Partial Solutions Mean More Wars to Come

The same questions are still being asked, by all the parties concerned and by the international and regional powers, about the course of events and the possible scenarios after more than ten months of the Gaza war: a war that appears open in time, even if so far it is relatively contained in space. The scenarios range from intermittent truces and a fragile halt to the fighting, to a prolonged war of attrition, to a wide and open regional war. The influential international parties, with the United States at their head, may be able to restrain Israel from a strategy of dragging Washington and others into a regional war whose consequences would be dangerous and unknown, for the people of the region and for the international parties with vital interests in it. But the international parties, and those playing one form or another of the mediator's role, are unable to stop the wars that are small in area, already under way and linked in various ways across their arenas: wars in which many of the red lines in the rules of the game that governed the management of the conflict on the ground before the Gaza war are being changed or gradually brought down. After the Doha meeting last Thursday and Friday, Washington announced that the gaps were beginning to be bridged or narrowed. This breath of optimism is a bet on the success of the diplomatic activity that began the day after Doha, with the arrival of the American secretary of state in Israel on Sunday, in preparation for this week's Cairo meeting that follows on from Doha. There is an American bet on succeeding in pushing Israel to drop two conditions designed to entrench its total security and military control over the Strip. The first concerns the Rafah crossing and the Philadelphi corridor, in order to hold the Palestinian (Gaza)-Egyptian border; the second, control of the Netzarim corridor, which cuts Gaza in two and means control over movement between its north and south. It remains difficult, or almost impossible, to push the Netanyahu government into accepting this unless there are effective international pressures, and others on the ground, each reinforcing the other, that compel Israel to accept. And these Israeli conditions are of course ones that the Palestinian forces, and the Arab parties concerned or engaged in various ways in the negotiations, cannot accept.

What also makes success in reaching a real truce, as a first step, more remote is the Israeli escalation in the West Bank: increased settlement activity to cut the West Bank into pieces and create conditions that press on its people and drive them out, together with the "policy" of repeated settler attacks on Palestinian citizens to push them into forced migration. The storming of the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque last Tuesday, on the "anniversary of the destruction of the Temple", is a further sign of the policy of Judaising the West Bank being carried through. It is a policy that is undoubtedly preparing a major collision to come, one that adds to the complications of the "policy of truces" on offer and exposes how fragile that policy is. Add to this that Israel regards the file of "the security of northern Israel" as entirely separate from the question of Gaza, and holds that an agreement on Gaza, if one were reached, would not mean accepting a return to the situation that existed before on the Lebanese front. Against the strategy of the "unity of the arenas", Israel proceeds from a strategy of separating the two "arenas", the Palestinian and the Lebanese. It is true that a truce on the Palestinian front, difficult as that is, as we have said, would help to lower the level of conflict on the Lebanese front; but in the Israeli conception it would not end it. Lebanon calls for the full implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701, but the reality on the ground, and the facts that now govern the conflict, make the full implementation of that resolution difficult within any reasonable time frame. What could be reached, if a prolonged truce were agreed under the heading of a fragile ceasefire on the Gaza front, is a new unwritten understanding, organised and guaranteed by the "third party", to manage the new status quo on Lebanon's southern border, along the lines of what existed before.

To avoid leaving the conflict open and exposed to every kind of escalation, with all the different dangers to the region as a whole, the time has come for the effective international powers to go through the Security Council to impose, yes impose, a comprehensive ceasefire in the war now under way: a war whose fronts are intertwined, which can expand vertically, as we are seeing, and horizontally too, which can be put to use in the game of powers in the region, and which carries great dangers for regional peace and security. A comprehensive and unconditional ceasefire is a necessary condition, and of course not a sufficient one. After it there must be effective international action to launch the path of a comprehensive and lasting peace, based on the relevant and well-known international resolutions and on the two-state solution. Many difficulties stand in the way. But it is the only thing that, if achieved, can provide security, peace and stability in a strategic geography that is central to the region.