Hamas must be crushed, but what then for Palestinians?
By Marc Champion / Bloomberg Opinion
A bunch of Harvard student groups issue a statement putting the blame for Saturday’s wanton massacre of civilians by Hamas “entirely” on Israel. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin blames the U.S., while Republican presidential hopefuls are accusing Iran. Meanwhile, Israel’s defense minister says it’s all about the “human animals” in Gaza; Hamas, the group of animals in question, blames the existence of Israel.
When it comes to the deliberate slaughter of civilians, those who pull the trigger are always responsible. Yet collectively, these attempts to assign blame for Saturday’s orgy of violence go to the heart of the problem facing Israel’s new “war management cabinet,” formed on Wednesday with Benny Gantz, an opposition leader and retired general: What comes after crushing Hamas? That’s best addressed before the Israeli Defense Forces send tanks among 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
What the Hamas attack proves is that the emerging new Middle East everyone was so excited about just a week ago — the one in which Israel trades and invests with its Arab neighbors — can’t happen without some kind of settlement for the Palestinians, says John Jenkins, a former United Kingdom ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya and Myanmar, who also served as a diplomat in Israel. “After this is all done, how do you reinvent a new politics of settlement?” he asked at a London panel on events in Israel held by Chatham House on Wednesday. “I don’t know what the answer is, I just know there will have to be an answer.”
There are two paths that attempt to solve complex territorial problems such as the Israel-Palestine question typically take. One, the route of absolutes, leads inexorably toward greater violence. The other, involving compromise and self-sacrifice, is messy, politically dangerous to those who execute it and hard to achieve. (The attempt cost former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin his life). Israel, tragically, has been on the bloodier track for at least 15 years, and the blame for how that happened is spread widely.
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