WHEN the blinded biblical hero Samson pulled down the temple on his own head, killing his enemies and tormentors, he became the first person to resort to suicide to eliminate his foes in recorded history. Israel has based its nuclear strategy on this example from its past: should its neighbours ever threaten to invade and destroy the country, its nuclear arsenal would be unleashed as a weapon of last resort.

Known as the Samson Option, this strategy is no secret to Arab leaders. Conceived in the Fifties when Israel first began working on its nuclear programme with covert French assistance, this approach is now redundant as no Arab state is remotely capable of threatening the existence of the Jewish state.

Indeed, it can be argued that Hamas is using its own version of the Samson Option to achieve its limited goal of lifting the Israeli and Egyptian siege. By firing rockets towards Israeli towns, it has ensured that massive Israeli retaliation would cause hundreds of civilian deaths in Gaza. Hamas has thus gambled with Palestinian lives to try and break the deadlock that had turned the tiny sliver of land into a prison.

While Israel has exploited Hamas’s refusal to accept an Egyptian proposal for a ceasefire to highlight the organisation’s callousness, a return to the status quo would be unacceptable. If, after all these needless deaths, Gaza is to revert to its isolation under the Israeli blockade, what was the point of sending rockets into Israel in the first place? So clearly, Hamas needs some face-saving concession to show its people that the hundreds of civilian deaths were not in vain.

But Israel is in no mood to throw its hated enemy a lifeline. Despite the global outcry against the slaughter, its staunch patron, the United States, is solidly behind its ally. Both American and Israeli politicians repeat the mantra that any country would defend itself from missile attacks from a neighbour.

However, the point they miss is that not many countries occupy and besiege land that belongs to somebody else. Pressure cookers are fitted with safety valves so that if pressure mounts beyond a certain point, the utensil does not explode because steam has an outlet. Legal border crossings and clandestine tunnels had earlier acted as this safety valve, but since General Sissi’s coup last year, the Egyptians have shut down the tunnels as well as the crucial Rafah crossing. While this has been done at Israel’s behest, it also reflects Sissi’s hatred for Hamas and its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Thus far, most of the outrage over Israel’s savage air, sea and land assault has been in the West. Most Muslim states have sat back while Palestinians are being killed in large numbers. Ecuador and Brazil have withdrawn their ambassadors from Israel, while TV channels from London to Lisbon have shown disturbing images of hospitals, schools and mosques being bombed. But so far, apart from a handful of soldiers killed and the Ben Gurion airport shut for a couple of days, the cost to Israel has been minimal.

But while Israel is on track to win this battle — as it has all past conflicts with Palestinians and Arabs — the war goes on. For the last couple of days, Channel 4’s popular news anchor, Jon Snow, has been broadcasting from Gaza, showing powerful images of the devastation. The anger in mainstream Britain is palpable, not just at the Israelis, but at their own government for not reacting more strongly to these atrocities.

Clearly, though, Hamas is not blameless. Deprived of the income it earned by taxing legally and illegally imported goods, and increasingly friendless after Morsi was toppled, Hamas tried to improve its fortunes by forming a coalition with Fatah. However, this did nothing to improve the daily lives of Gazans, and hence the recourse to the Samson Option.

But the people of Gaza were not consulted when Hamas decided to launch its rocket attacks. Given the area’s size and population density, high civilian casualties were only to be expected when the Israelis retaliated in their entirely predictable fashion. All this while, Hamas leaders have either been abroad, or safe in deep underground bunkers.

Even if a ceasefire is agreed, it is only a matter of time before there’s another explosion and fighting breaks out again.

One thing that’s different this time from Israel’s last assault on Gaza in 2012 is that Hamas has become a better fighting force. IDF officers have admitted to meeting a better-armed and more highly trained foe. But the stated aim of destroying the tunnels leading into Israel is surely a sticking plaster as more will be dug as soon as the army pulls out.

Even Netanyahu, Israel’s right-wing prime minister, will one day have to see that it is his country’s policy of occupation, siege and colonisation that is the root cause of the repeated explosions of violence in both Gaza and the West Bank. The current round only serves to radicalise the younger generation and legitimise extremist factions.

Thus far, Israeli policy, supported by the United States, is aimed at using overwhelming violence whenever it faces resistance. But after 47 years of occupation and the recurring cycle of violence and repression, surely policymakers in Washington, if not in Tel Aviv, will see that there must be a better way.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2014