Tensions rise in the Levant

An attack in Israel has spurred tensions that could spark a war between Israel, Iran ind its proxies and even more regional powers. USA has lost its clout in the Middle East. A tentative analysis.

The dynamic of suppression

It is not always possible to keep a whole people down over a longer period since prolonged sense of oppression have a propensity to change incentive structures. Suppression relies on deterrence, and deterrence relies on the escalation of measures, ultimately actual killing to be effective. But if the calculus for the object of suppression becomes: ‘I would rather be dead than degraded,’ one can see reactions like when Mohammad Bouazizi

set himself on fire in Tunisia, the event that is said to have sparked uprisings across the Middle East in 2011. The moment Bouazizi set himself ablaze the region was already ripe and loaded with boiling frustrations due to demographics and the global distribution of norms: many young people dreamed of a different future than the one they could see coming for them. Of course, whether you experience oppression is not an objective category. Like its cousin, consent, it is a concrete evaluation hence subjective. For Bouazizi it was the lack of opportunities that made him cross the line and when he showed that death was his preference, regime deterrence was severely weakened, and a large scale uprising followed. The fact that many people in the region, especially in Egypt and Syria would now wish that the old days of relative suppression before the so-called Arab Spring was back, is another matter. The political dynamic remains in effect. Suppression short of extinction will eventually generate a reaction.

Israel and its issues

The state of Israel emerged in 1948. Like Pakistan and India, it came out of a waning British empire. From 1517 till it collapsed, the Ottoman empire ruled the whole of the Levant, but in the 1920ies The British empire stood with the mandate to control the territory named Palestine. It is still early days for the new political entities and much of the area is still under reconstruction. Israel is in fact one of the more stable entities there. But since the end of the cold war, Israel has seen various uprisings from its Palestinian population as well as internal divisions leading to difficulties of establishing government that can seek to ease tensions. The conflict in Israel spurs a lot of emotion. Easily people are pro or con and easily one get accused of seeking to legitimize the one side or the other. October 7th 2023 saw an attack by Hamas out of Gaza, a territory occupied by Israel, since 1967, that has given rise to Palestinians, a political identity formed in opposition to Israel on the grounds that Palestinians claim Israel has deported them from their land. The intra-state conflict in Israel has been going on since its inception and threatens to tear it apart. Calling it a war would already be inaccurate due to the status of Hamas operating as a non-state actor. It is a hornet’s nest for the analyst to stick one’s hand into. This comment summarizes the local, regional, and global level of analysis from a distance of three weeks from the attack, but, of course, as already indicated, the world did not start three weeks ago.

Locally

The polity of Israel is politically unstable due to a deteriorated oligarchy that has been unable to attend to the immediate concerns facing the polity. Polarization and elite fragmentation have led to paralysis of government like we see so many places around the world, for instance among Israels most prominent allies: USA, and U.K. What makes Israel even more vulnerable to political instability is internal divisions, ranking citizens differently due to the difficult circumstances of administrating occupied territories. These territories contain able elites with agendas opposing the very foundation of the Israeli state. In this perspective, the Palestinian Question is as old as the idea of the Israeli state and actors are at times seeking to legitimize their actions by referring all the way back to the Biblical account of ‘The battle of Jericho,’ the Hebrew name for a city that is supposed to have been around the site of one of the oldest settlements known to The History of Civilization, the Ein Es-Sultan spring (9000 BC); according to gospel the walls came tumbling down when the descendants of Moses arrived.

On Saturday the 6th of October 2023, on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, 50 years after the October war of 1973, the militant wing of the Palestinian organization Hamas conducted a commando raid into Southern Israel killing and kidnapping soldiers and civilians. Now the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is conducting a land offensive into the Gaza strip home to around 2 million people. Gaza is bordering Egypt to the south and Israel proper to the north and East; it is formally under the control of Hamas but materially on the mercy of the occupier. The Israeli government has already for weeks cut electricity and is enforcing a blockade while seeking to uphold order on the occupied West Bank, another occupied territory with prominent cities like Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jericho, and home to around 2,8 million people, a quarter of them Israeli settlers, creating tensions and international condemnation. The repercussions of these events are prone to have severe ramifications both locally, regionally, and globally for years to come.

Regionally

The Middle East, stretching from what was known as Libya in the West to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the East, is known as a region of fragile states and intense conflict. There are no major regional powers although Turkey and Israel display substantive military might. Other minor regional powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt also display substantive might. Qatar is known to be a supporter of the Palestinian cause. Recently, the region has been traversed by the collapse of Iraq and the subsequent rise of Kurds and Islamic State in the Levant at some point spreading hundreds of kilometers into Syria and Iraq. Now the vacuum left by the implosion of ISIL is being filled by Ankara, Damascus, Bagdad, Tehran, and USA. Turkey, heavily invested in the Kurdish question but with a clear edge to Israel, supports the Palestinians. Iran are naturally on the side of anyone opposing USA and Israel, and Hamas would of course like to gain operational support from Iran through its proxy Hezbollah, a Shiite militia controlling the south of Lebanon on the border to Israel equipped with large amount of missiles of unknown range and quality directed towards deterring Israel and the USA from bombing their positions behind the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, a disputed area dividing Israel and Syria, who are formally still at war. Saudi Arabia has strengthened ties with Israel, but perhaps this building of ties between former rivals will have to be put on the back burner for a while to come

Recently, tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have been better, but in general mistrust and historically bad relations between countries prevail all over this region, making diplomacy extremely hard and complex. An escalation into a regional level of conflict involving Iran and Hezbollah is likely, but at the moment forces appears to be kept at bay. Iran lack a nuclear deterrent to balance Israel, but Iran is nevertheless accused of having somehow aided the attack by Hamas who themselves seems to try to incriminate Tehran, perhaps with the aim of dragging Teheran directly into the conflict. Iran is known to be supporter of Islamic Jihad a transregional group seen as a rival to Hamas in Gaza. Interesting how jihad (to strive) in its fourth potency (Holy war) seem to transcend the Shia/Sunni divide. The attack on Saturday 7th of October did display a hitherto unseen precision on the side of Hamas that recalls actors like Al Qaeda and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency who is legendary in its ways, but something seems to have gotten wrong somewhere in the top of Israeli government this time; quite a few in Hamas must have known about the operation and Mossad was not aware? Of course Hamas has had support from the outside in terms of weapons purchase and training, but operationally, Hamas seems to have been able to conduct the attack on October 7th, 2023, without hinderance and seemingly without regional coordination that could have endangered the mission.

Globally

Israel is an important bridgehead in the global power distribution of the superpower, who have already deployed warships to the Israeli coast in support of Tel Aviv. The heap of issues piling up in The Oval Office is becoming monumental, with the president heading into the election campaign where foreign policy may be a sideshow, but the ability of the commander in chief of the USA to keep the hands on the wheel does matter to voters. If Biden and his team loses the election, then things could take a different turn regarding the conflicts where the superpower is currently invested, but although the support for Israel will most likely continue, it is no longer given. Now, the situation is tense and despite U.K. and Germany, only outright US vassals has really voiced on which side of this conflict they will come down this time. At the moment there was obviously an effort to engage the network of BRICS+ to scan for a solution.

There are no powers that are currently able to seek a solution and USA is restricted to seek deterrence of Iran and its shia proxies in Lebanon (Hizbollah) and Yemen (Houthi) from intervening on the side of Hamas. Washington is not able to muster the authority as an honest broker anymore and must keep its tunge straight in the mouth, which has been a challenge for the current administration, also in its recent Middle Eastern endeavors. Where Saudi Arabia will land after this is very interesting to the astute observer, who sees the former US ally potentially slipping out of the hands of Washington. Anyway, Tel Aviv and Washington will most likely end up becoming immune to diplomacy with USA vetoing security council resolutions and IDF operating in the occupied territories. EU has been backing the Israeli military operation, but at some point, when casualty numbers keep rising, it will become unbearable for the European public to watch the consequences. Only Spain has voiced some descent vis a vis the official EU posture, while France must find its legs. If tensions drag out for many months, then the Asian powers will most likely seek a way to stay out of it; China does not benefit from a regional war at all. India is the potential outlier here, and could become a candidate for a peacekeeping mission. How individual European capitals will pose in the long run is still uncertain: will Paris be able to use this occasion to further distance itself from Washington? Does this conflict present a window of opportunity to maneuver in the field of foreign policy? Well, we will see. At least the Western media, that has already revealed its incompetence in informing the public on the war in Ukraine and now again seems to bandwagon with the perspective of outrage and emotion, gets to focus on something else than the war in Ukraine that has now turned south thus revealing that the whole narrative about that conflict was absurdly biased towards rallying support for Washington and its proxy in Kiev.

In conclusion

In the wake of the Ukraine war, we have seen the cleavage between ‘The West’ and ‘The Rest’ deepen. With renewed focus on the Israeli conflict this cleavage could turn into a division between, on the one side, those who will see the attack by Hamas as an intolerable violation of Israel and on the other side, those who will think that Israel had it coming due to what is often articulated as ‘apartheid like policies’ with the effect of creating ‘hell on earth in Gaza’ due to the policies implemented by Tel Aviv. It is often difficult to see what each party in this conflict could do differently, observers of global politics tend to place demand on Israel to find a solution to its situation since Israel is perceived as the stronger actor, but internal divisions combined with difficulties of administrating the occupied lands makes Israel face dilemmas it has not yet been able to solve hence while Israel definitely possesses some economic, technological, and military muscle, its inability to obtain political stability 75 years into its existence raises eyebrows of concern in the realm of geopolitical analysis: Why? Well, it is a touch neighborhood for one. But secondly, the occupation undermines Israeli society.