Winners and losers

With the Gaza war in its third week and its third stage, Israel is faced with a choice between complete re-occupation of the Gaza Strip on the one hand, or a withdrawal on the best terms and with the best PR it can obtain--for instance the piece by Tom Friedman in the NYT yesterday reads like the opening statement by the defense attorney in a war-crimes trial--on the other. The initial bombing campaign didn't achieve either the collapse of the Hamas regime or breaking the will of the population; and the following two stages--depopulation of areas around the major population centers to isolate them; and now limited incursions into Gaza city--hasn't achieved either of those aims either. So short of full re-occupation, the end of the war seems to be in sight.

Bashir Nafie, writing in AlQuds alArabi this morning:

There are a number of factors that will determine the outcome of this war. The first is the steadfastness of the Gaza sector and the unity of its forces and its people, in the face of the attack; and their refusal to submit to the Israeli will. The second is the amount of popular support from the Arab and Islamic world, and from the world as a whole. Never before have a people of this size, on a piece of land of this scale, stood up to an instrument of war as imposing and as ugly as the Israeli war machine.

And not since the Palestinian nakba of 1948 has there been this kind of popular support for the people of Palestine. Or such a message to the great powers affirming the central place of the Palestinian cause in the stability of this region of the world, and the peace and stability of the world generally.

But there are other factors as well, including such things as the level of confidence between Hamas and the Egyptian negotiators; and certainly also including the question of the ability of the official Arab order to agree on the principle of the protection of the Gaza Strip and its people, and in particular their ability to exert escalated pressure on the United States and the main European countries.

Sooner or later this round of fighting will come to its end, and at that point there will be revealed a new map of powers in the region, Palestinian and Arab both. The Palestinian political scene [at the beginning of the war] appeared split...and the official Arab world repeated the split that it manifested in the 2006 war, although this time in the face of a war that was even uglier and a heavier burden on the Arab and Islamic conscience. If this war ends in Israeli failure--and that is what events are indicating--then there will be winners and losers in both areas: Arab and Palestinian. Soon, if not necessarily within days or even weeks.