The AFR View
Biden must keep the flame of peace alive
The US president must lend Israel support as he seeks its restraint in Gaza. But the long-term goal has to be a durable peace for Israeli and Palestinian alike.
President Joe Biden’s dramatic arrival in Tel Aviv, planned for Wednesday, will correctly underscore Israel’s right to defend its people from mass slaughter. He will urge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seek to avoid needless casualties as Israeli ground forces prepare to enter teeming civilian-populated Gaza in pursuit of Hamas’ terror networks.
But the leader of the free world must also keep alive the idea of a long-term peace settlement between Palestinians and Israelis. That dream had seemed closer as part of a looming diplomatic deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia being brokered by President Biden, the culmination of an Israel-Arab thaw that began with Egypt in 1979. That has been derailed by the atrocities of Hamas, an organisation that still seeks to wipe Israel off the map. But the terrorists must not succeed in killing the idea of peace too.
Joe Biden’s presence in Israel, Jordan and Egypt this week will be a further warning to Iran not to launch new fronts against Israel in Lebanon or Syria. David Rowe
It will be better for everyone, including the Palestinians, when Hamas has been destroyed. The deranged levels of brutality inflicted on Israeli civilians on October 7 could only have been designed to provoke maximum Israeli retribution on Gazan civilians for the benefit of Hamas propaganda output.
Israel must not allow itself to be baited into rash action, because every new civilian death just adds to this calamity, and because Hamas will also be keen to lure Israel into risky urban combat. Yet clearing Hamas’ strong points and tunnels with Israeli boots on the ground is more likely to uproot the infrastructure of terror than any pounding from the air. Achieving this without heavy civilian casualties will be an enormous test of Israeli military professionalism.
But a military plan is not a political strategy that shows how this new battle ends without generating the next version of Hamas. A long-term settlement to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will for now seem fanciful. The most that can be hoped for in the coming days is that Israel, a democratic society still ruled by law, does its utmost to minimise civilian casualties and show how different it is to the nihilistic violence of Hamas.
Despite support for the Palestinian cause among Australian Greens, the Labor Left and some teals, and misguided talk of Israeli “war crimes”, there is no moral equivalence between the wanton murders of Hamas and Israel’s striking of military targets in Gaza. It is up to Israel to maintain this restraint and ensure such equivalence can never be credibly drawn.
It will also be a mercy if the war stays confined to Gaza, without triggering a 1914-style cascading of the conflict across the region, and all too easily playing into the confrontations elsewhere between the West and trouble-making autocrats. Mr Biden’s presence in Israel, Jordan and Egypt this week will be a further warning to Iran not to launch new fronts against Israel in Lebanon or Syria.
But out of this pit of violence and despair, a turning point for peace must emerge that offers security for both peoples. There are enough powerful players to press for another peace effort, in the US, among other Middle Eastern nations, in Europe, and in Beijing and other Asian capitals, who must be alarmed at these fresh Middle Eastern eruptions. There will be minimum conditions for both sides.
Israel was founded in 1947 after centuries of pogrom and genocide against the Jewish diaspora showed that Jews could not rely on anyone else for safety. The way protests against the Israeli government in Sydney degenerated into criminal antisemitic hate speech only reinforces that point. But dispossessed Palestinians need a state too, and the lack of one has resulted in the emergence of increasingly brutal non-state actors such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon. Land for peace is the only currency available to do this, yet each attempt to make such a trade has failed out of intransigence, for which all must take some blame.
It’s inconceivable for now that Israel, shaken by the attacks and the intelligence failures before them, is in any mood to talk peace, concede territory, or trust others on security. Yet, there are historic precedents where two sides met halfway with those they had detested, and accepted compromises that had seemed odious. Is it now possible that the trauma of October 7, followed by a major defeat of Hamas, could bring a desire to end the revenge cycle for good?
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