The ceasefire that wasn’t
Politics Notebook #3: The House of Commons votes against the SNP’s motion on Gaza.
Contrary to what a lot of outlets are reporting, the House of Commons has not voted ‘against a ceasefire’ tonight.
I don’t just mean that what was being proposed in the Scottish National Party motion was not a ceasefire — more on that in a moment — but that some have forgotten the terms of reference here. The UK Parliament was not voting for or against a ceasefire in Gaza because the UK is not a party to the conflict in Gaza.
Even if the votes had gone the SNP’s way this evening, the effect would have been nothing more than symbolic. The Commons has no power to impose its resolutions on Israel any more than it has the power to decide the wartime policies of Australia or Canada or New Zealand. The British Mandate of Palestine/the Land of Israel expired some time ago. So the Commons vote was about MPs grandstanding in a conflict in which they have no say.
Note that I say grandstanding and not ‘virtue signalling’, for no virtue was being signalled here. What the pro-ceasefire side was proposing was not a cessation of hostilities but a cessation of hostilities on the part of one side of the conflict, namely Israel. There was already a ceasefire in place. It was broken by Hamas on October 7 when it sent its terrorists to invade Israel and slaughter 1,200 of its citizens in a massacre of demonic sadism.
So we know Hamas isn’t going to abide by a ceasefire. When Operation Iron Swords does conclude, Hamas will do what it has always done: use the end of Israeli strikes to regroup, rearm and return to planning its next atrocity. (I am assuming that Israel will not succeed in destroying Hamas, though I would be very happy to be proved wrong.) There are undoubtedly malign actors pushing for a ceasefire but most are too naive, uninformed, emotionally driven or blinded by prejudice against the Israelis to reckon with the realities on the ground.
The ceasefire lobby, the sinister and the sentimental alike, want us to think about the current fighting in isolation from the broader conflict. They want us to forget what Hamas is, how it operates and what its grisly track record documents. They want us to pretend the question at issue is ‘Are you for or against killing?’ when the question is actually ‘Are you for pausing killing right now even though it will result in much more killing over time?’ If Hamas is not destroyed, and that is an exacting feat, it will be back again soon, whether with another October 7-style outrage or thousands more rocket attacks or some obscenity we have yet to conceive of. In response, Israel will have to launch a fresh wave of aerial strikes on Gaza and perhaps another, much more expansive ground invasion, in which thousands more Palestinians, including civilians, will die. Hamas will then use those deaths to recruit more young Palestinians to become terrorists, and so the cycle of killing will continue to turn.
There is no answer to this conflict that does not involve the destruction of Hamas. There is no way to destroy Hamas that does not result in large-scale Palestinian casualties, including civilians. Hamas will never give up on its human shields and will never stop using hospitals, schools and mosques as terrorist command centres and weapons storage and launch facilities. There is no all-we-are-saying-is-give-peace-a-chance option here. More Israelis are going to die and many more Palestinians are going to die, the difference in the death tolls not substantially down to how Israel fights but down to how Hamas fights. Israel uses its fighters to defend its babies, Hamas uses its babies to defend its fighters.
This is a highly complex conflict. I know that’s a cliche but it’s true. One of the complexities is that even if Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and all the other terrorist organisations could be made to disappear tomorrow with the click of the fingers, it would represent only the possibility that, one day, in the far future, some kind of resolution to the conflict might be arrived at. The scale of the work needed to be done to ready the Palestinian-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) for making peace with Israel is unfathomably vast. The scale for doing the same in Gaza is so many times bigger that I cannot think of an adverb-adjective collocation to describe it.
The reforms required to Gaza’s institutions, the economy, education, welfare, public attitudes, laws and customs, religious entities — it amounts, in effect, to the reinvention of an entire society. That is not going to happen overnight. It may not happen in the lifetime of anyone reading these words. This is why you don’t go rushing into this conflict from comfortable leather benches halfway across the world. Because it’s a conflict that has run for generations and will likely run for generations more, and then some.
That’s a deeply dismaying thought, so allow me to conclude on a more positive note. Something I noticed over the ceasefire vote was a number of soft-left Labour people who seemed to understand all the points I’m making here. These are people who cannot be slandered as warmongers — they will be anyway — and I suspect some of them struggled mightily against the tempting logic of the ceasefire argument. Some of these people are MPs, others rank-and-file Labour door-knockers. Some of them have popped up on my Twitter timeline in recent days and pleasantly surprised me with their clear-headed and unequivocally stated opposition to the ceasefire motion. (If you’re reading this and wondering if you are one of the people I’m talking about, you almost certainly are. Kol hakavod to you, as they say in Israel.)
The past five weeks have supplied too many examples of people and institutions allowing their mask to slip or lacking the moral courage to stand up to extremism and antisemitism. I propose that we take some succour from these centre-left bulwarks against the siren call of the current fashionable opinion. They show that you can be on the left and still do right on Israel and the Palestinians.
Excellent piece, Stephen. Thank you. I’m thoroughly embarrassed by my fellow countrymen but then Nats do what Nats do - talk a lot and say absolutely nothing of value.
Yet again, you have hit nail on the head. So often you seem to put into words exactly what I feel about an issue. Thank you.