Palestinians warm by the fire in the rubble of destroyed buildings in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 16, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The story so far:

Saudi Arabia hosted a summit of leaders from Arab and Islamic countries last week to discuss the Palestine question. The summit demanded an immediate end to Israel’s military aggression on Gaza and Lebanon.

What did leaders say?

In their closing statement, the leaders condemned the Israeli military’s “shocking and horrific crimes”, its “crime of genocide”, and “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, and called for an “independent, credible” international committee to investigate these crimes. It urged for measures to end the Israeli occupation and “establish an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the lines of June 4, 1967, with occupied Al-Quds [Jerusalem] as its capital, based on the two-state solution, and in accordance with the approved references and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002.”

What is the significance of the summit?

In recent years, Arab countries had shown a willingness to improve or even normalise ties with Israel bypassing the Palestine question, in violation of the spirit of the Arab Peace Initiative, which promised recognition to Israel in return for the creation of a Palestine state. In 2020, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalised ties with Israel in an agreement called the Abraham Accords. In the past, Arab-Israel normalisation — Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 — came with some Israeli compromises. Israel signed the Framework for Peace in the Middle East with Egypt in 1979 (following the Camp David Agreement), agreeing to establish an autonomous Palestinian self-governing authority in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the Israel-Jordan agreement (the Wadi Araba Treaty) following the 1993 Oslo Agreement, which laid the foundations of the Palestine National Authority.

But when the Abraham Accords were signed, the Palestinians got nothing. After the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza (and the West Bank), Arabs condemned the Israeli actions but stopped short of provoking the Jewish state. However, their unease and anger over the war Israel was carrying out were on display. In the Riyadh summit, they came together and expressed their collective anger and sent a message to both Israel and the U.S. that resolving the Palestine question is key to peace in West Asia.

Where do Saudi-Israel ties stand?

In September 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, and Prime Minister, said the kingdom was in an advanced stage of finalising a normalisation agreement with Israel. For both the U.S. and Israel, an agreement with Saudi Arabia was the logical next step of the normalisation process. Arab countries were also increasingly wary of Iran and they seemed ready to bolster ties with Israel and build a joint defensive shield against potential Iranian threats. Then came the October 7 attack, and Israel’s war on Gaza.  Israel’s indiscriminate use of power, which has destroyed much of Gaza, has triggered strong anti-Israel sentiments in the Arab Street. Saudi Arabia and the UAE see the Hamas brand of political Islam as a threat to their monarchical systems. But they cannot ignore the mood in the Arab Street and West Asia, which is predominantly anti-Israel and pro-Palestine. A few months after the war, the Saudis said any future agreement with Israel should be linked to resolving the Palestine issue.

On September 18, Crown Prince Mohammed said, “The kingdom will not cease its tireless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and we affirm that the kingdom will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without one.” At the opening of the Riyadh summit, MBS, as Prince Mohammed is popularly known, said Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza, in his harshest criticism of the war. This points to a steady deterioration in Saudi-Israel ties over the past year.

Will the Arabs join the war?

Very unlikely. The last time an Arab country attacked Israel was in 1973 when Egypt, along with Syria, launched a surprise offensive in Sinai and Golan, Egyptian and Syrian territories, respectively, that were captured by Israel in 1967. Egypt launched the attack to get its territory back, not for the Palestinians. Ever since, peace between Israel and Arab states prevailed, irrespective of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories. That status quo is unlikely to change as no Arab country has the stomach to go to war against Israel. But before the October 7 attack, Arabs were moving closer to formalising their relationship with the Jewish state — that push has now been derailed. Now, even the UAE, which had close ties with Israel, says it “is not ready to support the day after the war in Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state”. Arab countries have also entered into a detente with Iran, bringing their decades-long rivalry with the Shia state to a tactical halt.

This signals a subtle realignment in West Asia’s strategic landscape. Before October 7, the Gulf Arabs and Iran were at loggerheads with each other. The U.S. wanted to bring Israel and the Gulf Arabs, the two pillars of its West Asia policy, closer to each other. Israel had proposed a joint defensive alliance against Iran, with America’s blessing. The Palestine issue had been pushed to the sidelines of the region. Now, the Palestine issue is back at the centre. Iran and the Arabs have learned to co-exist, at least for now. And the Arab-Israel normalisation process has been shelved.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine in October 2023, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan wrote, “…Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades… The Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.” A few days after the piece was sent to press, on October 7, Hamas launched its deadliest attack in Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking some 250 people hostage, triggering the latest spell of war in the Israel-Palestine conflict. A year later, West Asia (or the Middle East, as Mr. Sullivan calls it) is deadlier today than it has been in decades.

Mr. Sullivan’s October 2023 prognosis was not entirely unfounded if the region is seen from an American perspective. The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 by Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, announced a new age of Arab-Israel partnership. Saudi Arabia was in an advanced stage of normalising ties with Israel, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself put it. At the G20 Summit in Delhi in September 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden announced an ambitious economic corridor that sought to connect India’s western coast to Europe through the Persian Gulf, Jordan, and Israel. But what Mr. Sullivan, the Arabs, and the Israelis overlooked was the Palestine question.

Two narratives

Israel believed that it had established a new status quo — occupation without consequences. The Arabs believed that the Palestine issue had lost its geopolitical currency and that they could go ahead with formalising their decades-long back-room relationship with Israel. The U.S. wanted to bring the Sunni Arabs and the Israelis, two pillars of its West Asia strategy, closer in its bid to reshape West Asia and isolate Iran. But by carrying out a murderous attack in Israel, Hamas not only torpedoed this status quo, but also triggered a chain of events that led to a wider regional conflict, reinforcing the old argument that there will not be peace and stability in West Asia unless the Palestine question is addressed.

But Israel has a different narrative. It has always sought to delink Palestinian militarism from its occupation of the Palestinian territories. Before October 7, Israel had been treating Palestinian violence as a security nuisance. But after the Hamas attack, the first large-scale one in Israel proper since 1948, the narrative shifted. Now, Israel is fighting an “existential war” against terror. Israel marched to Gaza with fire and fury. Over the past 12 months, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have killed more than 41,000 Palestinians (more than 110 every day) and injured nearly 1,00,000 Palestinians. Nearly the whole population of Gaza (2.3 million) has been displaced.

Three-tier war

As the onslaught on Gaza began, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia group, opened a “support front” in Israel’s north. Israel expanded the war, defying pressure from the U.S., by doubling down on its assault on Hezbollah and taking the war to Iran by attacking its embassy complex in Damascus. In retaliation, Iran launched direct attacks against Israel. Now, Israel is fighting a three-tier regional war in West Asia.

Israel has different objectives at each tier, which collectively make for its strategy to alter the balance of power in West Asia to further its advantage. At the bottom tier, Israel went to Gaza with two declared objectives — to destroy Hamas and secure the release of hostages. In the middle, it wants to push Hezbollah from the border region of Lebanon and stop the Shia militia from launching rockets into Israel so that the displaced residents of the Upper Galilee region can return to their homes. At the top, it wants to weaken Iran, its main regional rival. Israel sees the conflict, as the former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett put it, as a war against a rival octopus. Iran is the head of the octopus and the militias (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Hashad al-Shabi, etc.) are the tentacles. In the three-tier war, Israel wants to destroy or degrade the tentacles and weaken the octopus and thereby reshape West Asia. Is this an achievable goal?

After 12 months of fighting in Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007 and has been besieged by Israel since October 7, 2023, Israel is yet to meet its objectives in the 365 sq. km enclave, sandwiched between the Mediterranean Sea and Israel proper. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to obliterate Hamas, but now even the IDF says this is not an achievable objective. More than 100 hostages, many of them believed to be dead, are still in Hamas’s captivity. Hezbollah says it will not stop firing rockets into Israel unless Israel ceases fire in Gaza. Israel cannot do this unless it meets its goals in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu chose to expand the war to Lebanon not because he is achieveing his objectives, but because he is far from doing so. Granted that Israel’s back-to-back attacks on Hezbollah, including its killing of Hassan Nasrallah, perhaps the second most influential figure in Iran’s axis after Ayatollah Khamenei, was a huge setback for both Hezbollah and Iran. When Hezbollah was in shock after the killing of its leader, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Here, Israel faces two questions. First, will the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership help Israel finish the war in Gaza? Second, will the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership help Israel defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon? The answer to the first question is an outright no. The second question will be answered in the coming weeks, months, or years.

History suggests decapitation hardly works in destroying or deterring militias. Nasrallah took over Hezbollah after Israel killed the group’s co-founder, Abbas al-Musawi. That did not stop Hezbollah from becoming what it is today: the most powerful non-state militia in the region. Israel killed two of Hamas’s founding leaders in 2004. But that did not stop Hamas from driving the Israelis out of the enclave in 2005, capturing the territory in 2007, and carrying out the cross-border attack on October 7 last year. If Israel has not destroyed Hamas in the besieged Gaza in 12 months, how is it going to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets from Lebanon? After Nasrallah was killed, Hezbollah has launched hundreds of rockets into Israel.

The Iran question

This takes us to the third problem: Iran. The IDF has great firepower. Israel has proved in the past that it can carry out pinpointed attacks inside Iran, which shows the deep penetration of its intelligence in the Islamic Republic. Israel is set to carry out a decisive attack in Iran, in retaliation for the October 1 ballistic missile attacks by the Iranians. But will that deter Iran from launching another attack or supporting the axis? If it doesn’t, what Israel, Iran, and the region as a whole will get is a shooting match between the two most powerful actors of West Asia. If Iran’s already porous deterrence is weakened further in the shooting match, there is a high possibility that Iran will change its nuclear doctrine. Israel does not have a clear endgame vis-à-vis Iran, unless there is a regime change in Tehran.

This is a conflict loop where no side is deterring its rival. With no way to break out of the loop, Israel chose to climb up the escalation ladder. To dial down the heat in the region, there has to first be a ceasefire in Gaza. For long-term stability, the Palestine question needs to be addressed. Israel is ready for neither at this point. Instead, it is seeking to reshape West Asia in its favour. The last time a country tried to do so was the U.S. And the world’s most powerful nation failed.

stanly.johny@thehindu.co.in