The prospect of an exchange of hostages taken by Hamas and prisoners held by Israel, to be accompanied by a pause in fighting, is of course welcome news. It’s a constructive moment in the tragic seven weeks that began on 7 October.

The question is what happens once the exchange takes place. For all the temporary relief, the so-called truce cannot be permanent given that Hamas’s control of Gaza is the foremost obstacle to long-term peace. The negotiation has come about because Israel’s response to the October terror attacks and hostage-taking has put Hamas under immense pressure. Indeed, this is why Hamas took the hostages—anticipating an unyielding Israeli military operation, the terror group knew it needed leverage to extract concessions from Israel such as today’s hiatus in fighting and create domestic challenges for the Israeli government.

It is also why Hamas won’t return all the hostages (releasing about 50 but keeping 180). It is looking to hold on to its bargaining chips in the hope that Israel will be persuaded by a global community tired of the horrors of war to extend the pause indefinitely. Indeed, once Israel resumes its operations, Hamas will no doubt claim that it’s the Israelis who are restarting the conflict without justification. In pushing this strategic messaging, it will draw on the Iran-backed web of proxies to exploit the genuine global sympathy for Gazan civilians while also stoking the flammable fringes of the debate occupied by less well-meaning participants such as antisemites.

The discussion of a ceasefire inevitably appeals to our urge to find a modicum of optimism amid the carnage, but it doesn’t change the reality that Israel faces: Hamas does not want peace; it wants the extirpation of the Jewish state. The group’s long-term strategy is a fight to the death—backed by regional benefactors and sympathisers—to bring about the demise of the Jewish state.

A truce that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza will not be a permanent solution but merely a temporary pause in which Gazans remain controlled by a terrorist group that will abuse civilian infrastructure and resources to rebuild, rearm and return to its stated objective of destroying Israel.

Most other aspects of this immensely complex political problem involve difficult, but negotiable, trade-offs in which the parties could make compromises. That goes for territorial borders, the status of refugees and even the presence or otherwise of Israeli settlements.

Israel cannot continue living with a Hamas-controlled Gaza. The untenability of having Hamas on Israel’s border has long been clear. However, to dismantle and disarm the group was always going to involve grievous civilian bloodshed and the inflaming of anti-Israeli opinion—a prohibitive proposition for Israel prior to 7 October.

Yet now Israel finds itself facing this task anyway, which is a reminder to the world that tolerating the intolerable—even grudgingly, because the alternatives are too difficult—is never sustainable in the long term. This was demonstrated on 7 October.

The world should absolutely insist that Israel follow the rules of armed conflict. We should hold it to account if it fails to meet that standard. We should expect higher standards of democratic, law-abiding societies than we expect of lawless terrorists.

But we must also understand that we can’t hold a law-abiding society to an unfeasible standard that goes beyond international law and leaves it with no assured pathway to guarantee its future security, which is what we would be doing if we ask Israel to accept the continued control of Gaza by Hamas. We would be asking Israelis to live in perpetual fear of their state—as well as themselves and their families—being attacked and wiped off the earth.

We can demand that Israel minimise civilian casualties and hold it to account when it fails. (The very fact that the civilian toll is the foremost consideration serves as an important reminder that Israel is at war with Hamas, not Palestinians.) But we cannot demand that it enter a truce that relies on the word of terrorists whose raison d’être is Israel’s destruction. The group that carried out the 7 October attacks is not transforming into a peace-abiding actor.

As invaluable as the laws of armed conflict are, there is no goal of international law that says a nation must accept, in perpetuity, such a grave security threat as Hamas poses to Israel.

And Israel can’t keep Hamas at bay forever. Even accepting that 7 October represented a colossal intelligence failure on the part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the ruthless determination of Hamas will always drive it through whatever cracks it can find in Israel’s defences. And however sophisticated Israel’s security apparatus might be, all armour has vulnerabilities.

Hence the pathway to long-term stability and security cannot begin with the continued rule of Gaza by Hamas.

So where does this leave us? Nobody pretends that Israel’s military operation will automatically create peace.

What Israel must do is disarm Hamas and neutralise the extreme threat that it poses, while it embarks on a renewed and genuine effort at a long-term peace solution. However difficult that will be, it is the only way forward.

It needs to convince the Palestinian people and its regional neighbours that it is genuine about finding a pathway to peace. Acknowledging the anger that is building among Palestinians and Arabs as a consequence of the costs of its pursuit of Hamas, Israel will need to demonstrate a heartfelt effort that may not sit well with all individual Israeli citizens in the wake of 7 October. It will be monumental, but it is the only way. A two-state solution—however cynically it has been abandoned by some in Israel, intentionally sabotaged by Iran and its proxies including Hamas, and despairingly written off by many objective commentators—remains the best hope.

There will be no quick fix. It will require Israel to work over the long term, including with the US and Arab countries, to persuade the majority of Palestinians that Hamas and its ideological confederates were only ever an obstacle to peace and, in fact, an obstacle to a Palestinian state becoming a reality. Only by neutralising Hamas will this process have a chance.

And while many people will argue, rightly, that an ongoing conflict risks creating more extremists, terrorism, like all security threats, takes both intent and capability. Sadly, there are many people and organisations worldwide who mean harm against Israel and often the West more broadly. These individuals and groups are prevented from succeeding by being denied the capability.

To allow Hamas to control Gaza is comparable to accepting al-Qaeda’s control of land in Afghanistan or Islamic State’s control of territory in Syria and Iraq. There are reasons the military battles to degrade and destroy the operational capabilities of these terrorist groups were and remain so important. Allowing them to plan operations from ungoverned spaces is a fundamental obstacle to long-term peace.

It is this capability that Israel must now remove while working longer term to defuse the intent. A genuine peace effort by Israel can start to erode the drivers and influence of extremists, but it needs the breathing space that Hamas’s neutralisation can create.

We are all horrified by the death and suffering of war. For there to be less violence and bloodshed, the world needs Israel to chart a responsible course of removing Hamas and pursuing peace.

The crises, conflicts and wars that are currently raging highlight just how profoundly the geopolitical landscape has changed in recent years, as great-power rivalries have again become central to international relations. With the wars in Gaza and Ukraine exacerbating global divisions, an even more profound geopolitical reconfiguration—including a shift to a new world order—may well be in the works.

These two wars heighten the risk of a third, over Taiwan. No one—least of all Chinese President Xi Jinping—can watch the United States transfer huge amounts of artillery munitions, smart bombs, missiles and other weaponry to Ukraine and Israel without recognising that American stockpiles are being depleted. For Xi, who has called Taiwan’s incorporation into the People’s Republic a ‘historic mission’, the longer these wars continue, the better.

US President Joe Biden understands the stakes and is now seeking to defuse tensions with China. Notably, after sending a string of cabinet officials to Beijing, Biden’s planned summit talks with Xi on the sidelines at the APEC forum this week in San Francisco are set to steal the spotlight. And he and his G7 partners have stressed that they are seeking to ‘de-risk’ their relationship with China, not ‘decouple’ from the world’s second-largest economy.

Whatever one calls it, this process is set to reshape the global financial order, as well as investment and trade patterns. Already, trade and investment flows are changing in ways that suggest that the global economy may be split into two blocs; for example, China now trades more with the global south than with the West. Despite the high costs of economic fragmentation, China, seeking to reduce its vulnerability to future pressure, has been quietly decoupling large sections of its economy from the West.

In no small part, the US has itself to blame for this situation. By actively facilitating China’s economic rise for four decades, it helped to create the greatest rival it has ever faced. Today, China boasts the world’s largest navy and coast guard, and is overtly challenging Western dominance over the global financial system and in international institutions. In fact, China is working hard to build an alternative world order, with itself at the centre.

Though the current system is often referred to in neutral-sounding terms such as the ‘rules-based global order’, it is undoubtedly centred on the US. Not only did the US largely make the rules on which that order is based, but it also seems to believe itself exempt from key rules and norms, such as those prohibiting interference in other countries’ internal affairs. International law is powerful against the powerless, but powerless against the powerful.

When it comes to creating an alternative world order, the current conflict-ridden global environment may well work in China’s favour. After all, it was war that gave rise to the US-led global order, including the institutions that underpin it, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations. Even reforming these institutions meaningfully has proved very difficult during peacetime.

This is certainly true for the UN, which appears to be in irreversible decline and increasingly marginalised in international affairs. The hardening gridlock at the UN Security Council has caused more responsibility to be shifted to the UN General Assembly, which was forced, notably, to adopt a resolution on the war in Gaza calling for a ‘humanitarian truce’ and an end to Israel’s siege. But the General Assembly is fundamentally weak, and, in contrast to the Security Council, its resolutions are not legally binding.

As US-led institutions deteriorate, so too does America’s authority beyond its borders. Even Israel and Ukraine—which depend on the US as their largest military, political and economic backer—have at times spurned US advice. Israel rebuffed America’s counsel to scale back its military attacks and do more to minimise civilian casualties in an already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. US officials have blamed Ukraine’s wide dispersal of forces for its stalled counteroffensive.

Beyond the global reordering that the Sino-American rivalry appears to be causing, important regional shifts are possible. A protracted conflict in Gaza could set in motion a geopolitical reorganisation in the Greater Middle East, where nearly every major power—except Egypt, Iran and Turkey—is a 20th-century construct created by the West (especially the British and the French). Already, Israel’s war is strengthening the geopolitical role of gas-rich Qatar, a regional gadfly that has become an international rogue elephant by funding violent jihadists, including Hamas.

If the conflict spreads beyond Gaza, the geopolitical implications would be even further-reaching. Whatever comes next, Ukraine may well be among the biggest losers. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged, the war in Gaza already ‘takes away the focus’ from his country’s fight against Russia at a time when Ukraine can ill afford a slowdown in Western aid.

Yet, more forces and trends—including Russia’s increasingly militarised economy, China’s stalling growth and the growing economic weight of the global south—are making fundamental changes to the international order more likely. Meanwhile, the world is grappling with widening inequality, rising authoritarianism, the rapid development of transformative technologies like artificial intelligence, environmental degradation and climate change.

Though the details are impossible to know, a fundamental global geopolitical rebalancing now appears all but inevitable. The spectre of a sustained clash between the West and its rivals—especially China, Russia and the Islamic world—looms large.

Following Hamas’s terror attack on Israel on 7 October and Israel’s declaration of war in Gaza, events in the Middle East have dominated world headlines and threatened social cohesion, including in Australia. To avoid a noxious spillover of violence and vitriol, Australians have a duty to avoid the sort of rhetoric that harms national unity.

On 12 October, the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, spoke on the recent events in the Middle East and their ramifications for security in Australia. He cautioned: ‘[I]t is important that all parties consider the implications for social cohesion when making public statements … [W]ords matter. ASIO has seen direct connections between inflamed language and inflamed community tensions.’

While the responsibility to safeguard social cohesion lies with every Australian, the media plays an especially important role. And in an age of near-universal social media use, this includes non-traditional media influencers and other public figures who boast large online followings. The temptation to attract views, likes and engagement through provocation must not trump the responsibility to conduct a thoughtful and measured response to injustices, recent or historical.

This is perhaps wishful thinking. Social media isn’t known for its nuance and dedication to the careful participation in discourse that such matters demand. Instead, it is liable too often to decay into a cacophony of simplistic and corrosive exchanges. Yet, as Burgess said, it is incumbent on each participant in this discourse to consider the power of their words on individual and collective wellbeing, including the potential for such expressions to vilify and exclude entire groups.

For nearly three decades, Middle Eastern and Arab men and boys have been portrayed by sections of the media and the entertainment industry as a menacing threat, both to individuals and national security, if not to Western civilisation itself. In the wake of Hamas’s vicious attacks on Israeli civilians, the re-emergence of this typecasting threatens social cohesion across the world and perpetuates false narratives that distract a war-weary humanity from the ultimate peace process that must prevail if this and other conflicts are to cease.

Social media carries the potential to supercharge these stereotypes and entrench social division through a self-propelling cycle of vitriol and rhetoric. More anger and hate will do nothing for those who, as we watch these horrors unfold again, are once more burying their dead and suffering irreparable loss.

The wave of grief from the outbreak of violence on 7 October took only hours to reach Australian shores, where it just as quickly began to tear at the fabric of our multicultural, multifaith and multiethnic society. Our open democracy allows each of us to express our views freely, but if such opportunities are squandered by deploying hateful, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic or racist messages, we are all poorer for it. If we are to maintain the precious gift our freedoms afford us, we must likewise shun the all-too-easy insults and stereotypes that have divided us before.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and with Australia, the US and others engaged in conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa, the brush of rhetoric tarred a whole community. Simplistic narratives of the Middle East’s history and society—exemplified by the belief that the coalition invasion of Iraq would usher in an era of prosperity and liberalisation with the grateful cooperation of a unified Iraqi nation—combined with racist and Islamophobic tropes to create distrust and resentment.

Sections of the media were either unable or unwilling to quell this toxicity, and some fuelled the flames of discord. Added to this was a dearth of representation in much of the popular media, providing the public with a limited range of narratives about people of Middle Eastern extraction. This in turn created a narrow conception of what people from that region valued.

The post-9/11 media environment heaped millions of ordinary people in with the perpetrators of those and other terrorist attacks, crimes or delinquency, giving rise to events like the 2005 Cronulla riots and countless reported and unreported instances of racial abuse.

While some of these narratives have cooled in intensity, the Israel–Hamas war threatens to usher in a new episode in media portrayals of Arabs, Iranians and others as dangerous and violent people intent on ‘destroying the West’.

Of course, prejudicial depictions in news and entertainment media aren’t reserved exclusively for those from the Middle East. Over the past half century, the baton has been routinely passed between Africans, Eastern Europeans, Arabs and Iranians in the relay for ‘Hollywood villain from a foreign land’. Anti-Semitism, a mainstay of propagandists for millennia, is also growing across the globe and the Israel-Hamas conflict threatens to exacerbate this most heinous brand of discrimination. Anti-Chinese sentiment, after the emergence of Covid-19 and with growing US–China tensions, has likewise been amplified.

But the renewed focus on the Middle East’s conflicts, the outrage at Hamas’s attacks and concerns about Israel’s response and Gaza’s desperate humanitarian situation once again threaten to draw the public into simplistic and cynical analyses of the region and its people, driving exclusion, extremism and social tension here.

Social cohesion demands that each individual is held to account for their actions and judged by the content of their character, not for their ethnicity or faith.

To protect Australia’s social fabric, public figures, media organisations, think tanks and every Australian should heed the words of Mike Burgess. In a world suffering the pangs of ethnic and religious conflict in so many places, Australia offers a model, albeit with room for improvement, of a community capable of security, cohesion and prosperity. Ambitious as it is, we must aim to export these ideals of plurality and harmony, not import the divisions that have left so many corners of the globe bloodstained and divided.

Recognition among Western governments of the scale of death and dispossession in Gaza has been widely accompanied by references to the need to return to a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

It’s a comforting sentiment. It was the default political answer in the United Nations to an intractable problem in the late 1940s. From the 1970s, it set an ambitious and positive framework for discussion of Middle East policy in Western capitals and, eventually, in the Arab world.

But it has no connection to contemporary realities. At best, the idea of two states has become, once again, an idea long ahead of its time.

A succession of Israeli prime ministers from the right has sought consistently to ensure that no Palestinian state would eventuate in what they call Judea and Samaria. Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s ideal of a metaphorical ‘iron wall’ to crush Palestinian irredentism has long been their guiding principle.

The idea of a Palestinian state being created alongside Israel always ran counter to the Likud vision of Israel extending from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. (Indeed, a song popular among Likud supporters used to go further: harking back to Churchill’s creation in the 1920s of the Hashemite state east of the river, at the expense of Zionist wishes, it said: ‘The Jordan has two banks, and both of them are ours.’)

Even the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was intended to freeze the peace process in place.

Twenty years ago, support on the Israeli left for a two-state approach collapsed, gutted by terrorist violence from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Palestinian National Authority (PA) president Yasser Arafat’s failure to exercise the leadership required to quell immediately the outbreak of the second intifada in late 2000.

Coming in the aftermath of the failure of the Camp David negotiations in mid-2000, the bloodshed among Israelis that followed the return to large-scale violence traumatised Israel. Hamas, Iran and Iranian proxies, Saddam Hussein and Islamist terrorists across the Arab and Islamic world rejoiced and postured in it.

At the same time, nationalist and hardline religious parties associated with the Jewish settler movement, enjoying significant financial support from elements of the Jewish diaspora and an absence of countervailing political pressure, and dedicated to achieving perpetual Israeli rule over the West Bank, flourished.

Israel was content, unwisely, to stand by as Hamas took full advantage of the steadily diminishing political strength of its secular rival. It said it had no partner for peace, as Hamas entrenched itself in Gaza and the PA, sclerotic, authoritarian, self-indulgent and limited in its capacity to respond to settler pressure, lost its popular appeal.

The horrific violence of the despicable Hamas attack on 7 October has taken that political trajectory in Israel to a new level. Irrespective of whether Benjamin Netanyahu survives in power in the aftermath of Gaza, voices arguing for Palestinian self-determination will be marginal to the mainstream of Israeli politics for a generation, at least.

On the Palestinian side, long before 7 October it was evident the paradigm of Palestinian politics had shifted. Support for a two-state approach has collapsed.

Fatah, self-indulgent, corrupt and unwilling to do the hard yards of election campaigning, lost to Hamas in Gaza in 2006. It was crushed by Hamas when it attempted a coup in 2007.

Meanwhile, Israeli intransigence; settler violence in the West Bank; the loss of political authority on the part of Mahmoud Abbas; the contempt of Palestinians for the role played by the PA in meeting Israel’s security demands and destructive military and settler incursions; US promotion of normalisation between Israel and Persian Gulf Arab states, without addressing the Palestinian issue as an essential part of that process; and the emergence of West Bank urban militant groups defying the PA all combined to deadly effect.

Hamas maintained its staunch opposition to a two-state solution, although for external consumption its political wing in Qatar clouded its stance in ambiguities. It presented itself, however improbably, to a generation of Palestinians who had grown up under occupation as a viable, authentic Palestinian alternative to the struggling PA.

It promoted calls for the return of refugees from Gaza that pointlessly sacrificed young Palestinian lives. It carried its posturing to the point of inserting itself, through indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel, into the struggle for the future of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. It mocked the PA for its adherence to the formal obligations into which the Palestine Liberation Organization entered with Israel, seeking a negotiated settlement.

Its mainstay was, and remains, its role as a symbol of and force for resistance to occupation.

We now face the reality that without an Israeli commitment to—and realistic political prospect of—ending the occupation, and without a determined Israeli effort to address those crucial issues behind the PA’s demise, there will be no credible Palestinian partner to engage in negotiations to arrive at a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Outsiders cannot create a negotiation in a political vacuum, even in the realm of track 2 diplomacy.

A factor further sealing the two-state solution’s demise is the shift in Israel’s strategic approach, since 7 October, from deterrence and measures to regulate the conflict. Previously, Israel was content to ‘mow the grass’ and perhaps to deepen divisions between Hamas and its Fatah rival. Now it is seeking regime change.

Where regime change has been tried elsewhere in the Arab world (Suez in 1956; Lebanon, 1982; Iraq, 2003; Syria, 2011–2015) it has failed abysmally, not least because of an absence of clear and realistic political objectives and credible strategies for bringing them to fruition.

Slogans aside, Israel has yet to articulate either its political objectives in Gaza or its intended means to achieve them. Instead, it has been left to the United States to begin formulating ideas for an approach to follow the military campaign.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and some prominent voices in the US think tank community have spoken of the desirability of an ‘effective and revitalised’ PA resuming control of Gaza—without identifying why the PA has reached its current nadir of political and moral authority among Palestinians.

The reasons for that decline are inextricably connected to the Israeli occupation and the PA’s failure to protect the security and dignity of Palestinians under Israeli control.

Those factors won’t change unless there’s a wholly unexpected shift in the direction of Israeli politics. Instead, it’s questionable whether the PA will survive its own loss of credibility if Israeli pressures on Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continue unchecked.

Blinken has also referred to the possibility of ‘other temporary arrangements that may involve a number of other countries in the region’ and ‘international agencies that would help provide for security and governance’.

The notion that such arrangements would be temporary defies regional experience. The UN has been in southern Lebanon for four decades.

More importantly, though, it is based on a problematic assumption that a reluctant Egypt, or some other Arab country, could be induced to become, in effect, the security force in Gaza.

No doubt the Egyptians, if they could be pressured and persuaded to assume such a role, would  ruthlessly deal with Palestinian militants. They have crushed dissent and subversion at home, including in the Sinai.

But Egyptians across the board are deeply supportive of the Palestinians and hostile towards Israel. And the popular memory of Egypt’s disastrous military intervention in Yemen in the 1960s still runs deep.

Moreover, Israeli officials have indicated that they expect to maintain the capacity to intervene militarily again in Gaza whenever they identify security risks.

Israel has maintained that approach in West Bank cities including Nablus and Jenin and other urban areas supposedly under PA control. Israel won’t rely on others to deal with those risks.

Once again, however, the conflict’s paradigm has changed.

It would be folly, now, in contemplating the possibility or desirability of creating an international security force, to underestimate the enduring impact on Palestinians, in Gaza and beyond, of the sheer magnitude of the deaths of children and other non-combatants, and the loss of homes for a significant proportion of the population.

It doesn’t matter to Palestinians that Israel insists it isn’t targeting civilians. It is not relevant to dying and injured Palestinians that Hamas, in its unwanted and unspeakably evil actions, caused the loss of their futures. They could not prevent what it did, even if they’d wanted to.

Palestinians are losing their children, their families, their homes and their dignity. They believe the US could prevent that from happening but has chosen not to. They see Western (and Arab) double standards where their lives are concerned.

Against that background, any Arab or other external force in Gaza that failed to resist further Israeli incursions with military force would be damned in Palestinian eyes, just as the PA in the West Bank has been deemed to be an accomplice of the Israeli occupation.

The Egyptian leadership is savvy enough to appreciate those risks. They are committed to the continuation of peace with Israel. And they would know that the costs of occupation, and the security and political challenges of suppressing popular frustration and demands for revenge, among not only Palestinians but much of Egyptian society as well, would, at some point, make an Egyptian occupation of Gaza unsustainable.

Aid will begin to flow from Western countries and the Gulf when the conflict winds down. In due course there will probably be some sort of UN and international coordination mechanism for reconstruction of housing and the restoration of education, health and medical services in Gaza.

Hamas and its militant counterparts will use that reconstruction effort to rebuild their capacity, drawing on support from around the Arab and Islamic world, and Iran.

The result of the current assault, and its most likely aftermath, will not, therefore, be a rejection of Hamas. Unless the occupation of Palestine ends, which is not in prospect, the aftermath will most probably be the emergence of Hamas Mark 2, more violent, more authoritarian and ideologically driven, and possibly more globally focused than before.

Hamas will not lose the will to fight. Nor will the Palestinian victims of its actions and the Israeli response insist, to any meaningful effect, upon an end to violence. As on the Israeli side of the equation since the horrors of 7 October, a fundamental line has been crossed.

Western rhetoric notwithstanding, there will be no two-state solution, nor much prospect of meaningful steps being taken towards achieving one. Instead, there will be recurring cycles of violence.

Israel will prevail in those conflicts with the Palestinians until, one day, it doesn’t. And when that day comes, even generations from now, the reckoning will be terrible.