Israel's apologists are trotting out familiar talking points about 'self-defense,' preparing the public for another attack. But the war on Gaza's Palestinians never ended.

Recent headlines have once again raised the specter of war in Gaza, where the United Nations this week warned that critical fuel supplies, including for hospitals, were nearly at zero. With cuts to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency already threatening basic services to Gaza's two million residents, talk of violent conflict has distracted from the humanitarian crisis—and given pundits new occasion to frame Israel's occupation of the 25-mile-long strip as "self-defense."

With Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu saying on Sunday that Israel "will do everything to defend itself," his apologists are already trotting out familiar talking points, all aimed at managing the fallout sure to follow from a new attack.

But this is an old story.

Consider that the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, wrote almost a full year ago that war in Gaza is as inevitable as "the change of seasons." It's hard to know what to do with such a pronouncement, especially when it employs such bucolic imagery to recall the industrial scale of destruction visited upon places like Shujaiya or Sha'af. But let's begin with the ambassador's conclusion.

It hinges, of course, on an all-too-familiar syllogism, one that goes something like this: Gaza is ruled by Hamas; Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel; Israel and its American backers, therefore, have no choice but to prepare for more war in Gaza. The only question, according to Shapiro, is how.

There are at least three problems with this line of argument.

The first and most obvious is that ambassadors, of all people, have no business presuming that conflict is inevitable (Shapiro, for example, might have offered another way of analyzing the problem, one that seeks to understand what actually happens between crises).

The second is that Israel's "self-defense" arguments omit any mention of the various, well-known diplomatic means by which another conflict could be avoided, including opening the Gaza seaport—an idea put forth by Israeli leaders themselves.

But the third problem with Shapiro's reasoning, if one can call it that, is easily the most vexing. For to judge by his a priori hypothesis, this Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, this Harvard graduate and fluent Arabic speaker, comes across sounding like a garden-variety fatalist, as if no mortal—least of all of the Ivy League—could overcome the preordained violence to which, we are to believe, Gaza and its two million people are somehow predisposed.

Another way of saying this is that Shapiro believes there are no rational Palestinian actors in Gaza. That they are all Palestinian makes of the entire geography a place to be surveilled at altitude and targeted at will. And if Hamas's recent conciliatory moves, like accepting the internationally recognized borders of Israel, make Shapiro's determination sound harsh, he hastens to add that familiar told-you-so about "Israel's full withdrawal" from Gaza in 2005. To this, he neglects to append the nuclear power's complete control over how—or, indeed, whether—a population four times more likely to live under the poverty line than not can aspire to more than Israeli-imposed caloric restrictions.

That humanitarian injustice, in the final analysis, is the real story in Gaza. And no amount of warmongering should distract us from its undoing.