GAZA

Intro: Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, which began last Thursday, becomes its fourth such war on the Palestinian strip in the past decade

With the Israeli armed forces having kicked off the latest episode in a 66-year-old conflict, the brutality and cynicism of its actions suggests resolution is further away than ever.

Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, which began last Thursday, becomes its fourth such war on the Palestinian strip in the past decade. Following its withdrawal from the densely populated enclave in 2005, Israel sent its troops back in 2006 and 2008. In 2012, the offensive was confined to surgical air strikes and a campaign of bombing. In each case, the reason for acting was the same: to halt rocket and missile attacks into Israel by Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that largely controls Gaza. Hamas refuses to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Each time, the sequence of events has become choreographed into one that is utterly and depressingly predictable. Israel responds disproportionately, always inflicting far greater casualties than it suffers. As international accusations and condemnations of Israeli overreaction multiply, a ceasefire eventually happens, either declared unilaterally by the Israeli government or brokered through a third party, most likely Egypt and/or the United States. In the interim, some Hamas leaders will be targeted and killed, and some rocket launch sites and underground tunnels from Gaza into Israel will be destroyed.

In reality, though, nothing is ever likely to change. More arm shipments will flow into Gaza, new Hamas leaders will emerge, and new tunnels will be dug. When equipped and replenished enough the Palestinian militants will once again fire off its rockets, and Israel will ready itself as it will feel compelled to act in light of the provocation and threats it faces. All the while, as the root causes of the conflict remain untackled, the prospects of a final settlement grow ever dimmer.

The new level of fighting may well lead to a new Palestinian intifada. Israel, protected by its barrier wall – declared illegal by the International Criminal Court – from potential terrorist attacks and by its robust Iron Dome anti-missile system from Hamas rockets, seems less interested than ever in a two-state deal. Far from being concerned about the plight of Palestinians and their livelihoods, Israel simply ignores them, pressing ahead with its settlement building programmes on territory that would be part of any future Palestinian state.

****

A ground invasion of Gaza, however brief, was always likely to signal an intensification of the Israeli response to the more than 900 rockets which have fallen into Israeli territory over the past 10 days. Fears exist for a much greater troop deployment in the coming days. Some 40,000 Israeli reservists have already been mobilised. But that will only work to fuel Palestinian resistance and intensify retaliatory rocket strikes that now reach much further than within a 25 mile radius of Gaza.

It is these rocket attacks that the Israeli government is determined to stop. For so long as they continue, Israel’s shelling of targets within Gaza will go on. Inevitably, this puts further civilian lives at risk. Without the strongest foreign diplomatic intervention the bloody cycle of tit-for-tat rocket and bombing attacks seems likely to endure. There are no signs of the current hostilities ending any time soon. The latest outbreak in violence is still young by comparison with previous offensives. Exchanges during the outbreak in 2011-12, for instance, lasted 22 days.

The day after Israel launched its current air offensive in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a rare press conference in which he was brutally blunt about the danger he believes the state of Israel to be in. He made clear he could never countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank. Mr Netanyahu’s world-view is that Israel is standing almost alone on the frontline against a rising tide of vicious Islamic radicalism. He insists that the rest of the as-yet free world does its best not to notice the march of extremism. Such indifference says nothing of how western intelligence services are battling against the odds to keep their citizens safe or at the outrage following the recent air disaster over the skies of eastern Ukraine.

Mr Netanyahu has also indicted that he considers the current American diplomatic team led by John Kerry as naïve. Netanyahu made plain that ‘no international pressure will prevent us from acting with all force against a terrorist organisation that seeks to destroy us’.

Operation Protective Edge will thus go on until ‘guaranteed calm’ was restored to Israel. A prerequisite for that, it seems, is a cessation of Palestinian rocket and missile attacks.

Either the Israeli offensive in Gaza will go on until Hamas has exhausted its supplies of air-to-ground missiles (the scale of which, this time around, has been astonishing) or international pressure is brought to bear. Despite Mr Netanyahu’s rhetoric, Israel well knows it only has a narrow window for further military force before international opinion swings heavily against it.

For diplomatic intervention to be effective it needs to come from the top, as well as being co-ordinated with pressure from Western leaders as a matter of urgency. An approach centred on de-escalating the current rocket exchanges should be the priority before any other progress can be made in securing a more lasting truce.