All wars lead to increased hatred, but the war in Gaza, though small in military terms, has probably provoked more hatred than any conflict since 1945.
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 ceasefire, set to take effect on Sunday, is fragile and is unlikely to be fully implemented without massive US backing.
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.
It has been a war fought by massacre, first by Hamas in its attack on Israel which killed 1,200 Israelis on 7 October, 2023, and then by Israel over the following months, during which at least 46,000 Palestinians have been killed.
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.”
Milton, who had been through the English Civil War, understood this in a way that Joe Biden and his senior officials have not. The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, recently gave a self-congratulatory interview in which he said that the administration had largely achieved its goals of preventing another 7 October attack on Israel, stopping a regional war and protecting civilians in Gaza.
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.
Biden’s ability to have stopped the war at any time is confirmed by the fact that today’s peace deal is much the same as the one he proposed last May and rejected by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
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.
The tragedy is that this could have happened eight months, if not a year ago, and tens of thousands of people would still be alive and uninjured.
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.
Pundits will now draw up lists of winners and losers from the Gaza war, though it is by no means over. In the Israel-Palestinian conflict there is always another round because, whenever the fighting stops, there will still be seven million Palestinians and seven million Israeli Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. If Hamas disappeared tomorrow, as it shows no sign of doing, this would remain the case.
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
Hamas claims that its aim on 7 October was to prevent the Palestinian issue from being forgotten or ignored at a time when the US was seeking a security agreement between Israel, Saudi Arabia and itself. The massacre was devastatingly successful in proving that the Palestinian question is at the centre of Middle East politics, though at horrendous cost to ordinary Palestinians. It disproved Netanyahu’s mantra during his quarter century dominance of Israeli politics that Israel need not compromise with the Palestinians and still have security.
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.
The political landscape of the Middle East has been changed dramatically in favour of Israel and the US and against Iran and Russia.
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.
What we are seeing in the Middle East is enhanced Israeli military capability, but also a power vacuum in Syria and Lebanon which Israel cannot fill. The region is far more dangerously unstable than when Biden came into office. Trump may want a security pact between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. But arbitrary governments defended by merciless secret police forces still have to pay some attention to public opinion.
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.
The prolonged blood bath in Gaza has had a toxic impact on attitudes towards Israel everywhere in the world. A YouGov poll last July showed that only 8 to 14 per cent of West Europeans thought that Israel had not committed war crimes in Gaza. Some 54 per cent in Britain thought that the International Criminal Cort should issue an arrest warrant against Netanyahu. In the US, a more recent YouGov poll shows that of the 19 million who voted for Biden in 2020 but not for Kamala Harris in 2024, 29 per cent cited Gaza as their main reason for not supporting her.
For Israel, its Gaza campaign has been a military walkover – but a self-inflicted political catastrophe.
Further Thoughts
One of the most important, but too little commented-on, feature of political life in the UK is the great vacuum of information that has developed about what is happening in the country at a local level.
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.
Once a big chunk of the population of greater London, currently nine million people, read the Evening Standard or the Evening News or both, but no longer. Nothing has really replaced them online or off. Cities big and small all had their own newspapers, which reinforced their identity. These have now disappeared or are a shadow of their former selves.
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.
I have been going around the country writing 2,000 word essays illustrated by my son Henry about what is happening in towns, cities and counties such as Canterbury, Dover, Newcastle, Blyth, Herefordshire and Salford. I try to find a person or persons who are well plugged into local communities and who can introduce me to the widest possible range of well-informed people to interview. I find this fascinating and rather inspiring because it turns out that there are so many in England – we have not yet gone to the other UK nations – who are deeply knowledgeable and have nuanced opinions about local and national developments.
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.
I hope at some point that this great void or vacuum of news will be filled, but when and how this is to be done remains wholly unclear.
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.
Understandably, he is having some last-minute nerves before making his assault and wonders whether it might not be better to go for a ceasefire or peace deal with the Almighty. On further reflection, however, he decides that the level of hate induced by the recent war, which he lost and after which he was cast into hell along with his defeated legions, is too great – besides, whatever he promised to do, he would certainly rebel again.
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
After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, there was a great flood of news providers into Damascus, but I am not sure that their reports made us much the wiser. Many were visibly at sea when it came to describing the impact of regime change on Syria’s complex mosaic of religious and ethnic communities, though relations between them and their foreign backers will decide if the country faces more wars or will relapse into an uneasy peace.
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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