With apartment buildings falling like houses of cards in Gaza, rockets striking Israeli towns and sectarian violence spreading across the Jewish state's "mixed cities", the United Nations Security Council this week delivered what has become its customary response to deadly confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians: silence.
Moves were afoot among the 15-member council from early in the week to draft a straightforward statement that held to established UN positions: deploring the killing of civilians, urging restraint by all the key players, expressing concern about the forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem and calling on Israel to cease its expansion of illegal settlements. The draft never issued, however, as the United States, alone among council members, refused to support it. US diplomats briefed that any UN intervention could be harmful to behind-the-scenes efforts to end the violence.
The new round of violence between Israel and Hamas, the worst in seven years, has thrust Ireland into the centre of international diplomacy – such as it is – around the conflict.
In New York, where it holds one of the security council's rotating seats, Ireland supported the draft statement, which had been drafted by China (the council's current chair) with input from Tunisia and Norway. The Biden administration had declined even to get involved in the drafting, and when, as expected, it refused to go along with the text, Ireland joined the other EU states on the council, France and Estonia, as well as Norway. in issuing a statement of their own that made broadly the same points.
The result – that the body charged with maintaining global peace and security has nothing to say about an escalating conflict that has already killed more than 100 people, including 27 children – was a blow to the security council’s credibility and a neat illustration of how international organisations have become peripheral players in the politics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Divisions
The European Union looks even more marginal. Like the UN, the EU spends heavily in the region and plays an important role in supporting Palestinian institutions. As Israel's largest trading partner, it also has some economic leverage over the Jewish state.
But its own internal divisions have for years impeded the EU from making its voice heard on issues such as the status of Jerusalem, the proposed Israeli annexation of the West Bank or Israeli settlement-building.
The pattern is by now familiar: a clutch of mostly small states, including Belgium, Ireland, Sweden and Finland, will agitate for an assertive defence of Palestinian rights. Hungary and the Czech Republic will block, and will usually be joined by Austria and Poland.
It was striking that it took the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell – the union's diplomatic mouthpiece – until Wednesday to utter a pro-forma statement about events in Israel and the occupied territories.
In the current crisis, and more generally, the failure of international organisations to speak with one voice works to the advantage of the Israeli government, which avoids global censure and has more room for manoeuvre as a result. And its means much of the world is powerless to influence a crisis like this one.
Against that background, brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas could be the easy part
Binyamin Netanyahu's regional diplomatic imperatives mean the Israeli prime minister will at least humour states such as Egypt and Qatar, which were reported to be attempting to broker a ceasefire this week, but in effect the only external power capable of shaping Israel's thinking is the US.
And as the crisis worsened this week, Washington looked firmly disinclined to intervene.
The Biden administration has not even feigned interest in building a peace process. It was slow to engage at all this week, and when it did its public comments cleaved to standard-issue Washington rhetoric on the conflict. Not in a generation has Israel been under less pressure to compromise; on the Palestinian side, meanwhile, many fret that Arab capitals have lost interest in their cause.
Internal factors
For Hamas and for Israel the next steps will be shaped almost exclusively by internal factors. Weighing on the minds of Hamas will be Palestinian public opinion, the state of its arsenal and the relationship with its rivals in the Palestinian Authority, whose leader Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 17th year in power, has been invisible all week.
It will also calculate the likelihood of an Israeli ground invasion, which neither side wants but which the logic of escalation dictates could happen anyway.
Domestic politics are at play also in Israel, where Netanyahu’s political future is at stake. Just a week ago he looked set to be ousted from power by a coalition of his rivals; now he casts himself as the indispensable wartime leader whose period in power, as he often points out, has coincided with an era of unprecedented security for most Israelis.
That was one of the reasons Netanyahu long ago concluded that the status quo – the occupation, the siege of Gaza, the expansion of settlements and the absence of peace talks – suited Israel, and him, just fine.
But the status quo now looks like it has delivered something else: a radicalised Israeli far-right, stirrings of a third intifada, and sectarian clashes at some of the most sensitive intersections of Jewish and Arab communities in Israel itself.
Against that background, brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas could be the easy part.