The cause that won’t go away: Latest conflict shows Palestine is back on the international agenda

Despite diplomatic efforts to sideline the Palestinian issue in recent years, this week’s violence shows it is as important as ever, writes Patrick Cockburn

Israeli soldiers fire a 155mm self-propelled howitzer towards targets in the Gaza Strip from their position near the western Israeli city of Sderot (AFP via Getty Images)

The most important long-term outcome of the latest hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians is already clear: Palestine is back as an important issue on the international agenda.

The events of this week show that Donald Trump’s pro-Israeli initiatives, such as moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, made very little difference to the real situation on the ground.

“The idea that there was a decisive shift of power to Israel from the Palestinians [during the Trump era] turns out to be wrong,” says Daniel Levy, an Israeli political scientist and former diplomat who is president of the US-Middle East Project. “The belief that the Palestinians would have to accept permanent second-class status is being shown to be mistaken.”

The balance of political and military power remains vastly in favour of Israel, but the last four years – when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, got everything that he wanted from the White House – has produced very little in real political gain.

The hope of the Trump administration, shared by many western and Arab governments, that the Palestinians were a defeated people who could at long last be safely marginalised and ignored, has turned out to be demonstrably false.

The spin and hype in Israel surrounding these moves probably contributed to a mood of hubris that led to the authorities overplaying their hand.

Mr Levy says signs of this arrogance include the fast expansion of Israeli settlements, the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem, and the Israeli police’s overreaction to Palestinian protests by throwing stun grenades and using teargas in al-Aqsa.

“The Palestinians had the gumption and courage not to roll over,” he says.

Any threat to al-Aqsa has always united the Palestinians as nothing else does.

This could be seen this week as protests took place among the 2 million Israeli Arabs who make up 20 per cent of the population of Israel. There have been demonstrations and violence between Jews and Arabs in such Israeli towns as Lod, Ramle and Acre.

Mourners carry the body of Majd Abu Saadahthe, a Palestinian killed in an Israeli airstike, during his funeral in the town of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip (AFP via Getty Images)

Yet the Palestinian position remains very weak and not only because Israel is a strong state with powerful allies.

Hamas may increase its popularity among Palestinians and Arabs by firing rockets at Israel, but it is isolated and is militarily greatly overmatched by Israel. Meanwhile, the president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who enjoys truncated municipal powers on the West Bank, once again postponed elections at the end of April. He had good reason to, since he would probably have lost them; his rule is seen by Palestinians as moribund and compromised.

The chief Palestinian strength is simply that they number about 7 million between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, a population that is approximately equal to the number of Jewish Israelis living in the same area. Whatever their political and military weakness, the physical presence of Palestinians remains a crucial political fact that is not going to disappear.

Why has this explosion of unrest happened now? One reason may be that the Israeli government believes too much of its own propaganda about having won a final victory, thanks to Trump, over the Palestinians. But many Israelis detect a more cynical motive, of Netanyahu needing a crisis like this to preserve his grip on power.

Negotiations between seven parties opposed to him – including one Arab party – were close to success when normal Israeli politics were put on hold by the present violence. Different responses to the upsurge are likely to divide the potential coalition partners and prevent them forming a new government.

Neither Netanyahu nor Hamas have an immediate incentive to de-escalate the crisis from which they both benefit as defenders of their respective nations. But it is probably over-conspiratorial to imagine that Netanyahu planned a confrontation in a Machiavellian bid to stay on as prime minister.

A long-running crisis might suit Netanyahu, but there are limits to what he can achieve by it. An Israeli army incursion into Gaza may happen, but it is not going to eliminate Hamas or even significantly weaken it. Israel would be guaranteed weeks of bad publicity, with the bodies of Palestinian children being pulled out of the rubble in front of the television cameras. Going by the experience of the last big Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2014, the political costs to Israel rise the longer a technically successful military attack goes on.

Some Palestinians predict that we are on the verge of a second intifada or uprising, but the political fragmentation of their community, and lack of sympathetic allies abroad, make this an unlikely option.

A damaged house in the city of Yehud in central Israel (AFP via Getty Images)

Israel may hold strong diplomatic cards, though not as many as it held before the US president, Joe Biden, took over in the White House. Arab leaders who had written off the Palestinians and were enthusiastic about their new enhanced links to Israel will be wondering if they made a wise choice. They gained negligible influence over Israeli policy, but will be held responsible for its actions by many of their own populations.

Israeli-Palestinian relations are returning to their deeply unsatisfactory pre-Trump norm. President Biden will be happy if he can devote his efforts to his domestic agenda, a wish shared by many past presidents who nevertheless found themselves dragged into crises in the Middle East.

A report just issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace titled Breaking the Israel-Palestine Status Quo suggests a new approach, arguing that the Biden administration should not try to resurrect a discredited and ineffectual “peace process”, but should “reaffirm and safeguard Israeli rights to security and peace while paying equal attention to long-neglected Palestinian rights, including freedom of movement and freedom from violence, dispossession, discrimination, and occupation –whether in the West Bank, east Jerusalem, Gaza, or, in specific ways, inside Israel”.