It might not look like victory. Dozens of dead children among nearly 100 civilians killed. Hundreds more injured, some condemned to a life of struggle by terrible wounds. Houses flattened. Bridges, offices and stadiums blown to bits.
But as life returns to what passes for normality on the streets of Gaza – once again clogged with people and traffic even as the Israeli drones continue to buzz overhead – many Palestinians regard the ceasefire that put an end to more than a week of incessant bombing and shelling as an Israeli surrender.
The victor, they say, is Hamas, which faced down Israeli aggression and has emerged from years of diplomatic isolation to be embraced, if tentatively, by the leaders of a new Arab world. The lesson learned is that standing up to Israel delivers results that years of concessions under US peace plans and drawn-out negotiations have not.
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It was no coincidence that the first stream of regional political heavyweights to visit Gaza in more than a decade was led by the Egyptian prime minister and the Tunisian and Turkish foreign ministers. Scenes of the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, shedding tears in a Gaza City hospital over dead children, and saying he stood in "solidarity with the Palestinian nation's suffering", were read in Gaza as proof they were no longer alone.
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The past week has been a severe blow to Abbas's strategy to bring about a Palestinian state. He has renounced violence and committed to a negotiated peace with Israel. He has followed the obstacle course laid out by the US and Europeans, and supervised by Tony Blair, of "institution-building" and security co-operation with Israel, with the promise of a Palestinian state dangling at some undefined point in the future.
The result, as many Palestinians see it, is that Netanyahu has ignored and humiliated Abbas and continued Israel's expansionism with yet more Jewish settlement construction and measures to reaffirm Israeli control over all of Jerusalem and great chunks of the West Bank.
