If there’s a ‘peace deal’ to end the war in Gaza, it will boil down to one thing: changing the subject. For the Israeli bombings continue. Humanitarian aid remains inadequate. Foreign journalists are still barred from entering, unless they are embedded with the occupation forces. Reconstruction remains a figment of the imagination. Any form of justice – regarding civilian casualties, the atrocities carried out, the unjustifiable destruction – is equally illusory. The fundamental questions – who will govern Gaza, how will they do it and with what legitimacy? – have no satisfactory answers.

The agreement, celebrated by the United States, France and Arab states, contains none of the necessary ingredients for a viable peace. If normalisation happens, it will only be by shutting the door on the problem: let’s move on, because the negotiations are over and the violence has decreased a notch.

Bringing the curtain down like this is remarkably effective. Media outlets, the majority of whom covered this conflict only reluctantly, were eager to take a break from an issue that has caused them recurring discomfort, unmanageable tension and a frankly shameful need for self-censorship. Many of our governments are heaving a similar sigh of relief as they watch the attention that had to be given to the suffering of Gaza’s people fade, while the suffering itself goes on. By declaring the conflict over, they appear able to resolve a whole stack of thorny issues – presumptions of genocide, accusations of complicity, abuses of international law – by simply consigning them all to the past. The war that our governments wanted to treat as a parenthesis can finally be closed.

This arbitrary closure throws into disarray all those who, by contrast, saw this conflict itself as a pivotal moment – one of monstrous, uninhibited violence, heralding a world without faith or law, governed only by racist impulses backed by overpowering technology. But if everything ends (…)

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