It is still too early to say who won and who lost Israel's war on Gaza, especially since the ceasefire has not yet begun. But if at least the first stage of the agreement goes ahead, it can be said that Israel has not achieved its war goals.

Israel has not succeeded in achieving its pronounced goals: wiping out Hamas and returning the captives by military force.

More importantly, its undeclared goal was to eliminate the Palestinian human presence in Gaza and that was not achieved. Despite all the destruction and mass killing that Israel inflicted during the 15 months of war in Gaza, the Palestinians continue to cling to their land.

The Palestinians who took to the streets in Gaza after the announcement of the ceasefire agreement celebrated their survival as a people and as human beings against Israeli aggression. These scenes indicate that as far as Israel is concerned, it failed.

We cannot talk about a Palestinian victory either. With probably more than 50,000 Palestinians killed, most of them women and children, and their cities in ruins in a way never seen before in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, any talk of victory seems detached from reality.

However, if the Palestinian goal was a kind of "sumud", or steadfast perseverance, then the Palestinians achieved this goal.

Why did Netanyahu agree now?

It is difficult to know exactly why Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu agreed to accept a deal that has been on the table since May 2024. Pressure from Donald Trump may have played a major role, but Netanyahu has problems also within Israel.

All polls show that a large majority of the public supports a deal that would free the 100 or so Israeli captives in return for an end of the war, and his coalition has weakened significantly.

According to a recent poll, the current coalition would win 49 of the parliament’s 120 seats in a new election, losing almost 20 and its majority in the process.

Agreeing on the first stage of the hostage deal, therefore, may allow Netanyahu to regain support within center-right voters while at the same time promising the more hard-right wing to renew the fighting afterward.

Until now, Netanyahu rejected a deal, mostly for political reasons. His extreme right-wing allies, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, threatened to topple his government if he ends the war.

Such a threat also exists now. But Netanyahu had other more profound reasons to refuse. The end of the war, he feared, may put the Palestinian issue back on the negotiation table.

As Netanyahu dedicated his political career to preventing a Palestinian state, such an eventuality may undermine his legacy. And yet he now agreed to cease fire, forced by Trump and Israeli public opinion.

Is there a chance of a permanent ceasefire?

Whether it won or lost, Israel after the signing of the ceasefire is very different from Israel before the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023. The attack caused a trauma from which Israeli society did not recover. The destruction in Gaza was an attempt to heal it, but the trauma remained.

On 7 October the idea that Israel can “manage the conflict” with the Palestinians collapsed. Researchers at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli think tank that deals with Middle East affairs, recently showed how and why this line of thinking failed and how it led to the devastating results of 7 October.

After failing to “manage” the conflict, Israel pivoted to eliminating the Palestinians instead, in the spirit of Smotrich’s “decisive plan”, a manifesto for securing all historic Palestine for Israel. The destruction of Gaza was a part of this plan, but now, so it seems, this route has failed too.

Smotrich and Ben Gvir still think that this goal is achievable. Therefore, they demand from Netanyahu a commitment that immediately after the first stage of 42 days, Israel will resume the war with the declared goal of fully occupying the Gaza Strip and minimizing humanitarian aid.

Netanyahu remains vague about the possibility of renewing the war, but it seems that it will be very difficult to do it for several reasons.

It is not yet clear what kind of pressure Trump has exerted on Netanyahu so far, but it is quite clear that he does not want a war in Gaza and that he is aiming at resuming some kind of political process in the Middle East. A return to war would be against his wishes.

Trump would likely not stop arms shipments to Israel or lift the American veto at the UN if Israel returns to war, but Netanyahu will prefer not to confront him in his first months in the White House.

Resuming the war may also strain relations with Egypt, which helped broker the deal.

But the main problem will be internal. Returning to war would mean giving up on the lives of 66 hostages who are not included in the first stage of the deal. Such a move would be perceived by many in the Israeli public as a betrayal.

A poll published on Friday shows that 73 percent of Israelis support the release of all the hostages in exchange for an end to the war. If the war is renewed before all of them are back home, the anti-

government demonstrations, which are already significant, could intensify and become more violent.

Most of the Israeli public wants to return to a normality. If the war is resumed under the pressure of a relatively small minority from the extreme right - Smotrich and Ben Gvir have 14 seats in parliament and in the polls their numbers are even lower - it could tear Israeli society apart even more that it is today.

A return to fighting will be also difficult militarily. The Israeli army is already exhausted. The soldiers don't know anymore what is wanted from them and where this war is going. The percentage of reservists who show up for service is going down.

If the terms of the first stage will be fully implemented, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will return to the northern Gaza Strip, and that will pose a huge challenge to the Israeli army as it will have to fight in an area that will become again very densely populated.

Hamas has already proven its ability to regroup, as was evident when 15 Israeli soldiers were killed in one week in Beit Hanoun. After 42 days of ceasefire, Hamas will surely be more ready.

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the second phase of the ceasefire will go into effect, which will lead to the release of all the hostages and to a permanent truce between Israel and Hamas.
The impact on Israeli society

Most Israelis want to return to the pre-7 October era, to a kind of internal Jewish reconciliation between the center, the moderate right and the center left, and to continue ignoring the Palestinian issue, as

was the case in the Bennett-Lapid government that preceded the current Netanyahu administration.

But after the trauma of 7 October and 15 months of devasting war against the Palestinians in Gaza, which failed to deliver results, it will be difficult to put this Palestinian genie back in the bottle. In the international arena, the Palestinian issue is in a completely different place than it was on 6 October 2023.  

From university campuses to the foreign ministries around the world, it has become a pressing issue, maybe the most pressing issue. The chances that the international community will allow Israel to “manage” the Palestinian issue as it sees fit are much slimmer now.

In Israeli society new forces may arise. Some of the political and social forces that led to the huge demonstrations against Netanyahu’s judicial overall in 2023 and the protests for the return of the captives may understand that the Palestinians can no longer be ignored.

Not from a moral point of view, but because 7 October and the war that followed it showed them that it is impossible to live a normal life in Israel while this issue is not settled, and not by force.

It is still too early to say if such a new political point of view will emerge after this war is over, but Israeli history tells us that this is possible. After the 1973 Middle East war ended, many Israelis felt that they won the conflict. And yet the trauma of the defeat in the first few days continued to haunt them, albeit unconsciously.

Six years later Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt, withdrawing from all territories it occupied in the Sinai Peninsula in 1967.

This state of affairs 50 years ago is reminiscent of the circumstances today. It is optimistic, maybe too optimistic, to believe that such a scenario may repeat itself after the latest war on Gaza. But it does seem that new possibilities are opening.

Source: Middle East Eye