Something of a cease-fire

Now that the dust has settled in Gaza, perhaps only temporarily, what is left?
Well, there are currently 372,948 monthly active users of the Facebook application QassamCount, meant to display the number of rockets set off by Hamas in your status.

Then there is the “STOP Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza” application, which was developed “to reply to some Zionist developers who developed Facebook applications that update subscribers’ status periodically with the number of missiles launched by Palestinian resistance.” That application currently has 692,610 monthly active users.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has never exactly brought out the best in people. Israel’s recent Gaza offensive was ridiculously declared by its critics to be genocide. Michele Malkin’s blog was riddled with comments about a religiously “motivated pogrom against all non-Muslims.” Even here in Bloomington, tension was high as Indiana Students Against War protested the vote of our house representative, Baron Hill, to reaffirm American support for the Israeli government.

Currently, both Hamas and Israel have declared cease-fires, but they are unilateral and do not represent any kind of deal or understanding between the two sides. This is the result of hubris all around, but Israel surely could have gotten some deal out of Hamas after its devastating military campaign.

This failure means the peace will be fragile; there are already reports that the cease-fire was violated when Hamas launched a failed rocket attack on Israel, which responded with air strikes.

Throughout this conflict, cool heads were in short supply. People split along the usual lines of loyalty. It remains unnerving to hear radical supporters of both Israel and the Palestinians go to such great efforts to push all responsibility of violence on the other side. Israelis and Palestinians both display a diversity of action and opinion, but this is rarely acknowledged.

If Obama’s inauguration really represents the passing of the torch to the next generation, IU students should avoid seeing this conflict as one-sided. Students will inevitably express their allegiances through Facebook statuses, conversations and bumper stickers, but they should be aware of how they do so. Jewish and Muslim students on campus have even more of a responsibility not to see the conflict in the us vs. them terms that have prevented peace for nearly a century.

We did not and will not declare a side. Victory in war is often bittersweet. It is understandable that Israel felt it needed to stop the frequent rocket fire on its territory – something no other nation would tolerate – but this was not a struggle between good and evil. The Palestinians of Gaza will continue to be Israel’s neighbors. After an extended ground invasion that now seems likely to end with a continued blockade, any kind of all-encompassing peace deal is probably years away.

Perhaps Obama will actually force – arm-twisting will definitely be required – the two sides to reach the settlement they have occasionally been close to.

That is what the Palestinians and Israelis need right now – a moderator, not more of the same assumptions and prejudices that make the conflict so intractable in the first place.