Observing events from outside the region, one habitually hesitates. Nevertheless, it feels clear that the four-day truce between Hamas and Israel, with the exchange of prisoners that is woven into it, is better than what preceded it.
It will bring home some abducted Israelis and will save some Palestinian lives, though not enough in either case. It involves the kind of political concessions without which conflict becomes endless. It is a cheering success for the diplomacy that brokered it. It brings a pause. And it is a precedent.
All this is so obviously true that the people of the region, and most of the world’s governments, will inevitably breathe a collective sigh of relief if Thursday’s 10am start to the truce, now delayed by at least 24 hours, passes off smoothly. But it feels equally clear that the significance and durability of the truce should not be overstated. Its terms are extremely contingent. All sorts of things could go wrong, hour by hour, handover by handover, and become pretexts for renewed brutality.
The truce’s elaborately choreographed conditionality makes it an accident waiting to happen. Hopefully, those who negotiated it have put contingency plans in place to stop a glitch from spiralling into a breakdown. But the truce will not end the agonies of some of those who are suffering most. Nor will it allay the suspicions of those on both sides who oppose it. The deal offers no guarantees at all for the future. And Israel and Hamas have explicitly pledged to resume the conflict.
Even so, a truce offers hope. Many will naturally clutch at that. But the limitations should not be shirked. The deal divided the Israeli cabinet. It will probably divide Hamas, too. Those who oppose it will seek to undermine it, perhaps by lethal means. The longer the hostage release process is dragged out, the tougher it will become to complete it. If the process gets that far, its final days will be even more tense than these first days already are.
Consider, if nothing else, the emotional suffering written into the evolution of this deal, even if all goes to plan. The first releases will reportedly be of 10 Israeli women and children, and of 30 Palestinian detainees. The joy and tears of the hostages and their relatives will be beamed around the world. A similar set of exchanges is expected to be repeated over the following days. Yet, for every family that rejoices, there will be many more who cannot do so, families for whom the wait will daily get longer, the stress of uncertainty greater. If these releases continue, as the Americans say is incentivised by the deal, the process will become a game of Russian roulette with their lives.
That is not a reason not to try. Far from it. But it underscores the vulnerability of the process. Right now, both sides undoubtedly have incentives to pause the fighting. Israel wants its people back, and prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has bowed to pressure from hostages’ families and from his security chiefs to pick up a deal that he rejected in the past. Hamas presumably wants to regroup, to re-equip and to redeploy after the battering of Gaza.
But do they both want the process to continue for long? The reality is that both also have incentives to restart fighting. Hamas because, after years in which the world turned away from it and in which oil-rich Arab states began making peace with Israel, the organisation’s vicious assaults have made the world pay attention to Palestine once more. Israel because Netanyahu knows that, after his failures helped pave the way for the horror of 7 October, he faces being ousted from office and prosecuted for corruption as soon as the conflict comes to an end.
I make no claim to military expertise, but it seems more likely than not that the war will in fact restart. Even before the 7 October attack, Israel and Hamas had been fighting a prolonged low-intensity conflict for years. Nearly seven weeks later, neither has got close to their ostensible war aims of destroying the other altogether. Israel has pulverised Gaza, but it has not yet shown the world that it has found, destroyed or expelled Hamas’s military nucleus. Hamas has committed an unconscionable massacre, but it has conspicuously failed to rouse the rest of the region to its banner.
If war is the extension of politics by other means, then today’s mutual military failure reflects a mutual political failure, too. The 30-year refusal of both sides to cooperate to deliver a two-state solution is as reprehensible as its now monumentally dire consequences, which include the Israeli settlements and the sleazy enfeeblement of Palestinian politics. These consequences are now so deeply rooted that it seems no amount of ingenious heavyweight diplomacy could really overcome them.
Yet this is the question that the truce at least places on the table. Whether it can be answered better than in the past depends on three huge and highly uncertain things: the ability of Joe Biden’s United States to drive a comprehensive deal before a presidential election that Donald Trump (whom Netanyahu supports) may win; the availability of Gulf money to bankroll and buttress the reconstruction of a new Palestinian state; and the readiness of Israelis and Palestinians to decide to do the very opposite of what Netanyahu and Hamas want. The last of these is the key. The two sides must listen to one another’s grievances and try to end them. It is hard to be hopeful. But there may not be another chance to try.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
