Since the war in Gaza started a year ago, there has been speculation that the conflict-ridden Middle East may find itself in a tight spot once again once the guns fall silent.
The shock induced by Israel’s full-scale invasion of Gaza following the landmark surprise armed incursion by Hamas from the Strip into southern Israel marked a geopolitical awakening for the Middle East.
A year on, the trigger was the combination of the genocidal and scorched-earth war Israel has waged along the frontlines, its refusal to find a compromise, and the way of thinking among its arrogant political leadership about maintaining the grand sweep of Israel’s superiority.
As the war in Gaza entered its second year this week, the situation on the battlefield and in the larger regional equilibrium is at a setback. When the fighting eventually ends, the conflict could reshape the region and produce a new regional order.
Forensic analyses of the devastating armed conflict with its obvious deadly impact on the prospect of a two-state solution and major ramifications for the geopolitical picture of the region, worsening its instability, support this claim.
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that Israeli forces are nearing victory in Gaza, Israel has been unable to credibly claim to have reached its war aims: the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza and the destruction of the group’s capacity to pose a military threat to Israel from the Strip.
The crisis has showed not only the failure of Israel’s military campaign but also what will be known as the Netanyahu Doctrine: to use the attack on Hamas and the flattening of Gaza to thwart any effort to revive the political process with the Palestinians and the two-state solution.
As was widely expected, however, the stalemate in Gaza has threatened soon to implode into a broader war, throwing out old rules and opening a multi-pronged front and raising fears of a wider Middle East conflict.
Netanyahu himself probably provided the context for such a mindset when he first ordered the Israeli military to launch a widescale bombing campaign in Lebanon and then declared that “we have just begun… and we will work to change the Middle East.”
Following Hamas’ unprecedented multi-pronged attack from the Gaza Strip on 7 October last year, Netanyahu also promised that Israel’s response to the Palestinians will “change the Middle East”.
International and regional diplomacy has so far defused the risk of a broader conflict, but with Netanyahu bent on carrying out his agenda, the Middle East will remain on a strategic threshold.
When even a minor event in one of its oldest and major conflicts can be transformative, the region has remained jittery and has spent most of this year watching change in the making.
In some ways, this change is already at hand, and to avoid the worst-case scenario regional governments and institutions must start planning now for a new era in which a new balance of power will emerge in the Middle East.
From the outset, it was obvious that the impact of the war on Gaza would be felt for years across the region and that it would have profound implications for its security and stability.
Just before the war started, the Middle East was going through a period of regional de-escalation. A Chinese-brokered detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023 ushered in a period of regional calm.
Saudi Arabia was also engaged in intensive talks with the US Biden administration over a normalisation deal with Israel that would also include a set of agreements on security and technology-sharing.
The package would have established a defence pact between the two countries and help in building a Saudi civil nuclear energy industry and high-level sharing in the field of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
The deal would have followed the wave of Arab countries officially normalising their relations with Israel facilitated by US President Joe Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump and polled in November 2020.
The agreements saw the normalisation of relations between Israel and several Arab states, among which were the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. They were viewed as opportunities to enhance security and diplomatic and economic ties with Israel.
The accords, called the “deal of the century,” and the Saudi normalisation deal would have obliged Israel to commit to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, even if they would soon have showed that Israel’s actions had made peace more unlikely.
But most importantly the agreements, also dubbed the “Abraham Accords,” were the most important step in advancing Israel’s efforts to join the region since the 1978 Camp David Accords with Egypt, the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, and the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty in 1994.
Together with the proposed Saudi deal, the accords, heralded as the “dawn of a new Middle East,” were hoped to mark the most significant transformation in regional geopolitics in a generation.
The consequences of normalisation with Israel would have been enormous in both forging and splintering the Middle East’s political landscape, risking deepening divisions over the future of the region.
By accommodating Israel into a divided and polarised Middle East, the agreements shifted the region’s old security order, bringing its already unstable paradigm into further question.
A year of the Israeli war of destruction and annihilation in Gaza, nearly daily exchanges of fire across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and the Yemeni Houthis and Iraqi Shia militias’ drone and missile attacks have severely strained this paradigm.
Following the killing of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s missile attacks on Israel, the dizzying escalation in Lebanon has raised fears of a wider Middle East conflict that could involve Iranian-backed Shia groups in Iraq that have already threatened to strike US bases in the Gulf.
Without doubt, the region will face a grinding new reality beyond the prewar status quo regardless of the outcome of the conflict. Most countries and peoples in the Middle East have no desire to be dragged into a full-scale war, which Israel could use to impose its hegemony on the region.
Yet, the Middle East nations should be wary as they might find themselves sleepwalking towards a nightmarish descent into the very regional chaos that they have been trying to avoid.
To keep away from the worst-case scenario, countries and institutions in the region must start planning now. They must be ready for seismic shifts that could result from coming disasters.
But even if the region can avoid an all-out war, it will wake up the day after to a new harsh reality, at the heart of which is its future and its security order.
Whatever the outcome of the war with Hamas, Hizbullah, the Houthis, and the Iraqi Shia militias, their backer, Iran, will declare victory if only because they have survived Israel’s onslaught.
If Israel wins, it will have the upper hand and will be further emboldened to threaten, coerce, and disrupt the rest of the Middle East, namely the Arab world, for generations to come.
It will be the end of the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a void which will certainly be exploited by the “victorious” Israelis to retrigger the cycle of annexation of Palestinian land and the forced displacement of its population.
As they face the dangers of such an eventuality, the Arab governments will need to grapple with many hard questions.
The most urgent among them fall into four categories: how to avoid further divides, especially on sectarian lines; how to restructure the region’s security; how to forge new international partnerships; and how to stand up to Israel’s geopolitical hegemony.
The Arab world has been poorly prepared for the harshness of this reality because the idea of peace with Israel was built in opposition to the very idea of power politics and its dynamics.
From this starting point, the Arab world should begin to prepare itself for the potential geopolitical maze it will find itself lured into the day after the Gaza war ends.
It must maintain its ability to diminish this possibility, but nothing will be done unless the will to diminish it is also restored.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 10 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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