Gaza and israel: will the killing ever end? | thearticle

Like rolling thunder, the rage driving Israel to annihilate Hamas for its slaughter of civilians on October 7 is deafening. It leaves little to the imagination. Smashing Hamas in retribution

for its crimes is accompanied by a slaying of the innocents in Gaza. In this miniscule, arid strip of land men, women and children have died and are still dying in their thousands in a

mercilessly short period of time. In the latest ordeal, Israel has demanded that a major hospital is evacuated because it sits above a Hamas command centre. The UN has warned that civil

order is starting to break down as desperate civilians run out of food and water. The world meanwhile joins in — at a safe distance — mostly with words of little consequence. In some cases

squabbling over the obvious: humanitarian pause or ceasefire? Does Israel have a right to defend itself? Should Palestinians have a country of their own? But nobody is listening. Not Israel

and certainly not Hamas. Not now. Not yet. Israel is temporarily united in its pain and its grief. It wishes to see Hamas obliterated as a military force. The fact that many, perhaps most,

Palestinians in Gaza see Hamas as an obstacle to a better future and do not align with its Islamist ideology of destroying the Jewish state, is by the by. How much of Hamas survives the

pounding and the Israeli Defence Force’s search and destroy mission is moot. Out of the rubble a new generation of fundamentalists will inevitably rise. Palestine, like Israel, is an idea

that will not die. But Hamas won’t care because it has, in a sense, already scored a victory, shocking as this may sound. We do not know what its war aims are beyond inflicting the greatest

possible suffering on Israeli civilians. But we can gauge their effect. Behind the cruelty there is a strategy, no doubt emboldened by the theocrats in Iran. The assumption that the

Palestinian issue has been settled – the central case of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Arab policy – is demolished. More deals between Israel and the Arab world (notably Saudi Arabia) are stillborn,

much to Tehran’s relief. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators flood the streets of London, Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul. The wound is gaping again. It is tempting to argue that October 7, like 9/11,

has changed everything. That Hamas in 2023, like Al Qaeda in 2001, has set in train a chain of events that will lead to a wider regional conflict in Lebanon and the West Bank, perhaps

sucking in the United States, Iran and other powers. Just as 9/11 lit the fuse that eventually led to the Arab Spring and the disintegration of much of the Middle East, the terror of October

7 will drag the region into a similar upheaval in its slipstream. Let us examine this proposition because what happens next depends on how likely such a scenario is. For sure, a Hamas-run

Gaza and Israel cannot co-exist. That much is now painfully clear. Hamas is a spin-off from the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood and as such is primarily an Islamist, not a nationalist

movement. This is an important distinction. Palestinian statehood is a second-order priority. Its principal aim is the spread of Sharia-based Islam in which a Jewish state has no place. The

bigger fear is that Iran, which has been sabre-rattling since the start of Israel’s counter-offensive, will ignite a wider war. The argument goes something like this: Iran, fearing its sway

over the Shia world will weaken, pushes Hezbollah to open a second front against Israel from southern Lebanon. This then leads to a deepening humanitarian crisis in which the US (and

possibly Britain and the EU) are forced to intervene. The US has already moved a carrier force into the Mediterranean. Iran retaliates by blocking the straits of Hormuz, the jugular of

global oil supplies. It is not hard to write the next episodes in this apocalyptic script. Oil prices spike as they did in the wake of the 1973 October war between Israel, Egypt and Syria.

The eye of the storm moves to the Gulf. Saudi Arabia, Iran’s principal, (Sunni) rival chooses (as it must) to side with the West. The balloon goes up. This is not a threat to be taken

lightly. But how likely is this or any other set of events that might flow from a widening of the war in Gaza? A second geo-political certainty in 2023 (as opposed to, say, 1973) is that the

US, while still the most powerful nation on earth, is no longer the global hegemon. Faced with a challenge from Russia in Ukraine to a rising China, it must manage what is a slow but

inevitable relative decline (emphasis on relative) to other powers. The world is no longer bipolar and certainly not unipolar, as we were led to believe after the collapse of the Soviet

Union in 1989. Populous and/or economically important countries especially in the global South (Brazil, India, Iran, Nigeria) are being much choosier in who they align themselves with. The

split vote in the UN General Assembly over whether to call for a ceasefire in the Gaza war was a good illustration. Joe Biden, the US president, has thrown his weight unequivocally behind

Israel, while calling for a two-state solution. He cautioned against the kind of reaction after 9/11 when the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq triggered a collapse of what was, if not a

desirable, at least a stable world order. In the immediate aftermath of the atrocities committed by Hamas, the American public is four-square behind the US commitment to Israel. But if the

war against Hamas lasts, as Netanyahu has warned, “a long time”, or if it widens, will that same public stay firm, while also supporting a hugely expensive war in Ukraine? There must also be

a question, surely, of how far Iran is willing to go to project its influence in the Middle East maelstrom. The leadership is under pressure at home from a restive populace and its economy

is on its knees following the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal. Iran has more than $100bn in frozen assets outside the country. The Biden administration is reconsidering its thaw with

Tehran and may increase its sanctions on the country’s oil and gas exports. Iran’s religious leaders may be zealots. But they are also pragmatists. Vladimir Putin will continue to stir the

waters. China will do whatever serves its interest. And some people – terrorists in particular and anarchists before them – just enjoy chaos because they profit from it. The killing of

innocent Israeli civilians and the war on Hamas are biblical in their ferocity. Israel will not stop until it thinks it has done all it can to subdue Hamas, even if “destroying” it is

unachievable. When the killing stops, as it must, and when (as is almost certain) Israel replaces a government that has led it up a blind alley, there will be time to pick up the faltering

dialogue between Arab and Jew. There is no alternative. Otherwise fanaticism wins. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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