The latest spasm of violence in Gaza, where eleven souls have been extinguished by Israeli ordnance, is not a rupture but a rhythm. It is the metronome of a conflict that has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the days of Allenby's conquests. The headlines scream of fading ceasefire hopes, as if such hopes were ever more than a diplomatic fiction, a pat on the head for a global audience that demands the appearance of progress. But let us be honest: the cycle of strike and counter-strike, of funeral and retaliation, is as predictable as the tides. The question is not whether peace will break out, but whether the protagonists have any interest in it beyond the performative.
Consider the historical parallel. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire left a vacuum filled not by nations but by grievances. The British Mandate, with its Balfour Declaration and its Arabist double-dealings, sowed the dragon's teeth that we now reap. The current iteration of this ancient quarrel is merely the latest chapter in a saga of impotence dressed as statecraft. Israel, a nation forged in the crucible of existential threat, now finds itself trapped by its own security paradigm. Every strike, every targeted assassination, is a tactical victory that purchases a strategic defeat. It hardens the resolve of Hamas, it radicalises the next generation, and it convinces the world that Israel's democracy is a fig leaf for colonial occupation. And yet, what is the alternative? The left's answer of a single secular state is a fantasy that ignores the blood libels and the intransigence of both sides. The right's answer of annexation is a recipe for apartheid.
Meanwhile, the so-called international community wrings its hands. The UN issues resolutions; the EU issues statements; the US issues condolences. All of it is noise. The real power lies in the hands of the men who press the buttons and the men who fire the rockets. And they have no interest in peace because peace would require them to become irrelevant. The Iron Dome may intercept rockets, but it cannot intercept ideas. And the idea of resistance, of defiance, of martyrdom, is a missile that no defence system can stop. The only question is how many more cycles of destruction it will take before the parties realise that the status quo is unsustainable. But I suspect they will not realise it until the region is reduced to a smouldering ruin, and the historians of the future look back at this period as a cautionary tale of nationalistic folly.
Let us not fool ourselves. The killing of eleven people in Gaza City is not a tragedy; it is a statistic. The tragedy is that we have become inured to such statistics. The tragedy is that the discourse has been so degraded that we cannot even speak of a two-state solution without being dismissed as naive or a traitor. The tragedy is that the guardians of Western liberalism, who once championed the self-determination of peoples, now wring their hands over the self-determination of Palestinians as if it were a threat to civilisation itself. No, the real threat is the intellectual decadence that prevents us from seeing this conflict as what it is: a clash of two nationalisms, each with a legitimate claim to the land, each with a tragic history of victimhood, and each incapable of the magnanimity required to share it. Until that changes, the bombs will keep falling, and the hopes will keep fading. And we will keep writing about it, as if our words could stop the slaughter. They cannot. They never could.
