*Gaza ceasefire: After 15 months of brutality, Israel has failed on
every front *
The Palestinian people have shown the world that they can withstand
total war, and not budge from their land
David Hearst <https://www.middleeasteye.net/users/david-hearst>15
January 2025,
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-ceasefire-after-15-months-brutality-israel-has-failed-every-front
When push came to shove, it was Israeli
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel>Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu who blinked first.
For months, Netanyahu had become the main obstacle to a Gaza ceasefire,
to the considerable frustration of his own negotiators.
That much was made explicit more than two months ago by the departure of
his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. The chief architect of the 15-month
war, Gallant said plainly that there was nothing left
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/07/yoav-gallant-israel-army-nothing-left-to-do-in-gaza>for
the army to do in Gaza.
Still Netanyahu persisted. Last spring, he rejected a deal
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/cia-director-reviewed-gaza-peace-proposal-accepted-hamas-sources-say>signed
by Hamas in the presence of CIA director William Burns, in favour of an
offensive on Rafah.
In the autumn, Netanyahu turned for salvation to the Generals’ Plan
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/israel-gaza-palestine-what-generals-plan>,
aiming to empty northern Gaza in preparation for resettlement by
Israelis. The plan was to starve and bomb the population out of northern
Gaza by declaring that anyone who did not leave voluntarily would be
treated as a terrorist.
It was so extreme, and so contrary to the international rules of war,
that it was condemned by former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon as a war
crime
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-war-crimes-gaza-moshe-yaalon-defense-minister-netayanhu-icc-rcna182398>and
ethnic cleansing.
Key to this plan was a corridor forged by a military road and a string
of outposts cutting through the centre of the Gaza Strip, from the
Israeli border to the sea. The Netzarim Corridor
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/netzarim-corridor-israels-axis-death-palestinians>would
have effectively reduced the territory’s land mass by almost one third
and become its new northern border. No Palestinian
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine>pushed out of
northern Gaza would have been allowed to return.
*Red lines erased*
No-one from the Biden administration forced Netanyahu to rethink this
plan. Not US <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us>President Joe
Biden himself, an instinctive Zionist who, for all his speeches, kept on
supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide in Gaza
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-war-gaza>; nor Antony
Blinken, his secretary of state, who earned the dubious distinction of
being the least-trusted diplomat in the region.
Even as the final touches were being put on the ceasefire agreement,
Blinken gave a departing news conference in which he blamed Hamas for
rejecting previous offers. As is par for the course, the opposite is the
truth.
Every Israeli journalist who covered the negotiations has reported that
Netanyahu rejected all previous deals and was responsible for the delay
in coming to this one.
It fell to one short meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump’s
special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-01-13/ty-article/.premium/trumps-mideast-envoy-forced-netanyahu-to-accept-a-gaza-plan-he-repeatedly-rejected/00000194-615c-d4d0-a1f4-fbfdce850000>,
to call time on Netanyahu’s 15-month war.
After one meeting, the red lines that Netanyahu had so vigorously
painted and repainted in the course of 15 months were erased.
As Israeli pundit Erel Segal said
<https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-israel-hamas-gaza-ceasefire-deal>:
“We’re the first to pay a price for Trump’s election. [The deal] is
being forced upon us … We thought we’d take control of northern Gaza,
that they’d let us impede humanitarian aid.”
This is emerging as a consensus. The mood in Israel is sceptical of
claims of victory. “There’s no need to sugarcoat the reality: the
emerging cease-fire and hostage release deal is bad for Israel, but it
has no choice but to accept it,” columnist Yossi Yehoshua wrote in Ynet
<https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1eucoqvjx>.
The circulating draft of the ceasefire agreement is clear in stating
that Israel will pull back from both the Philadelphi Corridor and the
Netzarim Corridor by the end of the process, stipulations Netanyahu had
previously rejected.
Even without this, the draft agreement clearly notes that Palestinians
can return to their homes, including in northern Gaza. The attempt to
clear it of its inhabitants has failed. This is the biggest single
failure of Israel’s ground invasion.
*Fighting back*
There is a long list of others. But before we list them, the Witkoff
debacle underscores how dependent Israel has been on Washington for
every day of the horrendous slaughter in Gaza. A senior Israeli Air
Force official has admitted
<https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-unable-sustain-gaza-war-without-us-weapons-official>that
planes would have run out of bombs within a few months had they not been
resupplied by the US.
It is sinking into Israeli public opinion that the war is ending without
any of Israel’s major aims being achieved.
Netanyahu and the Israeli army set out to “collapse” Hamas after the
humiliation and shock of its surprise attack on southern Israel in
October 2023. They demonstrably haven’t achieved this goal.
Take Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza as a microcosm of the battle Hamas
waged against invading forces. Fifteen months ago, it was the first city
in Gaza to be occupied by Israeli forces, who judged it to have the
weakest Hamas battalion.
But after wave upon wave of military operations, each of which was
supposed to have “cleansed” the city of Hamas fighters, Beit Hanoun
turned out to have inflicted one of the heaviest concentrations of
Israeli military casualties.
Hamas kept on emerging from the rubble to fight back, turning Beit
Hanoun into a minefield for Israeli soldiers. Since the launch of the
most recent military operation in northern Gaza, 55 Israeli officers and
soldiers have perished in this sector, 15 of them
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/hamas-capabilities-in-beit-hanoun-not-significantly-damaged-report/3449741>in
Beit Hanoun in the past week alone.
If any army is bleeding and exhausted today, it is Israel’s. The plain
military fact of life in Gaza is that, 15 months on, Hamas can recruit
and regenerate faster than Israel can kill its leaders or its fighters.
“We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding
itself is higher than the pace that the [Israeli army] is eradicating
them,” Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, told the Wall
Street Journal
<https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-has-another-sinwar-and-hes-rebuilding-0a16031d>.
He added that Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of slain Hamas leader
Yahya Sinwar
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/yahya-sinwar-refugee-prisoner-who-lead-hamas>,
“is managing everything”.
If anything demonstrates the futility of measuring military success
solely by the number of leaders killed, or missiles destroyed, it is this.
*Against the odds*
In a war of liberation, the weak and vastly outgunned can succeed
against overwhelming military odds. These wars are battles of will. It
is not the battle that matters, but the ability to keep on fighting.
In Algeria <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/algeria>and Vietnam,
the French <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/france>and US armies
had overwhelming military advantage. Both forces withdrew in ignominy
and failure many years later. In Vietnam, it was more than six years
after the Tet Offensive, which like the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023
was perceived at the time to be a military failure. But the symbol of a
fightback after so many years of siege proved decisive in the war.
In France, the scars of Algeria last to this day. In each war of
liberation, the determination of the weak to resist has proved more
decisive than the firepower of the strong.
In Gaza, it was the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on
their land - even as it was being reduced to rubble - that proved to be
the decisive factor in this war. And this is an astonishing feat,
considering that the 360-square-kilometre territory was entirely cut off
from the world, with no allies to break the siege and no natural terrain
for cover.
Hezbollah <https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/hezbollah>fought in the
north, but little of this was any succour to Palestinians in Gaza on the
ground, subjected to nightly bombing raids and drone attacks shredding
their tents.
Neither enforced starvation, nor hypothermia, nor disease, nor
brutalisation and mass rape at the hands of their invaders, could break
their will to stay on their land.
Never before have Palestinian fighters and civilians shown this level of
resistance in the history of the conflict - and it could prove to be
transformative.
Because what Israel has lost in its campaign to crush Gaza is
incalculable. It has squandered decades of sustained economic, military
and diplomatic efforts to establish the country as a liberal democratic
western nation in the eyes of global opinion.
*Generational memory*
Israel has not only lost the Global South, in which it invested such
efforts in Africa and South America. It has also lost the support of a
generation in the West, whose memories do not go back as far as Biden’s.
The point is not mine. It is well made by Jack Lew, the man Biden
nominated as his ambassador to Israel a month before the Hamas attack.
In his departing interview, Lew, an Orthodox Jew, told the Times of
Israel
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-ambassadors-farewell-warning-you-cant-ignore-the-impact-of-this-war-on-future-us-policymakers/>that
public opinion in the US was still largely pro-Israel, but that was
changing.
With the enormous cost in lives, every family has been touched by loss.
But what Gaza has achieved in the last 15 months could well transform
the conflict
“What I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war
is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding
of the state, or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the
intifada even.
“It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on
future policymakers - not the people making the decisions today, but the
people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next
30 years, 40 years.”
Biden, Lew said, was the last president of his generation whose memories
and knowledge go back to Israel’s “founding story”.
Lew’s parting shot at Netanyahu is amply documented in recent polls
<https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-830230>. More than one-third of
American Jewish teenagers sympathise with Hamas, 42 per cent believe
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and 66 percent
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/one-third-american-jewish-teens-say-they-sympathise-hamas-israeli-government-poll-shows>sympathise
with the Palestinian people as a whole.
This is not a new phenomenon. Polling two years before the war showed
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-quarter-us-jewish-voters-say-israel-apartheid-state-survey>that
a quarter of American Jews agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state”,
and a plurality of respondents did not find that statement to be
antisemitic.
*Deep damage*
The war in Gaza has become the prism through which a new generation of
future world leaders sees the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is a major
strategic loss for a country that on 6 October 2023 thought that it had
closed down the issue of Palestine, and that world opinion was in its
pocket.
But the damage goes further and deeper than this.
The antiwar protests
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/uk-police-say-ban-still-in-place-to-block-gaza-protest-outside-bbc/3449399>,
condemned by western governments first as antisemitism and then
legislated against as terrorism, have created a global front for the
liberation of Palestine. The movement to boycott Israel is stronger than
ever before.
Israel is in the dock of international justice as never before. Not only
are there arrest warrants
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157286>out for Netanyahu and
Gallant on war crimes, and a continuing genocide case
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67922346>at the
International Court of Justice, but a myriad of other cases are about to
flood the courts in every major western democracy.
A court action has been launched in the UK against BP
<https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/23/gaza-war-victims-legal-action-bp-oil-supply-israel>for
supplying crude oil to Israel, which is then allegedly used by the
Israeli army, from its pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/turkey>.
In addition, the Israeli army recently decided to conceal the identities
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-prosecution-attempts-abroad-idf-to-conceal-identities-of-all-combat-soldiers/>of
all troops who have participated in the campaign in Gaza, for fear that
they could be pursued when travelling abroad.
This major move was sparked by a tiny activist group named after Hind
Rajab, a six-year-old
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQN7vW-yszo>killed by Israeli troops in
Gaza in January 2024. The Belgium-based group has filed evidence of war
crimes with the International Criminal Court against 1,000 Israelis
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-prosecution-attempts-abroad-idf-to-conceal-identities-of-all-combat-soldiers/>,
including video, audio, forensic reports and other documents.
A ceasefire in Gaza is thus not the end of Palestine’s nightmare, but
the start of Israel’s. These legal moves will only gather momentum as
the truth of what happened in Gaza is uncovered and documented after the
war has ended.
*Internal divisions*
At home, Netanyahu will return from war to a country more divided
internally than ever before. There is a battle between the army and the
Haredim who refuse to serve. There is a battle between secular and
national religious Zionists. With Netanyahu’s retreat on Gaza, the
settler far right are sensing that the opportunity to establish Greater
Israel has been snatched from the jaws of military victory. All the
while, there has been an unprecedented exodus
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/data-shows-post-oct-7-emigration-surge-from-israel-which-has-since-stabilized/>of
Jews from Israel.
Regionally, Israel is left with troops still in Lebanon
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/lebanon>and Syria
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/syria>. It would be foolish to
think of these ongoing operations as restoring the deterrence Israel
lost when Hamas struck on 7 October 2023.
Iran <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/iran>’s axis of resistance
might have received some sustained blows after the leadership of
Hezbollah was wiped out, and after finding itself vastly overextended in
Syria. But like Hamas, Hezbollah has not been knocked out as a fighting
force.
And the Sunni Arab world has been riled by Gaza and the ongoing
crackdown in the occupied West Bank as rarely before.
Israel’s undisguised bid to divide Syria into cantons is as provocative
to Syrians of all denominations and ethnicities, as its plans to annex
Areas B and C of the West Bank are an existential threat to Jordan
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/jordan>. Annexation would be
treated in Amman as an act of war.
Deconfliction will be the patient work of decades of reconstruction, and
Trump is not a patient man.
Hamas and Gaza will now take a backseat. With the enormous cost in
lives, every family has been touched by loss. But what Gaza has achieved
in the last 15 months could well transform the conflict.
Gaza has shown all Palestinians - and the world - that it can withstand
total war, and not budge from the ground upon which it stands. It tells
the world, with justifiable pride, that the occupiers threw everything
they had at us, and there was not another Nakba
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/nakba>.
Gaza tells Israel that Palestinians exist, and that they will not be
pacified until and unless Israelis talk to them on equal terms about
equal rights.
It may take many more years for that realisation to sink in, but for
some it already has: “Even if we conquer the entire Middle East, and
even if everyone surrenders to us, we won’t win this war,” columnist
Yair Assulin wrote in Haaretz
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-01-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-could-conquer-the-entire-middle-east-but-still-wouldnt-win-this-war/00000194-4c8a-d6f4-a9b5-5c9e50310000>.
But what everyone in Gaza who stayed put has achieved is of historic
significance.
//
/David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He
is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia.
He was the Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in
Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman,
where he was education correspondent./
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