Israelis are outraged by the murders of three teenagers in the West Bank. © Sebastian Scheiner/AP/Press Association Images
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Governments around the world immediately condemned the murder of the three Israeli teenagers, whose bodies were discovered late on Monday near Hebron and near where they had been kidnapped 18 days earlier. President Barack Obama declared that “The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of terror against innocent youth,” and that “From the outset, I have offered our full support to Israel and the Palestinian Authority to find the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice.”
However, he added, “I also urge all parties to refrain from steps that could further destabilise the situation.” He was right to say it; he is unlikely to be granted his wish. Just over two months since the collapse of the latest US-brokered peace talks, the kidnappings have taken relations between Israel and the Palestinian leadership into desperately difficulty territory. The next moves by both sides will show whether even faint hopes of more talks can be resurrected, or whether, as diplomats have warned, a new era of violence and attack will begin.
When the three teenage boys were kidnapped on 12th June, trying to hitch a lift back from yeshiva or religious school in Kfar Etzion, an Israeli West Bank settlement near Hebron, there were at first cautious hopes for their safety. Kidnapping, leading to demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners, has been a tactic of Hamas, the militant group which runs the Gaza Strip. In 2006, in a raid by underground tunnels, Hamas militants captured Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier; he was released in 2011, in exchange for 1,027 soldiers. However, he was the first captured IDF soldier to be released for 26 years. In this latest kidnapping, the signs were bleak from the start: no group (including Hamas) claiming responsibility, and no ransom demands.
What should happen now? Israel will rightly have overwhelming support in pursuing the perpetrators (its prime suspects are apparently two members of Hamas based around Hebron). The kidnapping and murder of civilians offends all rules for the conduct of conflict and there are not justifications for it. However, Israel will have less support in turn for retaliation which hurts the Palestinian civilian population. The Israeli military said that just hours after the bodies were found, it launched 34 air raids on Gaza Strip, in response to more than 20 rockets fired from there.
During operation Cast Lead, Israel’s aerial attack on targets in Gaza from late December 2008 to January 2009, which it launched in response to an increase in rockets fired from the zone, Israel suffered 10 military and three civilian deaths while it is estimated that more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed and much infrastructure destroyed. Israel argued that it had a right to defend itself and that its citizens’ security was paramount, but its action provoked strong criticism from many governments including within the European Union.
Western diplomats are hoping that an escalation of response on either side can be avoided. But the murder has undoubtedly made even harder the job of trying to piece together the fragments of the peace process. It has undermined Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who had just formed a unity government with Hamas leaders. Its members, according to the deal, were to be “technocrats” not politicians affiliated with Hamas or Abbas’s more moderate Fatah. But despite US encouragement to deal with this new government, Israel declared that it would not deal with Hamas.
The Abbas team—and US negotiators—now fear that Israel will demand the end of the unity government or the expulsion of members with supposed Hamas links. However, Hamas has denied responsibility for the kidnapping, and at this stage, whatever Israel’s presumption of its role, it is in theory possible that other militant elements were to blame (Hamas’s control of these factions even within Gaza is far from complete).
There is no question that hopes for peace have taken a jolt backwards, as so often before. However, this strengthens the case—a bleak one—of those who have pointed out (as in my piece for Prospect this month) that it would take little to start the whole cycle of reciprocal violence again, and that in the longer term, Israel’s predicament will worsen if there is no peace deal. It is not hard to predict, however, that there is not going to be one any time soon.
