War and peace - the conundrum
Pressing the peace agenda is all the more important in this war. We must fight for a political agenda.
So says John Strawson about the current hostilities in Gaza, a sentiment pretty much in line with what I've been writing on this blog. For a bleak contrasting perspective, see the piece by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post:
[T]he trouble with all of these peace efforts, peace conferences, peace initiatives and peace proposals is that none of them recognizes the most obvious fact about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It's not a peace process; it's a war. At the moment, at least, both parties are still convinced that their central aims will be better obtained through weapons and military tactics than through negotiations of any kind. To be more explicit, Hamas and its followers believe that the continuing firing of rockets into southern Israel will, sooner or later, result in the dissolution of the Jewish state. The Israelis - both on the "peacenik" left and the more bellicose right - believe that the only way to prevent Hamas from firing rockets is to fight back. Intervention - whether by well-meaning Europeans, U.N. delegations, Russian envoys (or even Condoleezza Rice, who has wisely stayed home, so far) - can postpone the conflict but cannot halt the violence, at least not until one side or the other surrenders.
That brief, halcyon period of the Oslo peace process was possible because this is precisely what happened: a combination of Russian emigration into Israel, the end of Soviet support and general weariness led at least a part of the Palestinian leadership to conclude, after 30 years, that it would never push Israel into the sea. At least some of the equally weary Israeli leaders came to believe that their occupation policies were doing Israel more harm than good and that they would gain more from negotiating than from fighting. Further negotiations will make sense only when Hamas's leaders - currently emboldened by a combination of popular indignation and Iranian support - finally arrive at the same conclusion as their secular counterparts, and a new generation of Israelis is persuaded to believe them.
Until then, there is no point in bemoaning the passivity of the Bush administration, the silence of Barack Obama, the powerlessness of Arab leaders or the weakness of Europe, as so many, predictably, have begun to do. It's no outsider's "fault" that the fighting continues, and pretending otherwise merely obscures the real issues. Diplomats might be able to slow its progress, but this war won't be over until someone has won.
And if it's a war that neither side can win?
