Adrian Hamilton: Pure politics is driving this war

The year 2008 is finishing as it began, as indeed the millennium has begun, with the abject failure of politics to do anything about man-made violence. You can list the roll call of calamity – Zimbabwe, Darfur, Somalia, Burma, North Korea, the Congo, the Middle East. In each case the leaders of the world have huffed and they've puffed and they've done not a thing to change the course of events.

And yet none of these situations are unavoidable. All are the man-made products of power and politics. Nowhere is this more true than in Gaza. Ignore all the accusation and counter-accusation of fault. Forget too the unconscionable calculation of relative death and destruction, the apportionment of blame on the basis of victimhood.

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The bombing of Gaza happened because it was in the political interests of the parties concerned. Israel's Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, propelled it, the Foreign Secretary Tzipi Livni applauded it, outgoing Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, sanctioned it and the whole cabinet voted for it because there is an election in February in which the head of the far-right opposition and arch-hawk, Binyamin Netanyahu, is in front in the polls. Barak, as head of the Labour Party, and Livni has head of the ruling Kadima Party are determined to outbid him in the war-mongering stakes.

The timing was right and so, in Israeli eyes, were the circumstances. President Bush, the most unreservedly pro-Israeli president since that country's birth, is still in power for the next few weeks before a new, and less assuredly sympathetic US leader takes over on 20 January. At the same time the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, also outgoing, saw in this a chance to break once and for all his Hamas opposition before new elections have to be held. Indeed you could, if dramatically inclined, describe Gaza as the last desperate gambit of three leaders on their way out – Bush, Olmert and Abbas.

If regime change in Gaza is the stated aim of this war, as Israeli cabinet ministers keep repeating, then it has to be said that an awful lot of powers outside Gaza, including the US and Britain, Egypt and Jordan as well as Abbas, are all for it.

And Hamas itself? That it has miscalculated in ending the ceasefire when it did and underestimating the ferocity of the Israeli response is manifestly true. It joined a game of chicken with Israel staking the lives of its own people on the throw. But then Hamas too has its political reasons for such a violent confrontation with its enemy. The harder Israel hits Gaza, the more enraged becomes its population, and particularly the unemployed youth who provide the movement with its fighters, and the more sympathy is aroused in Arab, and indeed Muslim, countries. Israel may wish to change regime in Gaza, but its effect is to undermine the regimes in Ramallah, Cairo, Amman and the Gulf.

It may be harsh to say that hundreds of civilians have died and several hundred wounded purely in the interest of a bunch of politicians too keen on their own political ambitions to consider the consequences. But that is the brutal truth of this conflict.

Just as this conflagration is essentially political in aim, so then must be its solution. It's no good pretending it will be easy. We wouldn't be in this situation had any of the major players a hint of statesmanship to them. Inevitably even a short-term stop to the fighting will have to come from within. Israel, despite its best efforts to prove the contrary, is not immune to the disapproval of the outside world. Although it has stopped all media entry to the Gaza, in the modern world of mobile phones and internet the pictures and the stories cannot be stilled. The longer it goes on, the more world opinion, and opinion within Israel, will begin to feel repelled.

At the same time, both Barack and Livni must know from the Lebanese experience that these sorts of actions only work if they produce quick results. In the first days they could hope to outflank Netyanyahu in toughness. Give it a week without a clear victory and they begin to look ineffective. At some point they may well see it in their interests to declare victory and accept a ceasefire.

For the outside world, the most helpful thing it could do is to stop playing politics there. The crisis in Gaza has been started and made immeasurably worse by the way that Washington and London have worked to build up Abbas and pull down Hamas. Egypt and the so-called moderate Arab states, as well as the Quartet represented by Tony Blair, have all been sucked into a policy of deliberate isolation of Gaza and the undermining of Hamas there. It hasn't worked and it won't work. Hamas was democratically elected, it has strong roots among people and the more it is isolated, the greater has been its claim to be the one independent voice of the Palestinians.

The Arabs themselves are partly to blame. Egypt and the Gulf states have been all too easily corrupted into taking part in this divide-and-rule approach to Palestine and to heating up a US-promoted and Iraq-based vision of a fundamental Middle Eastern conflict between Sunni and Shia, which no self-respecting Muslim regime should have countenanced.

President-elect Obama is not going to reverse this policy overnight. He can't, given America's commitments to a close alliance with Israel and it is quite futile for the Muslim world to expect him to. But he can influence opinion within Israel. One word not even of condemnation of Israel but of the resort to violence as a weapon of policy would be enough to warn the country's leaders and their electorate that a more even-handed approach was on its way.

Gaza won't be solved until the Palestinians sort themselves out. But their only chance of doing that is if we – Washington, London and the Quartet – stop playing sides and the Israelis stop playing politics through war.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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