Fratricide,
as the latest conflict between
Hamas
and Israel has proven once again,
only
benefits the one percent of
extremists
on both sides.
The
Palestinian people have never really figured
prominently in the calculations of U.S.
administrations. The Middle East is a locus of
power politics, and Palestinians have very
little power. Tragically, Arab states have all
too often treated Palestinians like pawns as
well. In Israel, as second-class citizens and
residents of occupied territory, Palestinians
hardly merit a place on the chessboard.
Sure,
the Palestinians have international law, the
United Nations, and a large swath of public
opinion on their side. That and $3 will get
you a latte.
The
latest outbreak of horrendous violence—the
slaughter of Israeli citizens by Hamas, the
slaughter of Palestinian citizens by Israeli
forces—has frequently been linked to the
specific suffering in the Gaza strip.
Nominally governed by the militants of Hamas,
Gaza has been rightly compared to an open-air
prison where Israel subjects the residents to
all the indignities of the incarcerated. The
environment is tightly controlled. There is
terrible overcrowding. Only a designated
number of Palestinians are allowed out on work
release. These intolerable conditions have
nurtured dreams of resistance: the more
intolerable the conditions, the more violent
the resistance.
But
there is another desperation at work here,
fueled by a fury at being sidelined by
geopolitics. Even as they lose more and more
land to Israeli settlers, Palestinians have
had to listen to promises that this agreement
or this pact or this set of negotiations will
accord them something approximating a state or
a secure homeland or some measure of dignity.
And it just hasn’t happened.
The
most recent deal, which would result
in Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic recognition
of Israel,
has also included some sops thrown at the
Palestinians. According to murderous Saudi
prince Mohammed bin Salman, the
deal would “reach
a place that will ease the life of the
Palestinians.”
Say
what?!
Forget
about an independent state, which had long
been the Saudi demand. This time around,
Riyadh would settle for some unspecified
version of prison reform: better meals, more
exercise in the yard outside, perhaps conjugal
visits. As if Palestinians don’t merit even an
asterisk in the agreement, Israeli President
Benjamin Netanyahu refused to enumerate even
these minor concessions.
Disrupting
this imminent deal seems to have been at least
one motivation for the attacks launched last
week. But if it’s true that Hamas had been
planning this assault for one or even two
years, then it’s necessary to look at the
other geopolitical conditions that have pushed
Palestinian militants to act and the Israeli
government, equally militant under Netanyahu’s
extremist reign, to wage war in return.
Arab-Israeli
Conflict
As
befits a country obsessed with power politics,
American presidents have long been focused on
the very sources of power in the Middle
East—namely, fossil fuels. Oil undergirded the
longstanding U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia,
a regressive, authoritarian state that has
nevertheless thumbed its nose at the United
States by funding anti-Western extremism
throughout the world. Securing access to oil
was one reason the United States invaded Iraq
in 2003 and unseated Saddam Hussein. If the
Middle East consisted of nothing but sand and
date palms, the United States would have
expended as much geopolitical capital there as
it has in Patagonia and Mauritania.
The
other locus of U.S. interest in the region has
been Israel. Over the years, Israel has been
the top recipient of U.S. military assistance.
In 2021, for instance, it received
$3.3 billion,
11 percent of the entire U.S. foreign
assistance budget. To make this alliance more
secure, successive U.S. administrations have
dreamed of ending the nearly 80-year-long
conflict between Arab countries and the
Zionist state. Beginning in the 1990s, the
road to that rapprochement ran through the
Occupied Territories. If the United States
could push the Israelis and Palestinians
toward a two-state solution, so the thinking
went, Arab-Israeli peace would follow.
Beginning
with the Trump administration, however, the
United States reversed the equation, focusing
more on negotiating agreements between Israel
and the Arab states that secondarily dealt
with Palestinians. Through the Abraham
Accords, the brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law
and foreign policy neophyte Jared Kushner, the
United States brokered a deal between Israel
and both the UAE and Bahrain. Then came
normalization between Morocco and Israel, at
the expense of U.S. recognition of Moroccan
claims to Western Sahara. In one of its last
acts, the Trump administration presided over
an agreement between Sudan and Israel, which
has so far stopped short of full
normalization.
Not
only has the Biden administration adopted the
Abraham Accords as part of its own foreign
policy in the Middle East, it has attempted to
build on them by pushing the normalization of
relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. If
it can make the bed for these strange
bedfellows, the United States can accomplish a
task started during the Obama administration:
refocusing U.S. attention away from the Middle
East and toward Asia in particular. Because of
its need for heavy crude, the United States
still imports some oil from the Persian Gulf—12
percent of total imports in 2022.
But beginning in 2019, America began to
produce more energy than it consumes.
No longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil and
having brought Israel in from the cold, the
United States is poised to downgrade the
Middle East in geopolitical importance.
Israel
and oil are not the only pull factors for the
United States in the Middle East. Since the
overthrow of the Shah in 1979, the United
States has also sought to contain Iran and its
partners, including Hezbollah and Hamas. The
progress made during the Obama administration
to secure a nuclear agreement with Tehran was
unraveled by Trump, which also led to the
discrediting of the political pragmatists in
Iran and their loss in the 2021 elections. A
sign of the erosion of U.S. influence in the
region could be measured recently when China
negotiated a détente between Iran and Saudi
Arabia.
Less
animosity between the leading Shia (Iran) and
Sunni (Saudi Arabia) countries in the region
should be good news for Palestinians. Despite
much rhetorical support, however, the major
states in the Middle East have largely failed
to stand up for the Palestinian cause,
beginning with Egypt’s involvement in the Camp
David Accords in 1979. “Seeking to maintain
good relations with the superpower, Arab
regimes allowed Washington—Israel’s main
supplier of weapons and military support—to
take control of peace efforts in the
region,” writes Imad
Harb of the Arab Center Washington DC. “This
left no space for Arab leaders to positively
impact decision-making regarding the
Palestinians. Slowly but surely, the rights of
the Palestinian people dropped down the
priority list of Arab governments which saw
the US as the main guarantor of their
political survival and narrow economic
interests.”
This
high-level abandonment of the Palestinians has
proven unpopular with folks on the street in
the Middle East, who have taken
a very dim view of
the Abraham Accords and their successors.
Demonstrations in support of Palestinians have
spread rapidly throughout
the region in
the wake of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and
preparations for a ground invasion. But if the
United States is unable to influence Israeli
policy—and several administrations indeed
attempted to push back on Israeli occupation
policy and its
treatment of Gaza—then these public protests
won’t have much impact either.
The
Russia Factor
Hamas
has counted on both Iranian and Russian
support over the years. Iran has provided
military support and,
through Hezbollah, training as well. Despite
much work by intelligence agencies, however,
no Iranian fingerprints have been found on the
latest attack by Hamas.
Russia,
meanwhile, adopted the Soviet foreign policy
of supporting the Palestinian cause. Although
some Russian weapons have ended up in the
hands of Hamas, it’s not
likely that
there has been a direct military relationship.
Indeed, Russia has tried hard to maintain good
relations with Israel, and it thinks of itself
as a potential arbiter of conflict in the
region.
At
the same time, the Hamas attacks fit
comfortably into the Kremlin narrative that
the tide is turning against Ukraine because
now the West’s attention is divided. As far as
Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned,
U.S. and European governments are experiencing
donor fatigue, which is accentuated by the new
demands for assistance from Israel.
But
the Biden administration is likely to use the
Hamas attacks to
bundle assistance to
Ukraine with support for Israel, making it
that much more difficult for Republican
lawmakers, who are currently hamstrung by
their inability to choose a House speaker, to
vote down the package.
Putin,
meanwhile, has placed calls to various leaders
in the region. The Kremlin has its own version
of the Abraham Accords: the Authoritarian
Accords. The Russian leader has good relations
with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s Ebrahim
Raisi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, not
to mention Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. If he
weren’t saddled with the conflict in Ukraine,
Putin might actually be able to bring everyone
to the table. But a leader’s convening power
is undercut when he has broken international
law by invading a neighboring country and
helped to drive up the global prices of food
and energy. In such an environment—Russia
down, United States on the way out—Israel acts
without meaningful constraints.
What’s
Next
The
situation in the region is indeed bleak. An
Israeli ground assault on Gaza will have
horrendous consequences—for Palestinians,
probably for Israel, and for the prospects of
regional peace. Israel will try to eliminate
Hamas, an entity it once helped
to create in
order to undercut the authority of the more
secular PLO. But Israel has never been able to
eradicate any of its adversaries in the past.
So, should it proceed with an invasion,
Israeli will face an occupation of Gaza as
difficult to maintain as Russia’s seizure of a
part of Ukraine.
It
might seem that any kind of rapprochement
between Israel and Palestine is off the table
for another generation. But some analysts
harbor hopes, however slender. According
to Steven Simon,
a former Obama national-security adviser, “The
U.S. should establish a small contact group of
important players, including Saudi Arabia, to
validate and sell a post-conflict plan. This
would entail the handoff of Gaza to the U.N.,
once the guns have cooled, pending the
invigoration of the Palestinian Authority and
commitment to Palestinian national rights.”
Perhaps, under cover of providing public
solidarity with Israel, Biden quietly pursued
such an option during his recent trip to the
region.
The
key point here, though, is “once the guns have
cooled.” The sooner the guns cool, the better.
That means an immediate ceasefire.
Israel
should learn the lessons of the past,
including the ones that the United States
learned after September 11. The invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq might have satisfied, in
whatever misguided fashion, an immediate
desire for revenge. But keeping the guns hot
ended up killing more than twice as many
Americans as died on that day in 2001. The
costs—in shattered lives, in outlays for the
military campaigns—continue to negatively
affect the United States. And those costs are
dwarfed by the impacts on the people of
Afghanistan and Iraq.
What
should Israel do instead? It’s certainly easy
to preach restraint from a distance. But
here’s the reality that Israel needs to face:
even if it somehow eliminates Hamas, it won’t
eliminate the conditions that brought Hamas to
power in Gaza. Israel has to grapple with the
reality of Palestinians. They can’t be wished
away.
The
dispossession of the Palestinians has
been
a non-stop tragedy—for the
dispossessed
obviously but also for the
occupiers,
who have known no real
security.
An independent Palestinian
state
at first might only externalize the
risks
that Israelis face. Over time,
though,
the two historically stateless
peoples,
who have both been used as
pawns
for centuries, can find common
cause
as neighboring states—like
Germany
and France after World War II
or Indonesia
and East Timor today.
Fratricide,
as the latest events have
proven
once again, only benefits the one
percent
of extremists on both sides.
