In 1948 some 720,000 people were classified as Palestinian refugees. Now it is about five million.
formed, Israel began a phased handover in Gaza and in the towns of the West Bank, and the beginnings of a state-to-state relationship could be seen.
I read an account by a veteran British journalist of her return to Gaza last week, which took in Monday’s bloody protests at the border. In passing she mentioned how Palestinian frustration with the slow progress of the implementation of the Oslo Accords had led to the Hamas suicide bombings, which began in 1994.
But actually it didn’t happen like that at all. In February 1994 a far-right Israeli extremist called Baruch Goldstein, who loathed the Oslo process, massacred 29 Palestinians at a shrine near Hebron. The first Hamas suicide bombing, of a school bus, was supposedly in retaliation for this attack.
Hamas hated Oslo too. Its subsequent and even bloodier bombings, in effect, destroyed the Israeli peace movement. Security trumped peace every time.
In 1995 another Israeli extremist murdered the pro-Oslo prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin. At the next election the anti-Oslo Binyamin Netanyahu became prime minister. Wretched are the peacemakers, for they will be called traitors to their kind.
The last great peace effort, brokered by the Americans, foundered in early 2001. For the best part of 20 years now, while Jewish settlements have continued to grow on the West Bank, the separation wall has been built and the Palestinian population in Gaza, the West Bank and the camps has burgeoned.
In effect, both sides have settled down into a malign pattern. The Palestinian weapon is demographics: they are outgrowing the boundaries that contain them and the forces that occupy them. The Israeli weapon is separation backed by force. From inside their hi-tech Eurovision-winning bubble they will shoot anyone who climbs the fence, and who cares what the world thinks when Donald Trump is on your side? The deaths in Gaza past week are, in that sense, a perfect expression of the default strategies of the protagonists.
I once had hope. I had thought that war was the hard thing and peace was the simpler one. But in fact peace is more painful and harder. It means compromise, complexity and sometimes the loss of an ideal (such as the impossible Palestinian Right of Return).
The lesson of this past week is that it is much easier to shoot and be shot.