Hamas has not lost the conflict and neither has Israel triumphed in it

Israel has not won the war it launched in Gaza. And Hamas has not lost it. That is the truth which has emerged in all these weeks of Israeli bombardment of the enclave. No fewer than 15,000 Palestinians have perished through the relentless Israeli raids on homes and hospitals and schools in Gaza. As many 8,000 children have died in the conflict. In Israel, more than 1,400 people were killed when Hamas launched its attack in early October.

But, no. The war has not been won by Netanyahu. It has not been lost by Hamas, an organization which has been branded by Tel Aviv’s friends in the West as a bunch of terrorists. That is what they once said about the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat. That is how the apartheid men of South Africa and their friends denigrated the African National Congress. 

But history has a way of correcting false perceptions. It goes speedily into informing people with misplaced notions of politics that they are wrong in their attitudes toward those they hate, that the force of circumstances will make them change their perceptions of that entity known as the Other. In Gaza today, it is this change in perceptions that is beginning to be at work. With millions of people regularly taking to the streets in the West to protest the murder of the innocent in Gaza and to demand a cessation of the bombardment there, attitudes are beginning to undergo change.

That the struggle of the Palestinians is geared toward freedom, that the occupation of their land for decades is an insult to humanity, that Israel is and has been morally wrong in a pursuit of its policies in the region is today a truth the world needs to come to terms with. One notices the softness that has come into the voices -- in the United States, in Europe -- that were strident in their condemnation of Hamas in early October. Biden, von der Leyen, Olaf Scholz, Rishi Sunak, Anthony Blinken all made a dash for Tel Aviv to express their solidarity with Netanyahu. Not one of them had a kind word for the Palestinian men, women and children dying every day and night as the bombs fell on them from Israeli war planes.

But all men and women of good sense, of common sense around the world knew what these powerful men and women around the world did not know -- that the conflict would be a stalemate, that neither side would be able to defeat the other. That has turned out to be the truth. The Israeli government has been forced to negotiate with Hamas on the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. With Qatar taking the lead, and the United States having little option but to tag along, the world has now been made witness to Israeli hostages going back home from Hamas captivity and Palestinians in Israeli prisons returning home as part of a deal. That there has been a truce, albeit a tentative one, and to allow the exchange to go through is proof that -- despite the pounding of Gaza -- the Palestinians stay resolute in their determination to be free. 

It is a lesson history teaches us -- that mighty states do not, indeed cannot, finish off a people or a struggle for liberation. The Biden administration should have walked back to the story of Vietnam, a country upon which the Johnson administration dropped thousands upon thousands of tons of bombs from B-52 bombers to prevent a communist victory.

The ferocity did not yield results. President Johnson had to dispatch Averell Harriman to Paris to speak to Vietnam’s Xuan Thuy. The Nixon administration saw to it that Henry Kissinger met Le Duc Tho to negotiate a peace deal. America was not winning the war; and Vietnam was determined not to lose it. That is history. And history is also what we go back to when we recall the end of the war in the Balkans in the 1990s.

Netanyahu has made it known that once the present ceasefire draws to an end, his country will resume its attacks on Gaza. He may very well do that, but he ought to know by now that the crisis he caused to erupt though ordering military action against a people who had declared no war against Israel, that in his virulence against Hamas he was snuffing the life out of innocent Palestinians is a crisis which will not end unless he calls his forces back home. Israel’s soldiers are not waging war against a country, against Egypt or Syria or Jordan. 

They are waging war against people whose land they have kept under occupation since June 1967, land where they have arranged for their settlers to illegally occupy the villages which once belonged to Palestinians. The voice of reason has never been heeded by Israel. It has not occurred to successive generations of its leaders that a people under occupation do not lie low, do not accept fate for what it is. They strike back, and they fight hard. Those stone-throwing children are not terrorists but descendants of Palestinians who have experienced the Nakba and who have seen Gaza and the West Bank pass under Israeli occupation.

The resilience of the Palestinian people, the durability of Hamas despite the fierce pounding of it by Israel’s war machine, the need for a deal between Tel Aviv and Hamas on an exchange of hostages and prisoners are a reassertion of history’s lessons. The softness of tone in Europe today, the worry generated in Washington over Israel’s failure to demolish Hamas, the pro-Palestinian marches around the world rekindle the truth that brute force cannot subdue a people who have been imprisoned in their own land, who have lived in the open-air prison that Gaza is and the ghetto that the West Bank has become. 

The whole issue of Palestine, of the need for a two-state solution, of the requirement for a sovereign Palestinian state that will enjoy all the rights and powers and privileges underscored by the principles of modern sovereignty -- and not a demilitarised Palestine existing beside a nuclear-armed Israel -- is today the theme which should be worked on. For the West, it should have by now become abundantly obvious that after October 7, the Middle East has become a changed place. Hamas caused the change and then Israel added its own weight to it through its military operations.

Those powerful men and women in the United States, in Britain, in the European Union must now reflect on the damage they have caused the world and themselves by their unabashed support for Netanyahu’s actions. All of them are collectively guilty of the murder of those thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza.

They can now make amends though promoting a peace process that will have Israel sit down to meaningful negotiations with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority on Tel Aviv’s withdrawal from occupied Arab land and on the creation of an independent Palestinian republic. 

They ought not to forget that their condemnation of Hamas terrorism, as they call it, without an equal and unequivocal condemnation of the terror unleashed by the state of Israel will lead to consequences, naturally.