The Guardian view on... a futile war in Gaza

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/21/guardian-view-futile-war-gaza

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The worst thing about the fighting in Gaza and the dismal toll of civilian casualties each day brings is that this battle is not really about military objectives, but about prestige, pride and national self-image. If you were to ask how these justify the deaths of women and children or, for that matter, uniformed soldiers, the answer would be that they do not, but that this is how violence is so often driven in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

The intention is to achieve a psychological dominance over the opponent and an unchallenged command over your own constituency. Both Israel's super-modern military and Hamas's poor-man's army perform less in a theatre of war than in a theatre for their own inhabitants, seeming to have to prove, again and again, that they are the champions of their respective peoples. In all the years they have been swooping over the border like useless fireworks, the primitive rockets that Hamas fires at Israel have killed hardly anybody. They scare people, close supermarkets, disrupt business and increase insurance premiums. Of course it is hard to live under even a remote threat, and the damage done to young children especially should not be underestimated. But this is not the blitz, or anything like it.

What is true of the rockets is equally true of a newer threat, the Hamas tunnels dug to funnel raiding parties into Israeli territory. These raiders have, except in the case in 2006 when an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped, almost always been intercepted and killed, usually with no losses on the Israeli side.

The tunnels have not justified the huge cost in labour and building materials which Hamas has invested in them. From a rational Israeli point of view, it would be better to let Hamas go on wasting its time with tunnels while perfecting ways of spotting the raiders than to crash into Gaza in full strength to destroy the underground network physically. But this is unfortunately not a rational argument. Israeli doctrine, as it has come to operate, lays down that any threat to the populace, however small, must be met by overwhelming force. Israeli politics punishes leaders who ignore this principle. Hamas, similarly, had no military reason for going to war. But it was slipping politically, having lost its Egyptian patron and its other allies. It had been forced into a government of national unity with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, with a promise of financial help and the prospect of a lifting of Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on trade.

Israel could have seen the new government, a potentially useful consequence of the failure of secretary of state John Kerry's efforts to broker a peace settlement, as an opportunity to contain Hamas politically. Having the PLO back in Gaza would have been a much better way of stopping the rockets and the tunnels than a military campaign. Instead, Israel opposed the reconciliation government, and then used the abduction and murder of three yeshiva students as a pretext for a roundup of Hamas people in the West Bank. Hamas saw itself cornered with no way out except to fight.

Hamas took on Israel militarily in the hope of a ceasefire which would bring in money, lift the restrictions, and above all show Gazans that it could still defend their interests.

This terrible little war, largely pointless in its political aims and cruel beyond words on civilians, must be ended quickly. John Kerry, recognising the urgency of the situation, has flown to the Middle East. He has an even more complicated task than after earlier Gaza clashes. For a start, Egypt is no longer trusted by Hamas as a mediator, yet its agreement is vital if movement is to be restored on the Sinai border. The Palestinians want Qatar or Turkey instead. Then, in parallel with work on a ceasefire, there need to be negotiations between Hamas and the PLO to restore their strained unity government, while Israel needs to fundamentally reconsider its hostile attitude to such a government. Unless there is a broader agreement, the rockets and the tunnels will sooner or later reappear. And then it will be time for another war.

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