Israeli-Palestinian crisis: why this latest conflict cannot be considered a sideshow
The twists and turns of political animosities, sectarian rivalries and territorial disputes in the Middle East over many decades now include further unravellings of the regional order as new forces take hold. The enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be now be seen within this context
This latest Palestinian conflict is not a sideshow in Middle Eastern affairs. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA
Many Palestinians and Israelis foresaw another round of conflict on theIsrael-Gaza front this summer. They depict a kind of inevitability to it all, that speaks of a fatalism about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some Israelis even hold to the view that they can sustain the status quo in both the West Bank and Gaza through a combination of containment and periodic resort to force, while mouthing the rhetoric of a two-state solution sometime in the future.
Yet the situation in the region as a whole should give them pause. The regional order that has more or less prevailed for decades is fast unravelling and new forces are emerging that cannot be contained in the way that the Palestinians have been since the 1948 war in which most of them became refugees and the state of Israel was established.
The configuration of Arab states that came into being at the end of the First World War has experienced relative stability on the basis of a system designed by Frenchman Georges Picot and his British counterpart, Mark Sykes, (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) in May 1916. They paved the way for the British mandates in Palestine and Iraq and the French mandate in Syria-Lebanon that endured until 1948. Thereafter, maintenance of the lines drawn on the map by the British and French has required a level of enforcement and dictatorial rule at odds with the ideals of self-determination and democracy. And the fate of the Palestinians today derives from their relative weakness in the successive struggles for power that have characterised the Middle East since 1916.
The enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in a sense, unfinished business from that era and it might have remained so, in relative isolation, but for the fact that in 2003 the Americans and British thought that by intervening in Iraq they could remake the regional system for the better. Instead, they opened Pandora's box, to quote former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and now the whole system is in flux.
From 1948 to 1967, when Israel captured land from the surrounding Arab states, including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Palestinian problem was depicted as one of refugees, not self-determination. Resort to guerrilla warfare and terror tactics by the Palestinians from the 1960s drew attention to their cause, but it was not until the first Palestinian intifada of 1987 to 1993 that the idea of self-determination for those living in the West Bank and Gaza, potentially leading to a Palestinian state alongside Israel, really gained traction.
Meanwhile, the cause of Arab nationalism suffered such a blow in the defeats of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967 that the Palestinians could no longer look to the Arab states to solve their problem. In the place of Arab nationalism, the phenomenon of revisionist Islamist movements emerged as a new challenge to the regional order. Post-revolutionary Iran identified with these movements, sponsoring Hezbollah in Lebanon and supporting Hamas in the Gaza Strip. These developments, the collapse of the Oslo peace process in the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, and then 9/11 combined to produce a new narrative on the Palestinians that depicted them as part of the general problem of terrorism besetting the region and beyond.
The unravelling of Sykes-Picot has much to do with the rise of jihadi groups at the forefront of the terrorist challenge in the region. They gained strength in the fallout from the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Then came the Arab uprisings that brought down governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya and fighting between government forces and rebels, aided by jihadis, in Syria.
Since 2011 the rising toll of death and destruction in Syria, the flight of millions of Syrian refugees to neighbouring countries and the divisive policies of the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad have led commentators to depict a region riven more by sectarian animosities than the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Another shift has taken place at the international level, with the Americans no longer able to exercise decisive influence in the region overall. In their opposition to the Assad regime in Syria, the Americans were at one with their long-standing Arab ally Saudi Arabia, but they upset the Saudis by not doing more to bring him down. This omission was not the only source of aggravation to the Saudis who have come to question the commitment of the Americans to their erstwhile friends in the region. They were aghast when the Americans did nothing to prevent the fall of Mubarak in Egypt and watched in consternation as the Muslim Brotherhood came to power there.
The Brotherhood's stance on regional issues represents a direct challenge to the Saudi monarchy. And therein lies a contradiction to the depiction of a region embroiled in sectarian conflict. Both the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood are Sunni Muslims. Their rivalry is about political power, not simply sectarianism.
When President Morsi was ousted last summer, the Saudis were delighted. President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi is as opposed as the Saudis to the Muslim Brotherhood and, by extension, its offshoot, the Palestinian Hamas movement that presides in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has been embattled ever since. Meanwhile, Obama's decision to pursue a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue, capitalising on the election of President Rohani as successor to the abrasive Ahmadinejad, alienated the Saudis afresh while also alarming Israel.
As if these twists and turns were not already complicated enough, recent developments in Syria and Iraq, specifically the advances made by Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and its declaration of a new Islamic caliphate across captured territory in both states, represent a further unravelling of the regional order.
It is in this context that the latest round of conflict on the Israeli-Palestinian front cannot be dismissed as a sideshow. If the durability and legitimacy of the post-First World War regional system is up for grabs, both the Israelis and the Americans will be hard pressed to contain Palestinian resistance to Israel for another decade in the name of a moribund depiction of regional stability. The Palestinians represent but one of several communities in the region for whom a remaking of the 20th-century regional order may not be unwelcome. However, their main defenders in the region are more anti-Israel than they are pro-Palestinian and if Israel and its friends want to stem the trend toward Islamist extremism in the region they would do well to find a resolution of the Palestinian problem through a two-state solution than leave it to fate.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/26/israel-palestine-middle-east-uprisings-conflict
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/26/israel-palestine-middle-east-uprisings-conflict
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