One of my childhood friends works in Bahrain. He recently gave me a call. He was particularly apprehensive about the continuing Israel-Hamas conflict. Reasonably so, as he worries that the momentum may gradually spread to other countries, especially those in the Middle East, and cause a tremendous tremor. And a lot of other economic, industrial, strategic, and geopolitical problems might be linked to it to escalate the conflict. This is what transpired during World War II.
The likelihood that Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Turkey, and some other nations may soon become embroiled in this ongoing conflict in one way or another is already sufficiently high. In any event, the US is already involved. Additionally, given that the majority of nations in the world have chosen sides, the situation could get worse. Didn’t Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, predict a “long and difficult war” on October 9?
Incidentally, the current conflict broke out just one day after the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War, which was fought from October 6 to 25, 1973, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. And a lot of people are noticing startling parallels between the current situation and the Yom Kippur War. On Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday that fell on the tenth day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan that year, the Arab coalition collectively launched a surprise attack against Israel, starting the war.
It had broad ramifications. The early successes in the 1973 conflict gave the Arab world a psychological sense of justification. Other repercussions of the war linger today. The Yom Kippur War is referred to by Abraham Rabinovich, author of “The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East,” as both “the greatest military victory Israel has ever had” and “the most traumatic event in Israel’s history.” Israel suf- fered a sense of security loss following the Yom Kippur War that it has never fully recovered from.
According to Boaz Atzili, a political scientist at American University’s School of International Service, “it broke Israel’s image of invincibility and made Israel more humble.” And these subse- quently paved the path for the Israel- Palestine peace process. Will this present conflict yield significance similar to the Yom Kippur War?
The 1973 war marked a shift in Israel’s domestic politics, too. Prime Minister Golda Meir of the Labour Party resigned after the Yom Kippur War, and a right-wing government, controlled by Likud (the party presently led by the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), was elected for the first time. Can Israeli politics, which appear to be in a state of stagnation, undergo a tectonic change as a result of this ongoing war? Will Netanyahu’s political future, which otherwise seems bleak, be improved by this “long and difficult war”?
Or is it the other way around, perhaps? This time, as the price for his prime ministership, Netanyahu had granted the right-wing extremist members of his coalition partners important positions. The three extreme parties in the coalition at the time were characterised as collectively reflecting “a racist, Jewish supremacist, anti-Arab, and homophobic view” by American Middle East analyst, author, and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Aaron David Miller. Instead, will they benefit politically from this war?
From a larger perspective, the stability of the entire region has been tee- tering for a while. King Abdullah II of Jordan famously said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2010 that “Jerusalem is a time bomb that I fear is just waiting to go off.” And as one might imagine, by “Jerusalem,” he might have meant the conflict involving the entire region. So, in any event, there was a ticking time bomb there.
And it was generally known to everyone in the world. Overall, there was sufficient time for the world’s powerful countries and their leaders to attempt mediating a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, bring about the “two-state solution,” and permanently defuse the “time bomb.” A two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian issue, which envisaged an independent state of Palestine living alongside the state of Israel west of the Jordan River, was first proposed 86 years ago, but the border between the two states is still up for debate and negotiation. Despite some attempts, overall a startling degree of reluctance was shown in mediating the negotitions.
Seventy-five years have passed since independent Israel was established. It has also been fifty years since the Yom Kippur War. In fact, a total of six significant Arab-Israeli wars involving Israeli forces and various Arab forces took place in 1948-1949, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006, and two Intifadas occurred during 1987-1993 and 2000-2005. And it was clearly known around the world that some terrorist groups were seizing power in some places. However, millions of people remained confined in the largest open-air prison in the world, in a hopelessly helpless situation.
The best approach to combating terrorism was to introduce democracy. But, overall, the world continued to stay blind to one of the most severe global problems, pretending as though the deadly status quo between Israel and Palestine would last forever as a peaceful arrangement. Unfortu- nately, some of the powerful global leaders did not even stop there. When UNESCO decided to accept Palestine as a full member in 2011, the US shut off funding to UNSECO in retaliation. It was Barack Obama’s America.
Subsequently, Donald Trump’s America and its ally Israel officially quit UNESCO on the grounds that it promotes an anti-Israel bias. Thus, it was across political regimes. And in December 2017, Trump announced that the American embassy would be relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and formally recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. These undoubtedly didn’t even contribute to the sta- tus quo in Israel-Palestine relations. Then, Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties didn’t help the situation either. The UN, however, insisted that a two-state solution should be pursued, but history has repeatedly shown that the UN lacks both teeth and claws, which is again clear during the ongoing conflict.
Indeed, Israel has recently gotten closer to some Arab nations. First, it was through the signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020, the bilateral agreements on normalising Israel’s relations with the UAE and Bahrain that were mediated by the US. The US initiative to establish a normalisation agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia has gained momentum in recent months.
The Saudi-Israeli agreement would fundamentally alter Middle Eastern geopolitics, for sure. Of course, normalising relations with Saudi Arabia would be advantageous for Israel, and Saudi Arabia would gain from a stronger alliance with the US in several crucial areas. But this agreement may also have significant ramifications for the Palestinian national movement’s future as well as China’s involvement in the Middle East in general, as many observers perceive. Was the attack by Hamas on Israel intended to under- mine the potential normalisation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel?
Whatever the case, the situation in the Middle East is extremely com- plex. The misery is being experienced by the millions of ordinary people in Gaza and Israel. Perhaps one of the greatest humanitarian calamities of the twenty-first century is developing. We desperately need urgent solutions. And like my friend in Bahrain, let’s cross our fingers in the hope that it’s not the time bomb explosion with its full devastating potential. We’ve already experienced the pandemic of the century; we don’t want to see a world war in our lifetime.
(The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.)