Perhaps nothing better illustrates the perverse, self-propagating logic of open-ended military campaigns as the fact that an episode which began with four kidnapped teenagers (three Israeli, and one Palestinian in revenge) has now resulted in such carnage: grave damage to Gaza’s Shujaiyeh neighbourhood, the death of over 500 Palestinians (a disturbing number of them civilians), and more Israeli troop causalities than in the previous two Gaza wars combined.
Israel’s stated aim of “restoring deterrence” is nebulous and elastic, and by definition can only be evaluated after any war comes to a conclusion. At first, restoring deterrence required degrading Hamas’s rocket stockpiles from the air; the target set then expanded to senior Hamas leaders; then it progressed to the destruction of tunnels on the fringes of Gaza; and, in the past days, it has spread closer to the tightly packed heart of the coastal strip. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it, “this battle is almost on the scale of the Lebanon War”, referring to the massive 2006 war between the IDF and Hizbollah.
Eleven days ago, discussing the paucity of possible mediators, I warned that "unless someone steps up, Israel and Hamas could find themselves hurtling into a wider war that neither truly wants". This is precisely what has happened. Those with leverage over the combatants have shown themselves to be every bit as useless as I feared.
Although US President Barack Obama has called for an “immediate ceasefire”, and US Secretary of State John Kerry was caught on tape sarcastically criticising Israel (“It's a hell of a pinpoint operation. We've got to get over there. I think we ought to go tonight. I think it's crazy to be sitting around”), Washington has been unpardonably slow to act. There is no sign that the White House did anything to caution Israel against escalation, and only today - Monday - has Kerry travelled to Cairo.
The three key regional actors here - Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, in order of importance - are all major US allies and significant beneficiaries of American largesse. But there are complications in each case.
Qatar is home to Hamas’s political chief, Khaled Meshaal, and a longtime financial backer of Hamas. But its financial aid to the group seems to have dwindled recently, under pressure from Qatar’s more conservative Gulf rivals, such as Saudi Arabia, who strongly oppose Doha’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood (which, incidentally, parented Hamas in the late 1980s).
Turkey has also supported Hamas. In October 2012, Meshal received a standing ovation at the ruling Justice and Development Party’s National Congress, and he visited Ankara again in March and October last year. On the latter occasion, he met Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan for three hours, and Turkey’s foreign minister and intelligence chief both sat in on the meeting. Although Turkey has been trying to normalise relations with Israel since they fell apart in 2010 after Israel’s assault on a flotilla bound for Gaza, relations are still strained. Netanyahu has refused to sign a normalisation agreement. Last week’s attacks on Israel’s consulate in Istanbul made things worse, and on Friday Erdogan even accused Israel of “systematic genocide” in Gaza (he added, in characteristically conspiratorial fashion, that the UN was “serving whatever their secret agenda is”). Needless to say, Turkish diplomats are not especially welcome in Jerusalem.
But for exactly these reasons, Hamas sees Qatar and Turkey as more honest brokers than most - and, in particular, more so than Egypt, which has turned viciously on Hamas since the rise of a military-backed government led by former army chief Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. Sisi has been overseeing a brutal campaign of repression against the Muslim Brotherhood at home - whose elected President, Mohammed Morsi, he deposed last year - and sees Hamas as similarly dangerous. Saudi Arabia and the UAE tend to agree, and, like Israel, would much rather see Egypt in the driver’s seat than Qatar.
At the urging of Tony Blair (of all people) last week, Sisi called Netanyahu to discuss a ceasefire - but he did not speak with Hamas. Egypt is naturally central to talks and a ceasefire because it controls the key underground and overground land routes into southern Gaza, and its intelligence services are long accustomed to broking deals (as they did in 2012). But its credibility with Hamas is at an all-time low, and diplomacy is a multiplayer game.
There are other, lesser players in all this too. Over the weekend, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, were both in Doha for talks - but the PA, which rules in the occupied West Bank, has no real sway in Gaza at this point. Its pronouncements are just hot air.
Put all this together, and it is clear that that mythical entity, “the international community”, is really just a collection of squabbling, parochial-minded actors playing out their own petty rivalries while Gaza burns. This is a case study in disjointed and immature diplomacy.
What we must recognise is that diplomacy requires mediators who have the trust of each warring party. In this case, no one such mediator exists, and therefore the imperative is to bring together all of the would-be arbitrators in a more structured process. Only the US can fulfil this role.
Mr Kerry is right. It is “crazy” to be “sitting around”, while he might have been convening a working group of officials from Qatar, Turkey, Egypt and the UN who could talk to their respective interlocutors from Israel and Hamas, find possible ways to break the impasse, and apply real and meaningful pressure to each side. If such an effort had been undertaken right from the outset - and not after hundreds of civilians have been killed - then we might have averted this pointless spiral of war that we find ourselves in.
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