The consequences of the Netanyahu government’s brutal response to the grotesque Hamas attack on October 7th are already inevitable. Beyond the mayhem being inflicted on Gaza, behind the fog of war, despite the propaganda from both sides, and even through the distorting lens of emotion, many of the repercussions of the Israeli military campaign are now entirely predictable.
If the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza continues on its present trajectory, the following 25 things will happen.
1. Countless more innocent Palestinian civilians, including women and children, will die.
2. Tens of thousands more Palestinians will be maimed or injured.
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3. All the Palestinian children of Gaza who survive will be emotionally scarred for life.
4. Many more immensely brave doctors, humanitarian workers and journalists will die, on top of those who have already been killed.
5. Many more Hamas members, including some of its current leaders, will be killed.
6. Hamas will not be eliminated.
7. At least one more generation of Palestinians will be radicalised, not by the recruiting sergeants of Hamas, but by the horrific impact on Palestinian civilians of the Netanyahu “strategy”.
8. More Israeli soldiers will be killed.
9. Many of the remaining Israeli hostages, monstrously seized in October, will at best remain in captivity. At worst, they will be killed by Israeli military actions - as three of them were so tragically last week -or by Hamas. Hopefully some may be released during further pauses in the fighting.
10. Widespread international condemnation of Hamas will continue. Israel’s current behaviour should not dilute that criticism, but will increasingly distract from it.
11. International condemnation of the disproportionate Israeli actions, including by many Jewish people, will widen and deepen. Israeli spokespersons, however articulate, will be become ever more unconvincing in trying to justify the indefensible.
12. Calls for a sustained ceasefire will grow and become more difficult to resist. The overwhelming majority of EU Member States, having moved towards Ireland’s position, now support one. The leader of the British Labour Party, Keir Starmer, for example, will soon find that his internal party discipline problem, with those party members who have been calling for a ceasefire, will solve itself. He won’t need to move his policy towards calling for a ceasefire; the unanswerable case for such a ceasefire is already moving inexorably towards him.
13. Israeli settlers in the illegally occupied West Bank will continue to seize more Palestinian land and to brutalise the people to whom it belongs.
14. The Israeli government will continue to give the West Bank settlers free rein.
15. Palestinian civilians, who merely want to live on their own land, will continue to be dispossessed, attacked, imprisoned and frequently killed. All those who resist will be called “terrorists”. The relentless injustice being inflicted in the Occupied Territories will further radicalise Palestinians.
16. International sympathy for the Palestinian people (as distinct from Hamas) will continue to grow.
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17. Relations between Israel and its closest ally, the United States, will deteriorate further. The first signs of this are already evident.
18. The international standing, influence and interests of the United States will be progressively damaged by association with Netanyahu’s behaviour. At some point, the limit of how far US president Joe Biden is prepared to be ignored and insulted by Israel will be reached.
19. The Netanyahu government’s priority of improving and normalising relations with Israel’s Arab and other neighbours will be profoundly, perhaps permanently, damaged. A post-Netanyahu government may eventually be able to start, very slowly, to build the bridges again.
20. The Netanyahu strategy, now doomed, of bypassing the existence of the Palestinians and ignoring their legitimate rights, will be as dead as Monty Python’s parrot.
21. China’s international standing will be enhanced. The international focus on Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine will become increasingly blurred.
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22. The eventual costs of reconstructing Gaza will continue to grow astronomically. Any realistic plan for the post-conflict governance of Gaza will become ever harder even to imagine.
23. The appalling scourges of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia will be further fanned into life around the world.
24. The already unanswerable case for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict will receive increasing international support, as it becomes obvious that it is the only alternative to a permanent cycle of bloodshed. Importantly, it will become evident that such a two-state solution must involve a genuine Palestinian state, not an entity designed and controlled by Israel.
25. The international instability and dangers caused by the conflict will not end when the shooting stops, or for a very long time afterwards.
These outcomes are inevitable. Apart from the new impetus for progress towards a Palestinian state, they are almost all tragic. The only outcome that Israel itself will be able to celebrate is the killing of more Hamas leaders and members. However, especially as Hamas will continue to exist and possibly even be strengthened, any satisfaction that prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu can derive from that will be heavily outweighed by the other damaging outcomes for Israel.
Israel will be impacted not only by the strengthening of Palestinian extremism but also by the profound damage to its own reputation, international support and long-term security.
The outcomes are also injurious to Israel’s closest friends. They are, as the world can see every day, particularly tragic for Palestinian civilians, hounded around their own land, as if in some macabre video game, by an Israeli military campaign that even Biden now recognises as “indiscriminate”. The glimmer of eventual progress towards a Palestinian state is set to be an important positive - but it is hard to celebrate a prospect for progress that is built on such grotesque suffering.
Bobby McDonagh is a former ambassador of Ireland to London, Brussels and Rome