Hamas sees the piti­less waste of Pales­tin­ian lives as glo­ri­ous. Israelis believe they are con­fronting an exis­ten­tial threat that must be elim­i­nat­ed at any cost. In the end, nei­ther will be able to claim a defin­able mil­i­tary or moral vic­to­ry in Gaza. But all is not yet lost.

When the slaugh­ter and destruc­tion are over, the belea­guered, bat­tered, des­per­ate and inno­cent civil­ians of Gaza will have no rea­son to love or trust Hamas or Israel, which they nev­er real­ly had anyway.
And there­in lies a tiny crack through which a plan, or at least an idea, out­line, roadmap or what­ev­er term comes to hand, just may be able to slip. It will require con­dem­na­tion in pro­por­tion­ate mea­sure, from their foes and sup­port­ers alike, of the excess­es and poten­tial war crimes of both Hamas and Israel.
That should be easy.
The gen­er­al guide­lines for a “just war or cause” include right intent, legit­i­mate author­i­ty, net ben­e­fit or like­li­hood of suc­cess, last resort, pro­por­tion­al­i­ty of means and non­com­bat­ant distinction.
On avail­able evi­dence, nei­ther side has a strong case for claim­ing the mantle.
In mil­i­tary terms, Hamas had no rea­son to believe it could win the war it start­ed. In moral and polit­i­cal terms, its motives were exe­crable: a hope that ‘the state of war with Israel will become per­ma­nent on all the borders…”
Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu summed up Israel’s aims and case thus: “There will be no Hamas. There will be no civil­ian author­i­ty that edu­cates their chil­dren to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to destroy the state of Israel.”
There doesn’t have to be, Israel is all but writ­ing the cur­ricu­lum for inter-gen­er­a­tional Pales­tin­ian rage and cat­alyz­ing recruit­ment for extrem­ist groups across the region for years to come.
Hamas killed 1200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage.
At the time of writ­ing Israel has killed ten times that many peo­ple in Gaza, main­ly civil­ians, the major­i­ty women and chil­dren, and held thou­sands more hostage to the for­tunes of war, includ­ing hos­pi­tal patients. A huge pro­por­tion of Gaza’s infra­struc­ture has been reduced to rubble.
Alleged­ly that was the result of “sur­gi­cal strikes”, a com­fort­ing phrase unless you’re in the vicin­i­ty of one. Then you need to take com­fort from the phrase “col­lat­er­al dam­age”, which is no com­fort at all.

                  “THEY DID IT FIRST”                   

Blam­ing Hamas for  hid­ing among, behind and beneath civil­ians is not with­out jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. It does so using the cyn­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion that every wound­ed, maimed or dead civil­ian is in essence a weapon for them on the bat­tle­field for  inter­na­tion­al sympathy.
And it’s working.
By seem­ing to put no more val­ue on pro­tect­ing civil­ians than Hamas does, Israel puts itself in the same camp as its enemy.
If this quote attrib­uted to “a senior Israeli mil­i­tary offi­cial with access to sen­si­tive intel­li­gence” is accu­rate, the  Israelis have no excuse for play­ing Hamas’ game: “They were very clear-eyed as to what would hap­pen to Gaza on the day after. They want­ed to buy their place in his­to­ry — a place in the his­to­ry of jihad — at the expense of the lives of many peo­ple in Gaza.”
As the BBC’s ven­er­a­ble Inter­na­tion­al Edi­tor Jere­my Bowen wrote this week, the Israelis run two clocks in a war: “One is mil­i­tary: how long do they need before they accom­plish their mil­i­tary objec­tives? The oth­er is diplo­mat­ic: how long does Israel hold legit­i­ma­cy to car­ry out that oper­a­tion before its allies say, “you’ve killed enough peo­ple, civil­ians, you need to stop now please.”
There is evi­dence from hard­en­ing posi­tions in Wash­ing­ton and the cap­i­tals of oth­er friends of Israel that the moral break­ing point is close.
It needs to be backed up by a firm com­mit­ment to sup­ply a gen­uine­ly neu­tral force to pro­vide an even-hand­ed but firm secu­ri­ty force for Gaza, but­tressed by a clear com­mit­ment to cut off aid to Israel if it allows any more set­tler vio­lence against Pales­tini­ans in the occu­pied West Bank, along with an end to set­tle­ment expansion.
Whether that can be done will piv­ot on Israel’s friends hav­ing the back­bone to make it clear to a new crop of Pales­tin­ian lead­ers and a more sen­si­ble Israeli gov­ern­ment, that will hope­ful­ly replace Netanyahu and his coali­tion coterie of reli­gious zealots (who have more in com­mon with Hamas than they recog­nise), that the world has had more than enough of the intran­si­gence and will­ful self-destruc­tive­ness that has been the norm in their lit­tle patch of sand that is sup­posed to be the Holy Land of the mutu­al god they worship.
To put it sim­ply: the time has well and tru­ly arrived for them to make a seri­ous effort to share it equi­tably, and in peace.
But that, of course and alas, requires a com­mod­i­ty that so far has been as rare as com­pas­sion from either of the pro­tag­o­nists – prag­mat­ic real­ism.
Just ask the civil­ians of Gaza.

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