Patrick Kingsley
speaker
102 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Patrick Kingsley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And we're also left with questions about what all this means in the long term for Israelis, for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, and also for the region, the Middle East as a whole.
For Gazans, it is, at least for a few weeks... Respite from one of the most intense aerial campaigns and ground invasions, certainly in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also in 21st century warfare. And even if this deal collapses after six weeks, it gives them the opportunity to have a night's sleep without bombardment.
It gives people a chance to find their loved ones whose corpses have been trapped on the rubble for months, in some cases over a year. It gives hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in southern Gaza the ability to finally, after more than a year of displacement, return home to northern Gaza.
Scores of universities, hospitals, medical centers have been destroyed during this war, and it could even take decades to repair some of that damage.
So Hamas is a movement and the Hamas-controlled Ghazan authorities don't really have the ability to do much of this on their own. They're going to rely on massive overseas help from the rest of the Arab world, from the United Nations, and exactly how that is going to work has not yet been decided.
The deal gives them the chance of survival. As the war went on, they were losing more troops, more operatives, more leaders. Their top leader Yahya Sinwa was killed, if you recall, in October. Sinwa's predecessor Ismail Haniyeh was killed also in the summer.
Now that the war has stopped, at least for now, and there's a possibility that the initial six-week ceasefire will extend into something longer, they may be able to survive the war both intact as a movement and in power as a governing force in the Gaza Strip.
They said words to that effect. After the October 7th raid by Hamas and its allies, Israel basically said its two goals of the war would be to return the hostages captured by Hamas and its allies on October 7th and to destroy Hamas's military capabilities and its governing capabilities. If they are still able to govern Hamas,
Gaza Strip after the war ends, or if the ceasefire becomes a permanent one, then that would represent something of a victory for the group, even if their actions have resulted in the decimation of the territory that they controlled before the war began.
In the short term, it brings also some respite, also some joy to an Israeli society that has been traumatized both by the October 7th attacks, which were the deadliest attacks on Israel in its history, but also by the 466 days since Israel in which Israelis have been torn by guilt and sadness over the continued incarceration of their friends, relatives in Gaza.
And if at least some of those hostages can be released, it counts as a kind of redemption, not only for the hostages themselves, but for Israelis across the political spectrum. Longer term, if the deal holds and Netanyahu decides to continue it and to nudge it towards something permanent, then it could severely destabilize his own coalition government. He is in power in part through the support of
several far-right ministers and lawmakers who deeply oppose ending the war with Hamas still in power, even if that means leaving some hostages inside Gaza. So if he does agree to take this from a six-week deal into a longer arrangement, they could leave his coalition potentially
destabilizing it or maybe even collapsing it, which could lead to early elections and perhaps, depending on the results of those elections, a transition of power within Israeli society. So short term, this brings relief and joy for Israelis as well as people in Gaza.
In the long term, it could deepen some of the divides that we've seen split Israeli society for many different reasons in recent years.
Yes and no. In reputational terms, Israel has dealt itself damage by the way it has been perceived to conduct this war. It is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
there has been criticism of Israel almost like never before as a result of the way it's conducted its war in Gaza. And in that sense, you could argue it has lost or it has at least lost ground in a diplomatic war, a war for legitimacy and a war for reputation.
So Israel depends on international support for at least some of its actions. It depends on American funds and American military resources, ammunition, fighter jets, in order to wage its wars. And within the Middle East, it depends on good relations with the Arab world in order to cement its long-term status within the region.
Before the war, Israel was close to forging a landmark diplomatic deal between itself and Saudi Arabia, the most influential country in the Arab world. The war put those negotiations on ice and, in fact, made it much harder for Saudi Arabia to be seen to be doing a deal with a country that many people in the Arab world believe is committing a genocide against Palestinians.
And if the war ends, Israelis will hope that they can get those negotiations back on track. But militarily, yes, as you say, Israel has weakened Hamas, they've weakened Hezbollah. They have weakened Iran. And all of those battles contributed, at least in some part, to the collapse of Iran's ally, the Syrian government.
And so Israel, despite all its internal divisions, has proved itself as the region's strongest military power. It means, or at least Israelis will hope it means, whatever reputational loss Israel has suffered because of the conduct of its war in Gaza, both in the Middle East and across the world. It is simply too powerful militarily to be wished away.
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