This deal is a calamity for Gazans

But if the peace holds, we then have to make a judgement as to its legal, moral and geopolitical quality. On each of these metrics the Trump-Netanyahu deal is a calamity for Palestinians in Gaza, to whom it denies all agency. It is also a blow to the rules-based international system, above all the UN, which has been sidelined.

Trump has strongarmed Netanyahu into a public apology over the Doha bombing, and into dropping – for now – his ethno-nationalist fantasy of clearing Gazans out of the strip. That might look like an expression of American power, but it’s the product of weakness: Trump was both bribed by and pressured by the Gulf monarchies to enforce this deal on the Israelis.

As to the various magnanimities in the deal – such as permission for Gazans to leave, safe passage for Hamas fighters and rebuilding the strip under a “transitional authority” – they are meaningless until the agreement achieves status under international law. And neither Trump nor Netanyahu intends for it to do so.

My hunch, therefore, is that Gaza will not be rebuilt; that every secular-minded young Palestinian there will leave; that Hamas will neither disarm nor flee to the Gulf; and that no senior member of the “transitional authority” will ever set foot among the rubble – let alone its mooted leader Tony Blair.

As to prosecuting Netanyahu and the relevant Israeli ministers for war crimes, that looks unlikely – unless a political revolution takes place in Israel itself. Because amid all the confusion as the peace unfolds, a major fact is being missed: the structures of international law and justice have been sidelined.

The Palestinian Authority is riding high among the remaining liberal democracies, after the belated flurry of recognition it achieved at the UN in September; but it is confined to the West Bank, and excluded both from Gaza and the deal. 

Meanwhile at least 67,000 Palestinians are dead, one third of them under the age of 18. And while upwards of 10,000 of those were likely fighters, it is without doubt that the majority were civilians, killed not only through the normal recklessness of an army in war, but by what looks like a calculated decision to expand targeting permissions beyond what any western army would deem legal. 

As I wrote here last week: there is no way Britain or any international law-abiding country can be party to a deal that creates a Bantustan in Gaza. Nor can we normalise our relations with Israel until there is clear accountability over breaches of the laws of war.

But we can work towards something lasting that can replace the Trump deal. That work, necessarily, has to be done by government: the very government whose offices, members and officials are being harassed and abused in Whitehall by protesters chanting for people to “globalise the intifada”.

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British officials must now engage in the slow, patient work of helping to rebuild Gazan civil society without Hamas and its allies. And the most sensible thing the Palestine solidarity movement could now do is support them in that effort, maintaining pressure to bring the perpetrators on both sides to international justice, and work towards the two-state solution.

Because this deal is not only unjust. If we are unlucky, it could represent the end of international justice in the Middle East, and the start of a new age of “realism”, where might is right and there is zero chance of accountability under human rights law for anyone.

As we look forward, all friends of the Palestinian people must register something that will be hard to swallow for those who’ve become pathologically obsessed with destroying Israel and “globalising the intifada”: there is no intifada. Israel bestrides the region more powerfully than at any time in its history.

There may yet be a route to statehood and stability. But only if the remains of the international order holds.

Who is to blame for that? Mohammad Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif and all the other Hamas geniuses who thought that, by mounting their brutal antisemitic terror attack on 7 October, they could start the war that destroyed Israel. 

The extreme wing of the pro-Palestinian movement is even now planning a conference where it will teach people to “confront Zionism on campus” and “attack the Labour Party”. They have adopted the deliberately ambiguous slogan “Honour our Martyrs” and are in danger of dragging thousands of young people into a futile politics of hate, with no relationship to any principles that could be described as left wing.

So it is time for the mainstream Palestinian solidarity movement to repudiate those politics. They have led to catastrophe and Gaza and they will strain community cohesion if activated here.

Khaleed Mashal, the political leader of Hamas who survived September’s attack on Doha, spelled out the strategy that failed in 2012:

“The state will come from resistance, not negotiation. Liberation first, then statehood… Palestine is ours from the river to the sea… We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation… We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone.”

In pursuit of that strategy, Hamas has achieved only crushing defeat – not just for themselves but for their allies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria. Their powerless subjects – the ordinary people of Gaza – have only been spared further torment by the beneficence of two right wing crooks, and because of money sprayed around Washington by the Gulf monarchies.

All those who want a free Palestine will have to work for it amid the wreckage created by Hamas, and through complete dissociation with the “from the river to the sea” brigade.