IN THE 12 months since Israel's devastating assault on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, conditions in the Strip "remain wretched", to use Amnesty International's phrase. The Israeli economic siege has remained in place since Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections and enforced its rule within Gaza. Almost no work has been done to repair an estimated $1bn worth of damage because of restrictions on the import of building materials.
Indeed, since the end of the conflict in January, only 41 truckloads of building materials have entered Gaza when thousands are needed. The economy is dependent on the Hamas-regulated warren of tunnels on the southern border with Egypt.
For Israel itself, the consequences of its war on Gaza have been more difficult to assess. Rocket fire by the Palestinian factions has finally been halted, but the cost to Israel of a war that claimed almost 1,400 Gazan lives has been serious. The use of white phosphorous against civilian targets, as well as other suspected breaches of humanitarian law, have corroded the country's moral standing even among its most robust supporters. Israeli politicians and officials have been forced to confront the fact that they risk arrest in a number of countries including, for now at least, the United Kingdom. The impact on Israel has been pernicious in another way. The principle of deterrence has been crucial for its defence. So its failure to dislodge Hamas from Gaza, coming so close after the disaster of its adventure in Lebanon in 2006, has seen its military diminished.
But the assault on Gaza had other consequences that it is, perhaps, easy to forget. The conflict was conducted in the febrile conditions of an Israeli general election which saw all main parties aggressively endorsing the war. It returned Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister in a coalition that has included Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, a man notable for demanding Israeli Arabs swear an oath of loyalty or face expulsion. Unsurprisingly a peace process, already moribund, has faltered further.
Netanyahu has carefully managed a new style designed to derail US demands for a freeze to further settlement in the West Bank by offering the most partial of freezes, in the knowledge it cannot possibly be acceptable to the Palestinian leadership. If Netanyahu has succeeded in this policy thus far it is because he has been allowed to by an American president who promised so much in his Cairo speech and yet has delivered so little. While it is fair to say Barack Obama has been preoccupied with other issues, it is a truism in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that no movement has ever been achieved without the full, vigorous engagement of the US president.
So what we have is an increasingly dangerous stasis in which all issues, save for the stop-start negotiations for prisoner exchange, are on hold. Palestinian national reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, the West Bank and Gaza, has made little headway; Israeli-Palestinian talks are on hold; the economic stranglehold of Gaza goes on. All largely ignored by the international community.
The peril of this lack of movement has been starkly visible in the last week, as Israel yesterday shot dead six Palestinians in two separate incidents in the West Bank. What is required, if there is to be any movement, is an urgent new sense of commitment that must begin in Washington. But equally, there needs to be moves to relieve the plight of Gaza's 1.5 million residents.
They must be allowed access to markets so that they can rebuild, and at least makes some attempt towards lives of dignity. Moreover, stasis suits Hamas, its enemy a sense of opportunity and purpose among those it governs. It is not good enough for the world to ignore this problem while a new generation grows up frustrated and alienated in what is effectively an enormous prison. That is no solution, merely tragedy deferred. Violence will follow.
