Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are desperate. Not only because they are burying their dead while marking the anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 that saw their grandparents flee or expelled from homes in what is now Israel, but also because their lives under blockade are intolerable, as is the sense that they have been abandoned to their fate by an indifferent world.
Israel was their main enemy before and after the 1967 war. It unilaterally dismantled settlements and withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005 but still controls its borders, airspace and waters.
Meanwhile Egypt’s crossing point at Rafah is often closed and Cairo uses access to put pressure on Hamas and the 2 million people in the territory it rules. Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based Palestinian president, condemned Monday’s killings from Ramallah, but he is hostile too, withholding the salaries of Gazan Palestinian Authority employees because of a row over taxes and legitimacy dating back to Hamas’s takeover in 2007.
Efforts at reconciliation between Abbas’s Fatah movement and Hamas have got nowhere since a flurry of excitement last year. Abbas’s demand for disarmament was unacceptable to Hamas. In the 2014 war, when 2,300 Gazans including hundreds of civilians and Hamas fighters were killed, Abbas was accused of nodding and winking at Israel to continue attacking and thus weaken his rivals.
Abbas’s popularity has hit rock bottom in the last few months, and not only because of his authoritarian style. The overwhelming reason is that the Palestinian national liberation movement he has led since Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004, with a strategy of non-violence, negotiations and, crucially, security coordination with Israel, has failed to liberate anything.
Continuing Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Benjamin Netanyahu has hammered nail after nail into the coffin of a diplomatic solution.
Donald Trump, the US president, has also done much to help write its obituary. Netanyahu, leading the most rightwing government in Israel’s history, is prepared at most to give the Palestinians what he calls a “state-minus” while demanding that Israel be formally recognised as the nation state of the Jewish people. No peace talks have been held for over four years.
Increasingly, Palestinians also fret about the wider Arab world. Their cause has long attracted popular support: witness the emotional scenes in cafes from Algiers to Kuwait when al-Jazeera is broadcasting from Gaza, Nablus or Jerusalem.
Arab governments are a different matter. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) have held in part because both are close US allies. Nowadays the discreet links between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, making common cause to confront Iran, have generated accusations that their leaders are “Arab Zionists” who are conspiring to liquidate the Palestinian issue. The bitter divisions caused by the war in Syria have been a far bigger preoccupation since 2011.
Still, Gaza’s border protests reflect not only despair but also popular mobilisation and tactical creativity that has attracted international attention and condemnation of Israel for using excessive force – albeit at a terrible cost. Hamas certainly wants to harness the protests, but Israel’s insistence that it is merely “defending its borders” from terrorists is a glib soundbite that ignores ordinary Palestinians, a bitterly contested past – and its own role.
The US parrots the Israeli line. If Trump’s message in the timing of the controversial opening of the US’s Jerusalem embassy was greeted with jubilation by Israelis, it seemed to Palestinians to be an act of open bias that was deliberately intended to pour salt on their still raw wounds. The message that Jerusalem is “off the table” promoted even Abbas to disqualify the US from playing any role in a future peace process. That means that Trump’s promised “deal of the century” between Israel and the Palestinians – if it is ever delivered – will be pronounced dead on arrival.
Hopes for reviving any kind of negotiations now look like a remote fantasy. The same is true of demands for the mass return of Palestinian refugees. Alarm, anger and calls for restraint and investigation are predictable responses to what the Haaretz journalist Amos Harel called “a predictable bloodbath”.
But there is an urgent need to persuade the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to end their debilitating rift, to help provide drinkable water, electricity and sewage treatment to Gaza, for Israel to allow more exports and exit permits, and for Egypt to open the Rafah crossing regularly. Otherwise Gaza’s unrelenting misery, when the smoke has cleared, is unlikely to be relieved any time soon.