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Israel’s wars have sustained the destructive leadership which brought it to this crisis

EXPERT COMMENT

A year after 7 October, a viable alternative to the Netanyahu government is needed – alongside international support for those willing to invest in peace.

The first anniversary of the Hamas atrocities of 7 October and the horrific bloodshed that followed was always going to be a difficult time. What makes it worse is that war is still raging in Gaza Strip, the hostages haven’t been returned, millions of Palestinians live in inhuman conditions and the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon have escalated in recent weeks, leading to more bloodshed and devastation. More pain seems inevitable from the latest missile attack and likely retaliation between Iran and Israel.

The loss of life, the destruction and above all the loss of hope for a better future is heart-wrenching. However, it is also a time for reflection and reckonings about how both Israelis and Palestinians reached this lowest ever point in their relations.
There are many sources of this tragic state of affairs, but above all it has been a failure of leadership, at both domestic and international levels.

That failure goes back far further than a year. Individual and collective decisions to allow – sometimes to encourage – the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to fester for so many decades eventually made the latest, most deadly confrontation inevitable. Counterintuitively, it is the conflict that perpetuates these leaderships, which are either incompetent or extremist or both, and which thrive on cynically exploiting human traits of fear and distrust of the other to gain and maintain power.

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Original article link: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/10/israels-wars-have-sustained-destructive-leadership-which-brought-it-crisis

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