what the British call a “quickie”; the Resolve and Essential polls were conducted over six or seven days, which is one way to boost very low (though undisclosed) response rates.

What, then, explains the differences in the levels of support and opposition across the polls? Most likely, the pollsters’ introductions or preambles (when these were used) to their question, the wording of the question, and the range and nature of the response options.

DemosAU: Conducted late July, the poll that produced the biggest proportion in favour of recognition introduced its question thus: “The recognition of a Palestinian state is a topic of international debate. Some countries have formally recognised a Palestinian state as a step towards supporting a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestinian conflict. Others believe such recognition should only occur as part of a negotiated peace agreement between the parties.” Then came the question: “Would you support or oppose Australia formally recognising a Palestinian state in the present circumstances?” The response options, as published, were “support,” “oppose,” “don’t know.” As presented to survey respondent, they appear to have been ordered differently: “support,” “don’t know,” “oppose.”

Formally, the introduction was “balanced”: reasons were given — one for recognition, one against. Whether the respondents themselves considered the two reasons to be balanced — and how one might establish whether they did — is another matter.

While each of the reasons was drawn from the current debate, they were not necessarily the most powerful each side had to offer, nor were they necessarily of comparable importance. In September 2022, the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network listed at least ten reasons for recognising a Palestinian state “now.” And following the government’s announcement, Peter Jennings, formerly of the defence department, listed nine reasons not to do so. As it happens, recognising “a Palestinian state as a step towards supporting a two-state solution” was not on APAN’s 2022 list, and recognition “only occur[ing] as part of a negotiated peace agreement” doesn’t appear to be on Jennings’s list.

Since the argument in favour of recognition was the first consideration mentioned, and online polling can generate a “primacy effect” — the tendency for respondents to choose the first option they are offered — the introduction might (unwittingly) have encouraged support for recognition. Moreover, if we assume that most respondents preferred peace to war, the reason for supporting recognition may have seemed more constructive, hence more attractive, than the reason for opposing it — the appeal of the immediate (“a step”) especially attractive to those who placed some distant future (“should only occur”) at a discount.

Note, too, that by the standard Flesch–Kincaid measure of intelligibility, the introduction was “very difficult to read.” The difficulty of comprehending the introduction may have encouraged “satisficing”: respondents struggling with the cognitive load, ticking the first box (“support”), and moving on. The cognitive challenge (and the placement of the “don’t know” option) may also help to account for the fact that nearly a third of the sample (32 per cent) responded by saying “don’t know.”

Having answered the question, those who had expressed a view one way or the other were “engaged in a chat-style discussion with a research AI specially programmed by the DemosAU team to probe their opinions and attitudes in more detail.” From these discussions “key themes” emerged.

For those who supported recognition these were: “Historical Land Claims and Right To Self-Determination” (to which 39 per cent of respondents were said to have referred); “Humanitarian Concerns” (34 per cent); “Path to Conflict Resolution” (26 per cent); and “Response To Israel’s Recent Military Actions” (15 per cent). What proportion expressed other views, or no view, is not disclosed.

For those opposed to recognition, the themes that emerged were: “Concern Over Legitimising Hamas” (40 per cent); “Not Australia’s Business” (20 per cent); “Preconditions for Peace as Conflict Resolution” (18 per cent); and “Belief that Israel Holds Exclusive Sovereignty for Historical/Biblical Reasons” (15 per cent). Again, the proportion offering other reasons or no reason at all was not stated.

Both sets of reasons suggest that while the considerations mentioned in the introduction to the question may have primed some — bringing considerations to the fore that might not otherwise have entered their thinking — they certainly didn’t prime all. “Path to Conflict Resolution,” the only consideration that approximated the reason referred to in the preamble, was mentioned by no more than a quarter of those in favour of recognition; “Preconditions for Peace as Conflict Resolution,” the only consideration against recognition that approximated the consideration to which the preamble had referred, was mentioned by less than a quarter.

What of those respondents who registered as “don’t know” when asked about recognition? Were they unable to decide between conflicting considerations or did they know nothing and had never considered the question?

Resolve: The question asked by Resolve and response options it offered were much more problematic; so problematic that it shouldn’t have been asked — or, if asked, not published. It’s an example of poor polling and woeful oversight by newspapers that commission polls and find themselves ill-equipped to distinguish good polling from bad.

“The prime minister has recently said Australia, along with several other countries, will recognise Palestine at the UN assembly in September,” Resolve told respondents. This introduction lacked formal balance; by referring only to the prime minister and countries that supported him, it was weighted (however inadvertently) in favour of his position. At the same time, it ran together things about which respondents might have had separate views — the position of the prime minister, and the position (as DemosAU had done) of “several other countries.”

Following this introduction, respondents were asked, “Which is your preference on this question of recognition: Australia should recognise Palestine in September’s UN meeting regardless of who is in power” (24 per cent ticked this box); “Australia should wait until Hamas is replaced and/or when Palestine considers recognising Israel’s right to exist first” (32 per cent); or “No change” (44 per cent)?

While there was one box respondents could tick to indicate their support for the government’s move, they were offered two to indicate their opposition. To what, in the first box, was the phrase “regardless of who is in power” supposed to refer? To Labor and the Coalition in Australia? To Likud or some other party in Israel? Or to Hamas or some other entity in Palestine? On the Flesch–Kincaid scale, this option was “difficult to read.”

The second box — “wait until Hamas is replaced and/or when Palestine considers recognising Israel’s right to exist” — rolled two considerations into one, separated by “and/or.” Even if we assume that “Hamas” was an entity with which respondents were familiar, that they also understood that an entity called “Palestine” had yet to recognise “Israel’s right to exist,” and that they understood these things in roughly the same way, the use of “and/or” made this a daunting choice. On the Flesch–Kincaid scale, this statement, too, was “difficult to read.”

What about the third box, “no change” — referencing the fact (nowhere spelled out) that Australia didn’t recognise Palestine at the time? Though the second and third alternatives should have been mutually exclusive — respondents, after all, could only choose one of the two — those who ticked the second box might just as easily have ticked the third since the belief that “Australia should wait until Hamas is replaced” and the belief that “Australia should wait until Palestine considers recognising Israel’s right to exist” (the second option) were not alternatives to supporting the status quo but reasons for supporting the status quo (the third option) — unless, of course, we assume that “no change” meant “no change, whatever happens.”

“Don’t know” was not a response the question allowed. Preventing a “don’t know” may encourage those with an opinion to express it, but only at the cost of forcing those without an opinion either to skip the question (creating a potential non-response problem) or to select an option they don’t necessarily support — here, most likely, in large numbers, “no change.” That “no change” was the most popular of the three alternatives also may be explained by the fact that it was the only alternative “easy to read.”

If DemosAU exaggerated the level of support for the government’s move to recognise a Palestinian state, the Resolve poll surely underestimated it.

Essential: “To what extent do you support or oppose the Australian government’s move to recognise the state of Palestine?,” Essential asked. There was no introduction. This was the question that produced an answer in favour of recognition mid-way between the result obtained by DemosAu and the result obtained by Resolve. If the other two questions were “very difficult to read,” this one was simply “difficult to read.”

Respondents were offered five-point scale: “strongly oppose” (20 per cent); “somewhat oppose” (10 per cent); “neither support nor oppose” (37 per cent); “somewhat support” (16 per cent); “strongly support” (18 per cent). Responses were evenly spread — some might say randomly spread: 34 per cent in favour, 30 per cent opposed — a difference of just four points — with 37 per cent saying “neither support nor oppose.”

The way the results were published might have suggested that “strongly support” was the first option, but “strongly oppose” came first. So, any “primacy effect” would have boosted opposition to the proposal, not support. Essential, the only one of the three polling organisations to be a member of the Australian Polling Council, was the only one of the three to publish its questionnaire.

How do these polls measure up against Gallup’s “quintamensional plan”? None sought to establish whether respondents had “given any attention or thought to the issue,” much less what interest in or information about the issue they brought to the interview. The closest we can get to estimating how many had given little or no “attention or thought to the issue” is the proportion registered by the polls as “don’t know” or as “neither support nor oppose.” These numbers are high.

Had the polls drilled down into the numbers to discover how many had “given any attention or thought to the issue,” the findings might have been sobering. Asked in January 2021, in a probability-based poll, “how interested are you in the Middle East and the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” two-thirds of the respondents said they were either “not at all interested” (35 per cent) or only “a little bit interested”; only a quarter (24 per cent) said they were “somewhat interested” and hardly any (8 per cent) said they were “very interested.” Asked “How much do you know about Australia’s foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine,” most (57 per cent) said they knew “virtually nothing”; while 27 per cent said they knew “a little” and 14 per cent said they knew “something,” almost no one (2 per cent) said they knew “a great deal.”

Polls like this are almost certain to reflect the times in which they are taken. Given the events of 2023 — October 7 — and their consequences, both the level of interest in “the Israel–Palestinian conflict” and the level of knowledge about “Australia’s foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine” are very likely to have increased. How much they might have increased, we cannot say.

Given the likely low level of engagement, the questions and introductions — and/or, we should add, the response alternatives — invited the use of split-ballots, even if this meant enlarging the number of respondents. This never happened. Pollsters (and academic survey researchers) have always been keen to maintain that public (polled) opinion largely exists independently of how it is measured. So, experimental techniques — with the risk that different techniques will yield quite different results — are rarely used, no matter the insistence of the experts in questionnaire design that they should.

In the era in which he proposed it, Gallup’s suggestion that pollsters include an open-ended question “to bring to light general attitudes,” was largely impractical. Until the 1970s, interviews were conducted almost entirely face-to-face; the idea of interviewers faithfully recording open-ended responses, of market research organisations putting the time into coding these responses, and of media outlets footing the bill for effort involved, was mostly fanciful.

AI might change all that. DemosAU’s poll included no open-ended question before respondents were asked whether they would “support” or “oppose.” But in asking for their reasons for supporting or opposing “Australia formally recognising a Palestinian state in the present circumstances,” DemosAU was able to harness the power of AI to both record respondents’ “verbatims” and to code them.

Gallup’s final suggestion, that the polls measure the intensity of opinion, has always been something pollsters could do. On the Palestine question, however, only Essential tried to do it. As we have seen, it presented respondents with a five-point “Likert” scale with “strongly oppose” at one end and “strongly support” at the other. On this measure, 38 per cent had strong opinions — 18 per cent in “favour,” 20 per cent “against.” In 2021, slightly fewer (32 per cent) said they were either “somewhat interested” or “very interested” in “the Middle East and the Palestinian conflict,” even if many fewer (16 per cent) said they knew either “something” or “a great deal” about “Australia’s foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine.” Even allowing for an increase in the levels of interest and knowledge since then, the polls suggest (though they certainly don’t prove) that intensity of opinion on the recognition of Palestine may be closely related to interest in the conflict but not closely related to (self-assessed) knowledge about Australia’s position on it.

Of the three polls, the Essential poll is the one most likely to represent the state of public opinion on the recognition issue. This is not because it is the most recent, taken after the public had had more time to digest the news and think about it. Nor is it because it represents a reading that is midway between the other two — though, as rule of thumb, the idea that the truth is likely to in the middle offers some reassurance. Rather, it’s because the Essential poll is the least problematic of the three.

Essential’s is the only poll to have respected the injunction to “Beware of asking respondents about solutions to complex problems.” It avoided the use of an introduction that might bias as well as inform a response. It avoided the use of alternatives that might have been loaded or incomprehensible. And it allowed respondents to say they had no opinion even if this also allowed respondents to conceal views they held.

Does that mean that support for recognition split 34–30, as the Essential poll showed? Not necessarily. A poll, after all, is no more (if also no less) than the product of a sample survey; even if the sampling is probability-based, there are other kinds of possible error: coverage error (a sampling frame, such as the internet, that doesn’t cover everyone), measurement error (from asking the wrong question to asking a question that solicits meaningless answers), non-response error (those asked to participate not responding, now very common, with those who do respond having different views from those who don’t). Each of these may be more important than sampling error — though sampling error is the only source of error most pollsters are prepared to acknowledge.

More striking than the difference between the level of support for a Palestinian state and the level of opposition is the level of non-commitment — the number of respondents who chose “don’t know” or “neither support nor oppose.” In American polls that offer a “don’t know” as an option, the uptake across all manner of topics normally ranges from “about an eighth to a third.” In these Australian polls, the level of non-commitment ranges from about a third (32 per cent) to about a half (46 per cent) — both “don’t know” and  “neither support nor oppose.” How many who responded with a “yes” or a “no” should really have registered as uncommitted?

For an issue that appears not to have generated widespread engagement — with low interest in it, and little knowledge about it, if only one of the polls had had the wit to measure it — might the intensity of opinion be a better measure of public opinion than its overall distribution? If intensity is our best guide, then support for recognition (as measured by Essential, the only poll that measured it) appears to be evenly split: 18 per cent in favour, 20 per cent against.

Has there been a shift in the polls over the last eighteen months or so? If there has been — either in the distribution of opinion or in its intensity — then the findings of Essential and DemosAU in April and May last year respectively suggest it was small. (DemosAU’s head of research declared that the July 2025 figures represented a “jump” in support of ten percentage points since last May, with the gap between support and opposition increasing from thirteen points to twenty-two. But changes in the questions and/or response options mean the polls don’t allow us to infer anything much.)

Are polls the only measure of public opinion? They are not. The rise of polled opinion, the American political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg argued nearly forty years ago, transformed earlier understandings of public opinion: from being understood as views citizens volunteered to views survey researchers solicited; from views inferred from particular kinds of behaviour to the expression of particular kinds of attitudes; from the expression of groups, their leaders and so on, to the expression of random individuals; and from assertions of an agenda for public debate to responses to a pollster’s agenda of public concerns.

While the rise of polled opinion may have marginalised earlier understandings of public opinion, it hasn’t eliminated them — especially when it comes to public policy — as the recent pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests show. Political leaders are usually less concerned with whether a proposal has widespread public support than with whether falling into line with — or defying — calls of certain kinds is likely to shift votes. •

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We should keep this question front of mind in thinking about the events of 7 October 2023. The vicious Palestinian breakout from Gaza that day and Israel’s ongoing neo-genocidal retaliation might shock in its scale and brutality. But it was long in the making. Reading Erik Skare’s insightful and richly detailed new book, Road to October 7: A Brief History of Palestinian Islamism, is therefore akin to sitting through a disaster movie — seemingly powerless to change the script, we can but watch in sickened horror.

“So Gaza could not be contained after all” is the singularly apt opening sentence of the book. Gaza had been under blockade (Egyptian as well as Israeli) for sixteen years. Nearly 80 per cent of its population of around 2.2 million people depended on aid and more than half of them (and 70 per cent of its young people) were unemployed. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency, Israeli security forces had damaged or destroyed around 300 of Gaza’s water wells, and more than 80 per cent of the water extracted from the territory’s aquifers did not meet the World Health Organization’s water quality standards.

By 2023, Skare writes, the majority of Gazans under thirty had never seen the world outside, and a sixteen-year-old would have experienced four wars and countless skirmishes, airstrikes and armed cross-border confrontations. Add to this the gloomy political reality. October 7 happened, Skare argues, because the moderates in Hamas had few, if any, victories to show since the movement’s success in the legislative elections of 2006.

Hamas had not brought Palestinians any closer to liberation. The political and geographic split between Gaza and the West Bank persisted. The occasional violent flare-ups with Israel did little to disturb Israeli daily life “or shake the Israeli perception that pacifying and containing two million Palestinians indefinitely was feasible.” Continuing international isolation deepened a conviction that the experiment by Hamas moderates had been in vain and no political or diplomatic solution was in prospect.

Skare is a historian at the University of Oslo and has published extensively on Palestinian Islamism and the resistance to Israeli occupation. Armed movements, he writes, including Palestinian Islamist ones, reflect broader political and societal developments. So the emergence during the 1970s and 1980s of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, reflected a loss of faith in the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by the quixotic Yasser Arafat and his Fatah party. It also pointed to what Skare terms the “desecularisation” of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The majority of the founders of both Hamas and the PIJ were either born in or forced into refugeehood. How then, Skare asks, could they possibly recognise the legitimacy of the state that had displaced them and taken everything from them? Where the PIJ had a singular focus on armed struggle, the much larger and influential Hamas encompassed “moderates” and “hardliners.” It also faced the sometimes difficult challenge of reconciling the views of “insiders” — those located in the occupied territories themselves — and “outsiders,” located in the Gulf states, Syria, Jordan or elsewhere.

Such categorisations can be fluid and very much in the eye of the beholder. On several occasions, including just before Israel killed him in a targeted missile attack, Sheikh Yassin held out the prospect of a long-term truce, dependent on Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Skare also cites the example of Mahmoud Zahar, now seen as one of Hamas’s leading hardliners. In the 1990s Zahar was regarded as a dove, so much so that he faced death threats from Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades. His stance changed dramatically after Israel tried to assassinate him in 2003 by dropping explosives on his house, killing his twenty-year old son and maiming his daughter.

Hamas vacillated in its approach to electoral participation but eventually contested the 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority, winning seventy-four of the 132 seats. Hamas moderates gambled that electoral participation “would underscore the movement’s democratic intentions and its acceptance of shared political norms,” writes Skare. They were demonstrably naive; relations between Hamas and Fatah rapidly deteriorated and Hamas forcibly took over the Gaza Strip in 2007.

Skare is scathing about the European Union’s role. It had encouraged Islamist participation in the political process then “refused to accept the outcome of the people’s vote.” The so-called Quartet, made up of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia, aspired to weaken Hamas as a whole but succeeded mainly in undermining the moderates who had urged participation in the 2006 elections in the first place.

No examination of Hamas is complete without some discussion of its value to Israel in helping to divide the Palestinian nationalist movement. In 2015, Bezalel Smotrich, currently Israel’s finance minister and an outspoken advocate of “burying” Palestinian statehood, described the Palestinian Authority as “a liability” and Hamas “an asset.” Although Skare says there is no evidence that Hamas was the creation of Israeli intelligence, it is a pity his book doesn’t explore the Hamas–Israeli link in more detail.

Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the PLO and the Fatah party. In 2009, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Skare argues that Israel’s regular assassinations of Palestinian leaders were “seldom guided by cost–benefit calculations.” They were the result of “opportunity rather than necessity… emotion rather than cold reason.” The choice of target was sometimes bizarre. Ismail Abu Shanab, a prominent Hamas moderate committed to working with the Palestinian Authority, once declared: “Let’s be frank, we cannot destroy Israel. The practical solution is to have a state alongside Israel… When we build a Palestinian state, we will not need these militias.” Shanab was assassinated by Israel in 2003.

The appeal of Islamism, Skare argues, was never its religious doctrine but “as a prism through which Palestinian nationalism is expressed.” In 2025, despite genuflections from “moderate” countries including Australia, we seem further away than ever from the logical expression of that nationalism — a viable Palestinian state. Skare’s book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the toxic mix of history, inhumanity and hubris that has shaped the scene before us. It points to further agony ahead. •

Road to October 7: A Brief History of Palestinian Islamism
Erik Skare | Verso | $28.50 | 222 pages

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Many observers have interpreted Hamas’s immediate endorsement as a sign of weakness, if not desperation. In this reading, after nearly two years of unremitting Israeli bombardment and siege of Gaza, the assassination of Hamas’s top leaders, and devastating attacks on the group’s allies around the region, including Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas has few options left.

But Hamas’s rapid acceptance of the deal may be as much a strategic ploy as a symptom of duress. After nearly two years of war, Hamas’s political organization has suffered severe blows and its remit over war-torn Gaza is tenuous. Yet despite the growing devastation of Gaza, Hamas’s fighters have shown continued strength. Since the spring of 2025, they have stepped up offensive attacks on Israeli forces across the strip, including a large-scale assault on an Israeli base on 20 August, and other operations in June and July in which multiple Israeli soldiers were killed.

At the same time, Hamas has increased coordination with other armed groups in Gaza and replenished its ranks, even amid the widespread starvation of the population. Behind its resilience is an evolution in its approach to the war that has further raised the stakes and that could make Israel’s controversial new campaign to seize Gaza City a military, as well as humanitarian, disaster.

To understand Hamas’s survival strategy, it is crucial to trace the way its aims have evolved. When it launched its 7 October attacks, Hamas’s Gaza leadership assumed that the operation would quickly draw in allies across the region, and cause Palestinians and even the Arab public to collectively rise up. In essence, it expected a replay of May 2021, when Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem provoked an unprecedented collective response: Palestinians rose up across the West Bank and in Israeli cities, Hezbollah and other allied groups fired rockets from Lebanon and Syria, and Hamas itself launched an intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. October 7 was intended to replicate this joining of the fronts but on a much larger scale.

After nearly 700 days of war, those aims have dramatically failed. Following Hamas’s unilateral attack from Gaza, Palestinians in Israel did not mobilise, while those in the West Bank found themselves surrounded by an intense Israeli crackdown. Most of Hamas’s regional allies remained on the sidelines. Despite its formidable arsenal in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah sought to contain rather than expand the conflict; then, in September 2024, it succumbed to Israel’s pager operation and decapitation of its leadership. In December, the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime closed off crucial military supply routes.

The collapse of these external fronts was compounded by the difficulties Hamas faced in Gaza. After breaking the ceasefire in March 2025, Israel initially focused on aerial bombardments, keeping ground incursions strictly limited. The lack of fighting in urban centres prevented Hamas from taking the initiative, often leaving it a passive bystander to the massacres of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli forces reoccupied large parts of the strip. Combined with the Israeli cut-off of all aid in March, the new offensive greatly increased the ordeal in Gaza and Gazans began to publicly protest against Hamas.

Hamas’s forces in Gaza began to change their approach. On 20 April a small group of fighters staged an ambush from a tunnel in Beit Hanoun, an Israeli-held “buffer zone.” Using rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, they overturned an Israeli military vehicle, killed an Israel soldier, and left several others wounded. Since then, groups of fighters have been ramping up similar actions across Gaza. On 24 June, fighters from the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, killed seven Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis. On 7 July, again in Beit Hanoun, a group of fighters assaulted a convoy of tanks just a few metres from the border, killing five soldiers and wounding fourteen others. On 15 July, in the northern enclave of Jabaliya, three more soldiers were killed in an ambush targeting an Israeli engineering team that had been sent to clear roads for Israeli forces. On 22 July, in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the strip, a Hamas operation targeted an Israeli military convoy and a Merkava tank.

In recent weeks, these pressure attacks have become bolder. By mid-August, when the Israeli army resumed its incursions in into residential areas, Hamas’s offensive operations were multiplying in eastern Gaza City, especially in the neighbourhoods of Tuffah, Zaytoun and Shujaiyya. The al-Qassam Brigades have also been active in the south, as the unusual 20 August attack on an Israeli military encampment in Khan Younis attests: no fewer than eighteen fighters attacked the base with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at close range. Such a large-scale operation, which Israeli officials concluded may have been an attempt to capture new soldiers, would have required significant preparation, coordination, and intelligence.

In fact, these operations are part of a tactical reassessment by Hamas, which has sought to turn Israel’s expanded war aims to its own advantage. Despite Israel’s overwhelmingly stronger military resources, Hamas has drawn on the potential of asymmetrical warfare and the singular determination of its fighters. When Israeli soldiers began to limit ground incursions in urban areas, Hamas fighters began to seek out and target them in the “buffer zones.” As Israeli officials have acknowledged, Hamas was able to adapt and rebuild its forces in areas that Israeli forces had previously “cleared.”

Now, as the Israeli government has set out to seize and control large parts of Gaza City, Israeli forces must contend with urban guerrilla warfare in a terrain that Hamas knows by heart. These tactics could prove especially effective in the labyrinthine ruins of Gaza City, where Hamas is believed to still have a significant network and where Israeli forces have until now mostly avoided major incursions.

Even as Hamas has been cut off from external support and come under growing pressure in Gaza, its fighters have shown surprising strength. Hamas’s ability to renew its manpower has long been a defining feature of the group, which has for years managed to maintain a very strong foothold in Palestinian society even after severe setbacks. The current war is no exception. The loss of a significant number of top leaders — including Yahya Sinwar, the overall leader of Hamas in Gaza and mastermind of the 7 October attacks, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, and Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing — has had little visible effect on its capacity to fight.

The overall manpower of Hamas’s brigades remains unclear. In the summer of 2024, Israeli sources claimed that some 17,000 Hamas militants had been killed since October 2023, including “half of the leadership” of Hamas’s military. But as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials assessed that just 8900 named fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad had been killed, according to a classified database newly revealed by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian news organization +972 Magazine. US intelligence officials concluded in January that Hamas may have added as many as 15,000 additional fighters since the war began. Gazan officials and the United Nations do not distinguish between civilians and fighters in their total count of fatalities, but if the Israeli database is correct, it would mean that more than 80 per cent of the 53,000 believed to have been killed as of May 2025 were civilians.

Paradoxically, Israel’s relentless escalation may be fuelling Hamas’s resilience. To an extent, the growing desperation of Gaza’s civilians has fed public opposition to Hamas. After Israel’s total aid blockade began in March, Gazans began staging anti-Hamas protests in the northern part of the strip, calling for the immediate entry of aid and for Hamas to relinquish power. Hamas’s response fluctuated between allowing discontent and repressing the demonstrations. Although Hamas has always faced significant opposition to its rule in Gaza, public protests have previously been rare. Their appearance in March appears to be a direct response to the extremity of the situation in Gaza amid the Israeli cut-off of aid.

Opposition to Hamas has also been encouraged by Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and has tried to exploit Gazan anger and position itself to govern postwar Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has advanced its own strategy to fragment the social fabric, including by backing and arming an anti-Hamas militia in Rafah controlled by Yasser Abu Shabab, a strongman and drug trafficker who escaped from a Hamas prison in October 2023 and who also has ties to Fatah. According to UN officials and international aid workers, the Abu Shabab militia has been looting aid convoys.

The strategy appears to be aimed at making Gazans believe that Hamas is stealing their food — as Israeli officials have long claimed, without furnishing evidence — and to sow chaos. For Israel, it also may be a way to impose the idea that it can place its own men in a position of control and power in the enclave, in preparation for the “day after” in Gaza. After Israel’s arming of the militia was revealed in early June, Netanyahu publicly defended the practice. (“What’s wrong with this? It saves IDF soldiers’ lives,” he said.)

Yet this divide-and-conquer approach, combined with the relentless attacks on civilians, has also entrenched resistance among ordinary Gazans, who now perceive Israel as undertaking a war of extermination. In southern Gaza, the Abu Shabab militia is widely reviled, and Abu Shabab’s own family has disassociated itself from him and called for his death. Meanwhile, there are indications, including on social media, that growing numbers of young Palestinians with no prior training have been joining the al-Qassam Brigades and carrying out guerrilla actions. Although the intensive bombardments and the territorial division of almost the entire Gaza Strip has weakened the coordination between the groups of fighters, who are acting increasingly autonomously, it has not buried their capacity for action.

Another crucial factor in Hamas’s staying power is its tunnel network. Even now, after months of intense bombardment and the use of advanced technologies, Israeli forces have been unable to destroy significant parts of this underground city, allowing Hamas to continue to hide the remaining hostages and prisoners, protect its fighters, and provide bases for watching and attacking Israeli forces.

Israel’s inability to control the depths of the earth highlights the asymmetrical nature of the conflict, which increasingly pits sophisticated and highly expensive weapons systems, many of them acquired from Western countries, against ersatz, locally made rockets, explosives, and tunnels.

The recent Hamas ambushes have also raised growing concerns among Israeli military officials that more soldiers could be captured. In July, the army implemented the so-called Hannibal directive, which requires the military to use all means necessary to prevent soldiers from being taken by the enemy, even if such use of force leads to soldiers’ death. Indeed, out of the 205 hostages and prisoners that have been released since the war began, only eight have been freed as a result of Israeli–American rescue operations — and these six were in buildings above ground and not in underground tunnels. On 8 June, an Israeli military operation to rescue four hostages from a building in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza led to the massacre of 274 civilians, among them sixty children.

Israel’s inability to destroy Hamas’s tunnels has led increasingly to efforts to obliterate everything above ground in Gaza. As early as October 2023, Israel began targeting displacement camps, schools and hospitals with the aim of turning the population against Hamas and forcing surrender. Although that objective failed, the Israeli government has doubled down on this strategy since resuming the war in March, enforcing a total cut-off of aid for eleven weeks, and then, starting in late May, taking effective control of aid delivery through the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has led to hundreds of Gazans being killed by Israeli forces at humanitarian distribution points, one of which an IDF soldier described to Israeli newspaper Haaretz in June as a “killing field.”

Hamas has long emphasised the sacrificial dimension of its liberation project, which has helped it push Gaza back to the centre of the Palestinian cause. Unlike their counterparts in other Palestinian regions, Gazans are primarily attached to their land not because of their historical presence there but because of its status as a place of refuge. Almost all Gazans are descendants of refugees from 1948, when some 250,000 Palestinians were expelled to Gaza from their towns and villages during Israel’s founding, and they have passed down stories of past massacres and dispossessions. Hamas sees the current war as part of that tradition.

In light of the extraordinary privations and mass killing of Gaza’s civilian population in the current war, Hamas’s external leader, Khaled Meshaal, has likened Gaza to Algeria, where independence was achieved only after the death of more than a million civilians.

Although Hamas’s leaders counted on regional allies joining with them in the war after 7 October, from the outset they viewed Hamas’s Gaza organisation as autonomous. It did not share the specific planning and details of the 7 October attacks with other members of the axis and it was the sole instigator. In compensation, Hamas’s brigades have relied on — and increased — ties to other militant groups within Gaza, some of which were already established before 7 October.

Particularly important has been Hamas’s longstanding entente with Islamic Jihad. In 2022, Israel sought to divide the two groups by launching a heavy campaign exclusively against Islamic Jihad. At the time, the strategy appeared to work, with Hamas lying low and many Israeli officials concluding that it was weak. In retrospect, Hamas’s decision to stay out of the 2022 confrontation appears to have been a division of labour agreed upon with Islamic Jihad — one that allowed Hamas more freedom to prepare for the 7 October attacks.

Since the war began, Hamas has remained closely allied with Islamic Jihad, which as of this summer continued to hold one of the remaining Israeli captives, Rom Braslavski. Coordination between the groups’ armed wings has also grown, including in a number of recent joint attacks in Khan Yunis. These attacks have in part been orchestrated by the joint operations room, an organization created by Hamas and Islamic Jihad back in 2006, but which officially emerged years later, during the 2018 Great March of Return, a series of popular protests by Gazans on the Gazan–Israeli border. Today, the joint operations room brings together twelve Palestinian armed factions — including, alongside Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Saraya al-Quds, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Mujahideen Brigades, and Omar al-Qasim Brigades — and has become the place where many decisions about the war and negotiations are made.

In recent weeks, there are signs that this broader front may be crumbling. Members of the joint operations room have called on Hamas to end the war. During a meeting with the head of Egyptian intelligence, some of these factions also criticised Hamas’s procrastination on reaching a ceasefire — which may account for Hamas’s immediate approval of the 18 August proposal without amendments. Still, these cracks in the coalition have not caused a shift in the brigades’ determination to fight. There is actually a consensus among the factions that surrender or capitulation is unthinkable.

As the core members of the Qassam Brigades see it, only continued attacks on Israeli troops will force Netanyahu to agree to another ceasefire and end the siege. In their view, it was military pressure by Hamas — including significant setbacks for Israel in Rafah and in Jabaliyya in November and December of 2024, as well as knife attacks in both Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun that caused the deaths of several soldiers in January 2025 — that finally led Netanyahu to sign the US-backed ceasefire in mid-January. By continuing to launch major operations, the Qassam Brigades hope to increase the pressure on Netanyahu, including from his own military. One such case was the 7 July killing of the five Israeli soldiers in Beit Hanoun, which caused some Israeli military and political figures, both on the right and in the opposition, to press the government to allow soldiers to return to their camps and to accelerate efforts to reach a ceasefire.

After nearly two years of war, the strengths and weaknesses of Hamas are almost the inverse of Israel’s. Where Israel has extraordinary military resources but has struggled to find the tens of thousands of additional troops it needs for its massive Gaza City invasion, Hamas, despite huge losses of forces, continues to recruit new fighters. Meanwhile, as Hamas expands operations, Israel is also losing more soldiers on the ground. It also faces increasing difficulty in getting reservists to show up for duty.

The 18 August ceasefire proposal is not new. Based on a previous proposal put forward by US president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, it calls for the total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and, like the January ceasefire, allows Israel to resume its war against Gaza at the end of the sixty-day period. Hamas had accepted earlier versions of this proposal even before its response to the new one on 18 August. Netanyahu has approached the ceasefire proposals not as negotiations, but as a way to achieve what Israel has been unable to through force. In late August, he and other Israeli government officials called instead for an all-or-nothing deal that negotiators have said is unreachable.

Netanyahu is now trying to push Israeli forces into the tunnels of Gaza City, despite strong opposition from the Israeli military. The army has said a takeover could take more than a year to complete and would be highly dangerous, and that it prefers to use every possibility to negotiate before undertaking such an assault. In 2024, Netanyahu and the military establishment sought to vanquish Hamas’s regional allies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon. But now, with the military’s continued failure to achieve its stated objectives against Hamas itself, it has stepped up attacks in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. By promoting its actions on these other fronts, including against Iran in June, the government can downplay the actual situation in Gaza. Increasingly, an enormous gap has emerged between the image of the conflict the Israeli government is trying to convey and the reality on the ground. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2025 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

The post The new Hamas insurgency appeared first on Inside Story.

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin shared the prize in 1978 for agreeing a treaty, urged on by US president Jimmy Carter. This treaty lasted, although Sadat was assassinated for his troubles in 1981. But to get Begin to agree Sadat had to set the Palestinian issue aside.

Sorting out the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip then became the main challenge. There was an apparent breakthrough in the early 1990s, based on the Oslo peace accords, leading in 1994 to another peace prize. It was shared by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for agreeing a road map to a two-state solution in 1994.

The next year Rabin was assassinated, and the prospects never looked quite so bright again, although Bill Clinton put a substantial effort into coming up with a comprehensive solution at the dog end of his presidency in 2000. Attempts to find a way for Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist that have ended in failure, disappointment and disillusion. Many ceasefires have been agreed but their number only reflects the regular resort to violence.

Meanwhile, the effort to forge relations between Israel and the Arab states that for decades have refused to acknowledge its existence has been more successful. Trump believed that his success in getting a number to sign up to peace treaties with Israel in 2020 — the Abraham Accords — was another good reason for him to get the Peace Prize. Saudi Arabia is the most important country yet to sign up, and that is conditional on progress on the Palestinian issue.

Another reason why it could seem timely to address this issue is that over the past twelve months, Israel has also seen its most deadly enemies of recent years — Iran and Hezbollah — knocked back and an old enemy — Syria — under new management. Its security environment in principle is more benign than ever before.

This assessment could even be extended to Gaza, where Hamas as a military force is a shadow of its former self. If Netanyahu had chosen to cash in his winnings he could have offered Israel a more hopeful, and more peaceful, future. But he has spent his political career doing his best to thwart such a deal, and he is now in coalition with extremists whose “solution” to this problem would be to see Palestinians expelled from all the occupied territories to make room for more settlers.

The result of the path he has chosen has been to create conditions that make it easier for Hamas to survive and are steadily turning Israel into an international pariah. The idea of a separate Palestinian state is now being embraced by countries, including Britain, that until recently accepted it only as a pleasant but unrealistic idea.

I wrote last year explaining my scepticism about a two-state solution — not because this would be an undesirable outcome but because there was no plausible way to get there. I saw the most important and immediate task as addressing the dire conditions in Gaza, establishing effective governance in the Strip, and making progress on reconstruction. Since I wrote that, however, the situation inside Gaza has deteriorated further, and recognition of a Palestinian state, as a political project if not yet a functioning entity, is now firmly on the international agenda, presented as the only route to a lasting peace.

There are still grounds for scepticism. This is not going to lead to a Palestinian state any time soon, yet the immediate needs of Gaza require urgent attention. But the idea of a Palestinian state, which was accepted by past Israeli governments, has now become a way of warning the current government about the extent of its international isolation.

This is a symptom of a fundamental crisis in Israeli strategy. Netanyahu’s government has set itself objectives it cannot reach while ruling out any political role for Palestinian representatives. But without negotiations it lacks a means of stabilising the situation, let alone getting its hostages back. So long as it has American support the government may take the view that it can resist any pressure to change course. It is unclear whether Trump will back the Israelis in its current strategy for much longer. But what should be of even more concern for Israel is what support it will get following Trump.

At the start of 2025 there were grounds for optimism that the war would soon end. A deal was reached just before Trump’s inauguration, and Israel and Hamas began to swap hostages for prisoners. This process lasted for two months. For each of the thirty-three hostages returned from captivity some fifty Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons. Humanitarian aid was allowed to enter Gaza to enable displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. There were supposed to be talks leading to a permanent ceasefire, which in turn was supposed to set the conditions for a second stage in which all the remaining living hostages, military as well as civilian, would be exchanged for yet more prisoners. The third stage would see the remains of the deceased hostages released.

But allegations of non-compliance went back and forth from the start. In mid-February Hamas briefly suspended the release of hostages because of continued Israeli military action and a lack of sufficient aid. The process resumed but with constant accusations of bad faith.

On 1 March, when the first phase was due to end, Israel proposed that it should simply be extended, but Hamas rejected this because it wanted to move to the second stage which would see the war come to a complete end. Netanyahu wanted to retain the option of resuming military operations. When Hamas refused to accept his proposal, Israel blocked the entry of aid to Gaza and also the supply of electricity. On 18 March, it resumed airstrikes on Gaza.

In May, Israel began another military offensive, this one named Gideon’s Chariots. The plan pointed towards occupying all of Gaza, with the declared twin aim of defeating Hamas and releasing the hostages. A push would concentrate the population in the south and then deny Hamas leverage over the population by controlling the supplies of humanitarian aid. Two months on, this offensive is being wound down. Hamas has not been defeated, the hostages have not been released, the population is more or less where it was before, and the distribution of food and other assistance has been a complete and catastrophic shambles leading to famine conditions in Gaza.

The backlash against Israeli policies has left it isolated internationally. It is running out of options. The hardliners want to continue to occupy all of Gaza, even if this means sacrificing the hostages, and the government has decided to proceed along this path with yet another offensive, making the same claim as before that this will produce total victory.

One reason why Hamas is feeling stronger is because of the anger that has been directed at Israel as the Palestinian population suffers. The problem Israel sought to solve (and how much of a problem it actually was has been questioned) was Hamas’s ability to steal from international agencies as food was being delivered, and then to use this to gain influence over Gaza’s population. Israel’s alternative approach limited the amount of aid going into Gaza and changed the method of distribution. This involved an organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, apparently designed for the situation but evidently not fit for purpose. The idea was to distribute aid directly to Palestinians at four sites — three in south Gaza (to where Israel wanted people to relocate) and one more centrally, instead of moving the aid to where it was needed.

The scheme has been described, including in the Israeli press, as a colossal failure, with desperate scenes as Palestinians scramble for whatever sustenance they can find, malnourished children, shootings close to the distribution sites, and still no practical means of checking whether Hamas operatives were taking advantage.

Israel blames Hamas for the famine conditions, moans about fake videos and wilful exaggerations, but it is complaining largely to itself. As the occupying power it is responsible and it adopted what was widely recognised to be a scheme that was ineffective and harmful. Statements by Israeli ministers suggested a coercive element as well as incompetence. National security minister Itmar Ben-Gvir declared, “The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the ‘humanitarian’ aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.”

The Israeli government has belatedly appreciated the political damage caused by images of a starving population. The aid is moving again, and the UN is once again involved, although the levels are still too small. Tellingly, the Economist observed that:

Mr Netanyahu promised in a statement in English that Israel “will continue to work with international agencies” and “ensure that large amounts of humanitarian aid flows into the Gaza Strip.” In Hebrew he was much less emollient, promising his base that “in Gaza we are continuing to fight” and that “we will achieve our aim of destroying Hamas.” The aid entering Gaza, he said, would be “minimal.”

The humanitarian crisis, along with moves, led by militant settlers, to take more territory from Palestinians in the West Bank, and talk of annexations, put European governments under enormous domestic political pressure to denounce Israel’s actions and urge it to reverse course. This is what led to the push for a Palestinian state, starting with French president Macron with others, including the British government, following behind.

Israel complains that international moves to recognise a Palestinian state reward Hamas. That was not, in fact, one of Hamas’s objectives when it rampaged into southern Israel on 7 October 2023. It then had a variety of possible motives: inflicting pain on Israelis as an act of “resistance”; responding to settler activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem; demonstrating that it was putting up more of a fight than the hapless Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah; obstructing the proposed “normalisation” of Israeli–Saudi relations; and, high up on the list, taking as many hostages as possible to swap for Palestinian militants stuck in Israeli jails. There was no demand to adopt a “two-state” solution because that was not its policy.

It has on occasion said that it would not oppose a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza but its own demand is for all of Israel and not just the occupied bits. That is what the chant of “from the river to the sea” is all about. For Netanyahu, this lack of interest in a separate Palestinian state was one of Hamas’s most attractive features. It was why he was content to leave it in charge in Gaza, assuming that there was little harm it could do other than send an occasional barrage of missiles into Israel. It kept the Palestinians divided and rendered negotiations impractical.

In the aftermath of the attacks, which disqualified Hamas from running Gaza in the future, Netanyahu went out of his way to avoid addressing the question of who would replace it. Any serious non-Hamas, non-Israeli arrangement is bound to involve Palestinians and would be unpopular among the hardline elements of his own coalition. These elements still hanker to expel the Palestinians altogether, or squeeze them into a small enclave, to enable them to resettle the abandoned land.

The Israeli government is now discussing yet another new offensive, this time one that would have the IDF push into the remaining 25 per cent of the territory to seek out and destroy the remaining pockets of Hamas’s strength. This would be done without regard for the hostages, the humanitarian situation, and the even stronger international objections that would result.

The UN is already warning about “catastrophic consequences.” Of more concern to the government are the well-publicised objections of IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir that not only will an attempt at full occupation endanger the remaining hostages, as fighting moves close to where they are held, but it will also stretch further the IDF, already exhausted after almost two years of fighting. The alternative military option is not exactly promising. Encircling Hamas-held areas without entering them in force would likely lead to an attritional guerrilla war. The prospect either way is of a forever war without any obvious conclusion.

Because Netanyahu has no credible policy of his own for the long-term it is not surprising that the gap is being filled by the only political option that commands widespread international support. Recognising a Palestinian state can be dismissed as little more than a gesture as there is little there to be recognised. For now it is best seen as a protest against a reckless and self-defeating Israeli policy. If nothing else it tells the Israelis how much they have lost the “narrative battle” in Europe, having already lost it in much of the southern hemisphere a long time ago. Already, 147 states are signed up to recognition.

The difference Britain and France make is that they are both permanent members of the Security Council. If they supported a resolution backing a Palestinian state then it would leave the United States exercising its veto. This Trump would probably do. Unlike Biden, who supported the two-state policy, he does not. Nor is he influenced by the same considerations as Europeans, such as appeals to international law and human rights. When Canada joined proposals to recognise a Palestinian state he claimed this as justification to raise tariffs.

His view of the Middle East is, however, different from that of Netanyahu. He has not bothered to align other policies with Israel — on the Houthis or the ending of the war with Iran, and he has taken different stances on Turkey and Syria. He puts a high priority on his relations with the Gulf monarchies. And most of all he dislikes wars that go on forever and cannot be concluded quickly. He may not want to break with Israel over Gaza but he does not appear to be impressed and has expressed concern about the humanitarian situation.

If he really wants to take an initiative he has been handed an opportunity by Arab countries. At a UN conference on a two-state solution, which the United States did not attend, the twenty-two members of the Arab League unanimously supported a declaration, signed also by Britain and members of the European Union, that called for Hamas to lay down its weapons, release all hostages and end its rule of the Gaza Strip, as essential pre-conditions for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“In the context of ending the war in Gaza,” it read, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objectives of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.”

As important, the declaration also called for the deployment of “a temporary international stabilisation mission,” invited by the Palestinian Authority, and ‘under the aegis of the United Nations.”

Israel made its customary denunciation of calls for a Palestinian state as supporting Hamas, although Hamas was none too pleased by the document’s boost to the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, let alone the demands that it disarm. The document’s call to normalise relations with Israel elicited from Hamas a mirror image of Israel’s complaints about calls for a Palestinian state: “Talk about integrating the Zionist entity into the region is a reward to the enemy for its crimes.”

US negotiator Steve Witkoff reportedly told hostage families that the United States is developing a new position involving an ultimatum to Hamas to release all the hostages at once, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, followed by complete disarmament in return for the end of Israel’s military operation. If it refused the Israeli campaign would continue. Hamas has long said it will not disarm (and even if it did it is not clear how this could be implemented and monitored) and has now added that it would only do so if a Palestinian state were established. (Its language could be taken to mean that it was still after all of Israel and not just the occupied territories.)

For Israel this just shows how Hamas is exploiting the Europeans naivete in recognising a Palestinian state. Hamas is undoubtedly being opportunistic, but it is Netanyahu that has given them the opportunity. His insistence on a total victory over Hamas mean that all Hamas needs to do to claim its own victory is to survive while using the distressed state of the population as a weapon against Israel. Without serious governance arrangements in Gaza the situation there will remain violent and anarchic, allowing Hamas to keep going. But any new arrangements will involve Arab and European states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, and will nod in the direction of a future Palestine state.

As before, except now in much more desperate circumstances, the rejectionist policies of Hamas and the Israeli government feed off one another, providing each with an excuse not to make concessions.

Within Israel opposition to the government’s policies is growing, especially among the diplomatic and security community, who can see no credible end game and worry about Israel’s increasing international isolation. The generation in the US and Europe that saw Israel as the underdog — a small, beleaguered state in a sea of hostility — has been replaced by one that sees it as cruel and heartless.

Whatever position Trump decides to adopt, support for Israel has been haemorrhaging on both the left and right of American politics, and that will influence the policies of his successor. A Pew poll in April found that about 53 per cent of US adults now express an unfavourable opinion of Israel, up from 42 per cent before the Hamas attack. Another Pew poll, conducted in June found that in twenty of twenty-four countries surveyed, half or more of adults had an unfavourable view of Israel. The figures are higher among younger people. One of the largest gaps in the United States is between young and old. There, alienation from Israel is also becoming apparent in the Jewish community.

Taking a long view, peace diplomacy, in all its forms, has by and large served Israel well. It can claim that it has demonstrated the benefits of peace through strength. By showing resilience and military prowess, it convinced past enemies that there was no point in preparing for a war none wished to fight. Now it has put itself in an even better position by coming out on top in its recent battles with Iran and its proxies. Yet it simply does not know what to do with Gaza.

Israel does not have a sure military route to free the hostages. They are the last serious bargaining card that Hamas has and they will not play it until Israeli military operations stop. Yet Israel does not need Hamas to make a push to ease the humanitarian distress in Gaza, and nor does it need Hamas to agree a plan for Gaza’s future governance and reconstruction. For that it will have willing partners in the Gulf and Europe. These measures will undercut Hamas more than yet another offensive, for they will weaken its political base and not just its military base.

It is important not to underestimate the challenge of developing new governance and security structures in a situation, full of trauma and suspicion, involving many external actors with their own agendas. Nor can we expect Netanyahu to embrace the challenge, not least because to do so would be to break his coalition. But continuing with the current policies requires Israel to accept responsibility for the progressive immiseration of the Palestinian people without it ever being sure that it has truly eliminated Hamas, while further straining relations not only with its old friends in the West but its new friends in the Arab world.

Trump’s most recent comments don’t offer a ringing endorsement of Israeli strategy. He wants the United States to take bigger role in handling the humanitarian aspects of the crisis. The Gazans, “are obviously not doing too well with the food,” he has noted, adding that “Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution and also money.” That is his focus. “As far as the rest of it, I really can’t say, that’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.”

Whether or not this will get him his Nobel Prize, if he is really concerned to preserve and extend the Abraham Accords as well as prevent the humanitarian situation getting even worse, then Israel’s next steps should concern him greatly. Israel is divided on its next steps. Netanyahu needs the extremists to keep him in power but they do not offer a tenable prospectus. A forever war means constant insecurity and increasing isolation. Many Israelis, including in the IDF and the intelligence agencies, know this and are pushing back. Trump would do well to join them. •

The post Israel’s forever war appeared first on Inside Story.

Segal suggests, at the very least by inference, that antisemitism is the most dangerous form of racism in contemporary Australia. Accordingly, her report calls for action against antisemitism in ways that go beyond any protections offered any other group. This “privileging” of antisemitism is absurd. The most dangerous form of racism in Australian history and in contemporary Australia is anti-Indigenous racism, something one still reads about every day.

The settlement of Australia involved the near-destruction of Aboriginal society. By contrast there is probably no country in the world — including even the United States — where Jews have been treated more justly and equally than Australia. Isaac Isaacs, a Jew, was one of the original High Court judges. Later he became Australian governor-general. Our most revered soldier is probably John Monash, a Jew. Shortly before the outbreak of the second world war, following the vicious anti-Jewish action in Germany, “Kristallnacht,” and the German annexation of Austria, Australia offered refuge for up to 15,000 refugees from Germany and Austria. The chief sponsor of this offer was the Australian high commissioner in London, the former old-fashioned “liberal” prime minister, Stanley Bruce. Both my parents, who met in Australia, were beneficiaries.

If I might speak personally, even though I was involved in two controversies that concerned Australia and the Jews — the Helen Demidenko Affair and the question of the Hawke Government’s war crimes legislation — I have experienced antisemitic attacks in my life only twice.

The first occurred when, in my late teens, I part-owned a rental house. One of the tenants, who was a criminal, called me a “Jewboy” when I came around to collect unpaid rent.

The second occasion occurred in 1989 when I was co-editor of Quadrant. After I wrote “Left of the Urals,” a short article opposing the Hawke government’s war crimes legislation, principally on the grounds that Japanese war criminals were excluded, I was accused of being a (Jewish) antisemite by Isi Leibler, the most powerful figure in the Jewish community at that time.

I know from talking to Jewish friends that others’ experience of antisemitism was greater than mine. Nonetheless I’m sure that the antisemitic-free air I have breathed in throughout my life in Australia was by no means unique. The most reliable index of social attitudes in Australia — the Scanlon Report — shows that following 7 October and its aftermath negative images of Jews have risen from 9 per cent to 13 per cent.

It is obviously true, as the Segal report suggests, that over the past twenty months there has been a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents. The putatively most important instance of them was a hoax. The two other important actions so far have been two arson attacks on synagogues. Thankfully, so far as I am aware, there has not been even one case of a physical attack on a Jew. What is however remarkable about the Segal report is that in its entirety there is not one word about the cause of this rise in antisemitic incidents following the Israeli response to the vicious Hamas-led attack on Israelis of 7 October 2023.

On that day, 1200 Israeli Jews were murdered and 250 taken as hostages. In response the Israeli armed forces have slaughtered at least 60,000 Gazan Palestinians, and more likely 100,000, the majority of whom were entirely innocent women and children and also men. More than double that number have been seriously wounded with only the slimmest hope of medical aid. The modus operandi of the Israeli armed forces, the self-congratulatory supposed “most moral army” in the world, has seen ratios of up to fifty innocent Gazans killed, as regrettable “collateral damage,” in pursuit of one member of Hamas. Food, fuel, water, medical supplies have been cut off for significant periods of time. Seventy per cent of buildings in Gaza, including hospitals, universities, schools and administrative facilities have been systematically reduced to rubble.

Australians have been able to observe what Israel has done to Gaza on social media and on their television screens, even though journalists are forbidden entry into Gaza, for their protection of course. The more politically engaged or savvy among them will have noticed that not one of the many powerful Jewish organisations in Australia — including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, on whose board Jillian Segal once served as president — has condemned or even questioned the almost unbelievably pitiless brutality of the post–7 October Israeli destruction of Gaza.

Having failed to mention the self-evident cause of the relatively modest rise in antisemitic feeling, antisemitism is treated in Segal’s report as the most dangerous and insidious form of racism in contemporary Australia. Accordingly, the Segal report suggests measures whose censoriousness goes beyond anything in Australian legal history.

Australian law outlines powerful and once controversial protection against all forms of hate speech in article 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. This is not sufficient protection, according to Segal. What she proposes is not only individual but also organisational responsibility for any antisemitism in speech or action discovered on their turf. According to her proposal some unidentified body, perhaps made up of members of the Jewish community, should monitor both public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, and every university and cultural institution in Australia, for any instance of antisemitism. Segal proposes that some of their government funding be taken away from public broadcasters or universities (including protests) or cultural institutions if some so far unidentified body decides that in action or speech such an incident has occurred.

So far as I am aware, nothing like this has ever before been proposed in Australian history. It comes straight from the contemporary playbook of president Donald Trump.

There is no suggestion in the Segal report that government funding should also be stripped from universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions if instances of First Nations racism, Islamophobia, misogyny or homophobia are discovered there. The choice Segal offers is stark. Either the only form of bigotry to be monitored and punished in universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions by loss of government funds is antisemitism, or bigotry directed against indigenous Australians, Muslims, women and gays should also be monitored in publicly funded institutions and where appropriate punished. According to Segal either antisemitism is the only truly serious form of bigotry in Australia, or universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions will become subject to a regime of censoriousness without parallel in Australian history.

As we have recently discovered because of the investigative journalism of the independent online media platform, the Klaxon, the man to whom Jillian Segal is married is the partner with his brother of a trust that in 2023 and 2024 donated $50,000 to “Advance,” the most significant mainstream far right movement in Australia, that led the campaign against the indigenous Voice to Parliament and that has described Prime Minister Albanese as “weak, woke and broke.” Taking cover behind political correctness, Segal has claimed she had nothing to do with her husband’s political activities or he with hers, and that it was outrageous to suggest otherwise. She refused to tell the Guardian whether she knew about the $50,000 donation or what she thinks about “Advance.”

Segal’s thoughts about “Advance” and her husband’s $50,000 donation matter. Segal’s desire to monitor the ABC and SBS and to strip them of funds if they are found to have allowed antisemitic content onto their programs is consistent with one of the most conspicuous perennial demands of the mainstream far right in Australia, the attack on the ABC. I am now a devoted listener to the most politically sophisticated arm of the ABC, Radio National. In several years I have not even once encountered a program that could even remotely be regarded as antisemitic.

How will the existence of antisemitic content be discovered? Here we arrive at another novel and extraordinary suggestion. Segal believes that a 2016 definition of antisemitism, developed at a conference in Bucharest — “the IHRA non-legally binding definition of antisemitism” — should become mandatory for all individuals and organisations in Australia. So far as I am aware we do not live in a totalitarian country. Accordingly, we are free to decide for ourselves our own definition of what constitutes antisemitism and even to decide that definitions are not the best way of deciding whether an antisemitic incident in speech or action has occurred.

As it happens, the IHRA definition, which was drafted six years before 7 October and its aftermath, is replete with references to the relation of antisemitism and Israel. The definition concedes that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” However it then asserts that it is antisemitic to claim that Israel invents or exaggerates the Holocaust; that it is antisemitic to claim that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country where they live; that it is antisemitic to compare the actions of Israel to the actions of the Nazis; and that it is antisemitic to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”

In general, I agree with these claims and the other parts of the definition. However, I believe that it is wrong to make such a definition mandatory on individuals and organisations and to go beyond the 2016 Bucharest conference participants by rendering the definition “legally binding.” There is more than enough wriggle room in the IHRA definition to allow a clever lawyer to present a case that an entirely legitimate discussion about Israel in general and, in particular, Israel-in-Gaza is antisemitic.

Let one example suffice. There are scores of genocide scholars who believe, as I do, that since the Hamas atrocity of 7 October 2023 Israel has been carrying out policies of both ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian peoples of Gaza.

By slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children; by withholding altogether or restricting radically supplies of food, water, fuel, medicines and medical supplies; by reducing to rubble most of the buildings in Gaza — what Israel is telling the Palestinians of Gaza by its unmistakable action is: you have no future in Gaza. President Trump’s fleeting fancy about transforming Gaza into the Middle Eastern Riviera was music to Israeli ears. The current ethnic-cleansing fantasy action plan is to collect all the Palestinian people of Gaza inside a massive tent city on the ruins of Rafah where they might find food and medicine and freedom from bomb attack but from where, until transported to another country, they would not be permitted to leave.

Even as it pulverises Gaza, Israel prides itself on having the world’s “most moral army.” In a rare example of black humour, Israel’s great oppositional newspaper, Ha’aretz, recently described this latest means for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as “the world’s most moral concentration camp.”

The second half of this claim — the overlapping claim of genocide — is also strong. According to the international convention, the crime of genocide occurs when a state attempts to eliminate or destroy a nation, race, ethnicity or religion “in whole or in part.” The Palestinian nation is principally concentrated in two localities — in Gaza and on the West Bank. To eliminate Palestinian existence in Gaza involves the destruction of the Palestinian people “in part.”

Unlike ethnic cleansing, the charge of genocide relies on intentions as well as actions. For the crime of genocide to be proven what must be demonstrated is that beyond the actions taken to ethnically cleanse Gaza the intention to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part can be found. Especially in the early days, following 7 October, president Isaac Herzog, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant, and two far-right members of cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, all spoke in ways that unambiguously suggested genocidal intent, as did scores of Israeli commentators. The Israeli public was now frequently reminded that God had required his people to exterminate the enemy of the Israelites, the Amalekites.

Because concentration camps and genocide are (wrongly) associated in the public mind almost exclusively with the Holocaust, I believe a clever lawyer would be able to use one detail of the mandatory IHRA definition — “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” — to “prove” that anyone who argues that Israel is establishing concentration camps in preparation for ethnic cleansing in Gaza or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is an antisemite.

Another kind of discussion, one concerned not with the IHRA definition but with the difficult issue of “balance,” might lead to a similar outcome. During the debate about climate change a seminal article showed how “balance” could be “bias.” Similarly in a discussion of, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, balance does not mean putting the case for Russia and for Ukraine in equal measure. It involves condemnation of the unprovoked Russian invasion. Balance does not rest on false equivalences but on judgment.

In my judgement, any discussion of 7 October and its aftermath that denied the evil of the Hamas attack on the Israeli Jews and concentrated exclusively on the Israeli actions since the Hamas atrocity could reasonably be said to lack balance and even be open to the charge of antisemitism. However, an unvarnished discussion of the evil that Israel has done to the innocent people of Gaza following but also preceding the horror of 7 October is not antisemitic but the truth. These include the occupation policies of 1967 to 2005; the short military interventions that Israelis call “mowing the grass” after their supposed departure in 2005; and the ethnic cleansing and the genocide post–October 2023 in the war/slaughter against Hamas. It is the evil of these policies that climaxed following the horror of 7 October that Jillian Segal’s report into combating antisemitism is trying to deny, with the apparent support of most of the organised Jewish community in Australia. If her report is adopted by the Albanese government, it will not only strike the most serious blow against both freedom of speech and academic freedom in Australia in recent decades. It will also almost certainly strengthen rather than combat the post–7 October growth of antisemitism in Australia.

Hannah Arendt once confessed that the crimes and mistakes of her own people, the Jews, were more painful to her than the crimes and mistakes of others. That is how I feel. The former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, who is certainly no dove, recently wrote that the actions of Israel-in-Gaza caused him to feel “heart-broken and ashamed.” That is also precisely how I feel. •

This article first appeared in Robert Manne’s Substack, Thermidor: Cultural Counter-Revolution in the Age of Trump.

The post The wrong way to respond to antisemitism appeared first on Inside Story.

From the political centre, former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote an essay in the newspaper Haaretz in which he pulled no punches against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition.

“The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success,” Olmert argued. “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” His conclusion: “Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

From the right, you have the likes of Amit Halevi, a member of Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party, who is staunchly pro-war but thinks its execution has been bungled. Halevi had his membership on the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee suspended by Netanyahu’s coalition after he voted against a proposal to extend the government’s ability to issue emergency call-up orders for Israeli reservists. In an interview with the newspaper Yediot Ahronot following his dismissal, Halevi said, “This war is a deception. They lied to us about its achievements.” Israel has “been fighting a war for twenty months with failed plans,” and it “is not succeeding in destroying Hamas.”

And from the left, Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s liberal alliance, the Democrats, stated in an interview with Israel Radio: “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country. A sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set itself the aim of expelling populations.”

After the “hobby” comment drew an outcry, Golan, himself a Gaza war hero, clarified that he was not blaming the military but rather the politicians who were extending the war for reasons that no longer have anything to do with Israel’s national security needs.

While Golan probably should have used a different word so as not to give Israeli rightists an easy way to discredit him, the truth is this: virtually no independent foreign journalists have been allowed to report first-hand from Gaza. When this war is over and Gaza is saturated with international reporters and photographers free to roam, the level of death and destruction is going to be fully reported and pictured — and that is going to be a very bad time for Israel and world Jewry.

So Golan was right to warn his nation — bluntly — to stop now, forge a ceasefire, get the hostages back, get an international and Arab force into Gaza, and deal with the remnants of Hamas later. When you are in a hole, stop digging.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu has insisted on continuing to dig, claiming that he can bomb Hamas into giving up its remaining twenty or so living Israeli hostages — and because the religious-nationalist members of his coalition have essentially told him that if he stops the war, they will topple him. So the Israeli military is going after more and more secondary targets, and the result is Gaza civilians being killed every day.

Amos Harel, the military analyst for Haaretz, explained why: “Many bombing runs are actually assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, often when they’re with their families. And these officials no longer live in private houses or apartment buildings — they’re usually in the crowded tent camps with thousands of civilians. Even when the army declares multiple steps of caution, these attacks result in massive killing.”

It is not only, and indeed not even mostly, the rise in Gaza civilian casualties that is turning more and more Israelis against the war. It’s simply that the war has worn down the whole society. The signs, Harel notes, are everything from “an increasing number of suicides (which the army doesn’t report) to families that are breaking up and businesses that are collapsing. The government conveniently ignores these developments and scatters promises of victory instead.”

If many Israelis feel trapped by their own leaders, many people in Gaza clearly feel the same. Polling in Gaza is obviously difficult, but the antiwar movement there seems to be stirring as well — although there you can get killed by Hamas for protesting. A survey by the independent, Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research of people across the Gaza Strip found that 48 per cent supported the anti-Hamas demonstrations that erupted in several places in recent weeks.

Indeed, be assured that it’s not only some Israeli leaders who will face a reckoning when the guns of Gaza finally fall silent. Hamas’s leaders will live in infamy. They attacked Israeli border communities on 7 October 2023 and, when Israel predictably retaliated, they essentially offered up Gaza’s civilians as a collective human sacrifice to win global sympathy for their cause — while Hamas leaders hid in tunnels and abroad. Hamas is still operating, but now Gaza is unliveable. Yet Hamas’s leadership is still stubbornly saying it will not turn over all its remaining live hostages unless Israel agrees to leave Gaza and return to an open-ended ceasefire.

Really? Israel should leave all of Gaza and accept a ceasefire? What a great idea. If Hamas achieved that “victory,” it would mean that Hamas fought this entire war — losing tens of thousands of fighters and civilians and having few buildings in Gaza left intact — in order to get back to exactly what it had on 6 October 2023: a ceasefire and Israel out of Gaza.

For this alone, history will remember Hamas leaders as mendacious fools. They thought they were unleashing an apocalypse on Israel and instead unleashed an apocalypse on their own people that also ended up giving licence to Netanyahu to destroy their ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon and Syria, which weakened Iran’s grip on both of those nations, as well as on Iraq, and helped drive Russia out of Syria. It was a rout of the Iran-led “resistance network.”

But here’s the rub. As a result of Netanyahu’s military operations, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah — not to mention Saudi Arabia — are all now much freer to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel to a degree they never were when Iran’s regional mercenary network was so powerful.

Yes, Netanyahu made that happen! But he also never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. Netanyahu today staunchly refuses to harvest what Netanyahu has sown. He will not do the one thing that would unlock the politics of the whole region: open a road, no matter how long, to a two-state solution with a reformed Palestinian Authority.

No wonder Donald Trump doesn’t want to waste time with him — he can’t make any money from him, and he won’t allow Trump to make any history with him.

The more I would argue to Israelis that Netanyahu is making a historic mistake — trading peace with Saudi Arabia for peace with the far-right extremists who keep him in power — the more they would ask me “Do you think Trump can save us?” That question is the ultimate sign that your democracy is in trouble.

I had to explain that Trump goes to countries that give him things — cash, 747s, $Trump meme coin and Official Melania Meme sales, arms purchases, hotel deals, golf courses, AI data centres — and not countries that ask him for things, like Israel.

In fairness to Trump, he probably has no idea how much Israel has internally changed. Even many American Jews don’t understand how big and powerful the ultra-Orthodox and religious-settler-nationalist community in Israel has grown and how much it sees Gaza as a religious war.

“Bibi is actually their pawn, not the real player,” explained Avrum Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, referring to the religious-nationalist-settler right in Israel. “You tell them Israel could have peace with Saudi Arabia and they will shrug and tell you that they are waiting for the Messiah. You tell them they could have peace with Syria, and they will tell you the Jewish people already own Syria — it’s part of Greater Israel. You tell them about international law, they will tell you biblical law. You will tell them Hamas, they will tell you Amalek [a biblical enemy of the Israelites].”

The real divide in Israel today, concluded Burg, who teaches about relations between religion and state, is not between conservatives and progressives. “It’s between the Jewish tribe and the democratic tribe. And the Jewish tribe is now winning. If Zionism was originally the triumph of secular nationalism over religious Judaism, what is happening to today is the resurgence of religious-nationalist Judaism over democracy.”

And so, after a week, I flew home from off-Broadway — Israel — only to discover that the same play, only bigger, is running on Broadway, in America. It is eerie to watch how Trump and Netanyahu are using a similar playbook to undermine their respective democracies. My only question is whose authoritarian impulses will trigger a full-blown constitutional crisis first.

Each leader stands accused of trying to undermine his country’s courts and the “deep state’’ — i.e., all the institutions that uphold the rule of law. In Trump’s case, it’s effectively to enrich himself personally and shift wealth in the country from the least privileged to the most privileged. In Netanyahu’s case, it’s effectively to escape the many corruption charges against him and shift power and money away from the democratic, moderate Israeli centre to the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. That group will keep Netanyahu’s coalition in office as long as he excuses the ultra-Orthodox from fighting in Gaza and allows the settlers to continue their march to annex the West Bank today and Gaza tomorrow.

When Netanyahu was elected in November 2022 and began forming his Jewish supremacist coalition, I wrote a column the next morning headlined “The Israel We Knew Is Gone.’’ I hope I was premature — but I hope even more that I won’t soon have to write the same column about America.

The year 2026 will have a lot to say about whether the Netanyahu and Trump cults can be contained. That year, Netanyahu will have to hold national elections, and Trump will have to face the midterms. Those committed to democracy and decency in both countries have one job between now and then: organise, organise, organise to win power.

Nothing else matters. And everything is riding on it. •

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The post The flashing signals I saw in Israel appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps the most dramatic shift came during the Whitlam era, when prime minister Gough Whitlam proclaimed a move in government policy in favour of “even-handedness” towards Israel and Palestine. Whitlam infuriated the most vocal Jewish organisations in Australia by separating his government from that of United States in UN votes on issues relating to the Middle East: in one case, provocatively from Israel’s standpoint, refusing to condemn Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

Until now, that period between 1972–75 marked a nadir in relations between Canberra and the Jewish state, as it did between Canberra and Washington. Now, a new nadir appears to have been reached with the Albanese government’s support for a UN General Assembly resolution that Israel and its supporters in Australia regard as anathema.

Australia joined 156 other countries in supporting a resolution urging Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza and commit to a peace process aimed at achieving a sustainable resolution of the conflict in compliance with international law. This would include ceasing all settlement activity in territory occupied in the 1967 war.

Its unequivocal wording called on the Netanyahu government to “bring to an end its unlawful presence in the occupied territories as rapidly as possible.” It also referred to reparations, and the need for genuine efforts to end the Israel–Palestine conflict with agreement and implementation of a two-state solution.

For the purposes of this resolution, “occupied territory” includes East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. East Jerusalem and West Bank, the first two of which are home to a total of about 750,000 settlers.

Australia’s friends and allies voting for the resolution included Britain, Canada, New Zealand, France and Germany — among virtually all members of the European Union — Japan, Scandinavian countries and Asian neighbors, principally Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.

In the sweep of history going back to the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, the General Assembly resolution represents a signficant diplomatic challenge for Israel.

International opinion has solidified on the illegality of Israel’s continued settlement activities in territories occupied in war. Australia, which had abstained before on these sorts of resolutions, has now joined a global majority censorious of Israel, leaving Israel and the United States isolated diplomatically.

Of course, it needs to be said such resolutions can, and will, be ignored by Israel, but international disapproval is building against the Jewish state’s disregard for repeated calls to wind back its settlement-building activities and embrace a genuine effort to reach a compromise with the Palestinians.

In the annals of Australian Middle East diplomacy this is a potentially watershed development and one that now clearly divides Labor from the Coalition. Opposition leader Peter Dutton was quick to describe Labor’s UN vote as a “sellout” to garner support from Muslim voters in electorates made vulnerable by what is regarded as Canberra’s limp responses to the Gaza war. Whether this latest development neutralises Muslim voter displeasure remains to be seen.

This week’s decision invites comparison with Labor’s previously warm alignment (though not always uncritical) with Israel, and, conversely, a certain standoffishness, at least initially, on the part of the Coalition.

In the early stages of Israel’s life after it fought, and won, its war of independence against Arab armies in 1948, the Coalition tended to associate itself with Britain’s coolness towards the new enterprise. There was no hostility, simply a wariness.

This contrasted with Labor’s enthusiastic support and, indeed, pivotal role in securing the partition of Palestine under the 1947 Partition Plan, which divided what had been Palestine under the British mandate between Jewish and Palestinian entities, the latter under Jordanian rule.

Labor’s foreign minister, Bert Evatt, brought this outcome to fruition in his role as chair of the ad hoc UN committee on Palestine, thus forever endearing him to the Jewish establishment in Australia. Ben Chifley’s government further earned the gratitude of Australian Jews when Australia was instrumental in Israel becoming a full member of the UN in 1949.

This is a very far cry indeed from the curdling of relations today between the Albanese government and the main Jewish organisations in Australia. In contrast with its predecessors, the Jewish establishment today has become more attached to the conservative side of politics — an attachment rewarded by an indulgent approach to Israel among Coalition figures who have been advocating a virtual carte blanche in Israel’s approach to the Gaza war.

Looking back, Whitlam’s departure from virtually unconditional support for Israel among the major parties was a sign of things to come, albeit a  generation later. Arguments during 2012 within Julia Gillard’s government about whether Australia should support the granting of Palestine observer status at the United Nations were an indicator of shifting sentiment on Palestine.

Gillard had insisted Australia vote against the Palestine observer status resolution, but pressure from colleagues, and principally foreign minister Bob Carr, forced her to accept that Australia should abstain.

Significantly, former prime minister Bob Hawke, regarded as primus inter pares among senior Labor figures in his support for Israel, lobbied behind the scenes for that shift. The Israel that Hawke had sworn fealty to in championing of the cause of Soviet Jewry had ceased to exist in his view because of its continued illegal settlement of territory seized in the 1967 war and its subjugation of the Palestinian population there.

The governments of Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison effectively reverted to the approach to Israel adopted during the John Howard years in which Australia was regarded in international forums as one of Israel’s most reliable supporters. Morrison’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, thereby short-circuiting the issue as a final status matter, certainly endeared him to Australia’s Jewish establishment. Labor was quick to reverse the Morrison decision when it got into government.

Viewed historically, it was probably inevitable that Labor would become more critical of Israel, or at least more sceptical of claims by its leadership that it was open to a reasonable compromise with the Palestinians. Under Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist government, with its reliance on settler support to remain in power, reasonable compromises are off the table.

Netanyahu’s record — as opposed to his occasional indications that he might countenance a two-state solution — has left little, if any, room for manoeuvre. The 7 October Hamas pogrom against Jewish people and Israel’s response exposed an issue that was festering inside the Labor Party in any case. That issue is whether Labor in government would recognise the state of Palestine as a means of advancing prospects for a “two-state solution” and peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The Gaza war with its horrific images on TV news of war casualties, including women and children, has forced Labor in government to take seriously the Palestine question, especially given risks to its voter base among traditional supporters in places like Sydney’s western suburbs, and from the progressive left.

At its August 2023 federal conference delegates called on a future Labor government to recognise Palestine as a state and “expects that this issue will be an important priority for the Australian government.”

These calls by the rank and file for urgent action on Palestine had tended to be ignored in the past by a Labor leadership anxious to avoid a showdown with the Jewish establishment.

Labor support for this week’s contentious UN resolution shows that it is edging towards recognition. The party of Evatt, Chifley and Hawke has moved a long way from its pro-Israel positions, but then again Israel itself, in its lurch to the hard right, is hardly the same country of an earlier fraternal Labor movement. •

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Recognising the Stranger began as a lecture Hammad delivered at Columbia University just days before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. It opens with a homage to Edward Said, the renowned Palestinian writer and academic for whom the lecture is named. With its focus on narrative fiction, this is a necessarily literary essay; yet, like Said’s writing, it is also steely in resolve. Said wrote that texts are worldly events, as are “the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.” For many, that made him as much a political as a literary inspiration.

While constructing her talk, Hammad revisited Said’s 1974 book, Beginnings, a foundational text of his critical work. On rereading it, she found that she was drawn more to the middle of texts than to their opening passages. On the basis of this realisation she went on to re-examine examples of Aristotle’s anagnorisis, that point in a narrative that functions as the clarifying moment for a character: the gestalt or Eureka instant that suddenly illuminates the fulcrum on which the plot swings. Hammad’s aim was to pinpoint these points as they related to “the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.”

The narratives she focuses on are Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex, said to have been first performed in 429 BCE, and Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, a novel published in 1970. In both, the anagnorisis is the protagonist’s sudden recognition that the person thought to be a stranger is actually a family member. In Oedipus’s case, he discovered that his wife was, as the prophecy held, his own mother. In Kanafani’s novel it is the revelation, among other things, that one’s enemy is one’s own brother.

The story of Oedipus Rex, upon which Sophocles based his play, is one of the Western world’s most powerful myths. Most of us know of it through the Oedipus complex, the name Sigmund Freud gave to the boy child’s erotic fixation on the parent of the opposite sex — a stage of infancy that males may never grow out of, lingering in their unconscious and blighting their emotional lives until analysis frees them. Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas haven’t the hold on us they once had, yet the Oedipus myth still retains its power.

In Sophocles’s play it is in the plague-ravaged city of Thebes that Oedipus discovers he has murdered his own father and that his wife is his mother. Sophocles appears to have used poetic licence here, substituting the Theban plague for Sparta’s siege of Athens. The myth, then, may be rooted in historical reality, in this case the Peloponnesian war. But there are other such instances in which children were the foundlings of crises. The Lebensborn, for example, were the Jewish babies given to German couples during the Shoah; many of the children of the disappeared in Chile and Argentina were adopted by military parents. My own novel West Block deals with Australians rushing to adopt Vietnamese babies during the collapse of Saigon, and of course there are our own stolen generations.

And so it is with the Kanafani novel, which draws on the real-life Palestinian babies who ended up in Jewish families after the Nakba. For Hammad, this a resonating metaphor for Palestine’s own story. “Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life,” she writes: “apparent blindness followed by staggering realisation.”

But recognising doesn’t necessarily mean redemption, in literature let alone in life. These pivotal “knowing-again” moments can be tricky. Ghassan Kanafani, a left-aligned Palestinian refugee, was a well-known journalist and writer. In Return to Haifa, published two years before Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad agents, the Palestinian infant left behind after the Nakba has no desire to relinquish his adoptive parents or his Israeli persona — even after the 1967 occupation, when borders are momentarily opened and his birth parents are able to locate him.

Born Khaldun, Dov has grown into a proud, loyal Israeli. His Palestinian brother Khalid, meanwhile, is prey to a paralysing nostalgia brought on by the Nakba’s trauma and the Pan-Arabic nationalism of the time, when irridentist hopes for Palestine had all but evaporated. The motive of the novel, then, is the existentialist one — that the call of blood is negligible compared with acquiring a cause for living, even if it’s the meretricious patriotism Khaldun/Dov represents.

The situation has changed since 1967. Fifty-seven years of brutal occupation later, Palestinians today have a cause, and the watching world, finally, a dawning recognition of their terrible plight. What, then, could be more of an anagnorisis than that fateful October morning in 2023? Unsurprisingly, Recognising the Stranger has an afterword, written in January 2024, by which time Israel had killed 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza. While the lecture itself does occasionally venture into the political realities consequent on the Nakba and the ongoing occupation, it is in the afterword that literary exegeses are swept aside, leaving the pain of the author’s Palestinian heritage nakedly exposed.

The seventh of October 2023, Hammad writes, “resembled an incredibly violent jailbreak.” It also signified “a paradigm shift,” similar to the kind alluded to in the lecture, and here she states unequivocally that “a system in which one population is afforded rights that the other population is denied will be safe for neither.”

Referring to Israel’s grossly disproportionate retribution and the escalating condemnation by various instrumentalities of international law and governance, she is moved to ask what Edward Said might say if he had witnessed it all and seen charges of anti-Semitism used to close down any criticism of Israel, any questioning of its “right of defence.” What would he have said about the draconian measures taken against protesters at Columbia University, where he had spent the better part of his exile?

It is here that I’m reminded how Hammad ends her essay by turning to “Freud and the Non-European,” a lecture of Said’s that became his last book. There he examined Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which raised questions in his mind about the response of the founder of psychoanalysis to Zionism’s ethno-nationalism. Like other prominent twentieth-century Jews — Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, for instance — Freud was suspicious of Zionism, and Said took comfort from that very non-Zionist Jewishness — its “irremediably diasporic, unhoused character” — and the importance of what it bequeathed to the world.

Thus the lecture Hammad delivered in his honour ends with these thought-provoking words:

Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honouring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.

Needless to say, I have often thought that about myself. After all, the word “cosmopolitan” was once a dog-whistling reference to Jews (though it hasn’t been applied in that way, as far as I’m aware, to Palestinians).

If she wasn’t specifically writing about being Palestinian, Hammad might have been thinking about what it is that makes us writers. Or, more importantly, what makes a human being — what we Jews of the diaspora still call a mensch. Able to stand back, and then go forward, recognising that the stranger is as human as oneself — is an imperative for states as well as individuals. That we haven’t got there yet is the great tragedy of our time. •

Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
By Isabella Hammad | Fern Press/Penguin | $22.99 | 84 pages

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The remote-controlled explosions in pagers and hand-held radios used by Hezbollah officials and fighters have exposed the organisation’s vulnerabilities in about the most humiliating way possible. Its leadership will be consumed by the question of what else and what next after a stunning series of security breaches over the past several months. These include the elimination of Hezbollah commanders and leaders of its ally, Hamas, in drone strikes and targeted assassinations.

Israel’s motivation is clear: it is striving to re-assert its policy of deterrence against its enemies. The longstanding strategy was badly shaken by the 7 October Hamas breakout from Gaza, which tore apart Israel’s confidence in its ability to ward off acts of terror. Its vulnerabilities were exposed, its deterrent capabilities called into question. An aura of invincibility was shaken.

Two questions will now be paramount in the minds of Hezbollah leaders. What steps are required to rally their legions in the face of a crippling strike at the organisation’s communications network, effectively its nerve centre? And what form retaliation should take?

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and his commanders are under enormous pressure. They can’t appear to be allowing Israel to get away with what is arguably the most destructive strike against the militant group since its formation in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In Arabic, the word for revenge is antiqam, which carries enormous weight in a region where restoring one’s honour passes down through generations. The generational Israel–Palestine conflict is defined by the blood of its martyrs in Palestinian antiqam mythology.

It’s not clear that Sheikh Nasrallah will subscribe to the notion that revenge is a dish best served cold, although his responses since the war began in Gaza have been carefully calibrated. He will be considering the extent to which Hezbollah will use its rocket arsenal to rain terror down on Israeli cities in the certain knowledge that Israel will respond with overwhelming force. He need look no further than the Gaza wasteland to apprise himself of the consequences of precipitate action.

On the other hand, a limp response would run the risk of failing to satisfy a desire for antiqam among the militant group’s legions, and would also diminish Hezbollah’s aura of invincibility in Lebanon.

Israel’s scarcely believable use of modern technology had two main motivations. As well as helping restore its deterrent capabilities, the explosions were aimed at easing pressure on Israel’s northern towns and settlements. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet asserted the latter as a priority on the eve of the strikes against Hezbollah.

Whether Israel will follow up with an assault on Hezbollah’s ability to hold much of the country’s northern region hostage to its rocket arsenal remains to be seen. But the latest Middle East conflict has clearly entered a new and even more dangerous phase.

What is certain is that shoes will continue to drop. Short of an Israeli land invasion of Lebanon, as we’ve witnessed in the past, it is hard to see pressure on Israel’s northern settlements being alleviated. Would Netanyahu commit his country to another push across Lebanon’s borders, thus opening up a two-front war? Israel’s success on the ground in Lebanon over the years has been patchy, to say the least.

Its 1982 invasion to root out the Palestine Liberation Organisation from its strongholds in Beirut ended in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by Israel’s Maronite militia allies. Its thirty-four-day incursion into Lebanon in 2006 failed to put a stop to Hezbollah’s threats to northern Israel.

In all of this, American nervousness is understandable. While US secretary of state Antony Blinken continues his desultory efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza, the last thing Washington needs is an all-out conflagration between Israel and Lebanon. Other Middle East players could well be drawn into the conflict, and the limp ceasefire efforts in Gaza would undoubtedly be made more complex.

It’s little comfort to America that its Israeli ally is playing a high-stakes game in highly volatile circumstances. While Washington is seeking to calm the situation, Netanyahu is upping the ante.

In an election year, with a shaky administration anxious to avoid being seen to exert undue pressure on an ally, ruthless political operators like Israel’s prime minister will pursue their own agendas. Netanyahu’s agenda is not separate from his own circumstances — his hold on power is unlikely to survive an end to conflict and a frank appraisal of the events that led to war — and nor is it separate from the corruption charges that hang over him.

Then there is Iran, and its proxies across the Middle East. Tehran won’t be content to be a bystander: not only has its principal Middle East ally been humiliated, its own officials have been harmed. The injury of its representative in Beirut in one of the pager explosions comes on top of the assassination in July of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guest house, the result of a stunning breach of Iranian security. What Iran does now is no less important, and in some ways more important, than Hezbollah’s response, given its region-wide ramifications.

Conditioning prospects of a wider conflagration is the fact that neither Hezbollah’s nor Iran’s interest are served by a confrontation that spirals out of control. Nor, of course, are the interests of the United States and its allies. In the end, the question will be whether a Hezbollah response can be contained, and whether Iran itself will elect to avoid wider conflict. •

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Since January, the Court has delivered orders and decisions in three Palestine-related cases. Together they give an insight into how international law sees the violence and how countries including Australia are obliged to respond.

The first of the cases was launched in December 2023 when South Africa alleged that Israel had violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention of 1948. South Africa argued that Israel’s acts and omissions are “genocidal in character” and had been committed with the intent “to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”

States that have signed the Genocide Convention (including Israel and Australia) have the obligation to prevent, and punish, genocide — even if it is being committed somewhere else. Committing or attempting to commit genocide is punishable, as is inciting genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide. Also punishable is complicity in genocide — namely, the provision of material, strategic, or political support for genocide. This last point is particularly important for governments that might have military and economic ties with a state allegedly committing genocide.

The ICJ’s final judgement on whether Israel’s actions amount to genocide seems likely to be years away. But South Africa also requested “provisional measures,” similar to an urgent injunction in domestic law. At this stage of proceedings, the court need not make a definitive ruling about whether a genocide is occurring — instead, it needed to determine whether the rights being asserted by South Africa were plausible. In late January 2024, the ICJ did make such an order, and essentially found that there is a plausible claim that genocide is occurring in Gaza.

By an overwhelming majority, the court ordered Israel to adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention and “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission” of all genocidal acts. In relation to Palestinians in Gaza, Israel must stop killing members of this group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to them; deliberately inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about” the destruction of members of this group; and “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within this group. The court also ordered Israel to take immediate and effective steps to enable humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza.

Only a few days later, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered further military action in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. South Africa again approached the ICJ, this time with an “urgent request for additional provisional measures.” In March, the court handed down a new order reiterating the earlier provisional measures and outlining additional measures. These included a unanimous order that Israel adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention by taking “all necessary and effective measures” to ensure the provision of “urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” including “food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation” and “medical supplies and medical care.” Israel must also ensure that its military doesn’t commit a genocidal act by preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

In May, South Africa returned to the ICJ to request further provisional measures. On 24 May, the court ordered a halt to Israel’s military offensive in Rafah and insisting that the Rafah crossing remain open for humanitarian assistance.

These orders make Israel’s obligations clear. But what do they mean for Australia and other countries? As a party to the Genocide Convention, Australia has the obligation not to commit or be complicit in genocide, and to prevent and punish genocide occurring elsewhere. In earlier cases, the ICJ found that the obligation to prevent genocide requires any governments that is aware (or should be aware) of the serious risk of genocide “to employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide so far as possible.”

What about states that provide military support to Israel? This question was raised in the second Palestine case at the ICJ this year. In March, Nicaragua sought an ICJ declaration that Germany had failed in its obligations under the Genocide Convention and “contributed to the commission of genocide” in violation of the convention. Nicaragua also claimed that Germany “has failed to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law” by providing assistance to Israel.

Nicaragua sought an provisional measures order that Germany immediately suspend military aid and exports of military equipment to Israel to the extent that it could be used in violation of the convention and other rules of international law. The court declined the request in terms that will be of interest to officials in Australia for a couple of reasons.

First, the ICJ relied heavily on the fact that German manufacturing, marketing and exporting of military equipment must be approved by an “inter-agency process” involving at least two ministries. Export licenses are granted only after a formal “assessment” of whether the item would be used in the commission of genocide or other crimes. The ICJ also found that the value of military export licences had fallen significantly since November 2023, and Germany had not yet acted on some pending requests from Israel. As a result, the ICJ concluded, provisional measures were not needed at this stage.

But the ICJ did make several clear points about the situation in Gaza and the responsibilities of states. It reiterated that signatories to the Geneva Conventions — regardless of whether they are a party to a specific conflict — are required “to respect and to ensure respect” of the conventions and comply with them. It also recalled that signatories must “employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide.” Finally, the court considered it “particularly important to remind all States of their international obligations relating to the transfer of arms to parties to an armed conflict” to avoid the risk that these arms be used to violate the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. The message from is clear: signatories including Australia need to be very careful to comply with their legal obligations.

This year’s third ICJ decision concerning Palestine — an advisory opinion on the “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” — was delivered on 19 July. The action dates from December 2022, when the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ to advise on “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory.” Unlike the two other cases, this advisory opinion relates to Israel’s actions in the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territories, not only Gaza.

The ICJ concluded that Israel’s occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories is unlawful. It violates the right of Palestinian people to self-determination; imposes a comprehensive regime of restrictions on Palestinians that “constitutes systemic discrimination” on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity; violates the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid); and facilitates a systematic practice of unlawful settlement that is part of a broader policy of annexation.

Once again the ICJ pointed to the obligations of governments, including Australia’s, “to abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel” that may “entrench its unlawful presence” in the occupied territories; to “take steps to prevent trade or investment” that assists the illegal situation in the occupied territories; and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence there. All parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention — which include Australia — have the obligation “to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law.”

In light of these three cases, how can we summarise Australia’s obligations? Put simply, Australia has clear international obligations: to act to prevent the plausible genocide occurring in Gaza; to punish genocide if it is established; to ensure that it is not complicit or involved with any genocidal acts (by providing support to Israel); and to ensure Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law throughout Palestine.

How compliant is Australia with these obligations? What are the economic and military ties between Australia and Israel? What defence industry partnerships are in place? What arms are being sent to Israel – perhaps via third countries? What military intelligence is being provided (including through the Pine Gap surveillance base near Mparntwe Alice Springs)?

Publicly available information is scarce but concerning, and suggests continued Australia support for Israel’s military activities in Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine. While Australian officials have denied that Australia is “supplying Israel with weapons which are being used in the conflict in Gaza,” the landscape of military technology and bilateral trade is complex.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, notes that “Australia continues to broaden bilateral cooperation with Israel” and that “in recent years, there has been significantly increased engagement across a range of sectors, including innovation, security and defence.” The bilateral economic relationship between Australia and Israel is strong and “continues to grow,” according to DFAT. Two-way trade between the two countries was worth $1.34 billion in 2021.

Particularly since 2017, “Australia and Israel have expanded cooperation on national security, defence and cyber security,” according to DFAT, and a memorandum of understanding “on defence industry cooperation” was signed in October 2017. Even into 2024, the military trade between Israel and Australia continued to expand: for example, in February 2024 a new joint venture agreement worth US$600 million was concluded between the Australian Army and Israeli military company Elbit Systems.

Permits are required under the Defence Trade Controls Act 2012 to export Australian military goods and technologies. Military and “dual-use” goods and technologies are listed on the Defence and Strategic Goods List and the permits are issued (and may later be revoked) by the Defence Minister. Without a permit, a supplier would face ten-year imprisonment or $825,000 fine.

For a permit to be issued, the minister must be “satisfied that the supply would not prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia.” To determine this, the minister “must have regard” to criteria set out in the Defence Trade Controls Regulations 2013, which gives domestic expression to Australia’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty. One criterion is the risk that the goods or technology may become available to a country where “it may be used in a way contrary to Australia’s international obligations or commitments.” Another is the risk that the goods or technology “may be used to commit or facilitate serious abuses of human rights.”

How does this system measure up in light of Nicaragua’s case against Israel? At the provisional measures stage the ICJ believed Germany’s inter-agency process was sufficient to avoid breaches of international humanitarian law. But Australia’s system is different in several ways from Germany’s, including the difference between an “assessment” and “having regard” to certain criteria, and the German requirement for more than one ministry to be involved. For these reasons, Australia’s system doesn’t appear to be as robust as Germany’s.

Defence minister Richard Marles has revealed that eight export permits have been granted for Australian shipments of defence goods to Israel since 7 October 2023. Of these, seven were for “items which have gone to Israel to be worked on and then returned to Australia.” This suggests that the export permits were not provided for goods destined solely for Israeli use — but also that a two-way trade in military technologies continues between the countries.

Marles’s figure doesn’t capture the number of export permits granted before 7 October 2023 that are still in place. In June, it was confirmed that around sixty-six such permits are still operational. Marles has stated that these permits are for “dual use” technology, but this is a murky area: while the goods might be suitable for civilian use, they may also be used in commission of a crime. This was recognised by a Dutch Court that in February 2024 ordered the Dutch government to stop the export of fighter jet parts to Israel because there is now an “undeniable” and “clear risk” that these parts would be used in violation of international law.

Of particular concern is Australia’s role in a broader supply chain of component parts that then go to another country for integration into a product to be supplied to Israel. One example is the component parts made in Australia for F-35 fighter jets. Lockheed Martin, the manufacturers of the F-35s, noted in a now-deleted website post that “every F-35 built contains some Australian parts and components.” In June 2024, Israel’s defence ministry signed a $3 billion agreement with the United States to acquire twenty more of these fighters. The Israeli military has confirmed that F-35 aircraft are being used in its attacks on Gaza.

A related concern is Australian export of military goods and technologies to another country, which then sends it to Israel. In August 2024 Australia “streamlined” its weapons trade to the United States and Britain as part of the AUKUS military partnership. From 1 September, around 900 export permits previously required under Australia’s system are no longer necessary, representing around $5 billion worth of military exports per year.

Goods can therefore leave Australia without a permit, bound for the United States or Britain, which both have significant miliary trade with Israel. Just days ago, Britain withdrew some of its export permits given the “clear risk” that military exports might be used in violation of international humanitarian law. This may seem reassuring: Britain has its own permit system, and a risk was identified the permit has been revoked. But this change suggests that goods may have previously left Britain while at risk of being used in violation of international humanitarian law.

Given all this, Australia’s military and economic ties to Israel appear to remain significant, and Australia is at risk of providing military and economic support to a state that is plausibly committing genocide and violating international law — thereby making Australia complicit in these crimes.

For these reasons, more than one hundred Australian international lawyers recently called for “a comprehensive arms and energy embargo on Israel that covers the export, import and transfer of weapons, including parts, components and other dual-use items as well as military jet fuel.” The lawyers (I was among them) also called for Australia to “urgently suspend all investment, trade and scientific, technical and technological cooperation in these areas and engage in a systematic evaluation of all economic ties with Israel.” These lawyers are not alone: Save the Children, Amnesty International, the Jewish Council of Australia and the Australian Centre for International Justice have all made similar calls. More than 5500 Australian citizens signed Petition EN6141 to “Impose Trade and Arm Sanctions on Israel.”

In its decision in the South Africa v Israel case, the ICJ took note of a statement by a United Nations official: “Gaza has become a place of death and despair… its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence — while the world watches on.” In the face of this plausible genocide, Australia must comply with its obligations: to prevent further genocidal acts, and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law. •

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The deaths of six hostages, five Israeli and one American, in what appears to have been a rescue operation that ended disastrously has crystalised opposition to Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war. Hostage families are at the forefront of protests against failure to negotiate an end to the conflict.

This revolt has been a long time coming in a country riven by disagreement over what is widely perceived to be Netanyahu’s self-serving efforts to prolong the conflict. Israelis are conflicted over their backing for a ruthless campaign to eliminate Hamas, on the one hand, and a desire to see an enormously destructive war brought to an end, on the other.

At a distance, it is easy to understate the involvement of Israelis in defence of their country at virtually every level. In war, their traditional default position is to put aside political differences. But such is the level of disquiet over Netanyahu’s motivations in continuing the conflict to buy himself time politically that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are saying enough.

The phrase “existential threat” is too frequently used for propaganda purposes to describe pressures that Israeli might be under. In the case of the Hamas pogrom against Jewish people on 7 October, however, and subsequent conflict on Israel’s northern border with an Iran-backed Hezbollah, the phrase is not out of place.

That said, Netanyahu’s brutal conduct of the war, his lack of flexibility around negotiations for a ceasefire, and indeed his arrogant disdain for efforts of Americans and others to bring about a halt to hostilities has vastly complicated efforts to cauterise an open wound.

Has he overplayed his hand? The answer to that question will depend on the next few days, as he faces the wrath of his own people, the open resistance of his defence minister and the disdain of Israel’s security establishment. Adding to public disquiet is the willingness of former heads of Israel’s security agencies, its military and political leaders to speak out against Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

In the eyes of Israelis and the international community, whether Netanyahu likes it or not, this is his project and it is being pursued at tremendous cost for all concerned, and not least Israel’s for reputation.

A meeting of Israel’s war cabinet last week descended into a shouting match between Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant over negotiations towards a ceasefire and release of hostages. Netanyahu is refusing to budge on what is known as the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Removing Israeli troops from the corridor is a sticking point: Gallant wants to yield on this issue to enable a ceasefire agreement.

In a tense exchange, Gallant, who was sacked by Netanyahu and reinstated last year over disagreements about the conduct of the war, reportedly called the Israeli prime minister’s attitude towards the hostages a “moral disgrace.”

What this exchange, along with the mass protests, reveals is that the Israeli consensus on the war is deeply fractured. Gallant’s belief in the need for flexibility almost certainly reflects views among senior military, who are opposed to an endless urban conflict at tremendous cost for all concerned. On Sunday he called for an immediate cabinet meeting to reverse Thursday’s decision to keep troops in the Philadelphi corridor.

Israel’s casualties from war, leaving aside economic costs, run into the hundreds. In a small country, this is a heavy burden. (The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000, according to Gazan health authorities.) Among the concerns of the Israeli military is that Israel’s political leadership refuses to describe what might constitute a political solution to a conflict that shows little sign of ending militarily. Netanyahu’s refusal to address this question in pursuit of total victory is not the least of the impediments to a lasting ceasefire and the release of surviving hostages.

In all of this, a feckless American leadership has been exposed. President Joe Biden might express understandable outrage at the death of an American hostage in Hamas hands, but Washington has had ten months to bring this war to a negotiated conclusion that would enable the political and physical rebuilding of Gaza. Thus far, it has failed.

This will not be regarded as a high point in American diplomacy. •

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Israel’s assassination of a Hezbollah military commander in Beirut and Hamas’s number two in Tehran invites retaliation. The question then turns to what form this retaliation might take, and whether it will risk a wider Middle East conflict. Is the region sliding towards a war that risks involving not simply Israel and its enemies but also the United States and its allies?

The answer lies in whether Iran and its proxies are willing to endure an all-out conflict that would devastate swathes of the Middle East and threaten region-wide stability. Here, the Iranian regime’s calculations about its ability to withstand such a conflict — and indeed retain its own hold on power — will be paramount.

We are not simply talking about an Israeli war with Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Yemen. The much wider question concerns which other Middle East players might become sucked into a regional conflict with devastating consequences. All-out war between Israel and Iran and its proxies would inevitably spill over into surrounding states and down into the Gulf.

Sometimes overlooked in the war-gaming that goes on at times like this is Iran’s capacity to shut down tanker traffic via the Strait of Hormuz, which handles up to 30 per cent of the world’s oil each day. Such Iranian adventurism would invite a crushing response from the United States, with enormous disruption to the global economy and the security of surrounding oil-rich states.

None of this is preordained, or perhaps even likely, but it would be unwise to discount the risks to region-wide stability if the conflict were to spiral out of control.

In Washington, worst-case scenarios will have been dusted off as a region awaits the aftershocks of two of the most provocative extrajudicial assassinations in a blood-soaked regional history. The killing in a Beirut suburb of Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, was followed a day later by the remote-controlled bomb that ended the life of Hamas’s Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran. The killings could hardly have been more provocative, nor more damaging to Iran’s proxies and its credibility more broadly.

If Tehran can’t guarantee the safety of someone like Haniyeh on what amounted to a state visit for the swearing of a new president what does this say about its ability to protect its own leaders?

Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei has vowed revenge. What form this might take is anyone’s guess, but a response there will be.

Leaving aside Haniyeh’s wider importance as a principal negotiator of a ceasefire with Israel in Gaza and the release of those hostages still alive, the bigger question is where all this leaves the desultory American efforts to stop a Middle East escalation. Israel’s twin assassinations have further complicated those efforts at a moment when negotiators were edging towards some sort of accommodation. All bets would seem to be off for the time being.

In all of this, the question arises again of whether Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is in any way motivated to bring the Gaza war to a conclusion in some sort of ceasefire arrangement. On the evidence of his government’s slow-walking response to various ceasefire and hostage-release initiatives advanced by American negotiators in partnership with Arab allies, the answer is no.

Since the beginning of the conflict American policy has been captive to Israeli domestic politics and Netanyahu’s own quest to hang on to power in the face of widespread domestic agitation. In remarkable contrast to other moments of crisis, when Israel tends to coalesce around its political leadership, the reverse has been the case during the Gaza war.

Israelis may be invested overwhelmingly in the removal of Hamas as a threat, but a large proportion also regard Netanyahu and his extremist allies as a significant part of the problem. They will not forgive him for the security lapses that contributed to Hamas’s breakout pogrom against Jewish people on 7 October, more than nine months and 40,000 Palestinian casualties ago.

Complicating the situation from the perspective of an international community looking askance at America’s fumbling peace efforts is the state of the White House itself. In the erratic history of American foreign policy there has scarcely been a more inept performance than the Biden administration’s attempts to push its Israeli ally towards a sustainable ceasefire.

From Biden’s initial rush to Israel to embrace Netanyahu to secretary of state Antony Blinken’s so-far futile efforts to stop the war, Washington’s inability to rein in its Middle East ally has been exposed. Last week’s address to a joint session of Congress by Netanyahu, during which he received sixty-one standing ovations, simply underscored American ruptures.

With the United States distracted by one of the most consequential presidential elections in its history, with a senescent lame duck president in the White House and with Donald Trump using the word “Palestinian” as a political weapon, American domestic politics finds itself on a knife-edge.

American political historians like to talk about “October surprises” in the context of presidential elections — those exogeneous events beyond reasonable calculations that threaten to overturn political predictions within weeks of an election. Earlier than might have been anticipated we have entered “August complications” territory, with a Democratic presidential nominee untested in the management of foreign crises and a Republican alternative whose unsteadiness would risk making a bad situation a whole lot worse. This leaves aside Biden’s own limitations.

In Tehran and Beirut these permutations will be weighing on calculations about what do next. At this stage, Ayatollah Khamenei and the Hezbollah religious leader Hassan Nasrallah seem unlikely to risk all-out conflict across Lebanon’s frontier, let alone further afield. Neither leader has a reputation for capriciousness.

Since the Gaza war began, Tehran has seemed intent on avoiding a wider regional conflict. Hezbollah has held back from unleashing the sort of rocket barrage against Israeli cities and towns of which it is capable.

Israel’s likely response to an escalation would be devastating on a scale unmatched by its various incursions into Lebanon, including its invasion of 1982 and its war of 2006. Neither ended well for Israel, and the 1982 invasion spawned Hezbollah.

As the world watches and waits for the next act of violence that will weigh further against prospects of an end to the Gaza war, other shoes will undoubtedly drop. Netanyahu seems determined to stretch limits, both militarily and politically, as he has from the beginning. Washington’s influence remains much diminished. •

The post Violence begetting violence appeared first on Inside Story.

History hangs heavy on Labor’s relationship with Israel. Its foundational support for Israel; its traditional ties to Israel’s labour movement; its alignment with Israel’s social democratic values; its connections to a Jewish establishment — none of these is reflected in the sort of country Israel has become.

Labor’s two great champions of  the Jewish state, 1940s external affairs minister Bert Evatt and 1980s prime minister Bob Hawke, would have difficulty recognising the proto-nationalist settler state of today. Indeed, Hawke’s attachment to an Israel dominated by the labour movement for its first three decades had begun to dissipate towards the end of his life.

Behind the scenes, he used his influence in 2012 to persuade prime minister Julia Gillard to allow Australia to abstain rather than oppose a vote to give Palestine observer status at the United Nations. Gillard resisted tooth and nail, to the point where she risked alienating much of caucus. Her decision to appoint a senior member of her staff as an “envoy” to the Jewish leadership in Australia baffled colleagues.

Whether Anthony Albanese and his frontbench like it or not, they won’t be able to separate themselves from the complexities of an issue that animates a big — and growing — section of the Australian population.

Concern about the Palestine question is not restricted to members of the Muslim faith: a large non-Muslim constituency within Labor’s rank-and-file is also exercised by the issue. Beyond the party’s footsoldiers, concern is widespread, especially among younger members of the voting public who were already drifting towards the Greens.

Put simply, Labor’s fumbling response to the Gaza war has exposed deep-seated contradictions for all to see in the party’s policies towards Palestine. On one hand Labor’s espouses its support for two states, one Palestinian, one Israeli; on the other, it indulges Israeli policies that sabotage any prospect of compromise. This is Labor’s “two state confusion.”

Whatever else might be said, the Palestine issue is now indelibly embedded in Australian domestic politics. Graphic television images  of death and suffering in Gaza are heightening public sensitivity. Senator Fatima Payman’s stand in support of recognition of Palestine drew attention to an issue that has moved decisively from the margins of politics.

Payman might be dismissed as a political ingénue not sufficiently marinaded in the traditions of the Labor collective. This misses the point. In her defiance of the party whip she spoke for a wider community, many of them young people increasingly estranged from Labor.

Pro-forma resolutions at Labor conferences designed to deflect rank-and-file concerns are no longer sustainable. Leaving them on the books like rusting ordnance on a Middle East battlefield mocks their intent.

In the history of Labor foreign policy, going back to the party’s earliest days, there has hardly been a more vexed issue. This includes differences  over conscription in the first world war; attitudes towards the Soviet Union that prompted the split of the 1950s; intramural arguments over the Vietnam war; and, most recently, the white-anting of Simon Crean for his courageous decision to oppose the rush to war in Iraq.

Arthur Calwell’s fine speech in 1965 opposing the Menzies government’s decision to commit Australia to Vietnam was subject to sniping within the party. Among those with reservations was Calwell’s deputy, Gough Whitlam. In contemporary politics, it would be out of character for an Albanese government to follow the example of a Calwell or a Crean — or the lead of social democratic countries like Spain and Norway — by adopting a bold stance on recognition of Palestine.

The long history of Australia’s engagement in Middle Eastern conflicts stretches back to 1885, when a NSW expeditionary militia was mounted to relieve General Sir Charles Gordon, whose forces were under siege in Khartoum by the Mahdi’s whirling dervishes. This quixotic antipodean force in support of empire landed on the shores of the Red Sea but never got to Khartoum. It saw very little combat.

Gordon died in the siege, but his memory is preserved in statuary in Australia, in the naming of Geelong’s Gordon Institute of TAFE and in the middle name of the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Gordon Menzies.

Australian involvement in the Middle East has persisted since then, in war and peace, in ways that have a habit of intruding themselves jarringly into domestic politics. The Gaza war is merely the latest example.

In Australia’s history there is hardly a more important event than the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, in which Australians served and died in a Middle Eastern theatre of war.

Unremarked by historians, Australians fought alongside a contingent of Jewish volunteers, known as the Zion Mule Corps, which had been raised in Palestine. The corps was the forerunner of the Jewish Legion that served in the British army during the Palestine campaign against the Ottoman Turks — a campaign notable for the role of the Australian Light Horse in the defeat of the Ottomans and the reshaping of the modern Middle East.

The Light Horse’s involvement has been a useful prop for those seeking to embellish Australia’s role in the birth of the Jewish state. The causal link is not much more than a historical happenstance, a generation ahead of Israel’s creation.

This leaves aside the role of the ninth division in the defeat of Rommel’s legions at El Alamein during the second world war, and the courageous exploits of the Rats of Tobruk in Libya in resisting a protracted siege. In that sense, Australia played a role in the defeat of Hitler’s war machine in the Middle Eastern theatre and events that flowed from it — including, as things turned out, the partition of Palestine, driven significantly by Western guilt over the Holocaust.

Thus is Australian history embedded in the Middle East, for better or worse — John Howard’s ill-starred decision to join the American cavalry in the rush to invade Iraq in 2003 being one example of the latter. Israel’s supporters in Australia, amplified by the conservative media, were among those most outspoken in their advocacy of that rush to war; the consequences, as it turned out, were disastrous.

For Labor, its own history since 1945 weighs heavily on its Middle East policies and its relationship with Israel and its supporters in Australia. It is at least arguable that without Bert Evatt’s energetic advocacy at the United Nations in 1947, the partition of Palestine may not have happened, and certainly not as expeditiously.

Evatt’s backing for a separate Jewish homeland is the stuff of Labor mythology and a source of gratitude among Australian Jews, although this gratitude is conditional on the party’s continued support for Israel, irrespective, it seems, of its excesses.

As chair of the UN Special Committee on Palestine, Evatt worked tirelessly to bring about partition. In the words of a Polish envoy to the UN, Australia’s external affairs minister “bullied, pleaded, cajoled and  coaxed until he got the right numbers for them.” In the event, the UN voted twenty-five for partition and thirteen against (including all Arab states), with seventeen abstentions, hardly an overwhelming endorsement.

Then, as president of the General Assembly in 1948, Evatt pushed for Israel’s admission as a sovereign state. This happened in 1949. Under Ben Chifley’s Labor government, Australia was among the first countries to recognise Israel.

Since 1917, and British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s declaration of support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, Australia had followed the waxing and waning of Britain’s policy towards Jewish aspirations in Palestine. British policy generally waned in the interwar period, which was marked by Jewish terrorist activities against Britain’s mandated post-Ottoman oversight of  Palestine.

Evatt’s interventions at the UN effectively set a benchmark for Australian support for the embryonic Jewish state, and one that infused Labor history. It persisted through the Menzies years and beyond.

The election of Gough Whitlam in 1972, with his declaration that Australia would adopt an “even-handed” approach to Palestine, caused a schism between a Labor government and the Jewish leadership in Australia. Where Evatt had acted as a midwife to the birth of the Jewish state, Whitlam was proposing to sever the umbilical cord.

An “even-handed” policy was not something that found favour in the salons of Melbourne, since it implied a willingness to listen to Palestinian grievances and engage with the “terrorist” Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Whitlam’s defeat in 1975 was welcomed by a Jewish establishment since it meant that Australian policy towards the Middle East could return to a comfortable status quo under Malcolm Fraser. That stance persisted under Labor’s Bob Hawke.

Considerable mythology is attached to Hawke’s connection to Israel. It is true that his close relationship with Peter Abeles and other prominent Australian Jews meant he had an emotional attachment to Jewish people and the State of Israel — an attachment borne out by his advocacy for Soviet Jews.

On the other hand, his government was a less reliable supporter of Israel at the UN than its predecessors. In its latter years, it exhibited greater willingness to criticise. As foreign minister, Bill Hayden condemned Israel’s settlement policies, for example.

Later, under Paul Keating’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans, Australia proved a sharper critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. It welcomed the PLO’s acceptance of Israel’s existence and the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and it shared Washington’s dismay at the assassination by a Jewish zealot of Israel’s prime minister and peace advocate, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995.

A relatively unquestioning policy towards Israel returned under John Howard and his foreign minister, Alexander Downer. At the UN and in other global forums, Australia became a reliable voice for Israel. Canberra ceased referring to territories seized in the 1967 war as “occupied.” Downer observed that Australia admired the “strength and courage of Israeli for those are traits Australian see in themselves.”

From 2007, the prime ministerships of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Rudd again, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison coincided with various aimless efforts by Washington to advance a peace process. Morrison pleased the Jewish establishment in 2018 when he recognised West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and pledged to shift Australia’s embassy from Tel Aviv. Labor, under Albanese, reversed the decision to recognise Jerusalem.

Australian policy reverted to the mean: that Jerusalem should be left to final-status negotiations. In other words, there should be realistic negotiations on a two-state solution. As a battle continues to rage in the Gaza Strip, those negotiations seem very far away.

Given the unsteadiness it has displayed in the face of pressure from within its own ranks and the wider community, what is the fair assessment of the Albanese government’s management of the Palestine question?

Or, put another way: what burden does history place on a government that is seeking to be faithful to its social democratic ideals and Australia’s role in the birth of Israel, on one hand, and demands by a wider constituency that it live up to its commitments to a two-state solution, on the other, when it is faced by a vociferous campaign to delegitimise legitimate criticism of Israel?

The fair judgement at this stage is that the government is having enormous trouble managing the Gaza war issue, trapped as it is between its own history, the expectations of its rank-and-file, community disgust over the slaughter of innocents, and an extraordinarily effective pro-Israel lobby given virtual carte blanche in the pages of the national daily.

Under these sorts of pressures the government has wilted. Initially, foreign minister Penny Wong creditably advanced a proposal to recognise Palestine as a “pathway” to realistic negotiations on a two-state solution. No sooner had she put forward this relatively mild initiative than a near-hysterical reaction obliged Labor to retreat to the point where its policy on Palestine is at best passive and at worst a contradiction of its own platform to recognise a Palestinian state.

One is tempted to ask what a Whitlam, or a Hawke with Hayden as foreign minister, or a Keating with Evans as foreign minister might do in these circumstances? Evans himself has in recent times advocated the implementation of Labor policy on recognition without delay.

In the wash-up of all of this one other observation might be made. Politicians from the factional left of the party — figures like Gillard, Albanese and Wong — have a tendency to overcorrect on issues like Palestine.

It is interesting to recall that in September 2002 Albanese, as convener of the parliamentary Friends of Palestine, delivered one of the most resolute statements in support of Palestinian rights. It bears rereading in light of the difficulties he is having in aligning policies with the principles he enunciated then. In his grievance-debate speech, he engaged in a far-reaching critique of Israel’s occupation and demanded implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the wake of the 1967 war.

Resolution 242 — agreed fifty-seven years ago — calls for combatants to withdraw to pre-1967 boundaries and expresses the clear principle, under international law, of the inadmissibility of the seizure of territory by force.

Like a thunderously dark cloud, history hangs very heavily indeed over the Albanese government’s Gaza policy, and indeed over the prime minister’s own record. •

The post History’s burdens appeared first on Inside Story.

I was in the middle of reading Apeirogon, the Irish writer Colum McCann’s novel based on the lives of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. You may already be familiar with these two men, one a West Bank Palestinian, the other a Jerusalem Israeli, who in separate incidents lost their schoolgirl daughters to what has been euphemistically called a “conflict.” Together, they have gone around the world speaking of how profoundly the girl’s deaths changed them, presenting themselves to whoever is willing to listen as living examples of the possibility of peace.

You may have seen the documentary about them; you may have been in the audience on one of their speaking tours. Though the incidents they speak of occurred long before 7 October, their stories have thrown much light on what has gone wrong on that tiny sliver of land I prefer to call Israel–Palestine.

And who today hasn’t been thinking about Israel–Palestine?

Though A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a brilliant work of non-fiction and Apeirogon a magnificent fiction (McCann himself calls it a “hybrid novel”) they are nonetheless remarkably similar. Each is a window on life as it has been lived on that portion of land the Los Angeles Times compares with “the slice of California from San Diego to Fresno.” For over half a century, since Israel became Israel in what Palestinians call their Nakba, it’s been the site of a preposterously unequal struggle between a nation obsessed with the need for security and an occupied people seeking to break free from the harsh oppressions imposed on them.

What makes both Thrall’s book and McCann’s novel so rivetting is that, while each account is based on true events, the authors skilfully navigate between their stories of real people and the historical and political complexities that enmesh them.

Since 7 October this struggle has erupted into what may become a Middle Eastern, or possibly even a global, war. In the intervening months Israel has invaded and mercilessly bombed the Gaza Strip, with an estimated 34,000 Palestinians dead and those still alive enduring unimaginable suffering, including the risk of starvation. The crisis threatens all the players — Israel, Hamas, the United States and its allies to boot. More and more people around the world are out on the streets demanding an immediate ceasefire.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama had its genesis in a fifty-page article published in the New York Review of Books in 2021. But Thrall insists that what he wrote there forms a very small part of the book, which came out only eighteen days after Hamas had breached Israel’s seemingly invulnerable defences. So who is Abed Salama, and what is it about this man that made Thrall write these two substantially different works about him?

When we first meet him it is 2012 in the West Bank town of Anata, some time after he’d learned on the radio of a road accident involving a semi-trailer and a school bus taking kindergarteners to a picnic at a nearby theme park. Salama had lived most of his life in Anata, once a Palestinian village but today encircled by the separation wall and lying within Palestinian Authority–governed East Jerusalem.

The changes began around the time Salama was born, after Israel had won its war of 1967. “Year by year,” writes Thrall, “Palestinians from Anata found themselves absorbed into the urban fabric of an expanding Jerusalem, which had swallowed up the Old City and the rest of East Jerusalem, as well as the lands of more than two dozen outlying villages, all annexed by Israel.” In the process the Salama family’s fortunes plummeted.

When the first intifada broke out in 1987 Abed was a year and a half out of high school. His hopes for a Russian law degree were dashed when the Soviet Union dissolved; then Israel shut down the Palestinian universities. He couldn’t even get a passport to study in Jordan. Needless to say, he was radicalised. He rose as a construction worker in the union controlled by a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, organising protests, clandestinely disseminating literature and spray-painting texts on walls. Eventually a faction leader, it was only a matter of time before he was arrested.

Israeli soldiers came for Abed at night, which appears to be standard operating procedure. Beaten and tortured, he landed in a prison near Hebron where security officers interrogated him and tortured him again. He was then moved to another detention facility in Anatot, a nearby Israeli settlement ironically “built on land confiscated from his family,” Thrall writes.

From there he was shunted between various prisons before being shipped to one earmarked for political prisoners in the Negev (what Palestinians call the Naqab). Nearly 13,000 Palestinians were in Israeli jails at the time. Yet when the Oslo Accords got underway, ending the intifada, restrictions on Palestinians actually increased.

Released from prison, Abed was issued with a green ID card. This was to distinguish him from those issued with orange or blue cards, each of which indicated the extent of movement permitted for their holders. His card not only marked him as an ex-prisoner but indicated the length of his incarceration.

It was soon apparent that the efficacy of the system depended on its baffling arbitrariness. Abed was back at his old construction job once he managed to get the orange card that meant he could enter Jerusalem, though newly installed checkpoints slowed movement along the way. After a doomed Romeo and Juliet–style love affair, he agreed to an arranged marriage. His wife bore him four daughters, but the marriage failed. He married again, this time by choice. It was Haifa, his new wife, who gave birth to a boy, Adam, and three years later another boy, Milad.

All the while Israeli control of the Occupied Territories intensified and Jewish settlements spread on the West Bank. Palestinians were neither free nor independent. As Thrall writes:

In fact, Oslo had furthered Israel’s goal of holding on to maximal land with minimal Palestinians on it. The agreements had fractured the West Bank into 165 islands of limited self-government, each one surrounded by a sea of Israeli control. Trapped in these islands and watched over by PA [Palestinian Authority] security forces that were subservient to Israel, Palestinians mocked the impotence of their Authority, their sulta, calling it a salata, a salad instead.

The second intifada erupted from these accumulated frustrations. Its immediate trigger was Ariel Sharon’s incendiary visit to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. When Palestinians protested, Israel reacted, killing four unarmed Palestinians and wounding 200.

That intifada ended when Palestinian leaders eschewed violence as their method of resistance, opting instead for black South Africa’s example. To halt the murderous cycle of suicide bombings and Israeli reprisals they sought international community support through boycott, sanctions and divestment, or BDS as it’s known.

Israel quickly intervened after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, reinstating the PLO’s Fatah on the West Bank and pulling Jewish settlements out of Gaza and leaving Hamas in control there. It was a brutal, classic divide-and-rule tactic, its realisation too convoluted to detail here. But we know the rest — all of which affected Abed Salama — in broad outline, though some of us more than others.

On the morning of the school bus crash, Salama slept in. It was his day off work. While he was sleeping, five-year-old Milad and his friends climbed onto the bus. Rain was falling heavily by the time Abed rose. He left with a cousin to buy meat from a butcher in another part of Jerusalem, but the friend who was to accompany them rang to say he’d been stuck in traffic. Then a nephew rang to ask if Milad had gone on an outing. “There was an accident with a school bus near Jaba,” he said.

Abed left his cousin’s vehicle immediately and ran through the rain to find the bus. Spotting an Israeli army jeep, he hailed it down, saying in Hebrew that he thought his son was on the bus. The driver refused to give him a lift. He ran again. He didn’t spot the bus at first — a large, jack-knifed semi-trailer blocked the way. People had gathered, among them other parents.

Then he saw it, “flipped on its side, an empty burnt-out shell.” Where were the kids? Where were their teachers? Nobody could tell him much. “They carried the burned bodies out of the bus and laid them on the ground,” said a Palestinian Authority official, one of Israel’s enforcers.

At that stage, all any parent could do was hope that their child hadn’t died. Rumours swirled. The children appeared to have been taken to different hospitals, but no one could tell which of them had been taken where.

The rest of Abed Salama’s day was a nightmare pilgrim’s progress, with impediments every single step of the way. Along that way, Thrall narrates the stories of many others caught up in the tragedy. We learn about the bus driver, the paramedics, an onlooker, teachers, social workers, nurses. So many; all enmeshed in the horror. And looming above them all, that wall.

Called the “separation wall” or the “apartheid wall,” for Palestinians it’s as much a symbol as a barrier. Originally meant to follow the 1967 “green line,” it has proceeded in stages, departing from that line considerably, wiggling in and out of the Occupied West Bank, surrounding or segmenting towns and villages, cutting off farmers from their fields, kin from kin.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a granular damnation of its effects. Small things: from a soldier’s refusal to give a terrified father a lift in the rain to the narrow, winding, pot-holed road the kids take to a picnic site, contempt for the occupied rules. Kids disappear into different hospitals, some in Ramallah, none of them to far-closer ones in Jerusalem. The checkpoints, overseen by gun-toting adolescents, ever delay.

The stories Thrall interweaves are cumulatively scarifying. Even readers like me, who have known of such oppression for some time, will learn much about the utter injustice of the present situation. Others who should learn are unlikely to pick up A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. But for those whose hearts and minds are still open, this is the book.

As for Abed Salama he, like Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, is talking around the world to those who are willing to listen. Peace may very well depend on them. •

A Day in the Life of Abed Salara: A Palestine Story
By Nathan Thrall | Allen Lane | $36.99 | 255 pages

The post The wall appeared first on Inside Story.

Take the phrase “two-state solution,” which has become the political currency of the moment. Few, if any, longer historical shadows have fallen across the Middle East than this reference to an ideal of two countries, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side in relative harmony.

In the absence of a realistic pathway towards resolving the longest-running conflict in modern history, this hollowed-out phrase serves an obvious political purpose.

I use the word “pathway” deliberately. This was the terminology chosen by foreign minister Penny Wong last week when she outlined Labor’s approach to resolving the Israel–Palestine conflict. “We need to build a pathway to a peace that is enduring and just,” she told the ANU’s National Security College in a landmark speech. “Because the simple truth is that a secure and prosperous future for both Israelis and Palestinians will only come with a two-state solution.”

Wong went on to canvass the possibility that Australia might accord recognition to a Palestinian state as a “pathway” towards a revitalised peace process. Controversially, recognition would take place ahead of final-status negotiations on all the vexed issues that have stymied a peace process over many years.

Leaving aside the wisdom of this approach, her remarks were aligned with views expressed by the leaders of several of Australia’s close allies, including, principally, Britain. Conservative foreign secretary David Cameron had suggested a similar step a few weeks earlier, on the basis that whatever had been tried before was not working.

Wong’s alignment with Cameron produced a reaction in Australian domestic politics that was as discordant as it was ill-judged. Opposition leader Peter Dutton indulged in the sort of hyperbole that defines his leadership, declaring it “the most reckless act of a foreign minister I have seen in my twenty-two years in the parliament.”

His remarks were echoed by conservative media, which has adopted an Israel-right-or-wrong culture-wars approach to the Israel–Palestine issue. So invested have sections of the media become in this point of view that headlines appear regularly in which Wong is “lashed” by spokespersons for an assortment of Jewish organisations — including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council — all espousing very similar viewpoints.

I’ll leave it to the reader to judge whether the views of particular lobby groups who are in the habit of “lashing Wong” are given more credence than is justified.

Wong’s act of “recklessness” was, of course, not reckless at all. It may have been naive, given an unpromising situation on the ground; it may have been contrived, given the complexities of the issue; it may have aimed to ease political pressures in Labor’s heartland seats. But reckless? Hardly.

For argument’s sake, and without much hope of genuine progress towards illusion becoming reality, let us consider prospects for a “two-state solution” in light of the terrible conflict in Gaza.

First, it might be useful to trace the evolution of the concept from the 1917 declaration by British prime minister Arthur Balfour, in which he pledged support for a national home for Jewish people in Palestine, up to the present. Like rusting tanks left in the desert after one of the Middle East’s innumerable wars, the signposts have found themselves submerged in shifting sands of subterfuge, mendacity and ill will.

From Balfour to the 1937 Peel Commission, which first proposed separate Jewish and Arab states; to the United Nations “partition plan” of the 1947; to the wars of 1967 and 1973 that redrew the maps of Israel and Palestine; to the Camp David Accords of 1978 that ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt; to the still-born Oslo peace process of 1993; to subsequent attempts to achieve an historic compromise — all have added layers of complexity.

This was certainly the case at Camp David in 1999 and at Taba in 2000, when a last-minute effort by US president Bill Clinton’s administration to bring Israelis and Palestinians together foundered in a sea of mistrust, with much of the blame for this failure accruing to the Palestinians. Desultory attempts were made during George W. Bush’s administration, and a more purposeful effort was launched by Barack Obama to bring the parties together, but such efforts trickled into the sand.

Donald Trump advanced his own solution by proclaiming that he was intent on bringing off what he called the “deal of the century.” As far as the Palestinians were concerned this was no deal at all, rather than an attempt to expunge their legitimate rights to a sovereign state undiluted by increasing numbers of Jewish settlers. In truth, Trump’s deal was a confidence trick detrimental to Palestinian interests, as if anyone should have been surprised.

Along the way, and apart from the Oslo process and the Clinton initiative, other significant two-state proposals have included the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, also known as the Saudi Initiative, which laid down terms for a resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Broadly, it called for Israel’s withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war and the creation of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The chances of Israel agreeing to this formulation are, to say the least, remote. But the formula, agreed at an Arab League summit in Beirut and reaffirmed in 2007, remains the cornerstone of Arab demands.

Since no resolution of the Palestine issue remains remotely possible without  a regional consensus, the Saudi initiative can’t be disregarded, however far-fetched its demands may seem in light of current circumstances. Separate from efforts to embed a two-state solution into Middle East peacemaking, a binational state in which Jews and Arabs co-exist has its advocates. However, the likelihood of such a “one-state solution” gaining traction is negligible given that Jewish people would risk ceasing to be a majority in a combined state.

History hangs heavy on the Middle East and nowhere more so than in a conflict whose contours are now further complicated by threats of a regional war between Israel and Iran. Israel’s colonisation of swathes of the West Bank, and the subjugation of a resident population to stifling military rule, remains the greatest single impediment to a settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict based on a two-state solution. Put simply: how do you unscramble the egg?

Again, history is important.

The phrase “two-state solution” didn’t gain traction in peace-making efforts until Jordan’s King Hussein relinquished his claim to represent the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1985. The role had been assumed by the Hashemite monarchy in 1950, not long after Israel’s 1947–48 war of independence, when Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The king’s reluctant acceptance of reality enabled an animated discussion about two states, one that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was able to exploit. This important historical moment is dealt with in my book Arafat: The  Biography.

By 1985, the Palestine Liberation Organisation under Arafat had long abandoned the illusion of armed victory over Israel. After King Hussein’s intervention that year the PLO moved hesitantly towards endorsing Israel’s right to exist under a two-state formula. At a press conference on the sidelines of the 1988 UN General Assembly, Arafat reluctantly accepted Israel’s right to exist, de facto and de jure, by endorsing UN Security Resolution 242, which implicitly recognised Israel. He also renounced terrorism as a means for the PLO to achieve its objectives.

This was the PLO’s down payment on a “two-state solution,” and one that embedded the phrase in Middle East peace-making.

That was thirty-six years ago. Apart from an all-too brief moment between 1993–95, following the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, and the Clinton initiative of 1999–2000, a two-state solution has remained elusive, and never more so than now.

The current conflict will not retire the phrase, of course, since politicians need to be seen to be making constructive suggestions, even if they have no intention of doing anything about them.

Foreign minister Wong should not be censured unduly for this: at least she was suggesting an alternative “pathway” in an effort break the mould of a tired debate in which “final status” discussions have served as a barrier to progress. Her critics offered not much beyond restatements of an allegiance to Israel under an extremist nationalist leadership whose impulses are to crush Palestinian aspirations.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to those who have sought to create “pathways” to peace has been to pursue an aggressive annexationist policy in the Occupied Territories built on ever-expanding settlements.

In all of this it is hard to disagree with Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. In an essay for the Guardian last week, “A New Abyss: Gaza and the Hundred Years War on Palestine,” he derides the lip service paid to a two-state solution by the Biden administration.

“There was no sign,” he writes, “that the US would demand implementation of the essential prerequisites for such a solution: a rapid and complete end to Israel’s nearly fifty-seven-year military occupation and to its usurpation and colonisation of Palestinian land, which has planted nearly 750,000 illegal settlers in 60 per cent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

With no indication these measures would be firmly enforced, says Khalidi, “a call for a ‘two-state solution’ has always been meaningless, a cruel Orwellian hoax.” •

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First came a period of strategic deception, during which his Hamas movement appeared to moderate its armed confrontation with Israel, notably by cutting rocket attacks, in return for large-scale economic aid from Qatar. That aid deal was tacitly approved by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw it as a way of helping tame Hamas while deepening the split in the Palestinian leadership between the Islamists of Hamas and the secular Fatah elements running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Then came the attack, delivered so surprisingly and with such indiscriminate violence that a harsh military response was inevitable. Sinwar then withdrew his surviving fighters, accompanied by as many Israeli hostages as they could capture. Having himself been part of a swap of 1000 Palestinian prisoners for just one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, he knew their value as bargaining chips.

Stinging at the deception, Netanyahu marshalled 50,000 soldiers and launched an air, land and sea campaign into Gaza with the aim of eliminating Hamas for good and freeing the hostages. So far, some eighty-five of the original 230 hostages have been released in a swap for Palestinian detainees. About one hundred are thought to remain alive, captive to Hamas or other militant groups.

After six months of military operations, the Israel Defence Force says it has killed about 13,000 of the estimated 30,000 fighters in Hamas’s military arm, including several senior unit commanders, for 260 soldiers of its own killed in Gaza operations. But Sinwar and other top leaders remain hidden and active.

For their part, Hamas health officials say 33,000 (among them 9000 women and 12,300 children) have died from Israeli attacks, with about 75,000 wounded and a further 7000 missing, believed buried in rubble. The figures, which seem widely accepted by international agencies and observers, don’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

The Israeli onslaught is the response Hamas expected. “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7,” said Khaled Mashal, a Qatar-based Hamas political leader, soon after the attack. “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”

If any Gazan citizens don’t agree with being put up as sacrifices like this, we don’t hear from them. In the daily stream of smartphone videos of bereaved survivors pulling their dead children from the rubble we haven’t seen Hamas being blamed for the bloodshed. And perhaps Gazan journalists working for Reuters, Associated Press, Al Jazeera and other media would hesitate to ask.

It took Israeli authorities some time realise that the death tallies and horrific video images made up the narrative mostly being seen by the outside world. Israel’s own media, with a few exceptions like the liberal newspaper Haaretz, concentrated on the violence against Israelis in the October attack, showing little of the carnage inside Gaza. After some weeks, Israeli embassies and lobby groups abroad began showing video and other evidence, emphasising child murder and sexual assault, to counter sympathy for the Gazans.

The high death toll and the destruction of more than two-thirds of dwellings in Gaza was meanwhile achieving the objectives stated explicitly by Mashal and other Hamas figures. They had seen the Palestinian cause slipping away, the West Bank being steadily annexed by Jewish settlements with little effective protest by Western powers pledged since 1993 to a two-state solution.

Under Donald Trump, the US embassy had been moved from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem: he was not holding out for a two-state settlement. Trump had also brokered the Abraham accords, which brought Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states closer to Israel: support for Palestinians seemed to be weakening among these Sunni powers.

Hamas set out to shatter this trend. “We knew there was going to be a violent reaction… But we didn’t choose this road while having other options,” said one Hamas official, Basem Naim. “We have no options.” It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told the New York Times in Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

Without going into the “context” sometimes used to explain or even excuse the 7 October attack, it’s useful to consider what Israel could have done instead of its all-out military response. What alternatives does it have now to pursuing it?

Cautioning voices in the early weeks made comparisons with America’s “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks. Could a more measured response, holding back the military while carefully assembling police evidence of the atrocious crimes committed by Hamas and other attackers on 7 October, have turned the moral tables? Bodies were quickly buried, and other forensic evidence lost, in the wave of anger and grief that swept Israelis.

And even then, what to do? Military experts say there is no way to eliminate an enemy hiding in cellars and tunnels in a dense urban setting without many civilian casualties. The battle of Fallujah, in 2004 during the Iraq war, and the Mosul siege against Islamic State in 2017 are comparable, except that in both cases most of the civilian population was able to flee beforehand. Even so, the Americans and Iraqis killed many of the remaining civilians and lost many soldiers, while the insurgents were not decisively eliminated.

Given the narrowness of Gaza and Egypt’s refusal to accept refugees (assuming Palestinians agreed to leave, knowing they might end up permanently expelled), the strip has hardly any space for safe refuge, and Hamas fighters would in any case move with civilians. Further slaughter of civilians would be unavoidable.

Netanyahu says Israel’s military is regrouping to push into Rafah in the south of the strip, against the Egyptian border, where 1.2 million displaced Gazans are camped and where the Israeli Defense Force claims the bulk of surviving Hamas fighters are hiding. Israeli spokesmen have suggested the IDF’s first move will be to seal the border and offer Hamas militants safe passage out to exile. If few accept, which seems likely, what then?

The operations in the north and centre of the Gaza strip have not been a clean sweep. Hamas elements remain, causing Israeli casualties, and a recent return to the large al-Shifa Hospital to ferret out hidden insurgents has resulted in more Gazan casualties. A Rafah attack and even more civilian deaths and injuries will only add weight to Sinwar’s grim calculus.

Israel’s main Western allies, meanwhile, are declaring it is time to stop — calls that intensified after a drone attack killed seven aid workers including Zomi Frankcom, an Australian. They are also preparing to deliver humanitarian aid themselves: the United States is building a new jetty and Britain will send a Royal Navy ship to land supplies.

Netanyahu is also facing mounting pressure inside Israel: for not giving priority to freeing the hostages; for failing to take responsibility, by resigning, for the security lapses that allowed the 7 October attack to happen; and for his earlier attempts to undermine judicial independence and wriggle out of corruption charges.

“If we enter into Rafah it will be a human disaster,” Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, told London’s New Statesman last week. “I don’t know how many Palestinians will die. I know that many Israelis [soldiers] will die. We have to assume rationally that Egypt will have to react. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will climb on the [border] fences.” Egypt, Jordan and other regional states will reassess relations with Israel.

Pressure of a different kind comes from within the Israeli cabinet, where extreme Zionists like national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir say they will topple Netanyahu if he baulks at attacking Rafah. Politically, he has every motive to keep up the military offensive.

At whatever point the Israeli government declares “mission accomplished” it will be left in control of 2.2 million destitute people and a Gaza in ruins, among them many Hamas sympathisers and a new generation seething for vengeance. Like the insurgent leaders in Fallujah, Sinwar might well have slipped away.

But at that point, too, Netanyahu knows that his days in power could end. The war has protected him against calls for elections or a reshuffle in the Knesset. But if it is over, and hasn’t been extended to new fronts — against Iran, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, or by settler attacks in the West Bank — Israel could then have a new leadership, probably still right-wing but perhaps less invested in Netanyahu’s policies.

That would bring an opening for Arab powers, the West, and the United Nations to assume responsibility for rebuilding and securing Gaza.

The US secretary of state Anthony Blinken has been working on a plan that would see a Gaza truce extended into a creation of a Palestinian state. The Washington Post reported in February that the ideas under discussion include the withdrawal of many, if not all, settler communities on the West Bank; a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; the reconstruction of Gaza; and security and governance arrangements for a combined West Bank and Gaza. Israel would be offered specific security guarantees and normalised relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Britain and the European Union are said to be supportive.

And Australia? Speaking at ANU this week, foreign minister Penny Wong indicated that Canberra was party to this thinking. Instead of putting Palestinian statehood at the end of negotiations, she said, “the international community is now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution.” Echoing ex–Shin Bet chief Ayalom, she argued that statehood would undermine Hamas, Iran and other extremists.

A reformed Palestinian Authority would be needed to run the state, with no role for Hamas. “Hamas is a terrorist organisation which has the explicit intent of the destruction of the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” Wong said.

(In a revised charter in 2017, Hamas said it would accept a Palestinian state within the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war only as a step towards complete settlement of the original pre-Israel territory. It was not opposed to Jews, it said, just Zionists. Netanyahu publicly ripped up a print-out of this less-than-reassuring charter.)

In Australia, the Coalition has quickly characterised Wong’s proposals as “rewarding terrorism,” as have various Israel-aligned lobby groups. Indeed, it will be hard to avoid Hamas getting credit. Among Palestinians, including those in the West Bank, opinion polls have shown support for Hamas and its attack has risen to 80 per cent.

In a plan circulated at the end of February, Netanyahu declared that Israel must maintain security control, including a 300-metre no-go zone at the Gaza borders and a wide corridor across the middle of the strip, and by tightly controlling the Egyptian border. He wants the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, kicked out. He proposes replacing the Hamas administration with local representatives “who are not affiliated with terrorist countries or groups and are not financially supported by them.” He continues to ridicule the idea of Palestinian statehood and says a date has been set for invading Rafah.

In other words, a Palestinian state would probably emerge only over Netanyahu’s political corpse. With the US presidential election getting nearer, Blinken’s time may also be running out.

Many Palestinians would also have to be convinced that the United States and other Western powers are sincere and determined. More than thirty years have passed since the Camp David accords set two states as the goal. Tareq Baconi, president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, is one who argues that the moment for a two-state solution has long passed, and that the idea of partition, which ignores the 1947 expulsion of Arabs from what became Israel, is inherently unjust and impracticable. Israeli journalist Dimi Reider has long urged that creative thinking be used to turn Israel’s “apartheid” system into a single entity that gives equal rights and security to Israelis and Palestinians.

Rebuilding Gaza will take decades and tens of billions of dollars, says senior UN economist Rami Alazzeh. Not only have many homes been destroyed, but water, sewerage, electricity, schools, administrative records and financial systems have also been devastated. The population is suffering dire physical and psychological distress.

Just possibly, though, the vista for a longer-term building of peace could be opening. Whether it’s a two-state solution, a single state or one that leads to the other is a field of literature in itself. Either requires a vast effort of trust and reconciliation in the embittered Holy Land. •

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The raid took place at a critical moment in the Gaza war. The Biden administration has been seeking to dissuade Israel from launching a full-scale military assault on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where a million or more displaced Palestinians are huddled.

Under international law, diplomatic missions like Iran’s Syrian consulate are regarded as sovereign territory. Leaving aside the seniority of the commanders killed in Damascus, the missile strike thus represents a direct assault on Iran’s interest in the region. Iran has vowed retaliation, but its leaders have not indicated what form this will take or given any indication of the extent to which they are prepared to risk a wider conflict.

In its responses so far to American and Israeli strikes — including the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani, another senior Revolutionary Guard leader, in January 2020 — Iran has been restrained. Leaders in Tehran clearly want to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States and Israel that would quickly become a regional conflict with devastating consequences — including for Iran itself, whose oil-dependent economy is brittle.

So, the question becomes twofold. How is Iran likely to assuage Zahedi’s slaying? And what are the risks of a further deterioration in regional security?

It is important to bear in mind that Zahedi, like Soleimani, was a commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force, which is deeply engaged in supporting Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy. Indeed, the Quds commander is credited with overall responsibility for overseeing Hezbollah’s build-up of a missile capability aimed at targets in Israel.

For that reason alone, his death during an Israeli airstrike is not coincidental. Nor are the casualties of a number of other such Israeli strikes conducted over recent months against Iranian commanders in the region.

Late last year, for instance, Israeli forces killed Iranian general Sayyed Reza Mousavi in an airstrike in Damascus. Mousavi had been directly responsible for procuring missiles, rockets and drones for Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. Strikes like these highlight the fact that Iran prefers to use its proxies to conduct operations against the US and its interests in the region. The Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, for example, would not be possible without supplies of Iranian-manufactured drones and missiles. It has seriously disrupted container traffic in a waterway that previously carried around 30 per cent of global container trade.

But that disruption is happening at some distance from Gaza. What will be more concerning for Israel and the United States is the prospect of an escalation across the Israel–Lebanon frontier.

Until now, Hezbollah’s cross-border rocket and drone strikes have been sporadic, but the risks of an escalation are ever-present. A full-scale war would have destructive consequences for both countries, and for the region more generally. It would recall the devastating impact on Lebanon of the war it waged with Israel in 2006. Destruction of infrastructure was widespread, further setting back Lebanon’s fragile economic recovery after years of civil war.

The risks of such a conflict are real. With Iran’s assistance, Hezbollah has stockpiled thousands of missiles capable of striking targets deep inside Israel. Given such a threat to Israel’s security, any US administration would find it hard to remain indifferent.

President Joe Biden’s relocation of two aircraft battle groups into the eastern Mediterranean early in the Gaza war was aimed at forestalling a wider regional conflagration of this kind. But what has been noticeable in recent weeks has been an uptick across the Middle East of the proxy war between United States and Israel, on the one hand, and Iran and its allies — from Yemen itself to Iraq and Syria — on the other.

Early this year, for example, Israel killed Hamas’s deputy political head, Saleh al-Arouri, in a drone strike in the heart of Hezbollah’s seat of power in west Beirut. Al-Arouri was the Hamas leader regarded as closest to Iran. His assassination was designed to remind Hamas leaders across the region that they are not immune to Israel’s ability to exact revenge.

Israel has clearly decided that its security would be best served by region-wide pre-emptive actions. It is testing Iran’s tolerance for provocative strikes against its frontline military commanders and allied proxies while reminding Iran and other regional powers that its military reach is long and lethal.

At this stage, Iran seems unlikely to want a wider regional conflict, though the risks of such an outcome can’t be discounted. But Israel’s actions at this intensely dangerous moment, whether or not they are coordinated with Washington, are pushing Iran towards decisions that could spark a wider regional conflict. •

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We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the  Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic  interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.

In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

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Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

Most tellingly, the vote demonstrates a fracturing in what has been a fairly solid wall of support for Israel’s war against Hamas among its allies, led by the United States.

Given the tormenting scenes emanating from Gaza of civilian casualties pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings it is surprising, even unconscionable, it has taken countries like Australia as long as it has to say “enough.” Prime minister Anthony Albanese has been under considerable pressure from within his own party to detach Australia from the United States and Israel on this issue. That he managed to do so in partnership with two of Australia’s close allies — Canada and New Zealand — gave him the diplomatic cover he no doubt wanted.

In effect, Australia averted its eyes for too long from Israel’s slaughter of civilians in response to the pogrom conducted by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October. No reasonable argument can be advanced to deny Israel the right to wreak vengeance on those responsible for that heinous crime. However, what are the limits on Israel’s war against Hamas? How many non-combatant Palestinians, including children, need to die to satisfy Israel’s declared aim of “eradicating” the terrorist group?

In other words, how much longer will Israel persist in its efforts to eliminate Hamas, and at what cost to a civilian population that has been displaced in its tens of thousands, and traumatised? And is it even possible to kill off a movement and an ideology, however repugnant?

After weeks of some of the most intense bombing of civilian areas since the second world war, another question presses in: where lies the exit strategy for Israel once the guns fall silent?

Unless they are inhabitants of another planet, members of Israel’s war cabinet can’t be unaware of Washington’s increasing uneasiness over Gaza’s civilian casualties, made more pressing by the horrendous images playing out on the nightly television news.

At a 2024 election fundraiser this week president Joe Biden voiced some of his strongest criticism of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza. He warned that Israel was beginning to alienate Europe and the rest of the international community. Although his remarks were made at a private function, they have been reliably reported. He is also quoted as saying that Israel can’t continue to say no to a Palestinian state.

Biden’s intervention on the twin issues of Israel’s disproportionate use of force and its reluctance to embrace a Palestinian state will be troubling for Israel and its supporters globally. While the United States voted against this week’s General Assembly resolution on grounds it didn’t condemn Hamas, its diplomatic support is weakening. Whatever might be said by Israeli hardliners and their friends in the West, Israel can’t afford to alienate Washington, which provides both diplomatic cover and armaments.

In all of this a reasonable question arises: could Biden and his national security team have done a better job managing a highly combustible situation? The answer is not simple, and comes in two parts. Biden responded well to the risks of a wider conflagration by quickly bolstering a US naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf to deter a regional spillover. But his embrace of Israel’s strategy — literally, for he travelled to Tel Aviv in October and hugged Israel’s prime minister on arrival — relayed a message to the region that Washington would indulge Netanyahu’s war aims and practices.

That this was a mistake has become increasingly obvious in recent days as Israel continues a merciless bombing campaign that has reportedly killed more than 15,000 Gazans, including thousands of children. Casualty numbers are imprecise, but may well exceed 20,000, including those buried in rubble and not recovered.

Having given Netanyahu the impression that the United States was offering virtual carte blanche to Israel, Biden is now trying to rein in the Israeli leader. This will not necessarily end well.

Of course, Israel will be hoping it can capture key Hamas leaders, including political supremo Yahya Sinwar and military commander Mohammed Deif, either dead or alive, to parade before the international media as evidence of the success of its mission.

All of this leaves unresolved the fundamental conundrum: what happens once the guns fall silent and the bombing campaign and other offensive measures have run their course?

No one, not the American president, nor the United Nations, nor Arab states, nor the international community more generally, and certainly not Israel itself, has come up with a realistic way forward. The reason is simple: no clear-cut avenues exist for resolving an Israel–Palestine dispute vastly complicated by the devastation wrought on the people of Gaza.

Central is the question of who will take responsibility for managing Gaza in the war’s aftermath, assuming Hamas has been disabled. Would it be a UN trusteeship using the organisation’s humanitarian resources? Would it be the Palestinian authority, currently governing the West Bank? Would Arab states fill a vacuum until the devastated Strip could be rebuilt? Or will Israel remain in Gaza as a garrison occupier much as it did in South Lebanon after its invasion in 1982 to rid that country of the Palestine Liberation Organisation?

On the face of it, none of these options seems particularly attractive, or even plausible. Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have warned Netanyahu that they won’t tolerate an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza or Gazans being forced to leave. They have also made clear that Israel needs to engage meaningfully with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s response has been to say he won’t deal with the Palestinian Authority in a Gaza context and that he is against a two-state solution in any case. This is hardly encouraging. But if there is a glimmer of hope in all of this, it is that Netanyahu himself will not be a spoiling factor.

Israel’s leader is living on borrowed time, and will almost certainly be pushed aside after the war ends. This is not the least of the reasons why it remains in his interests to continue to prosecute a war that is proving devasting for Israel’s support among its close friends and allies, including Australia.

Israel and its supporters would be unwise to misread the message emanating from the UN General Assembly this week. Global patience, including that of the United States, is wearing awfully thin. •

The post A turning point for Gaza? appeared first on Inside Story.

Even now, as Israeli forces push deeper into southern Gaza, the exact purpose of Israel’s approach is far from clear. Although Israeli leaders claim to be targeting Hamas alone, the evident lack of discrimination raises real questions about what the government is actually up to.

Is Israel’s eagerness to shatter Gaza a product of the same incompetence that led to the massive failure of the Israeli military to counter Hamas’s attack on 7 October, the plans for which ended up in the hands of Israeli military and intelligence officials more than a year earlier? Is wrecking northern Gaza and now southern Gaza a prelude to sending the territory’s entire population to Egypt, as proposed in a “concept paper” produced by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry?

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel’s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel’s approach is doomed to failure — and indeed, it is already failing. Mass civilian punishment has not convinced Gaza’s residents to stop supporting Hamas. To the contrary, it has only heightened resentment among Palestinians. Nor has the campaign succeeded in dismantling the group ostensibly being targeted. Fifty-plus days of war show that while Israel can demolish Gaza, it cannot destroy Hamas. In fact, the group may be stronger now than it was before.

Israel is hardly the first country to err by placing excessive faith in the coercive magic of airpower. History shows that the large-scale bombing of civilian areas almost never achieves its objectives. Israel would have been better off had it heeded these lessons and responded to the 7 October attack with surgical strikes against Hamas’s leaders and fighters in lieu of the indiscriminate bombing campaign it has chosen.

But it is not too late to shift course and adopt a viable alternative strategy for achieving lasting security, an approach that would drive a political wedge between Hamas and the Palestinians rather than bringing them closer together: take meaningful, unilateral steps towards a two-state solution.

Since the dawn of airpower, countries have sought to bomb enemies into submission and shatter civilian morale. Pushed to their breaking point, the theory goes, populations will rise up against their own governments and switch sides. This strategy of coercive punishment reached its apogee in the second world war. History remembers the indiscriminate bombing of cities in that war simply by the place names of the targets: Hamburg (40,000 dead), Darmstadt (12,000) and Dresden (25,000).

Now Gaza can be added to this infamous list. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has himself likened the current campaign to the Allies’ fight in the second world war. While denying that Israel was engaging in collective punishment, he pointed out that a Royal Air Force strike targeting Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen killed scores of schoolchildren.

What Netanyahu left unmentioned was that none of the Allies’ efforts to punish civilians en masse actually succeeded. In Germany, the Allied bombing campaign, which began in 1942, wreaked havoc on civilians, destroying one urban area after another and ultimately a total of fifty-eight German cities and towns by the end of the war. But it never sapped civilian morale or prompted an uprising against Adolf Hitler, despite the confident predictions of Allied officials. Indeed, the campaign only encouraged Germans to fight harder for fear of a draconian postwar peace.

That failure should not have been so surprising given what happened when the Nazis tried the same tactic. The Blitz, their bombing of London and other British cities in 1940–41, killed more than 40,000 people and yet British prime minister Winston Churchill refused to capitulate. Instead, he invoked the civilian casualties in rallying society to make the sacrifices necessary for victory. Rather than shattering morale, the Blitz motivated the British to organise a years-long effort — with their US and Soviet allies — to counterattack and ultimately conquer the country that had bombed them.

In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against its own government. The United States has tried the tactic numerous times, to no avail. During the Korean war, it destroyed 90 per cent of electricity generation in North Korea. In the Vietnam war, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam. And in the Gulf war, US air attacks disrupted 90 per cent of electricity generation in Iraq. In none of these cases did the population rise up.

The war in Ukraine is the most recent case in point. For nearly two years Russia has sought to coerce Ukraine through wave after wave of devasting air assaults on cities across the country, killing more than 10,000 civilians, destroying more than 1.5 million homes and displacing some eight million Ukrainians. Russia is clearly shattering Ukraine. But far from crushing Ukraine’s fighting spirit, this massive civilian punishment has only convinced Ukrainians to fight Russia more intensely than ever.

This historical pattern is repeating itself in Gaza. Despite nearly two months of heavy military operations — virtually unrestrained by the United States and the rest of the world — Israel has achieved only marginal results. By any meaningful metric, the campaign has not led to Hamas’s even partial defeat.

Israel’s air and ground operations have killed as many as 5000 Hamas fighters (according to Israeli officials) out of a total of about 30,000. But these losses will not significantly reduce the threat to Israeli civilians, since, as the 7 October attacks proved, it takes only a few hundred Hamas fighters to wreak havoc on Israeli communities. Worse, Israeli officials also admit that the military campaign is killing twice as many civilians as Hamas fighters. In other words, Israel is almost certainly producing more terrorists than it is killing, since each dead civilian will have family and friends eager to join Hamas to exact revenge.

Hamas’s military infrastructure, such as it is, has not been meaningfully dismantled, even after the much-vaunted operations against the al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli military alleged Hamas used as an operational base. As videos released by the Israel Defense Forces show, Israel has captured and destroyed the entrances to many of Hamas’s tunnels, but these can eventually be repaired, just as they were built in the first place.

More important, Hamas’s leaders and fighters appear to have abandoned the tunnels before Israeli forces entered them, meaning that the group’s most important infrastructure — its fighters — survived. Hamas has an advantage over Israeli forces: it can easily abandon a fight, blend into the civilian population, and live to fight again on more favourable terms. That is why a large-scale Israeli ground operation is also doomed to failure.

More broadly, Israel’s military campaign has not deeply weakened Hamas’s control over Gaza. Israel has rescued only one of the 240 or so hostages taken in the 7 October attack; the other hostages freed have been released by Hamas, showing that the group remains in control of its fighters.

Despite large-scale power shortages and extensive destruction throughout Gaza, Hamas continues to churn out propaganda videos showing civilian atrocities committed by Israeli forces and intense battles between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops. The group’s propaganda is distributed widely on the messaging app Telegram, where its channel has more than 620,000 subscribers. By the count of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (which I direct), Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has disseminated nearly 200 videos and posters every week from 11 October to 22 November through that channel.

The only way to deal a lasting defeat to Hamas is to attack its leaders and fighters while separating them from the surrounding population. That is easier said than done, however, especially since Hamas draws its ranks directly from the local population rather than from abroad.

Indeed, survey evidence shows the extent to which Israel’s military operations are now producing more terrorists than they are killing. In a 14 November poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank conducted by Arab World for Research and Development, 76 per cent of respondents said they viewed Hamas positively. Compare that with the 27 per cent of respondents in both territories who told different pollsters in September that Hamas was “the most deserving of representing the Palestinian people.” The implication is sobering: a vast portion of the more than 500,000 Palestinian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are now ripe recruits for Hamas or other Palestinian groups seeking to target Israel and its civilians.

This result also reinforces the lessons of history. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most terrorists do not choose their vocation owing to religion or ideology, although some certainly do. Rather, most people who become terrorists do so because their land is being taken away.

For decades, I’ve studied the most extreme terrorists — suicide terrorists — and my study of 462 people who killed themselves on missions to kill others in acts of terrorism from 1982 to 2003 remains the largest demographic study of these attackers. I found that there are hundreds of secular suicide terrorists. Indeed, the world’s leader in suicide terrorism during that period was the Tamil Tigers, an openly anti-religious, Marxist group in Sri Lanka that carried out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad — the two deadliest Palestinian terrorist groups — combined. What 95 per cent of the suicide terrorists in my database had in common was that they were fighting back against a military occupation that was controlling territory they considered their homeland.

From 1994 to 2005, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups carried out more than 150 suicide attacks, killing about 1000 Israelis. Only when Israel withdrew military forces from Gaza did these groups abandon the tactic almost entirely. Since then, the number of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has grown by 50 per cent, making it even harder for Israel to control the territories in the long run. There is every reason to think that Israel’s renewed military occupation of Gaza — “for an indefinite period,” according to Netanyahu — will lead to a new, perhaps larger wave of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.

Although the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has many dimensions, one fact helps clarify the complex picture. Virtually every year since the early 1980s, the Jewish population in the Palestinian territories has grown, even during the years of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. The growth of settlements has meant the loss of land for the Palestinians and increasing concerns that Israel will confiscate more land to resettle more Jews in the Palestinian territories. Indeed, Yossi Dagan, a prominent settler and member of Netanyahu’s party, has urged the creation of settlements in Gaza, where the last settlements were removed in 2005.

The growth of the Jewish population in Palestinian territories is a central factor in fomenting conflict. In the years immediately after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the total number of Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza numbered only a few thousand. Israeli–Palestinian relations were mostly harmonious. No Palestinian suicide attacks and few attacks of any kind occurred during this period.

But things changed after the right-wing government led by the Likud Party came to power in 1977, promising a major expansion of settlements. The number of settlers increased — from about 4000 in 1977 to 24,000 in 1983 and to 116,000 in 1993. By 2022, about 500,000 Jewish Israeli settlers lived in the Palestinian territories, excluding East Jerusalem, where an additional 230,000 Jews resided. As the settlements grew, the relative harmony between the Israelis and the Palestinians dissipated. First came the creation of Hamas in 1987, and then the first intifada of 1987–93, the second intifada of 2000–2005, and continuing rounds of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis ever since.

The near-continuous growth of the Jewish settlements is a core reason why the idea of a two-state solution has lost credibility since the 1990s. If there is to be a serious pathway to a Palestinian state in the future, that growth must come to an end. After all, why should Palestinians reject Hamas and support a supposed peace process if doing so means only more loss of their land?

Only a two-state solution will lead to lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is the only viable approach that will truly undermine Hamas, and Israel can and should unilaterally press forward with a plan, taking steps on its own before negotiating with the Palestinians. The goal should be to revive a process that has been dormant since the last negotiations failed in 2008, fifteen years ago.

To be clear, Israel should couple this political approach with a military one, engaging in limited, sustained operations against the Hamas leaders and fighters responsible for the atrocities of 7 October. But the country must adopt the political element of the strategy now, not later. Israel cannot wait until after some mythical time when Hamas is defeated by military might alone.

Those who doubt that a two-state solution can ever be reached are right that immediately resuming negotiations with the Palestinians would not reduce Hamas’s will to fight. For one thing, the group is an avowed proponent of eliminating Israel. For another, it would be one of the biggest losers in a two-state solution, since a peace deal would almost certainly involve the prohibition of armed Palestinian groups aside from Hamas’s main internal rival, the Palestinian Authority, which would likely enjoy renewed support and legitimacy if it secured an agreement that the majority of Palestinians supported. And even if a two-state solution is achieved, Israel will still need a strong defence capability, since no political solution can completely eliminate the threat of terrorism for years to come.

But that is why the goal now should not be to immediately put forward a final plan for a two-state solution — something that is simply not in the realm of political possibility at the moment. Instead, the immediate objective should be to create a pathway for an eventual Palestinian state. Although sceptics claim that such a pathway is impossible because Israel has no suitable Palestinian partners, Israel can in fact take crucial steps on its own.

The Israeli government could publicly announce that it intends to achieve a state of affairs where the Palestinians live in a state chosen by Palestinians side by side with a Jewish state of Israel. It could announce that it intends to develop a process to achieve that goal by, say, 2030, and will lay out milestones for getting there in the coming months. It could announce that it will immediately freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank and forgo such settlements in Gaza through to 2030 as a down payment that demonstrated its commitment to a genuine two-state solution. And it could announce that it is willing and ready to work with all parties — all countries in the region and beyond, all international organisations, and all Palestinian parties — that are willing to accept these objectives.

Far from being irrelevant to Israel’s military efforts against Hamas, these political steps would augment a sustained, highly targeted campaign to reduce the near-term threat of attacks from the group. Effective counterterrorism benefits from intelligence from the local population, which is far more likely to be forthcoming if that population has hope of a genuine political alternative to the terrorist group.

Indeed, in the long run, the only way to defeat Hamas is to drive a political wedge between it and the Palestinian people. Unilateral Israeli steps signalling a serious commitment to a new future would decidedly change the framework of and dynamics in the Israeli–Palestinian relationship and give Palestinians a genuine alternative to simply supporting Hamas and violence. Israelis, for their part, would be more secure, and the two parties would at long last be on a path towards peace.

Of course, the current Israeli government shows no signs of pursuing this plan. That could change, however, especially if the United States decided to use its influence. For instance, the White House could apply more private pressure to Netanyahu’s government to curtail indiscriminate attacks in the air campaign.

But perhaps the most important step that Washington could take now would be to jump-start a major public debate about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, one that allowed alternative strategies to be considered in depth and that brought forth rich public information for Americans, Israelis and people around the world to evaluate the consequences for themselves. The White House could release US government assessments of the effect that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is having on Hamas and Palestinian civilians. Congress could hold hearings centred on a simple question: is the campaign producing more terrorists than it is killing?

The failure of Israel’s current approach is becoming clearer by the day. Sustained public discussion of that reality, combined with serious consideration of smart alternatives, offers the best chance for convincing Israel to do what is, after all, in its own national interest. •

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From the 7 October Hamas pogrom against Jewish residents on the borders of the Gaza Strip to the obliteration of much of the civilian infrastructure of North Gaza by Israel in retaliation, this is a merciless conflict. How will it end so that the “day after” question can begin to be answered?

The short answer is no one knows how this war will end, nor how many will be killed beyond the 1200 Israelis who have perished and, according to Gaza’s health ministry, the 11,000 Palestinians. These are the raw numbers, but they hardly reveal the extent of the destruction of a Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people in a narrow strip of land on the Mediterranean, and nor do they account for the extent of the trauma experienced by both sides.

The day after will not simply involve a reckoning of casualty figures or physical destruction, but will also leave a traumatised Palestinian population in Gaza and an Israeli population haunted by what happened on 7 October. These are wounds that will not be healed for generations, if at all.

All wars end sooner or later, even the Hundred Years’ war, but in the case of the Gaza war it is hard to envisage how this conflict can be brought to an end in a way that will avoid further conflict in that conflict-ravaged space between the Jordan River and the sea.

Israel’s stated aim is the complete destruction of Hamas, its leadership inside Gaza, its military infrastructure and indeed its ability to reconstitute itself as a viable player. Whether this is achievable remains to be seen, since Hamas is not simply a military organisation to be defeated in the field. Like the Irish Republican Army it has a political wing and, most definitely, an ideology, whatever we might think of it.

The Israeli government has said repeatedly that what happened on 7 October means it won’t deal with Hamas, not now and not ever. What it has not made clear is the sort of arrangement that might satisfy it in Gaza once the shooting stops.

Will Israeli forces occupy Gaza and oversee the toxic aftermath of war? Will a global community shocked by the ferocity of the conflict mount a peacekeeping operation under a United Nations supervised trusteeship or some other such arrangement? Who will be responsible for the enormous cost of reconstruction that will run into billions of dollars?

Only those with direct experience of a war-ravaged wasteland pulverised by the most intensive bombing campaign since Richard Nixon’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 can have any idea of the extent of damage wrought by modern weaponry. Would Israel, in any case, be prepared to hand over the governance of what remains of Gaza to a depleted and discredited Palestinian Authority in faraway Ramallah in the West Bank?

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel won’t be yielding responsibility for Gaza to the PA. He deflects questions about the circumstances in which Israel would remain in Gaza.

In any case, it is unlikely that any of this will be within his control. Politically, Netanyahu is a dead man walking given the degree of disapprobation with which he is regarded by Israelis, who blame him for security failures that enabled the 7 October attack in the first place.

PA leaders have said they won’t be reasserting responsibility for Gaza in present circumstances, weakened as they were by the election there in 2006 and having yielded control altogether to Hamas the following year. They have said they will certainly not be re-entering Gaza on the “back of an Israeli tank.”

Then there is the overarching question of whether the savagery of the Gaza conflict will bring about a full-on attempt, backed by the United States, the European Union, Arab states and the United Nations itself, to force-feed a political settlement more broadly to Israelis and Palestinians?

Here, we are talking about a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would be granted a state of their own behind secure borders in exchange for peace. This was the aim of the Oslo process of 1993–95 that delivered an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation designed to lead to a permanent settlement after a transitional period.

The breakthrough agreement was consummated in 1993 by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat in the presence of US president Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. Two years later, before the Oslo process took root, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians. That terrible moment, whose main political beneficiary was Netanyahu, effectively killed a nascent peace process.

In the generation since, attempts have been made by successive presidents to re-energise the peace process, Clinton at Camp David in 2000; Barack Obama in the early stages of his presidency before he foundered on Israeli obduracy and Palestinian fecklessness; George W. Bush, half-heartedly, at Annapolis in 2007; and Donald Trump with his “deal of the century” that was no deal at all as far as the Palestinians were concerned.

The Trump administration’s strategy was to persuade Arab states, principally Saudi Arabia, to make peace with Israel. The Palestinians would then be left, the strategy proposed, with little choice but to fall into line — in other words, to accommodate themselves to whatever morsels were left to them. This process was marketed by Trump as the “Abraham Accords,” as if the memory of the revered Jewish patriarch would cast a biblical spell over the region.

Among Hamas’s clear aims on 7 October was to derail that process. In that regard it has succeeded for the time being, but in the longer term it may have galvanised an international community to actually try to do something about the issue beyond mouthing empty platitudes about a “two-state solution.”

The next question is why Hamas chose to attack Israel in the way it did in the certain expectation that retaliation would be brutal and the civilian population of Gaza would bear the brunt. The answer is complex but might be explained by a nihilistic terrorist mindset that pays less attention to the consequences than to the act of terror itself.

Hamas’s branding of its military operation by reference to the violation of Jerusalem’s  Al-Aqsa mosque by an extremist member of Netanyahu’s cabinet underscores the jihadist component of what took place. But beyond all this is the possibility that Hamas may have hoped to provoke a regional conflict involving Israel in a several-fronts war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Syria in the north, and may even have believed Iran could be drawn into the conflict.

None of this, apart from fairly desultory rocket salvos from Hezbollah in northern Israel, has come to pass. US president Joe Biden’s decision to deploy two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region was aimed at forestalling a wider conflict. It appears to be working, for the time being.

As Israel continues to dismember what is left of the northern section of Gaza, which had been home to one million Palestinians, we come closer to the existential question: what next when, and if, the guns fall silent over a wasteland?

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, having reported from Israel and the occupied territories and having written a book about Israel–Palestine, I find it hard to be optimistic about a resolution of the longest-running conflict in modern history. For the sake of argument, though, let’s consider a scenario that harks back to the lost opportunities following the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist, as dramatised by the Rabin–Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Under this optimistic, even improbable, scenario, America would lead a comprehensive process to impose a settlement on Palestinians and Israelis that would enable the two sides to accommodate each other in separate states living in relative harmony side by side. The contours of such an arrangement were negotiated up hill and down dale in the 1990s, with territory to be set aside for land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for Jewish settlements contiguous to Israel that could not be dismantled under any reasonable circumstances.

An agreement with the Palestinians would have four main pillars: the putative state of Palestine would be demilitarised, Palestinians would not have the right of return to Israel proper among families displaced in 1947–48, settlements on the boundaries of Israel would remain in place and, tackling the thorniest issue of all, East Jerusalem would be the Palestinian capital under a shared sovereignty with Israel over the Holy places. Jerusalem would be left for “final status” talks, in other words the concluding chapter of a peace settlement.

When those bare-bones details are exposed, what becomes apparent is how difficult, if not impossible, a comprehensive settlement would be. The above was more or less on the table — without the Jerusalem issue being close to being resolved — at Camp David in 2000 and in a final desultory attempt by the Clinton administration at Taba in 2001 before Bush was inaugurated.

What has happened in the meantime to further complicate the picture? Quite simply, a very great deal has transpired to make realising a two-state solution even more complicated, if not impossible. This might be described as the multidimensional Middle East Rubik’s cube.

For a start, Israel’s settlement-building in territory occupied in the 1967 Six Day war has continued apace. By 2022, Israel had 199 settlements and 220 outposts in the West Bank with something like 500,000 settlers on land occupied in 1967. Under international law those settlements on territory seized by Israel in 1967 are illegal; even Israel itself regards many of the small settler outposts as renegade establishments.

On top of that are the 250,000 Israeli residents of East Jerusalem. That adds up to three-quarters of a million Israelis who would be anxious about, if not bitterly opposed to, any peace settlement that involves relinquishing those areas.

Under present circumstances Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subject to military rule and don’t enjoy the same civil and political rights as Israeli settlers. Human rights groups describe this as apartheid.

This is the reality of 2023. It is one of the main reasons why there are many advocates for what is described as a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in a single state with equal rights. This is not an outcome that would be favoured by most Israelis, and certainly not those on the nationalist settler right. It is not idle to say that the country would risk falling apart on the concessions that would be required to secure an honourable settlement.

Here it might be useful to clarify a misunderstanding surrounding the failure of Camp David in 2000. Arafat got, and deserves, much of the blame for its failure; the Palestinians were deeply divided on the concessions required for an agreement. But blame should also be attached to the Americans for poor preparation of the process, and to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one at Camp David.

What is often overlooked is that it was not in Barak’s gift to deliver an agreement without strings attached. He had undertaken to take the Camp David II formula to a vote of his compatriots with no certainty of a positive outcome.

If the lessons of Oslo and the other attempts at Middle East peace tell us one thing, it is that no positive outcome will come without American leadership, and not simply leadership but a willingness to take control of the process in partnership with its allies, including Arab states fearful of further destabilisation in the region.

Does America have the time and energy for such a process given challenges it faces from China in the Indo-Pacific and from Russia on NATO’s western flank, not to mention a domestic political environment that could hardly be less stable.

America and its allies have always been at pains to say it is up to the protagonists to make peace. A settlement cannot be force-fed. In light of what has happened since 7 October the question becomes whether the West in partnership with Arab states can afford to allow the situation to continue to fester.

American supporters of the Israeli settler right would certainly mobilise against a process that involved widespread dismantling of settlements. Yet no agreement will be possible without a comprehensive arrangement that respects Palestinian sovereignty, removes impediments to freedom of movement in a West Bank desiccated by settlements and, most likely, creates a secure and elevated transit route between the West Bank and Gaza that itself would need to be open to the outside world.

Only a supreme optimist would believe that all this will come to pass in very many days after the guns fall silent, and certainly not “the day after,” but it is the only plausible scenario that has emerged so far. •

The post The day after appeared first on Inside Story.

Deterrence’s conceptual framework developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war given the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.

Israel also practises nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is for potentially hostile governments to be aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.

For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas operating out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored. It is more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. Unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.

It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and may never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.

WHY DETERRENCE?

Before it became so dependent on deterrence, Israel sought to control threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence proved too high.

In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation, having been kicked out of Jordan, took up residence there in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally entered its territory to push the guerilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving north until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (with some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (in which it failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.

The Israeli Defence Forces, or IDF, eventually withdrew to a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak decided the presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory and a result of its constant harassment.

Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, decided as prime minister that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained at an inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. In the face of protests from their residents, the IDF closed down the settlements. (Sharon suffered a stroke and went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank.)

The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes didn’t last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.

With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling supplies and getting fighters into Israel.

DETERRENCE BY DENIAL OR PUNISHMENT

With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.

Deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it will be unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent, and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.

Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. But the fences couldn’t stop rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system — the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also use air raid shelters to protect them from rockets that get through.

The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids on the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.

The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political figures or military. Israel’s many “targeted killings” may have disrupted the enemy’s command structures and operations in the short term, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Other commanders step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee they will be less capable or effective.

Second, the IDF targets the military assets that make the attacks possible. Again, this can make a difference in the short term but in the long term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug and more fighters recruited.

Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately near schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the name of self-defence and military necessity, it is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.

But intense strikes against military targets, especially involving tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings or individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often hard to discern.

Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats can’t be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working, there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.

DOES IT WORK? (I) HEZBOLLAH

In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two abducted to Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. It responded instead with air and artillery strikes, against not only Hezbollah military targets but also Beirut airport and other civilian targets. It launched a land attack against well-prepared Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon that turned out to be costly and difficult.

Eventually the United Nations arranged a ceasefire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to twelve of his commanders and went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.

On the question of whether Hezbollah’s operation would have proceeded if it was felt there was “even a 1 per cent chance” it would lead to a war like the one that eventuated, he responded, “I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.” Israel had been waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, he added — yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that deterrence can perhaps work.

But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is less so than Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese political system. While it is the most substantial force in that country, it still has to be responsive to factions and persuasions that are less interested in its feud with Israel, and to present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and still being run by a caretaker government, it is in no position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.

This is not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. It sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, for example, where they worked (not particularly effectively) with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad.) It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. It has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.

DOES IT WORK? (II) GAZA

The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory, the periods of calm on the border have been few. Clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. Each case involves rocket fire by Hamas (and its junior partner, Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes by the Israelis; the casualties are starkly asymmetric, with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially for civilians.

The suffering of Palestinians in these flare-ups leads international organisations, governments and campaigning groups to denounce Israel for acting disproportionately. Other than in 2021, when unrest spread to Arab communities in Israel, supporting protests have been held in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. After weeks of fighting, a ceasefire of some sort has been struck and nothing much has changed once the fighting subsided.

The regularity of the clashes suggests that deterrence has worked poorly in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective the priority has mainly been to show that it is not rattled by provocations and will respond forcefully each time. These responses were described by some Israelis as “mowing the lawn,” a phrase capturing the idea of an indefinite conflict containable by occasional forceful action.

Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that its approach was working, to the extent that it was starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. Islamic Jihad was a problem, but Hamas didn’t seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was a failure not only of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.

The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity. Many individuals connected with Hamas and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. Despite Hamas’s original provocation, this has led to international anger and demands for a ceasefire.

We can question whether deterrence was ever operating effectively, but it certainly isn’t now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it never has the capacity to do so.

But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. The latter’s network, including the Houthis in Yemen, has been busy. So far, much of that has been largely posturing, with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that the deterrence offered by Iran/Hezbollah has failed because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war, though they might claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.

If Hezbollah did want to get involved, it would have had more effect if it had done so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This doesn’t mean Hezbollah won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to worry its leadership. But the key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue with which to take on the United States. A tweet from Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — “Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action” — suggests that no decision has yet been made.

The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have already “normalised” relations with Israel or were preparing to. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.

NEXT STEPS

Israel’s land invasion of Gaza was undertaken despite US misgivings and Saudi objections — one a country on which Israel relies, the other that it has been courting. The foreign ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the ceasefire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to UN secretary-general António Guterres because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on Israel’s people and the ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.

Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against Islamic State and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop will only grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars, it will be resisting pressure for a ceasefire until its objectives have been achieved.

Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy, so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still potential mediators, including in efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.

Israel has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory, but that is not a serious option. This is where the other flaw in Israel’s deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza were turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.

Given how Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if it is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world, and regardless of what happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate and to return to power if there is no alternative government in place.

There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans, and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of its constantly provoking Israel into attacks that it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept, corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.

If Israel can’t find a government for Gaza, someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the United States. This seems to be what many analysts anticipate happening after this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, given the job of coming up with a viable government for Gaza and managing the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks and look to possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.

In principle, this process could be confined to Gaza, but Arab governments are unlikely to cooperate unless the future of the West Bank is also tackled. The trade that Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the “two-state solution” is put back on the agenda. Most Western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.

Netanyahu has been around long enough to know that dismissing the two-state solution out of hand isn’t realistic, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea. That’s why he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote.

All one can say is that this war changes a lot. When the two-state solution has come up, as it did for example in the prewar talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea and pointed to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to show why progress is impossible.

But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas out of Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this, Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. If there is to be any resolution of the current conflict, the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel. •

The post How Israel’s deterrence policy came undone appeared first on Inside Story.

Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamas’s recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assault’s surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a “total system failure on Israel’s part.” Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for “a ragtag band of terrorists” to beat the “mighty” Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, “was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israel’s two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, “the most extreme ever,” downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies — which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison” — Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with “defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping.” Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there. Haaretz editorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as “the IDF provided security for every settler whim.”

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be “erased.” This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a “pogrom.” A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrich’s comments as “irresponsible… repugnant [and] disgusting.” Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”

Last August, Netanyahu’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his family’s right to move around the West Bank “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s nominal partner in any “peace process.”

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, commented recently that Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahu’s policy to “nearly topple” the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamas’s “sense of impunity and capability.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israel’s inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion “as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.” Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a “strong reaction” around the Arab world. President Biden’s whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamas’s military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamas’s embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israel’s bombardment — 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 —  suggested that “the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.”

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces’ Major General Ghassan Alian declared that “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamas’s rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the New York Review of Books Fintan O’Toole wrote that “Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s.” That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its “atrocious war crimes.” He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marles’s claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was “poorly briefed.”

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval “complete siege” of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. “A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas’ sins.”

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war, “parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.” Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, “Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israel’s main cities.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the question of “what now?” only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price. •

The post Netanyahu’s war appeared first on Inside Story.

Bowker is the “dean” of an exceptional group of Australian diplomats who dedicated their careers to understanding the region. That description comes from Nick Warner, a wise owl of Canberra foreign policy, defence and intelligence, who says Bowker throws much light “on the history of our relationship with the Middle East, where we have gone wrong and right, and what we should do now.”

The book’s title — Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World — gives a taste, in several senses. Bowker explains that the apricot prophecy is a Syrian saying similar to “pigs might fly.” The hope for apricots, he writes, “captures an unquenchable, droll optimism which, together with the deep appreciation of culture and hospitality, ranks highly among the virtues that define what it means to be Arab. It also reflects an abiding scepticism towards the pretensions of those in positions of authority.”

In just 300 pages Bowker offers two books. The first traces his career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, as a Middle East specialist, after he joined as a diplomatic cadet in 1971. The second, “Reflections,” is an analysis of the big issues confronting the region.

The two-in-one package is a fine blend of the personal and the policy, describing a fifty-year journey: thirty-seven years with DFAT and twelve years as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments and an academic at the Australian National University.

“Being an Australian diplomat in the Arab world was more than a career: it was an adventure,” Bowker writes. “In many ways it was my life.” He reminds us that former prime minister John Howard labelled himself a cricket “tragic” because he was tragically in love with the game. Bowker embraces the hopelessly-in-love thought, titling the first half of the book “The Career of a Middle East Tragic.”

It’s notable the book starts with that light-hearted reference to Howard, because one of the great policy fights of Bowker’s career was Howard’s shifting of Australian policy on Palestinian self-determination to lean towards Israel. The diplomat notes he was “trumped by the prime minister” and “went down in flames.”

A great scene in this flame-up has Bowker locked in a shouting match with the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser at the annual conference of the Zionist Federation. Howard was sitting only metres away, preparing to address the conference dinner. His breach with Canberra is an example of Bowker’s observation that the policy choices the Middle East must live with are divided between bad and much worse.

Tragically in love with the Middle East in all its tragic complications, Bowker offers great yarns, finely told. He has an ear for the telling quote and an eye for a good scene.

Heading off for his first overseas post as a third secretary only seven months after joining the department, he records the three pieces of advice given him in the conversation that amounted to his consular “training”: “Never take possession of a corpse. Never take possession of a madwoman. Use your common sense. And that was it.”

At his second post in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, his struggle learning Arabic is illustrated by his regular visit to a roadside stall: “I later realised that when I thought I was asking, in terrible Arabic, for a freshly cooked chicken, I was actually asking for a fresh wife. The stall owner didn’t seem to mind.” But Bowker’s “colloquial Levantine Arabic” had uses beyond talking to stallholders and taxi drivers. To impose ceremonial pain on Sudan’s president for atrocities by his tribal proxies in Darfur, the ambassador gave “my speech on presentation of my credentials in Arabic.”

A gem of a chapter entitled “Touring Tobruk by Moonlight” captures Libya’s “blend of chaos and impenetrability under the Ghaddafi regime” by describing Bowker visiting, as the non-resident ambassador, as scout for a visit to the war cemetery by the Australian defence minister. Two Libyan minders drive Bowker from Benghazi in a car that “sounded very sick indeed” to visit a range of war cemeteries — British, French and German — but can’t find the Australian site until the moon is out.

At the end, the minders have an animated discussion about the report they must file “on why the ambassador chap had been scoping out the port area and surrounds of Tobruk, especially the high ground overlooking the harbour, quizzing the locals about the layout of the urban area, and doing so in execrable Arabic.” When they got back to Benghazi at 1.30am, one of the minders “shook my hands and planted kisses on both my cheeks. When you are kissed by a Libyan security official, you know it is time to go home.”

Writing of his time in Syria in the 1970s, Bowker recounts a local quip: “Saudi Arabia exports oil, Iraq exports dates, Egypt exports jokes and Syria exports trouble.” The three-line description of president Hafez al-Assad, the late father of the incumbent, is a miniature masterpiece of disdain: “his smile was like moonlight on a tombstone,” he had a “penchant for delivering historical lectures” and he dominated meetings with “his awe-inspiring bladder control.”

Bowker’s sad conclusion is that the Assad family — Hafez and now his son Bashar — has become the regime that outlasted its country. The bedrock of Bashar’s rule is its brutality, he writes, and father and son always avoided “questions about the appropriate relationship in Syria between state and society.”

Among his reflections, Bowker considers the department that made his career, lamenting how the role of Australia’s diplomats in Canberra has changed, “and not for the better.” DFAT, he argues, gives priority to trade and consular crisis management ahead of the research and thinking needed for effective foreign policy planning and advocacy. Policy is made in ministerial offices, with the department seen as mere implementor. “This is a deeply problematic direction for any government, or government department, to take.”

DFAT no longer debates with itself and the rest of Canberra through despatches and cables: “The final decade or two of my time in the department saw a shift to reporting by cable that was prone to be concise rather than nuanced. It was directed in its brevity towards immediate briefing needs, rather than the evaluation of trends and their consequences for Australian interests.”

Under the Howard government, he notes, the lengthy despatch from an overseas post became a thing of the past: “By the time I retired it had become almost unthinkable to reflect on broader issues, let alone to challenge policy settings, in cable traffic.”

In this second half of the book Bowker considers three core questions:

• “How do you build peace between two peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — with compelling national rights, human rights and historical narratives, but who have a clear imbalance of power?”

• How do you connect the present, the past and the politics of Palestinian identity? This is an intellectual who twenty years ago wrote a book called Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. As a diplomat, he offers the answer (“if there is one”) of negotiating on interests, because beliefs are “organic, structural and fundamentally non-negotiable.”

• How does the Arab world confront its demographic fate (a Middle East population of 724 million people by 2050) and its economic and social challenges while preserving its Arab and Islamic identity? “None of the current leaderships of the major Arab states and Iran have answers to the problems of legitimacy and governance,” Bowker writes. His fear is that governments will “grow more authoritarian, transactional and violent in their instincts and behaviour.”

Defending privilege and predictability, rulers have found that repression works for them, arguing that “freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division rather than bread and social justice.”

The Arab outlook, Bowker observes, feels like being on the bridge of the Titanic smelling the ice. It took the Titanic a long time to sink, though, and the modern Arab world has no way to stop the drivers of change, which are “generational and societal as well as political.”

On the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Bowker declares that the two-state approach pursued since the 1990s is “dead.” He pointedly calls it a two-state “approach” because no solution is in sight. If that option is mired in fundamental conundrum, the path to justice is by “building a foundation for Palestinian rights and dignity among Israelis.”

Israel can facilitate a new, more positive future for Palestinians and Israelis, he says, without raising existential questions for Israel: “The absence of sovereignty is a legitimate grievance for Palestinians, but in practice it is the absence of dignity and economic security that matters much more.”

If the two-state vision/solution is dead, as Bowker avers, then Palestine’s dream of independence must fade. As the Economist observed recently, the Palestinian diaspora has “begun to call for a one-state solution, where Jews and Arabs between the Jordan rivers and the Mediterranean would live together in a single democratic state — and where Arabs would have a slender overall majority.”

For Israel and the Arab world, demography should meet democracy, and history must reconcile with geography.

Bowker concludes that the fun and frustrations of his life as a Middle East tragic have forced him to accept key realities. Middle East policy is not a morality play; expediency shapes decisions: “The logic of strategy is not always consistent with the logic of politics.”

Diabolical complexity rules. It is in the nature of the Middle East for problems to linger and become more complex: “We must accept that views, interests and values within Arab societies are more likely to differ from our own: any apparent synchronicity of views should be cause for caution, as well as celebration.”

The final sentence of this tragic’s meditation on his life’s works reads: “And, despite almost fifty years of exposure to the Arab world, I remained free of tribal delusions, except where Collingwood is concerned.”

Ah, the Melbourne conundrum of the Collingwood Football Club — the only passion running through this fine book that (in the tribal view of this reviewer) does not bend towards truth and logic. •

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World
By Robert Bowker | Shawline Publishing | $24.95 | 307 pages

The post Memoirs of a Middle East tragic appeared first on Inside Story.

He woke up, a bit dazed and groggy and then smiled, said hello, looked at me quizzically and said, “And to what paragraph of the Public Health Order do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

I didn’t want to plead civil disobedience and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a care visit for a dying friend. Sensing that I didn’t have an answer, he looked at me, and smiled, and said, “I suppose it could be a care visit for a dying friend.” I smiled back.

For around two decades, I would catch up with Hal regularly, often every month, and we would sit down over lunch and discuss the state of the world. We discussed the law and Indigenous policy, and what George Bush or Donald Trump were up to. And we — though more him than me — would reminisce. Sometimes he told stories that I had heard before but usually they were new. Each time they were wonderful and told with a generosity and humanity that said much about the teller.

But that afternoon a few weeks ago, with Hal well aware that death was finally coming, I had the unique privilege of telling his stories back to him, reminding him of why his life was one of great meaning, why he had lived out his motto — “to thine self be true” — and why, in his own humble way, he had had an immeasurable impact on this country.

For a man with such a keen sense of humour, and who led such a reflective life, irony sometimes escaped him. I remember having lunch with him when he was eighty-seven and living up at Hawkes Nest. He was complaining that he was feeling a bit sore. I raised a curious eyebrow, but privately thought it was just an old person complaining about his ailments. However, he went on to say that earlier in the week he had used a wheelbarrow to move ten tonnes of soil from the front of the house, where it had been delivered, to the back. I asked him why on earth he would do that. His response: “I want to build up the garden beds so that when I get old, I won’t have to bend over so far.”

There has always been a certain restlessness to Hal, one that would cause him to spend two months walking the untracked reaches of the Snowy Mountains as a student; or to leave a prestigious city law firm, Minters, to join the Australian School of Pacific Administration and then head to Manus Island in New Guinea to undertake fieldwork; or to leave a lucrative practice at the bar and sell up his fledgling cattle enterprise in order to establish a law school when his only experience of teaching law had been as a part-time tutor; or to leave Australia in his late eighties to spend three months living in Ramallah in order to get a deeper understanding of the Palestinian predicament. Hal certainly gave licence to his curiosity, and the more any learning experience involved an element of adventure, the keener he was.

He once told me how he would continually ask his colleagues at the School of Pacific Administration — poets, historians, anthropologists and experienced kiaps (New Guinea field officers), many of whom had spent years working in very challenging environments — “Why?”; “Why do you say that?”; “Why is that the case?” He genuinely wanted to know the answer, but they came to think of him as the true intellectual among them for doing no more than constantly asking “Why?” That was something that amused Hal, and he continued to make good use of the technique throughout his life, often to the discomfort of his hyperbolic friends.

People often speak of Hal as a figure on the left of politics. Certainly, in his early days as a lawyer he was briefly a member of the Communist Party. It didn’t trouble the senior partner who employed him as his personal brains trust. But then Hal would later be the industrial lawyer of choice for the Packers (that’s Frank and Kerry, not the storemen) and the pastoralists. He was also the unionists’ lawyer of choice on occasion.

Whether he was for capital or labour, he was respected by both and independent of either. He was not just open to the arguments but determined to test his own assumptions and preferences. His compassion was never in doubt, but his intellect was always his guide. No one owned Hal Wootten, but he was loyal to people and causes.

Despite John Kerr’s very public shortcomings, Hal remained loyal to him. Kerr had taken Hal up as a protégé and was one of Hal’s early mentors, although never in the league of Hal’s mother and grandparents. But Hal was also one of the first to privately signal his disapproval after Sir John’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975. When Sir John rang him on the day it happened to seek affirmation of what he had done, Hal’s response — “I’m sure you must have had a very good reason” — delivered in his sceptical tone, would not have been the one Kerr was seeking.

Like all of us, Hal was not without his contradictions. He could show enormous patience and sympathy in some situations, especially in dealing with those who were struggling, and yet be short and even cantankerous in others.

One of the few times I encountered Hal in a professional capacity was in the early days of the Native Title Act, when he was conducting a mediation as deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal. The parties were a group of native title claimants at Peak Hill, for whom I acted, a gold mining company wanting to mine the old town reserve, the local council, and the NSW government. Peak Hill is south of Dubbo and the history of the Aboriginal people there, like elsewhere, had been one of dispossession, discrimination, suffering and exclusion.

In listening to each party speak, Hal was unrushed and very attentive. Occasionally he would ask an open question for clarification, but there was no judgement in his manner. He was there to listen and learn. Importantly, no lawyer spoke. It was the people at the heart of the dispute talking directly to one another, airing, in the case of the claimants, grievances that were generations old. The mayor acknowledged the wrongs but spoke of what the mine would do for the town; the miner’s CEO, confronted with a situation that he hadn’t experienced before, promised that they would be respectful of the community’s concerns and interests.

It was a genuine and moving exchange — until the state government, through its barrister and senior lawyers, delivered its legalistic position, which gave no scope for compromise or agreement. In an instant, Hal, the gentle grandfather, transformed into the very grumpy, acutely attuned judge. But there are limits to what a mediator can achieve in the face of intransigence, and with the state unwilling to shift, Hal terminated the mediation. Unlike so many of his successors on the tribunal, who kept matters in fruitless suspension for years, Hal knew there was no value in flogging a dead horse.

Hal had a number of important personal friendships with people “on whom the law bears harshly.” Frank Doolan, a renowned senior Wiradjuri man who is known across the state as “Riverbank Frank,” would introduce Hal to friends as “Gill’s legal aid boyfriend.” Frank, who always had a very deep affection and respect for Hal, remembers him as “a kind, gentle man with enormous strength of character.” He goes on: “Although I often argued (or tried to argue) about Black issues with him I can’t recall a single time when I won the argument. Hal would sigh, look at me, with the patience of Job and say, ‘Frank you’ve got to have a plan.’ The Aboriginal Legal Service, which was born in Redfern, actually came into being because Hal and people like Neville Wran, Frank Walker and Paul Landa supported Indigenous Australians and saw their great need for proper representation in the legal world.”

For some years until he was well into his nineties, Hal and Gillian would join Frank in quiet protest at Villawood Detention Centre each Australia Day. Hal was concerned for the plight of refugees in Australia, especially those arriving by boat. One was Ali Gulzari, who became Hal’s friend when Ali’s remarkable success as a new arrival at high school in western Sydney led to them being put in touch. The friendship between these two flourished and they both learned much about the world from sharing stories with one another, sometimes on long exploratory drives across the country, including visits to Richard Frankland, a respected Aboriginal leader from Western Victoria who assisted Hal in the landmark work of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Richard recalls that he first met Hal when he was about twenty-five. “We investigated First Nation deaths in custody together. It was a hard job, and we covered many miles together, over a period of about four years. As I watched Hal work, I was astounded at his ability to listen and actually hear what people had to say. We heard stories from many people who had lost a friend or family member in custody, stories about grief, injustice, systemic discrimination. Hal humanised what had been dehumanised. I once asked Hal what advice he would give a young man, meaning myself. He said, ‘Love with an open hand, have humility and give of yourself generously.’”

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hal was disturbed by events in the Middle East and the tensions between Islam and the West, so he decided to develop a deeper understanding of the roots of the conflict. In particular, he was concerned at the demonisation of Muslims. He returned to university, this time as an undergraduate student in Arabic studies. But this was not enough, and he decided to spend three months living in Ramallah, on the West Bank. It was a time in which he formed friendships on both sides of the border and made links that led to a program of Palestinian lawyers undertaking doctoral studies at UNSW. It also led to a close friendship with Naser Shaktour, the founder and director of the Palestinian Film Festival in Australia.

Hal was arrested among a group of Israelis defending Palestinian farmers from Israeli settlers in the West Bank. He insisted on the soldiers telling him under what law he was being detained. Eventually they released him without charge, but he refused to leave until all of the protesters were let go. After hours and hours of waiting around, the whole group was released.

Hal cherished his time as a barrister and a judge, but establishing the law school at UNSW was, for him, the highlight of his career and the source of his greatest professional pride. How a country trains its lawyers is no small thing. In setting out to change legal education, Hal was conscious of the impact that it could have on changing the country.

By the time I came to study law in the early 1980s, UNSW had already marked itself out as a progressive and highly innovative law school that broke with century old methods of how lawyers were to be trained. Importantly, the UNSW law school took seriously its obligation to engage students actively in their training, while inculcating a strong sense of professionalism and the responsibilities to society as a whole, especially “those on whom the law bore harshly,” who were the corollary of the privileges of practice. The pedagogy designed by Hal was based on the simple but effective principle of avoiding all that he had found miserable and useless in his own legal education. As time has gone on, elements of Hal’s approach have been adopted in every law school in the country, and overseas institutions, from Harvard down, have made efforts to explore UNSW’s approach.

No brief reflection like this can ever do justice to such a rich, purposeful and long life as Hal’s. Brought up by his widowed mother and her parents, he studied law part-time while working as a government clerk and went on to become a leading law student, adviser to the senior partner of a leading commercial firm as a graduate lawyer, New Guinea field worker, lecturer in law for colonial government administrators, leading industrial barrister, secretary-general of LAWASIA, foundation dean of a law school offering a new mode of legal education, founding chair of the first Aboriginal Legal Service, adviser to the government of the newly independent Papua New Guinea, Supreme Court judge, chairman of the NSW Law Reform Commission, chairman of the Australian Press Council, chancellor of NSW Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology Sydney), president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, royal commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody, deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal, patron of the Environmental Defenders Office, Queen’s Counsel, Companion of the Order of Australia, farmer, activist, conservationist, humanitarian, friend of the downtrodden.

Hal was intellectually brilliant, warm, quick-witted, generous and humble. But of all his many wonderful qualities, three made him stand out.

The first was his vision of what could be achieved. He was so often the johnny-on-the-spot, trusting his instincts and judgement; he saw what others couldn’t but which in hindsight was so often blindingly obvious.

The second was his practicality. He didn’t hesitate in taking the first, often simple step and seeing where it would lead. He was courageous and tenacious in doing what needed doing.

And lastly, he was principled. One friend has said that he held a mirror up to the country, which he did, but not before he held it up to himself. •

This article is based on Andrew Chalk’s reflections at Hal Wootten’s funeral in Sydney on 6 August.

The post Why, and why not? appeared first on Inside Story.

Now the questions are very different: have we entered an altogether new era of violence, more akin to past conflicts in Yugoslavia or Rwanda than to any of Israel’s? And never mind who started it, who can make it stop?…

Read the full article here

The post A thousand frontiers appeared first on Inside Story.

If Netanyahu was contentious then, he is even more so now. Two Sundays ago he achieved another first as prime minister, appearing in a courtroom on corruption charges, having felt no obligation to resign from office and having announced his intention to annex large swathes of West Bank territory previously earmarked for an eventual Palestinian state.

Perhaps not surprisingly, events in Israel have caused a shift within Australia’s 120,000-strong Jewish community, and it has been reflected in the formation of their delegation to the World Zionist Congress in October. The five-yearly congresses are an important opportunity for political representatives from Israel to hear how diaspora supporters of Israel as a Jewish homeland feel about their policies.

In a consensual process just completed, eight members of the small Australian delegation (just thirteen out of 500 congress delegates) will be representatives of “progressive” or liberal Jewish organisations, either secular or from the like-minded religious streams known as “Reform” and “Conservative.” The other five delegates will speak for the Orthodox religious stream and groups like Friends of Likud, which generally support the steady push by Netanyahu and his Likud party for Israel to fully absorb the West Bank areas they call by their Biblical names of Judea and Samaria.

A notable new voice in the progressive majority is a secular coalition calling itself Hatikvah (“The Hope”), the title of the nineteenth-century poem that became the lyric of Israel’s national anthem. It wants Israel to “fulfil its destiny as a just, free homeland for the Jewish people” that also “lives in harmony with its neighbours and upholds the rights of all its citizens.”

Hatikvah has managed to pick up two places in the delegation. Leading the push for support during the formation of the delegation were Liam Getreu and Maddy Blay, respectively from local groups Ameinu, which is aligned with the Labour Party in Israel, and Meretz, aligned with the greenish-secular Meretz party. Behind Hatikvah is a new voice in the Jewish community, the online magazine Plus 61J, established in April 2015 and edited by liberal journalist Michael Visontay. Strongly focused on the Israel–Palestine question, Plus 61J declares itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro–human rights” and supportive of a two-state solution.

Joining the Hatikvah ticket was the Melbourne venture-capital entrepreneur and longstanding supporter of Israeli–Palestinian contact, Ron Finkel, who modelled the push for places at the World Zionist Congress on a Hatikvah ticket for the big United States delegation organised by his American friend Kenneth Bob, long active in Ameinu and a board member of the American liberal Jewish group J Street.

Finkel says that the Jewish community in Australia, “or at least a large chunk of it,” had begun to “tune out” from Israel because of alienation from the values shown by the Netanyahu government. “The drift has been clearly in the direction of non-engagement,” he tells me.

That was not the Jewish voice heard by the wider public, however. “You have those who are dyed-in-the-wool Israel über alles and they seem to have by and large effective control of communal institutions,” says Finkel. “They are the voice you hear through the ECAJ [Executive Council of Australian Jewry], through various state councils, and if that is all that there is you would come to the very rapid view that these sentiments reflect ‘the Jewish community.’”

A group of Jewish Australians decided they wanted to promote a different viewpoint. “We have got to make it clear that there is a voice in the community that reflects core progressive Zionist values, that they’re still relevant,” says Finkel, “even though progressive Zionists don’t have much say in Israel at the moment. And that’s good because it’s the first time in a long time that progressive Zionists of all ages have decided to stand up and say: this is what’s going on.”

As well as sending representatives to the congress, Hatikvah wants to work in a more engaging, structured way to gain a voice within the Jewish community. “We don’t want to be outside the tent pissing in. We want to be inside the tent and being part of the shaping of communal strategies.”

Already the group has put out two statements, one on climate change and one on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. “We are not trying to replace organisations that are active in this space, but we want to make it clear these are issues that speak to us, that are important to us as Australian progressive Zionists, and we’re involved,” says Finkel.

All this is encountering some resistance among some older, established community figures. “They can’t grasp, they can’t get their heads around the idea that you can be critical of policies of the current government of the state of Israel, fight for the rights of oppressed minorities in Israel whether they be Ethiopians or different segments of the Arab populations, or point out Israeli soldiers can do obnoxious things,” says Finkel.

He believes these sentiments are understandable, especially in Melbourne, which had the highest postwar concentration of Holocaust survivors, per capita, outside Israel. “You can’t blame them when your family has gone through the horrors and as a young person in 1967” — during the Arab-Israeli war — “you thought there was a likelihood that a new holocaust was going to be perpetrated on the state of Israel.”

After the past year’s three Israeli elections, each of which resulted in a stalemate, Netanyahu is still in power. He has stared down his rival, former defence chief Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party, and persuaded him to accept second place in a governing coalition. So precarious is the political balance that the government includes fully thirty-six ministers and sixteen deputies, some with invented portfolios and no clear responsibilities, in a Knesset of only 120 members. Crucially, Netanyahu retains control of the law-related portfolios.

Israel’s High Court allowed Netanyahu to stay in office while being tried on charges of receiving gifts and favourable media coverage in return for political favours, partly because of the presumption of innocence and partly because prime ministers, unlike ordinary ministers, are not explicitly prohibited from doing so.

“A situation in which a defendant charged with serious ethical crimes forms a government and heads it raises a public and moral problem whose magnitude is hard to overstate,” said Justice Menachem Mazuz in his judgement. “Such a situation reflects a social crisis and a moral failure by both society and the political system.”

Still, Netanyahu is doubling down, announcing he will start annexing some 30 per cent of the West Bank, including many of the Jewish settlements there, on 1 July. Gantz has acquiesced as part of the coalition agreement. Cynics believe that Netanyahu, while advancing the Israeli right’s perception of an ancient destiny, also hopes to project himself in court as a heroic statesman rather than a slippery politician.

The start on annexation may be more token than real. While the American right and its evangelical component might support the aim, even Donald Trump’s administration seems to be telling Netanyahu to slow down. It wants presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “peace plan” — land for Israel, cash and connecting freeways for the resulting Palestinian enclaves — to stay in play.

Formal annexation would sever Netanyahu’s new dialogue with conservative Arab governments and possibly set off a new Palestinian intifada. It would not be recognised by most European nations, nor by Washington if Joe Biden becomes president.

Hatikvah still holds the hope that the two-state solution can be revived. “What’s happening in the trajectory of both sides has been a continuous path of delegitimisation to now, unfortunately, many elements of dehumanisation,” says Finkel. “And so that chasm is getting bigger, so we have to try and bridge it, and the only way to bridge it is bringing people in touch with each other so they can realise that not every Palestinian is a murderous terrorist and not every Israeli is a bloodsucker. The need to inject humanity into the relationships is paramount.”

Palestinians would find “an incredibly receptive” audience in Israel if they changed their discourse to frame their aspirations as a civil society alongside Israel, Finkel believes. At the same time, Israel should restrain its “messianic” expansion. “All these steps towards colonisation or the settlement enterprise are a cancer on Israeli society,” says Finkel. “They are really going to put a stake through the heart of the Jewish future in Israel if they don’t step back from it.

“But I am an optimist and I certainly believe we can get to a two-state solution,” he adds. “You’ve got to have the will in order to find the way.” •

The post Can the drift be stopped? appeared first on Inside Story.

But the tentacles of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute spread right across the Arab and Islamic world, and any efforts to resolve it, well-intentioned or otherwise, could have significant knock-on effects.

Now into the second half of his term, Trump has systematically shaken the props behind the “rules-based world order,” even though he has failed to find anything better to replace them with. In the Middle East, he has clearly decided to trust a new generation of players who seem set on remaking the rules.

Ideally, in his view, these players would be the Saudis plus other key Gulf states, who would then take on Iran and those Arab states willing to act as Iranian proxies in alliance with Russia. But he is oscillating between the hawkish scenarios promoted by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security adviser, John Bolton, on the one hand, and the more sober assessments of his generals and diplomats, on the other.

Most American presidents would avoid bouncing around like this, but Trump lacks thought-through plans of his own. His instinctive tool is “disruption”; he has no patience for history or theology. We may well be at the most critical phase of his attempt to sweep old paradigms off the table and see what can be picked up from the floor in the way of new “deals.”

By deliberately courting disorder, Trump is abandoning the logical thinking that might be expected of the leader of a superpower and allowing himself to be manipulated by a new figure in the Gulf, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, who has adapted the customary Saudi formula of an aggressive form of Sunni Islam backed by profligate oil funds.

MBS’s role is amplifying the difficulty of resolving the stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians. Rivalries across the Gulf go back thirteen centuries and still define the way the Sunni–Shia divide is perceived. Most outsiders have long seen the divide as something to stay well clear of, conscious that the tensions have largely been kept in check since the middle of the eighth century by leaving small theological differences to theologians.

Instead of working through issues patiently and cautiously, though, and at least paying lip service to international mechanisms, Trump wants to try it his way. In the process, the United States is being sucked into disputes its president neither comprehends nor has patience for.

The current confrontation in the Gulf is largely a result of Trump’s willingness to do Salman’s bidding, and secondarily Israel’s bidding, by attempting to reduce Iran’s role in the region and ditch the exactingly negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, rather than build on it. The JCPOA got in the way because it was working. Its other members — China, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and Britain — have been bypassed and even threatened with secondary sanctions for actions that are essentially legal under anyone’s law except Trump’s. The signal is clear: only Washington makes the international framework from now on.

Underneath this heap of disruption lies the compost pit that is the Israel–Palestine problem, with its huge overburden of UN and human rights resolutions. Trump has abandoned the traditional role of helping, or at least ostensibly helping, to unpick the issues between the parties, and has instead embarked on a course of serial disruption designed to replace UN resolutions and international law with disorder based on an impossible paradigm.

This week’s Bahrain meeting furthers that plan. In playing along with MBS’s vision of a Middle East in which Saudi Arabia is Trump’s deputy sheriff (or is it vice versa?), Trump has accepted another breathtaking leap of Salman’s logic. The same logic delivered an unwinnable war in Yemen, tried to hold a Lebanese prime minister to ransom and had a regime critic hacked to death in a backroom in Istanbul. On these performance parameters, Saudi Arabia’s chances of persuading scores of Arab League and Islamic states to accept Israel’s 1948 takeover of Palestine as a fait accompli are slim indeed.

The Bahrain plan is not only overwhelmed by the drama in the Gulf. In Jared Kushner’s hands, it also shows every sign of poor design and clumsy execution. Even if a brace of Arab states can be summoned to Bahrain to endorse a new economic “plan” for Palestine, little can be done unless Israel commits to lifting its blockade of Gaza and its stranglehold on the West Bank. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now so beholden to extremists that any hope of coopting him appears remote, even if some would find tempting the prospect of banishing the Palestinians to a series of Arab Bantustans and closing down their access to Jerusalem.

Middle-power countries like Australia have always argued that this dispute will only be resolved by a rules-based approach. Their interests lie in avoiding the nastier complications caused by disruptive tactics with no defined outcomes. Australia may be faced with difficult choices if Trump seeks support for hastening the dismantling of the JCPOA, or in endorsing the Bahrain game plan as a way of bypassing many decades of support for a two-state solution in Palestine. To join the disruption game is to put at risk structures that have largely served Australia’s interests well.

Scott Morrison’s ill-informed lurch towards the recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem last year was a foretaste of what life might be like if we rely on deals in the age of America First. Australia has maintained a policy of engaging with Iran, for example. It is perhaps ominous that Pompeo is currently in the Gulf pressing a range of countries to join a “global coalition” against Iran — “a coalition,” to use his words, “not only throughout the Gulf states but in Asia and in Europe.” This is a deal-making game Australia would be well advised to stay out of if it doesn’t want to find itself a victim of Pompeo and Bolton’s dark obsessions. •

The post American disruption, Saudi logic appeared first on Inside Story.

By any conventional measure, Hamas should now be more than ready to agree to a ceasefire in its bitter war with Israel. Since the bombardments started on 8 July 2014, Israel has expanded its airstrikes on targets concentrated in heavily populated areas, leading inevitably to a gradual increase in casualties, the vast majority of them civilians. The damage to infrastructure in an already weak economy adds to the misery.

Hamas has continued its rocket attacks on Israel. Israel is intent on destroying Hamas’s launchers and munitions stores as well as its “infiltration tunnels.” It has the means to do this, given time; its military capacity is huge, it is the most powerful state in the Middle East, and it enjoys both close cooperation with the United States and technical reliance on its advanced weapons and radar systems.

Hamas has little external support, at least at state level. It is adamantly opposed by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt; Syria and Iran have also withdrawn much support because of Hamas’s backing of Islamist movements. Qatar may remain an ally, but a more cautious one.

All this makes for a reasonable assumption that Hamas must be getting desperate and will shortly sue for peace, perhaps on terms falling far short of its aims. There may well be a ceasefire in the coming days, but the assumption nonetheless has two deep flaws. These must be grasped if any search for a tolerably stable peace is to be grounded in reality.

Israel’s troubles

The first is that Hamas, though facing great problems in Gaza, does not appear to be losing support among the population as a whole. There, Israel and of course the United States are being blamed for the destruction. There is also an upsurge in public support for Hamas across the region, enhanced by coverage of the war on Al Jazeera and other TV channels and the many social-media outlets. These show the human suffering and destruction in Gaza at a much starker level than the largely self-censoring Western media.

The second is that aspects of the conflict are very troubling to Binyamin Netanyahu’s government in ways that are just becoming apparent. Israel’s great projection of power, for example, has not stopped rockets from being fired; one even evaded the missile-screen to land in the Yehud suburb of Tel Aviv close to Ben Gurion airport. The airport was then closed on safety grounds to some of the major carriers (including Delta, US Airways, Lufthansa, Alitalia and Air France). The government immediately opened Uvda airport, north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat, to more traffic.

Ben Gurion airport may reopen to many foreign carriers, but the psychological impact of even a short closure is substantial, especially because many Israelis look much more to their contact with the world beyond the Middle East rather than the region in which they actually live.

The airport closure, as well as affecting national morale, has also damaged Israel’s tourist industry. This is one of the country’s main foreign-exchange earners, and losses are already estimated at $200 million. Here is a powerful symbolism: an impoverished, densely populated and hugely constrained community with hardly any external support was able to put together crude weapons that can affect the economics and psychology of a hugely more powerful country convinced that it can ensure its own security.

The only winners

Another particular worry for Israel is Hamas’s use of the infiltration tunnels it has built. The early phase of Israel’s direct military intervention has been a real shock to the army, for it has revealed a network of tunnels of astonishing complexity – far more wide-ranging than expected. In addition, the fact that Hamas paramilitaries could use a tunnel to penetrate Israeli territory at the height of the war is profoundly disturbing for Israel’s military and government.

Their concern is deepened by the level of casualties being inflicted as the army tries to find and destroy the tunnels. Much of the impact has been on the elite Golani brigade, one of Israel’s five regular army brigades, whose role dates from February 1948 and the war of independence. On a single day, 20 July, thirteen members of the Golani were killed, including a battalion deputy commander; the brigade’s commanding officer, Colonel Ghassan Alian, was wounded.

By late on 23 July, Israeli forces had identified twenty-eight tunnels with sixty-eight entry points, six of which had been demolished. But there were reported to be far more, and it will not be hard for Hamas paramilitaries to utilise many of them in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. If demolition is the only option to prevent further attacks, it also means the risk of continued occupation and more casualties.

Israel is now facing considerable pressure even as it intensifies the war. In a hard military sense this is not surprising: a force with overwhelming firepower facing entrenched urban paramilitaries will use that firepower rather than expose its soldiers. The result is almost certain to mean more civilian deaths and injuries, and greater opprobrium.

Israel is also turning its attention to Hamas supporters elsewhere. That includes destroying their houses on the West Bank, enhancing its existing program of demolitions. The result is more likely to increase than reduce backing for Hamas and hatred of Israel, even among Palestinians who would not normally be sympathetic to the movement.

Binyamin Netanyahu is now facing an unforeseen dilemma. He has both raised expectations of an end to the rockets and insisted that the tunnels must be destroyed; yet it’s almost certain that his armed forces cannot achieve this without recourse to a long-term occupation of Gaza. Such a move, however, would increase casualties on both sides and invite further condemnation.

In this situation, Israel may well accept something short of its own aims. John Kerry may therefore be in a stronger position than supposed. That makes a ceasefire possible within the next week. But even if it is, the greatest beneficiaries of the conflict will be the extreme Islamist movements in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. A continuation of the war would serve these movements’ interests even more. Israel’s actions, as so often, are aiding its worst enemies. •

The post Israel vs Hamas: the flawed assumptions appeared first on Inside Story.

THESE days, any Israeli story can also be an Australian one. The case of Ben Zygier, the Australian Jew who migrated to Israel, took out Israeli citizenship and ended up working for Mossad, the Jewish state’s notorious overseas intelligence unit, puts this in high relief. Despite the fact that fighting in Syria is illegal for Muslim Australian citizens, Jewish Australians can volunteer with impunity for service in the Israel Defence Forces.

Yet there’s a deep reluctance to address such anomalies, for reasons that aren’t too hard to find. In the decades after the second world war, Australia had the highest per capita concentration of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. The Holocaust legitimised Zionism as had no other event in Jewish history, giving tragic credence to Herzl’s warning fifty years earlier about the lethal results of European anti-Semitism. In that light, to criticise Israeli policies or even to question the wisdom of opting for a Jewish-dominated state in the Middle East is tantamount to heresy in the mainstream Australian Jewish community. While claiming that all Jews ever wanted was to have a nation like any other, with its own respected legitimacy and undisputed territory, Israel and its supporters maintain that the Jewish state is special, that it is not bound by the laws that hold for other countries, and they defend this position with a combination of denial, indifference and that specifically Jewish sophistic argumentation that has its origins in the Talmudic tradition of pilpul.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the ongoing refusal to acknowledge that the rights of the Palestinian people – the majority in British Mandate Palestine – have been ruthlessly and cunningly abrogated. After the opening of archives on the 1948 war of independence, or what Palestinians remember as the Nakba, Israeli “New Historians” such as Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev and Benny Morris drew on the record to revise the official history. Yet almost as soon as the archives were opened they were closed again. Pappé, effectively in exile now at a British university, has been ostracised for his work on the expulsion of Palestinians, including those who were forced from their homes but were able to stay within the 1948 borders. Segev has moved further towards a binational narrative. Of the three, only Benny Morris has recanted, accepting that Jewish forces did commit atrocities but claiming they were justified.

It is perhaps in Israeli fiction that the existential complexities of the legacy of 1948 have been most sensitively dealt with. A caveat here: I can no more keep on top of the fiction than absorb the wealth of historical material. But there aren’t many recent novels I’ve come across (though I confess to a reliance on books written in English or translated) that haven’t exhibited concern for the Palestinians.

A case in point is Edeet Ravel’s 2003 Ten Thousand Lovers, the first in a trilogy that was completed in 2005. Born and raised on a kibbutz in the Galilee, Ravel divides her time between Israel and Canada, and writes in English from a Canadian perspective.

Lily, the narrator of Ten Thousand Lovers, is also half-Canadian, a student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who hitchhikes on weekends to Tel Aviv. She’s picked up by Ami, a well-paid ex-actor who is immediately upfront about his job as an interrogator of war prisoners. Lily makes clear her uneasiness:

We should try a little harder to make peace. We should withdraw unilaterally from the territories for a start. It’s the least we can do. A Palestinian state would solve everything. It’s only fair.

As they get closer Ami reveals to Lily that it isn’t the army he belongs to but Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, though the work has become increasingly difficult for him. “This is what we’ve decided,” he says, trying to justify it. “We’ve decided torture is OK. Detention is OK, war justifies everything. We’re doing this to survive, to avoid repeating our history.” Yet when he makes a crucial decision to reject that life, it’s a Palestinian friend who will play an important role in the novel’s resolution.

The most celebrated recent Israeli novel – and possibly the most celebrated of all time – is David Grossman’s Woman Flees Tidings, published in 2008 and published in English as To the End of the Land. Near the novel’s beginning, after a prologue set in the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel won what we call the occupied territories, the heroine, Ora, takes a taxi ride. It is now July 2000, the time of the Second Intifada, and the Israel Defence Forces are mobilising. Ora is accompanying her soldier son to the Gilboa region, where the forces are meeting. Their Palestinian taxi driver Sami, who has driven for the family for decades and is almost, in the way of these things, considered part of it, came without question when Ora called, but is quieter than usual. Fixated on what she feels is the certain loss of her son, Ora overlooks how Sami might feel about this journey. Israel is a tiny country for such overwhelming considerations, and a taxi ride from Tel Aviv to Gilboa is no great distance. But the road, a convoy now, is crowded, and no one, not even Ora, can fathom where it might actually lead.

Both these novels have Israeli Palestinian characters who are central to their themes yet remain somehow peripheral. Perhaps there’s a limit to how much Israeli Jews, even the most sympathetic, can afford to arrogate to themselves the sensibility of the “other.” It’s not that they may not comprehend it, though that is too often the case, but writers can be reluctant, even when empathy does exist, to usurp that sensibility for their own aesthetic purposes. Whatever the limitations, though, these fictions were an advance on much of what preceded them.

WE MIGHT expect that the latest fiction would move forward from that position. If we’re to read Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid for signs of this, though, we can only be disappointed. There are hardly any sympathetically portrayed Palestinians in this book. In fact, there are few sympathetically portrayed characters full stop, although their stories, perhaps for that very reason, do elicit compassion. They are narrated by each of the three protagonists: Lea, Yael and Avishag, born in 1983 – adolescents when we meet them, women in their twenties at the novel’s close. The subject of their stories is the rite of passage they share with all Israeli Jews, male and female, aside from the orthodox, after they graduate from secondary school. That is to say, their stints in the army.

It’s noteworthy too that the women come from Mizrahi or Sephardic backgrounds, the children of Jewish immigrants hailing from Middle Eastern countries, one step above Israeli Palestinians in the peculiar Israeli pecking order that has had the European Ashkenazim as its aristocracy. Only Lea, with a German-Jewish parent and “European looks,” has access to this privilege, pitifully played out on the high school playground where other girls clamber round her for acceptance. But Lea’s claims are compromised by her other, Moroccan parent, and consignment to this dusty ghetto-like village, dangerously close to the Lebanese border and peopled for the most part by Mizrahim and struggling single mothers. “A whole town of crazy bitches,” a teenage boy casually, cruelly, remarks. Avishag’s family has been shattered by the suicide of her older brother Dan. Yael, whose first-person voice opens the novel, has been in love with Dan, yet so much of the tragedy is buried under that special brand of toughness Israelis have cultivated since the earliest pioneer days and which, by the 2000s, has spread to every corner of society.

Everything is blanketed by the ubiquitous presence of war. Both Lea’s and Yael’s mothers work for companies making machine parts that one way or another end up in planes. Soon enough the girls are in boot camp, suffering the standard, sanctioned humiliations. Then they are given postings in the army proper.

For Yael it’s on Route 433, close to a Palestinian village, where she is a weapons instructor. Discovering that boys from the village have managed to steal her helmet, a colleague observes, “These boys are like rats… they’d steal the entire base if they could.” Next, the boys take the “closed military area” signs off the base fence, and then the bullets from target practice. Then they are shot at.

Apart from the ramped-up tensions with Israeli Palestinians, Israeli society has been increasingly separated from West Bank Palestinians ever since the building of the wall. Lea is sent to the military police, guarding the Hebron checkpoint, in a year when Israel “closed the sky” for other foreign workers and needed Palestinians for construction work again. “We needed them, but we were also a little afraid they’d kill us, or even worse, stay forever. These were both things the Palestinians were sometimes into doing. That’s why I existed.”

In both these instances, the girls’ interaction with Palestinians takes place through a military barricade; for neither of them is it possible, as it is in previous Israeli novels, to begin to know Palestinians as people. Palestinians, separated by the roads and the wall, are now entirely “other.” In Avishag’s case, down at the Egyptian border, Sudanese refugees appear as mere pixels on her green computer screen.

Shani Boianjiu was born in Jerusalem in 1987 and is the youngest-ever recipient of the American National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. That means she’s younger than her characters, though Yael, for one, appears to be at least partly autobiographical. As well as this first novel, released in the United States last September, she has published stories in the New Yorker and other US literary journals, making her something of a wunderkind, especially when the fact that she is writing in English rather than her native Hebrew is taken into account.

The reviews of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid have been mixed, the book frequently panned for the very reasons I like it. Its terse, colloquial prose, the irony, its shifting tenses and points of view all lend the novel a rhythm that overcomes the anomie to which her characters seem condemned. That many parts of the narrative betray their origins as stories might bother some but poses no problem for me. Yet I admit that my interest in this novel has as much to do with how it demonstrates what has happened to Israel over the years, especially since 1977 when Likud first came to power, as it does with my passion for literature.

SO WHAT has been happening? Diana Pinto’s Israel Has Moved charts these developments from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider. She describes herself as an intellectual historian and policy analyst, and comes across as a kind of Jewish-intellectual Eurocrat. Based in Paris, she’s been associated with London’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research and has spent many years studying the place of Jews in post–cold war Europe. Most pertinently for us, she relates how she told an Israeli friend that “I had never personally considered Zionism to be a valid life choice for me, that I criticised Israeli politics, but at the same time I could not conceive of a world without Israel.”

Pinto argues forcefully that Israel is thumbing its nose at its European benefactors and at this juncture is even prepared to ignore the United States. The reasons are manifold, but largely derive from the creeping Jewish settlement of Palestinian land since 1967, the changing demographics within the Jewish population, and the current engagement with the non-European world through Israel’s new emphasis on consumerism and developing and marketing its cybertechnology. In other words, like the rest of us, Israel is looking towards Asia, and especially China.

But Pinto delineates a paradox. As Israel looks ever outward, away from its European origins and the boiling Middle East tensions, its gaze is inward in a way it has never been before. Again, both the cause and expression of this – Israel’s “autism,” as Pinto calls it – are complex. The old Ashkenazi attachment to the land, manifest symbolically and materially in the kibbutz and its agricultural base, has all but disappeared, while the strident if often cynical militarism born from the need to protect the land has grown exponentially in size and power.

When the children and grandchildren of the generals who fought in Israel’s many wars are conscripted for their mandatory two years’ service they are not to be found on the frontline posts where Boianjiu’s characters serve, but in the elite branches of military command and civilian intelligence where Ben Zygier sought to make a name for himself. But, as Pinto tells it, Israel isn’t all that interested anymore in Diaspora Jews making our aliyahs. Our role is to remain where we are in order to better defend her, though Israel is making it harder than ever to do so, and many, like me, have given up pretending.

Yet this fascinating group of essays gripped me throughout. Pinto is skilled at plucking out details of everyday Israeli life and highlighting their significance – noting, for instance, the efflorescence of intricately decorated skullcaps (kippot) on more and more male Jewish heads, even those of secular Jews, or walking the streets of the Muslim quarter of old Jerusalem and seeing “young ultraorthodox women with their strollers coming out of houses that seem to contain no visible sign of previous Jewish life.” She writes of the roads that separate Jews from Palestinians, among them Route 433, where Boianjiu’s Lea is stationed, the route that “incarnates perfectly the schizophrenia of Israel’s history.”

Pinto’s text is crowded with intriguing symbols – the menorah, the Hill of Evil Counsel, the bubble, the tent. And if in one sense they are telling, and in another their very abundance can unmoor their separate meanings, the argument is clear. The Oslo Accords are dead; the “two-state solution” is merely the rhetoric of Western politicians. Israel is going its own way, global in its economic orientation while ever more insular in its politics, with the Palestinians ever more invisible in this evolving outlook.

Israel Has Moved is depressing and oddly futuristic in its outlook. “Israel’s old agronomy,” Pinto writes,

the one of much-heralded orange and avocado miracles, sang the praises of an ever deeper rooting in the nation’s soil, whereas the military values of the young state were all based on the notion of defendable terrestrial borders. The new technology instead is all about mobility and flexibility, with little, if any, anchoring in any soil or with any clear national identity. Can this change hearken back to the Middle Ages when the Jews, before their emancipation, incarnated these same values in the financial and commercial realm?

With the proliferating start-ups having global transnationals like Google as their clients, Pinto asks, “Does this strategic choice echo in its own way the old Jewish tradition of dialoguing with kings rather than their people?”

If this, indeed, is the future, it threatens to be as scary as the past. But the fact remains that the old agrarian Zionist solution has borne its own crop of bitter fruit. •

The post Israel’s shifting moorings appeared first on Inside Story.

THIS month’s outbreak of violence in Gaza sent thousands of Israelis into bomb-shelters and left twenty-five Palestinian militants and civilians dead. While Hamas forces in Gaza did not participate in the exchange of fire, the movement failed to rein in competing militants. Groups affiliated to the Popular Resistance Committees responded to the assassination of one of its leaders by the Israeli military with a barrage of rockets and mortars, and within hours the situation escalated. For now, it seems that Egyptian mediation has re-established a fragile ceasefire.

While Hamas’s decision not to return fire is certainly a welcome development, the internal political struggle over how the movement should position itself in relation to Israel is far from over.

As Israeli planes circled the skies of Gaza, representatives of different wings of Hamas embarked on two competing diplomatic missions. Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas political bureau and overall leader of the movement, paid a surprise visit to the Turkish capital, Ankara, a fortnight ago, briefing Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on what was described as “recent developments in Palestinian politics” and the prospects for reconciliation between the competing Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.

Meanwhile, the Gaza-based leaders of Hamas dispatched strongman Mahmoud Zahhar to Tehran. Zahhar, one of the closest aides of Ismael Haniyeh, the Gaza prime minister, thanked Iran for its “unlimited and unconditional support.” Zahhar also underlined the fact that the “principles and strategies of Hamas” – synonymous with the movement’s commitment to armed struggle and terror operations – had “not changed” despite the ceasefire.

Both diplomatic initiatives are clear attempts to rally support behind competing wings of Hamas. As such, they are only the most recent examples of a series of regional moves in the past few weeks that illustrate growing tensions within the organisation, as separate centres of power vie to determine the future course of the movement.

The contenders are the leadership in Gaza, represented by Haniyeh and his interior Minister Fathi Hammad, and the exiled overall leadership represented by Meshal. While Haniyeh maintains control of a breakaway branch of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza strip, Meshal is supported, by and large, by Hamas members from the West Bank and the Palestinian Diaspora, though he also enjoys the backing of many Gazans critical of Haniyeh’s authoritarian regime in the coastal strip.

Early assessments assume that the struggle centres on the implementation of reconciliation documents signed by Meshal and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is leader of Fatah. Agreements were ceremoniously concluded in Cairo in May 2011 and again in Doha in February 2012. Both agreements were welcomed by many Palestinians but were concluded in the face of ill-concealed opposition by Haniyeh’s Gaza branch.

The Gaza prime minister, fearing a challenge to his position in the coastal strip, attempted to torpedo the initial Cairo agreement by praising the “martyr Osama bin Laden” on the eve of the concluding ceremony. Likewise, the Gaza leadership opposed the Doha agreement by labelling it “unconstitutional” and by refusing to accept President Abbas as an interim acting prime minister, as stipulated in Doha.

The question of who will lead the interim Palestinian government until elections are held is still far from concluded. But there is clearly more at stake than personal ambition. What lies at the core of the conflict between the Hamas leaders in Gaza and the leadership abroad is a fundamental struggle over the future of Hamas as a movement. Certainly, recent shifts within Hamas suggest the possibility of a transformation from terrorist organization to legitimate political party. While the outcome remains unpredictable, signs of internal strife have escalated to a tipping point.

In December, Ismael Haniyeh embarked on a western-bound Mediterranean tour in an attempt to gather political support from post-revolutionary regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. He was granted a hero’s welcome. In mid-February, he started a second diplomatic circuit that brought him to Qatar, Bahrain and Iran. To the dismay of more conciliatory Hamas members, Haniyeh vehemently and repeatedly stressed Hamas’s commitment to “armed resistance,” “the futility of peace negotiations” and the movement’s commitment to fight “until all Palestinian land has been liberated.” Haniyeh’s hosts in Tehran reacted warmly, swiftly increasing the flow of financial support to Gaza.

Emboldened by this wave of outside recognition, Haniyeh has continued to lobby against the implementation of the reconciliation agreements. By preventing the Palestinian Central Election Commission from updating voter registers, he is effectively preventing elections that were scheduled in the Cairo and Doha agreements in order to cement his hold to power.

Haniyeh’s regional rallying of support has not gone unnoticed by Khaled Meshal. In contrast to the Gaza prime minister, Meshal silently backed “exploratory talks” between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators hosted by the King of Jordan in Amman in January. Likewise, Meshal has on numerous occasions expressed his acceptance of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – a tacit acceptance by the faction of the right of the State of Israel to exist in secure borders side by side with a future Palestinian state.

At the same time, Meshal has attempted to bring Hamas closer to the secular institutions of Palestinian political life as he pushes for the organisation’s integration into the Palestine Liberation Organization, which at the moment does not include the movement. Integrating Hamas into the PLO would close Palestinian ranks and effectively mean a formal cessation of violence from Hamas. At the same time, it would represent a further implied acceptance by Hamas of agreements previously signed between the PLO and Israel.

Meshal’s change of heart can be partly attributed to the ongoing public revolt against Syrian President Bashar a-Assad, who has hosted Hamas’s diaspora leadership since the 1990s. Assad’s violent response to an uprising that is at least partly backed by Hamas’s umbrella organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, has strained relations. Reacting to turmoil in Syria, Meshal has been forced to relocate Hamas’s diaspora headquarters from Damascus to Doha, the Qatari capital, in February. This relocation from Iran-backed Damascus to Washington’s closest remaining Arab ally in the region is an important symbolic gesture towards what Meshal may very well envisage for the movement: a comprehensive re-invention of Hamas.

Whether or not Hamas as a unified movement would follow Meshal on this change of course has been the subject of much speculation. Notably, Meshal recently expressed his outrage at Gaza’s refusal to fall “in line” by announcing he would step down as leader of the political bureau. Elections for the Hamas Shoura Council, the group’s highest decision-making authority, which appoints the movement’s leader, are due in April. It is unclear whether Meshal will ultimately follow through on this threat, as observers speculate that he could be re-elected despite his recent declaration. Alternatively, it seems he might be elected to head a new and independent Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The outcome of this power struggle within Hamas is far from pre-determined. Current developments present Western decision-makers with an opportunity to influence the outcome and to support the shift from a renegade terrorist militia to a necessary partner in what could very well be an all-encompassing peace process with Israel.

Hamas leaders such as Khaled Meshal need to be engaged not isolated. Washington has embraced moderate Islamists in Cairo and Tunis, and representatives of political Islam in the Palestinian territories should not be treated any differently. Instead of resorting to ineffective undifferentiated boycotts, Washington and European governments should engage with reformist groups from within Hamas.

While it does carry political risks, such an approach might just tip the scales in the right direction. Violent escalations such as this month’s exchange of rockets in Gaza will continue to bring suffering to Israelis and Palestinians, but will also strengthen forces from within Hamas that thrive on a political vision that fosters isolationism and extremism. •

The post The Hamas split and the future of the Palestinian peace talks appeared first on Inside Story.

THAT Australians are less well disposed to Israel than they once were is almost certainly true. Israel’s friends are no less likely to deny the truth of this than are Israel’s enemies. Identifying the turning points in public opinion is much more difficult. So, too, given the dearth of decent data, is the task of estimating the breadth or depth of the change. Even if that could be done, there remains the question of how governments should respond.

Recently, Peter Manning, the respected journalist and author of Us and Them: A Journalist’s Investigation of Media, Muslims and the Middle East, argued that the “overwhelming trend” in data compiled from various opinion polls “shows a sharp swing since the 1980s against Israel's image and actions among ordinary Australians.” This account of the polls is misleading. Manning went on to argue that since public opinion had shifted, government policy should also change. But is a swing in public opinion sufficient reason for public policy to swing too?

The trend Manning claims to have identified is in respondents’ attitudes towards the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In a 1981 McNair poll, he notes, 28 per cent said their sympathies in the Middle East were “mainly with the Jewish people” while 4 per cent said they were “mainly with the Arabs.” The poll was taken in the first two weeks of July, before Israel bombed the PLO’s headquarters in Beirut causing a large number of civilian casualties. When the question was repeated in August 2006, by McNair Ingenuity, 13 per cent said their sympathies were “mainly with the Jewish people,” while 10 per cent said they were “mainly with the Arabic people.” This poll was taken shortly after the 2006 Israel–Lebanon conflict had begun. This is the only clear evidence of a shift from a margin in favour of “the Jewish people” of twenty-four percentage points to a margin in favour of “the Jewish people” of just three.

But it is hardly evidence of a “trend.” We need more than two data points to show when opinion shifted. Over a quarter of century there may have been a number of movements, the earliest perhaps quite soon after the 1981 poll. And that poll may not have been the point at which opinion was most polarised.

Since 2006, the figures have continued to show roughly equal numbers of sympathisers on each side. In 2006, a UMR survey found 24 per cent feeling “more sympathy” for the “Israelis” (compared with McNair’s 13 per cent for “the Jewish people”) and 23 per cent feeling “more sympathy” for the “Palestinians” (compared with McNair’s 10 per cent for “the Arabic people”). Similar results to UMR’s were reported in 2009 and 2011 by Morgan.

The differences in the figures produced, in 2006, by the McNair Ingenuity and UMR polls are puzzling. Perhaps the answer lies in the different ways the two sides are described. The “Jewish people” (McNair Ingenuity) may not have been as well regarded as “the Israelis” (UMR), the “Arabs” (McNair Ingenuity) not as well thought of as the “Palestinians” (UMR). Ethnicities might be less appealing than nationalities. In 1981, had the question been about “the Israelis” and “the Palestinians” rather than about the “Jewish people” and the “Arabs,” McNair might have produced a closer result.

Feelings of “sympathy” are very general and rather vague. Especially where they are not strongly held, sympathies may not be a very reliable guide to how respondents judge specific circumstances. When the question of “Israel’s recent military action in the Gaza strip” was raised in the 2009 Morgan poll, fewer (28 per cent) said it was “justified” than said it was “not justified” (42 per cent). But in other polls, conducted in 2006, more respondents sympathised with Israel (33 per cent in July, 27 per cent in August) than with Hezbollah (15 per cent and 12 per cent respectively) in the fighting then taking place; the majority response was “neither,” “both” or “can’t say.”

Polls that touch on Israel and the Palestinians – and few have – often fail to produce majorities in favour of one or the other. In 1946, a Morgan poll found opinion evenly divided (44:44) not over “whether Palestine should be partitioned,” as Manning claims, but on “limiting the number of Jews who enter Palestine.” In 1967, another Morgan poll didn’t find a “large majority” supporting Israel, as Manning reports, but a plurality (44 per cent) in favour of Israel keeping “the old city of Jerusalem” rather than giving it to the United Nations to be “internationalised” (36 per cent) or giving it “back to the Arabs” (6 per cent). And in 1974, after the 1973 war, the polls didn’t report “a large majority” that was “pro-Israel,” as Manning believes; they reported pluralities whose sympathies were with “the Israelis” rather than with “the Arabs” – 44:5 in a Morgan poll, 37:5 in a Saulwick poll.

WHAT should we make of polls where opinion is not so much evenly divided as widely spread – as it has been on the general question of “sympathy” in recent times – between pro/anti, neither/both, and unsure? Of the recent items to which Manning refers the proportion typically recorded as “can’t say,” “don’t know” or “unsure” is around 20 per cent or more. Figures this high suggest relatively low levels of knowledge about the issues or engagement with them. In an online poll conducted by Research Now in May 2010, only a quarter of the respondents rated their “own understanding of the Israel–Palestine conflict” as “very good” or “good.”

Even if the results are meaningful, where public opinion treads governments may not feel compelled to follow. Manning’s depiction of a plurality or minority as “a large majority” in 1967 and 1974, and his reference to an “overwhelming trend” since the 1980s, as if earlier majorities had now become minorities, is important. His point, after all, is that rather than “snubbing” public opinion the government should change its policy. And the democratic argument for policy change in response to public opinion is much stronger when the opinion is that of the majority rather than that of a minority.

Manning frames the consequences for government of not following any shift in public opinion in terms of votes. In particular, he warns of a loss of votes to the Greens – a relatively new threat to the government, since previously “progressive voters had nowhere else to go.”

Although the balance of opinion is now less lopsided, a loss of votes doesn’t necessarily follow. None of the polls show – in fact, top-line results cannot show – whether the issue is a vote-changer. In any event, governments that judge an issue to be a vote-changer need to consider, if they are prudent, whether changing their policies might lose votes not just gain them. A shift by the government away from its present stance might please supporters of the Palestinians’ claims but anger those committed to Israel’s.

On an issue like this, where the votes of very particular minorities may be at stake, governments are less likely to consider national poll data than the distribution of sympathisers in particular seats. In marginal seats, which are going to be won either by the government or by the Coalition, “progressive” voters who shift to the Greens and want to cast a valid vote will have nowhere else to go but back to Labor; a second preference for the Coalition won’t make much sense to these voters if the opposition hasn’t shifted on this issue either. Only in the two or three seats where the winner is likely to be either the government or the Greens does the issue stand even the remotest chance of deciding the result.

If Labor were to follow Manning’s advice the government might strengthen its hold on a marginal seat like Reid, in Sydney’s western suburbs, with the fourth highest proportion of Islamic residents. But it would weaken its hold on Melbourne Ports, which has the highest proportion of Jewish voters, and where the Liberals might pre-select a Jewish candidate strongly committed to Israel, as they have done in the past.

Changing its stance could help the government retain the marginal seat of Grayndler in Sydney’s inner-West, where the threat is more likely to come from the Greens than from the Liberals. But given what happened to the Greens’ candidate for Marrickville, which takes in part of Grayndler, at the 2011 New South State election we shouldn’t count on it; the candidate embraced the BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) movement, registered a precipitous drop in the level of her support (according to a Galaxy poll) after doing so, and failed to take a seat from Labor that the Greens should have won.

Whether or not governments judge their position to be a net electoral liability, they need to weigh up things other than votes. These, in relation to the Middle East, would have to include Australia’s alliance with the United States, on the one side, and perhaps its quest for a seat on the Security Council, on the other. The merits of the issue might also warrant attention.

If a government feels the public is hostile to its position, and sees the issue as a vote-changer, it can either fall into line, ignore the polls (especially if the opposition isn’t biting) or adopt some other strategy – arguing against it, trying to reframe it or simply displacing it on the list of public concerns by talking up some other issue.

On the question of Israeli settlements, the government might well want to criticise Israel if not publicly then in private. If it did it would be in line with the Research Now poll, noted by Manning, which reports that most respondents (77 per cent) agreed that “Israel should withdraw from the settlements it has constructed on Palestinian land.” But on the question of whether Palestine should be admitted to the United Nations as a full member, the government might disagree – notwithstanding the Morgan poll of September 2011 in which the majority (62 per cent) agreed that the United Nations, in the teeth of opposition from “Israel and the USA,” should “recognise Palestine as one of its member states.”

Faced by a series of polls that appeared to show the Palestinians – not the Israelis – losing the PR battle, it is unlikely that commentators sympathetic to the Palestinian position would warn the government to heed such polls or face an electoral backlash. •

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PETER Kosminsky’s four-part drama series, The Promise, has produced the same deeply divided response in Britain, France and Australia. From official Israeli and Jewish establishment sources there has been fierce condemnation, nowhere more so than in the formal complaint to SBS, which screened the series in Australia, by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, or ECAJ. From most other sources the series has received high praise, both as a film and as a contribution to the discussion of the tragic Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The Promise takes up a problem that has troubled Jewish thinkers since the Zionist project of creating a Jewish homeland or state was first mooted. Since the world had run out of uninhabited lands, what would happen to the people who already lived in the chosen territory? The question was debated with admirable frankness and calmness, but little consensus, by theorists who did not foresee the terrible urgency that the Holocaust would one day bring to it. They asked whether the inhabitants could be lured away by bribery or subterfuge or whether force would be needed. The optimistic view, expressed in Theodor Herzl’s novel Altneuland, was that life in the Jewish state would be so attractive that the indigenous people would happily submit – Israel’s “immaculate misconception” as the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit described it to me.

That was never going to happen in Palestine, the land ultimately chosen. The Arabs believed they too had a historic right (some saw it as a divine right), and a British promise, to what an American analyst has dubbed the “much too promised land.” To the Arabs of Palestine it was already their home, where their ancestors had lived for generations, and where they had a right of self-determination as part of the Arab homeland promised by the British in return for Arab help in the first world war. When they were told that the fine print left Palestine out of the Arab promise, and that Britain would instead honour its promise of a Jewish homeland, the Arabs felt betrayed and threatened, and predictably resisted.

As the ECAJ’s complaint about The Promise notes, Arab objections to Zionist-inspired immigration go back to its beginning in the late nineteenth century. But the objection was not, as the ECAJ may expect the reader to assume, an irrational objection based on prejudice; as the historian Benny Morris emphasises, it was a well-grounded, and indeed prescient, fear that the Zionists wanted to take their country. The official recognition and support of the Zionist project resulted in acute and growing conflict during the British mandate, and open warfare when a Jewish state emerged with UN blessing. Although Israel triumphed in the wars of 1948 and 1967, and remains in military control today, the question remains: what is a just solution to the competing claims of Jews and Arabs? What could once be debated as a historical or theological problem is now an existential human problem: what is going to happen to the five million Jews and five million Arabs who today live in Palestine? They all need a home.

This is the question implicitly asked by The Promise. Kosminsky does not answer it, but he gives a powerful reminder to a readily forgetful world that the question has always been there and remains there, and that the failure to answer it has had and continues to have terrible consequences. He does this by interweaving two stories, one of Len, a British sergeant serving in Palestine in 1946–48, and the other of Len’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter Erin, who visits Israel in her gap year in 2005. Initially the purpose of Erin’s trip is to give moral support to Eliza Meyer, her Jewish school friend who is returning home to Israel to do her military service. But in her grandfather’s diary she finds a house key that Len had promised to return to its owner, and she sets out to fulfil his promise.

The interwoven stories, rich in incident, character and plot, provide two snapshots of the ongoing conflict between two peoples seeking to live in the same land. In 1948 the Jews are the people without a home, desperately seeking to create not just shelter for the wretched refugees from the Holocaust but also a refuge for all potential victims of anti-Semitism in the future. The snapshot shows the length to which desperate people will go, and shows how the conflict is starting to make Arabs into refugees. The second snapshot, in 2005, shows that Jews now have a homeland but Palestinians do not. Established but isolated in their homeland, symbolised by the Meyer family in the bubble of the coastal town of Caesarea, Israelis are ignoring the needs of the Palestinians, who see Israel taking more and more of the only land that could provide their home. Israel has a monopoly of military force and Palestinians respond with the shocking weapon of the weak, suicide bombing, to which Israel retaliates by demolishing houses.

Kosminsky has emphasised that he did not set out to take sides or offer solutions; his first responsibility was to present an image that did justice to the complexity of the situation. Historians and political commentators have written many volumes about this complexity, and the film was based on years of research. In contrast to a historian, the artist and film-maker must choose a few characters and events to capture the viewers’ attention, stimulate their minds, fire their imaginations and touch their consciences. It is inevitable that people with an existing view about Palestine will be disappointed that this or that point dear to them was not made or emphasised, but they can still be grateful that Kosminsky has put the fundamental problem on the table in a high-quality film with great human impact.

Apologists for special interests have a choice. They can be open to The Promise as one of many ways a film about the Israel–Palestine conflict could be made, they can accept its challenge to seek solutions, they can learn from it, even if some of the lessons may be painful, and they can offer competing views and interpretations and emphasise different points if they wish. Alternatively they can firmly close their minds, refuse to recognise the challenge or seek solutions, resist any lessons they could learn, and seek to suppress the film. In that endeavour they may seek to place stereotyped and demeaning interpretations on the film. Antony Loewenstein, in his 2006 book My Israel Question, was far from the first to deplore the tendency to portray criticism of Israel and its policies as anti-Semitism, a practice he saw as wrongly conflating Zionism and Judaism.

IN ITS thirty-one-page complaint, the ECAJ compares The Promise with Jud Süss, a “Nazi propaganda film” praised by Goebbels and made compulsory viewing for Nazi death squads. The complaint asserts, without particulars, that “the ancient libel that holds all Jews throughout history to be collectively guilty of killing Jesus has been segued into the equally ludicrous proposition that all Jews are collectively guilty of the wanton shedding of innocent blood.” It complains about the historical background but its major allegation is that “all of the principal Jewish characters (and thus by implication Jews generally) are portrayed negatively and, ultimately, without any redeeming virtues. They are cast as variously cruel, violent, hateful, ruthless, unfeeling, amoral, treacherous, racist and/or hypocritical... The series also panders to stereotypes about Jews being immoderately wealthy and having acquired their wealth unfairly.”

In contrast, an English reviewer for the Israeli website Eretz Acheret noted that “the Israeli characters are drawn sympathetically and realistically, with not a hint of demonisation.” The ECAJ reaches the opposite conclusion only by itself imputing unfavourable attributes to the Jewish characters, judging them by harsh and unrealistic standards, interpreting their conduct in the worst possible way, and making quite absurd comparisons. There is a striking irony in a Jewish organisation’s striving to show that every Jewish character is a demon and every Arab character a saint. One by one, the ECAJ’s submission proceeds to do a hatchet job on every Jewish character of any importance, rejecting the humanity with which Kosminsky endows each of them, and substituting an anti-Semitic stereotype of its own manufacture.

The ECAJ gives what it calls “seventy-five examples of negative stereotyping of Jews” in its complaint. I can only deal with a few here, but an extended response to the complaint can be found here. The complaint itself can be found here.

Much of the calumny is directed at Erin’s hosts, the Meyer family. The complaint says that “none of the Arab characters speaks with a raised voice, in stark contrast to the violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled Jewish families.” It is in the nature of the plot that viewers see an Arab family only briefly on the special occasions of entertaining an important visitor, when they are naturally on their best formal behaviour. In contrast, Erin is asked to treat the Meyer household as her home, and becomes a part of the family. She sees everyday family life, in which a father has heated arguments with his youthful son over politics but rushes frantically to his side when he is injured, a younger sister calls her older brother insane but has deep affection for him, a mother reacts angrily to those who blow up her son by calling them “animals,” and parents treat their daughter’s friend with great care and responsibility. Erin finds the parents “the kindest and most generous” people she has known and, despite his despair at their politics, their argumentative son agrees.

By no stretch of the imagination is this a “violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled” family. It is a normal family. Its members are human beings, neither demons nor saints. Viewers who have been confronted for the first time by someone experiencing an epileptic fit will know that when the Meyer parents are momentarily paralysed with shock when Erin collapses in front of them, they are not being shown as “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous, cruel,” in the ECAJ’s words.

It is, however, a family whose members are awkward and at a loss for words or actions when, owing to Erin’s naivety, they find Omar, a real, live Arab peace activist, in their luxurious home. Omar shows similar unease, his only conversational gambit being to needle his hostess by asking where her family came from. In its search for an anti-Semitic interpretation, the ECAJ accuses Kosminsky of using this incident as “the vehicle for conveying the alien-ness of Leah and her husband Max (and by extension all Jews) to the land, further estranging them from the audience’s sympathy,” and of portraying them as “ungracious and racist,” “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous”and “cruel.”

Such an interpretation may appeal to anti-Semites who are trying to discover an anti-Semitic meaning. They will miss the more reasonable interpretation. What the film is doing, in effect, is dramatising Benny Morris’s observation that a “mutual lack of empathy” has characterised the Palestinian conflict from the beginning. Palestinians, he says in his book, Righteous Victims (1999), “never really understood the Zionist claim to the land” and Zionists “were uninterested in the Palestinian Arabs’ nexus with the soil.” “Thus, the Zionist–Palestinian conflict, which was the origin and remains the core of the Israeli–Arab conflict, has been characterised by a crude and brutal perceptional symmetry.” The message of The Promise is that Israelis and Palestinians must get beyond this and see each other as human beings who, among other things, need a home.

The lengths to which the ECAJ will go is illustrated by its attempt to demonise the convicted terrorist Avram Klein by comparing him with the Zionist leader Dov Gruner, on whom he is loosely based. The ECAJ presents Gruner as admirable in every respect, whereas Klein is said to be portrayed as “a blinkered fanatic who could have saved his own life by appealing his sentence to the Privy Council,” who uses “words that demonstrate that he refused to do so in a vainglorious quest for martyrdom,” and who in contrast to Gruner failed to win the respect and admiration of his guards. In fact, the film depicts Klein more favourably on all three scores.

First, Klein refuses to appeal whereas Gruner refused to defend himself at all. Second, speaking to Len in a friendly tone, Klein quietly utters the succinct and dignified words, “If you kill me you’ll regret it. Every movement needs its martyrs,” whereas Gruner bombastically told the court that nobody “could sever the tie between the Jewish people and their one and only land” and that “whosoever tries to sever it – his hand will be cut off and the curse of God will rest on him forever.” And, third, whereas Gruner won the respect and admiration of his guards, Klein is given a greater accolade: he wins the respect and friendship of Len, the sergeant who is the leading British character.

The ECAJ complains that because of the lack of certain background historical detail the film “shuts off any possibility that the viewer might understand how Jews who saw themselves as fighters for a noble cause could commit atrocities.” The reverse is true. The sympathetic portrayal of the terrorist Klein has been mentioned. Eliza Meyer’s grandfather, who lost most of his relatives in the Holocaust, was also a 1948 terrorist, and explains that after the Holocaust members of his generation were determined to carve out a land that could be safe for Jews forever. The British stood in their way, so the Jews “wiped them out. It was as simple as that.” Far from shutting off the possibility of understanding his implicit claim to act in a noble cause, the film shows a concentration camp and wretched refugees. It presents Eliza’s grandfather as an ordinary, civilised human being and passes no judgement on him. It is the ECAJ, not the film or the normal viewer, who finds him “obdurate and unapologetic for his part in an atrocity” and “lacking a moral compass.” Why does the ECAJ make this harsh judgement? The case put in his mouth is the case made by the real-life terrorist Menachem Begin, who blew up the King David Hotel and was later prime minister of Israel; it is the case made by Benny Morris, a historian admired by the ECAJ, when he justifies the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinian villagers from Israel as necessary for its ethnic “cleansing” (the term used at the time).

Viewers who have lived comfortable lives in peaceful countries like Australia and never faced challenges like those faced by Jews in Palestine in 1948 may be horrified by what was done and unable to identify with the case made in support. It does not follow that they will share the ECAJ’s harsh condemnation of those involved as people without a moral compass. Rather they will see them as vulnerable human beings with strong moral compasses pulled off course by experiences of anti-Semitism, culminating in the overwhelming effect of the Holocaust and all the tragedies that went with it. They will not join the self-righteous rush to judgement of those individuals, and certainly not the ridiculous extension to Jews generally that the ECAJ postulates.

What the ECAJ seems incapable of understanding is that the film is not making or inviting judgements. It is implicitly saying that it is too late for that; here is a terrible human problem that has to be faced.

AN IRONY of the ECAJ’s complaint is that Kosminsky has gone out of his way to discourage people from drawing anti-Semitic inferences from his film. Far from trying to blacken Israel, he shows that practices for which Israel is unfavourably known have been practised, and indeed were invented, by others. He shows the gratuitous humiliation of Palestinian civilians by soldiers and political assassinations as practised only by the British, and the retaliatory destruction of houses used by terrorists as practised by both Britain and Israel.

It would have been very natural for the film to mention the history of Caesarea, where Erin is staying, and it would have helped explain why the Meyers are so taken aback when an Arab turns up in their home. The Caesarea community website records without any indication of embarrassment or regret the expulsion of all Arabs in 1948. Benny Morris adds the details that they were expelled by the Haganah (which the ECAJ invokes as a symbol of Jewish rectitude) in mid February 1948 (three months before the Arab invasion to which the ECAJ attributes the war), despite the fact that according to Jewish sources the villagers had “done all in their power to keep the peace in their village and around it… [and] supplied agricultural produce to the Jewish market in Haifa and Hadera.”

Telling this story would have been easy pickings if Kosminsky had really been out to put Israelis or Jews in a bad light. It would also have pre-empted the ECAJ’s criticism that The Promise shows a Jewish swimming pool but not an Arab swimming pool in Caesarea. Perhaps the ECAJ is unaware that in Israel generally, far fewer Arabs than Jews can afford swimming pools. In Israel 58.5 percent of Arab families (as compared with 20.7 percent of Jewish families) are defined as living below the poverty line

The ECAJ is not only ungenerous in failing to recognise Kosminsky’s restraint. It acknowledges his Jewishness by a quotation about “self-hating Jews” who “betray their own people,” and speculates that he set the film in 2005, instead of 2010 when it was filmed, so that Erin could say to the soldiers about to blow up a house in Gaza: “Don’t drive them out of Gaza.” It ignores Kosminsky’s explanation that, having done his research before 2005, he wanted to include events like suicide bombing, which had ceased several years before 2010.

IT IS reassuring that the SBS complaint process rejected ECAJ’s complaint and showed no difficulty in recognising the true character of the film. But this does not mean that no harm has been done, or that no harm would be done by similar baseless attempts to smear individuals, organisations, books or films in the future. A number of groups are entitled to feel fearful, angry or dismayed by the ECAJ’s attempt to use the smear of anti-Semitism to suppress access to this film.

First are the viewers of SBS, who watch its programs because they are distinctive and open windows on the world not readily available elsewhere; they do not want it confined by unjustified rulings and, more importantly they do not want its future decision-making intimidated by the mud that will stick from this exercise or the fear of other baseless attempts to smear it in the future.

More generally, the people of Australia want freedom of access to information, points of view, and artistic representation in all their media in order to conduct their intellectual, political and moral life, without its being confined because some people are so sensitive to criticism of themselves or their cherished interests that they will go to any lengths to protect them. As citizens they also want those who make decisions on their behalf to be able to exercise Australia’s influence in the world not only on an informed basis but also free of similar intimidation. Those who have a special concern about the achievement of just solutions to problems of the Middle East, and would like the millions of Jews and the millions of Palestinians who live there to do so in freedom and justice, uncorrupted by the temptations of power or the temptations of powerlessness, will be particularly concerned.

There are many who value the great contributions that Jewish people have made to the intellectual, moral and artistic life, and particularly to the pursuit of social justice, in our civilisation. They are dismayed to see their contributions limited and their moral compasses sometimes distorted by the acceptance of the duty of short-sighted and uncritical defence of Israel, right or wrong, which the ECAJ’s complaint exemplifies. There are many, too, who believe that it would be a tragedy if all the courage and sacrifice and idealism that has gone into the building of Israel should result only in a pariah state because of its denial of justice to Palestinians.

If it is to maintain balance among the destabilising forces raging within and without, Israel is in desperate need of trusted but frank and independent critical voices such as the Diaspora could provide. Australian Jews can play such a role only if they open their eyes and ears and hearts and minds to the messages of the writers, artists, thinkers and people of insight and goodwill in the world, rather than attempt to shoot the messengers. Fortunately more and more are doing this. •

The post Much too promised land appeared first on Inside Story.

THE sense of crisis that preceded Palestine’s application to the United Nations for admission as a state has entirely dissipated. The issue has disappeared from the media, the familiar deadlock over construction in the Israeli settlements has returned and – with the provocative timing to be expected from the present Israeli government – new construction has been approved in the disputed area in East Jerusalem, prompting the familiar ineffective Western protests. A return to business as usual? In all probability the answer is affirmative, at least in the short run, unless Western European governments can bring themselves to take an uncharacteristic initiative.

First, what of the crisis? It has become clearer that the tension was generated mainly by Israel and the United States. Both proclaimed that a unilateral move by the Palestinians would mean an end to negotiations for a two-state agreement and both threatened to withhold much-needed funding for the Palestinian Authority – in Israel’s case, taxes that it collects on behalf of the latter, in the United States’ case, that Congress would terminate financial support provided in recent years. The Palestinians’ claim that the move was intended, rather, to place the negotiations on a new foundation was more convincing, and points to the more plausible reason for the American and Israeli reaction: the move signalled an end to the acceptance of the US role as sole mediator in the relations between the two parties; in other words, it threatened the loss of American control over the “peace process” and the privileged position, and protection, that Israel enjoys within that framework.

As soon as the application was lodged, common sense returned. It was clear that it would be self-defeating for Israel to terminate negotiations or, even more so, to withhold financial support, opening the way for more extremist forces in Palestine. These dangers could be averted by the simple device of delaying decisions in the Security Council, which also saves the United States from a hostile Arab reaction should it veto the Palestinian application.

But the crisis was not wholly artificial. If a crisis is a moment when established practices have become untenable and new approaches suddenly become conceivable, then it is a moment of rare opportunity but also of serious risks. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in May showed that the US-mediated “peace process” had become moribund, and the Arab Spring provided a favourable setting for a Palestinian initiative to place negotiations for a two-state agreement on a more favourable footing. But the move also held serious risks. If it proves fruitless the Palestinian Authority will be weakened or even wholly discredited, and Mahmoud Abbas will forfeit his newly won prestige; at worst, Palestinian frustration may lead to serious outbreaks of violence. The perception of a volatile regional environment provides a more valid reason for the Western sense of crisis, and Israel’s provocative move in approving new settlement construction shows a remarkable insensitivity to this environment.

The speeches to the United Nations by Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas did not bring much new enlightenment. Obama’s was surprisingly one-sided, highlighting Israeli concerns but not Palestinian rights, reaffirming his support for a two-state solution but reiterating the implausible contention that statehood and negotiation were alternatives. Netanyahu went further, claiming that the Palestinians wanted a state but not peace, giving no hint of endorsing Palestinian rights, and roundly condemning the United Nations for its bias against Israel. Abbas had the far easier task of presenting to a sympathetic audience the case for recognising Palestinian statehood after so many years of fruitless negotiation, but also reaffirmed his readiness to resume negotiations based on the 1967 frontiers and conditional on a settlement freeze.

Within a few hours of the debate the Quartet on the Middle East (made up of representatives of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations), which had been deadlocked during the preceding weeks, issued a statement calling for negotiations without preconditions to achieve an agreement by the end of 2012. This might be seen as undermining the argument that the Palestinian initiative ruled out negotiation, but perhaps assumed that a decision on statehood would depend on the outcome of the negotiations. The statement called on the parties to agree on a timetable within a month, to make proposals on frontiers and security within three months, and to reach substantial agreement within six months.

The statement had serious limitations, however. It omitted all reference to the “parameters” long regarded as necessary for an agreement – the 1967 frontiers, subjected to agreed exchanges of territory, each state to have Jerusalem as its capital, and adequate measures to ensure Israel’s security – and there was no mention of the settlements issue. It may be inferred that these omissions were at the insistence of the United States. The proposal was entirely to the liking of the Netanyahu government: it was committed to nothing, all the fundamentals were open to discussion, and it could engage in endless negotiation without having to move toward a two-state agreement, blame the Palestinians for obstructing agreement and continue unrestricted construction in the settlements. Not surprisingly, Israel accepted with alacrity, leaving the Palestinians to appear less accommodating by insisting on their precondition regarding the settlements.

Unless the “ community” is prepared to move beyond the Quartet’s formula, it will prove as abortive as Obama’s ill-fated call a year ago for a two-state agreement by the time of this year’s meeting of the UN General Assembly. The United States, it has become obvious, will do nothing constructive before the presidential election. The question is whether there is any other actor prepared to fill the ensuing vacuum and provide an impetus to the negotiations. In particular, might “Europe” – either the European Union or some of its leading members acting with its approval – be prepared to assume this role?

Major European interests are at stake, and European values have long been engaged. A loss of control by the Palestinian authority, desperate acts of violence by Palestinians and massive Israeli reprisals could prompt much wider disorder in the present regional environment, threatening Western economic interests (not only oil supplies, but also wider trading relations), and would make for unrest in Europe’s Muslim communities. And “European values” would appear ineffective and hollow if Europe passively watched such a process. But can it summon up the energy to intervene before such a deterioration becomes unmistakably clear? Can its leaders, under extreme pressure owing to the euro crisis, pay attention before it is too late? In the next phase, in all probability, the United States will press the Palestinians to abandon their precondition. Will the Europeans be prepared to take a contrary stand? There are likely to be frequent reminders of the dangers in the situation, such as recent acts of violence by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian lives and property.

The Israeli government’s spectacular deal with Hamas, exchanging over 1000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, introduces new complications. More than a little ironic in view of Israel’s expressions of outrage over the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah – announced earlier this year but yet to be implemented – it is seen as strengthening Hamas against its rival, and thus sending the message that violence pays. Abbas appears to be losing the initiative and may find it difficult to retain broad support for seeking a negotiated settlement. The situation surely calls for a move from outside to revive the ailing “peace process.”

The new diplomatic machinery available to the European Union under its foreign affairs and security policy representative, Catherine Ashton, provides it with the capacity to formulate policy. After a shaky start, Ashton is beginning to gain a certain diplomatic credibility. But her role could be no more than an initiator of proposals for the EU governments, and agreement among all member governments would require protracted negotiation, making for delay and lowest-common-denominator decisions. What might be conceivable would be agreement in principle to a course of action, the details to be worked out by whoever was authorised to implement the policy.

Alternatively, the initiative might come from a few members – the Libyan model – who would likewise have to seek broad agreement before taking up a position. The success of the Libyan intervention – at least as perceived by its initiators – might encourage this approach. But what might such an initiative attempt to achieve? The immediate aim, presumably, would be to overcome the present deadlock such that meaningful negotiations toward a two-state agreement could proceed.

But it would need to recognised that the Netanyahu government is fundamentally opposed to such an agreement, notwithstanding his own lip-service to it. Substantial progress is unlikely under the present coalition. It would seem prudent to focus on the first steps – the first three months of the Quartet’s schedule, and in the first place the immediate obstacle, the settlements issue. Here the Europeans would lose all credibility if they simply endorsed the American and Israeli approach.

But could a European stand, however determined, influence the Netanyahu government after it had successfully defied Obama on that issue? It would, of course, win strong support in the region, and the heightened isolation might disturb some Israeli officials, but this would not be decisive, as the recent rigidity towards Turkey would suggest. While any communication would have to be addressed to the Israeli government, its real message would have to be to the Israeli people – as always, divided but with many surely uneasy over the issue. The tone and content of such a démarche would be important, but so would its manner of presentation. A major address by a prominent European leader, delivered in the region, would have an impact of a different order from an anonymous statement issued in Brussels. It is not difficult to envisage themes that might form part of such an address: that the settlements constitute a form of aggression against a neighbouring people, the strength of feeling that they are illegitimate as well as illegal, that they have no place in the present century, that they are unworthy of a great nation, that they foster the kind of violence by extremist settlers that has recently been observed, and so forth. Needless to say, the speech would also have to be supportive of Israel’s well-being and security.

A successful diplomatic initiative would call for unorthodox thinking. Many commentators have recognised, for example, that if left to themselves, the two parties will be unable to reach agreement. The US approach, remaining in the background, favours the party that is stronger and averse to the kind of changes that any agreement would entail. A more active mediator would have to question and cajole both parties, but the logic of moving towards an agreement requiring asymmetrical “concessions” would tend to lead it to be more supportive of the party pressing for changes from the present status quo. The potential task for diplomacy is daunting. It must be hoped that, if Europe takes up the challenge, it will be equal to its demands. •

The post A Palestinian state within a year? appeared first on Inside Story.

THE current moment may reasonably be termed a crisis. A longstanding situation has become untenable but the attempt to deal with it is creating multiple tensions and prompting fears of an explosion of violence in the region. The Palestinians are seeking a radical change, Israel is resisting and claiming it would mean an end to direct negotiations for a settlement. The United States is supporting Israel’s objection to “unilateralism” and is prepared to veto a resolution endorsing a Palestinian state, even while dreading the consequences for its standing in the region. The Europeans fear that a UN vote may expose their divisions and finally discredit the idea of a common European foreign policy. Beyond these fears there is a fairly widespread apprehension that at a time of dangerous regional volatility, diplomatic moves may have entirely unpredictable consequences: unexpected outbreaks of violence, an escalation of tensions.

But could the crisis be turned into a moment of opportunity? In particular, does it not offer a chance to resume negotiations on a more satisfactory foundation, whereas the present framework, with the United States as the sole, ostensibly impartial mediator – though, at a deeper level, consistently in favour of Israel – is increasingly unable to move the “peace process” forward? The recognition of a Palestinian state does not entail the end of negotiations – a false alternative – and it should not be difficult for the Europeans to agree in pressing for their resumption, especially in view of the dangerous regional situation. The EU countries are also agreed on the “parameters” of an eventual settlement; where they differ is in their willingness to act against the wishes of the Israeli government. But even here, and in relation to other difficult choices that may arise, the diversity of perceptions and opinions may work to their advantage. It could make for more carefully considered policies than does the rather monolithic American policy “community,” which has had no difficulty in overcoming Obama’s initially heterodox intuitions in relation to the Palestinian issue – or, for that matter, in relation to Iran.

But why should Europe be able to succeed in restarting negotiations when the United States has been manifestly unable to do so? Before attempting an answer, it is necessary to examine another fundamental issue that Western policymakers and most commentators have been unwilling to confront. This is the fact that direct negotiations are bound to be fruitless if one of the parties rejects the ostensible aim of the negotiations. As Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has recently maintained, Netanyahu’s diplomacy, his earlier record, and indeed his choice of coalition partners can best be understood as indications of his basic ideological commitment to Israel’s supremacy over the whole of Palestine. Thus, his goal is to prevent the two-state solution, long accepted by Israel as well as ly as the aim of the negotiations. To express this openly would mean the loss of all support and would alarm the Israeli electorate, so Netanyahu pretends to accept a Palestinian state while putting forward unacceptable preconditions for negotiating, as his diplomacy in Washington earlier this year made clear. Western policy-makers are reluctant to see this. Their recent diplomacy has focused on seeking to persuade the Palestinians to return to direct negotiations instead of going to the United Nations (as if the one excluded the other), seemingly oblivious of the reasons why the Palestinians have come to see this as fruitless.

The fundamental weakness in Western policy has been its longstanding toleration of Israel’s relentless construction of settlements on Palestinian territory. The not-infrequent Western protests have remained verbal, with no mention of sanctions or even a willingness to engage in a diplomatic confrontation with Israel. Obama initially appeared to make this a precondition for negotiations, but acquiesced in Netanyahu’s obdurate resistance; his diplomacy returned to a more familiar and comfortable posture, persuading and pressuring the Palestinians to resume negotiations in unfavourable circumstances – which, not surprisingly, proved short-lived and fruitless. Again, most recently, enormous diplomatic efforts have been made in seeking to persuade the Palestinians to avoid a confrontation at the United Nations. This effort has now failed. US diplomacy is trapped in its contradictions. Support for Israel – for the current Israeli government, that is – negates its endeavour to support the “Arab Spring” and diminishes its standing in the region and beyond. It is sad that Obama’s diplomacy has come to this.

There seems to be no good reason for the Europeans to support the United States in this seemingly contradictory and hypocritical stance – claiming to support a two-state solution but voting against a Palestinian state. Germany’s traditional role of supporting Israel in European diplomacy might leave it with no other option, but it may be hoped that in the ensuing discussions it will cease to equate supporting Israel with supporting every wish of its current government, however devious it may be. The European Union will not be so greatly damaged by another split vote. Chancellor Angela Merkel has rightly pointed out that the important thing is what happens after the UN vote. And here, at the time of writing, the available information is far more sparse.

It is not clear, for example, whether the Europeans, or for that matter the Americans, have sought to dissuade Netanyahu from taking the kind of provocative steps that have been threatened – withholding the transfer of taxes collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, proclaiming the end of direct negotiations or even declaring that the Oslo Agreements are no longer valid. Perhaps an awareness of regional volatility might restrain even this Israeli government, but Western diplomacy should not leave this to chance. There has been no mention of this in the public reporting, but it is clear that damage limitation must be an important aspect of Western diplomacy in the next phase.

Beyond this, is there a prospect of utilising the crisis as a diplomatic opportunity? Could the moment of danger be the occasion for a diplomatic breakthrough? Could there be a return to negotiations with more favourable prospects than before? This would not seem out of the question, but it could only be achieved against the will of the Netanyahu government. It would require, in the first place, a freeze and later an abandonment of construction in the settlements (perhaps excepting those to be transferred to Israel under the proposed “territorial swaps”) and later some form of monitoring to prevent wilful obstruction – in other words, a willingness to exert the maximum diplomatic pressure.

But is this credible, and could an effective strategy be devised? If the problem of the Netanyahu government’s real goals is directly confronted, such a reorientation of EU diplomacy becomes conceivable, even though little more than tacit support could be hoped from the United States. The more difficult question is whether an effective strategy could be devised. It is difficult to suppose that persuasion alone would influence Netanyahu, or that the kinds of pressure and sanctions usually considered would be acceptable to the Europeans. But the arts of diplomacy have been greatly diminished in the Cold War era and subsequently. Earlier, it was not so much a question of sanctions and the like, but more one of outmanoeuvring one’s adversary, or counterpart, leaving him or her with no better option than to act as one sought: one devious actor getting the better of the other. Could Netanyahu be placed in a position where ambition, and even the desire to remain in office, could lead him to opt for the role of the leader who achieves a historic settlement at the cost of his longstanding commitments and his preferred coalition?

His weakness is the gap between his real and his pretended goal. The challenge to diplomacy would be to exploit this, to make proposals that he would find difficult to resist but which would push negotiations in the desired direction. It may well be necessary to grasp the nettle of the settlements issue at an early stage, and here there might be a powerful message to the Israeli public, delivered by one or more of the main European leaders in the region itself, bringing out the strength of the objections to their continued expansion, as illegitimate not only legally but even more morally. These are no more than hints at an answer. More important is the question of how to become clear about the nature of the diplomatic challenge. The Europeans may well lack the power to coerce such a government, but they have a wealth of under-used diplomatic expertise that the ad hoc personal diplomacy of its leaders, and their approach to foreign policy in terms of electoral preoccupation, have left woefully neglected. •

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IN EACH of its three years so far, the small Palestinian Film Festival has been marked by a spirited, glamorous opening evening: lots of black silk and satin, champagne, high heels and glitter. It’s appropriate; these films come out from under, and without the energies of a very small number of organisers and supporters we’d never know they were there. Celebration is in order. The four evenings of cinema which follow are variously pleasurable and challenging; some films will extend consciousness on what it can mean to live under military occupation, and work to break the stereotypes.

Julian Schnabel’s Miral is, like his earlier, remarkable The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a full-on melodrama, all stops out; he gets away with it brilliantly. The beautiful, motherless Miral grows up under the tutelage of a true Palestinian heroine, Hind al-Husseini, who keeps her orphanage and school going against all odds. Emerging, on her way to becoming an international journalist, Miral discovers the realities of the refugee camps, and brutalities of the Occupation. This is a film of conventional strategies, deployed for a story that is still outside conventional boundaries; it has great flow and energy, and should be sought for commercial release.

Miral was shown with 138 Pounds in My Pocket, a twenty-minute documentary on Hind al-Husseini and the beginnings of her orphanage, when she took on the child survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948. The pairing worked well, high-end fiction offered beside its ground in history.

A few films divided the audience. Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention moves off from the more literal, autobiographical mode of his The Time that Remains, the major feature in last year’s program, and rebuts empathy to deliver the Occupation as farce. Staring calmly through everything, Suleiman plays a man who lives in Nazareth, with a beautiful young girlfriend in Ramallah. The film opens with the girl, in high heels and a pink sheath, walking imperturbably through a checkpoint, insulting the guards by simply refusing to see them. The tale moves in comic, quasi-surrealist jumps, with more than a touch of the Godards in holding action at a distance and finding absurdity in authoritarian rituals. There’s a wonderful sequence in which a drunken Israeli guard, clumsily trying to control a fast stream of cars at his checkpoint, has to flounder and give up. A red balloon is set flying over the landscape; it carries Yasser Arafat’s face, the expression humorously benign. Some would have liked more realism, but as it is, Divine Intervention helps lift Palestinian cinema up and away from the political ground; the horizon widens, and much more is possible.

Zindeeq is sparse, stern, resolute; as the opening night film, it was found by some to be rather too grave and cheerless. A lone man’s travels through the night, when one hotel after another refuses to find him a bed, are clearly allegorical; where is home? Mohammad Bakri’s intense, contained performance as the searcher instils the sense of dispossession; this is about 1948, and the requirement to remember. Other ways to make that call are spoken, seen and felt in the hour-long essay called As the Poet Said, an elegy in many voices for the late Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), modern Palestine’s national poet. It’s been argued that poetry and film can’t work together – remember the discussions round Jane Campion’s Bright Star?; they do here, resoundingly.

One of the strongest items here is Budrus, Julia Bacha’s great documentary already seen, and discussed, after this year’s Sydney Film Festival. Among much else, this film reminds the audience that not all Israelis support the Occupation, and many – particularly among the young – hate and oppose the security wall and all it stands for. Some of those stood with the villagers of Budrus, unarmed, facing the bulldozers that threatened their olive groves and livelihoods; and they won. It’s the strongest pro-peace film I know; beyond argument, they show us how. •

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IN MAY the ABC made Ronin Films, the independent Canberra-based distributor, a firm offer to buy and screen a one-hour documentary called Hope in a Slingshot. This film, which was independently financed, explores daily life in a part of the Palestinian territories under the Israeli occupation. Interviews and observation are punctuated with maps, segments of history back to 1948, and statistics – for example, on the forced evictions of Palestinian families, on deaths by violence on both sides, on periods of imprisonment, on the numbers of young Palestinian men confined to their villages. One map shows how far the settlements have penetrated the West Bank, and thus the near-impossibility of the so-called two-state solution. The huge concrete security fence – or segregation wall, depending on which side you’re on – is inescapable; diagrams show how far it moves east of the notional border, separating workers from workplaces and families from each other. The checkpoints appear in clusters, sometimes no more than seven kilometres apart. The Israeli soldiers are cavalier and inconsistent; here they scrutinise papers minutely, there they don’t bother.

The filmmaker, Inka Stafrace, interviews both Israeli and Palestinian residents of the West Bank; she tried and failed to get into Gaza as well. She follows a peaceful demonstration, involving international visitors, Jews and Palestinians together; they are assaulted by armed Israeli soldiers who use rubber bullets, but those do considerable bodily damage. She finds a senior Israeli lawyer, a woman who defends Palestinians in court and who finds her own country’s practices abhorrent. She finds young people gripped by anger and frustration; one is cast down to the point of hopelessness by the sight of another line of trailers, marking a new building site, on a Palestinian hillside; others plead for attention from the international community. Stafrace reflects on the psychological damage to young men from long-term restriction and surveillance, a system that breeds exactly the sort of enmity it seeks to guard against. Around the checkpoints, as she watches people subjected to pointless, malicious obstruction, she has to keep her temper; she sees that for the sake of the victims around her, she can’t afford to lose it. Holding her camera close, she shares her own fear as she walks alone toward a checkpoint. Through the whole essay, feeling and factual analysis work dynamically together; having seen this, we won’t forget.

For Ronin, a small family firm with a long track record in supporting film work outside the mainstream, the ABC sale was very important, both for its own sustaining income as well as for the circulation of this particular documentary. It fell through; the head of television, Kim Dalton, cancelled the deal on the grounds that since (as he saw it) the film is an expression of opinion on “contentious” matters, it couldn’t be run unless a program made from the Israeli side was run as well; he referred to a general policy of “impartiality.” Dalton said that the ABC had been unable to find such a program. A friend remarked that at that rate you couldn’t run an anti-slavery film without turning on a pro-slavery one as well; and what price Four Corners?

The call for “balance,” however, misses the point that this film is arguing for peace rather than, more simply, pressing the Palestinian cause. While there has been an international shift toward better recognition of the Palestinians’ case – a shift that was under way even before the assault on Gaza and the attack on the aid ship – there are also Jewish people everywhere who want to see peace with justice. In Hope in a Slingshot the concluding interview is with two young women, who wish passionately that nationalities and national identities could simply disappear, taking the bitter inheritance with them. The film is a rational assemblage of evidence on that inheritance, its reasons and its force in the present; it isn’t an anti-Israel polemic. Behind the Palestinians’ story of occupation and oppression, there is always Israel’s own story, the grand postwar multicultural project, a social-democratic dream buried under fear-driven militarism. Because these stories are, perennially, the whole world’s business, this film is one we should all be able to see. It seeks to contribute to the process of changing perceptions: a twenty-first-century shift. The ABC’s action amounts to self-censorship; the thinking here is seriously out of date.

Hope in a Slingshot will undoubtedly find outlets, both in and outside Australia. You can get it on DVD from Ronin Films. •

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WHEN ISRAEL withdrew the 9000-strong settler population from the Gaza Strip five years ago, hopes were renewed that normalisation was beginning after the five years of deadly violence that followed the breakdown of the 1993–2000 “Oslo” peace process. In New York, the United Nations commented that “the Palestinians have experienced the joy of the departure of the occupier” and “the Israelis are no longer saddled with the unrewarding, Sisyphus-like grind of securing the Gaza Strip.”

Voices in the neighbourhood were more pessimistic, even cynical. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Zvi Bar’el, a liberal political commentator, noted that “all the components of the potential [Gaza] explosion are yet to be neutralised – the highest population density in the world, terrible poverty, a huge collection of arms, and a radical leadership [Hamas].” The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published a cartoon that depicted Ariel Sharon contemptuously tossing a lean bone labelled “Gaza” onto an outstretched plate held by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who gazed longingly at a fat leg of lamb, labelled “West Bank,” grasped firmly in the Israeli prime minister’s other hand.

Five years on from 2005, the faint hopes aroused by Israel’s Gaza withdrawal have been cruelly shattered. Instead, Gaza has emerged as symbol and flashpoint of the morass that is post-Oslo and post–second intifada Israel–Palestine, of which internecine Palestinian warfare, Israel’s punitive “Operation Cast Lead” in December 2008–January 2009, and now the peace flotilla fiasco in the eastern Mediterranean are all symptoms.

Israel has long regarded the Gaza Strip as an unmanageable and dispensable liability. A few months before the first Palestinian intifada began in the Jebalya refugee camp, located at the Strip’s northern end, in December 1987, the Israel Defence Forces completed a classified study titled “The Gaza District Up to the Year 2000.” It was, in the words of the Israeli analysts Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, “one of the grimmest documents ever submitted to the Israeli establishment.” The report warned that an exponentially rising population combined with acute land and water shortages amounted to “a human time-bomb ticking away at Israel’s ear.” In their study of the first intifada, published in 1989, Schiff and Ya’ari wrote that “the Gaza Strip is a cancer that will steadily drain the State of Israel” and predicted that “Israel will soon be on its knees begging all and sundry to do it the mercy of taking Gaza off its hands.”

That prognosis proved prescient. Over the first eight months of 1993, during the famous “back-channel” talks between Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organisation representatives in Norway, the first point of in-principle agreement concerned Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. Dennis Ross, the US special envoy to the Middle East from 1989 to 2001, has written in his memoirs that “in Israeli eyes, this was a promising beginning. The Israelis wanted out of Gaza.”

In 1994 the Strip’s maze of congested townships and claustrophobic refugee camps was duly turned over by Israel to the administration of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, along with Jericho, a West Bank town in the Judean desert near the border with Jordan. Israel retained a significant portion of the Strip containing Jewish settlements, as well as control over roads linking those settlements to Israel. In 2005 Sharon took the seemingly revolutionary step of dismantling the settlements and relocating their inmates to Israel, in the face of strong protests by the settlers. Especially resistant were those in the large settlement bloc of Gush Katif, located in the south-western part of the Strip next to the teeming Palestinian areas of Rafah and Khan Yunis. Sharon defended his decision in pragmatic terms: “I am not prepared to accept the claim that leaving Gaza is the trampling of Zionism. It is in fact strengthening Zionism in areas that are much more important.” He specifically cited Jerusalem and its environs, the Galilee region of northern Israel (which has a large “Israeli Arab” population) and the Negev desert of southern Israel as the areas of high strategic priority, unlike Gaza, to the Jewish state.

It is thus more than a little ironic that Israel continues not just to bear, but also to aggravate through its own actions, the Sisyphus-like burden represented by Gaza. Fifty-four years ago, the Israel Defence Forces seized Gaza during the Suez conflict of 1956. Dr Haidar Abd al-Shafi, an eminent resident of the Strip, recalled that brief occupation many years later: “I remember Israel’s occupation of Gaza during the Suez invasion in 1956. It was clear that they were engaged in long-term planning, that they intended to stay. When the UN passed resolutions calling for withdrawal, France and Britain withdrew immediately from the canal area and Israel began to slowly withdraw from the parts of Sinai it had occupied. But they made no move to withdraw from Gaza, and when President Eisenhower sent a letter to [David] Ben-Gurion” – the Israeli prime minister at the time – “asking why Israel did not withdraw Ben-Gurion had the gall to not reply. But then Eisenhower wrote a second letter threatening sanctions, and Israel withdrew in one night. That night we went to bed to the noise of armoured cars roaming the streets, and woke up the next morning to find no trace of Israelis in the Strip. It took a president with a moral fibre to get them out.”

Alas, 2010 is not 1956, Obama – his virtues notwithstanding – is not Eisenhower, Netanyahu is definitely no Ben-Gurion, and Israel finds it seemingly impossible to extricate itself from the messy legacy of the long occupation of Gaza that commenced in June 1967. And Gaza’s inhabitants find Israeli occupation replaced by Israeli blockade.

The consistent harshness of Israeli operations aimed at Gaza, most notably in Operation Cast Lead but also apparent in the decision to interdict the activist flotilla sailing toward the Strip, may seem somewhat puzzling at first glance. Why react with such ferocity to the relative pinpricks inflicted by Qassam rocketry, and mostly on small towns like Sderot? Why risk a fresh round of global controversy and criticism by pouncing in waters on a flotilla of vessels with hundreds of people of different nationalities on board? But while the Israeli use of disproportionate force may not be justified, it can be explained.

To most Israelis, the elites and the citizenry alike, a Gaza Strip under Hamas control embodies in a concentrated microcosm the mixture of menaces that cumulatively constitute the “existential threat” to their state and society. The declaratory hostility of Hamas, a movement that enjoys the committed adherence of a very large minority of Palestinians, to the existence of Israel is one component of this existential syndrome; the unsettling physical proximity to Israel of the Hamas enclave in Gaza is another. But by themselves these two components would not add up to more than a major irritant to Israel’s sense of security.

What makes Hamas-controlled Gaza more than a neighbourhood nuisance is the movement’s links with Syria and (particularly) Iran. The hardline Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in and operates from Damascus. The Islamic Jihad group, which has long been active in Gaza and currently enjoys a relatively fraternal relationship with Hamas, has a longstanding and close nexus with Iran’s military and intelligence apparatus. Israel has a simmering “northern front” where it faces a formidable adversary, Hezbollah, backed by Iran and also Syria. The Hamas-dominated enclave in Gaza represents a live “southern front” where the same constellation of anti-Israel forces coalesces. Nor can Hamas be chased away from Gaza – or Hezbollah from Lebanon – in the manner the PLO was evicted from Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982.

It is this calculus of interlinked threats that fortifies the Israeli siege mentality. That mentality is manifested in the hammer-and-tongs operations seen in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008–09 and 2010 (and indeed in the assassinations of Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in early 2008 and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in early 2010). The Gaza imbroglio and its periodic eruptions are especially uncomfortable for the authoritarian regime of Egypt, whose suspicion of Hamas – an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement – is matched if not surpassed by the Egyptian public’s dislike of Israel’s aggressive behaviour.

In January 1995, a suicide bombing conducted inside Israel by the Islamic Jihad group killed twenty Israeli soldiers and one civilian. In a nationally televised address after the incident, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin grimly promised to “take Gaza out of Tel Aviv” and declared that this would be achieved through “a separation between us and them,” to be negotiated with Yasser Arafat. The promise to liberate the faux Mediterranean Europe of Tel Aviv from the fanaticism and violence of Gaza underlined the mixture of contempt and fear with which the typical Israeli views the festering cauldron of the Strip. And this was fifteen years ago, well before the rise of Hamas to political and strategic prominence.

THE PALESTINIANS, meanwhile, are a nation divided. The strongman-centric Palestinian Authority regime of Yasser Arafat was past its sell-by date significantly before Arafat’s death. In the post-Arafat phase Palestinian politics has, instead of experiencing a transition to a two-party system based on mutual tolerance and power-sharing between Fatah and Hamas, experienced its opposite: a bitter rift between the two major Palestinian political formations, a Hamas power-grab in Gaza and Fatah repression of Hamas supporters in the West Bank. Arafat’s legacy of corrupt, clique-based governance has of course contributed much to the unseemly fracas into which Palestinian politics has degenerated after his demise. But so has Arafat’s absence from the scene. The Palestinian polity has had trouble evolving beyond the situation in which Arafat, for all his flaws and misdemeanours, provided a focal point.

The decline of Fatah and the ascendancy of Hamas are due, above all, to one factor – the catastrophic failure of the 1993–2000 peace process. Hamas rose almost literally from the ruins of Oslo and the embers of the second intifada. As the most significant Palestinian faction opposed to and excluded from the Oslo process, Hamas stood to gain the most once most Palestinians, in the words of the Israeli observer Ron Pundak, “came to the conclusion that Israel did not in fact want to end the occupation” and became convinced that their established leadership had been tricked into a “barren process” and “historical trap.”

And gain Hamas did. Through 2005 it won a string of victories in Palestinian local elections. And not just in the Gaza Strip, the cradle and stronghold of the movement; it also won resoundingly in West Bank cities like Nablus and towns like Qalqiliya. These local triumphs were the precursor to its landslide victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election of early 2006, when Hamas took an absolute majority – seventy-four out of 132 – of the legislature’s seats. It was striking that Hamas won handsomely not only in places where it is known to have a strong base, such as religious-minded Hebron, but also in Ramallah, regarded as a bastion of secular Palestinian nationalists and leftists.

The lesson of this history is that the “problem” represented by Gaza – and Hamas – cannot be tackled in isolation, but only through a serious, sustained renewal of an Israeli–Palestinian peace process. That is a tall order. The constellation of mutually reinforcing obstacles is quite daunting.

The Palestinian polity is hopelessly disunited. Yet it is difficult to deny the argument made by Hamas specialists Beverley Milton-Edwards and Alastair Crooke that “a meaningful and inclusive Palestinian national unity is necessary for a negotiated peace” between Israel and the Palestinians. As a political actor Hamas is too significant to be ignored, marginalised or suppressed, and at the same time the “inclusion” of Hamas is fraught with complications. The possibility of indirect inclusion via the good offices of a third-party intermediary such as Turkey has receded for the time being after the flotilla fiasco and the sharp downturn in Turkish–Israeli relations. It is certain, however, that the formulaic distinction made by many influential Israelis and Americans between (acceptable) Fatah “moderates” and (unacceptable) Hamas “extremists” is a recipe for continuing deadlock.

The problem of Palestinian disunity is reinforced by the very pronounced rightward shift of the centre of gravity of Israel’s polity since the early years of the Oslo process. This shift is exemplified among many other developments by the progression from Shimon Peres to Tzipi Livni and then to Avigdor Lieberman in Israel’s foreign ministry. As for Binyamin Netanyahu, it remains to be established whether he has evolved since his previous term as Israel’s prime minister (1996–99), when he was privately described by a British ambassador to Tel Aviv as “a drunk who lurches from one lamp-post to the next.” Sixteen summers ago, it seemed feasible that Rabin and Arafat – both towering figures amongst their own peoples – would be able to deliver a lasting Israeli–Palestinian rapprochement. Harbouring such hopes with Netanyahu and Abu Mazen – lightweights presiding over deeply factionalised polities – would stretch the imagination of a fantasist. The demoralisation and disarray on the Israeli left looks unlikely to abate in the near future, and the appearance of Marwan Barghouti as a Palestinian Gerry Adams remains just a gleam on the horizon.

The geopolitics of the wider region is also challenging. The Israel–Syria antagonism cannot be mended without a resolution of the Golan Heights issue. Lebanon’s internal equilibrium is fragile, and the summer 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel a recent, ominous memory. The paranoia – partly feigned but partly real – among Israel’s political and security establishments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions is an additional source of tension and intransigence. The seriousness of the “Iran factor” has been aggravated by Iran’s internal, and unresolved, turmoil since the disputed presidential election of June 2009. The image of Iranian aid ships attempting to run Israel’s Gaza blockade is exactly the kind of picture the world’s television screens can do without.

“Only a dispassionate, fair and impartial arbiter,” according to the scholar Rashid Khalidi, “can help bring the two sides to mutually acceptable terms.” He believes that “if there is to be peace between Palestinians and Israelis the United States must begin to act in this fashion, or it must allow another [third] party to do so.”

There is clearly no plausible third party other than the United States that could possibly play a substantive role to disentangle this stalemate. At the same time, the limits to American influence with Israel became apparent in March 2010, when the United States fired a calculated – if only verbal – warning shot across Israel’s bows after an Israeli announcement of further housing for Israelis in East Jerusalem coincided with Vice-President Biden’s visit to the Jewish state and the West Bank, and the Israeli government reacted in the manner of a cornered bulldog. Will George Mitchell, the US special envoy for the Middle East – a far bigger brief than the one he creditably handled in the second half of the 1990s as the US special envoy for Northern Ireland – be able to make a difference? Can the Obama administration, disengaging from Iraq but bogged down in Afghanistan, rise to the challenge? Time will surely tell, but the portents are not promising. •

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THE NOW-ANNUAL Palestinian Film Festival ran last weekend in Sydney, and moves on to Melbourne and Adelaide. For most sessions in Sydney, the cinema in Leichhardt was packed; attendances were greatly increased since last year – evidence, perhaps, of significantly shifting consciousness.

The last item in the program was, you’d have to say, cinematically sparse; but the queue went down the stairs and out into the street. Edward Said: The Last Interview is just two hours of one man talking; with punctuating fades and cutaways to the interviewer, movements in and out on face and figure, but virtually no changes of camera position on the subject. The critic and activist was interviewed only months before his death from leukemia in September 2003; he was pale and gaunt, but absolutely lucid, plain-spoken and passionate. The audience was held fast while he canvassed some of the issues in his own story, a Palestinian Arab born in Egypt in 1935, to well-placed Christian parents; exiled in America, from age fifteen, for the sake of his education; eventually a critic and teacher of classical European literature, a member of the American and international academic establishment; musician, music critic, fighter and spokesman for the Palestinian cause.

What emerged, dynamically, was the way the tensions among those identities have to do with the constant to and fro of his thinking, both as it is elaborated in prose and as it came over in the film. As he responds to his interviewer, Charles Glass, Said’s opposition to the Occupation and his support for the right of the Palestinians to living space in their lands are fundamental; they are given; but at the same time he won’t condemn Zionism outright, knowing too much about the complexities of its history. Nor will he defend nationalism of any kind, nor support the much-canvassed two-state solution: in the face of the Occupation and all its cruelty, he still wants to see Palestinians and Israelis sharing their country, learning to live together. (He’s not the only Middle Eastern intellectual to argue this way; vide Ilan Pappe’s History of Israel–Palestine.) At the same time, in fighting the Occupation and the expansion of settlements on the West Bank, Said gives no houseroom to the compromised Oslo accords, and leaves the late Chairman Arafat without a feather to fly with.

Along the way, he revisits the strange position of literature and literary criticism in anti-imperial and postcolonial struggles, and looks back at his own essays on Joseph Conrad – who, like him, had to negotiate several identities – and especially on Heart of Darkness. He also finds words for an area where, for many of us, language fails: his experience of music. In all this something very curious is happening; intellectual processes become a set of cinematic events for a cinema audience. (As they do, but differently, in the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who has said that “anything whatever can be filmed” – including philosophic and political abstractions.)

And this wasn’t a captive audience; according to the festival’s organisers, only a minority of those who answer their surveys identify as Palestinian; many are of local Lebanese families, Muslim, Christian and secular; and a good many more are ourselves, ordinary Anglo-Australian moviegoers. For all of them and us, the festival presents a map of Palestine – and Israel–Palestine – which you won’t be getting from the mainstream media. In one film after another, documentary and fiction, the checkpoints are there, the banked up traffic, the irrational bureaucratic obstructions. In Pomegranates and Myrrh, a pretty romantic drama, the bridegroom is badly held up on the way to the wedding; in a stark half-hour animation, Fatenah – based, they said, on a true story – a young woman in urgent need of breast cancer treatment is fatally delayed.

On audience demand, the festival screened again a marvellous documentary from last year, Slingshot Hip Hop, in which teenage music groups bop and rap their way from innocence into politics as they find out how long it can take, for example, to get a group from one end of Gaza to the other (eight checkpoints). Invited to share a major concert with other groups in the West Bank, the Gaza group can’t make it; with great difficulty, negotiating the Wall, the boys who live inside Israel manage to get there. Parents are seen supporting the kids; however alien they find the pounding music, they still understand that this cultural pursuit (“another kind of resistance”) is better than throwing rocks. A girl singer is shown in double resistance – against her family’s notions of her feminine role, and then, with the boys, against the Israeli authorities. Their project carries them beyond their first intentions; they and it are transformed. This little movie should get around; it’s an ultimate anti-depressant.

One feature film, Elia Suleiman’s The Time that Remains, is a fine autobiographical meditation on the eminent director Suleiman’s own life, his parents’ and Palestinian history since 1948. Seen at the beginning of the program, it connects in retrospect with Said’s thinking at the end, when he says that while the Occupation continues there can be no conciliation, no meaningful peace process. It’s not only the violence (in both directions), the irrational degrees of surveillance, but also the indignities constantly inflicted. The film that most completely unfolds the situation (and one that had a good few people reaching for the Kleenex) is the great documentary essay, The Heart of Jenin. When that town comes under fire Ahmed, a six-year-old boy, is killed. After only a little hesitation his parents agree that his organs, the symbolic heart included, should be given to Israeli children whose lives may thereby be saved. A year and a half later Ahmed’s father, Ismail, goes travelling through Israel to visit the young beneficiaries. This involves struggling at checkpoints to explain his errand to completely unsympathetic functionaries, and in one case facing hardline Zionist parents who are most reluctant to credit his humanity. See it if you can – and send the DVD to politicians who need straightening out on Israel–Palestine; I think those may include the prime minister. •

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