Many reams have been written about the rights and wrongs of the Gaza conflict, but one aspect hasn’t had much attention in the west. The Israeli action is taking place in the middle of an election campaign. In fact, it is possible to argue that without the election it wouldn’t have happened right now.
The veteran Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko once described American presidential elections as a ‘recurrent natural disaster’, because they led to the US leadership becoming ferociously hardline every four years as the need to woo the public approached. It’s hard to avoid the impression that the intervention in Gaza had a good deal to do with impressing the electorate, who in the most recent poll as we go to press favour the action by a margin of 91 per cent.
No government could indefinitely tolerate regular missile fire from a neighbouring territory without some form of retaliation, so the formal ending of the ceasefire by Hamas, after repeated breaches by both sides, was bound to lead to some sort of confrontation. However, the massive scale of the bombardment, which has attracted so much criticism from western politicians (including myself), seems likely to have been undertaken with one eye to the coming vote.
Leaving aside what we think of it ourselves, what effect will it have on the outcome of the election? At the time of writing, the main effect has been a major boost in Israeli Labour’s standing (their leader Ehud Barak is defence minister), mostly at the expense of the smaller parties. Likud remains ahead of Acting Prime Minister Tzipi Livni’s party, Kadima, which Ariel Sharon formed when he split from Likud, but not by a huge margin. Likud remain favourites, but as usual in Israeli politics any government will be dependent on a coalition.
The major question for the wider region and incoming President Barack Obama is whether that new government will have both the will and the strength to pursue a peace deal. Israel clearly hopes that Hamas will be so weakened by the offensive that it will be unable to block a deal largely on Israel’s terms, but it seems unlikely that any kind of unbalanced deal will be durable.
What might a ‘balanced’ deal look like? The outlines of a possible two-state solution have been clear for some time. Israel retreats broadly to its 1967 borders, with land swaps to deal with special cases; Palestine becomes a fully-fledged country with an unhindered flow of trade to both the West Bank and Gaza; Jerusalem gets some form of special shared status; refugees get either the right to return to Palestine or compensation; everyone recognises everyone else; the UN guarantees the new borders. The problem is that this solution has proved so elusive that its many proponents are beginning to lose heart, and one of the most tragic consequences of the Israeli action may be that it proves to have further postponed the day when serious negotiations towards that goal are possible.
Kadima and Labour would disagree. Their game plan seems to be to complete the operation to weaken Hamas before the election, then to work with Obama to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority from a position of strength, without ruling out significant concessions on the removal of some major West Bank settlements. Whether they will have a coalition strong enough to push that through, even if they really want to, seems doubtful.
But what if Likud wins? Could Benjamin Netanyahu deliver a ‘Nixon in China’ surprise, using his undisputed hawkish credentials to marginalise any opponents to a workable compromise settlement? We have, after all, seen the apparently completely unyielding Democratic Unionists under Ian Paisley do exactly that. The snag is that Likud has lost nearly all its more flexible members – they left with Ariel Sharon.
The prospects for settlement, then, are not good. Yet, Obama’s arrival may be the last best chance of a successful negotiation of a two-state solution. If the alternative is conflict for further decades, who knows what might after all be possible?