The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas offers a slender hope of a return to “normal life” for those caught in the crossfire. But what does normal mean in Gaza? As with every previous fight, the asymmetry of military power has produced a one-sided death toll for Gaza’s civilians, including dozens of children. In a television interview aired on Sky News, one mother described what it felt like to go through an entire week with her terrified young children fully expecting to die in each new Israeli airstrike. When asked about local attitudes towards Hamas, she shrugged off the question, stressing instead the utter despair within Gaza. When everyone has given up, she seemed to say, is it a surprise that extremists carry the day?
Israelis have also been rattled by the violence. They may have the region’s largest and best-funded military safeguarding them, but no one was prepared for the thousands of missiles launched at their cities. The new sense of vulnerability has empowered Benjamin Netanyahu who was fighting for his political life just two weeks ago. The ricocheting violence has also boosted the political fortunes of Hamas at the expense of their main political rival, Fatah. Most significantly though, the conflict has shifted social attitudes within Israel.
The evictions in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, riots by the-right Jewish groups like Lehava, and the burning of synagogues in the city of Lod have all gravely damaged the fragile trust that was poised to bring an Arab party into a coalition government for the first time. Instead both sides now view each other with redoubled wariness. Politics, once again, has been ceded to the loudest voices in the room.
Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland warns that the violence within Israel has shattered any hopes for a return to the status quo. Confrontations between Jewish and Arab citizens have derailed a short-term political solution. The evictions in Sheikh Jarrah have driven home the second-class status of most Palestinians and the communal violence in formerly integrated towns has shown how deep the mutual distrust runs. Before the bubble popped, writes Freedland, it was possible to forget the long toll of the 54-year occupation. The fact that the West Bank has two legal systems “one for Jews, another for Palestinians”; the “suffocation” of Gaza by an Israeli-Egyptian blockade; the fact that Israelis “can reclaim property owned before 1948 but Palestinians are denied that same right.”
With a cosy and corrupt Palestinian Authority suppressing dissent within the West Bank and with Gaza hemmed in by what a former negotiator calls “the wall of Hamas and Islamic Jihad” the fight for Palestinian nationalism will fall far more heavily on Israel’s Arab population. Unfortunately the new tensions all but guarantee that interactions between formerly cooperative centrists on both sides will be far more difficult than before. This is the real legacy of the recent bloodshed.
In a poem that has gone viral on social media, the poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha imagines a Gazan who has been given one minute to flee, before their home is destroyed in an airstrike. Bewildered and desperate to salvage something personal before it is too late, the speaker of the poem concludes: “It doesn’t matter that you have children. / You live in the wrong place / and now is your chance to run / to nowhere.” A season of pointless and indefensible violence, driven by political extremists on both sides, has pushed Gaza even further in this direction.
