By Sylvia Westall
(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Rockets rain on Israel; Gaza is
bombarded. Anger erupts on Middle Eastern streets, and there’s
squirming in the Gulf Arab capitals.
The Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel—which killed more than a
thousand Israelis, with some 200 more snatched as hostages—has
already upended the region. Israel has responded by pummeling
the impoverished Gaza Strip, killing thousands of Palestinians,
while Hezbollah has attacked from Lebanon. Meanwhile the
promising diplomatic overtures between Israel and Saudi Arabia
are as good as frozen. What was supposed to be a “new” Middle
East—one that ended old enmities between Israel and the Arab
world in the pursuit of stability—is now looking like something
else that’s horribly familiar. And things may only get worse,
perhaps much more so.
“This is just the beginning,” Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised speech on Oct. 13 as
300,000 Israeli troops mobilized in preparation for a ground
attack on the Gaza Strip. “Our enemies have only begun to pay
the price.” In the week following the worst single-day attack in
its history, Israel formed a rare emergency government and
launched an all-out war on Hamas, an Islamist group the US and
European Union have designated a terrorist organization that’s
never recognized any legitimacy to Israel and never will. While
the recent atrocities come after years of neglect to the
Palestinian issue, they ultimately spring from an enduring cult
of violence and death that, no matter what else is happening,
has proven extremely hard to destroy.
The question everyone wanted to ignore—can there ever be
peace with the Palestinians?—again dominates Middle Eastern
geopolitics. Managing long-standing tensions with the
Palestinians had become a “sort of a check box” for normalizing
relations with the Saudis, Netanyahu told Bloomberg News in
August. The idea that millions of stateless people could just be
swept under the carpet is looking more arrogant than ever.
Israelis and Palestinians have entered an ugly phase
triggered by Hamas’ shock incursion. It also comes as a reminder
that such deeply rooted issues never really go away. For the US,
long keen to untangle itself from conflicts after years of war
in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s yet another foreign policy
quagmire ahead of elections. Other geopolitical confrontations,
in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, have left hundreds of thousands
dead, their countries in rubble and diplomacy stalled or
ignored. Now Israel must return to the fight again, the
consequences of which will be devastating—indeed, they already
are.
One of the worst assaults in Israel was on Kibbutz Be’eri,
a collective near the Gaza Strip. Vivian Silver, who’d
campaigned for peace with the Palestinians, was taken hostage
from her home. She’d been hiding in her closet, her son Yonatan
Ziegen said. He doesn’t know if she’s still alive but says she
wouldn’t want Gaza destroyed in revenge. “She would be
mortified, because you can’t cure killed babies with more dead
babies,” Ziegen told the UK’s Channel 4 News in a video
interview. “We need peace. That’s what she was working for all
her life.”
But the rhetorical lines, like the battle lines, have
already started to blur. “It is an entire nation out there that
is responsible,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at an Oct.
13 press conference, referring to the Palestinians in Gaza, a
tiny coastal enclave that’s been under Hamas rule since 2007.
“It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware,
not involved. … They could have fought against that evil regime
which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.” Just hours beforehand,
Israel had ordered the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to
evacuate south. Meanwhile, the United Nations warned of a
humanitarian disaster.
In support of Israel, the US has sent two battle fleets
into the Mediterranean and had Secretary of State Antony Blinken
crisscrossing the Middle East; now President Joe Biden is flying
in on Oct. 18 to temper Israel’s response and try to prevent a
wider conflict. Blinken even rang his Chinese counterpart, Wang
Yi, to urge Beijing to use its influence in the region to
prevent the crisis from escalating, a move widely viewed as an
attempt to restrain Iran. Israel has the right to defend itself
and ensure this never happens again, Blinken said during his
increasingly frantic tour, standing next to Netanyahu on Oct.
12. “How Israel does this matters.”
In Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, tens of thousands have
taken to the streets to protest Israel’s response, with smaller
demonstrations in Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Turkey and Yemen. Iran
has warned of a new front if the blockade of Gaza continues—an
escalation that could easily sweep the region into a conflict of
devastating proportions, engulf nearby US military bases and
jeopardize some of the world’s most important shipping routes.
The circumstances have become especially awkward for Saudi
Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been trying
to modernize a kingdom that’s long been sclerotic while cracking
down on dissent. He doesn’t want his multitrillion-dollar plans
derailed by a regional war. But in pursuit of ties with Israel
he, like everyone else, appeared to be sidelining the
Palestinians. Hence Saudi Arabia’s about-face, in which MBS
blamed Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and
Israeli provocations for “the exploding situation.” Saudis
defending Hamas’ actions online shared the statement widely.
“What is certain is that we are witnessing a situation
similar to post-September 11 in the United States,” Saudi
journalist Tariq Al-Homayed wrote in a column in the pan-Arab
daily Asharq Al-Awsat. “But this time, it’s in Israel, where the
strategic rule is madness, and where there is no place for the
voice of reason,” he wrote, warning against “changing the maps
and returning to ground zero.” If only such a conclusion didn’t
seem inevitable right now.
Read more: Wider War in Middle East Could Tip the World Economy
Into Recession
To contact the author of this story:
Sylvia Westall in Dubai at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Joel Weber at [email protected]
Cristina Lindblad
