by Rajan Philips

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israeli academic, Oxford historian, and Foreign Minister of Israel in Ehud Barak’s government, has provided one of the more even handed assessments of the current situation in Israel. In an opinion piece, published in Canada’s Globe and Mail, and entitled, “The destructive hubris of Benjamin Netanyahu,” Dr. Ben-Ami writes that “Mr. Netanyahu’s hubris met its nemesis in the form of Hamas’s brutality.” One cannot separate Mr. Netanyahu’s self-serving intransigence towards the Palestinians throughout his time in office as Prime Minister, from the biggest attack on Israel in 50 years that was launched by Hamas last Saturday, October 7. It was a day after the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war against Isarel that was started with some surprise by Egypt and Syria.

There are comparisons being made between the two clashes 50 years apart. Comparisons range from historical symbolism to contextual differences to geopolitical fallouts. John Rapley, Political Economist, Cambridge, has noted that while the 1973 war transformed the global economy by creating the petroleum crisis, the current war is unlikely to have similarly far reaching impacts. The embargo on oil shipment (from the Middle East to the US), imposed by the Arab countries in retaliation to US support of Israel, argues Prof. Rapley, set off a series of events that changed the world economic order.

While the end of the Bretton Wood system of fixed exchange rates had already begun, the petroleum crisis accelerated the end of postwar prosperity in the west, triggered the new phenomenon of stagflation, and led to the start of the war on inflation by Central Banks. The world economy is now different, far more widespread and diverse, and far less dependent on oil.

The current skirmish will have its economic fallout with oil price increases but nowhere near the crisis of the 1970s, unless the situation escalates into a full-scale conflict between Israel and Iran. While Iran is widely suspected in the west to be the hidden hand behind Hamas’s incursion into Israel, there is also general acknowledgment that there is no evidence of Iran’s involvement. And the US that has already declared its solidarity with Israel and is escalating its aircraft carrier presence in the region while sending ammunition to Israel, will also likely be a deterrent against any regional escalation of the crisis.

Aftermaths of 1973

The west’s declining dependence on Middle Eastern oil may also have been a factor in the Palestinian problem becoming a lesser concern in the foreign policy considerations of the west in general, and particularly in the US. But there have been other and more significant developments that have pushed the Palestinian question to the back-burner. The experience of the 1973 war led to Israel and Arab countries working towards bilateral rapprochements and the pursuit of a parallel peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The linkage between Palestinian liberation and Arab leadership was beginning to get attenuated, if not totally severed.

The 1978/79 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, although controversial and divisive, significantly changed the course of Middle Eastern politics. The Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 and 1995 between Israel and the Palestinians were another landmark achievement even though they were frustrated from reaching the elusive final settlement. Even the gains of the Peace Accords, the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority and limited Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were frustrated from reaching their full potentials.

There was also opposition to the Oslo Accords among both the Palestinians and the Israelis. The redoubtable Ishrak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the Oslo Accords with PLO’s Yasser Arafat, paid with his life for pursuing peace, gunned down by a right-wing lunatic. From a Palestinian standpoint, the great Edward Said pungently described the Oslo Accords as “Palestinian Versailles.”

The disagreements over the Peace Accords gave the new Palestinian militants, especially Hamas, considerable advantage over the old Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which came to be identified as a corrupt and upstart establishment. On the Israeli side, the right-wing forces were on the ascent and during Benjamin Netanyahu’s long spell as Prime Minister, even the paltry Oslo gains were not only stymied, but also reversed.

The unfolding tragedy was given a farcical fillip when Donald Trump became US President while Netanyahu was at the height of his powers as Israeli Prime Minister. Between them, they ignored the Palestinians, symbolically and substantively, and set about cultivating bilateral agreements between Arab countries and Israel for ultimately profiting business interests.

The famous or infamous Abraham Accords, usually credited to Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jarred Kushner, became the new framework for Arab-Israeli normalization while excluding the Palestinians. In September 2020, two months before Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in the US presidential elections, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became the first Arab countries to formally recognize Israel’s sovereignty and open diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Morocco and Sudan followed while Trump was still in office after the defeat and was busy plotting the January 6 uprising.

Warnings Ignored

The new Biden Administration continued the initiative, but chose to jettison the title “Abraham Accords” and use “normalization agreements” instead. The State Department also made it clear that Arab-Israeli normalization is “not a substitute for Israeli-Palestinian peace,” and expressed the hope that the new normalization agreements will “contribute to tangible progress towards the goal of advancing a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” But all hopes were dashed when Netanyahu returned as Prime Minister in December 2022 (after being out of office from June 2021) and cobbled together the most right-wing and incompetent government in Israel’s history.

Netanyahu’s return to power has been possible only because of the concessions he made to right-wing fringe parties, and satisfying his new coalition partners has come at the heavy price of alienating the Palestinians and aggravating their conditions in the West Bank and in Gaza. In addition to allowing Jewish takeover of Palestinian lands and the spread of illegal Jewish settlements, the Netanyahu government also provoked the Palestinians by infringing sacred Muslim areas within Jerusalem.

All the while, Mr. Netanyahu was trying to expand the Abraham Accords with far flung countries like Indonesia, Niger, Mauritania, and Somalia, in addition to finalizing the more prized normalization with Saudi Arabia next door. And he kept ignoring warnings from the Americans and Saudis, even when they came jointly from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farham.

In June of this year, the US Secretary of State travelled to Saudi Arabia for bilateral discussions on what a New York Times report called a “smorgasbord of issues: Iran, Sudan, the Islamic State, regional infrastructure, clean energy and the potential normalization of Saudi-Israel relations.” The larger purpose, of course, was to stem Saudi Arabia from tilting too much towards China and Russia.

Later in June, Mr. Blinken and Prince Farham participated at a Council on Foreign Relations event in New York. As reported by CNN, both men stressed that the expansion of Arab Israeli normalization will not be possible in a climate of rising Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Mr. Blinken said that he had raised this issue in conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Eli Cohen. For his part, the Saudi Foreign Minister added that while normalization would in the broader interest of the region, the benefits would be limited if the challenge of “finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people” were not addressed at the same time.

Whether these warnings were not strong enough, or whether the Netanyahu government would not have heeded them anyway, no one foresaw that they would come true so quickly and with such ferocity. The Netanyahu government is already under fire for the massive intelligence failure that left the government and the military totally clueless about what Hamas must have been planning for quite some time and what it would all of a sudden unleash.

The circumstances of Netanyahu’s return to power and his efforts to muzzle the judiciary have divided the country through the middle, and the attack on Israel by Hamas may have unified the country behind its now beleaguered Prime Minister. The government has formally declared war on Hamas, and has promised to take “significant military steps” to destroy the “military and governing capabilities” of Hamas, which according to Mr. Netanyahu will prevent Hamas from “threatening Israelis for many years.”

The punishment of Hamas will continue until there is nothing left to punish, or the punishment extends too long and leads to too much suffering to test the sensibilities of proportionality. Whether Hamas deserves the punishment it is getting is a moot question because deserving has nothing to do with this. It was going to get punished anyway, and Hamas would have had no illusions about escaping punishment when it embarked on its biggest and most horrific incursion in its 45 year history.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government will have their own problems. Their governing mandate will now be limited to punishing Hamas. Beyond that, they will be under intense scrutiny for any and all of their actions. That in itself could be an opening for a new phase in the tortuous history of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

World Reactions

According to an analysis of “International Reactions to the Hamas Attack on Israel,” undertaken by researchers at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (see map on this page), about 100 countries have reacted to the unfolding situation in Israel and in Gaza. Forty four countries are said to have condemned Hamas, while most of the Arab countries have blamed Israel for the attacks. Most of Africa has not expressed a public position, while China and a number of ASEAN countries in Asia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, Russia in Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Mexico and Chile in the Americas, are condemning all violence.

India has joined the ranks of the west supporting Israel, along with Brazil and Argentina, exposing new cleavages among the BRICS countries. Of the original BRICS members, Brazil and India are supporting Israel, while Russia, China and South Africa are grouped against all violence. As the Washington Institute’s map shows, world reactions are literally all over the map, and there is no single group of countries that can claim to speak for the ‘world,’ let alone act on behalf of the world.

The west’s rhetoric of speaking for the world is practically limited to NATO countries, which are now more than occasionally joined by India as part of its ‘all-aligned’ approach to international affairs. The expression of solidarity with Israel is meaningless in practical terms because there is no country threatening war against Israel, and there is no country that can stop Israel from pulverizing Gaza (40 km by 10 km land-strip habitat for two million Palestinians) for the sake of punishing Hamas.