Why this Middle East conflict poses a danger like no other

The question is whether the muddle of geopolitical players – Israel, an internally divided US and Europe, an affronted Arab world, and a cynical Iran, Russia and China – can somehow steer this crisis away from what many are calling “an abyss”.

‘Darkest hour’

The prospects look dim. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the moment as the country’s “darkest hour”. Its people are still reeling from the Hamas cross-border raids that killed whose savagery, which took 1400 lives, was almost incomprehensible.

Some 360,000 Israeli reservists, in a country of 9.4 million people, have been called up. Armour is massed on the border of Gaza. Air strikes are pounding the 365 square kilometre strip, and almost 3800 Palestinians have already died.

More than 200 Israeli hostages, including children and the elderly, are incarcerated somewhere in Gaza. They, like the 2.3 million Palestinians who live there, would suffer from the critical lack of water, food, fuel and medicines.

Meanwhile, daily skirmishes – involving missiles, artillery and even human incursions – are taking place on the Israel-Lebanon border. This is the work of Iran-backed Hezbollah, which has an arsenal of 100,000 missiles and is threatening an armed response to any Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Lebanon could become an involuntary party to this conflict, and the US, Britain, Germany and Australia have already warned their citizens to get out while they can.

Iran has issued daily warnings of “pre-emption” and of the conflict’s “probable” or even “unavoidable” spread “to other fronts”.

Europe has already suffered its first Islamist terrorist attack since the crisis began, with two Swedish football fans shot dead in Brussels. Antisemitic incidents have surged. Pro-Palestinian rallies in London and European capitals have led to bans in some countries.

The US has dispatched a second aircraft carrier group to the region, joining the one that is already there on a now-extended mission. The White House called this “deterrence”.

Anti-Israel, anti-US, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have occurred in cities in the West and across the Middle East, including in moderate Muslim countries such as Morocco, Turkey and Jordan.

“I came to protest here because America is supporting Israel,” a Palestinian demonstrator in Beirut told the al-Jazeera news network. “We are here for yesterday [the hospital attack], but also for the years before,” said another.

The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation’s ministerial summit in Saudi Arabia issued an unrestrained condemnation of Israel, underscoring how quickly a recent diplomatic thaw with Tel Aviv has now iced over.

The UN Security Council, on which the permanent members, the US, Russia and China have a veto, has failed to issue its typical, consensual lament following the explosion in Israeli-Palestine conflict. Washington vetoed a bid by Moscow and Beijing to take a perceived, higher, moral ground.

This time it’s different?

There are few grounds for optimism. The least bleak prognosis stems from the observation that Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah have marched to the precipice, and sometimes over its edge, so many times before.

“There have been four wars between Israel and Hamas since the group violently took over the territory in 2007, each one ending with a return to the untenable status quo,” the Financial Times quoted Lebanese-born, US-based author Kim Ghattas as saying.

But Netanyahu, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Israeli commentators have all been explicit that this time is different.

The civilian fatalities on both sides are already far higher than from previous battles. And Israel’s raw shock is so profound that Biden felt compelled to publicly urge Netanyahu not to repeat the mistakes of America’s emotion-charged but ultimately unfruitful response to the 9/11 attacks.

The next stage of the war “might be something different”, warned Lt Colonel Richard Hecht, the Israeli Defence Forces spokesman. “We have to break off from the old Gaza tit-for-tat. … It is going to take longer, and it’s going to look totally different,” he said.

Netanyahu on Thursday also predicted “a long war”. “I’ve never seen the people of Israel as united,” he told reporters.

One of those people, retired brigadier general Israela Oron, told Sky News that while she was worried about what might come next, the objective was clear.

“We should not forget that the purpose of this operation in Gaza of the IDF is so that Hamas no longer rules Gaza,” she said.

The IDF’s task is daunting. Hamas fighters will hide in the hundreds of kilometres of reinforced tunnels known as “the Gaza Metro”. The hostages will be in peril – and their loss would in turn imperil Netanyahu’s position as prime minister. Israeli military casualties could be high, and Palestinian civilian deaths will be even higher.

Wedge geopolitics

If there is a Gaza invasion, Hezbollah could attack in the north. The sheer quantity of rockets it has, if launched en masse, might potentially puncture Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield. There could be more Israeli deaths, and its military forces would be fighting on two fronts.

“Hezbollah will pay no attention to threats from anyone against it entering the war; it will ignore warnings to stay out of it,” Ahmed Abdul-Hadi, head of Hamas’ Beirut political bureau, told Politico this week.

“The timing of when Hezbollah wants to enter the war or not will relate to Israeli escalation and incidents on the ground, and especially if Israel tries to enter Gaza on the ground,” Politico quoted him as saying.

The Iranians would also offer tacit support – money, weapons, intelligence, cyberattacks. Tehran will back that with its political rhetoric, aimed at further isolating Israel and alienating most of the Middle East from Washington and the West.

That effort may be working. Even Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who detests Hamas, is offering the Palestinians an unusually strong show of support – though falling short of letting a destabilising flow of Gazan refugees into his territory.

It’s also backed by Russia, whose emerging “alignment” with Iran is “a significant development in the context of great power competition”, says Manuel Trajtenberg, director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel.

The fresh crisis represents “a reconfiguring of the Middle East as part of that much wider global geopolitical strategy”, Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted Trajtenberg as saying.

The US bind

The US will be in a bind. Biden has to support Israel, even during a potential brutal and law-breaking plunge into Gaza. But he has to prevent Iran from succeeding in this wedge geopolitics.

“Whatever his faults, Biden does have diplomatic skills, as shown by his ability to maintain the coalition supporting Ukraine,” Kings College London professor Lawrence Freedman wrote on a blog post this week.

“To talk with Arab leaders in a constructive way, he may need to distance himself more from Israel’s current tactics, and he needs a possible plan around which to structure his conversations.”

Neither of those challenges will be easy. Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says Biden would have to overcome both Middle Eastern reservations and domestic political divisions.

“For the last three presidential administrations the United States has signalled in every possible way that we are walking away from the Middle East,” she told Britain’s Henry Jackson Society.

“That is the perception in the region – in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, but most importantly in Iran. They may be slightly wrong but they aren’t completely wrong.”

At home, Biden is hemmed in by divisions between the centrist and liberal factions of his Democratic Party, and he faces sniping from both hawkish and isolationist Republicans.

“I am very nervous of the staying power of the President of the United States, not because of where his heart is but because of where the politics are,” Pletka says.

No one wants Gaza

As for coming up with a plan, it is hard to restart talks on two-state solutions, or a new regime to replace Hamas in Gaza, until it’s clear how Israel intends to proceed militarily.

Israel probably doesn’t want to occupy Gaza, but neither does anybody else. Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority – none want to do Israel’s bidding. And no matter what administration Israel and the US install in a post-Hamas Gaza, few Palestinians, or Arabs generally, will offer it legitimacy or authority.

Even if Israel eliminates Hamas, it will leave a battered, traumatised population behind – hardly a bastion of security for the Israeli state.

“[There’s] no work. No future. No hope. Life and death is the same,” Gaza-based journalist Samy Zyara told Sky News. “This [war] is the natural result of the pressure Israel has put the Palestinians under.”

American author Ghattas, unsurprisingly, is pessimistic: “The lesson of the past four decades is also that every attempt to wipe out Palestinian armed groups has only produced more extreme iterations and worse conundrums.”

It’s hard to see this conflict ending in anything other than a fresh Israel-Palestine stalemate, but with the already-shaky, Western-led geopolitical order rattled even further.

Former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind told the Henry Jackson Society the only option was for a new dialogue, despite decades of failure.

He was even slightly optimistic, in his own English, ambivalent way: “As [former Israeli prime minister] Shimon Peres once told me: ‘In Israel, miracles take longer’.”