Reshaping the Middle East?

Ahmed Mustafa
Tuesday 8 Oct 2024

Today’s attempts at reshaping the Middle East are likely to founder on the same kind of mistakes made after the first and second world wars, writes Ahmed Mustafa

 

Contrary to public statements from all the parties concerned about fears of an “all-out war” in the Middle East and the “empty” vows of diplomatic efforts to prevent it, all the players in the region are pushing for what they envisage as a new Middle East.

There are diverging visions of this reshaped region depending on different positions. In all cases, however, the Palestinians bear the brunt of a bloody struggle and are paying for it with tens of thousands being killed and towns and cities being wiped out. All the while the Palestinian right to self-determination is becoming an ever more distant cry.

For a year now, Israel has been committing daily massacres against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and extending these to the West Bank. The official line of targeting Hamas fighters is no longer plausible as tens of thousands of women and children have been killed, complete urban areas have been flattened, and hospitals and refugee camps left bloodied.

It is clear that this genocide goes beyond the hypocritical western pretext of Israeli “self-defence”. The Israeli offensive has attempted to paint over two million Palestinians as members of Hamas. This characterisation has led to the normalisation of military attacks on civilian non-combatants.

With the exception of Egypt and Jordan, very few states mean what they say when they refer to a just and lasting peace based on a two-state solution and achieving the minimum aspirations of the Palestinian people. The Israeli occupation refuses to accept Palestinian rights and has systematically kept them marginalised within their own land. Scenarios of driving the Gazans into Egypt and West Bank citizens into Jordan are not just hypothetical. They are part of the doctrine of the far-right extremism now rife in Israel.

Some in the region think that eliminating Hamas would be good for the Palestinian cause and might help broker a lasting solution to what has been the thorniest issue in the Middle East for almost a century. But the Israelis, encouraged by the Americans and many in the West along with some regional powers, are jumping on the Palestinian issue by launching a wider war on Iranian proxies in the region from Lebanon and Iraq to Yemen.

This is what is tempting many to talk about the emergence of a new region without militant groups. But is this a viable outcome of the ongoing war? That does not seem likely.

The US has been trying to reshape the region in the context of the “disengagement” strategy that started in the second term of former Republican president George W Bush in the mid-2000s. However, it dates back to the late 1980s towards the end of the Cold War when the US was seeking a “New World Order”. Since then, the process has been on a bumpy road, with the Middle East taking a good share of its failures and disappointments.

It is difficult to swallow the idea that Israel is launching its current wars detached from US strategy. Israel’s own vision is that it will become a leader in this part of the world with the Gulf in the passenger seat. The belief is that the rest of the world will accept this state of affairs as a fair trade-off for ending wars and enjoying the windfall of peace in the region.

But this rosy picture, even if drawn in blood and fire, is extremely far-fetched. At the heart of what will be the likely failure of the reshaping process is the goal of eradicating militia and other groups. Contemporary examples show that such groups will not disappear even under heavy blows against their creators and supporters.

The Taliban in Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda elsewhere are a stark reminder of this. First put together under American auspices and with Gulf financing and Arab and Muslim recruitment, Al-Qaeda splintered into more militant and terrorist offshoots like the Islamic State (IS) group, the Al-Nusra Front, and others.

Even if Iran wanted to dismantle groups like the Lebanese Hizbullah group, the Iraqi Shia groups, the Yemeni Houthis, and others, it would likely not be successful in doing so. Instead, an increase in militant offshoots would be the likely outcome, bringing further instability to the region.

Some might think that sacrificing an independent Palestinian state is a worthwhile price to pay for curbing Iranian influence and eliminating groups that challenge the authority of the state. Iran could be curbed, even crippled, which is what has happened to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and other countries in the region. But a Middle East free of militia groups is not plausible under current circumstances.

Extremists in Israel are insisting that the region is seeing religious wars, and the Anglo-Saxon axis of the US and UK is continuing the ethno-religious divide it started in Iraq and Afghanistan in seeking a new order and reshaping the region. This is the perfect recipe for militia groups to flourish.

When the Americans inherited their global hegemony from the defunct European empires after World War II, they opted to fight against secular nationalists in the Middle East region. They courted religious fundamentalism and other reactionary regional trends. The result is what we are living with today. Unfortunately, no lessons have been learnt, and the current “reshaping” process is making the same fatal mistakes committed since the world wars.

Such blocks in the Middle East are not going away anytime soon, and the dreams of a new Middle East without a Palestinian cause, Iranian influence, and militant groups is wishful thinking. Regardless of the outcome of the current period of turmoil, a lot of the fundamental struggles in the region will still remain and may even reach new levels of intensity.

One is reminded of the Arab proverb that states that “the wind does not always blow as the ships desire.”

 

The writer is a London-based seasoned journalist.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 10 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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