Yves here. Satyajit Das provides a long-term view of how the Middle East has become a tinderbox in a three-part series.
This review is provides an integrated assessment and I hope you will you circulate it as a backgrounder. Sadly, this vantage seems timely as Iran and the Axis of Resistance look set to retaliate bigly to recent Israel assassinations. Israel looks to be finally getting the regional conflict that many experts argue it has been seeking.
This post, which reviews the origins of the hostilities, includes a discussion of key miscalculations.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests (2024)
This is the first of a three-part series examining the unfolding events in the Middle East.
The Middle East like the Balkans produces more history than it can consume.
The central issue is Palestine. There are volatile religious differences between Sunni-Shia Islam, several forms of Christianity, Judaism, the Baha’i Faith, Druzism, Yazidism and Zoroastrianism. The 1916 secret British-French Sykes–Picot Agreement which shaped modern nation states borders without regard to historical tribal territories has left a legacy of resentment. A mix of hereditary monarchies, authoritarian democracies and theocracies complicates government. Great power politics remain a factor primarily because the region contains crucial large oil and gas reserves.
From time to time, this cauldron bubbles over. This is one of those times.
Dispossession
The essentials of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was summarised by George Antonius in his 1938 The Arab Awakening: “The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland …”
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, orchestrated by Lord Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann, pledged vague support for a Jewish ‘homeland’ in Palestine, seized by Britain from the Ottoman Empire during the first world war. Increased Zionist immigration created predictable tension and conflict between Arab and Jews. The decision by the United Nations (UN) to partition Palestine facilitated Britain’s withdrawal and the creation of Israel in 1948. US President Harry Truman recognised the Zionist nation minutes after its formation. It set the stage for subsequent events.
Israel has always sought for security reasons to gain control of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean and the Litani River within Lebanese territory and Syrian Golan Heights to the Suez Canal. Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist and founder of the Zionist movement wrote of emptying Palestine of its “penniless” Arab population: “Both the process of expropriation [of land and property] and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Over subsequent decades, Israel, supported by the US and its Western allies, expanded its territory in a series of wars. The Nakba and subsequent dislocation left Palestinians destitute and trapped stateless in two pockets of land: Gaza, controlled by Egypt, and the West Bank, administered by Jordan. In the 1967 six-day war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank.
The 1993 Oslo peace accords contained a five-year interim agreement giving the Palestinian people the right to self-determination. Crucial questions remained unresolved – the international border between Israel and a future Palestinian state, illegal Israeli settlements, the status of Jerusalem, Israel’s control over security, and the Palestinian’s right of return.
Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said described the Oslo Accord as a Palestinian Versailles and Yasser Arafat as an Arab General Petain. Opposed by far-right and orthodox Israelis and a large portion of the Palestinian population, including militant groups, the process failed. This led to series of violent protests or intifadas (shaking off) by Palestinians which were brutally supressed by Israel. In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza due to the high cost of occupation. Subsequently, victory in an election and military success allowed Hamas to gain sole control of Gaza while a Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority ran the West Bank.
Occupation
Israel’s occupation and rejection of the two-state solution relies on several factors. Holocaust guilt especially among Western powers who were directly complicit or did not intervene was easy to exploit. Over time, America and the West’s need for a sentinel to protect its energy interests, counter balance a post-Shah Iran and the rise of radical Islam has been central to support of Israel.
Israel’s vast propaganda machine indoctrinates its population and controls global opinion, portraying any event in Zionist terms. Critics are silenced by weaponizing the term ‘anti-Semitic’ – problematic in that Jews themselves are one of the Semitic races. Critics, such as Norman Finkelstein, whose The Holocaust Industry questioned the exploitation of the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for financial gain and to further Israeli political interests, are branded ‘self-hating Jews’ – a generic slur on any internal dissenter. In 1982, playwright Yehosha Sobol accused Prime Minister Menachem Begin of using the Holocaust like “a dishcloth with which to wipe one’s dirty hand clean”.
Israel’s military success was another factor. Well-equipped, nuclear capable, and backed by the US and its allies, it has dominated the Middle East. General Moshe Dayan allegedly denigrated his achievements on the grounds that he was only fighting Arabs: “If you put one knock on the tin bin – they all run away, like birds.” The rise of Iran and its non-state proxies has changed the balance at least in terms of asymmetric warfare.
Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy exploits Arab disunity, especially the Sunni-Shia divide. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu supported Hamas to divide Palestinians and undermine any two state solution claiming that Israel has no partner for peace. An allied factor is the corruption of many regional rulers and the Palestinian Authority.
Over time, success has emboldened Israel’s ambitions driving the rapid growth in illegal settlement in the West Bank and increased control over Palestinians. Key features include geographical isolation and restricting freedom of movement using walls, illegal settlements, checkpoints and permits. This is allied to control of tax revenues, resources such as water, and services such as healthcare. French Illustrator Julien Bousec saw the West Bank as an archipelago of Palestinian islands surrounded by an Israeli sea. These measures assert Jewish sovereignty over the land.
Israel ensures that Palestinians are economically weak. Blockades and restrictions, which can be imposed and removed arbitrarily, have strangled its economy. A system of limited work permits provides Israel with cheap labour and acts as a mechanism of control. It produces a society of those with and those denied permits. It make Palestinians heavily depended on international aid which Israel can regulate and turn on or off at will.
The most important feature of the apartheid state created is violence. Israel has deliberately created unbearable conditions in Gaza and the West Bank which has led to a cycle of never-ending violence and regular eruptions of desperate acts by the hopeless and victimised. Before 7 October 2023, there have been four major confrontations between Hamas and Israel resulting in around 70,000 Palestinian casualties.
Israel’s superior weaponry and surveillance means every aspect of life can be monitored. Destruction of homes and infrastructure in acts of collective punishment, detention without charges and torture is commonplace There is widespread use of bought informants. Targeted assassinations of deemed enemies without judicial process is policy despite Israeli laws proscribing such acts without trial unless the individual was preparing or carrying out terrorist acts.
Israeli politician Abba Elan writing in the Jerusalem Post on 8 August 1982 found the violence of Israeli language lacking in humility, compassion or restraint: ‘to pound’, ‘to crush’, ‘to liquidate’, ‘to eradicate to the last man’, ‘to cleanse’, ‘to fumigate’, ‘to solve by other means’, ‘not to put up with’, ‘to mean business’, ‘to wipe out’. Recurrent military actions in Palestinian territory with indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and destruction of civilian infrastructure is ‘mowing the lawn’. More recently, Israel leaders have gone further: “We are fighting against human animals…we will eliminate everything”.
Israel has converted Gaza and the West Bank into a “vast prison without a roof”, a phrase used by Fyodor Dostoevsky to describe his exile in Siberia, which he termed a “house of the living dead”, the title of his published diary of this period. The aim is to force the Palestinians to experience constant humiliation, similar to that used by the Nazis against German Jews recorded by Victor Klemperer in his diaries of the period. The objective is make conditions unliveable to drive out the Palestinians to allow Israel to expand its territory.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first President, allegedly acknowledged the problem: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come, and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” Ben Gurion understood the true dynamics: “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors, and they defend themselves…The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view, we want to take away from them their country.” Writing in 1967, author Amos Oz agreed: “the Arabs are here – because Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinians….The Palestinian owes no deference to God’s promise to Abraham, to the longings of Yehuda Halevi and Bialik, or to the declaration by that British Peer Lord Balfour”.
Resistance to the occupation is driven by the human desire for dignity and anger about humiliation and loss. Palestinians have correctly concluded that they stand alone and the only way to extract concessions is through force. Sun Tzu writing in his The Art of War: “If you surround your enemy completely, give them no chance to escape, offer them no quarter, then they will fight to the last.” As Frederick the Great observed: “The aggressor is the one who forces his opponent to take up arms.” The alternative is to die by inches.
Deluge
On 7 October 2023, Hamas undertook Al-Aqsa Flood a daring attack on Israel. What is frequently ignored is that international law, such as Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, recognises armed resistance against an occupying power giving legitimacy to Hamas’s actions although it does not give the right to indiscriminately kill or target civilians.
Israel’s response was characteristically violent. Brutal offensives on defenceless civilians and civilian infrastructure sanctimoniously defended as self-defence.
Israel deployed its arsenal, much of it provided by the US and allies, including well-equipped ground forces supported by armour and artillery, manned and unmanned air force which enjoyed full freedom of operation due to Gaza’s lack of air defences, and navy. As in previous Gaza wars, Israel used powerful 2,000 pound bombs whose lethal radius is nearly 400 metres as well as phosphorus and cluster bombs (use of which is either restricted or banned by international law).
This overwhelming military capability wads deployed in densely populated urban areas against a militia armed primarily with small arms, machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and primitive short-range rockets. Resistance fighters responded with guerrilla tactics, favoured by out-gunned insurgents, using improvised roadside bombs and setting lethal traps.
The casualties reflect this imbalance in weaponry. Israel initially claimed 1,400 casualties in the initial Hamas attack. Around 130 hostages, some of whom have been killed or released, were taken. In the subsequent military conflict, around 5,000 members of Israel Defence Forces (“IDF”) have been killed or wounded.
Palestinian casualties and losses have been greater. Hamas has lost around 10,000 to 15,000 of its reputed 40,000 force. Total Palestinian dead now approach 40,000 with around 90,000 wounded, around 70 percent of which are women and children.
On 5 July 2024, the British medical journal The Lancet, since validated as plausible by other sources, estimated that the actual death toll could be over 186,000. This reflects unrecovered dead buried under rubble. There are other causes. The World Health Organisation estimates around 1.8 million cases of infectious diseases. The lack of medical treatment is another contributor. If correct, then this would represent around 9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, compared to German losses and Russian losses of 10 percent and 16 percent in World War 2.
Israel has destroyed 60-70 percent of Gaza’s buildings and most of its civilian infrastructure including hospitals, power infrastructure, wells, water treatment and sewerage plants, food production facilities and schools. It has attacked health professionals and aid-workers including UN staff, to destroy the ability of Gaza to function. Journalists, especially those from media deemed unfriendly such as Qatari Al-Jazeera, have been legally prevented from reporting or murdered to choke off reporting from the war zone to mask its operations.
So-called civilian safe zone have been attacked. Constant changes in designation are designed to keep the population in a constant state of turmoil. Around 85-90 percent of Gaza’s population (1.8 million individuals) are now displaced with no area of safety or access to essentials of survival, especially food, water, sanitation, shelter and medicines
Israel has prevented aid supplies from reaching the victims effectively starving Gaza. This has been done through closure of critical access corridors. Before the war, around 500 trucks of supplies entered Gaza daily. Since the start of the war, only around 200 trucks on average have been able to enter with the numbers drastically falling since Israeli operation in Rafah which effectively shut down the route from Egypt.
Source: New York Times
Israeli operations have increased in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem with regular raids and isolation of areas for extended periods while the IDF conducts search, arrest or destroy missions. Over 500 Palestinians, around a quarter of whom are children, have been killed. Around 10,000 Palestinians, including a number of minors, have been arrested since 7 October with a number of deaths in custody. Allegations of torture have emerged.
Attacks against Arabs, including destroying crops and livestock, by settlers, whom former Prime Minister Menachem Begin thought had ‘messianic complexes’ has doubled . The Israeli military have been active participants or have failed to protect Palestinian civilians.
In parallel, newly passed laws effectively annex of the West Bank transferring land management, planning and construction, supervision and management of local authorities, professional licensing, trade and economy, management of nature reserves and archaeological sites to an Israeli appointed deputy head for civilian affairs.
The Israeli justification for their actions have been based on the 7 October civilian casualties, the largest in the country’s history. Many have challenged the statistics.
Israel subsequently revised its estimated initial death toll down substantially. The casualties appear to include Israeli soldiers alongside civilians as well as Hamas fighters. Many bodies were badly burned making identification difficult. Causation is uncertain because of the IDF invocation of the ‘Hannibal Directive’ which calls for all necessary measures to be used to stop Israel’s enemies kidnapping its soldiers if necessary killing both kidnappers and kidnapped.
Unsubstantiated claims that Hamas tortured, beheaded and burned alive babies and sexual violence were later dropped or refuted. Israel has sought to discredit UNWRA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, claiming that the body co-operated with Hamas. The immediate result was suspension of desperately need aid. Those claims too proved incorrect and most countries, with the exception of the US and the UK, have resumed funding.
None of this new. In reviewing the first Gaza War in 2008-2009, Richard Goldstone, a Jewish South African jurist who headed the UN Human Rights Council’s independent fact-finding mission, found that Hamas and the IDF had violated the laws of war in deliberately harming civilians. The Israeli side committed larger and more serious infractions. Goldstone’s team exposed direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcomes, direct and intentional attacks on hospitals. Preventing medical aid being provided and destruction of civilian infrastructure with no military significance in a campaign designed to deprive civilians of basic necessities. He found that Israeli actions were directed at the people of Gaza as a whole and intended to punish, humiliate and terrorise the population: “radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
An Uncertain Madness
In the 1854 book Daniel, a Model for Young Men, Reverend William Anderson Scott adopted a heathen proverb: “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad“. Israel believes that it has right to kill anyone and everyone. The objective is to make Gaza unliveable and kill sufficient Palestinians to force them to leave their ancestral lands in what some have called Nakba 2.
The actions are in contravention of international law. The concept of proportionality outlaws military actions expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the expected advantage. Israel’s action breach this standard.
Genocide is defined as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. Ethnic cleansing, while not recognized as an independent crime under international law, refers to a purposeful design by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. Israel’s violent actions would appear to prima facie meet both definitions. As EU Foreign Affairs head Josep Borrell stated: “One horror does not justify another.”
In Errol Morris’ film Fog of War, with the benefit of hindsight and age, US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara identified one key lessons of war: the need to know and understand your enemy. America’s defeat in the Vietnam War was proof that miscomprehension leads to defeat.
Hamas’s leadership, especially Yehya Sinwar, recognises that Israel and its Western supporters only pay lip service to the two-state solution. The 7 October 2023 attack made the Palestinian issue once again prominent. It demonstrated that the IDF were not all conquering and the plan for the erasure of Palestinian identity and hope could be successfully resisted, albeit at high cost. It was intended to draw in sympathetic regional actors such as Hezbollah, Syria, and the Houthis with the support of Iran to engage Israel and the West. It sought to unify the Palestinian people forcing them to confront the stark choice between fighting and extermination or exile.
Israel’s objectives are confused. Despite statements by politicians of destroying Hamas and preventing it from ever becoming a threat, its military establishment considers such an outcome unlikely. In the words of Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi: “Hamas did not create the conflict. The conflict created Hamas. You cannot bomb an idea out of existence.”
Moderate politician Moshe Sharett writing in the Jerusalem Post on 18 October 1966 had warned against disproportionate reprisals: “….has it really been proven that reprisals establish the security for which they were planned… when military reactions outstrip in their severity the events that cause them, grave processes are set in motion which widen the gulf and thrust our neighbours into the extremist camp?” Yet the only Israel strategy is violence: if force doesn’t work, use more force!
Former US General McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, developed ‘insurgent math’, that is, every innocent civilian killed helped recruit roughly 10 revenge seeking terrorists. Israel has helped Hamas and other regional militant groups increase their numbers dramatically condemning its future generations to fight a never ending and probably unwinnable war.
There is no realistic post-war plan for Gaza. Reversion to a two state solution based on 1967 borders is now impossible. It would require Israel’s leaders to admit politically toxic failure. The generational hatred amongst Palestinians resulting from the brutal war is unlikely to be surmountable. Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich stated on 14 November 2023 that: “Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza.”
Hamas’s strategy is reminiscent of the Tet offensive during the Vietnam war. While initially gaining ground, the Vietcong ultimate lost on the battle field incurring heavy losses. But it was decisive in determining the course of the war. It demonstrated the poorly equipped Vietcong’s fighting abilities and resilience. It also turned public opinion in the US against the war leading to its gradual withdrawal which allowed North Vietnam to overrun the South in 1975. Time will tell whether the events of 7 October 2024 are similar.
© 2024 Satyajit Das All Rights Reserved
These pieces are co-published by the New Indian Express Online and NakedCapitalism.com.
