A Dangerous New World

Almost a decade ago, I sat on a heavy bag loaded with body armour and much else waiting for a bus to take me into Gaza City. Behind me loomed the towers, cement walls and fences of the Erez border crossing, the fortified barbican built by Israel as a main entry point to Gaza. To the south, smoke rose above the dense buildings in the fourth week of a war. Multiple ceasefires had failed to halt the fighting between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Well over a thousand Palestinians and dozens of Israelis had been killed. The battle would go on for another two weeks before coming to an uneasy end.

As I waited, I had ample time to study the structure looming over me. Like most fortifications, Erez served multiple functions. With other routes shut off, the gates and passageways controlled the movements of any of the 1.82 million people then living in Gaza into Israel, and so to the outside world. To cross needed Israeli permission. It also acted as a defence, stopping militants from Hamas, whose charter dedicates them to the total destruction of the Jewish state, entering. This, too, was the purpose of the billion-dollar fence built around Gaza.

Last weekend, this system failed in the most drastic possible way. Hamas militants blasted their way through the fence or flew over it in paragliders, having overwhelmed Erez and its systems with an attack deploying every weapon at their disposal. Thousands of rockets were sent into Israel to distract and divert. Once through the fence, the militants attacked more or less anything they could find. Some soldiers, but mainly civilians: a rave party where 260 were killed, a kibbutz where babies were cut in half by automatic gunfire and the elderly shot or stabbed in their beds, small towns where shoppers were hunted through the streets and grenades thrown into shelters.

I had visited some of these small towns and kibbutzim, surprised by their air of normality, the cafés and small homes with red-tile roofs and palm trees and also by the views of many of their inhabitants. Some were unbending in their nationalism and prejudice, but many were committed to finding a solution to the gruelling ongoing conflict.

The same was true in Gaza itself. In 1999, on my first visit, before the days when Hamas had taken power, I had found some equally steeped in bitter anger and hate, but also those committed to a different future. Any hopes have now been obliterated by decades of Israeli leaders’ intransigence and that of the extremists in power there. The combination has been deadly and destructive. Now, as Israel brings the full power of its military against the packed streets of Gaza, there is great fear, as there is just a few miles away in Israel.

The aims of terrorist tactics have always been multiple. There is the simple and obvious objective: to use violence or the threat of violence against civilians to cause sufficient suffering and fear to advance a specific political, religious, cultural or other agenda. There are other more specific objectives too: to reclaim leader­ship of a nationalist struggle, to outbid other extremist groups, to show that deterrence through force will not (always) work. But there is also often a more opaque goal: to shatter the order of a given world, to smash and destroy and so open the way to new and different if frequently darker futures.

Whether the assault launched by up to 1,500 or more Hamas militants into Israel from Gaza last weekend constitutes terror­ism is still being argued over by armchair strategists, activists, spokespeople and others. Many of the more prominent experts in the US, in India and elsewhere have already judged that it does. If the early stage of the attack on Israeli frontier facilities and the border fence could be described as strikes on military targets, then other elements of the invasion—the massacre of unarmed civil­ians in streets, homes, even at a rave—would certainly seem to meet the classic definition, whatever the broader context. The efforts made by Hamas to produce and disseminate images of the attack suggest that the purpose of the killings was not purely military but also propaganda: to terrorise the enemy, mobilise the sympathetic, and polarise the rest.

Others, particularly in the Middle East or the Global South, excluding India, have not used the adjective terrorist. A differ­ent vocabulary is deployed. The violence of the weekend that has prompted the Israeli violent response and siege of Gaza this week is called something else: a “militant assault”, an “extremist attack”, for example. The evolving vocabulary reflects different viewpoints and a familiar difference in perspectives.

One unanswered question is the intended effect of the op­eration launched by Hamas last weekend. An inevitable con­sequence was massive retaliation by Israel—led by the most rightwing government in its history. This, the Hamas leaders must have known. Every other round of violence between their organisation and Israel has led to massive destruction and loss of life in Gaza, even when the casualties amounted to only a tiny fraction of the 1,200 or more Israelis who died last weekend. Other consequences will now spiral out, bringing massive and disruptive change in the long-running conflict in Israel-Pales­tine, the region and across the world. New lines of conflict will harden, alliances will weaken, an increasingly polarised planet will become that much more divided. No one, whether in Delhi or Dallas, Accra or Aleppo, will be immune.

In the region, the immediate question is how far does this new conflict spread. Will Hezbollah, the Islamist militia and movement in Lebanon, escalate its current low-intensity strikes against Israel into a bigger attack and so create a whole new con­flict on Israel’s northern frontier? Most analysts believe it will exercise some restraint, but if its great enemy is bogged down in a gruelling, draining conflict in Gaza then the opportunity to move more aggressively may be too tempting to ignore. He­zbollah’s capabilities are much greater than those of Hamas, and the scrubby hills of southern Lebanon are no easier to fight through than the urban environment of Gaza. Likewise, is the occupied West Bank going to descend into violent conflict too? Attempting to fight three simultaneous and very different con­flicts would be very hard on Israeli security forces.

Whatever happens, every local ruler and regime in the region will have to make choices. One will be that which has faced Arab leaders for decades: How much are they prepared to sacrifice for the Palestinian cause? The longer the Is­raeli bombardment of Gaza with its mounting civilian casualties goes on, the greater the pressure from their subjects to provide an outlet to growing anger and frustration. One possible aim of ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’, as Hamas called the attack, was to make any further progress with the nascent normalisation of ties between Israel and parts of the Arab world impossible for the foreseeable future.

This is certainly what Iran, which is a major sponsor of Hamas, would like. Tehran has been very concerned by the possibility that Saudi Arabia, too, might be contemplat­ing an historic rapprochement with Israel. This would lead to the consolidation of an axis further isolating Iran, potentially empowering its arch-rival with a flood of sup­port, possibly a defence pact with the US and even assistance in developing a civilian nuclear programme. “Today, the situ­ation of the Zionist regime is not one that should motivate closeness to it; they shouldn’t make this mistake,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned last week. Nothing in the recent evolution of the clerical regime in Iran suggests any desire to compromise.

But so far no solid proof has emerged that the Iranians actu­ally orchestrated the Hamas attack, though they have motive and, to an extent, means. There is some circumstantial evidence, such as sudden and intense high-level meetings between Ira­nian officials and Hamas leaders in recent weeks, but little more for the moment. Anyway, Hamas may take money and techno­logical assistance from Iran but they don’t necessarily take or­ders too. Khamenei has said that while Iran supports Palestine, “Zionists” and others should not jump to the conclusion that it was behind the attacks and that any belief that ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ was not entirely the work of Palestinians would be a “miscalculation”.

The shockwaves will travel across the region nonetheless, with successive regimes seeking to ride them out with minimal disturbance and maximum gain. Egypt is holding elections in December and never likes trouble on its border, often stepping up as a mediator between the Israelis and Hamas. Such a role always casts the troubled country’s repressive and often incompetent rulers in Cairo in a better light. Syria still has its own very evident and very deep troubles, and so it is entirely in keeping with Bashar al-Assad’s cynical manipulation of every opportunity that his regime has exploited the world’s focus on Gaza to step up bomb­ing of the enclave in Idlib which remains a holdout against his authority. Action by Hezbollah could attract unwelcome atten­tion from Israel too, which is well aware of how close Damascus and its Lebanese ally/proxy are. Iraq has just about overcome the threat of the Islamic State (ISIS), now contained in an infinitely drawn-out and sometimes lethal struggle in a handful of scattered strongholds. A wave of Sunni Muslim anger across the region is therefore unhelpful, however close to Tehran many Iraqi political figures might be. Loud supportive rhetoric costs nothing though, so there will be much of this. In Turkey, a similar calculation is being made. The US is always a useful target for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who made broadly balanced comments about the crisis but also launched a verbal tirade against Washington’s decision to dispatch a flotilla of warships to the eastern Mediter­ranean, partly to dissuade regional powers from any attempt at physical intervention. “What is the US aircraft carrier doing in Israel? It will start to carry out serious massacres there by striking, destroying Gaza,” Erdogan told reporters.

For countries farther off, out of reach of the red hot shrapnel that the confrontation now underway will hurl across the region, there will be concerns that the emerging battlelines of new glob­al great-power competition will reflect some of that heat. India may well find itself sweating as it tries to manoeuvre between its various commitments and agendas.

The reactions of the main players here have already revealed how this new conflict will consolidate a bloc of powers in the Global South against the West. Once again—as in 1967, 1973, 1982 and at many other times—Israel is the issue on which the world divides. These lines to­day closely resemble those of an earlier era. When in 1976, Palestinian and German ex­tremists hijacked an Air France passenger jet and forced it to fly to Entebbe in Uganda, the West celebrated the audacious Israeli special forces’ raid that freed the hostages while the Soviet Union, its satellites, as well as many countries in Africa and elsewhere that had recently thrown off the yoke of colonial rule expressed outrage at the rescue operation’s violation of a nation’s sovereignty.

Now the same actors are lining up in a similar way. The axis established since the invasion of Ukraine is being consolidated. Israel has bent over backwards to maintain its relations with Moscow since the war be­gan despite the immense diplomatic cost but is now learning that any idea that this would win favours from Vladimir Putin was wildly misguided. Russia is now increasingly reliant on Iran for drones that it deploys in Ukraine to terrorise civilians there. Even be­fore this latest crisis, being friends with Iran and Israel was difficult. Today it is impossible. The choice for Putin appears a clear one.

China, too, is trying to balance conflicting pressures. One is the reactions and perspectives of those in the Global South that Beijing is seeking to rally to its new coalition. South Africa is a very good example. Senior officials of the African National Congress (ANC), in power there for almost 30 years after the end of the rac­ist repressive Apartheid regime, have not forgotten the support of Israel for their former oppressors. The ghosts of the Cold War haunt Pretoria too. So far, South African statements on the crisis called for a cessation of hostilities but made no mention of Israel’s losses: “The new conflagration has arisen from the continued illegal occupation of Palestine land, continued settlement expan­sion, desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque and Christian holy sites, and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people.”

China is drawn by the gravitational pull of its own arguments about fighting imperialism and its competition with the US. As Washington is a vocal defender of Israel, so Beijing inevitably has to position itself in opposition to such a stance. Existing lines of confrontation are thus hardened and consolidated.

Back in 2014, when I finally left Gaza after a ceasefire that actually held and drove out through the Erez check­point, there was no sense of finality. Everyone was well aware that none of the fundamental problems that had caused the conflict had been addressed and that there would be further attacks, further oppression and repression and further wars. My visits to the region subsequently did nothing to disprove this. The vicious cycle of violence was not broken—as succes­sive conflicts and the events of last weekend showed. Israel’s entire security doctrine has now been shattered. There has been no deterrence or prevention, and Jews have been killed in the country that is meant to be their ultimate refuge in numbers not seen since the Holocaust.

The worst-case scenario of what happens now is regional conflict on a very considerable scale. Some analysts are now predicting that if Hezbollah joins the fight against Israel, the leaders of the Jewish state will not attempt to fight a two-front war but will look to strike those they believe are directing the organisation and Hamas. This would mean an attack on Iran, which would trigger massive escalation with consequences as dreadful as they are unpredictable.

It is tempting to see this as exaggerated. Almost exactly 20 years ago, in 2003, as I waited in northern Iraq for the war there to start in earnest, many dismissed similar predictions of the col­lapse of Iraq, Syria and a global wave of jihadi-inspired terrorism if the US sought to oust Saddam Hussein through invasion. As the Israeli tanks line up outside Gaza and clashes continue with Hezbollah and the West Bank seethes and the world looks on nervously, this is worth remembering. Tough, unpredictable and dangerous times lie ahead.

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