Gaza: Is There a Way Out?

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Whatever becomes of Trump’s twenty-point peace plan, it marks an important turning point in the conflict in Gaza.

It’s been two long years since Hamas fighters crashed through the borders into Israel, attacking attendees at a music festival and local kibbutzim and towns.  This was not a spontaneous act of desperate individuals who had given up hope.  Instead, it was a planned raid that was disastrous not just for their victims but for the organisation itself. Not only has Hamas itself been virtually destroyed as a fighting force, but its main allies and backers in Lebanon and Iran have also suffered serious blows.  And as for the Palestinian people in whose name Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, the price they have paid for Hamas’ miscalculation is almost unimaginably terrible.

From the very beginning, there was a way out.  Calls for a ceasefire and the return of hostages were made within the first few weeks of the fighting.  There were some early hostage releases, with Israel releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange.  There were brief ceasefires.  Both sides almost certainly knew what the eventual deal would be to end this chapter of the longer war between Israel and the Palestinians.  Many countries, including nearly all the Arab countries, were keen to help negotiate an exchange of hostages.  But until this week, there was little hope that this would happen anytime soon.

This is, on the face of it, quite strange. The vast majority of Israelis have been demanding that their Government make a deal to bring the hostages home. Enormous street demonstrations are held on a regular basis in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. The slogans the demonstrators adopted were not about calling on Hamas to do anything.  The demand of the tens of thousands of Israelis in the streets was always that their government do what it takes to bring the hostages home.  Increasingly, that demand was accompanied by a call on Netanyahu to end the war as well.

And despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Israelis now support the ‘end the war’ demand, Netanyahu still did not budge.  The war went on, week after week, with no end in sight. Why?  Probably because as soon as the war ends, Netanyahu will likely face elections in which his coalition will be defeated – as nearly all the polls show.  He’s being challenged not only by the usual crowd of centre-leftists and centre-rightists, but also by a resurgent Israeli Left.  The two historic parties of that Left, Labour and Meretz, were on the cusp of disappearing from the scene, but have united and grown much stronger during the last couple of years.

And Netanyahu will also face the Israeli criminal justice system, which he distrusts and detests. He risks winding up, like at least one former prime minister and one former president before him, spending some time in a prison cell.  This is something he is keen to prevent – at almost all costs.

There is a historical precedent for what might happen next.

Hamas timed their attack – almost certainly intentionally – to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of what Israelis call the “Yom Kippur War”.  Back in October 1973, the Egyptian and Syrian Governments, still stinging from their defeat in the 1967 Six Day War, launched surprise attacks on Israel’s southern and northern borders. 

Like the Hamas raids, those armies crashed through Israeli defence lines that seem, in retrospect, to have been remarkably flimsy.  It was said that the Egyptian army would never be able to cross the Suez Canal – but they did. Or that Syrian forces would storm into the Golan Heights and recapture territories lost six years earlier.  But they did that too. 

Israel then, as now, was a victim of its own arrogance in under-estimating its enemies.

What happened next also has parallels to what happened in 2023. The Israelis quickly recovered, and, in the course of about three weeks, reversed course, taking back all of the Golan and the Sinai, dealing another crushing defeat to Egypt and Syria. The result of that defeat in Egypt was that President Anwar Sadat reached the conclusion that his country would never get back Sinai by military means. 

What he may not have foreseen was that he’d get back every inch of Sinai through diplomacy. That’s what the Camp David accords were all about and by 1982, without any more blood being shed, Sinai was back in Egyptian hands – and has remained so ever since.

I don’t think we can expect history to repeat itself, though it sometimes does.  We cannot expect the surviving Hamas leaders – or for that matter Ali Khamenei in Iran – to come visit Jerusalem and address the Knesset with a message of peace, as Sadat did.

But what we may see is a Palestinian leadership in both the West Bank and Gaza prepared to give up on the dream of winning their independence by force of arms.  There is already some evidence that this has happened, and of course this was the case when Yasser Arafat agreed to recognise Israel as part of the Oslo accords more than three decades ago.

The two-state solution has been on the table, recognised by almost the entire world as the only way forward, since the time of Camp David and Oslo. It is not a new proposal.  And it remains on the table because there is no alternative to it.

But several things need to happen for it to become a real option again.  Some of those things are already happening. 

The international community, including the United States, must be on board.  Donald Trump is no Jimmy Carter, but there is much in his recent proposal that is positive, including an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. 

The Palestinian leadership – free of Hamas and its tainted legacy – has to accept a disarmed and peaceful state living side by side with Israel.  This has been the view for some time of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority. With Hamas out of the way, and with the reforms proposed by the Americans and others to the Palestinian Authority, the hopes awakened by the Oslo Accords can be revived.

And finally, the Israelis have to get rid of the most right-wing Government the country has ever known and replace it with a saner, more rational group of politicians. There needs to be not just a change in Government, but also a change in how Israelis see themselves.    

I write these words on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.  It is the Day of Atonement, a day to look back at our lives and our deeds, to do what in Hebrew is called ‘heshbon nefesh’ – an accounting of the soul. 

Looking back at two years of horrific and unnecessary slaughter in Gaza, at the thousands who died for no reason, there is much accounting to do.  

As Sadat told the Knesset during his historic speech in 1977, just four years after the Yom Kippur War:

“Be heroes to the sons. Tell them that past wars were the last of wars and the end of sorrows…  You, bewailing mother; you, widowed wife; you, the son who lost a brother or a father; you, all victims of wars – fill the earth and space with recitals of peace. Fill bosoms and hearts with the aspirations of peace. Turn the song into a reality that blossoms and lives.”

The only way out of the long nightmare of the war in Gaza is the vision described by Sadat – the way of peace.