No Room for Wishful Thinking in Gaza

The slaughter continues in Gaza as both Israel and Hamas demonstrate that they are prepared to fight all the way to the last drop of innocent blood.  Behind all the rhetoric of concern for civilians hopelessly trapped in a conflict zone from which there can be no escape, they continue to act with reckless and deadly abandon.

If any solution is ever to be found to this seemingly intractable conflict some unpalatable truths have to be faced.

Like it or not, Israeli strategy will forever be dictated by the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. This means that, ultimately,  Israel will never trust anyone other than itself to protect its citizens and it will do anything it considers necessary to establish what it considers to be defensible borders.  In the final analysis it would prefer nuclear conflagration to defeat. Any attempt to solve the Israel/Palestine problem that ignores these facts is pure fantasy.  

Hamas arose as an Islamist movement, seeking to establish a fundamentalist form of Islam across Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.  Article 7 of its founding Covenant states: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’  By anyone’s standards, this is uncompromising stuff.

What hope is there, then for the people of Gaza, understandably driven in large numbers into the arms of Hamas through years of hardship and humiliation at the hands of Israel, abandoned and discarded by Egypt? There is a terrible possibility that there is no hope for them at all; the best that can be expected is a lull in hostilities before the slaughter begins again……and again. Israel will not release its stranglehold and Hamas will not stop its attacks, both remaining ideologically, militarily and politically wedded to their mutually irreconcilable goals.

To abandon the people of Gaza to this fate is, however, unthinkable. Regional and world leaders are well aware of the environment in which any settlement might be brokered and they ought to bend every effort to this effect. In the meantime, ‘ordinary’ people can demonstrate at every opportunity their rejection both of Israeli tactics that result in the slaughter of innocent people and Hamas’ willingness to use Palestinians as little more than pawns in their war on Israel.

Peace-seeking Israeli and Palestinian individuals and groups do exist and can be supported and encouraged with minimal effort by anyone with access to the internet.  This might seem like a drop in the ocean, but surely that is better than abandoning hope and accepting (or even colluding in) a single drop of innocent blood being shed