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The saddest conflicts in the world are those defined by their bloody repetitions, as predictable as they are chilling. So it is with Israel and the Palestinians.
My first piece of foreign reporting 20 years ago this year was covering the work of a British doctor tending to the injured and malnourished in the Jabaliya refugee camp - the same place of displacement and immiseration now as then, and scene of the latest horrific civilian casualties after the shelling of a school yesterday.
Surely it could not simply go on, an uprising followed by a suppression, a further radicalisation of the Palestinians and yet another escalation? Surely, it does.
When Gordon Brown speaks of the "darkest moment yet" in the Middle East, old hands remark that there have been a lot to choose from.
One of the charges since this onslaught began is that the attacks are "disproportionate": as if a fully armed Palestinian authority and mighty Israel going at it hammer and tongs would solve things any more efficiently.
Palestinians do suffer disproportionately because Israel is by far the greater power and, in the densely populated Gaza strip, civilians are inevitably hit when Israel launches a major offensive. Nearly-President Barack Obama expresses "deep concern" about civilian casualties, the vast majority of whom are in Gaza.
Where the argument about proportionality falls down is that the threat to Israel from Hamas is real and not imaginary.
No amount of lecturing Israel to stop seeing its security as paramount will work because Israel is a state founded on the failings of the international community and has good reason to doubt its effectiveness.
Ken Livingstone describes Gaza as the "Warsaw Ghetto" - with his infallible knack of rustling up a cheap Third Reich parallel for any occasion to annoy Jewish opinion.
What he has to omit to make this parallel is that the sense of threat and insecurity works both ways in Gaza.
Even he must be aware that that was not the case in Warsaw, where Germany was in no danger at all from Polish Jews and the jackboot was on one foot only.
This sense of a threat shared is both the source of the latest outbreak of violence - and the root of its eventual solution. The smallness of Israel, and its vulnerability to Hezbollah to its north and Hamas from Gaza, sets the preconditions for any imaginable exit from the crisis.
When Tony Blair, in his role as peace envoy with little peace to show for it, says no progress can be made until the Egyptian border is secured to prevent the re-supply of Hamas with rockets channelled from Syria and Iran via tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border, he is not being perversely pro-Israel but simply stating a fact.
It is true that Israel's security concerns can be hard to swallow when civilians in Gaza are paying the price in such a terrible way. Until they are taken seriously though, nothing can change and all the genuine goodwill and sympathy that flows towards the Palestinians cannot help.
We know the way forward: no mystery here; it is the long promised, never delivered two-state solution. The dusty Oslo accords provide the crumpled road map, even if the journey has more forbidding obstacles in the form of an even more obstreperous Iran and its regional proxies.
An experienced Middle East negotiator once told me that what kept him going was the "tiny glint of possibility" of peace - or at least "longer periods between the wars". That glint is pretty small now.
But the light does change when power changes hands in Washington. Whatever her other faults, Mrs Clinton will fill the vacuum in that part of Obama's philosophy so far defined by a negative: his pledge to withdraw from Iraq.
She will also be a more thrusting presence on foreign policy than Condoleezza Rice, who tried to take the sting out of the Bush backlash but had little momentum or authority of her own.
This new Secretary of State has experience that counts for a lot: she watched her husband's peace plan fail. I suspect the only real tears Bill Clinton cried in the White House (including the ones he mustered after Ms Lewinsky turned out to be more than an intern) were those of real frustration and anger when the enforceable peace plan was finally scuppered by the decaying leadership of Yasser Arafat.
The Palestinian people do not get the leaders they deserve. Who could say, watching the father mourn five daughters, or limp, bloodstained children, that they do? They voted for Hamas to reject the corruption of Arafat's Fatah party, a logic of despair.
What they get now is a consequence of the misgovernment they have suffered and still suffer under Hamas - and even more despair.
This is not so much a party as an archipelago of views ranging from neo al Qaeda Islamists to pragmatists who would do a deal if the terms were right. It is too shaky a partner for any swift return to a peace plan.
But the not-so-secret story is that it has had contacts with Western governments (including Britain's) by proxy for some time. Palestinians need to recognise that Hamas cannot prevail by force of rocket attacks.
At the same time, Israel's strategic position is less strong than its military might: the unavoidable conclusion of its assaults on both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza is that when the fighting is over, it wakes up with the same neighbours and the same problems.
Jerusalem is in no hurry for a wider solution today, but there will have to be one sooner or later. The status quo cannot hold as Palestinians become yet more desperate and embittered.
Neither America nor its allies can act as miracle worker here, Nor is it always necessary - the Oslo accords happened outside its remit. But Washington can encourage, cajole and facilitate.
It can back Israel's security demands by endorsing the military restraint of Hamas on condition of a monitored ceasefire and an end to the economic blockade of Gaza.
Those who feel that the Livni/Barak coalition deserves isolation for the civilian loss of life it has sanctioned, might stop to reflect that, without the anti-Hamas assault, the chances of a more ideologically rigid Netanyahu-led government returning to power next month would be even higher.
If these past two weeks have reminded us of anything, it is the utter pointlessness of this most repetitive of conflicts, with all the lives and chances it has squandered - and the need to salvage that glint of hope and try again.
Reader views (19)
In Gaza, before withdrawal the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. In the following year after the withdrawal more than 12,000 settlers set up on Palestinian land in the west-bank. Hardly the act of a state looking for a negotiated settlement.
- Phil., london
To John Kent
Wrong - Israel did experiment with withdrawing unilaterally; GAZA the experiment. This war is the result of that and UN promises that if the Gazans did arm and fire that Israel would be able to immediately retaliate.
Hence Israels trust in the Plastinians - the 67 border issue and the UN
- David C., London England
Quote -
"The Palestinian people do not get the leaders they deserve." Is Anne McElvoy saying that the majority of those who voted in the election that gave Hammas power went into the polling booth and made a mistake? This is not possible. The voters elected Hammas and voted for this war.
- Steve.W, B'ham UK
Oh come on Peter from Wigan. This is your imagination. Israel was decreed a State in 1948 by a 33-13 vote in the United Nations, whereupon the Arabs (the state of Palestine did not exist)attacked the Jewish State. Sure there were some factions in Israel that 'encouraged' Arabs to leave, just as there were the other way round. There was no round up. After the Arabs failed to destroy Israel which was only 8 miles wide in some parts, many left of their own accord, hoping to return with a victorious Arab army sometime later. This hardly compares to the Warsaw ghetto, and no one is exterminating Palestinians for being Palestinians.
- Stephen Rothbart, Prague, Czech Republic
Strange that no one in Israel seems to wonder if they would be slightly better thought of abroad if they returned to their legal borders-ie. pre-1967 war-and stopped all settlement building in the occupied territories. If this was to happen, then, and only then, would Israel begin to feel more secure-but they are not prepared to try that.
- Jon Kent, Hertford. UK
Whilst much of Anne McElvoy’s report is objective, it is crass to dismiss Ken Livingstone’s comparison of Gaza with the "Warsaw Ghetto."
The Palestinians were rounded up and removed from their land and property to make way for waves of immigrants, many of whom have retained their original citizenship, from Europe the US and elsewhere. The Palestinians were herded and loaded onto trucks like animals and incarcerated in refugee camps.
With 1,500,000 inhabitants, half of whom are children, Gaza is the biggest concentration camp in the world.
The prisoners are not allowed to leave and have been deprived of basic necessities such as food, water and medicines.
They are now being slaughtered in their own homes or wherever they take refuge whether in mosques, hospitals or even UN controlled schools.
The comparison of Gaza with the "Warsaw Ghetto" is an understatement.
Whilst in Germany the jackboot may have been on one foot only, in Israel and Gaza it is on both feet, the Zionist’s.
- Peter Franzen, wigan
Lisa Israel moved out of gaza lock stock and barrel 3 years ago. There are no settlements in gaza, so you tell me why are hamas firing rockets at Israel.
- Tzreil, London UK
The Palestinians are being used as guinea pigs/scape goats by the rest of the Arab world who are financing the Hamas and their terrorist activities against Israel. If they really cared about the Palestinians why not give them aid instead of rockets? Israel has been suffering rockets daily for the past 8 years - it is normal they react to stop this terrorism once and for all. If you lived in fear of rockets landing on your home and family, you'd want your government to stop it. War is always ugly and even one civilian death seems to many but Hamas must be stopped.
- Krista, Geneva, Switzerland
The longer the confrontation and violence between Israel and the Palestinians continues, the more certain there can only be one winner, and, if history is anything to go by, it will not be Israel! The Crusaders lasted 100 years, were I a betting man I would not put money on Israel's tenure being in excess of it!
- Kevin Sullivan, Roehampton, London.
Too close for comfort is the photographs caption to a group of orthodox Jews looking on in the distant bombing of a Palestinian population. The irony of the caption seems appropriate given the more than partisan outlook of the journalist.
To claim the Israeli action is not disproportionate because the Palestinians have used 'rockets' is like saying the British Army should have bombed the Catholic estates in Belfast after an IRA atrocity.
Proportionality is what is says. If the Israeli government feels entailed to kill a hundred Palestinians for every Israeli death no impartial observer is going to describe that as proportionate
What this story glosses over as do many such stories is a motivate for the Palestinian people when the vote Hamas. Propaganda would have us think its because they want the destruction of Israel. The reality is that Israel has mercilessly oppressed Palastinans for decades, like other historical regimes they feel they have the right to treat these people in a totally inhumane way. At points depriving them of food medicine and decent sanitation.
Perhaps the caption should have been read 'looking on from comfort'. Maybe its time those looking on in comfort took responsibility for the problems rather than rely on friends in high places such as David Miliband to look the other way rather than criticise this civilian massacre.
- Martin, london
why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza - a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin - and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
- Mick Dundee, London, England
So, I suppose, Lisa of London, only Palestinians are the losers in this battle? What about the Israelis who have been living with a constant bombardment of rockets over the last eight years? Presumably the only good Jew is a dead Jew! All you posters might not have noticed that Israel does NOT occupy Gaza. She pulled out three years ago yet rockets have increased by 500%. Israel is not the aggressor here. Hamas is by it's very raison d'etre: Death to Israel. Hamas uses civilians to shield behind; builds schools, hospitals and mosques over munitions dumps and, when people get killed, scream and cry hysterically, that it's a 'genocide', a 'holocaust', thus denigrating the very people who have indeed suffered from both these: Jews. Look beyond the propaganda photography and realise how the entire world is manipulated by Hamas. Would YOU want to live next door to them? Whenever the Palestinians realise that the end is nigh, they create a situation - a 'massacre' 'carnage' so that Israel is pressurised into leaving a status quo. So far, considering their firepower it's extraordinary how FEW people have been killed. Who knows how many schools have been bombed in either the USA or Britain since the War on Terror began and where was Annie Lennox when a female suicide bomber blew herself up in Iraq this week, killing over 40 and wounding hundreds - in just ONE bomb!
- Ros, London, UK
As usual another apologist for Isreal the fact is Isreal as a country was imposed on Palestine and imported settlers. Since 1948 they have stolen by force of arms the indigenous populations land, property and water rights they have also used that force of arms to kill countless thousands of innocent Arab population.What of course the Irealies would never admit to ,is they they also arejust another Arab tribe from the past.
- Sam, budleigh uk
A well balanced article from Ms. McElvoy, but I am not sure all those who voted for Hamas really did so just to spite the corruption inside the PLA. Gaza is a small enclave with a huge population and over 40% of its population is under 18. It does not take much imagination to see what will happen in ten years. A huge population explosion, which will put enormous pressure on the present infrastructure.
The Palestinians there will soon run out of land, and the only place they can go is Israel or Egypt. Since Egypt hates them more than any Israeli that will not happen there. Sadly, Hamas, by calling on the death of all Jews/Israelis, offers them their only hope.
Gaza voted for Hamas because they want Israel destroyed. And that is true for much of the PLA too, its just they don't say it to the West, only to their supporters.
- Stephen Rothbart, Prague, Czech Republic
Its another year and the perverse saga of the middle east conflict continues .Extremists from either side have the shame of ugly rhetoric which is guaranteed to throw out of the window any rational thoughts on ever finding a solution.This begs the question if Hamas and a hard line Israel government want to live in a civilised manner,respect each other's views and here's the hard part..be tolerant .I think its obvious the various leaders of both sides have a disgusting attitude and enjoy giving the world boring history lessons while refusing to live in the present.Most Arabs and Jews worldwide want to live in peace and are sickened by the violence,if it takes another ten or twenty years to find peace it will arrive. Meanwhile the toothless diplomats,Blair and his grandiose posturing as middle of the road peace envoy along with the feeble UN are finger wagging yet again.Here is my quick solution...President elect Obama drags Iran,Syria,Lebanon,Iraq,Palestine Leadership,Israel and The Friends of Israel to a summit at the White House to thrash out a grown up solution that can be activated ASAP,if it wasn't so serious,we could mock all concerned and point out that in 1939-1945,an individual had the 'final solution' which if implemented would have taken every religion back to the stone ages.The parallels at the moment are frightening and just packaged in another way..
- Jonnie Of Brixton, brixton.london,england,
"How can a rocket containing 15kgs of explosives compare with Israel's bombs and military might?"
errr...how about, they can both blow you to bits?
That's comparable.
- Obvious, london
Did that lizard Livingstone really utter his obscenity about Gaza being the Warsaw ghetto? Would somebody be kind enough to post up on what forum and at what date and time this occured. Thanks.
- Tuff Tookas, London, UK
I think Palestinians DO understand that Hamas can't prevail by force of rocket attacks, but, as you say, they have elected Hamas by the logic of despair. There are no easy solutions, because for peace to evolve, it will need a LOT of individuals to undertake - not undergo by force - a human revolution, something that requires a deep, fundamental commitment, and that's what people find so difficult...of any political persuasion or faith. It's an obstacle of the human condition.
What I find a bit troubling is the suggestion (even if it's an open-ended question) that a Barak/Livni coalition, rather than a more hardline Netanyahu administration, might possibly justify what is too often called the "collateral" loss of civilian life, which here has been massive and - really - can it ever be justifiable?
But thanks for writing on this conflict - as usual (from Anne McElvoy), an incisive view amid a lot of hysteria flying around at the moment.
- Karli, Tottenham, London
Everyone keeps banging on about Israel's right to defend itself. What angers me is that none of the media is reporting on why Hamas are firing rockets in the first instance. Perhaps if Israel were to stop illegaly occupying their land and remove all the illegal settlements, Hamas would have less reason to try and kill innocent Israeli citizens. There is also an element of 'David and Goliath' here. How can a rocket containing 15kgs of explosives compare with Israel's bombs and military might?
Hamas are also despicable for allowing their people to die and suffer like this, while the leaders are safe underground. Have their people not suffered enough?
Both Hamas and the Israeli military should be ashamed and appalled at their behaviour. The only real losers are the inncent victims in all this - predominantly (although not all) Palestinian civilians.
- Lisa, London
