25

2009–2014

‘ “Mowing the Grass”, a new term in … strategic parlance, reflects the assumption that Israel [is] in protracted intractable conflict with extremely hostile non-state entities … The use of force is not intended to attain impossible political goals, but to debilitate the capabilities of the enemy to harm Israel.’1

‘ACTIVE AND AGGRESSIVE’ DIPLOMACY²

Palestinians and Israelis alike were waiting eagerly when Barack Obama strode briskly onto the red-curtained stage in an ornate hall at Cairo University on 4 June 2009. Both sides were keen to hear the new American president lay out his vision for tackling their unending conflict, though his main focus was the wider issue of US–Muslim relations in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and prospects for change across the Middle East. Expectations for Obama’s involvement were unusually high, although Arab commentators had been disappointed by his ‘deafening silence’ during the latest Gaza war as he prepared for his inauguration.³ In his long-heralded ‘new beginning’ address Obama described America’s relationship with Israel as ‘unbreakable’ and the situation of the Palestinians as ‘intolerable’⁴ – a neat and unintentionally insightful summary. He produced no new ideas, though his emphasis was striking: the US, he spelled out, did not accept the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, which undermined efforts to achieve peace. He appealed to Hamas to abandon violence. ‘It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus.’ Mahmoud Abbas – who had been impressed by Obama when they met for the first time a few days earlier5 – praised the speech as ‘clear and frank’. The Israeli government was annoyed that Obama had not gone on to visit Jerusalem after Cairo. Ehud Barak, again serving as defence minister, called the speech ‘brave’. Hamas denounced it as no different from what George W. Bush would have said. Israeli right-wingers complained that Obama had glossed over the fact that the Palestinians had not abandoned terrorism. The predictability of the responses could not mask the hope that perhaps, after all, something would now in fact change.⁶

Domestic politics on both sides were a formidable (and familiar) obstacle to the new president’s determination. Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert’s successor as leader of Kadima, narrowly won the February 2009 elections, but the Gaza war boosted the overall strength of the right-wing bloc and the Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu was asked to form a new government. During the campaign Netanyahu had spoken only of ‘economic peace’ with the Palestinians. The hardening mood in the wake of ‘Operation Cast Lead’ was illustrated by his choice of foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a Moldovan-born ultra-nationalist who lived in a West Bank settlement and campaigned on the promise of a law requiring Israeli Arabs to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state or lose their citizenship.⁷ Barak led the Labour party, now reduced to just thirteen Knesset seats, two less than Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu (Israel our Home), into the coalition but pledged not to be a ‘fig-leaf’ for extremists. Obama vowed to work ‘actively and aggressively’ to get the peace process moving. The seriousness of his intentions was underlined by the swift appointment of the heavyweight George Mitchell – former democratic senator, veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process and author of the report into the second intifada – as his Middle East envoy.

Netanyahu’s response was to demand that the Palestinians formally recognize Israel as a Jewish state – the nation state of the entire Jewish people – before negotiating a two-state solution. In a speech at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, shortly after Obama’s in Cairo, Netanyahu declared that he accepted a Palestinian state, although it was hedged about with qualifications: it would have to be fully demilitarized, with no army, missiles or control of its own airspace. Undivided Jerusalem would remain Israeli territory. That, complained one Palestinian politician, would constitute a ‘ghetto’, not a state.8 ‘The root of the conflict,’ the prime minister declared, ‘was and remains the [Palestinian] refusal to recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland’⁹ – deftly sidestepping both the issue of that state’s borders and on what terms Israel was prepared to reciprocate.

The ‘Jewish state’ demand was a familiar argument but a novel element in the diplomatic game. The Annapolis conference had referred to Israel as ‘the homeland for the Jewish people’. Netanyahu now went a step further. The PLO had formally recognized Israel in the Oslo agreement in 1993. The Jewish question had not been mentioned in Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan or been part of any other negotiation.¹⁰ Palestinians complained that the demand was tantamount to asking Abbas to endorse Zionism as well as undermining the position of Israel’s Arab citizens. Netanyahu made clear too that it was designed to counter the Palestinian demand for the ‘right of return’ of refugees. The formal Palestinian response was that the issue was not for negotiation. Abbas reiterated that the PLO recognized Israel and that Israel was free to define itself however it chose.¹¹ The less formal position was far blunter and went straight to the heart of the matter: ‘It’s a preposterous precondition,’ Hanan Ashrawi insisted. ‘I will not be a Zionist. No Palestinian will.’¹²

AN ‘INTOLERABLE’ OCCUPATION

Obama’s Cairo speech made no difference to Palestinian reality. The Gaza Strip’s 1.7 million people remained under siege, the crossings into Israel and Egypt largely closed, restricting economic activity and hobbling reconstruction. Israel banned imports of concrete, steel rods, pipes and industrial equipment that could be used to build bunkers or weapons – along with lentils, pasta, tomato paste and other items on a constantly changing list. Initially the Israelis said they wanted to ensure that a shipment of macaroni was not destined for a Hamas charity but then clarified that it was banned as a luxury item. American pressure overturned it.13 In mid-June Gazan militants attempted to attack a border post using horses rigged with explosives. The US and EU still refused to deal with Hamas. In Ramallah Abbas looked both impotent and complicit as PA security forces pursued a crackdown on Islamists in the West Bank.¹⁴ In July the PLO veteran Farouq Qaddoumi accused Abbas of having plotted to kill Arafat. In August, at Fatah’s congress in Bethlehem, the Palestinian president insisted that it was correct to pursue negotiations while maintaining a right to resistance, but suggested this was best done by peaceful protests against the separation wall.¹⁵ He was accused of ‘collaboration with the Zionist enemy’ when he gave in to US and Israeli pressure to end efforts to secure UN Human Rights Council endorsement of the Goldstone Report.¹⁶ Abbas strenuously denied reports that he had privately urged tougher Israeli action against Hamas during Cast Lead and was convinced, Mitchell reported, that the Netanyahu government had leaked the allegations against him.¹⁷ PA media excoriated the Hamas government in Gaza as an ‘emirate of darkness’.

Obama and Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, demanded a total freeze on settlements, but accepted much less. In November Netanyahu agreed to a ten-month ‘moratorium’ on settlement activity – he called it exercising ‘restraint’ – in order to relaunch peace talks. It was heavily qualified, excluding East Jerusalem, as well as construction already under way that was deemed essential for ‘normal life’.¹⁸ Days later he told his ‘brothers and sisters’ the settlers that building would resume as soon as the suspension was over. Abbas refused to enter negotiations.

Hamas officials occasionally signalled readiness for a hudna or long-term truce and hinted at de facto ‘acceptance’ of Israel in its 1967 borders, while refusing to formally recognize it and playing down the significance of the movement’s charter, with its anti-Semitic elements, which was naturally played up by Israel.¹⁹ But its more pragmatic side was also noticed.²⁰ Individual Israelis sometimes reciprocated, most notably Efraim Halevy, a former Mossad chief, who argued that in the light of the ‘destructive gamesmanship’ of the PA and the stagnation in Gaza, Israel needed to talk to the Islamists despite their being ‘a ghastly crowd’.21 Official determination to fight Hamas was illustrated sensationally by the assassination of Mohammed Mabhouh, who was found dead in a Dubai hotel in January 2010. Mabhouh had reportedly organized arms shipments from Iran to Gaza, which were a serious concern for Israel.²² The UAE published photographs of his suspected killers taken from CCTV cameras. It quickly became apparent that they were Mossad agents using disguises and false or stolen British and Australian passports.²³ Israel’s deadpan denials were implausible. It was more successful operationally than the bungled effort to kill Khaled Meshaal in Amman in 1997, though the impact was unclear.

Gaza’s plight was highlighted spectacularly by the ‘Freedom Flotilla’, made up of ships carrying some six hundred activists, which sailed from Turkey. On 31 May 2010 the lead vessel, the MV Mavi Marmara, was boarded by Israeli commandos who killed nine Turks, reporting afterwards that they had faced a ‘lynch’ by ‘terrorists’. Abbas condemned this as ‘a massacre’ while the Israelis fretted about an intelligence failure. The UN later upheld the legality of the interception but found Israel’s methods ‘excessive and unreasonable’. The flotilla was part of a growing international solidarity movement with the Palestinians, fuelled by the conviction that diplomacy was incapable of ending the blockade of Gaza and that the ‘peace process’ was a fiction masking the maintenance of the status quo and the enormous imbalance between the parties. Relations with Turkey, once Israel’s only Muslim ally, were badly damaged. ‘It is startling how, in its bungled effort to isolate Gaza, democratic Israel has come off worse than Hamas, which used to send suicide-bombers into restaurants’, The Economist newspaper commented.²⁴ Among those on board the Mavi Marmara were the radical leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, and Haneen Zoabi, the first Palestinian-Israeli woman member of the Knesset, illustrating the familiar way the occupation bolstered Palestinian solidarity across the green line.

Pro-Palestinian feelings brought gains for the growing movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). This campaign did not only target the occupied territories or demand the labelling of produce from illegal settlements (so that European shoppers could refuse to buy them) but all Israeli institutions – on the grounds that the entire state and many private bodies (banks, for example) were complicit in the occupation. It also opposed any kind of ‘normalization’ with Israelis, which limited the scope for joint struggle, as did the fact that influential supporters backed a one-state solution to the conflict.25 The symbol chosen by BDS was Handala – the defiant, ageless Palestinian cartoon child drawn by Naji al-Ali. In his new role little Handala clutched the scales of justice patiently behind his back. Israel began to warn of a campaign of demonization and ‘delegitimization’ it claimed was motivated by the anti-Semitism of enemies who rejected its very existence. That became the dominant theme of official hasbara (public diplomacy or propaganda) in the Netanyahu era. The PA – still committed to Oslo, recognition of Israel and a two-state solution – did not back BDS, only the boycott of settlement produce, which was also pursued energetically by the reforming Salam Fayyad: he called it ‘empowering the people’ to resist occupation without resorting to violence.²⁶ In general Fayyad, who was garnering international plaudits for his state-building strategy, urged Palestinians to overcome their feelings of failure and loss of confidence created by decades of Israeli rule and avoid defeatism, ‘passive nihilism or destructive acts of bravado’.²⁷ At the same time, Israeli-PA joint security operations increased by 72 per cent in 2009 – co-operation that Abbas’s growing number of Palestinian critics complained was sustaining an insupportable status quo.²⁸

American insistence led to the launch of a new round of Israeli–Palestinian negotiations in Washington in September 2010 after the killing of four Israeli settlers near Hebron a few days earlier. Hamas claimed responsibility for that attack and again denounced the PA’s ‘treachery’ when its security forces arrested several suspects. It dismissed the talks as ‘humiliating and degrading’. PA police broke up protests. But the talks made no progress as Netanyahu refused to extend the settlement moratorium despite tempting carrots dangled by Obama – twenty of the latest American F35 fighter aircraft and a pledge to veto anti-Israeli resolutions at the UN. The Israeli leader looked instead to his right-wing and the settlers, and the bulldozers and cement mixers roared into life again.

Economic growth, overseen by Fayyad, helped by cheap bank loans for homes and cars, brought a measure of calm and a façade of normality to the West Bank. That was a mixed blessing, some felt. In the ‘bubble’ of Ramallah, Raja Shehadeh complained of ‘desperate hyperactivity’ aimed at distracting people from resistance.29 ‘The spread of individualism means that more and more Palestinians are legitimating … and protecting their personal interests … above the collective interests and concerns of the community’, commented the sociologist Jamil Hilal. ‘This new middle class has an obvious interest in not rocking the boat. Any stoppage in salaries from the PA or other employers will leave this large segment of the population highly exposed.’³⁰ Ramallah had ‘acquired the reputation of a “five-star prison”, with a decided emphasis on the “five-star” rather than the “prison”,’ wrote a Bir Zeit academic.³¹ Even Gaza saw some slight improvement: launches of rockets from the enclave were down from 2,048 in 2008 to 150 in 2010. By the end of the year, however, diplomacy had again ground to a halt. In February 2011 the US cast its veto against a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements – the first by the Obama administration. It was drafted by Britain, France and Germany, in clear support of Abbas. Washington insisted it saw settlements as ‘illegitimate’, rather than ‘illegal’ – an unconvincing and unhelpful distinction – but it torpedoed the resolution because it risked ‘hardening the positions of both sides’.³²

ARAB SPRING, PALESTINIAN WINTER

Schism and stagnation in Palestine made for a depressing contrast with the winds of change that blew across the region in the wake of the Tunisian revolution in December 2010 – the start of what became known as the ‘Arab Spring’. Israel was alarmed by the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and fretted about the fate of its peace treaty with Egypt after the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Israeli officials warned of the strengthening of Hamas in Gaza and a wider ‘Islamist winter’ if the pattern persisted.³³ Uprisings in Libya and Bahrain were remote, but Syria loomed large. Palestinians were divided as the crisis next door escalated into full-scale war. Bashar al-Assad (who had succeeded his father Hafez in 2000) seemed to many to be a guarantor at least of stability and minority rights. Others saluted a popular uprising against a dictatorship which had always manipulated the Palestinian cause in its own interest, especially in Lebanon. Indeed, on Nakba day in May 2011, hundreds of unarmed Palestinian protestors poured across the normally strictly controlled Golan Heights demarcation line near Majdal Shams. It was the first time it had been breached in three decades and a sure sign that Assad was trying to divert attention from Syria’s unprecedented internal unrest. Others tried to cross the border from Lebanon. Fifteen Palestinians were shot dead by the Israelis, though one enterprising Syrian-born refugee managed to reach his ancestral home in Jaffa before being detained and deported. Coupled with official Nakba events organized by the PA in Ramallah, it was an impressive show of Palestinian national solidarity at a time when a recent law had allowed the Israeli government to cut funding to any body commemorating the catastrophe of 1948.34 Over the preceding few years the Tel-Aviv-based NGO Zochrot (Remembrance) had promoted greater knowledge of the Nakba – in Hebrew – by collecting testimony from Jewish veterans of the war as well as from Palestinians, and publishing detailed information about hundreds of depopulated or destroyed villages.³⁵ Better understanding of the past had not, however, translated into changing current mainstream Israeli attitudes towards this most sensitive of issues.

In the first few months of 2011 thousands turned out for West Bank rallies calling for national unity and new elections under the slogan ‘the people want to end the split’ (between Fatah and Hamas) – the Palestinian version of the Arab Spring’s ‘the people want to end the regime’. Abbas’s original four-year presidential term had expired two years earlier but he was ruling by decree, while Fayyad’s appointment as prime minister had yet to be confirmed by parliament, which had been inactive since the 2007 Gaza coup. Revelations about secret PLO talks with Israel – revealed in the leaked ‘Palestine Papers’ – led Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator, to offer his resignation. Abbas, however, refused to accept it.

Gazans faced the dual problem of Israeli siege and Hamas repression. The movement’s young supporters had grown up during the second intifada and never left the enclave, even to work in Israel, and they enforced austere social norms. Opponents called for a ‘dignity revolution’ in the spirit of the Arab Spring: their platform was a Facebook page named ‘End the Division’.36 In March Hamas suddenly fired dozens of mortar shells into Israel in an apparent attempt to deflect attention from domestic protests. In May Fatah and Hamas agreed on a unity government and a date for elections. Hamas was motivated by the situation in Damascus, where it was under pressure to side with Assad. Khaled Meshaal, its political chief, relocated to the Qatari capital Doha, however, and expressed solidarity with the Syrian revolution. Mubarak’s overthrow was in turn a blow to Abbas. Netanyahu reacted furiously: Abbas could not make peace with Israel if he was reconciled with Hamas, he warned, ordering the withholding of tax revenues – a significant part of the PA budget. Israeli hasbara was inadvertently served by Ismail Hanieh, the Hamas leader in Gaza, who hailed Osama bin Laden as a mujahid (holy warrior) when the news broke of his killing by US special forces in Pakistan. Yet the Palestinian rivals remained at odds over who should be prime minister. Fatah nominated Salam Fayyad to reassure the US and Europe. Hamas disagreed – and demanded the PA end security co-ordination with Israel. No solution was found for paying tens of thousands of Hamas-appointed officials. Opponents of a deal included Gazans who benefitted from smuggling goods through hundreds of tunnels under the border with Egypt, a blockade-busting lifeline for the local economy. The largest of the tunnels, equipped with lighting and generators, allowed cars to be brought in as well as construction materials, medicines, drugs, cigarettes and weapons, including rocket launchers looted from Libya. On the eve of holidays, traders imported live sheep and fresh beef. Even wedding dresses came through. The traffic was worth an estimated $1 billion a year, and served to reinforce Hamas’s rule. ‘The siege is a blessing in disguise,’ one Hamas official said. ‘It is weaning us off Israel and 60 years of aid, and helping us to help ourselves.’³⁷

Abbas’s conclusion in the face of deadlock with both Hamas and the Israelis was to seek formal recognition of Palestinian statehood at the UN, despite the certainty that it would be blocked by the Americans. It was part of an emerging strategy of making advances internationally to try to pressure Israel; ‘to legislate Palestine’, in the words of one Fatah official, ‘to give us the option of saying this is unlawful’.38 A giant blue chair, symbolizing the UN seat, was placed in Ramallah’s Manara Square. It was a high point for Abbas, who was greeted as a hero on his return from New York. Israel and its supporters dubbed this approach ‘lawfare’.

Often, however, outside intervention could help only when narrowly focused on security issues. Thus in October 2011 Hamas released Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier who had been captured on the Gaza border back in 2006, in a deal that was brokered by Germany and Egypt. Shalit had become a cause célèbre in Israel: his French-born father lobbied incessantly, fearing a repeat of the case of Ron Arad, an air force navigator captured when his plane was downed in Lebanon in 1986 but who died in captivity. Shalit was exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, many serving life sentences for killing Israelis. But they did not include Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned for organizing attacks during the al-Aqsa intifada, who was widely seen as a likely replacement for the ageing and increasingly unpopular Abbas. It was one of the most lop-sided of exchanges – though some of the Palestinians, monitored by the Shin Bet, were re-arrested later. Hamas trumpeted the agreement. ‘Hamas is Netanyahu’s sworn enemy’, complained one senior Western diplomat. ‘He gave them a huge morale boost and gave Abbas a kick in the teeth.’ Shalit was welcomed home, not as a hero – in fact he faced criticism for not resisting capture – but as an Israeli everyman in a country where compulsory IDF service was still the norm but militarily prowess could not guarantee peace.³⁹ The preoccupation was reflected in the TV series Hatufim (known as ‘Prisoners of War’ in English), which drew large audiences when it was screened in Israel while Shalit was still in captivity.

TUNNEL VISION

It was hardly a surprise when Gaza erupted again in November 2012. The preceding months had seen tensions rise after Israel’s assassination of the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, Zuhair al-Qaisi, in March. Like other such ‘targeted’ operations, it was seen variously as a provocation or a pre-emptive strike intended to disrupt and prevent future attacks. ‘A few days of fear in Sderot are a small investment that will bring a big profit in terms of punishment and deterrence’, commented one Israeli analyst.40 In May Israel released the bodies of ninety-one prisoners and suicide bombers in a ‘humanitarian gesture’ to the PA but that failed to calm tensions on the Gaza front. Each side blamed the other for triggering the new onslaught – the inevitable argument over sequencing impossible to resolve definitively. The Israelis counted rocket salvoes and the Palestinians pointed to the blockade of Gaza – the territory now routinely described as the world’s biggest open-air prison – and the occupation of the West Bank. The underlying situation remained volatile despite modest economic growth in the enclave. The election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi as Egypt’s president did not, as Hamas had hoped, make Cairo any more friendly than it had been in the Mubarak era. Hamas was accused of assisting jihadis in an incident in which eighteen Egyptian soldiers were killed in Sinai. Egypt’s ‘deep state’, instinctively suspicious of Islamists of all stripes, had not changed.

‘Operation Pillar of Defence’ began on 14 November with another assassination, that of the powerful Hamas military commander Ahmed Jaabari in an Israeli drone strike which incinerated his car on a quiet side street, followed by the immediate killing of a collaborator suspected of having betrayed him. It ended eight days later with an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire that at least prevented another full-scale IDF ground invasion: 162 Gazans, including 37 children, were killed; Israel lost 3 civilians and 1 soldier. Israeli air strikes were punctuated by rocket salvoes that paralysed the south of the country and hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time, though the US-financed Iron Dome anti-missile system proved largely effective. Gaza again suffered serious damage and much of the Hamas missile arsenal was destroyed, though the movement still claimed victory in what it named the Battle of Stones of Clay – a resonant Quranic reference.⁴¹ ‘We have come out of this battle with our heads up high’, Meshaal declared. ‘Allahu akbar, dear people of Gaza, you won’, mosque loudspeakers declared as the truce took effect. ‘You have broken the arrogance of the Jews.’ Israelis staged protests where three people were killed in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi by a rocket fired from Gaza. Netanyahu’s government insisted there had been no agreement to lift the blockade by opening the crossing points but confirmed that it would no longer enforce a no-go buffer zone inside Gaza up to the border fence, which severely restricted the use of farmland. Gaza fishermen were permitted to sail out further from shore. ‘The right to self-defence trumps any piece of paper’, warned Ehud Barak. It would not be long before it was invoked again.

Abbas, isolated and irrelevant in Ramallah, played no part in ‘proximity’ ceasefire talks held in Cairo between Israeli and Hamas representatives via Egyptian intelligence. He had attracted furious accusations of surrendering the hallowed Palestinian right of return when he said on Israeli TV that he believed he had the right to visit his birthplace, Safed, in Galilee, though not to live there. In the summer of 2012 independent protests near the Muqataa – demonstrators chanting ‘the people want to bring down Oslo’ – were broken up violently by PA police.42 But a year after launching his diplomatic campaign, Abbas did notch up a significant achievement, in rare and open defiance of both the US and Israel, when the UN General Assembly upgraded Palestine to a ‘non-member state with observer status’ – the same status as the Holy See. Lieberman had attacked this effort, without irony, as ‘diplomatic terrorism’.⁴³ The vote was cast on 29 November 2012, the sixty-fifth anniversary of the UN’s historic partition decision in 1947. Abbas had asked for a ‘birth certificate’ for his country. The enhanced status would give Palestine access to organizations such as the International Criminal Court, where it could file complaints of war crimes against Israel. Netanyahu, weeks before another election, responded by announcing that Israel would build thousands of new homes in the West Bank. That looked like another tactical move – but it fitted a consistent and long-standing pattern.

BARRIERS TO PEACE

Obama put settlements under a harsher spotlight than any previous US president, which was why Israeli right-wingers chanted ‘Saddam Hussein Obama’ at their rallies. Netanyahu’s second term as prime minister, from 2009, boosted the self-confidence of the settler lobby and the expansion of their project. Three years later, his response to the UN vote on Palestine was a plan to start building in a narrow east–west desert corridor known as E1, which separated Jerusalem from Maaleh Adumim. The significance of that was that once settled it would effectively bisect the northern and southern parts of the West Bank, already carved up by settlements and checkpoints, and break up what had been contiguous Palestinian territory, albeit under the patchwork of different areas as defined by Oslo. It was the last remaining open space that could mean a contiguous Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. In the first quarter of 2013, at the start of Netanyahu’s third term, settlement construction hit a seven-year high.44

By September that year, the twentieth anniversary of Oslo, the number of Israelis living beyond the green line had more than doubled, from 262,500 to 520,000, including 200,000 in East Jerusalem, the latter (home to more than one-third of all settlers) ignored by government bodies on the grounds that it was not up for negotiation. The total was often cited as a damning verdict on the 1993 agreement and incontrovertible evidence that it could not lead to a resolution of the conflict. In 2013 Israel began work on 2,534 new homes in the West Bank, more than double the 1,133 built in 2012.⁴⁵ In January Palestinian activists of the Popular Resistance Committee and international supporters set up a protest camp called Bab al-Shams (‘Gate of the Sun’), named after the novel by Elias Khoury, to lay claim to E1, mirroring the stealth and organization used by Israeli settlers. It was broken up by police after a few days.⁴⁶

By the second decade of the twenty-first century the Israeli presence in the West Bank was no longer marked by clusters of caravans or mobile homes on isolated hilltops, but by rapidly growing towns. The biggest, all close to the green line, were Maaleh Adumim, Beitar Illit and Modiin Illit, each with tens of thousands of residents, some living in tower blocks. The last two were largely Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) settlements, with high birth rates. ‘Sterile’ roads leading to them, bristling with surveillance cameras, bypassed Palestinian areas using bridges and tunnels and were barred to Palestinians. The route of the separation wall encompassed them all. Ariel, dominated by Russian immigrants47 and now with its own university, extended eleven miles east of the 1967 border.

The impact of the wall was memorably captured in Hani Abu Assad’s award-winning film Omar, Palestine’s entry for the 2013 Oscars in the best foreign film category – the eponymous young hero climbing it illicitly to woo his sweetheart on the other side. Israel’s Oscar entry that year was a film called Bethlehem, which covered much of the same territory but was less well received. Both featured Shin Bet efforts to recruit Palestinians – a significant element of what passed for normal life. Murals by the elusive British artist Banksy, one cheekily portraying a Palestinian girl searching an Israeli soldier, added to the wall’s global notoriety. In Bethlehem though, there was local unease about motives (and perhaps bad puns) when the ‘Walled Off’ hotel opened right next to it, advertising ‘the worst view of any hotel in the world’.⁴⁸ Grafitti and portraits of Arafat and the gaoled Marwan Barghouti were painted as acts of resistance. The slogan that overlooked the big Qalandiya checkpoint, north of Jerusalem, was an inspired borrowing from computer keyboards that seemed the essence of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians: ‘Control + Alt + Delete’.

The physical transformation of the West Bank landscape was underpinned by long-standing legal and administrative arrangements that entrenched the separation between Palestinians living under military rule and Israeli citizens of a democratic state. Land was confiscated, often for ostensibly military purposes, and spending concealed under innocuous headings in ministerial budgets – but carefully monitored by Israeli NGOs like Peace Now and B’Tselem. Settlers continued to enjoy significant financial benefits, including cheap loans, tax exemptions and higher spending on education per pupil than what was standard inside Israel. The government provided a subsidy of up to $28,000 for each apartment built in a settlement, one reason why many residents still explained their choice of dwelling place on financial and lifestyle grounds rather than political or ideological ones. In Ariel in 2012, for example, a four-bedroom home cost $200,000. In Tel Aviv, the same amount of money would buy only a two-room flat in a poor neighbourhood. When a spacious home in Maaleh Adumim was advertised for rent on Airbnb in January 2017, without any reference to its location across the green line, it seemed to symbolize the complete ‘normalization’ of the settlement enterprise. Religious or nationalist motives often mattered less than the banal considerations of ordinary life.49

Wider social, economic and political changes had brought the settlers closer to the mainstream of Israeli life. In 2008, 31 per cent of them defined themselves as ultra-Orthodox; 22 per cent lived in ‘nationalist-religious’ settlements; and 32 per cent in settlements with a variety of religious observance. Over half of the settlers who lived east of the separation barrier wanted to expand Israel’s borders.⁵⁰ The settlers were also well-connected: by 2010 one-third of IDF infantry officers were drawn from the ‘nationalist-religious camp’.⁵¹ The ultra-nationalist but secular Avigdor Lieberman lived in a settlement. Dani Dayan, chairman of the Yesha (Judaea and Samaria) Council, was close to Netanyahu, whose coalition ally, the confident and ambitious Naftali Bennett of the far-right HaBayit haYehudi (Jewish Home) Party, had held the same position. Liberals protested in 2011 over the appointment to the Supreme Court of a judge who lived in Gush Etzion, and, as Haaretz put it, ‘breaks the law every time he goes home’.⁵² Hebron remained the most sensitive flashpoint because of the sheer proximity of the most hard-line settlers, armed and guarded by the IDF, and Palestinian residents, both in the city centre and in adjacent Kiryat Arba.

Settler violence against Palestinians included attacks on West Bank mosques, homes, cars and crops. Olive trees were a favourite target: 7,500 were destroyed in 2011. IDF soldiers often fired over the heads of Palestinian farmers rather than confront Jews who were stoning and harassing them. Charges were rarely brought. So-called ‘price tag’ attacks by extremist settlers began in 2006 after Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza and the evacuation of four small outposts in the Jenin area. Activists of Noar haGvaot (Hilltop Youth) – inspired by Sharon’s famous 1998 call to ‘grab the hilltops’, and recognizable by their large skullcaps and tzitzit (the tasselled fringes worn by Orthodox Jewish men) – often initiated confrontations. Hilltop, the best-selling Hebrew novel by Assaf Gavron, portrayed life in a fictional West Bank ‘outpost’ where buildings were erected, water supplied and IDF protection provided, all without formal government permission, until it is eventually transformed into a ‘legal’ settlement.53 In Israeli discourse, an ‘outpost’ was a settlement that was unauthorized but officially tolerated, although under international law it was just as illegal as all others. And there was a marked increase in evictions of Palestinians for building unlicensed structures in ‘Area C’ – the 60 per cent of the West Bank under direct Israeli control – prompting a strongly-worded complaint from the EU about ‘forced transfer’. In the Jordan Valley, which was economically vital for a Palestinian state, Palestinians were increasingly hemmed in by settlements, IDF bases and firing zones, nature reserves and demolition orders.⁵⁴ ‘If you ask a standard Israeli about it they would think it is part of Israel,’ shrugged Irene Nasser, a Palestinian-Israeli activist with the ‘Salt of the Earth’ campaign, camped out among the date palms in the abandoned village of Ein Hijleh near Jericho – before being briskly evicted by the IDF. ‘This is Palestinian land and our presence here is to reclaim it and hold on to it.’⁵⁵ Even if the separation barrier were to turn into a permanent border, with 200,000 settlers inside it, an estimated 100,000 more would still be left beyond it.

The reality of Israeli politics and life in the West Bank belied the notion that sufficient territory was likely to be surrendered for a future viable peace agreement. Facts on the ground had transformed the landscape of what remained of the 22 per cent of Palestine outside the pre-1967 borders. The land occupied by the settlements proper – numbering some 230 by 2015 – was no more than 3 per cent of the West Bank, though their areas of jurisdiction, along with the roads, tunnels and other infrastructure that supported them, took up far more. Overall, some 42 per cent of West Bank land was in Israeli hands.⁵⁶ The issue of the settlers was bigger than the settlers themselves: the enterprise was a national strategy.⁵⁷ For many Israelis, the old debate about the ‘irreversibility’ of occupation launched by Meron Benvenisti in the 1980s no longer seemed relevant, just like talk of a two-state solution. ‘The Israeli left would like to make us believe that the green line is something solid; that everything that is on this side is good and that everything bad began with the occupation in 1967’, Benvenisti argued. ‘It is a false dichotomy. The green line is like a one-way mirror. It’s only for the Palestinians, not for Israelis.’⁵⁸ Other Israelis on the left and centre continued to believe that, although difficult, evacuating West Bank settlers in order to reach a permanent peace agreement with the Palestinians was a matter of political will, even as the country’s mood was changing. Yet even without a definitive answer to the settlement question – crucial to any deal – Oslo’s legacy was aptly described as a ‘zombie’ peace59 or a ‘dead solution walking’.⁶⁰

BUILDING JERUSALEM

Nowhere was the Israeli impulse to erase the green line more determined than in East Jerusalem. The US was furious in March 2010 when Netanyahu’s government announced plans for building 1,600 housing units in the ultra-Orthodox area of Ramat Shlomo during a visit by Vice-President Joe Biden. It was a ‘direct and astonishing insult’, felt Obama’s envoy George Mitchell.⁶¹ The overall, if unstated, goal was to increase the city’s Jewish population and decrease the number of Palestinians. This was done by isolating it from its West Bank hinterland (the separation wall now snaking through its eastern edge), combined with land appropriation and discriminatory planning and budget allocation. Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, with their blue identity cards, were worse off than Jews but did have access to a larger labour market and were generally more prosperous than their kinfolk in Nablus or Hebron, where the PA’s writ ran. In 2013, 62 per cent of the city’s population of 804,000 were Jews. Palestinians represented 36 per cent of residents, but only 10–13 per cent of the municipal budget was spent in their areas.⁶² Efforts increased by Jewish organizations to purchase property in Arab neighbourhoods. In 2010 the Israeli peace movement – which had been largely dormant since the trauma of the second intifada – revived briefly to protest at the eviction of a Palestinian family from Sheikh Jarrah in favour of Israelis, one of several such cases. The property had been Jewish-owned before 1948 so the court ruling on eviction raised the question of symmetrical claims for Arab property in West Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel. To add to both the symbolism and sensitivity of the affair the evicted family were themselves refugees from 1948.⁶³

The right-wing Elad movement took over buildings in Silwan, south of the Old City, aiming to ‘rediscover and preserve the Biblical city of David’, and connect Jews to their biblical roots through tourism, archaeological excavation and generally ‘Judaizing’ Jerusalem. Ateret Cohanim (Crown of the Priests), another settler group, conducted similar activities. But municipal practice facilitated the work of the radical fringes of the settlement movement.64 Arab houses built without hard-to-obtain permits were routinely demolished. Salah al-Din Street, the main commercial thoroughfare outside the Old City, looked frozen in time, barely changed in forty years, while West Jerusalem grew and developed. East Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighbourhoods became enclaves surrounded by the post-1967 Jewish ones, with little contact with each other. In 2013 Eliezer Yaari, a Jewish journalist who lived in the Arnona district, crossed the wadi to the adjacent village of Sur Baher to try to get to know his Arab neighbours: he called his vivid book about it Beyond the Mountains of Darkness to try to convey just how distant and alien they seemed.⁶⁵ Shuafat refugee camp, a slum plagued by crime and drug abuse, was within the city limits but abandoned on the other side of the separation wall: ‘the most dangerous place in Jerusalem, a crucible of crime, jihad and trash fires’.⁶⁶ Abu Dis and Al-Ram were divided by its thirty-foot high concrete slabs, covered in graffiti. In 2008 the Israeli interior ministry revoked the residency rights of 4,577 Arabs in East Jerusalem, the highest annual figure ever. In all, more than 14,000 Arab Jerusalemites had their status revoked since 1967. Palestinians from the West Bank who were married to Jerusalem residents encountered endless bureaucratic hurdles, which felt like deliberate harassment. Visits to the interior ministry and national insurance offices were a source of misery and humiliation.⁶⁷ Al-Quds University faced a long and unsuccessful battle for recognition by the Israeli ministry of education.

The Haram al-Sharif remained a source of permanent tension, with access regularly barred to Palestinians from the West Bank, usually men under fifty or even sixty, for security reasons. Sharon’s notorious visit in September 2000 had never been forgotten and there were frequent provocative attempts by Jewish extremists such as the Temple Mount Faithful to both stake and advertise their claim, their fringe status belied by official municipal or government tolerance or even support.68 Palestinians in Israel, especially members of the Islamic Movement, were bussed in to attend Friday prayers at al-Aqsa – another consequence of the disappearance of the pre-1967 border. The movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, had been gaoled for raising money for Hamas and for incitement to violence. Prospects for finding a negotiated solution for the city, never good, appeared to be regressing. Barak and Olmert had both accepted the principle of divided sovereignty or administration and internationally supervised arrangements for the ‘Holy Basin’ of the Old City and Temple Mount, although such concessions were highly controversial. Natan Sharansky, the famous Soviet-era Jewish ‘refusenik’, who had served as minister for Jerusalem in Sharon’s government in 2003, spoke for many when he cautioned then that giving up access to the Temple Mount was tantamount to betraying the very essence of Zionism. Ehud Barak had made the same point after the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000. ‘Without our historical connection to Jerusalem, without the link to the past, without the feeling of continuity with the ancient kingdoms of Israel for whom the Temple Mount was the centre of existence, we really are foreign invaders and colonialists in this country’, Sharansky wrote.⁶⁹ Polling showed that hardening Jewish views on the Palestinians were characterized by indifference and despair. The ‘lurch to the centre’ in the 2013 Knesset elections was marked by the emergence of the secular, centrist but domestic-focused Yesh Atid (There is a Future) movement led by the TV presenter Yair Lapid, that supported ‘separation’ between Israelis and Palestinians – though that did not extend to a readiness to redivide what was still ritually described as ‘united’ Jerusalem. Indeed, a minister and leading settler, Uri Ariel of Jewish Home, called for the Jewish Temple to be rebuilt on the Temple Mount – breaking a taboo on officials speaking about changing the status quo. And plans to build 1,500 new homes in East Jerusalem were announced after the second batch of prisoner releases had been agreed on when the latest Israeli–Palestinian talks got under way in July 2013. The goal set by John Kerry, secretary of state in Obama’s second administration, was a full peace agreement within nine months. Hamas, still isolated in its Gazan fiefdom, was excluded.

PERSIAN DIVERSION

Palestinians were the unavoidable enemy in Israel’s backyard, and by far the toughest problem in what Netanyahu relished calling a ‘tough neighbourhood’.70 But after 2009 Netanyahu’s sharpest regional focus was on Iran – as he made clear in his first meeting with Obama that March, an encounter so hostile that it was dubbed by officials in Jerusalem as ‘The Ambush’.⁷¹ Support for the Palestinians and hostility to Israel had been a centrepiece of Iranian policy since the 1979 revolution, when Yasser Arafat had been handed the keys to the abandoned Israeli Embassy in Tehran to use as a mission for the PLO (although during the Iran–Iraq war, Israel quietly supplied weapons to the Iranians in a classic illustration of the old axiom about befriending an enemy’s enemy). Iran’s ally/proxy Hizbullah was a preoccupation for Israel after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and Tehran also supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Revelations about a clandestine Iranian nuclear programme in 2002 galvanized concern in Israel about its own undeclared but widely acknowledged nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran admitted to the existence of its nuclear programme in 2003 and agreed to stricter international inspections of its nuclear sites and to suspend production of enriched uranium. However, alarm deepened in 2005 with the election of the hard-line populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s resumption of uranium enrichment.

In the wake of the US-led invasion of Iraq, European efforts began to negotiate a peaceful roll-back of the Iranian nuclear programme in the name of nuclear non-proliferation and regional stability. UN, US and EU sanctions were imposed to pressure Tehran while Israeli leaders repeatedly warned that they would not tolerate a nuclear Iran. In 2008 George Bush deflected a secret Israeli request for specialized bunker-busting bombs to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. In 2010 Netanyahu and Barak instructed the army to prepare for pre-emptive air strikes, although they were opposed by the head of the Mossad and IDF chief of staff. Cyber-attacks and assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists bore the hallmarks of Israeli and US covert action. Predictions of a unilateral Israeli attack in spring 2012 proved wrong, but the threat, perhaps as intended, did galvanize EU support for sanctions. That September, at the UN, Netanyahu brandished a cartoonish diagram of a bomb to represent the Iranian programme and drew a red line across it with a marker-pen to show where Israel’s red line was – graphically urging Obama to heed his warning. In the wake of ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’ in November, Netanyahu claimed that ‘virtually all the weapons’ in Gaza came from Iran. Iranian-made Fajr 5 rockets were fired into Israel and billboards thanking Iran for them appeared on Gaza’s streets.

The election of the pragmatic Hassan Rouhani as Iranian president in 2013 – replacing the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad – saw an intensification of nuclear diplomacy. By the end of the year the US, Iran and five other major powers had reached an interim agreement, under which Iran would curb its nuclear work in exchange for sanctions relief. Netanyahu, however, carried on pressing Obama on the issue as critics at home argued that his focus on Iran was ‘a fig leaf’ for the real danger to Israel.72 Yuval Diskin, the former Shin Bet chief, described Netanyahu and Barak as ‘messianic’ in their attitude towards the Islamic Republic. In late 2013 Diskin warned publicly that the ‘implications of not solving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict present a greater existential threat to Israel than the Iranian nuclear project’. The still serving head of the Mossad, Tamir Pardo, made the same point – albeit in private – a few months later.⁷³ (Powerful security figures like these were always guaranteed a hearing in Israel.) Netanyahu’s strategy appeared to be to somehow ‘manage’ the Palestinian issue indefinitely, rather than try to resolve it. But it could never really be ignored for very long.

ON THE EDGE

Ariel Sharon, sunk in a coma since 2006, died in January 2014, prompting a flurry of speculation about whether, had he not been felled by illness, he would have followed through the Gaza disengagement with a further unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. Sharon’s intentions could not be proven and suggestions that he had come to believe in a genuine two-state solution, rather than another partial redeployment on Israel’s terms, reflected wishful thinking rather than hard evidence. Still, the latest US-brokered peace effort had acquired surprising momentum – despite being a rough ride: Moshe Yaalon, Netanyahu’s hawkish defence minister, described Kerry as ‘messianic’ and ‘obsessive’ in pursuit of a deal. It was not intended as a compliment. And the talks foundered just before the expiry of the nine-month deadline for agreement.

Netanyahu reneged on a pledge to free a fourth and final group of 104 veteran Palestinian prisoners – always a highly sensitive issue for both sides – because Naftali Bennett of Jewish Home threatened to quit the coalition if the releases went ahead. Abbas had agreed that if the prisoners were freed he would suspend his bid to join UN institutions, including the International Criminal Court.74 But when they did not materialize, he signed applications for Palestine to join fifteen international treaties and conventions – live on Palestine TV.⁷⁵ Kerry mainly blamed Israel for the breakdown, even if he criticized the Palestinians too. ‘Both sides, whether advertently or inadvertently, wound up in positions where things happened that were unhelpful,’ he said. ‘And so day one went by, day two went by, day three went by. And then in the afternoon, when they were about to maybe get there, 700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem and, poof, that was sort of the moment.’⁷⁶ But it was Abbas’s signature on the long-awaited reconciliation agreement with Hamas that finally killed off the negotiations.

The Palestinian Islamist movement had been badly weakened by President Morsi’s overthrow by the Egyptian military in July 2013: General Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi moved quickly to shut down the tunnels into Gaza and cut off trade and revenues to the Hamas administration. Power cuts and price rises exacerbated an already precarious situation. Pressure was mounting. ‘The Israelis do allow some things in, to show to the media,’ Ahmed Yussef of Hamas told a visiting foreign journalist in February 2014. ‘They try to keep us on a diet. They will not let us become like Somalia, but they need to keep us busy worrying about food and electricity and sewage and shortages – not about politics and the struggle with Israel, not about the refugees and our long-range objectives.’⁷⁷ When the Palestinian rivals endorsed a government of technocrats headed by an academic named Rami Hamdallah, and without a single member of Hamas, Netanyahu suspended talks with Abbas and stopped the transfer of $100 million in customs revenues, though only after authorizing the latest payment, apparently out of fear the PA might collapse. Its continued existence, and especially its security co-operation, was, after all, still of immense value to Israel, as its Palestinian critics were only too aware.

The crisis escalated sharply in June 2014 with the kidnapping of three Israeli teenage boys who were hitchhiking home from their yeshiva in a West Bank settlement. Hundreds of Palestinians, including Hamas MPs and fifty former prisoners who had been freed in the Shalit prisoner exchange, were re-arrested. A strict news blackout concealed evidence that the three had probably been killed at once. The kidnapping gripped Israel, with rolling news coverage, prayer vigils and feverish social media campaigns. Pictures of the three were matched by images of Palestinian children smiling and holding up three fingers to celebrate the abduction. The #BringBackOurBoys hashtag worked for both sides. Jews chanted ‘Death to Arabs!’ and dragged Palestinians off the light railway that connected Jerusalem’s northern Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods to the centre – a rare shared public space. Even in a city where residential segregation was normal, Jerusalem had not felt so tense and divided since the second intifada. Netanyahu blamed Hamas. The bodies of the three, who had been shot, were found eventually near Hebron. It appeared that the kidnapping was a local initiative; the Hamas leadership hailed the killings but denied responsibility. In any event, the episode was an embarrassment for Abbas and was exploited by Israel – though critics accused Netanyahu of deliberate deception – to drive a wedge between the PA and the Islamists and torpedo their reconciliation.78 Rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel as the three were buried. Israeli jets and helicopters launched a wave of strikes on Gaza. Immediately afterwards a Palestinian teenager was abducted and killed in East Jerusalem, his mutilated body found burned in a nearby forest; an autopsy revealed that he had still been alive when set on fire. Three Jews, two of them teenagers, were given life sentences; a third twenty years. The father of the victim demanded that their families’ homes be demolished, as often happened when Palestinians carried out acts of terrorism.

‘MOWING GAZA’S LAWN’

‘Operation Protective Edge’, in the summer of 2014, was both the longest and and most devastating of the wars waged on Gaza since Israel’s ‘disengagement’ nine years earlier. Over the course of fifty-one terrible days, Gaza suffered massive material and human losses. More than 20,000 homes were estimated to have been rendered uninhabitable by shelling and air strikes that the IDF claimed targeted only ‘terrorist’ sites. On the penultimate day of the fighting, bombs brought down the fifteen-storey Basha Tower in Gaza City. Water mains and power lines were destroyed. The Palestinians gave the death toll as 2,310, including 1,617 civilians. The UN count was 2,251 people, including 1,462 civilians, of whom 299 were women and 551 children. The Israelis put the figure at 2,125, of whom 765 were civilians. Israel’s death toll stood at sixty-seven soldiers and six civilians, including a four-year-old who died when a rocket hit a house. The IDF said more than 3,700 rockets had been fired towards Israel by 20 August: one landed near Ben-Gurion airport, bringing a brief and alarming suspension of international flights. It destroyed thirty-two tunnels that were designed for attack rather than smuggling and turned out to be far more extensive than had been believed, prompting another row about inadequate intelligence. Hamas called the war ‘Eaten Straw’, referring to a Quranic verse about the defeat of Islam’s enemies.79

Israel’s high-tech capabilities did not spare Gazans. Automated phone calls, texts and leaflets dropped from planes announced impending attacks, but in many cases investigated by Amnesty International no prior warning was given. Journalists on the ground saw no evidence to support Israeli claims that Palestinians were used as human shields, though missiles were repeatedly fired from residential areas and there were reports of fighters being asked not to do anything to attract Israeli strikes. The head of an UNRWA school demanded the removal of a motorbike from the playground because the Israelis claimed bikes were being used to transport weapons.⁸⁰ The Shin Bet cited admissions by captured Hamas men that mosques were used for military activity and tunnels were built near kindergartens and clinics.⁸¹ Still, critics responded, even if Hamas were violating international law on this matter, it would not justify Israel’s failure to take precautionary measures to protect civilians.82 ‘Every single human being in Gaza, whether walking or on foot, riding a bicycle, steering a toktuk [motorbike with cart] or driving a car, is a threat to Israel now’, recorded Atef Abu Saif, a local journalist. It was the stuff of nightmares but all too real. ‘Occasionally turning on the TV doesn’t help: the body parts; the severed hand lying at the side of the road; the stomach dangling from a limp corpse; the face covered in blood; the skull rent open … Destruction, rubble. Screaming. Torn bodies.’⁸³ Unlike in ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008–9, access to the international media was unrestricted so coverage was intense, vivid and shocking. The level of Palestinian casualties led to charges that Israel was committing war crimes. In mid-July an Israeli air strike killed four boys playing on a beach, in full view of foreign journalists in an adjacent hotel. A Guardian correspondent captured the banal horror of the situation when he described a shell hole ‘the size of a toaster’ that killed three people, and a distraught father collecting his son’s dismembered remains in a plastic bag.⁸⁴ On 24 July, thirteen Palestinians were killed in an attack on a UNRWA school.

‘TELEGENICALLY DEAD’

The Gaza war was fought out in parallel in cyber-space, the IDF and the Qassam Brigades posting messages and images on social media and generating global reactions. Hamas produced a crude propaganda video of its men singing a Hebrew song, posted on YouTube, deriding Israel as weak as a ‘spider’s web’ – the phrase made famous by Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. It became a bizarre hit in Israel and prompted mocking counter-videos. Netanyahu was on peak PR form. ‘These people are the worst terrorists – genocidal terrorists,’ he said. ‘They call for the destruction of Israel and they call for the killing of every Jew, wherever they can find them. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.’⁸⁵

Israelis overwhelmingly supported the campaign – over 90 per cent in one poll; only 4 per cent believed excessive firepower had been used.86 Controversy erupted over pictures of young Israelis in Sderot eating popcorn and cheering as bombs fell on nearby Gaza as if they were watching an action movie. Critical voices were muted. The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by B’Tselem against a decision not to approve a broadcast of the names of Palestinian children who had been killed during the operation. ‘Compassion for the other’, commented one left-wing activist, ‘is seen as an act of treason.’⁸⁷ Journalists were abused simply for reporting the news. Anti-war protests were held in Nazareth and other Arab areas. Avigdor Lieberman called for a boycott of Arab businesses that went on strike in protest at the war, while Haneen Zoabi, the Arab MP, said that kidnappers of the Jewish teenagers were not ‘terrorists’ and described IDF soldiers as ‘murderers’.

Views inside Gaza were harder to gauge. Public criticism of Hamas could be heard in normal times but not during a sustained attack, though complaints were voiced once the fighting was over. Hamas, after all, was ‘the resistance’. Raja Sourani of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights called it ‘part of the Palestinian DNA’.⁸⁸ The public execution of twenty-five alleged collaborators with Israel was a reminder of the movement’s ruthless side – and of Israel’s extensive intelligence capabilities. That followed an Israeli bombing which targeted the Qassam Brigades commander, Mohammed Deif – father of the ‘tunnels doctrine’. Deif escaped, but his wife and children were killed.⁸⁹ Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani suggested, though without supporting evidence, that Hamas enjoyed the backing of the majority of Gaza’s population, ‘because they seem to prefer death by F-16 to death by formaldehyde’,⁹⁰ a reference to the famous quip by Sharon’s adviser Dov Weissglass about keeping the peace process alive but frozen until the day Palestinians turned into Finns.⁹¹ Protests took place across the West Bank throughout the campaign. CDs of Hamas songs, toy guns and grenades and rocket-shaped balloons all sold well. Abbas, said the independent leftist politician Mustafa Barghouti, was ‘trying to catch up because the people are way ahead of the leadership; the people are in total support of Gaza’.⁹²

Israelis felt that their government’s objectives had been achieved, although Netanyahu faced criticism from Lieberman and Bennett when the ceasefire began and Hamas was still in control after the third operation of its kind in less than six years. ‘Hamas needs to be punished for its aggressive behaviour and reminded of the cost it must pay for continuing the violence against Israel’, argued one mainstream Israeli commentator. ‘A period of calm can be achieved by destroying capabilities that are hard and expensive to rebuild. Buying time is a legitimate goal. Additionally, in the current strategic situation Hamas is isolated, making the rebuilding of its military assets a longer process.’93 Netanyahu’s opponents blamed him for the violence. ‘The war in Gaza is, fundamentally, not about tunnels and not against rockets’, wrote the liberal philosopher Assaf Sharon. ‘It is a war over the status quo. Netanyahu’s “conflict management” is a euphemism for maintaining a status quo of settlement and occupation, allowing no progress.’⁹⁴ Hamas claimed victory as well – though it was hard to see it amid the ruins, devastation and death.