Warum es Amerika nicht gelungen ist, einen Waffenstillstand zwischen Israel und der Hamas zu erreichen: Druck auf die Konfliktparteien auszuüben, funktioniert selten – und geht manchmal nach hinten los

A peace deal is always some sort of compromise. In this case, there is simply no compromise possible, given the stated and acted on policy goals of Hamas and Israel – namely, on the part of Hamas, to wind back the clock on the existence of Israel; and on the part of Israel, to eradicate Hamas as the ruling organization in Gaza. Hamas cannot give up its policy goal, because it is basic to the very existence of Hamas as an organization – its “selling point” to the Palestinians is that it promises to return them to their ancestral land – all of it – and never compromise this. Hamas has no interest in making a go of a “two” or “three state” solution whereby they would rule in Gaza, raise its standard of life, create a modern state, etc.

An additional difficulty is that Hamas is seen by Israel, and righty, as completely untrustworthy, and certain to use any “ceasefire” as simply a pause for regrouping and rearming, making the (inevitable) showdown more costly.

Meanwhile, Hamas’ only real hope is to muster Muslim allies to its cause – a hope that has, so far, generally failed, with the exception of Hezbollah and the Houthis lobbing missiles, something that, while it has displaced thousands of Israelis in the north, cannot pose an existential threat to Israel. However, the hope remains that, if Hamas can draw the conflict out long enough, perhaps Muslim world outrage may result in a better outcome – which seems unlikely.

What needs to happen is for another Palestinian organization to emerge that wants to create an independent Palestinian state – but decades of rhetoric are against this. The Palestinians as a people have largely been sold a vision that is completely beyond their powers – that Israel will somehow be made to give up and go away, in the way that other “foreign colonialists” have done in the past, like Crusaders or the French in Algeria. They are heavily encouraged in this by all sorts of outsiders – including the UN – and lots on the political left, who have dusted off the same tropes of “settler colonialism”. This is a direct encouragement to the Palestinian people to maintain the dream (of completely replacing the existing population of a nation stronger then them), sometimes lightly disguised in the form of pushing for a non-nationalistic nation that will unite the populations – which neither population actually wants.

Problem is, Israelis are unlike foreign colonialists in that they view themselves as indigenous and have nowhere to go. In fact, more than half of them are in ancestry from the Middle East (and have no intention of returning to places like Yemen, where they are likely to face a difficult fate). They are not going to simply give up and go home. Nor are they likely to accept a united nation with people who view their existence as illegitimate.

The only actual path forward to a compromise leading to a two (or three) state solution is to undo the pernicious notion that the Palestinians can undo to existence of Israel, if they only try hard enough or wait long enough. However, few have any interest in expressing this; for Palestinians, expressing this is actively dangerous. It is this notion that lies at the heart of all the other problems – frustration with Palestinian denialism has undermined the political left within Israel, allowing hard liners with no interest in compromise to succeed there (and encouraging those hard liners to keep chipping away at the remaining Palestinian Territories with “settlers”, which predictably enough keeps Palestinians rightfully furious – the hard liners simply don’t care, because making Palestinians angry or not has the same outcome).

The organization that ought to take up the torch of pragmatism (versus the utopian impossibilities proposed by Hamas) ought to be the PA. However, the PA lacks legitimacy, is widely seen as corrupt, dictatorial, and doubtfully committed to a legitimate peace deal – again, the problem is the very widespread faith on the part of the Palestinians themselves that some sort of reversal of fortune may see them back in their ancestral lands.