Desire for revenge renders any short-term mechanism of peace-making in Gaza unrealistic

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.” President JF Kennedy’s words resonate through the ages. We witnessed this in the anti-apartheid conflict, from which we were saved through a political settlement that saw Nelson Mandela elected as South Africa’s first democratic president. The escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine is not likely to end in a similar way.     

The brutal Hamas terror attack on Israel is unprecedented, while the definitive response of Israel was to be expected. Unable to resist the temptation of an eye for an eye, violence is met with violence, leaving the fundamental cause of the conflict unaddressed.

Caught between demands for revenge by Israeli citizens and demands by advocates of human rights to protect civilians in Gaza raises an insurmountable problem for the Netanyahu government. Without restraint in dealing with non-combatants, which includes people opposed to Hamas, the support that exists for Israel in the West could turn into widespread condemnation.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Gaza Strip — history of densely populated enclave is critical to understanding current conflict

Tony Judt, the author of Postwar and several other publications, suggests that the State of Israel faces three unattractive choices in the conflict with Palestine.

One: Israel can dismantle its Jewish settlements and return to its pre-1967 borders, which will perpetuate the question of the status of second-class Arab citizens in the Jewish State.

Two: Israel can pay the price of formally annexing the occupied territories in the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza, which will make the Arab population a demographic majority within an extended Israel.

Three: Israel can maintain military control of the occupied territories and face the hard reality of Palestinian resistance, settler insurrection and ultra-Orthodox Jewish revolts.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine conflict could dangerously amplify local political tensions

Evidence further suggests that politically aware young Israelis in Israel, the United States and Europe, are increasingly reluctant to pay the price accepted by earlier generations of settlers. The Oslo Accords signed in 1993 and 1995 are, at the same time, being seen as both politically and economically unviable as political tensions intensify in the region.

The desire for revenge that prevails in the wake of the Hamas attack renders a viable mechanism of peace-making in Israel-Palestine quite unrealistic. New and old scores are waiting to be settled. This requires governance in Israel that extends beyond the limited powers allocated to the newly formed unity government, as well as civic education and social engineering that favours peaceful coexistence in the interregnum between conflict and the pursuit of a new future.

Israel and the United States are rallying forces against Hamas and its allies, while the Palestinian Authority and grassroots Palestinians have, to date, shown restraint in their response to the actions of the Israeli state.

The cleavages in the Middle East, Levant and Asia are, at the same time, intensifying as the United States supports rapprochement between Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and several other Arab states, who share a concern to ensure a stable Israel as a basis for extending trade and mutual prosperity.

Those countries that carry the scars of colonialism and repression in their identities, (which, inter alia, include South Africa and sectors of Ireland) on the other hand support the Palestinian cause. The net outcome is a context that lends itself to the horror of further conflict and dirty wars.

The intense suffering in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank has the capacity to spill over into religious hatred in the West. More ominous is the possibility of holy war between fundamentalist Islam, dogmatic Zionism, and right-wing fundamentalist Christianity, as reflected in the massing of Shiite Muslim Hezbollah (“Party of God”) troops on the Lebanese border that threatens to open a second front to the Israeli war.

Peaceful resistance, fuelled by intensified repression, is the womb of violent revolution that violence cannot suppress. Even if the central structures of Hamas are dismantled and its leaders eliminated, Hamas and similar movements will revive themselves and probably be augmented by additional movements, in pursuit of ends first identified 75 years ago.

Sadly, without a new global leadership, including that of Israel and Palestine, the barometer of realism bends away from peaceful coexistence towards intensified unrest and violence in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. DM