After 15 months of agony, the potential Gaza ceasefire comes as a colossal relief not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for the wider Middle East. True, the deal is narrow in size and scope. It covers a physical space scarcely bigger than Martha’s Vineyard. The actual terms of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement extend no farther than a pause in fighting, an exchange of some hostages and a partial Israeli withdrawal. Given recent precedent, the fragility of Israel’s ruling coalition and the yawning gap between the belligerents, this deal is just as likely to collapse, or simply to lapse, as to foster a longer-term peace. Still, even a temporary lowering of the regional heart rate allows for useful reflection.
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The modern Middle East is prone to shifting alliances and balances of power, but each turn of the kaleidoscope tends to tumble only one piece of the multicolored pattern at a go. This time, the rearrangement looks far more radical than the puny size of Gaza might have suggested. Perhaps not since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 has the regional puzzle been so swiftly and wholly transformed. In those six days Israel conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, upending a two-decade-long status quo, shattering Arab dreams, expanding America’s role, and making the Jewish State an occupying power and turning millions of Palestinians into a subject people.
By contrast the Gaza crisis has lasted far longer than any previous Arab-Israeli clash. Its cost in lives has been immensely higher, too. An epidemiological study published this month in The Lancet, Britain’s top medical journal, suggests that 70,000 Gazans may have been killed so far, a grisly tally that is more than three times greater than the total number of Israelis, military and civilian, killed in all the wars and terror attacks Israel has faced since its founding in 1948. Even so, Hamas’s easy breach of Israeli defenses on Oct. 7, and Israel’s loss of 1,200 lives in a single day were an unprecedented shock to the Jewish State. But as in 1967 the reverberations of the war have reached beyond the immediate parties to Israel’s other neighbors and even more distant countries across the region, often in unexpected ways.
How so? At a dinner party in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, a guest speaks with dark sarcasm of the singular achievements of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind behind the horrendous Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the current conflagration (an Israeli drone killed Sinwar a year later). “Isn’t it amazing how one man achieved in one year what millions of people couldn’t do in decades?” she asks rhetorically, ticking off the effects. “Because of him Israel destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon, and because of that the Assad regime fell in Syria, and because of that Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ collapsed.” She pauses for effect, then adds that it is to Sinwar’s “genius” that we owe the prolonging of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political life as Israel’s prime minister, as well as the rescue of the Egyptian leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, from mounting debts and other troubles.
The sarcasm is merited. Each of these “successes” represents an own-goal for Hamas. The Palestinian Islamist group was allied to and funded by the now strategically diminished Islamic Republic of Iran. The Assad family in Syria were no special friends to Hamas, but Israel took advantage of their fall to obliterate Syria’s entire arsenal of heavy weapons, putting one more potential regional adversary out of military action for perhaps a generation. Netanyahu is far more popular in Israel now than before the war and the Egyptian leader, who has viciously persecuted its parent organization, the global Muslim Brotherhood, has been reprieved by Western creditors in reward for maintaining a stony silence over Gaza.
To be fair, Sinwar at immense cost to both Israelis and Palestinians did achieve some of his real aims. He put the plight of Palestinians back in the global spotlight. He undermined efforts to widen Israel’s web of treaties with Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia. He shamed Israel, first by exposing its military incompetence and then by provoking a response so violent that it has severely damaged the country’s moral standing. But the people of Gaza are not the only ones in the region to ask, now, whether Sinwar’s gamble was worth it.
The Hamas leader’s reckless play has left Israel, as it was briefly after the 1967 war, an almost undisputed mini-hegemon in the region. Its Arab neighbours are military dwarves by comparison, and in most cases too absorbed in internal affairs to care much for the fate of the Palestinians. Iran has burned its fingers, and all that even nuclear weapons would bring is a new level of stand-off with Israel–which is in any case a rather far-off country that many ordinary Iranians do not regard as an enemy. The timely arrival in Washington of a new, even more gung-ho Israel-first administration than Joe Biden’s, which bankrolled Netanyahu’s Gaza offensive to the tune of $17.9 billion, simply underlines Israel’s military dominance.
But as in 1967, Israel’s triumph comes loaded with unwanted responsibilities. Back then, wise Israelis counseled that to remain an occupying power over an understandably angry people was not only morally repugnant, but could erode Israel’s own society. That advice was ultimately ignored in favor of an undeclared policy of creeping annexation and colonization. The result is that today Israel rules over populations of Palestinians and of Jewish Israelis that are almost equal in number but disturbingly skewed in terms of rights and wealth and outlook. This is hardly a recipe for peaceful coexistence.
Yet because of unquestioning support from America and other Western backers, because of perpetual Arab disarray and because of its own rightward political drift, Israel has persisted in this direction. The temptation to dig the hole deeper is even stronger just now, with Gaza a smoldering ruin and all potential regional challengers cowed. Can Israel now rise to the wisdom of being magnanimous in victory? Alas, the signs are not good.