WAR is hell, as the saying goes, and it is suddenly thrown into sharp focus as the latest war erupts between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas.
Hamas unleashed a surprise border incursion into Israel this week of such unprecedented ferocity and killed over a thousand Israelis so far that a massive Israeli response had become inevitable.
Airstrikes alone have already resulted in heavy Palestinian casualties, also numbering in the thousands. The death toll on both sides will only mount as an imminent Israeli ground offensive gets underway. Both sides appear determined to avenge animosities that have steadily built up over decades.
It seems completely futile at this stage to apportion blame to any of the protagonists. It is also largely meaningless to innocent civilians on both sides to do so.
Gaza is effectively under a complete blockade as water, power and other essential supplies are cut off and borders sealed or otherwise under threat of bombings as to make any evacuation of its civilians next to impossible.
It is also mostly meaningless to talk now about a siege of Gaza – that has been its state (and the lot of its two million people) ever since Hamas gained political control there, just a matter of degree.
The sense of hopelessness this has engendered must only induce a harmful collective psyche that few aside from the Palestinians themselves can identify with: helplessness that a loss of basic human dignity inflicts.
Imagine being forced each day to cross the border into Israel, enduring countless indignities by Israeli border guards, for gainful employment that is largely absent in the Palestinian territories but grudgingly handed out of Israeli goodwill that may be withdrawn at the slightest sign of tension or trouble.
Why has the so-called Israel-Palestine conflict reached such a sorry and blood-splattered deadend? Will the latest war change anything, as some analysts predict it just might?
Can it even be changed for the better if a final settlement appears to be further and further beyond anybody's grasp?
The current right-wing Israeli government had thought it to be a good Palestine policy to keep the territories politically divided and their populations sufficiently cowed with minimal economic lifelines as it expands Jewish settlements further and further into the occupied territories.
Such are Palestinian frustrations about the realisation of a two-state political solution that sections of the populace are ready to countenance living as citizens of a single Israeli state.
But, of course, Israel will not realistically countenance this any more than it accepts a viable Palestinian state.
Hamas is making good and real the threat that Israel will enjoy neither peace nor security for as long as Palestine festers in its utter misery.
Are Israelis prepared to live forever under the cover of elevated security precautions which will be breached once a while as they are now?
And, if Israel today seems politically unable to come to grips with what it takes to end the Palestinian wound along its borders, are its Western backers – principally the United States – in any better political state to help midwife a final and durable Israel-Palestine settlement?
A Washington that is just as divided politically today as Israel is can seem to be united only on two broad strategic issues: unconditionally pro-Israel and almost reflexively anti-China.
On both, as it does on Ukraine as well, the West is increasingly risking alienating much of the rest of the world.
If the West is having so much trouble trying to convince the rest of the world on a fairly clear-cut case of a breach of Ukraine's sovereignty by Russia, it cannot reasonably expect that others will easily swallow the narrative that Hamas is nothing but a bunch of terrorists rather than the determined and even heroic freedom fighters that Palestinians almost instinctively identify with.
The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching
