Ceasefire in Israel Palestine

As of this writing, a cease-fire is in place in the current round of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Virginia Pietromarchi reports (Jubilation in Gaza as ceasefire takes effect Aljaueera 03/21/2021):

The ceasefire, which was welcomed internationally, was brokered by Egypt in the early hours of Friday after 11 days of relentless bombing of the besieged enclave and thousands of rockets launched into Israel by Hamas, the group ruling the Strip. ...

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed 232 Palestinians, including 65 children, and brought widespread devastation to the already impoverished territory. On the Israeli side, 12 people, including two children, were killed.

In other words, 19 times as many deaths among Palestinians as among Israelis, a reflection of the extreme disproportion in military capabilities between the two sides.

Fortunately, the Israel-Palestine flare-up hasn't derailed the nuclear disarmament negotiations in Vienna, which are reportedly proceeding. The Iranian President Hassan Rohani is reporting optimistically on an agreement being close. (Maziar Motamedi, Agreement on restoring Iran’s nuclear deal ‘within reach’ Aljazeera 05/19/2021; Atomstreit: Irans Präsident erwartet rasche Einigung Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 05/20/2021)

Recovering Iraq War advocate Peter Beinart reminds us of one of the bigger long-terms follies in the longterm conflict, Israel's deliberate promotion of Islamic extremists to divide the Palestinians and undercut their negotiating posture (If Israel Eliminated Hamas, Nothing Fundamental Would Change Substack 05/20/2021) :

Today, it’s common to associate Hamas’s militancy with its Islamist ideology. The implication is that if only Islamists were eliminated from the Palestinian political scene, Palestinian politics would grow more moderate and quiescent. But Israeli leaders didn’t always see it that way. Just as US officials once saw Islamists like the Afghan Mujahedeen as less threatening than communists backed by the USSR, Israeli officials once saw Hamas as more pliable than Yasser Arafat’s more secular Fatah. In a recent letter to the editor of The New York Times, former Times’ Jerusalem correspondent David K. Shipler noted that in 1981, Israel’s military governor of Gaza told him that, in Shipler’s words, “he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists.” Oops. [my emphasis]

As Beinart indicates, this was related to the US Cold War approach of encouraging Islamist political groups to offset the poopular of the kind of "Arab socialism" represented by Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nassar. Robert Dreyfuss recounts that effort in his 2005 book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundmentalist Islam.

Beinert in that column emphasizes that a substantive peace agreement that doesn't leave Palestinians in unbearable conditions is necessary. But he doesn't talk there about his views on what the road to such an agreement could or should be.

The recent reports by the human rights NGOs B’Tselem (A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid 01/12/2021) and Human Rights Watch (A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution 04/27/2021) show how difficult any "two-state solution" to the problem will be at this point.