Lesley Riddoch: We need to wake up to the fanatics on both sides in Gaza

Published on Sunday 18 January 2009 20:43

HAMAS resistance crushed. Campaign aims achieved. No withdrawal but a temporary unilateral ceasefire. Job mostly done. Who do the Israelis think they are kidding?

The politicians attending peace talks in Egypt can't say it for fear of fanning the flames and won't say it because of Israel's role as a non-Muslim stronghold in a sea of Middle Eastern hostility. But Israel's rationale for ending its three-week bombardment of Gaza is as flimsy as its rationale for starting.

The Israelis have been successful at hammering home one underlying principle – if fired on, we must retaliate. But Hamas is still firing and the Israelis have suddenly decided not to notice. The world heaves a sigh of relief, but clearly Israel's military objectives have not been achieved. Nor can they ever be. Five years in Iraq and seven years in Afghanistan are testimony to that.

The timing of Ehud Olmert's ceasefire is cynical beyond belief. Unsavoury headlines and chilling pictures of maimed children will be packed away to give Barack Obama's inauguration a clear run on front pages for the rest of the week. Yet three weeks of random killing by Olmert's troops in Gaza have already hobbled Obama's chances of starting a new chapter in world relations.

The inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama will see a Christian with a Muslim stepfather assume power in the US. His inaugural prayer meeting will be addressed by a group believed by the outgoing administration to be connected to Hamas. Yet this almost ecumenical world event has ironically been the trigger for Israel's attack on Gaza, leaving more than 1,000 Muslims dead.

It's not Obama's fault that his election has provoked a last gasp act of aggression. Nor his fault that the new peaceful era he promises to usher in has prompted Israel to strike while it still can. But the bloodbath in Gaza is now his legacy – and ours, too.

Gaza is perhaps the world's most dangerous front line. And the killing there has re-stoked the most dangerous conflict – between east and west, Muslim and non-Muslim. Above all it has given new force to the notion that might is right, just as the world, led by Obama, was determined to consign that dangerous belief to the dustbin of history.

Even as Britain's military top brass were thinking the unthinkable last week – suggesting Trident might be scrapped to fund more effective defences – Israeli troops were committing a possible war crime in Gaza. And nothing in Britain's armoury – nuclear, conventional, military or diplomatic – was capable of stopping them.

Israel's war was launched in the dying days of the Bush administration to clear the decks while the world's policeman was busy with domestic financial collapse and presidential interregnum. Thus Israel could peddle the nonsensical claim that terrorists could conceivably be "taken out" without large numbers of Palestinian civilians being killed too.

Israel has long claimed Hamas operates from civilian bases. They of all people knew more women and children than terrorists would die in any offensive.

It doesn't take a speech writer to guess what the world will hear tomorrow – the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a mistake. David Miliband has questioned the phrase "war on terror". Col Larry Wilkerson, a former Chief of Staff, has revealed he hadn't slept in years because of feelings of guilt. The world is agreed we must put 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq behind us.

Yet Gaza opens up the same wounds again with the same brutal tactics and lofty talk used to justify equally dubious underlying motives. In Iraq it was American oil security at any cost. In Israel, it's the coalition's re- election at any cost. Olmert will stand down in February and his replacement, former Mossad spy and foreign minister Tzipi Livni, is neck and neck with Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. Will the ruling Kadima party win again? Is their victory worth all those Palestinian lives? Is it worth wrecking the cause of peace before Barack Obama has even entered office?

Of course, that's not what the world believes to be at stake in Gaza. The Israelis have given a masterclass performance in news management to neutralise outrage. Women in combat fatigues and young men have appeared to explain Israel's case on TV – updating the country's image as a haven of old, bitter, finger-wagging Zionists. And world opinion has been brought a long way by these clever, bright-eyed media performers.

We believe them when they say Hamas are responsible for civilian deaths in Gaza because they have fired rockets from the homes, schools or UN centres struck by Israeli shells. There is no independent verification of this, but little doubt it is sometimes true. Hamas are unlikely to become sitting targets by firing from open ground or Hamas offices.

Evidently, in this macho power play between unpleasant fundamentalist regimes, people have become disposable. Deaths are just collateral damage which, if dwelt upon, would simply distract the "peacemakers" in Egypt from the real issues. Yet the dead of Gaza are the real issue.

As the Northern Ireland Secretary, Shaun Woodward, pointed out on Question Time last week, choosing not to deal with the IRA meant we had to keep dealing with the IRA for decades. Exclusion from power fuelled their cause and bound communities to them in near automatic, loyal support. The same sorry cycle has been given a huge boost in Gaza, as has the division of the world and its people into good (white, western, like us) and bad (Arab, Muslim, like them).

Tomorrow the Americans will finally accept they didn't make the world or their own nation safer by invading Iraq. The Israelis will resist the same awakening. The rest of the world resists delivering an overdue wake-up call at its own collective peril.