Israel-Palestine conflict: Latest Gaza Strip attacks just another chapter in a history book of war

While no one apparently saw this attack coming, there is a long history of Palestinian frustration with Israel over the lack of progress on a negotiated settlement, the ongoing loss of Palestinian land in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians, a legal system biased against Palestinian rights, arbitrary detention of Palestinians, and constraints placed on Palestinian movement out of Gaza.

One of the political problems is the lack of an impartial broker to achieve a negotiated settlement. Clearly, the US does not fall into that category as its generous military aid to Israel (US$3.8 billion a year) helps to reinforce Israel's hardline policies. Perhaps a neutral country like India needs to take the initiative.

The leader of Hamas's military wing, Mohammed Deif, said the assault was in response to the 16-year blockade of Gaza, Israeli raids inside West Bank cities over the past year, violence at al-Aqsa, increasing attacks by settlers on Palestinians, and the growth of settlements. (The disputed al-Aqsa Mosque compound, located at the heart of Jerusalem's Old City, is the third holiest site in Islam and sacred to Jews as the Temple Mount.)

Deif said the early morning attack was only the start of what he called Operation al-Aqsa Storm and called on Palestinians from East Jerusalem to northern Israel to join the fight. He commented "Today the people are regaining their revolution." The outcome is however inevitable, with Israel eventually crushing the latest uprising.

Hamas is proscribed by Australia and most of the Five-Eyes as a terrorist organisation, but the reality is that it represents the aspirations of most Palestinians for an independent Palestinian state. That does not, of course, justify brutal attacks on civilians or the taking of civilian hostages. The toll on civilians by both sides has always been heavy. Since 2008, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths has been more than 20 to one, with most of the 6000 killed being non-combatants.

I have been to Israel several times, including staying on a kibbutz, visiting the Golan Heights and travelling through the West Bank. I have also been to neighbouring Jordan and Lebanon, most recently two months ago. Israel is scenically a magnificent country but has a tragic history of Israeli and Arab conflict, with seemingly irreconcilable differences over who should have which parts of Israeli occupied territory.

The West Bank has been a major focal point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many decades. Israel captured the territory during the Six-Day War in 1967, but many countries and international organisations do not recognise Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank, considering it to be occupied territory. They support the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. (Australia is committed to a two-state solution within internationally recognised borders, in which Israel and a future Palestinian state co-exist.)

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In fact, the West Bank is gradually being absorbed by Israel. The West Bank has an estimated population of nearly three million Palestinians, and over 670,000 Israeli settlers, of whom 220,000 live in East Jerusalem. Many of the West Bank settlers have a frontier mentality with a fixated sense of territorial and religious entitlement. The settlers' displacement of Palestinian landholders will inevitably be a source of ongoing violence.

I was surprised to find that many of the West Bank settlers were American dual-nationals (as was the case elsewhere in Israel), hence presumably the US reluctance to rein in Israel when it reacts with overwhelming force to Hamas provocations, such as rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel. Meanwhile, Hamas believes that it needs to continue to attack Israel to keep the negotiation process alive.

To some extent having an existential threat has suited Israel's political leaders. It has bound a nation of diverse immigrants that might otherwise be difficult to manage, and has been used to justify conscription and political actions that would not be possible if there were not an ongoing security threat.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Israel accepted more than a million Russian immigrants into a population of eight million. They have slowly integrated, but one of their cultural contributions was organised crime. On one occasion when I visited the Jerusalem bomb squad, all was quiet on the Palestinian front, but there was a bombing war going on between Russian organised crime and Israeli organised crime. (The Russian mafia won.)

The likelihood is that once Israel has exacted vengeance on an unprecedented scale - probably to include a major military excursion into Gaza and hunting down of Hamas leaders - we will return to the usual situation of controlled instability and Palestinian containment until the next inevitable flare up. The situation is made more complicated by the involvement of external actors, particularly the US and Iran, who both seek to promote their regional interests through supporting the opposing parties.

Australia has large diasporas supporting the Israelis or Palestinians - which will always complicate our political response to the situation.