When will they ever learn?
‘How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?’
One of the most haunting anti-war songs of my 1960s youth was called ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’
Originally recorded by the American singer-songwriter Pete Seeger, and later recorded by everyone from Marlene Dietrich to Vera Lynn, Joan Baez and Harry Belafonte, its refrain was the repeated line ‘When Will They Ever Learn?’
And those were the words that immediately came to mind this morning when I learnt that the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh had been assassinated overnight in Tehran.
I think we can take it as read that he was killed by the Israelis — after all, who else would have had both the motive and the military capacity to carry out such an attack? In which case, given that he was the man with whom the Israelis have been supposedly negotiating a ceasefire agreement, albeit via intermediaries, an obvious question arises.
In the words of Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, prime minister of Qatar, where Haniyeh had his main residence and which has been a vital interlocutor in the ceasefire talks: ‘How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?’
(I wonder, by the way, if Iranian intelligence will ever discover how the Israelis knew exactly where Haniyeh was staying. Someone in Tehran is obviously feeding top intel to Mossad.)
I am not a pacifist and I shed no tears for Ismail Haniyeh. But nor am I a fan of extra-judicial killings, especially when the almost inevitable result will be a further increase in violence and an even less likely resolution to the long war between Israel and Hamas.
It is worth reiterating that Hamas is responsible for starting this phase of the war. Last October, it launched a cynical, brutal attack on Israeli civilians in the full knowledge of what the likely consequences would be. Tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children in both Gaza and the West Bank have been killed since then, and more than a hundred Israelis are still being held hostage in Gaza, forty of them believed to be dead.
The killing of Ismail Haniyeh would be a serious enough escalation on its own. But it came within hours of an Israeli drone strike targetting a senior Hizbollah commander in Beirut following the murders on Saturday of twelve children and teenagers in the Golan Heights, which were annexed by Israel from Syria in 1981.
The main headline on the website of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz as I write these words says: ‘Assassinations in Iran and Lebanon Have Pushed the Mideast to the Edge of a Regional War.’ It is a horrendous prospect that has been in the forefront of international diplomats’ minds ever since last October’s attack.
Iran, which arms and finances both Hamas and Hizbollah, has repeatedly insisted that it is not itching for a regional conflagration. (It should not have escaped Israel’s notice that the newly-elected Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has spoken of his wish for ‘constructive engagement’ with the West. The events of the past few days will not have made his task any easier.)
Israel’s beleaguered prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, seems to be doing everything he can to keep this dismal conflict going. He knows full well that the moment it ends, so does his political career. Even so, when his military chiefs came to him to say they had Haniyeh in their sights and to seek his authorisation for an attack, he could have said: ‘No, it’ll do more harm than good.’
But that’s not his style. Israel has been assassinating Hamas leaders for more than twenty years, yet it’s still a powerful force. Cutting off the head of the snake, which is how Israel likes to describe its approach, will never work when the snake is perfectly capable of growing as many new heads as it needs.
I have been reporting from, and about, the Middle East for nearly forty years. I have watched it descend into the violence of the First Intifada in the late 1980s, the all-too-short flowering of hope following the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, the spate of Hamas suicide bomb attacks that buried that hope almost at birth, the assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist in 1995, and then the Second Intifada that began in 2000.
I was in Israel at the time and reported on what I said ‘seems to be a total loss of confidence on both sides in the idea that problems can be solved by negotiation ... The streets are in charge. Vengeance is in the air ... I have never felt so fearful for the future of this blood-soaked region.’
More than twenty years later, I am as fearful as I was then.
When will they ever learn?