All wars and conflicts experience watershed moments which carry with them great dangers and sometimes suffering and devastation. But they also create new opportunities for the sides involved to re-evaluate whether reverting to collective violence serves their interests, or if they should rather resort to the path of peace and reconciliation. What will that watershed be in the horrific Israel–Palestinian conflict that would persuade both sides to reassess their positions? One conclusion from the collapse of the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is that conflict management is a fallacy that has failed time and again. As a long-term instrument it at best buys time until the next round of violence begins. More than 75 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have seen peri odic outbreaks of hostilities and periodic efforts to bring peace based on a two-state solution. For most of this time the focus has been on managing the conflict. This exposes a lack of belief that a peace agreement laying to rest the differences between the two peoples can be reached. It also shows that the international collective security mechanism set up after the Second World War has failed in its mission to peacefully settle conflicts. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an asymmetric one with the stronger side, Israel, more interested in injecting the notion of ‘status quo’. This has served its interests in letting it continue to build settlements in the West Bank with the aim of eventual annexation. By controlling the Gaza Strip and encouraging divisions between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Israel has ensured an in dependent Palestinian state remains a remote possibility while presenting the Palestinians as solely responsible for the impasse in the peace process. This apparent status quo also served those in Israel and in Palestine who were not prepared to make the compromises necessary to allow a two-state solution to work. Both sides found the international community complicit in their self-deception that the situation could not get any better, but it would not get much worse. This has allowed the international community to relinquish responsibility for resolving the conflict, something deemed unachievable by many of the actors within it and therefore not worth investing diplomatic, political or economic capital in when there are other pressing issues. Complementing this approach is the belief that everything has been done to re solve the conflict, one of the most enduring in modern history, which has simply proved intractable, and the only option left is to manage it and ensure any occasional flare ups are short and don’t spread. The attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7 and what followed amounts to a complete collapse of this paradigm. The consequences will reverberate for years to come. As horrendous and inexcusable as Hamas’s terrorist attack was, there is a real danger of drawing from it all the wrong conclusions. And palpable evidence of this is the deadly and destructive manner in which Israel is conducting the war, supported by certain elements in the international community, especially the US. By setting an unachievable objective of ‘destroying Hamas’ while using the entire population of Gaza as expendable collateral dam age, while other quarters portray Israel as an evil and genocidal state, any hope of ever reaching a peace is given up and replaced with a preference to manage the conflict as a long-term strategy. October 7 was as much a conceptual failure as an operational one for Israel. Hamas’s success in being able to prepare undetected for such an assault on the communities bordering the Gaza Strip was not only due to the sophistication of this Islamist organization. It was also the result of Israel’s decision-makers falling into the trap they laid for themselves of believing that they were successfully managing the conflict. The assumption that injecting money into Hamas-governed Gaza would pacify an explosive situation was wishful thinking. Economic improvement could never replace the de sire of Palestinians to see an end of the occupation and recognition of their political, human and civil rights. This conflict does not need management, it needs its root causes to be addressed. It is difficult to understand what the Hamas leader ship was hoping to achieve in committing such a grave atrocity. Despair at the miserable conditions the Palestinians have endured not only since the 1967 occupation but since the 1948, Nakba is understandable and has provided the conditions for radicalization. Attempts to overcome the deadlock were only to be expected. Israel used the cover of the peace initiative to unfurl a ‘grab what you can’ strategy to further the Right wing agenda of its hardline Netanyahu government. It feared a closing of the door on its agenda to restrict the post-normalisation space for the Palestinians. Palestinians, who were subject to Israeli impositions in terms of a continuing land grab in the West Bank and a creeping attempt to change the status of the Temple Mount com plex, were sceptical of the peace initiative. Their fight back against Israeli repression has resulted in over 300 casualties this year, in part prompting the conflict. Hamas reasoned that al lowing normalcy over Palestinians’ heads would leave it out in the cold. It was also worried that the Palestinian Authority, run by its rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the West Bank, might succumb to the enticement from the promise of developmental support by the international community, in the form of the ‘peace support package’ discussed on the sidelines of the General Assembly high-level week, to buttress peace deals. Hamas reacted in the only way it knows how: the launch of asymmetric war. Its expectation is that subject to such terror, Israel would resort to what could amount to State terror, placing it afoul of International Humanitarian Law since its reaction would be com pounded by its unfolding in occupied territory. Hamas also rode on regional dynamics. Tehran was worried that Riyadh’s position would stand enhanced with the backing of the US and Israel. Suspicion is that Iran might have prodded Hamas on, given its own penchant for asymmetric war developed under late General Qassem Soleimani. Nothing can justify com mitting atrocities against civilians by either side. However, the crux of the calamity we are now witnessing is the product of the failure to achieve a peace agreement based on a two-state solution in which Jerusalem is the capital of both peoples, whereby every Israeli and Palestinian enjoys security and the Palestinian refugee issue is satisfactorily re solved. This will be their test when the war is over: to realize that ‘status-quo’ is temporary and ‘conflict management’ is deceptive.
The writer is an Associate Professor in Seedling School of Law and Governance, Jaipur National University, Jaipur
