A year later, the Hamas attack and the Israeli invasion of Gaza have taken West Asia to a wider, deeper and deadlier regional conflict with more actors.
“The war has changed the region in many ways. It ended the regional status quo where the Palestine question was pushed to a corner. World powers had given up on finding a solution to the Palestine question. Israel continued its violent military occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. The attack brought the Palestine issue to the fore of West Asia’s geopolitics. The violence that followed the Hamas attack emboldened the old argument that peace and stability could not be established in West Asia as long as the Palestine question remains unresolved.”
A year ago, this day (October 8) Hamas launched an unprecedented cross border attack in Israel from Gaza. At least 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage. Israel immediately launched a retaliatory war. A year later, the Hamas attack and the Israeli invasion of Gaza have taken West Asia to a wider, deeper and deadlier regional conflict with more actors. Before the Hamas attack, the region appeared to be on a different course. In 2020, four Arab countries reached normalization agreements with Israel. Saudi Arabia and Israel were in an advanced stage of normalizing ties. The U.S., which was brokering the Saudi-Israel talks, proposed an ambitious infrastructure project aimed at connecting India with Europe through the Persian Gulf, Jordan and Israel. This led to Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Adviser, saying that “the Middle East is quieter than it has been in decades”. But now, as I write in this oped in today’s (October 08, 2024) The Hindu, West Asia (Middle East) is deadlier than it has been for decades.
The war has changed the region in many ways. It ended the regional status quo where the Palestine question was pushed to a corner. World powers had given up on finding a solution to the Palestine question. Israel continued its violent military occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. The attack brought the Palestine issue to the fore of West Asia’s geopolitics. The violence that followed the Hamas attack emboldened the old argument that peace and stability could not be established in West Asia as long as the Palestine question remains unresolved.
The war has also put a brake on the Israel-Arab normalization process. If Saudi Arabia was in an advanced stage of normalizing ties with Israel in September 2023, today, the Kingdom says normalization is not possible without a clear path towards the creation of a Palestinian state “based on the 1967 border and East Jerusalem as its capital”. This doesn’t mean that Arab-Israeli ties would move to enmity. Arab countries have voiced concerns and criticisms about Israel’s war on Gaza, but have stopped short of taking any hard policy decisions that would antagonize Israel. For example, all Arab-Israel peace agreements, except the normalization deal with Sudan, a country which is at war with itself, are still standing. But there are impediments in taking the relationship to the next level or formalizing ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, given the anger towards Israel on the Arab street.
While Hamas re-regionalized the Palestine issue and scuttled the Saudi-Israeli normalization, it had to pay a heavy price for its murderous attack in Israel. The retaliatory war Israel launched on Gaza has turned the enclave, sandwiched between the Mediterranean Sea and Israel proper, more or less uninhabitable. Israeli troops have killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in 12 months, a vast majority of them women and children. Nearly 100,000 Palestinians were wounded, while almost the entire population of Gaza (2.3 million) have been displaced. Israel has also stepped up its attacks in the West Bank. It carried out multiple raids in Jenin and launched an airstrike in Tulkaram. Global calls for a ceasefire were ignored. Palestinians see no end to the war and continue to pay a heavy price.
But the war also exposed the security vulnerabilities of the state of Israel, despite the aggressive face it is putting up in the region. The Hamas attack itself was a huge intelligence and security failure. Israel was caught off guard when Hamas militants strode into the border and started attacking communes and security sites. And when Israel went into Gaza, it said it wanted to destroy Hamas and secure the release of the hostages. Gaza laid to siege by Israeli troops, which controls even the flow of food aid trucks into the enclave. But a year later, Israel is yet to defeat Hamas, let alone destroying it. More than 100 hostages are still in Hamas’s captivity. The war on Gaza led to Hezbollah opening “a support front”, firing rockets into northern Israel, “in solidarity with the Palestinians”. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran. Israel took the war to Iran by bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Iran retaliated with ballistic and cruise missiles.
Today, Israel is fighting a multi-front war. It continues to fight in Gaza where Hamas is resurfacing in areas which Israel once said were cleared of the militants. In Lebanon, it dramatically escalated the war on Hezbollah, by killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and launching an invasion—its fourth invasion of the country. And Israel is preparing to hit Iran in retaliation for the October 1 Iranian ballistic missiles attack on Israel. West Asia is at an inflection point. Israel is fighting a multi-layered conflict. It is yet to win the war in Gaza. It has launched an invasion of Lebanon. And a regional crisis is unfolding with Iran. What Israel is trying to do is to establish escalation dominance, like it did in 1967, and neutralize its enemies using great fire power. However, unlike in 1967, Israel’s enemies include a host of non-state actors. It is to be seen whether Israel’s scorched earth tactics and its escalation strategy would provide the Jewish country the long-term security it seeks or trap it in a conflict loop.
(Stanley Johny is opinion writer with The Hindu. Source: The Hindu)