For the first time in 13 months, a hush will fall over Gaza. Starting Sunday and for the next six weeks at least, soccer fans, sweet-sellers, and students will not be obliterated at random and for no reason. In return for this moment’s quiet, 33 Israeli hostages—children, women, the infirm—will be exchanged for several hundred Palestinian prisoners. And if that quiet holds for longer than six weeks, with a little negotiation, the remaining male hostages might see light again, released with the bodies of those slain in captivity.
And so Palestinians cheered in Deir al Balah last night. They flew their colors in Khan Younis. Anas al-Sharif, a reporter for Al Jazeera, announced news of the ceasefire on camera while steadily removing his blue helmet and “press”-stamped flak jacket. He was lifted on the shoulders of a small crowd. At least 165 journalists have been murdered in Gaza—part of the 46,000 people who have been killed that we know of so far. Part of the 110,000 who have been maimed. One hundred people a day for 467 days.
Yesterday’s announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—achieved under American pressure—was necessary, urgent, and overdue. So is the tempered relief that comes with it. There will be time now to find the dead; perhaps even the months necessary to mourn them. But a pause is not peace. Stasis is not an end. It is in the nature of occupations that they lead to bloodshed. For so long as Israel clings to land that is not its own and covets more, murder will recur with the certainty of the seasons. A ceasefire is only the first step, the barest minimum, in righting this historic offense to justice.
The agreement itself is nervous and provisional. It describes probationary periods, talks about talks, while leaving the stickiest and most serious issues, such as who shall govern the blighted Strip and what control the Israeli army will exert, still not addressed in full. And even at this eleventh hour—as it squeezes in as many late bombing runs as it can—the Israeli government is threatening to collapse the deal, just as it has done previously when any hint of a break in the fighting looked near.
During these six weeks, the forced evacuation orders in place on the Strip will fall away; Gazans are free to return to their homes. Though to talk of “freedom” and “homes” seems absurd in this light. It is easier, when reporting of Gaza’s dismemberment, to mention what remains rather than to list what is done and gone forever. What is there? Rubble, mostly. Under that rubble, corpses not included in official tolls. A lot of people stricken in the mind and the body. The roads remain, yes, insofar as routes have been cleared through the dust of what used to be familiar streets. Who will do the mending? The usual confluence of overstretched aid groups, volunteer nurses, émigré teachers. Not Israel, no. Not the United States, although both should bear the burden of repair, for they together made this wreckage. Instead, the Palestinians of Gaza—Palestinians in general, subaltern peoples everywhere—shall be made to remember that they have been disciplined. That extermination, even if its perpetrators have stepped back from the brink this time, was possible.
And the Israeli army shall remain just inside the border fence. The buffer zone the troops will continue to occupy is 700 meters deep. But there is no mention yet of what shall become of the Netzarim corridor, the militarized belt that cleaves Gaza in half from its easternmost border to the Mediterranean. An occupying power does not spend all of that resource on an elaborate infrastructure—checkpoints, camps, surveillance posts, cell towers, synagogues—for land they do not covet and do not, at some point soon, hope to permanently settle.
With this ceasefire secured, Benjamin Netanyahu can show up in Poland in a week’s time for the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many European countries, including Germany and the U.K., have collectively (if covertly) decided that arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court are optional, unnecessary for their professed commitment to global justice.
Indeed, Netanyahu can make his appearance at the last major occasion when survivors of the Shoah will be well and able enough to attend. There he can say his solemn and statesman-ish things, with little awareness of just how yawning is the hole he has punched in the moral, legal, and political fabric of the postwar world. This world, made on the ruins of Auschwitz itself, is the same one invoked by Netanyahu in defense of this inhuman war in Gaza. “All these universalist reference points—the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry—are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians,” the intellectual Pankaj Mishra wrote in his landmark essay “The Shoah After Gaza”: “Netanyahu and his cohort threaten the basis of the global order that was rebuilt after the revelation of Nazi crimes.”
With or without a halt in the fighting, there is going to be a genocide trial at the International Court of Justice. It might take years to get to that point, but the state of Israel will be in the dock. Unlike the ICC process, it does not require Netanyahu and ex-defense chief Yoav Gallant to be present, however satisfying that might be. This process, like the mending of Palestinian minds and bodies, is just as urgent as any ceasefire, or whisper of a new peace process, for it will establish a new kind of Nuremberg precedent—the governing rule for a reality after Gaza’s ruin.
Meanwhile, Gaza itself will remain a frozen graveyard, a place where the few outlets for Palestinian despair will either be exile, suicide, or martyrdom in the ranks of a Hamas rebuilt with the spoils of rage. The party has potent symbols with which to recruit and rebuild, among them its former leader Yahya Sinwar’s last acts of defiance, fiercely fighting the Israeli Defense Force. Brutalization, hardening, coarsening: These too are potent instruments for the renewal of the conflict. And they run both ways, afflicting perpetrator and victim alike. A legion of Israeli soldiers will return to their families and think of their time in this zone where anything was allowed. And perhaps they will consider how much of their own behavior reminds them of their most notorious enemies.
This is only a pause for another breath. It can only be a pause for breath. The knife is still in the hand.
