Despite the Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas agreed this week, the 15-month war has injected such a heavy dose of poisonous hate into relations between Israel and the Palestinians that it guarantees a future determined solely by violence.
The savagery of the conflict has been grotesque and remained so up to the last moment, with 101 people in Gaza, including 27 children and 31 women, killed and 264 injured by Israeli strikes since the agreement was announced on Wednesday, according to the civil defence agency in Gaza.
Western politicians and pundits are now debating the chances of the second and third phases of the ceasefire being agreed and implemented. But such a deal, if it happens at all, will be very unsteady and built on blood-soaked sand. The great English poet, John Milton, explained why this is inevitable 350 years ago in Paradise Lost, writing that the fierce hatred inspired by war makes hope of compromise unrealistic: “For never can true reconcilement grow/ Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.”
Vague but tough words
Blinken’s naivety is dangerous. By refusing to use US leverage on Israel – through controlling the supply of weapons – the Biden administration allowed the Israeli war machine to do its destructive worst. It has been the cruellest of wars and it will undermine the chances for any real peace. Biden and Blinken sound detached from reality as they make their valedictory speeches. So far from preventing future atrocities like 7 October, they have made them more likely.
Yet as soon as it received the determined backing of the president-elect, Donald Trump, who spoke some vague but tough words and dispatched an envoy that refused to be pushed around by Netanyahu, Israeli objections turned out not to be an obstacle.
It may seem surprising that so vociferously a pro-Israeli politician as Trump should pressure Israel into a ceasefire. But what we have seen over the past few days is a return to traditional American policy, displayed in previous Israel-Palestinian wars, with the US both supporting and restraining Israel. In 1982, Ronald Reagan shouted down the phone at the then Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, telling him to stop bombarding Beirut.
Israel has successfully exerted its military power in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen, but, as in the past, it has difficulty in turning military victory into permanent political gains. An unachievable Israeli goal in the war was to eliminate Hamas, yet it has just agreed a ceasefire deal with this very same organisation. It claims to have weakened Hamas, a lightly armed militia, but its daily excuse for the appalling civilian death toll in Gaza caused by its bombardment is that it is targeting Hamas command centres, which would mean that they are as numerous now as when the war began.
Israeli air power
This is a century already shaped by war - and inadequate leaders
Read MoreNetanyahu may truthfully claim that he has made Israel more powerful in the Middle East than ever before, inflicting defeats on Hezbollah in Lebanon and indirectly helping to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Israeli air power has been striking freely at targets from Tehran to Sanaa in Yemen.
But Greater Israel is not exactly the new regional superpower. Its military successes depended on full and unprecedented American support. Under a mercurial Trump, who is averse to war – he started none in his first term – this US engagement may change.
Arabs and Muslims, along with the rest of the world, have just spent month after month looking at screens showing the broken bodies of Palestinian children being carried out of the ruins of Gaza. No Trump-sponsored Middle East security agreement will fly without Israeli concessions to the Palestinians.
For Israel, its Gaza campaign has been a military walkover – but a self-inflicted political catastrophe.
Further Thoughts
This is caused by the collapse of the provincial press because of the internet platforms taking away the advertising revenues, particularly the property and job advertisements, that once made local newspapers highly profitable.
At one time, the BBC pledged to provide this sort of local news but this service is being cut back. As a result, when there were anti-Muslim riots in a place like Plymouth last summer, it went almost entirely unreported.
But I am also struck by how little information I get about these places from the online local media, even where it survives. In less than a couple of decades, we have gone 200 years backwards in terms of publicly available information about local life.
The quote in the column above from Paradise Lost is from Book IV and it is Satan who is speaking. He is just about to infiltrate the Garden of Eden to do down humanity, God’s latest creation whom Satan has identified as a vulnerable target.
Overall, he shows a healthy sense of political realism and self-awareness. This would have kept him out of the Biden administration, and he sounds more like Trump’s type of person.
Cockburn’s Pick
A crucial question desperately difficult to resolve without violence will be how the two million strong Alawite Shia community, to which the Assad family belonged and which dominated the ruling elite in the army and civil administration, will be replaced by the majority Sunni Arabs.
The best-informed study I have read about what amounts to a social revolution is by the great French Syrian expert Fabrice Balanche. You can read it here.
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