Decisive choices

Both sides to the Gaza conflict knew precisely what they wanted when the guns fell silent.

After weeks of hard and painful warfare, Hamas wants nothing less, and rightly so, than lifting the siege on Gaza Strip, while Israel wants it demilitarised.

How to bridge these positions must be left to the brokers of peace between the two sides.

The Gaza government, led by Hamas, saw its image skyrocket during the war.

In the battle for world opinion, Hamas won a decisive victory after major TV networks carried images of Palestinian children and women dead and mutilated in the ruins of buildings levelled to the ground by Israel’s aerial, sea and heavy guns bombardments.

More than 1,800 Palestinians were killed, most of them children and women.

While the Israeli casualties were small in comparison to the Palestinians, it sustained a big damage to its reputation and track record as having won every war with the neighbouring Arab countries and having an omnipotent army that cannot be vanquished.

Victorious Hamas, however, may have to make a choice between seeing to its own business or looking beyond its boundaries to shoulder responsibility in solving the Palestinian crisis.

Gaza cannot appear as having abandoned the West Bank and the struggle to liberate Palestinians from the Israeli cage.

Once Gaza is truly liberated from the suffocating and humiliating Israeli siege and blockade, and is given a breathing space to develop politically, economically and socially, it may have to make a choice between repeating the spectacular economic successes of Monte Carlo and Singapore, and becoming the marvel of the Mediterranean Sea, or remain on the war path until the Palestinian conflict is settled in a just and fair manner.

True Gaza Strip is tiny. It measures only 130 square miles and has a population of 1.8 million, but its hardened people could, within a reasonable time frame, duplicate the Monte Carlo and Singapore models.

Monte Carlo is even smaller in size, but is among the richest countries in the world. Singapore is also among the most successful emerging economies in the world.

Forsaking the West Bank and the Palestinians living there is not an option for Hamas.

That is why the sooner the two-state solution resurfaces and acquires traction the sooner would Gaza, under the rule of Hamas, be tempted to follow in the footsteps of Monte Carlo or Singapore.