The worst way to end the war on Gaza is to let it be hijacked by the conflict between Israel and Iran and its regional extensions. This is not only because an ending of this sort will serve to support the narrative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been reiterating ever since 7 October in order to deny the Palestinians the truth regarding events on the ground.

Tel Aviv is desperate for something to counter the fact that the attack by the Palestinian resistance on 7 October was a logical reaction to the Israeli occupation and its decades of violating the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. That is the crux of the issue that needs to be addressed in order to revive a political path to ending the conflict as a whole.

However, when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres suggested as much in his statements calling for a ceasefire and a return to the negotiating table in the early months of the war, Israel unleashed a vicious and concerted attack against him and the UN’s humanitarian agencies. The US dutifully lent a hand by automatically wielding its veto to block any constructive step by the UN Security Council.

The Israeli war machine, like other war machines, needs a political doctrine and discourse its politicians can use in meetings with its counterparts and in the media it uses to address broader audiences. The aim is to secure the political backing needed to keep the war machine rolling so it can achieve its aims and/or inflict the greatest possible damage on the adversary.

In the current case, the doctrinal line has been set by the prime minister, even if to many Israeli military and intelligence figures it seems both incoherent and insufficient to achieve the stated goals of the war. Netanyahu’s doctrine establishes as its general context that the situation in Gaza is a mere link and episode in the Iranian threat, not just to Israel, but to the entire region.

Hamas in this telling has no agency of its own, driven by the struggle for Palestinian rights and resistance to the occupation. It is merely a tentacle in the Iranian regional project, like the Houthis in Yemen, the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), and Hizbullah in Lebanon.

It might be useful here to return to a short chapter in this Israeli narrative-weaving before the current discourse solidified. In the opening weeks of the assault on Gaza, Netanyahu tried to liken Hamas to the Islamic State (IS) group, thinking that this would rally the broadest base of international support behind his war. He even called for an “international coalition” to fight Palestinian “terrorism” like the one formed to fight IS in Syria and Iraq.

That gambit quickly collapsed, perhaps after it had been tested out on Washington first and had been found not to hold water or to withstand the dynamics on the ground. So, an alternative gambit was used, which presented the doctrine of the “unity of fronts.” This slogan referred to the readiness of all fronts in the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” to support the Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza against the onslaught of the Israeli Occupation Forces.

Observers of such developments understand that as with other wars there is an interplay here between the war and the political and media environment and that the nature of this interplay shifts and mutates in tandem with the changing conditions on the ground. So, it was not that difficult to sort through many of the actors concerned and determine how they interacted with the event as a whole in all its diverse dimensions.

The Arabs, as represented by the main Arab powers, found it crucial to invest in reviving global interest in the Palestinian cause in order to restart the political negotiations that are ultimately intended to lead to the “two-state solution.” Achieving this goal was seen as key to ensuring stability in the region, as it would end the main source of conflict while providing security guarantees to its main protagonists and other concerned countries in the region and the world.

This Arab stance has gained momentum, which is not surprising since it is supported by international law and UN resolutions. It has revived international interest in a return to the peace process, which had floundered before it could implement conditions that could be described as secure and irreversible.  

The Arab view is fully cognisant of the enormous toll the Palestinians have paid as victims of the war on Gaza, which has so far claimed at least 40,000 dead, 100,000 injured, and massive destruction that has impacted every aspect of the lives of millions.

However, now this vision for stopping the bloodshed and remedying the root causes of the conflict is facing a deliberate bid to derail it. The first step was the suspicious incident in Majdal Shams in the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights at the end of July. This happened to coincide with the mediating round in Rome that was on the verge of reaching a ceasefire agreement, one that would have brought an extended truce and hostage/prisoner exchanges.

The Majdal Shams incident, which claimed the lives of 12 children among the occupied population of the Arab Druze in the Golan, most of whom have long rejected citizenship under the Israeli occupation, was immediately followed by three other strikes, each clearly coordinated in a way to create a state of play radically different to that which had prevailed the day before.

The first was the Israeli airstrike against the southern suburbs of Beirut targeting Fouad Shukr, commander of the Hizbullah military wing. The second was the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. The third was the US strike against a PMF base south of Baghdad in Iraq.

In the space of a few hours, Netanyahu received the “kiss of life” he longed for following his failed visit to the US and the barrage of criticism by Israeli security and military leaders accusing him of deliberately sabotaging the negotiations after all the details and guarantees had been agreed on.

 This strategy of distraction will find other means and incentives to extend it, as long as it accomplishes the ends of its architects. The main aim is to void the Palestinian bloodshed by Israel of its significance through the grotesque distortion that reduces Gaza to a mere link in the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict and the intermittent exchanges between Israel and Hizbullah, all of which have their own dynamics and rules of engagement.

The writer is director of the Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies (ECSS).

* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly