While the American political drama preoccupied the world, another fast-paced development took place. The assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump was followed by the incumbent president’s sudden U-turn, with his decision to withdraw from the electoral race after coming down with a bout of Covid-19, passing the Democratic baton to Vice-President Kamala Harris. At the same time, in a word, the fifth Gaza war was becoming a full-scale regional one.

Escalation is the operative word on the Israeli-Lebanese front. The exchanges of missile fire have intensified in tandem with Hizbullah’s growing ability to strike Israeli military targets while Israeli intelligence appears to have infiltrated its adversaries in Lebanon, resulting in assassinations of Hizbullah military leaders as well as those of Hamas fighters there. Meanwhile, the Ansar Allah (Houthis), who have been threatening commercial and non-commercial ships in the Red Sea, have extended their reach to the Eastern Mediterranean by means of drones. Last week, they managed to strike Tel Aviv, killing an Israeli and wounding four. Israeli fighter planes responded by bombing the port in Hodeida, striking oil refinery plants and tanks, creating a massive inferno of fire and smoke. Israeli media said this was meant to send a message to everyone in the region. Just before writing this, a Houthi spokesman vowed retaliation, which is to say, further escalation.

The situation has come a long way since a few months ago, when an Israeli strike killed an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in the Iranian Embassy in Damascus. At the time, Washington’s intercession following the Iranian retaliatory drone and missile strike against Israel ensured that escalation would stop after a limited Israeli strike against Iran. But the war is much more complex. Increasingly, when two sides clash, they will have a propensity to continue to escalate. On the one hand, pressures are mounting from within each side where religious fervour inspires visions of paradise driving fighters to sacrifice themselves for the holy cause and where the culture of feud has taken hold and the thirst to avenge the martyrs fires the zeal for war. On the other hand, there is the obsession with striking the adversary so devastatingly as to create an aura of might that will deter them from attacking back. The fact remains, however, that such deterrence in the context of a cycle of hatred will never work. Thoughts of lives lost and the destruction wrought fade as the focus becomes how to score a decisive victory which always appears within reach even though history has shown this is always a mirage.  

This situation presents a dilemma to the reformist states in the region, the countries that have set themselves on the path to development and construction, as well as recreation and entertainment, as in the case of Saudi Arabia, which found that prosperity is incomplete without the means to cultivate the soul. This camp not only has to contend with the unrestrained axis of resistance camp whose members give no thought to nation-building and development, but also with a hodgepodge of groups that form armed militias taking advantage of the chaos to claim to represent countries and national causes, though without consulting the people or understanding the outcome.  

The current escalation and counter-escalation is a manifestation of this chaos. It speaks of a regional security breakdown that puts the entire region at grave risk. If, as they say, fires start from tiny sparks, in the Middle East we do not need the sparks because we already have both fires and flames. The spiral of reaction-counterreaction that propels escalation takes on another dimension when the antagonism is existential and the belligerents are never sated by the destruction they cause. The Middle Eastern school of violence did not create the wholesale slaughter that Israel is carrying out in Gaza. But we have seen it in action in Syria, where the dead and wounded exceed 600,000 and the displaced exceed 14 million. Sudan, today, is reporting similar figures, and the Sudanese complain of racism because their tragedy is not receiving the same level of international attention as the plight of the Palestinian people.

This state of conflict seems so entrenched that it will never receive its fill of international interventions by the UN, the International Court of Justice, or other world bodies. It will never tire of waiting for the outcomes of US elections or for world powers to forge an international consensus to stop violence in the Middle East. This region, like many other parts of the world, must take its fate into its own hands. It must marshal its energies to confront the violence just as it confronted terrorism before, and a coalition of Arab reform states is the key.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly