It is ultimately futile and probably wicked to calculate winners and losers in a war against civilians, least of all on any sort of balance sheet weighing and measuring the value of dead bodies.

It may be said that on paper the state of Israel won since, at the end of the conflict, it remained on its feet, as militarily belligerent as it started, and only partly restrained by the United States, who funded the war and provided Israel with most of the munitions that killed tens of thousands of people. By contrast, Hamas, the Palestinian political group which provoked the conflict with its massacre of Israeli civilians, is broken and ruined and mostly dealt out of the post-ceasefire process.

Yet supporters of the Palestinian cause will remark that before 7 October two years ago, Palestinians had no path whatever towards a Palestinian state. If anything, they were going backwards, with a reactionary Israeli political coalition, and the Israel Defence Force increasingly implacably opposed to any two-state solution, or Palestinian self-government. Despite the terrible punishment of the children, women and men of Gaza, the bombing and blasting, their deliberate starvation, and the reduction of most of Gaza to rubble, the survivors of Gaza and other Palestinians in the West Bank will say they are in a better position now politically. More nations, including most of the nations of Europe, and Britain, Canada and Australia, now recognise a Palestinian state.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu resisted any let-up or ceasefire on the grounds that this would amount to a reward for Hamas for the events of 7 October. He may have made this a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the world, even the US, began to tire of his lack of moderation, his aggressiveness and truculence. And his prolongation of the war — and its slaughter — for his own political survival. The world expects that reconciliation of this war involves a weakening of Israel’s position, and real progress on justice for the Palestinian people.

Israel has never been more politically isolated or unpopular with other governments and their populations. Israelis in Israel, and their supporters in other countries, have argued that the condemnation of Israel’s actions is antisemitic, but the progress of the war has sharpened differences between hostility to the Jewish religion and anger at, and repudiation of, the political and military entity of Israel.

Israeli politicians and supporters of Israel overseas quickly squandered any moral or political advantage their cause had after the surprise Hamas raid on Jewish settlements on 7 October. The slaughter was swiftly condemned by most of the Western world and by a good deal of the Third World. Western leaders, including Australian ones, frequently used the phrase that “Israel has a right to defend itself” as if it were a licence to attack anyone living in Gaza.

Every air strike increased the number of Netanyahu’s enemies in Gaza, the world, in the Western world and in Israel itself

There was no obvious right of self-defence for the people of Gaza, other than from international revulsion at the disproportion of the Israeli retaliation – ultimately, perhaps the sentiment that forced even the US to try to stop the slaughter. While significant sections of the Israeli population were also repulsed by the unremitting scale of the violence, some members of the Israeli Cabinet openly urged that the situation be used to clear all Palestinians out of the land that Israel now claims. There were ample indications, observed by international bodies, that ethnic cleansing was involved.

Prominent supporters of Israel have argued, in Israel and abroad, that the scale of the 7 October atrocities justified heavy retaliation, and had to be considered unprovoked. But Israel has been engaged in continuing hostilities against Palestinians since the 1940s and, during and after the 7 October attacks, was continuing the development of illegal settlements, and the practical apartheid of everyday life in the (greater) Israel it had unilaterally proclaimed. Palestinian resistance was now being justified as the only way that Palestinians could fight back against an overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive state.

Israeli refusal to allow any limit to their murderous rage came as many observers were beginning to see the counter story by which the 7 October attacks, whether or not ill- judged, were to be seen as part of a continuum of atrocity and counter-atrocity going back to the 1940s. By this argument, Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, its expansion of illegal settlements, and the practical apartheid and injustice of everyday life in the Israeli state, had caused Palestinians to fight back in the only way they could. If “terrorism” and guerilla tactics raised the ante, they also brought a sharp focus to why people were fighting.

Israel and its supporters had previously made distinctions between the military and political entity of Hamas, which it characterised as terrorist, and innocent civilians suffering under implicitly oppressive Hamas rule. Now, it seemed, the ordinary population was as much deserving of punishment for failing to rise against Hamas, or for allowing its operatives to move in populated areas. It claimed it was entitled to attack hospitals and schools and other institutions if it believed that Hamas operatives were hiding in them, Dead children, or innocent civilians, were, apparently, mere and justifiable collateral casualties.

Outside journalists were forbidden entry; journalists from Gaza found themselves under attack, often to claims, never established, that they were secret Hamas operatives. Aid workers, doctors and nurses, and ultimately, organisations trying to deliver scarce medicine and food were killed. International judicial organisations said they had credible evidence of war crimes and of crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing. But such statements were treated with indifference by the Israeli state and defence forces, and by the US, who initiated sanctions on employees of international courts.

It’s by no means a done deal yet, but there are parties on either side who will resist sabotage of the general terms of the ceasefire

The peace process is by no means set in stone and can still be sabotaged by either side. But there are now some relatively independent parties committed to an outcome, and, no doubt, determined to limit the capacity of the combatants to act unilaterally. Hamas is now ruled out of future action, an outcome which may prove more popular in the West than among Palestinians, particularly the people of Gaza. It should be remembered that the formation of Hamas was originally encouraged by Israel as a way of making the alternative Palestinian political organisation less effective and its corruption and incompetence more obvious. If it is now apparently evil incarnate to outsiders, it was originally much more effective than the Palestinian authority in providing municipal services, and had, originally at least, a good deal more popular support. Its “victory” may prove pyrrhic, in the sense that its militant membership may have been largely wiped out, and because there will be no shortage of Palestinians denouncing the punishment they inspired. But if they are to be dealt out, or treated as a merely terrorist organisation, it will be at the hands of Palestinians, not Israelis or outsiders, including Arab countries, involved in the peace process.

The physical rebuilding of Gaza may prove so daunting that it overwhelms all the other ingredients of a resolution that can lead to peace. The population is effectively displaced and homeless. It is entirely dependent on the outside world for food, for health, and for most of the wherewithal of basic living. It must rebuild and re-establish schools, hospitals and health centres, and cope as well with the many tens of thousands of people seriously displaced, disabled and injured by the war, as well as the physical and psychic trauma of those who have lost families, relatives and friends.

At the same time their political representatives, along with those who claim to be their representatives, must be involved in the process of working out just what everyone means by a two-state solution, how and where it can operate, and the basic rules by which Palestinians can go about their lives without constant harassment by suspicious and hostile Israelis. As with the concessions made in achieving a ceasefire, this will involve give and take. But the world — and no doubt the Nobel Peace Prize committee — will be very angry if it is a one-way process, likely at the end to leave Palestinians just as impotent and dispossessed as before. Israel will claim that it needs security guarantees, but some players will insist that its capacity for unilateral intervention — and its open chequebook from the US — must be reined in. The Palestinians deserve security guarantees too. In the long history of Israel, more than 50 Palestinians have died for every Israeli said to have died at the hands of Palestinians terrorists.

Ultimate peace must also involve the closure of the illegal Israeli settlements. Israel must take a role in this, instead of actively or passively supporting the establishment and then the defence of aggressive occupation.

In just the same way that established illegal settlements cannot become evidence of de facto borders, land seized by Israel going beyond the borders of the original Israel sketched out by the UN in 1947 should be up for hard negotiation. In the lead-up to Israel’s declaration of itself as a state, Israeli terrorists and the proto-Israeli army seized Palestinian land with atrocities — including rape — even more violent than that of 7 October. Thousands fled Palestine and were never allowed to return – a horrible contrast with the so-called Israeli “right of return” by which any person of the Jewish faith can settle in Israel. The war of independence saw other Palestinians flee to neighbouring countries, again never to be allowed to return.

Israel’s diaspora has encouraged and funded the settlement movement and its loss of moral status

Israel occupies most of the land allocated by the UN to Palestinians, and annexed other areas, such as the Golan Heights from other countries. Its politicians have increasingly regarded these lands as a part of a greater Israel, open to displacement of Palestinians and use for Israeli settlements. The settlement movement has also been encouraged and funded by Jewish groups in the diaspora, including from within Australia. Israel’s apparent immunity, as a state, from having such actions categorised as terrorism, as well as its capacity to draw on thousands in the diaspora for its armed forces, is hardly ever remarked on, even as Australia generally follows the US lead in categorising any Palestinian groups or militias as terrorists.

No Labor or Liberal politician would even concede it, but Australia’s “even-handed” approach to Palestinian aspirations for self-rule has always been very much to Palestinian disadvantage. Still is. In that sense, Australia, as much as the US, Germany and most of Western Europe have a heavy share of moral responsibility for the continuing suffering of the Palestinian people – a fact that ought to spur our every future move on the subject to lean towards justice.

In the end, the Western world’s active or passive support for the injustice dealt to the Palestinians by Israel may have done Israel no favours either. It, after all, inspired that Palestinian resistance which made every Israeli less secure (if far less at risk to life and limb than Palestinians). Israel’s approach has made random acts of terrorism, suicide bombing, rocket attacks and other forms of guerrilla warfare the logical if cruel response to a powerful, lawless and unaccountable armed state. It has made Palestinian resistance a powerful symbol and inspiration to people of the Third World, especially the Muslim countries everywhere. It has inspired lasting hatred from most of Israel’s neighbours and given some of them excuses to practise terrorism and oppression on their own populations.

That Israel is no more safe and secure in 2025 than it was in 1948, or, for that matter after 1956, 1967, and 1983 when it won wars against those neighbours, demonstrates the ultimate limitations of its bristling, overwhelming power. Israel will never have peace or security until it has provided peace, justice and security to the people of Palestine.

Republished from The Canberra Times, October 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.