A recurring cycle of futile violence

There is another cycle of violence unleashed between the Israel military and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, with Israeli forces bombarding the Palestinian towns on the pretext of targeting the militants’ bases and in the process killing more civilians – including women and children – and also damaging homes and hospitals, while rockets are being fired, and they say it is in retaliation, at Jerusalem and other places. So far, 30 Palestinians have been killed and on the other side two Israelis. And each side says that it will not stop unless the other does. That made truce difficult.

And it seems all major international powers, including the United States, the European Union (EU) are busy dealing with the war in Ukraine with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visiting Italy and Germany, seeking military aid, even as Palestinian civilians are trapped in their towns, some of them sick with serious ailments like cancer but denied access to Jerusalem because the Israelis have blockaded the movement of the people into Israel from Gaza. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has already condemned Israeli for escalating violence and “growing instability in the region.” The use of disproportionate use of force by Israel has been a counterproductive strategy in dealing with the Palestinians, and the leaders in Tel Aviv refuse to accept the futility of use of force. The only way out of the trap of violence for Israel is to talk to the Palestinian groups sitting across the table, and abandon some of its tough posturing because it leads nowhere.

For three decades since the Oslo Accords, successive Israeli governments adopted the obdurate stance that they would not yield an inch on any of the issues agreed upon in Oslo, including the dismantling of the West Bank settlements by Israeli zealots which has only made the problem more insoluble than ever. Most of the Israeli political parties, and especially those belonging to the hard right like Likud and other orthodox Jewish parties, depend on the West Bank Jewish settlers as a vote-bank. Both the Americans and the Europeans have proved to be ineffective mediators because they refuse to take a stance on the humanitarian crisis of the people of Palestinians. The precondition that the Palestinians should cease their hostilities towards Israel will make sense only when Israeli leaders get into talks with the Palestinian representatives without preconditions. It cannot be the case that Palestinians have to prove their “good behaviour” for a long enough time before the Israeli leaders will reward them by loosening restrictions on the movement of the people, and they would not even deign to hold talks with the Palestinian leaders. And Israeli leaders will have to talk to all the groups including the militants if need be, and they will have to show their willingness to facilitate progress in negotiations. Israel cannot use talks as a delaying tactic because then it would make the fragile talks untenable and the frustrated Palestinian youth would go back to their suicidal ways of waging a war against Israel which they know they can never win.

The fight between the Palestinians and Israelis is an unequal one because Israel is a militarised state with a defence budget that is vastly bigger than the finances available to Palestinians even to survive. This is very unlike the war between Ukraine and Russia where Ukraine is getting unlimited military aid from the US and EU. The solution is not the arming of the Palestinians so that they can stand up to Israel because that will lead to a full-scale war that will worsen the situation between Israel and Palestine. It is therefore necessary for the Americans, who have been trying to reconcile Israel with its Gulf Arab states, to impress upon the Israeli leadership that it cannot keep a negotiated peace with Palestinians for ever on the backburner.