It is hard to say what the Middle East will look like by the time this article goes to press. What is clear as I write, is that the war in Gaza is intensifying, the Lebanese-Israeli front is on fire, and tension reigns in the West Bank, Syria and Iraq. But the greatest source of alarm for all countries concerned, both regionally and internationally, is whether a regional war will erupt due to an attack by Iran and its regional proxies in retaliation for Israel’s double assassination of the Hamas Political Bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran while he was attending the inaugural ceremonies for the new Iranian president and the Hizbullah military commander Fouad Shukr in Southern Beirut.
People have naturally compared the current situation with the aftermath of the Israeli assassination of Iranian military commanders in the Iranian Consulate in Damascus. At the time, Iran was set on revenge and the US helped it out of an awkward position by clearing the way for a major retaliatory strike against Israel that would not claim any casualties or major destruction. War was averted by greenlighting an Israeli attack that would also claim no casualties, after which Iran issued a statement that the confrontation had ended. However, the comparison stops there. Repeating the experiment will serve no purpose. It is clear to all and sundry that Israel committed the assassinations to provoke Iran and its allies into a multipronged revenge so that it could have an opportunity to destroy Iranian nuclear weapons as it did in Syria and Iraq before. However, the US, which is heading towards a critical election, has moved a powerful armada into the region, threatening Iran with its wrath if it attacks Israel. Washington’s British, French, German, and Italian allies are lending support. In addition to this stick, Washington presented Iran with a carrot in the form of a major diplomatic offensive, backing the Egyptian and Qatari “mediators” in an effort to resume Palestinian-Israeli negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage/prisoner exchange deal.
It is unclear what will happen next, but now that the killing and destruction wreaked by the Palestinian-Israeli crisis has brought the region to the brink, it is essential to think of the safety and welfare of that region’s states and peoples. The common approach so far has been to discuss possible arrangements for the so-called “day after.” In a previous article in this space, I outlined the scenarios being considered by Palestinians, Israelis, Arab governments and the US. But given where we are today, it seems like whatever arrangements are put into place after the current crisis, it is impossible to avoid the root of the problem. This resides in the fact that both the Palestinian and Israeli sides are plagued by an internal structural crisis having to do political power’s lack of a monopoly on the legitimate recourse to armed force.
As I have mentioned before, the Palestinians have 14 armed factions, each of which can take decisions of war and peace independently outside of the legitimacy of an established framework. But the same problem exists in Israel. Its specific nature was explained in “The Undoing of Israel: The Dark Futures That Await After the War in Gaza” in the 12 August Foreign Affairs. Its authors, Ilan Baron and Ilai Saltzman, warn that Israel is “on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path” and that if it does not change course, “the humanist ideals of its founding” – as applied to Jews, of course – “will disappear altogether as Israel careens into a darker future.”
They continue, “Israel is on track to become increasingly authoritarian in its treatment not just of Palestinians but of its own citizens. It could fast lose many of the friends it still has and become a pariah. And isolated from the world, it could be consumed by turmoil at home as widening fissures threaten to break up the country itself.”
The authors see Israel heading towards a civil war that would culminate in the “end of Zionism”, by which they mean the Israeli nation-state project, and its replacement by an “ethnonationalist theocracy, run by a Jewish judicial and legislative council and right-wing religious extremists” who would treat others who do not see things their way, be they Arabs, Jews or foreigners, with contempt. As for how these fanatics acquired such power, the Israeli electoral system made it possible for extreme religious parties to enter the Knesset and from there into 11 far-right governments enabling them to advance their values and agenda. The latter includes exemption from military conscription for a select group of ultra-Orthodox youth.
However, a more dangerous development is that weapons are being distributed among Jewish settlers and settlements in the West Bank and Occupied Jerusalem along with the right to decide when and how to use the weapons against the Palestinian inhabitants of the Occupied Territories. Moreover, the theocratic forces in government have begun to unleash their militias against the Israeli army itself. In short, Israel no longer possesses one of the defining features of the state, the monopoly over the legitimate use of force.
According to Baron and Salzman, forestalling the unravelling requires urgent action to shore up the state’s constitutional foundations and rule of law. They nevertheless anticipate that such steps would encounter violent resistance from the extremist religious parties.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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