Diplomatic low point How conflict has been tragically mishandled

George Mitchell, the great American advocate for the Northern Ireland peace agreement, described diplomacy as 700 days of failure and one day of success.

- Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

In Gaza, tragically, there have been 733 days of failure and none of success. Indeed, the destruction, the death toll and the spillover of the conflict into other countries is a shame on diplomacy and what remains of international law. Arguably, it is the profession’s lowest point since 1939.

Some will claim failure is inevitable since this conflict is now so embedded and impervious to compromise that it can be settled only at the barrel of a gun, in essence through the repression or erasure of one side.

Yet however entrenched the mutual hatreds, a consensus is building across the west that this conflict has been desperately mishandled, including by European leaders, who initially ceded responsibility to a US Democratic administration that romanticised modern Israel and misread how its government might react to the horror of 7 October - as well as how that would polarise the west.

Indeed, the mea culpas and self-justifications have been streaming out of Joe Biden’s former team. In her book on her doomed attempt to become president, Kamala Harris writes: “I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians. But he couldn’t do it: while he could passionately state ‘I am a Zionist’, his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”

She says Benjamin Netanyahu never repaid the loyalty Biden had shown because he wanted Donald Trump in the seat opposite him.

The Democrats misread the power dynamics. “We did not act like a superpower,” Andrew Miller, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, said recently. “Instead of beginning from the proposition that these were problems we could solve, we persuaded ourselves that there was little we could do to move our regional ally Israel.”