We were due to get a video message from Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, a Palestinian and an Israeli who work together for peace after both losing relatives in the conflict — Sarah’s brother died of injuries sustained in Israeli custody and Inon’s parents were killed by Hamas on 7 October. But the computer failed. A few men stared at a laptop, balefully tapping a key, until a young, bearded bloke wearing a yarmulke took the mike: “I’m Hoff. I’m the tech guy. I’m an introvert, and not very good at public speaking,” He grinned shyly: “I’m also not a very good tech guy.”

But it was just a glitch, and soon the face of a handsome man in his early fifties, with wiry grey hair, filled the large screen at the end of the room. Mo Husseini, a Palestinian-American, was speaking to Friends of Standing Together, the Melbourne branch of an organisation of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis dedicated to — wait for it — peace in the Middle East.

Founded in 2015, Standing Together stands for an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories, peace and independence for both peoples, and “full equality for everyone in this land.” It has 7000 members in Israel, about two-thirds of them Jewish, a third Arab. It’s a small number but membership has more than doubled since October 2023. (It also has 250,000 followers on social media.) Standing Together has collected food and clothing for Gaza residents and protected food trucks entering Gaza from attacks by far-right Israeli groups. Israeli novelist David Grossman,  who has written powerfully about the conflict, has spoken at Standing Together rallies.

Husseini, who lives in Washington State, is a filmmaker, novelist and member of the national launch committee for Friends of Standing Together USA. A piece he published in May 2024, “50 Completely True Things,” got more than half a million reads, perhaps because he found a fresh and funny and heartfelt way to write about a conflict that has nothing fresh or funny about it. Husseini grounds his writing not in the region’s endlessly litigated history and politics but in a principle. Two peoples live on this land and both have a right to live in peace and dignity. Start there.

But starting there is difficult, a point Husseini made right off the bat when he thanked people for coming. “I don’t say that as a pleasantry, I mean it. Being involved with Standing Together when the world is rewarding people for picking a side, for the comfort of tribe, for the dopamine hit of certainty, is a choice that carries a cost,” one that was rarely acknowledged.

Husseini spoke for half an hour without notes and in the strange intimacy of Zoom, which shows every twitching eyebrow or thought crossing a face. Noticing a young boy in the front row, he apologised in advance for a few “swears.” I sensed a man not convinced of his own wisdom but feeling his way, through speech, towards his version of the truth.

“I am a Palestinian,” he began. “I am not the Palestinian. I do not speak for any Palestinians. I can barely speak for myself most days.”

His family, carried across borders “by the shifting winds of history,” migrated from Palestine to Kuwait, where Husseini grew up, then to the United States. Husseini always felt he was from somewhere else, “somewhere you can’t go back to.” Belonging was a kitchen, food, a certain accent, the way his mother said the word, “home.” “Being Palestinian is frankly a shitty gig.” But “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I carry it with pride and love, and a ferocity that sometimes surprises me.”

What profoundly shaped his thought was living in America after 9/11. As a cultural Muslim, with a name that “sounds like the names of the people who flew the planes,” Husseini felt a relentless pressure to make himself understood to people who saw him as dangerous or didn’t see him at all. A pressure to show in every conversation that he was a moderate, to condemn al-Qaeda and bin Laden, to make a “performance of harmlessness that is hard to describe unless you have lived in it.”

It was hardly the worst thing in the world, Husseini said, and he wasn’t asking for sympathy.

Nevertheless, in the looks he got on planes and in theatres, in the random body searches that weren’t random, “I learnt in my body, in my heart, what it feels like when a whole society decides that who you are matters less than your category or tribe or religion… when you stop becoming a person and become the representative of a people.”

That lesson was why he became a writer, and why he joined Standing Together. Because, Husseini said, “that same machinery, that same impulse to condense an entire people into a single dangerous silhouette,” was now being applied to Jews.

He didn’t elaborate much on what he meant, but in a recent piece he wrote of “the way Zionist has become, in some corners, a synonym for Jew… the way criticism of Israeli policy slides, sometimes by accident and sometimes very much on purpose, into something older and uglier.” Speaking to Australians while the royal commission was hearing testimony about the shocking extent of antisemitism in this country, Husseini didn’t need to explain.

Husseini said his listeners often asked him a hard question: how could he as a Palestinian extend understanding to a people that was actively oppressing Palestinians? By talking about Jewish pain alongside Palestinian pain, was he not letting Israel off the hook?

The answer was easy, Husseini said. “I’m not both-sidesing this.” The power was not equal; occupier and occupied were not on the same moral plane. “My anger at what Israel is doing to Palestinians is not diminished by one single degree… I judge the occupation, the settlements, the bombing of hospitals, the taking of land and the uprooting of olive trees, the entire apparatus of domination that has made Palestinian life broadly unliveable for generations.”

But, he said, he refused to take the next step: “that because the Israeli government is doing these things, somehow every Israeli is complicit… somehow all Jewish people are guilty.” Because that was the step that had always been used against Palestinians.

“Activists really need to hear this,” he said. “The people who want you to flatten, who want you to say they are all the same, who want to treat everyone on the other side as a stand in for the worst of the other side. You are handing the Israeli right the narrative it needs: ‘See, they all hate us, there is no partner, the only option is more walls and more bombs.’

“You don’t defeat an unjust system by becoming its mirror image, you defeat injustice by becoming the thing that injustice says is impossible — people from both sides in the same rooms refusing to be what the system needs them to be.”

Lest anyone think his vitriol ran only one way, Husseini took “careful aim” at his own side, because “intellectual honesty is not a buffet where you get to skip issues you don’t like.” The Palestinian leadership’s “corruption, authoritarianism and factional cannibalism” had catastrophically failed its people for decades, Husseini said. Leaders had refused to accept imperfect peace deals that might have saved lives. The Hamas “cult of martyrdom” that “feeds children into a meat grinder and calls it resistance” had gotten the people of Gaza killed in catastrophic numbers.

But he was not here, Husseini said, to weigh Israeli failures against Palestinian failures, misery against misery, who had suffered more — “that exercise itself is the poison, the thing that keeps the conflict locked in place.”

Instead, the path forward required “everyone to look at their own house with the same ruthless clarity that they bring to looking at the other guy’s.” Until that happened, “we are not serious about peace, we are serious about being right — and being right has never in the history of any conflict saved a single life.”

Husseini turned to the role of story-telling, and of Jews, in his life. “Before I had a conversation with a Jewish person, I had lived in Jewish stories: books, films, arts, music. They all did something no political argument could have done. They let me feel in my body what it is like to carry a different people’s history. Not to agree with it but just to understand it.”

It was through stories that Husseini learnt that Jewish people were “not performing their fear. Their fear and trauma is real, it comes from somewhere ancient and it lives in their children in the same way my trauma lives in me. A good story makes flattening impossible… you cannot reduce them to a slogan. You know they are a person.” Even a paragraph that “captures someone mid-scroll” on their phone — “that crack is the beginning of something, everything that happens in rooms like this.”

Husseini took a few questions from the room, then left with an apology and a grin: his son’s last soccer game of the season was about to begin.

A young guitarist, Samantha Levy, stepped up to sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in Arabic — words she said she had learnt from a Palestinian man. An organiser, Abe Schwarz, closed the event by pointing out that Husseini had quoted a line from Anthem, another Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” He asked us to support a project to provide food to Palestinian families in the West Bank displaced by Israeli forces. And if people wanted to stick around, he said, Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian and Arab people would be meeting that afternoon in this room to talk about the conflict.

People milled around, moved by Husseini’s talk. I was, too, yet something in me resisted these sweet notes at the end. Were they a balm to try to soothe the unending bitterness of this conflict? We would leave, stirred, with Cohen’s “sacred chord” humming in our heads, when only darkness seemed to lie ahead.

Five days after October 7, 2023, Standing Together signed a statement made by twenty-nine Israeli civil society groups calling for negotiations with Hamas to free the hostages and opposing the war that was about to begin. Dozens of members left the organisation as a result, no doubt feeling its line was too soft given the barbarity of the attacks and the ongoing threat posed by Hamas. At that time the organisation and one of its leaders, Alon-Lee Green, were getting 2000 threatening messages a day, after right-wing groups published their addresses.

And when an Israeli military action freed four hostages in Gaza in 2024, Jewish and Arab leaders of Standing Together struggled to write a joint statement that struck the right balance of joy at their release with pain at the collateral loss of Palestinian life. The organisation’s rule that it presents one united position to the two communities can be hard to uphold.

While Standing Together locates itself proudly on the left, it has few friends among the global left that has so ardently embraced the Palestinian cause. The Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which since its founding in 2005 has sought to ostracise Israel in global forums, called Standing Together a “normalisation outfit that seeks to distract from and whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” Speaking on American campuses after 7 October, Alon-Lee Green and another Standing Together leader, Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had the bizarre experience of white student protestors wrapped in keffiyehs telling her she was normalising Israel, and telling him to go back to Poland.

I wondered whether Standing Together’s traditional leftist rhetoric of solidarity, justice and struggle would limit its ability to grow in a country that has shifted sharply to the right since the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. But it is not the only voice calling for a middle way.

On the Palestinian side I’m thinking of Ali Abu Awwad, who founded the Palestinian non-violence movement, Taghyeer (Change), and Samer Sinijlawi, president of the Jerusalem Development Fund. In the diaspora there are the British-Palestinian blogger John Aziz, and in the United States, Ihab Hassan and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.

None of these writers is blind to the torment of their people. They’ve lived it. Alkhatib has lost thirty relatives, many to Israeli airstrikes, in the war in Gaza. Awwad and Sinijlawi both spent more than four years in Israeli jails after taking part in the First Intifada. In 2000 Awwad was shot by an Israeli settler while changing a tyre in the West Bank; an Israeli soldier shot his brother dead at a checkpoint. Nevertheless, all three have chosen to work with Israelis in calling for what Sinijlawi, in one of the most moving recent articles I’ve read on the conflict, calls dignity for Palestinians based on security for Israelis.

Such voices exist on the Israeli side — probably more of them — but given how much their people are the underdogs in this conflict, the voices of these Palestinian writers leap off the page. They get a lot of contempt — John Aziz is regularly called an Uncle Tom — and are seen as naive dreamers at best, but they might be not only the bravest but the most practical people in the conflict. They work in the space between millennial fantasies on the right and left: of one supremacist Jewish state and the elimination of the Jewish state. They have their own dream, but they also have a strategy to achieve it, one that looks hopeless… and is the only hope.

Husseini said he wasn’t by nature an optimist. “I’ve spent years writing about a conflict that has not gotten better and in the past two and a half years has gotten unspeakably worse.” Yet he held onto the “stubborn, possibly irrational, delusional” idea that “two peoples have lived before on this land and can again.”

Change would come “person by person, grain of sand by grain of sand” until, when the diplomats finally met to negotiate a final outcome, they would find the foundation for peace already built beneath them. Hope was not a feeling but an action, Husseini said. “It’s rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it.”

We left feeling a sliver of that hope, not a lot but a sliver. I’ll go to another Friends of Standing Together event. Hope to see you there. •

Hiba Qasas from the Geneva-based Principles for Peace Foundation and Gil Murciano from the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies are speaking on the Roadmap to Peace in Sydney on 1 June, Canberra on 2 June and Melbourne on 4 June. Details: New Israel Fund.

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Yet within hours, any hope the precise decapitation strikes would limit the scope of the war was dashed. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones not only at Israel but also across the Gulf. Air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Missiles slammed into interceptors over Doha and Abu Dhabi. At Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar — the forward headquarters of US Central Command — personnel took shelter as interceptors streaked overhead. Air defences flashed into action at US bases at Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates and Ali Al Salem in Kuwait. Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia reported incoming drones. Near the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, naval forces were placed on heightened alert.

The Iranian response has had enormous ramifications for the Gulf, killing civilians, shuttering airports, threatening shipping and oil exports, and tarnishing the region’s image of stability and safety. An iconic hotel on the waterfront in Dubai caught fire after debris from an intercepted drone fell into its upper floors. Kuwaiti authorities reported damage near civilian airport facilities. According to news reports, several tankers have been struck near the Strait of Hormuz, prompting a spike in insurance premiums for shipping through the Gulf. Soon after the conflict erupted, oil futures jumped sharply as traders priced in the risk of sustained disruption to one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints.

Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime. Rather, they represent a strategy of horizontal escalation, a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration. Such a strategy allows a weaker combatant to alter the calculus of a more powerful foe. And it has worked in the past, to the detriment of the United States. In Vietnam and Serbia, US adversaries responded to overwhelming displays of American airpower with horizontal escalation, eventually leading to American defeat, in the former case, and, in the latter, frustrating US war aims and spurring the worst episode of ethnic cleansing in Europe since the second world war.

Decapitation strikes, in particular, create powerful incentives for horizontal escalation: when a regime survives the loss of its leader, it must demonstrate resilience quickly by widening the conflict. Although the United States has hugely battered Iran, it must reckon with the implications of Iran’s response. Otherwise, it will find itself losing control of the war it started.

Horizontal escalation occurs when a state widens the geographic and political scope of a conflict rather than intensifying it vertically in a single theatre. It is especially appealing as a strategy for the weaker parties in a military contest. Instead of trying to defeat a stronger adversary head-on, the weaker side multiplies arenas of risk — drawing additional states, economic sectors, and domestic publics into the remit of the conflict. Iran cannot defeat the United States or Israel in a conventional military contest. It does not need to. Its objective is to gain greater political leverage.

The strategy of horizontal escalation follows a recognisable pattern. First, Iran has demonstrated resilience. US decapitation strikes intended to paralyse the Iranian military. By launching large-scale retaliation within hours of losing the supreme leader and many senior commanders, Tehran signalled continuity of command and operational capacity.

Second, Iran has widened the conflict well beyond Iranian territory, effecting what scholars call “multiplication of exposure.” Rather than confining retaliation to just Israel, Iran struck or aimed at targets in at least nine countries, most hosting US forces: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Greece, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The message was unmistakable: those countries that host American forces would face severe consequences and the war Israel and the United States started will spread.

Third, Iran has politicised the conflict through its strikes. Its retaliation has resulted in the closure of airports, the burning of commercial property, the killing of foreign workers, and the disruption of energy and insurance markets. Gulf leaders have been forced to reassure foreign investors and tourists. The war has migrated into boardrooms and parliamentary chambers. In the United States, the widening scope of the war has alarmed members of Congress. Numerous actors have now entered the conflict, each pursuing distinct interests, none fully coordinated, and all capable of altering the trajectory of escalation beyond Washington’s control.

The final dimension of Iran’s strategy is time. The longer multiple states feel pressure, the more politics both within and among regional states can intensify the conflict. Without a version of NATO in the Middle East or a single American general effectively running the military operation for all the countries targeted by Iran, there is a high risk of wires getting crossed.

US officials have, for instance, floated the idea of stoking an ethnic rebellion in Kurdish parts of Iran to help target the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But that might provoke responses from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, countries that would not welcome a powerful Kurdish insurgency in the region. The recent downing of three US jets in a friendly-fire incident over Kuwait also illustrates the logistical and coordination problems that bedevil any attempt to fend off Iran’s escalation in the Gulf.

Iran’s foreign ministry reinforced this logic publicly, framing the missile barrages as legitimate responses against all “hostile forces” in the region. The phrasing has widened responsibility for the attack on Iran beyond Israel and the United States to encompass the broader US–aligned order in the Gulf. Although Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has apologised to Gulf neighbours for the attacks, the installation of a new supreme leader aligned closely with the Revolutionary Guard suggests such gestures are tactical rather than a signal Tehran intends to abandon its strategy of horizontal escalation.

Fundamentally, Iran’s horizontal escalation is a political strategy. It plays directly to the audience Iran seeks to persuade: the Muslim populations across the region that might not be ideologically aligned with Iran but are generally poorly disposed toward Israel.

Operation Epic Fury is certainly not the first time the United States has acted out of the belief that overwhelming airpower can compel rapid political collapse. The US war in Vietnam exposed the limits of this assumption.

By 1967, the United States had dropped three times more tonnage worth of bombs on North Vietnam than it had used in the second world war. Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in 1965, was designed to break Hanoi’s will and destroy its capacity to wage war. Washington possessed tremendous air superiority and apparent escalation dominance, meaning North Vietnam could not hope to match the United States blow for blow as Washington ramped up the conflict. By the northern autumn of 1967, US airpower had devastated the crucial communication, military, and industrial centres and arteries on which North Vietnamese military power was thought to rest.

But just a few months later, in January 1968, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched coordinated attacks on more than 100 cities and towns across South Vietnam. They breached the US embassy compound in Saigon. They fought for weeks in Hue. They struck provincial capitals simultaneously. Although the offensive was costly for communist forces, it shattered the perception that a South Vietnamese and American victory was near.

President Lyndon Johnson soon announced he would not seek re-election. Public confidence in the prosecution of the war eroded. The war’s political trajectory shifted, even as American firepower remained dominant.

The lesson was not that bombing failed tactically. It was that Hanoi escalated horizontally, widening the conflict beyond rural battlefields into South Vietnam’s cities and political nerve centres, transforming a military contest into nationwide political upheaval, and reshaping domestic calculations in Washington. In Vietnam, the United States never lost a battle — but it still lost a war.

Three decades later, NATO relied on a different theory of airpower in the Kosovo conflict. Operation Allied Force, in 1999 — originally planned as a three-day air campaign to hit fifty-one targets in and around the Serbian capital, Belgrade — emphasised precision strikes against Serbian military assets and leadership targets. Western leaders expected a swift, successful campaign. The regime would weaken, if not collapse. Bombs even fell on the residence of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Instead, Belgrade ordered 30,000 Serbian troops to sweep into Kosovo, forcing more than a million Kosovar Albanian civilians, half the province’s population, from the territory. That exodus strained European governments and tested the cohesion of the NATO alliance. The United States and NATO lacked the large tactical airpower, much less the ground forces, to put a stop to the devastating ethnic cleansing. For weeks, as Serbian forces drove civilians from Kosovo, NATO debated escalation options. It ultimately mobilised nearly 40,000 ground troops for a major offensive to take Kosovo. Only at this point — and only after 78 days of sustained crisis, diplomatic pressure from Russia (a long-standing Serbian ally), and the threat of NATO invasion — did Milosevic concede.

Kosovo ended successfully for NATO — but not quickly, and not just through the use of precision strikes. Political endurance and alliance management proved decisive. Across both cases — the mass bombardment of Vietnam and the precision strikes on Serbia — airpower shocked and disrupted, but it did not automatically determine political outcomes. Adversaries widened the conflict’s scope or prolonged it by adopting horizontal escalation. Iran now appears to be applying that lesson to the Gulf.

Iran’s retaliation has clear political objectives. First, Tehran wants to puncture perceptions of the Gulf’s invulnerability. Cities such as Dubai and Doha market themselves to the world as secure hubs of finance, tourism, and logistics. When missile alerts interrupt operations at Dubai International Airport — one of the busiest in the world — the reputational cost is far greater than whatever physical damage Iran inflicts. The reported deaths of foreign workers in the United Arab Emirates underscore that civilians are no longer safe in Gulf states. The spectacle of interceptors exploding in the skies above these entrepôts might make investors skittish.

Second, Iran has raised the political cost for Gulf countries of hosting US forces. By striking near American bases at Al Udeid, Al Dhafra, and Prince Sultan, Tehran signalled that alignment with Washington entails exposure to attack. Gulf leaders must balance alliance commitments against domestic and economic stability.

Third, Tehran is shaping a narrative about the regional order. By portraying its actions as resistance to a US–Israeli campaign aimed at regional dominance, Iran seeks to drive a wedge between the Gulf country leaders and their publics — a wedge that could grow depending on how long the conflict persists.

Fourth, Iran is leveraging economic chokepoints. Roughly a fifth of global oil shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz. Early shipping data suggests traffic through the strait has fallen by about 75 per cent since the war began. Even a partial form of lasting disruption — through missile strikes, naval incidents, or rising insurance costs — produces immediate global ripple effects, fuelling concerns about inflation and domestic political pressure in the United States and Europe. None of these objectives require battlefield victories. They just require Iran’s endurance.

Horizontal escalation is not simply about hitting a wider array of targets. Its deeper effect is to change how a foe perceives risks. In a short war, risk is measured in sorties and intercept rates. In a prolonged conflict, risks extend to the political sphere. A protracted conflict forces difficult choices.

If this war drags on, Gulf governments that have quietly expanded security cooperation with Israel might have to make that alignment more visible. That clarity is dangerous. Arab publics remain deeply opposed to Israel’s aggressive military posture in the region. The longer the conflict continues, the harder it becomes for rulers to sustain that partnership with Israel without sacrificing legitimacy at home. Horizontal escalation presses on the soft seams between governments and their societies.

A protracted war would also reshape American politics. A sudden decapitation strike can galvanise support behind the US president, at least temporarily — although polling suggests most Americans are already opposed to the war even just one week in. A grinding regional war marked by energy price spikes, US casualties, and uncertain objectives will cause disquiet at home. Sizable elements of President Donald Trump’s political coalition have been wary of Middle Eastern entanglements and have accused US leaders of simply following Israel’s lead. The longer US military operations continue, the more fractures could widen within Trump’s own base.

Transatlantic strains could follow. European governments are acutely exposed to energy volatility and migration pressures. If Washington escalates while European capitals want to rein in the conflict, the two sides could diverge as Europeans try to keep themselves at arm’s length from the war. As Kosovo demonstrated, alliance unity requires constant political management. The United States would find the challenges of sustained bombing immense if European states decided to constrain use of their territory for logistics and tanker refuelling flights. Britain is already uncomfortable about the long-standing policy of American military aircraft conducting operations from the British possession of Diego Garcia. In exchange for European support in its campaign against Iran, Washington might have to commit more to European military objectives in Ukraine — at the risk of further irking the president’s MAGA base.

Finally, prolonging the war multiplies asymmetric threats. An extended conflict in the Gulf would likely see the involvement of nonstate actors, especially if US ground forces got involved in even a limited fashion. New and existing militant groups seeking to exploit regional anger might target leaders visibly aligned with US operations. What began as interstate missile exchanges could evolve into a wider tableau of violence and upheaval.

If Iran’s strategy is to widen and politicise the conflict, the United States faces a choice. One path is doubling down: the United States could ramp up its airpower campaign by bringing additional air assets into the fight to suppress Iranian launch capabilities and create the conditions for extending aerial control over the skies and surveillance on the ground. As with the imposition of no-fly zones against Iraq in the 1990s, doubling down to re-establish escalation dominance and control can be tantamount to a strategy of permanent aggressive military containment and control over Iranian airspace, one that could last for years.

The adoption of precisely this extended aerial control and surveillance approach with Iraq in the 1990s only set the stage for the 2003 US ground invasion. Permanent aerial occupation does not lead to political control, and without greater political control, Iran will still continue to pose a plausible threat to US interests — especially since its nuclear program persists in some form or another. In this way, an ostensibly restrained policy could actually precipitate greater commitment.

The alternative is ending the military commitment: Washington could declare objectives have been “met” and stand down its tremendous air and naval forces assembled near Iran. In the short term, the Trump administration would face the intense political criticism that it might have left the job unfinished. This policy, however, would allow the administration to move on to other issues, such as addressing economic needs at home, and limit the political blowback of its decision to attack Iran.

Trump is thus on the horns of a dilemma, having to judge whether Washington should deal with short but limited political costs now or more protracted and more uncertain political costs later. There is no golden off-ramp, one that increases the political benefits for Washington. Every option now carries political costs and risks; the initial strike might have solved a tactical problem, but it created a strategic one. Given these realities, the wisest choice might well be for the United States to accept a limited loss now rather than risk compounding losses later.

The strikes that have killed Iran’s leadership demonstrated tactical mastery. Tactical mastery, however, is not strategy. Iran’s retaliation — geographically broad, economically disruptive, and politically calibrated — aims to reshape the conflict’s structure. By widening the theatre and prolonging the war, Tehran is shifting the contest from a battle of military capabilities to one of political endurance.

As in Vietnam, the United States might win most engagements. As in Serbia, it might ultimately prevail after sustained pressure. But in both cases, the decisive arena was not the initial shock of airpower. It was the politics of an expanding war.

The decisive phase of this war began not with the first strike but with the regional crisis that followed — air defences activated across multiple capitals, airports suspended, markets jolted, and alliance politics strained. Whether this conflict is merely a contained episode or it becomes a prolonged strategic setback for the United States will depend not on the next volley of missiles but on whether Washington recognises the enemy’s unfolding strategy — and responds with one of equal clarity. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2026 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

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America, fuck yeah
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
’Cause now you have to answer to…
America, fuck yeah…

“For the habitual critics of US foreign policy in general and Donald Trump’s in particular,” Ferguson wrote, “the analogy between today’s air raids against Iran and the invasion of Iraq nearly twenty-three years ago is too obvious to be resisted.” He even conceded that the South Park team (which made the film) “understood before many commentators that the United States has a track record of coming to save the day and leaving a trail of devastation.”

Yet, he went on, there’s “one thing I can confidently promise about the US–Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: it will not last long.” Unlike Bush in 2003, Ferguson said, Trump’s aim is “not to march into Iran and confer, much less impose, freedom on the Iranians. It is to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s political structure and leave the Iranians to take their freedom from the mullahs and their murderous henchmen.”

Defence and intelligence agency denizens headquartered at Russell Hill in Canberra, wary of instant punditry like Ferguson’s, will also have been looking for the logic in Trump’s Operation Epic Fury. Defence department secretary Greg Moriarty, heading to Washington to replace Kevin Rudd as ambassador, will be particularly focused. The message he is likely to take with him from Australia is: wrap it up quickly, don’t expect an immediate transformation of the Middle East (as some of Bush’s advisers did in 2003), and get your eyes back on the main game: the challenge of China.

The Middle East has long consumed American strategic attention, along with its military resources and political capital, notes Jennifer Parker, an analyst close to Canberra’s defence thinking. “That sustained focus constrained Washington’s ability to compete as effectively as it might have with China,” she wrote in the Nine papers. “The Indo-Pacific was emerging as the central theatre of strategic competition while the US and its allies remained absorbed elsewhere.”

In 2025 and 2026, Parker reminds us, “aircraft carriers were diverted from the Indo-Pacific, where they were intended to deter China, to respond to crises in the Middle East. For a country that identifies China as its primary strategic competitor, that reallocation sits uneasily with its stated priorities.”

In Canberra and elsewhere, defence ministries will also be wondering about the capacity of American forces to sustain operations while keeping stockpiles of munitions for contingencies in Eastern Europe and around Taiwan. The Financial Times reported the Pentagon has ordered fewer than 650 high-altitude interceptors since 2010 and could burn through large quantities quickly in a sustained exchange. As many as 150 are thought to have been used during last year’s twelve-day war with Iran. Officials said “magazine depth” might constrain the scope or duration of operations and force trade-offs affecting US commitments in Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.

China has so far given no sign of taking advantage of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft-carrier group’s move to the Gulf region from its normal East Asia station. Ahead of the annual National People’s Congress session this month, Xi Jinping seems preoccupied with his purge of the People’s Liberation Army top ranks, his latest victim the general in charge of the military region facing Taiwan. Trump’s planned visit to Beijing next month is going ahead, with disruption of China’s oil supplies from Iran a reminder of his unpredictable power.

Trump’s justifications for the war are getting knocked down as soon as they are put up, as much as both his allies and his critics agree the Iranian paramount leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will not be missed.

Iran was resuming work on nuclear weapons, and getting close to producing them, Trump claimed. But after the US–Israel air strikes on its enrichment plants last June, he had already declared that capacity obliterated. The Iranian stockpile of enriched uranium seemed to be entombed under rubble, and a day before the 28 February attack, the Omani chair of Vienna talks between US and Iranian delegations had declared good progress towards agreement on meeting US concerns about nuclear enrichment and weapons development. The talks were due to reconvene on Monday, when an agreement would just meet Trump’s deadline.

Then there was Iran’s ballistic missile program. US officials told reporters they had information that Iran was planning a pre-emptive strike using ballistic missiles, creating an “intolerable” threat to US interests in the region and soon the American homeland. But sources in the Pentagon soon said that was nonsense: though it had missiles able to reach parts of Europe as well as the Middle East, Iran was many years away from achieving intercontinental missile capability.

And finally there was regime change: the aim of removing the theocratic tyranny that repressed its own people and pursued a regional agenda of violence and threats directly and through its network of allies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Yemen against Israel and America. But the Iranian regime was already reeling from sanctions, currency collapse, drought and a recent wave of protests quelled only by massacres. For more than two years since the violent Hamas breakout on 7 October 2023, Israel had blitzed and decapitated Iran’s regional allies.

And then, two days after the attack, US war secretary Pete Hegseth said the operation was not a “democracy-building exercise” and nor was it an “endless” commitment like the Iraq war. “It turns out the regime who chanted ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel,” said Hegseth. “This is not a so-called ‘regime change war’, but the regime sure did change.”

Assassinating a leader is not the same as regime change. If anyone is going to change the regime, it has to be the Iranian public, the people Trump is urging to rise up without giving a commitment to further help.

Adding to the discomfort in Canberra is the fact that the Trump administration has made crystal-clear that it sees Israel as its pre-eminent ally — and, what is more, an ally it is willing to be led by.

The administration was negotiating nuclear limits with Iran last June when Benjamin Netanyahu launched an air strike that Trump felt obliged to join. B-2 bombers carrying deep-penetration weapons were duly mobilised. This is what happened last Saturday too: Netanyahu acted to prevent any possibility of Trump reaching a nuclear deal with Tehran. If anything about the US attacks was pre-emptive, that was it.

As US secretary of state Marco Rubio admitted on Monday, the US attacked not because Tehran was preparing a missile strike but because the US feared Iran’s retaliation after Israel assassinated Khamenei. “There was absolutely an imminent threat and it was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believe that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow,” Rubio said. He tried to walk back this telling remark on Tuesday, with a new narrative taking Israel out of the decision chain.

The administration has drawn an unfavourable comparison between Israel and other old allies, notably Britain whose prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, refused permission for any of the initial attacks against Iran to be launched from the Diego Garcia base on the British-controlled Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. Trump told London’s Daily Telegraph he was “very disappointed in Keir” over this refusal. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump said later at a White House meeting with the German chancellor, adding that the closure of British bases had added hours to transit times for the Iran attacks.

Hegseth also criticised “traditional allies,” accusing them of being hesitant and indecisive about using military force. Israel was a “capable partner” with a clear mission, Hegseth said, while other allies would “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” He went on: “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history… No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

So it really is: Fuck, yeah!

Starmer later changed British policy to allow its bases to be used for operations against Iranian missiles and drones, and for British forces to join such operations. This followed advice from his attorney-general, Richard Hermer, that any British military involvement in the conflict would have to be purely defensive to be legal.

“President Trump has expressed his disagreement with our decision not to get involved with the initial strikes,” Starmer said in parliament. “But it is my duty to judge what is in Britain’s national interest. That is what I have done. And I stand by it.” He declared his decision “in accordance with international law,” adding: “We all remember the mistakes of Iraq… we will not join offensive action now.”

Australia was too far away for its bases to be used directly for the attacks, though the joint satellite ground station at Pine Gap might have relayed operational signals to US forces. The only Australian forces in the Gulf region currently are about a hundred air force and army ground crew operating a transport base inside a vast US–Emirati military airfield near Dubai, which came under drone attack without damage.

Still, it has been an awkward time for Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Penny Wong. Although the US build-up was blatant and Trump’s threats explicit, they seem to have had no advance notice of the Israel-led attack. Now they are bystanders to a chill between their two partners in the AUKUS nuclear submarine and high-tech alliance. Moriarty will no doubt work hard to convince the US administration that Australia is not a “pearl-clutching” ally, but one to be trusted to do the right thing by America with scarce submarines.

But they supported the US action: Iran was a destabiliser, its nuclear and missile programs a risk, and Khamenei’s regime a cruel one. They have quickly dodged questions about its legality, saying this was a matter for the US and Israel to judge — as if international law is what protagonist nations say it is.

Like other allies relegated to the second rank, Canberra will be wondering how much more of the rule book will be jettisoned by Trump’s team. The dispute with the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is hardly reassuring. The company wanted assurances written into its contracts with the Pentagon that its AI systems would not be used to direct fully autonomous lethal weapons or for mass surveillance of US citizens. Hegseth thought this an outrageous restriction and got Trump to bar Anthropic from any and all government contracts, though its AI application, “Claude,” was still being used by US forces to prepare the Iran attack.

Meanwhile, Albanese and other allied leaders will be dealing with the fallout: tens of thousands of travellers stranded in the Gulf; oil and gas prices possibly spiralling with the Hormuz Strait closed and Qatar shutting down its massive LNG plants; waves of Shia Muslim protests and mourning for Khamenei in far-flung Islamic communities including in Australia; and perhaps, when Iran’s rockets run out, a fanning out of terrorists seeking martyrdom.

Meanwhile, have the analysts all been looking at the wrong set of possible goals motivating Trump? In a perhaps prescient article, an anonymous writer in Asia Sentinel looks at Trump’s record and finds “neither a neocon warmonger nor a liberal interventionist” but “a distressed assets hunter.”

The article continued:

In the White House’s current calculus, Venezuela and Iran are not sovereign nations defined by borders and flags. They are underperforming energy super-majors holding a combined 511 billion barrels of reserves, run by boards of directors viewed as incompetent, hostile, and ripe for removal… If Venezuela was the pilot project, Iran is the Grand Prize. With 208 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and the world’s second-largest gas deposits, its strategic weight dwarfs that of Caracas. Control over Iran is not just about resources. It is about controlling the thermostat of the global energy market. Yet Trump views Iran through the same prism: a massive asset suffering from a severe liquidity crisis and a breakdown in internal order. The catalyst for Trump’s escalation was not a specific terrorist threat but the wave of protests beginning last December. The collapse of the rial [Iran’s currency] to historic lows and hyperinflation signalled that management in Tehran had lost its social capital and solvency.

The cynicism spreads even into the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. “If you were in a bunker in Tehran or Karaj,” asked columnist Matthew Syed in London’s Sunday Times, “would you rise up against the Iranian regime on the basis of Trump’s call to arms when he might, even now, be negotiating with a Revolutionary Guard general to cement the regime in place, as he did in Venezuela, on the proviso oil flows west rather than east?”

So far, the Islamic Republic’s institutions are moving ahead with deciding on a successor to Khamenei, who was eighty-six. Three senior Islamic scholars appear to be contenders, including a son of Kamenei and a grandson of the regime’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The new ayatollah will be chosen by a panel of eighty-eight clerics, whom Israel is trying to assassinate as well through further air strikes. The officer corps of the defence and security services are already starting reshuffles to replace the generals also killed in US and Israeli air strikes.

A forty-day mourning period declared for Khamenei will be marked by orchestrated displays of anger and grief. The humiliated Iran Revolutionary Guard Force, with 190,000 personnel and controlling somewhere between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of Iran’s economy, along with the 450,000-member Basij security volunteers and the 420,000-strong regular military will be vigilant against any rejoicing at Khamenei’s death coalescing into protest.

Persuading a new ayatollah to retreat from Khamenei’s failed promotion of an “axis of resistance” against Israel and the West might be a more tangible goal for Western statecraft than an explicit revision of theology. Progress on Palestinian statehood and the promise of a lifting of sanctions linked to good behaviour would help.

So Australian defence planners will probably have to put up with American military efforts being drawn off to the Middle East for a long time yet. At least this time, there seems to have been no pressure, or willingness, to join in. •

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What should have been a peaceful communal gathering became a scene of terror, reminding us how quickly belonging can unravel when hatred is allowed to grow unchecked. In moments like this, Australians rightly demand action. The question is not whether racism and antisemitism must be confronted — they must — but how we do so without eroding the democratic and social foundations we are trying to defend.

The government’s response to the antisemitism envoy’s report gets important things right. Strong hate-crime laws, clear consequences for incitement to violence, better data, education and protection for vulnerable communities are all essential. Antisemitism, like Islamophobia, corrodes our democracy and must be named and challenged early. But enforcement alone will never be enough.

History shows that lasting peace and social cohesion are not built through punishment and surveillance alone, but through sustained investment in civil society — in the institutions that allow people to meet one another, work together and rebuild trust over time. Northern Ireland offers a lesson worth remembering. Peace there did not emerge simply from political agreements or tougher policing. It was made possible by decades of patient investment in grassroots organisations, cross-community initiatives and shared civic spaces — the quiet, difficult work of helping former adversaries encounter one another as human beings rather than abstractions.

That belief has shaped our shared work. More than a decade ago, alongside Palestinian and Israeli partners, we helped build Project Rozana, which aims to connect Palestinians with appropriate medical training and healthcare, on a simple conviction: that caring for another human being can open doors that politics alone cannot. Over years of often unseen effort, this work has brought Israeli and Palestinian doctors, nurses and health leaders together — not to argue, but to heal.

We have witnessed it in small, human moments: an Israeli nurse training alongside a Palestinian colleague after an exhausting shift; a child from the West Bank receiving specialist care that would otherwise be out of reach; professionals crossing checkpoints most of us will never see, not in denial of the conflict, but in defiance of its most dehumanising logic.

In the years since, those same principles have guided our work here at home. We have applied the lessons of that experience to Australia’s own social fabric — building relationships across communities, absorbing criticism and backlash, and insisting that social cohesion is something that must be constructed deliberately, not assumed to endure on its own. This work is slow, relational and often uncomfortable. But it is precisely this kind of sustained engagement that makes it possible for people to encounter one another not as symbols or threats, but as neighbours with a shared stake in the future.

This work is not symbolic. It is civil-society infrastructure — practical, relational and fragile — and it requires protection and growth. That is why the Australian government’s decision to invest in Rozana’s health diplomacy matters so deeply. It recognises that social cohesion, here at home and abroad, is built not only by condemning hatred, but by funding cooperation. At a time of deep polarisation, this kind of investment is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

We are speaking out now because moments like this demand more than condemnation. They demand courage, restraint and a willingness to invest — patiently and deliberately — in the conditions that make hatred harder to sustain. Our shared future depends on whether we choose to keep building the bridges that allow us to meet one another not as enemies, but as neighbours — and, most importantly, as Australians. •

This article is republished from the Jewish Independent under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

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Sunday talk show anchors this week pressed Democrats on “How much credit does President Trump deserve for this deal,” if the cease fire was “a clear win” for Trump, and if “this peace deal came together now because President Trump was more effective at pressuring Prime Minister Netanyahu than former President Biden.”

We will learn nothing from a cramped debate designed to flatter one man’s ego and buoy his hollow, self-indulgent quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. And we will steer attention away from the far more tragic yet instructive strategic failures on all sides that produced so much needless death and suffering and have likely set back the cause of peace for decades.

That Trump gets some credit for the ceasefire agreement is not even something in dispute. All reporting indicates he successfully leaned on a reluctant Netanyahu to accept Hamas’s offer to release the twenty remaining living Israeli hostages in exchange for Israel’s release of far more Palestinian prisoners, without any broader peace agreement in place or commitment by Hamas to disarm.

But the value of that credit is limited. Finalising such a deal after two years of ruthless war that left Gaza in rubble and Hamas with depleted negotiating leverage is not exactly a diplomatic feat on the order of the Camp David accords. No trust has been built between Israelis and Palestinians; no vision of permanent peaceful coexistence has been offered, let alone given lip-service. The longstanding presumption that Israel still sought a two-state solution has been extinguished by the statements of those now in power. At the micro-level, freedom for individuals in captivity is worthy of celebration. At the macro-level, what is there to cheer?

According to Gaza health ministry statistics, Hamas’s decision to attack Israel two years ago led to nearly 70,000 deaths of its own people, about 3 per cent of the Gazan population. Among the dead were six members of Hamas’s own leadership. Much of the territory has been reduced to rubble and, according to the United Nations, about 90 per cent of the population has been displaced, often multiple times. The most optimistic estimate from the UN for how long reconstruction will take is sixteen years, and the most pessimistic eighty years. From the Palestinian perspective, the 7 October attack was an unmitigated disaster.

But this is no zero-sum game that requires christening Israel as the winner by default. The 7 October attack that killed nearly 1200 Israelis was a massive military, intelligence, and security failure on the part of a complacent Israeli government uninterested in the peace process yet unwilling to believe their own peace could be so easily shattered. Clear signs of a pending assault were known yet repeatedly downplayed and dismissed.

The brutally overwhelming military response from Israel decimated Hamas and rolled back its allies Iran and Hezbollah, but at enormous cost to civilian human life and Israel’s global reputation and support for its right to exist, and to unity within the Jewish diaspora. The notion that Hamas or other Palestinian groups will now be kept at bay by Israel’s military might flies in the face of the decades-long history of Middle East strife, in which military victories are eventually reciprocated by asymmetric terrorist attacks.

The seeds for irrevocable mistrust and ongoing conflict have been deeply planted. Without even a trace of hope in the near future for a two-state solution, we should expect them to grow for more decades. There were no strategic choices by Israel or Hamas that anyone in the future should ever want to replicate.

And Trump? Yes he secured this ceasefire agreement… seven months after he failed to maintain the ceasefire agreement struck by Biden in January. But Trump is never interested in protecting the “wins” of others. He loves to do just enough to organise his own ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Now he can assert that his agreement portends the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” even though there is no reason to believe that’s true — unless you think that Israel can and should persevere indefinitely by militarily subjugating Palestinian territories, without much global support, and that somehow amounts to a new dawn.

There is nothing in Trump’s record to show he has any understanding of the complex, multifaceted policy approaches required to strike not just a temporary agreement with a handshake but a lasting peace fortified by hard-earned mutual trust, political compromise and economic co-dependence. There is nothing in Trump’s record to suggest he cares about what may happen to any temporary agreement beyond his time in office, or even beyond the initial photo-op.

The question “is Trump more effective at pressuring Netanyahu than Biden” is extraordinarily narrow. Even if the answer is yes, does that mean Trump has superpower diplomatic skills that will be deployed to do the necessary follow-through work? Of course not. We all know Trump wants to do just enough — or be perceived as doing just enough — to get his medal, and that’s it.

We who live on Earth are stuck with Trump for another three years and three months. I understand the incentive for other world leaders to genuflect in hopes of surviving. But the rest of us need not fall over ourselves to narrow our fields of vision and place Trump at the centre of every story. The lesson to learn from the 7 October attacks and the subsequent Israel–Hamas hostilities is not how a vainglorious blowhard can channel his thirst for validation into tenuous ceasefire agreements. It’s how the dark thrill of self-righteous violence in the short run can easily lead to devastating consequences in the long run. •

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Many observers have interpreted Hamas’s immediate endorsement as a sign of weakness, if not desperation. In this reading, after nearly two years of unremitting Israeli bombardment and siege of Gaza, the assassination of Hamas’s top leaders, and devastating attacks on the group’s allies around the region, including Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas has few options left.

But Hamas’s rapid acceptance of the deal may be as much a strategic ploy as a symptom of duress. After nearly two years of war, Hamas’s political organization has suffered severe blows and its remit over war-torn Gaza is tenuous. Yet despite the growing devastation of Gaza, Hamas’s fighters have shown continued strength. Since the spring of 2025, they have stepped up offensive attacks on Israeli forces across the strip, including a large-scale assault on an Israeli base on 20 August, and other operations in June and July in which multiple Israeli soldiers were killed.

At the same time, Hamas has increased coordination with other armed groups in Gaza and replenished its ranks, even amid the widespread starvation of the population. Behind its resilience is an evolution in its approach to the war that has further raised the stakes and that could make Israel’s controversial new campaign to seize Gaza City a military, as well as humanitarian, disaster.

To understand Hamas’s survival strategy, it is crucial to trace the way its aims have evolved. When it launched its 7 October attacks, Hamas’s Gaza leadership assumed that the operation would quickly draw in allies across the region, and cause Palestinians and even the Arab public to collectively rise up. In essence, it expected a replay of May 2021, when Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem provoked an unprecedented collective response: Palestinians rose up across the West Bank and in Israeli cities, Hezbollah and other allied groups fired rockets from Lebanon and Syria, and Hamas itself launched an intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. October 7 was intended to replicate this joining of the fronts but on a much larger scale.

After nearly 700 days of war, those aims have dramatically failed. Following Hamas’s unilateral attack from Gaza, Palestinians in Israel did not mobilise, while those in the West Bank found themselves surrounded by an intense Israeli crackdown. Most of Hamas’s regional allies remained on the sidelines. Despite its formidable arsenal in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah sought to contain rather than expand the conflict; then, in September 2024, it succumbed to Israel’s pager operation and decapitation of its leadership. In December, the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime closed off crucial military supply routes.

The collapse of these external fronts was compounded by the difficulties Hamas faced in Gaza. After breaking the ceasefire in March 2025, Israel initially focused on aerial bombardments, keeping ground incursions strictly limited. The lack of fighting in urban centres prevented Hamas from taking the initiative, often leaving it a passive bystander to the massacres of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli forces reoccupied large parts of the strip. Combined with the Israeli cut-off of all aid in March, the new offensive greatly increased the ordeal in Gaza and Gazans began to publicly protest against Hamas.

Hamas’s forces in Gaza began to change their approach. On 20 April a small group of fighters staged an ambush from a tunnel in Beit Hanoun, an Israeli-held “buffer zone.” Using rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, they overturned an Israeli military vehicle, killed an Israel soldier, and left several others wounded. Since then, groups of fighters have been ramping up similar actions across Gaza. On 24 June, fighters from the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, killed seven Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis. On 7 July, again in Beit Hanoun, a group of fighters assaulted a convoy of tanks just a few metres from the border, killing five soldiers and wounding fourteen others. On 15 July, in the northern enclave of Jabaliya, three more soldiers were killed in an ambush targeting an Israeli engineering team that had been sent to clear roads for Israeli forces. On 22 July, in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the strip, a Hamas operation targeted an Israeli military convoy and a Merkava tank.

In recent weeks, these pressure attacks have become bolder. By mid-August, when the Israeli army resumed its incursions in into residential areas, Hamas’s offensive operations were multiplying in eastern Gaza City, especially in the neighbourhoods of Tuffah, Zaytoun and Shujaiyya. The al-Qassam Brigades have also been active in the south, as the unusual 20 August attack on an Israeli military encampment in Khan Younis attests: no fewer than eighteen fighters attacked the base with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at close range. Such a large-scale operation, which Israeli officials concluded may have been an attempt to capture new soldiers, would have required significant preparation, coordination, and intelligence.

In fact, these operations are part of a tactical reassessment by Hamas, which has sought to turn Israel’s expanded war aims to its own advantage. Despite Israel’s overwhelmingly stronger military resources, Hamas has drawn on the potential of asymmetrical warfare and the singular determination of its fighters. When Israeli soldiers began to limit ground incursions in urban areas, Hamas fighters began to seek out and target them in the “buffer zones.” As Israeli officials have acknowledged, Hamas was able to adapt and rebuild its forces in areas that Israeli forces had previously “cleared.”

Now, as the Israeli government has set out to seize and control large parts of Gaza City, Israeli forces must contend with urban guerrilla warfare in a terrain that Hamas knows by heart. These tactics could prove especially effective in the labyrinthine ruins of Gaza City, where Hamas is believed to still have a significant network and where Israeli forces have until now mostly avoided major incursions.

Even as Hamas has been cut off from external support and come under growing pressure in Gaza, its fighters have shown surprising strength. Hamas’s ability to renew its manpower has long been a defining feature of the group, which has for years managed to maintain a very strong foothold in Palestinian society even after severe setbacks. The current war is no exception. The loss of a significant number of top leaders — including Yahya Sinwar, the overall leader of Hamas in Gaza and mastermind of the 7 October attacks, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, and Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing — has had little visible effect on its capacity to fight.

The overall manpower of Hamas’s brigades remains unclear. In the summer of 2024, Israeli sources claimed that some 17,000 Hamas militants had been killed since October 2023, including “half of the leadership” of Hamas’s military. But as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials assessed that just 8900 named fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad had been killed, according to a classified database newly revealed by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian news organization +972 Magazine. US intelligence officials concluded in January that Hamas may have added as many as 15,000 additional fighters since the war began. Gazan officials and the United Nations do not distinguish between civilians and fighters in their total count of fatalities, but if the Israeli database is correct, it would mean that more than 80 per cent of the 53,000 believed to have been killed as of May 2025 were civilians.

Paradoxically, Israel’s relentless escalation may be fuelling Hamas’s resilience. To an extent, the growing desperation of Gaza’s civilians has fed public opposition to Hamas. After Israel’s total aid blockade began in March, Gazans began staging anti-Hamas protests in the northern part of the strip, calling for the immediate entry of aid and for Hamas to relinquish power. Hamas’s response fluctuated between allowing discontent and repressing the demonstrations. Although Hamas has always faced significant opposition to its rule in Gaza, public protests have previously been rare. Their appearance in March appears to be a direct response to the extremity of the situation in Gaza amid the Israeli cut-off of aid.

Opposition to Hamas has also been encouraged by Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and has tried to exploit Gazan anger and position itself to govern postwar Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has advanced its own strategy to fragment the social fabric, including by backing and arming an anti-Hamas militia in Rafah controlled by Yasser Abu Shabab, a strongman and drug trafficker who escaped from a Hamas prison in October 2023 and who also has ties to Fatah. According to UN officials and international aid workers, the Abu Shabab militia has been looting aid convoys.

The strategy appears to be aimed at making Gazans believe that Hamas is stealing their food — as Israeli officials have long claimed, without furnishing evidence — and to sow chaos. For Israel, it also may be a way to impose the idea that it can place its own men in a position of control and power in the enclave, in preparation for the “day after” in Gaza. After Israel’s arming of the militia was revealed in early June, Netanyahu publicly defended the practice. (“What’s wrong with this? It saves IDF soldiers’ lives,” he said.)

Yet this divide-and-conquer approach, combined with the relentless attacks on civilians, has also entrenched resistance among ordinary Gazans, who now perceive Israel as undertaking a war of extermination. In southern Gaza, the Abu Shabab militia is widely reviled, and Abu Shabab’s own family has disassociated itself from him and called for his death. Meanwhile, there are indications, including on social media, that growing numbers of young Palestinians with no prior training have been joining the al-Qassam Brigades and carrying out guerrilla actions. Although the intensive bombardments and the territorial division of almost the entire Gaza Strip has weakened the coordination between the groups of fighters, who are acting increasingly autonomously, it has not buried their capacity for action.

Another crucial factor in Hamas’s staying power is its tunnel network. Even now, after months of intense bombardment and the use of advanced technologies, Israeli forces have been unable to destroy significant parts of this underground city, allowing Hamas to continue to hide the remaining hostages and prisoners, protect its fighters, and provide bases for watching and attacking Israeli forces.

Israel’s inability to control the depths of the earth highlights the asymmetrical nature of the conflict, which increasingly pits sophisticated and highly expensive weapons systems, many of them acquired from Western countries, against ersatz, locally made rockets, explosives, and tunnels.

The recent Hamas ambushes have also raised growing concerns among Israeli military officials that more soldiers could be captured. In July, the army implemented the so-called Hannibal directive, which requires the military to use all means necessary to prevent soldiers from being taken by the enemy, even if such use of force leads to soldiers’ death. Indeed, out of the 205 hostages and prisoners that have been released since the war began, only eight have been freed as a result of Israeli–American rescue operations — and these six were in buildings above ground and not in underground tunnels. On 8 June, an Israeli military operation to rescue four hostages from a building in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza led to the massacre of 274 civilians, among them sixty children.

Israel’s inability to destroy Hamas’s tunnels has led increasingly to efforts to obliterate everything above ground in Gaza. As early as October 2023, Israel began targeting displacement camps, schools and hospitals with the aim of turning the population against Hamas and forcing surrender. Although that objective failed, the Israeli government has doubled down on this strategy since resuming the war in March, enforcing a total cut-off of aid for eleven weeks, and then, starting in late May, taking effective control of aid delivery through the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has led to hundreds of Gazans being killed by Israeli forces at humanitarian distribution points, one of which an IDF soldier described to Israeli newspaper Haaretz in June as a “killing field.”

Hamas has long emphasised the sacrificial dimension of its liberation project, which has helped it push Gaza back to the centre of the Palestinian cause. Unlike their counterparts in other Palestinian regions, Gazans are primarily attached to their land not because of their historical presence there but because of its status as a place of refuge. Almost all Gazans are descendants of refugees from 1948, when some 250,000 Palestinians were expelled to Gaza from their towns and villages during Israel’s founding, and they have passed down stories of past massacres and dispossessions. Hamas sees the current war as part of that tradition.

In light of the extraordinary privations and mass killing of Gaza’s civilian population in the current war, Hamas’s external leader, Khaled Meshaal, has likened Gaza to Algeria, where independence was achieved only after the death of more than a million civilians.

Although Hamas’s leaders counted on regional allies joining with them in the war after 7 October, from the outset they viewed Hamas’s Gaza organisation as autonomous. It did not share the specific planning and details of the 7 October attacks with other members of the axis and it was the sole instigator. In compensation, Hamas’s brigades have relied on — and increased — ties to other militant groups within Gaza, some of which were already established before 7 October.

Particularly important has been Hamas’s longstanding entente with Islamic Jihad. In 2022, Israel sought to divide the two groups by launching a heavy campaign exclusively against Islamic Jihad. At the time, the strategy appeared to work, with Hamas lying low and many Israeli officials concluding that it was weak. In retrospect, Hamas’s decision to stay out of the 2022 confrontation appears to have been a division of labour agreed upon with Islamic Jihad — one that allowed Hamas more freedom to prepare for the 7 October attacks.

Since the war began, Hamas has remained closely allied with Islamic Jihad, which as of this summer continued to hold one of the remaining Israeli captives, Rom Braslavski. Coordination between the groups’ armed wings has also grown, including in a number of recent joint attacks in Khan Yunis. These attacks have in part been orchestrated by the joint operations room, an organization created by Hamas and Islamic Jihad back in 2006, but which officially emerged years later, during the 2018 Great March of Return, a series of popular protests by Gazans on the Gazan–Israeli border. Today, the joint operations room brings together twelve Palestinian armed factions — including, alongside Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Saraya al-Quds, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Mujahideen Brigades, and Omar al-Qasim Brigades — and has become the place where many decisions about the war and negotiations are made.

In recent weeks, there are signs that this broader front may be crumbling. Members of the joint operations room have called on Hamas to end the war. During a meeting with the head of Egyptian intelligence, some of these factions also criticised Hamas’s procrastination on reaching a ceasefire — which may account for Hamas’s immediate approval of the 18 August proposal without amendments. Still, these cracks in the coalition have not caused a shift in the brigades’ determination to fight. There is actually a consensus among the factions that surrender or capitulation is unthinkable.

As the core members of the Qassam Brigades see it, only continued attacks on Israeli troops will force Netanyahu to agree to another ceasefire and end the siege. In their view, it was military pressure by Hamas — including significant setbacks for Israel in Rafah and in Jabaliyya in November and December of 2024, as well as knife attacks in both Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun that caused the deaths of several soldiers in January 2025 — that finally led Netanyahu to sign the US-backed ceasefire in mid-January. By continuing to launch major operations, the Qassam Brigades hope to increase the pressure on Netanyahu, including from his own military. One such case was the 7 July killing of the five Israeli soldiers in Beit Hanoun, which caused some Israeli military and political figures, both on the right and in the opposition, to press the government to allow soldiers to return to their camps and to accelerate efforts to reach a ceasefire.

After nearly two years of war, the strengths and weaknesses of Hamas are almost the inverse of Israel’s. Where Israel has extraordinary military resources but has struggled to find the tens of thousands of additional troops it needs for its massive Gaza City invasion, Hamas, despite huge losses of forces, continues to recruit new fighters. Meanwhile, as Hamas expands operations, Israel is also losing more soldiers on the ground. It also faces increasing difficulty in getting reservists to show up for duty.

The 18 August ceasefire proposal is not new. Based on a previous proposal put forward by US president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, it calls for the total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and, like the January ceasefire, allows Israel to resume its war against Gaza at the end of the sixty-day period. Hamas had accepted earlier versions of this proposal even before its response to the new one on 18 August. Netanyahu has approached the ceasefire proposals not as negotiations, but as a way to achieve what Israel has been unable to through force. In late August, he and other Israeli government officials called instead for an all-or-nothing deal that negotiators have said is unreachable.

Netanyahu is now trying to push Israeli forces into the tunnels of Gaza City, despite strong opposition from the Israeli military. The army has said a takeover could take more than a year to complete and would be highly dangerous, and that it prefers to use every possibility to negotiate before undertaking such an assault. In 2024, Netanyahu and the military establishment sought to vanquish Hamas’s regional allies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon. But now, with the military’s continued failure to achieve its stated objectives against Hamas itself, it has stepped up attacks in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. By promoting its actions on these other fronts, including against Iran in June, the government can downplay the actual situation in Gaza. Increasingly, an enormous gap has emerged between the image of the conflict the Israeli government is trying to convey and the reality on the ground. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2025 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

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From the political centre, former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote an essay in the newspaper Haaretz in which he pulled no punches against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition.

“The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success,” Olmert argued. “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” His conclusion: “Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

From the right, you have the likes of Amit Halevi, a member of Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party, who is staunchly pro-war but thinks its execution has been bungled. Halevi had his membership on the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee suspended by Netanyahu’s coalition after he voted against a proposal to extend the government’s ability to issue emergency call-up orders for Israeli reservists. In an interview with the newspaper Yediot Ahronot following his dismissal, Halevi said, “This war is a deception. They lied to us about its achievements.” Israel has “been fighting a war for twenty months with failed plans,” and it “is not succeeding in destroying Hamas.”

And from the left, Yair Golan, the leader of Israel’s liberal alliance, the Democrats, stated in an interview with Israel Radio: “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country. A sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set itself the aim of expelling populations.”

After the “hobby” comment drew an outcry, Golan, himself a Gaza war hero, clarified that he was not blaming the military but rather the politicians who were extending the war for reasons that no longer have anything to do with Israel’s national security needs.

While Golan probably should have used a different word so as not to give Israeli rightists an easy way to discredit him, the truth is this: virtually no independent foreign journalists have been allowed to report first-hand from Gaza. When this war is over and Gaza is saturated with international reporters and photographers free to roam, the level of death and destruction is going to be fully reported and pictured — and that is going to be a very bad time for Israel and world Jewry.

So Golan was right to warn his nation — bluntly — to stop now, forge a ceasefire, get the hostages back, get an international and Arab force into Gaza, and deal with the remnants of Hamas later. When you are in a hole, stop digging.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu has insisted on continuing to dig, claiming that he can bomb Hamas into giving up its remaining twenty or so living Israeli hostages — and because the religious-nationalist members of his coalition have essentially told him that if he stops the war, they will topple him. So the Israeli military is going after more and more secondary targets, and the result is Gaza civilians being killed every day.

Amos Harel, the military analyst for Haaretz, explained why: “Many bombing runs are actually assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, often when they’re with their families. And these officials no longer live in private houses or apartment buildings — they’re usually in the crowded tent camps with thousands of civilians. Even when the army declares multiple steps of caution, these attacks result in massive killing.”

It is not only, and indeed not even mostly, the rise in Gaza civilian casualties that is turning more and more Israelis against the war. It’s simply that the war has worn down the whole society. The signs, Harel notes, are everything from “an increasing number of suicides (which the army doesn’t report) to families that are breaking up and businesses that are collapsing. The government conveniently ignores these developments and scatters promises of victory instead.”

If many Israelis feel trapped by their own leaders, many people in Gaza clearly feel the same. Polling in Gaza is obviously difficult, but the antiwar movement there seems to be stirring as well — although there you can get killed by Hamas for protesting. A survey by the independent, Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research of people across the Gaza Strip found that 48 per cent supported the anti-Hamas demonstrations that erupted in several places in recent weeks.

Indeed, be assured that it’s not only some Israeli leaders who will face a reckoning when the guns of Gaza finally fall silent. Hamas’s leaders will live in infamy. They attacked Israeli border communities on 7 October 2023 and, when Israel predictably retaliated, they essentially offered up Gaza’s civilians as a collective human sacrifice to win global sympathy for their cause — while Hamas leaders hid in tunnels and abroad. Hamas is still operating, but now Gaza is unliveable. Yet Hamas’s leadership is still stubbornly saying it will not turn over all its remaining live hostages unless Israel agrees to leave Gaza and return to an open-ended ceasefire.

Really? Israel should leave all of Gaza and accept a ceasefire? What a great idea. If Hamas achieved that “victory,” it would mean that Hamas fought this entire war — losing tens of thousands of fighters and civilians and having few buildings in Gaza left intact — in order to get back to exactly what it had on 6 October 2023: a ceasefire and Israel out of Gaza.

For this alone, history will remember Hamas leaders as mendacious fools. They thought they were unleashing an apocalypse on Israel and instead unleashed an apocalypse on their own people that also ended up giving licence to Netanyahu to destroy their ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon and Syria, which weakened Iran’s grip on both of those nations, as well as on Iraq, and helped drive Russia out of Syria. It was a rout of the Iran-led “resistance network.”

But here’s the rub. As a result of Netanyahu’s military operations, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah — not to mention Saudi Arabia — are all now much freer to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel to a degree they never were when Iran’s regional mercenary network was so powerful.

Yes, Netanyahu made that happen! But he also never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. Netanyahu today staunchly refuses to harvest what Netanyahu has sown. He will not do the one thing that would unlock the politics of the whole region: open a road, no matter how long, to a two-state solution with a reformed Palestinian Authority.

No wonder Donald Trump doesn’t want to waste time with him — he can’t make any money from him, and he won’t allow Trump to make any history with him.

The more I would argue to Israelis that Netanyahu is making a historic mistake — trading peace with Saudi Arabia for peace with the far-right extremists who keep him in power — the more they would ask me “Do you think Trump can save us?” That question is the ultimate sign that your democracy is in trouble.

I had to explain that Trump goes to countries that give him things — cash, 747s, $Trump meme coin and Official Melania Meme sales, arms purchases, hotel deals, golf courses, AI data centres — and not countries that ask him for things, like Israel.

In fairness to Trump, he probably has no idea how much Israel has internally changed. Even many American Jews don’t understand how big and powerful the ultra-Orthodox and religious-settler-nationalist community in Israel has grown and how much it sees Gaza as a religious war.

“Bibi is actually their pawn, not the real player,” explained Avrum Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, referring to the religious-nationalist-settler right in Israel. “You tell them Israel could have peace with Saudi Arabia and they will shrug and tell you that they are waiting for the Messiah. You tell them they could have peace with Syria, and they will tell you the Jewish people already own Syria — it’s part of Greater Israel. You tell them about international law, they will tell you biblical law. You will tell them Hamas, they will tell you Amalek [a biblical enemy of the Israelites].”

The real divide in Israel today, concluded Burg, who teaches about relations between religion and state, is not between conservatives and progressives. “It’s between the Jewish tribe and the democratic tribe. And the Jewish tribe is now winning. If Zionism was originally the triumph of secular nationalism over religious Judaism, what is happening to today is the resurgence of religious-nationalist Judaism over democracy.”

And so, after a week, I flew home from off-Broadway — Israel — only to discover that the same play, only bigger, is running on Broadway, in America. It is eerie to watch how Trump and Netanyahu are using a similar playbook to undermine their respective democracies. My only question is whose authoritarian impulses will trigger a full-blown constitutional crisis first.

Each leader stands accused of trying to undermine his country’s courts and the “deep state’’ — i.e., all the institutions that uphold the rule of law. In Trump’s case, it’s effectively to enrich himself personally and shift wealth in the country from the least privileged to the most privileged. In Netanyahu’s case, it’s effectively to escape the many corruption charges against him and shift power and money away from the democratic, moderate Israeli centre to the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. That group will keep Netanyahu’s coalition in office as long as he excuses the ultra-Orthodox from fighting in Gaza and allows the settlers to continue their march to annex the West Bank today and Gaza tomorrow.

When Netanyahu was elected in November 2022 and began forming his Jewish supremacist coalition, I wrote a column the next morning headlined “The Israel We Knew Is Gone.’’ I hope I was premature — but I hope even more that I won’t soon have to write the same column about America.

The year 2026 will have a lot to say about whether the Netanyahu and Trump cults can be contained. That year, Netanyahu will have to hold national elections, and Trump will have to face the midterms. Those committed to democracy and decency in both countries have one job between now and then: organise, organise, organise to win power.

Nothing else matters. And everything is riding on it. •

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The post The flashing signals I saw in Israel appeared first on Inside Story.

Readers might be left with the impression that the government has initiated violent means to force regions to comply with structural reforms designed to deal with diehard adherents of rebel or Assad-era commanders. Both attacks are presented as signs of a failure to find a useful role for ex-fighters whose records for savagery have prevented their absorption into new security forces or administrative structures.

In the wings, Israeli leaders have loudly claimed a role in protecting the Druze communities in the governorates south of Damascus. Israel’s narrative-shaping machine, Hasbara, has quickly cranked into gear, with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu filmed on the Golan plateau in front of Mount Hermon. Gazing across the Syrian Hauran he claimed that Israel had come to the aid of the threatened Druze and suggested Islamist elements of the Assad era might have stored weapons depots across the three southern provinces.

Do the Druze want to be saved? A large Druze presence in Israel’s north enjoys many of the privileges of full Israeli citizenship (even enrolment in the IDF) and Israel has for decades used the much larger Druze concentrations in Syria as a means of gaining purchase in that country. The ever-eloquent Bezalel Smotrich, whose party provides the numbers holding together Netanyahu’s cabinet, had no hesitation in declaring his hand when he said publicly that Israel’s campaign in Gaza and its wider dimensions would only end with Syria’s dismantlement.

President al-Sharaa has shown little sign of wanting to cooperative with Netanyahu’s use of distractions across Israel’s borders to help strengthen the Israeli coalition’s hold on power. He has avoided using the vapid language of the Assad era, which customarily referred to the “Zionist enemy,” instead opening an indirect channel to Israel to underline his resolve to keep Syria together in the face of formidable economic and social tensions.

Al-Sharaa has also ended Syrian governments’ decades-long refusal to allow Syrian Druze to attend ceremonies in the Israeli heartland of Galilee at the shrine of their prophet, al-Nabi Shu’ayb, a figure linked to the Old Testament prophet Jethro. Some 600 Syrian Druze were given the green light to travel there in late April, hardly evidence of a Syrian ruler determinedly hostile to the Druze. Though the visit was widely reported (without commentary) in the Israeli media, it was entirely overlooked by Western outlets more interested in bad news stories out of Syria.

Less than one in twenty of Syria’s 700,000 or more Druze live in the zone contiguous with Israeli-held Golan. Outside Damascus the highest concentration of Syrian Druze is on the fringes of mountainous area around Jebel al-Hauran, 110 kilometres or more from the UN zone separating Israel and Syria. In between lies territory largely populated by Sunni, Orthodox Christians and Circassians, with only sprinklings of Druze. The challenge of biting off such a large chunk of Syria would dwarf anything the Israelis have historically attempted in firming their borders.

One theme that has rarely emerged in official Western commentaries is the need to preserve Syria’s territorial integrity rather than allow it to fall to numerous outside claimants. The question is how that integrity might be preserved in the face of avaricious claims by neighbouring countries. Israel’s attempt to stake a claim on southern Syria (four of the country fourteen provinces) might signal that Israel doesn’t share this ambition. As early as the week of Assad’s fall it asserted a right to intervene in enfeebled Syria. Since then it has claimed the right to destroy all of Syria’s weaponry and materiel and mounted a campaign of bombardments, even including targets, such as the outer enclosure of the Damascus presidential palace, that were designed to demonstrate Israeli resolve.

Until this month, Western responses had nevertheless been muted. Countries that supported the years of sanctions devised to punish the old regime have been hesitant to accept that sanctions are an ill fit if the aim is to avoid further complicating al-Sharaa’s job of keeping Syria unified. If the president falters then that will be time to say so, but at this point a well-rounded acknowledgement of what he is up against would be more helpful.

Three months after inaugurating his salvation government, al-Sharaa has clearly had a shaky start. After reporting on the initial nightly crowds celebrating the fall of Assad’s tyranny in the streets of Damascus, much of the Western media has settled back into the “rinse and repeat” school that marked the thirteen years of conflict. Massacres are reported with no analysis of what viewers were seeing. The one-dimensional picture relentlessly pursued during the Syrian conflict makes tempting television but often obliterates vital background.

For Syria’s goal of being readmitted to international forums, a more telling development was al-Sharaa’s meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris on 8 May. Macron set the terms of the visit cautiously, emphasising that the removal of sanctions must be a staged process in line with developments on the ground. It must also be matched, France says, by a structure for dealing with past wrongs — a necessary step in isolating those elements, still on the loose, that were responsible for past massacres of civilians.

Al-Sharaa seemed to be listening. During his visit he met with an exiled Syrian constitutional lawyer, Moatasim al-Kilani, who later told the media that al-Sharaa had assured him an independent Transitional Justice Commission was forthcoming and noted that “national justice cannot be built on slogans.”

Then, just yesterday in Riyadh, the US president trumped more hesitant Western leaders by announcing the lifting of American sanctions on Syria and the resumption of relations with its government. Apparently at the suggestion of the Saudi Crown Prince, this is an unexpected but welcome move.

But such progress could be threatened if Western countries turn a blind eye to Israel’s toying with a break-up of Syria. Surely the Israeli claim to a special security interest has worn thin in the face of the massively disproportionate loss of civilian life and destruction in Gaza over the past eighteen months.

A hundred years ago France found that tackling a separatist campaign in Druze-land — the Great National Revolt of 1925–27 — turned into the bloodiest confrontation it faced during the Mandate era. We should be mindful of the extent of infighting between religious and political factions on the Druze side of that encounter. Those divisions enabled the French to play favourites, reassert control and eventually fold the Jabal al-Druze, or État des Druzes, into a unitary Syrian state.

Running a Druze canton is not a challenge to be recommended. And it is incumbent on Israel’s friends to remind them that the breakup of Syria as a gesture to appease the Israeli far right is not a shared ambition. •

The post Syria’s problem neighbour appeared first on Inside Story.

The Baath Party, built on the core of a national army drawn from Syria’s Alawite heterodox community, came to power in 1970. More than two-thirds of the country’s population were Sunni Muslims, and a much smaller percentage, including the Alawite population of the coastal mountains, had historic links to Shi’ite offshoots of Islam. Baathism had sought to lift up an impoverished Alawite community that had advanced within the military under Ottoman and French Mandates favouring recruitment from coastal regions whose population followed a largely secular approach to Islam.

The scion of the Assad family, Hafez al-Assad, had risen to political power via his career in the airforce, and was using savage repression to tighten an increasingly tyrannical grip. When the largely Sunni population of Hama, on the eastern flank of the coastal mountains, rose up in 1982 in response to the regime’s failed economic policies, the army (under Hafez’s younger brother Rifaat) shelled the town into submission.

By the time I took up a diplomatic posting in Damascus in the post-Hama era, Syria’s state-dominated economy had stagnated and the system was being held together by repression, cronyism and corruption. Before he died in 2000, Hafez al-Assad had made clear that his successor should be drawn from his immediate family; in the event, power passed by default to option number three, his youngest son Bashar, who was hastily pulled out of his quiet life as an ophthalmologist in London. Bashar’s reserved, even awkward, demeanour contrasted not just with his father’s rock-like persona but also with his uncle Rifaat’s obvious relish for meeting dissent with massive firepower.

During his first decade as president Bashar tinkered with some of the absurdities of Baathist economics. Observers often assumed that these changes would eventually be accompanied by political reforms, but they had failed to realise that modernising the fringes of the economy would simply open paths for a new generation of cronies to practise corruption on a mammoth scale.

When the first embers of rebellion broke out in 2011 (often falsely attributed to the “Arab Spring”), it was difficult to predict how Bashar’s image-makers would rise to the challenge. Many assumed the young president would at least lend an ear to the public’s complaints about their worsening circumstances, but Bashar instead responded with ruthless, Hama-scale repression, this time deployed across the whole country.

After my retirement from the Australian foreign service in 2003, I had decided to further pursue my interest in the archaeology of the Middle East. The first edition of my book about Syria’s extraordinary heritage, Monuments of Syria had hit the shelves just as the initial wave of modest economic reforms was encouraging a new foreign exchange source for the country: tourism. I realised that the best way of combining writing with visiting the region was to lecture to the Australian and British tour groups whose interest had partly been awakened by my writings.

My last visit to Syria, with a group of English enthusiasts, was in April 2011. The embers of revolt were igniting, prompting worried calls to London to see what could be rescued of the program. On earlier tours I’d found that good-quality Syrian guides were an essential ingredient, and on this occasion we had the most outstanding local expert I’d encountered, Ahmad Yassin. His skills enabled me to confine my role to chats on the bus and discussion around the dinner table, where Ahmad also imparted his understanding of Syria’s mix of cultures.

I vividly remember how, on day five of the tour — 30 March 2011 — we set out from Palmyra to take the long motorway corridor up to Aleppo. Ahmad and our driver were naturally keen to listen to Bashar address the nation in response to rising casualties among largely unarmed demonstrators. The widespread hope was that Bashar would defuse the tension and offer something that would lead the nation back from the brink.

He did no such thing. He reeled off the usual Baathist lines interspersed with accusations (not entirely unwarranted) that the rebellion was being fuelled by outside fighters who had fled from the chaos across the Euphrates in Iraq. Ahmad and our driver were totally deflated, and the bus ride finished in silence. I left Syria four days later with my fears for Syria leavened only by happy memories of Ahmad’s commitment to the idea of his country as an assemblage of the numerous cultures and ethnicities we had seen on our tour.

Ahmad’s sense of Syria drew on the positive side of Baathist secular education, which he blended with his own Muslim upbringing while always carefully avoiding contentious claims. As the crisis descended into new levels of nightmare I received reports that his health had declined. He was still in his thirties when he suffered his first stroke; a second took him not long after.

After the tumultuous events of the intervening thirteen years, Bashar al-Assad’s lanky figure had acquired the rigidity of the statue of his father that dominated the motorway to Homs up until the day after Damascus fell. Long detested as a North Korean–style monstrosity, the patriarchal megalith was expertly hacked away at the ankles until it toppled backwards.

Hafez’s son had refused all suggestions (from Arab peers and even from the Russians and Iranians) that it might be time to go. He remained as obdurate as ever until the Russians provided a plane to take him to Moscow “in the most secure way possible,” to borrow the words of Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov.

Of course, the war isn’t over yet. One of the major complications is the relationship between the group that now controls Damascus, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the pro-Turkish “Syrian National Army” (formerly the “Free Syrian Army”), which formed the northern flank of the drive to take Aleppo a fortnight ago.

It may be too optimistic to hope that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will be guided more by Nelson Mandela’s transition model in South Africa than by the chaotic US-led attempt to helicopter a totally new administration into Baghdad in 2003. So far, the installation of a governing structure in Damascus has avoided alienating most elements they had quietly succumbed to the rule of the Assads. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s leader has dropped his nom-de guerre, al-Julani, and reverted to his family name (al-Shaar); in interviews he has invited minority ethnic and confessional groups to believe they have a stake in the success of the new government. But will the former al Qaeda fighters in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s ranks expect more reward for the years spent isolated in Idlib after they were moved from Aleppo under the “deconfliction” agreement in 2017 sponsored by Russia and Turkey?

It could be quite some time before any “peace dividend” is evident in the eastern regions of Syria where other external players may linger, hoping to cash in their chips. On the central Syria steppe, the countryside between the north–south motorways and the Euphrates basin is peppered with “Islamic State” stay-behind elements whose attacks on oil and gas drilling teams or itinerant Syrian officials climbed to almost 500 this year. The US presence in northeast Syria and a smaller US enclave on the Syrian side of the borders with Jordan and Iraq have done little to tackle these problems. In the northeast sector, Turkish distrust of US collaboration with the largely Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” is likely to complicate any dismantling of this foreign presence.

Finally, in an astonishing display of overkill, the Israel Defence Forces have mounted more than 500 attacks on bases, depots, anchorages and airfields of Syrian regular forces over the past week. They have also reserved their right to wipe out what remains of Syria’s conventional forces, including its entire naval resources, which might have played a part in creating a Syrian government with real authority. Israel’s wilful destruction of possible evidence of chemical weapons has also headed off any attempt to investigate the issue under recognised international mechanisms.

None of the players (internal and external) who have contributed to the tragic meltdown in Syria since 2011 can claim to be without fault, but some can still make amends. Nor can Baathism be assigned all blame for the actions of every group that streamed into the country over the years to end the Assads’ tyranny, some of them so determined to bring down Bashar that they brought even worse disasters. This risk was rarely perceived by outside commentators who publicised the brave battlers as another manifestation of an “Arab Spring” in the hope they would eventually nudge aside the murderous Salafists. It was the latter who soon dominated the ranks of the rebels.

Thirteen years of “civil war” — a term that glosses over the more dynamic contribution of outside players — have robbed Syria of most aspects of a viable state essential to restoring the economy, rebuilding infrastructure and rehousing the millions who have been displaced internally or abroad. An immediate end to the international community’s sanctions would incentivise, not hamper, this restoration process.

Syria sometimes surprises the world with its capacity to survive the worst natural and human-made disasters. As the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham forces took Aleppo this month, work was nearing completion on the minaret of the city’s Great Mosque, which had stood for eight centuries as the lighthouse of the city’s complex history. After it fell in a heap of rubble in April 2013 during the early battle for the old city, observers scoffed at the possibility it could be put back together. As the before and after photos below show, they were wrong. With luck, the minaret can serve again as a symbol of Syria’s regeneration. •

Minaret of the Great Mosque in Aleppo seen in 1984. Ross Burns

Work almost completed on the minaret’s restoration, as seen last month by the Aleppine photographer, Salah al-Maraashi (with his kind permission).

The post The fall of the house of Assad appeared first on Inside Story.

Moscow does not have enough military strength, resources, influence and authority for effective military intervention outside the former Soviet space… After [the full scale invasion of Ukraine in] 2022 this became even more apparent. It is completely possible to bluff about your power and abilities on the international stage, but one should not start to believe in one’s own bluff.

He’s right. Russia’s claim to be a great power, maybe even a superpower, is based on historical memory rather than current objective reality. As I argued in my 2023 book, Russia is a regional power, not a global one. Its economy is slightly bigger than Canada’s and Italy’s, about half the size of Japan’s, one-twelfth America’s and an eighth of China’s. Tiny Australia has an economy 75 per cent of mighty Russia’s. The population Putin rules over is significantly smaller than Bangladesh’s, Brazil’s or Nigeria’s, to say nothing of China or the United States. India has ten times as many people.

Given its relatively meagre resources, Russia has punched significantly above its weight over the past decade. President Vladimir Putin is an excellent tactician who is willing to leverage the nuclear threat he possesses. He has repeatedly confounded Western leaders who had grown used to the idea that the era of wars of conquest was over.

The economic base of Putin’s power play is oil, which Russia produces at a rate only exceeded by Saudi Arabia and the United States. It has allowed him to build a military significantly larger than that of the US. In terms of number of soldiers, Russia comes sixth in the world, with nearly as many people under arms as China (but less than half the number of troops North Korea keeps at the ready).

This claim to great-power status came at a price, however. Today, Russia is over-extended and its position is potentially perilous.

As the opposition forces marched on Aleppo and then on Damascus, the Russian airforce targeted them with several sorties, as usual hitting civilian targets including a hospital and a refugee camp. But Russia no longer had the assets and the time to bomb them into submission, as they did in 2015–16 when its aviation and ground troops played a major role in securing Assad’s survival. The war in Ukraine took precedent and the destruction of mercenary leader Yevgeny Pigozhin left fewer boots on the ground in Syria.

After Assad’s fall, with Russian commentators wringing their hands, the government tried to limit its losses by establishing working relations with those it had only days earlier condemned as “terrorists.” At stake are a naval base and an airport, both essential to Russia’s projection of power in the region and beyond.

Syria is one site of Russia’s multi-pronged assault on perceived US hegemony over the globe. If the attack on Ukraine was meant to rebuild the Russian empire, the intervention in Syria was to establish a bridgehead for power projection into the Middle East and Africa. It was a central step in the attempt to challenge the status quo and build a multipolar world order fit for mid-sized dictatorships like Putin’s.

The assault on the status quo gained momentum a decade ago. In 2013–14, Russia lost political control over Ukraine, where a popular revolution ousted the pro-Kremlin government. Putin reacted by annexing Crimea and fostering a war in the east of Ukraine, sometimes fought by proxies, sometimes by Russian troops themselves. In September 2015, Putin transformed his longstanding support for Assad into a military intervention, which gave him an airbase as well as a forty-nine-year lease on the naval base in Tartus, established during Soviet times in 1971. It is Russia’s only port in the Mediterranean.

With Syria stabilised and Russia’s role secure, Putin faced more unrest at his doorstep in 2020–21, when the brotherly dictatorship in Belarus was rocked by large-scale protests. These were clubbed out of existence by a well-entrenched regime supported by Russia. At home, Putin had protests repressed in early 2021, sparked by the return and arrest of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who had survived an earlier assassination attempt by the regime. Some analysts see the 2021 clashes with the opposition as part of the motivation for attacking Ukraine a year later: a successful little war to distract from troubles at home.

That, of course, did not go as planned. Nearly three years later Russia is bogged down in a war of attrition so terrible that Putin had to accept Iranian and North Korean support. The two fellow dictatorships provided drones, shells and, in the case of North Korea, soldiers. Russia is advancing, but slowly. As of late October 2024 it occupied just over 18 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, down from 27 per cent at its greatest extent in 2022. Ukraine still clings on to Russian territory in Kursk region, which it seized in a surprise attack in August.

Since the start of the war, Russia has lost enormous numbers of men, maybe 198,000 of them dead and 550,000 wounded. Ukrainian forces have destroyed more than 9000 tanks, twenty-eight warships and boats, nearly 700 fixed and rotary wing aircraft, 2500 cruise missiles and more than 18,000 drones.

At present, Putin’s best hope is that Donald Trump will pull the rug out from under Ukraine by refusing to further support its war effort. This remains to be seen — and whether that would mean the end of the war is yet another matter.

As of late 2024, then, Putin’s position is more precarious than often appreciated. He has lost Syria, and whether he can keep his military bases there is an open question. These are important to his wider strategy: as the Guardian’s Pjotr Saur wrote this week, the two Syrian bases “hold an outsized importance to Russia: the Tartus facility gives… access to a warm water port, while Moscow has used the Khmeimim airbase as a staging post to fly its military contractors in and out of Africa.” That continent, in turn, is a major site of Russia’s projection of power, where “mercenaries, disinformation, election interference, support for coups, and arms for resources deals” combine to secure support.

African backing, in turn, is crucial for the wider goodwill Russia tries to foster in the global south. Losing the Syrian bases would have “major implications for Russia’s ability to project power in the Mediterranean Sea, threaten NATO’s southern flank and operate in Africa,” assesses the Institute for the Study of War.

Closer to home, in the southern Caucasus region, Putin’s success in securing a pro-Russian government in Georgia might also be under threat, although at this stage it is difficult to predict whether Georgia will go the way of democratic and anti-Russian Ukraine or of dictatorial and pro-Russian Belarus. Further east, the dictatorships in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan) have meanwhile pivoted to a “multi-vector foreign policy,” designed to carve out a space for their own agency in international affairs. While not breaking fully with Russia, they certainly are no colonial dependencies of the former metropole any longer.

Things might still turn out well for Putin. But as Syria suggests, dictatorial military ventures can be like personal finances: they collapse “gradually and then suddenly.” The Russian analyst cited above is certainly concerned that Russia’s failure to secure Syria might point to things to come in Ukraine: “if not today, then tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.” •

The post Russia’s failed Syrian bluff appeared first on Inside Story.

All this is happening against a background of a US presidential election campaign in which the incumbents are vulnerable to criticism that they should have done more, and much earlier, to defuse a crisis that is threatening to metastasise. President Joe Biden will be judged harshly for fumbling his efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza that would have forestalled the risk of all-out, multi-front war. That war has now arrived.

This is arguably the most dangerous period in Middle East history since the Yom Kippur war of 1973 — or perhaps the most dangerous ever given the threatened destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu and his extremist war cabinet have in their hands a decision that risks scarring the region for generations to come.

In this latest moment a series of questions suggest themselves. What are Israel’s options in response to Iran’s brazen missile attacks on targets deep inside the country? What do Netanyahu and his colleagues hope to achieve by pushing across the country’s northern border and continuing to bomb Lebanese targets? What are the limits to Iran’s willingness to risk massive counterstrikes against oil facilities and other strategic targets? What role does the United State see itself playing in a crisis that risks becoming region-wide?

From Israel’s perspective, history is not encouraging. In 1982, its forces advanced north to the suburbs of Beirut to expel Palestinian strongholds and remake Lebanon under the control of its Christian Maronite militia allies. That was the plan, anyway: while the invasion did achieve its first goal of forcing the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, it failed to bolster Maronite militia control.

Israel’s complicity in the following year’s massacre, at the hands of its militia allies, of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children sheltering in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila was widely condemned. Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the Lebanon war, was forced to resign. Prime minister Menachem Begin withdrew from public life, claiming he had been misled about the scope of Israel’s invasion.

But unquestionably the most negative outcome for Israel of the 1982 incursion was the impetus it gave to the formation of Hezbollah, or Party of God, a lethal Iranian proxy. Hezbollah has proved the most serious threat to Israel since 1948.

The answer to my earlier question about Israel’s intentions in Lebanon is both straightforward and complex. The Israelis want to push Hezbollah thirty kilometres back from the Lebanese border to beyond the Litani River and enable some Israeli 70,000 citizens to return to their homes. Hezbollah rocket attacks have forced those Israelis to take refuge away from the border.

The more complicated answer rests on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objectives beyond restoring the country’s deterrent capabilities. Put simply: does he want to provoke a war with Iran in which America would feel obliged to support its ally? Netanyahu has never made any secret of his desire for a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities to remove the possibility of an Iranian nuclear breakout.

This is where the risk lies. It is also where Washington’s anxieties are undoubtedly greatest. A preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear installations would guarantee a wider conflict that would be difficult to contain.

Biden has said he doesn’t support an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, but his record in influencing Netanyahu is dismal. In a presidential election year, this administration finds itself riding a bucking horse — an Israeli government dominated by some of the most extreme elements in the country — whose priorities are well out of alignment with those of the United States.

Netanyahu’s motivations are both personal and political: Israel’s continued prosecution of a war with Hezbollah and Hamas has not only enabled him to cling to power but may allow him to rehabilitate himself electorally after the disastrous security breach that enabled the 7 October pogrom.

From an American standpoint, the Middle East — and Lebanon in particular — carries sour memories. A Hezbollah truck bombing in 1983 in Beirut killed 241 US service personnel, among them 220 marines. That shocking moment prompted president Ronald Reagan to disavow any future commitment of ground forces in the Middle East.

But another Republican president, George W. Bush, breached Reagan’s doctrine in 2003 by invading Iraq, thereby destabilising the entire region and empowering Iran. This overreach vastly expanded Tehran’s influence via its Shia proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and in Yemen, and its Sunni fundamentalist allies in Gaza. Netanyahu had been at the forefront of those urging the Bush administration to “take out” Saddam Hussein in order to rebalance power in the Middle East and relieve pressure on Israel itself. It proved a bad bet.

Now, in the current crisis, the key uncertainty is whether Iran will avoid a further escalation in revenge for the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israeli bombing of Hezbollah targets across Lebanon. Although Iran has made it clear it doesn’t favour a slide to all-out war, its leaders won’t hold back if their country’s sovereignty and security is threatened. This is where the risk lies, not simply in a back and forth with Israel but in a conflict that extends down into the Gulf, where Iran has the capacity to cripple international oil commerce.

Iran’s leaders are constrained, of course, by the fact that a full-scale conflict would harm its own economic interests. This is something it can ill afford, and significantly limits its willingness to escalate the conflict more broadly.

Overlaying Israel’s calculations about its strategy in Lebanon is the fact that its various incursions, invasions and occupations — going right back to 1948 — have come at a cost. Occupying swathes of southern Lebanon will inevitably bring Israeli casualties, as has happened in the past. Israel felt a Lebanese scorpion’s sting on multiple occasions in the lengthy occupation that only ended, after twenty-two years, in 2000.

On Wednesday, Israel suffered multiple casualties in an engagement with Hezbollah across its northern frontier. These are the risks inherent in guerrilla warfare at close quarters in hostile terrain.

In the background of the latest developments is the question of why American diplomacy has been unable to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza — a ceasefire that would have eased Middle East tensions more generally and avoided the crisis threatening to overtake the region.

When the history of this period is written, Washington’s limp efforts to force its ally to agree to a ceasefire will reflect very poorly on the Biden administration. President Biden announced weeks ago that a framework agreement had been reached that would enable a ceasefire. That announcement proved stillborn. His secretary of state, Antony Blinken has appeared wraithlike in the Middle East on multiple occasions, to little conspicuous effect.

Contrast Blinken’s efforts in the Middle East with Henry Kissinger’s successful calming of the situation after the 1973 war or James Baker’s work towards Middle East peace after the first Gulf war in 1990–91. Or go back earlier, to 1956, when US president Dwight Eisenhower intervened to defuse the Suez crisis. Unlike now, America’s honest broker role was respected, if indeed it can claim any longer to be an honest broker given its indulgence of Netanyahu’s priorities.

Vastly complicating the situation is a US election in which both Democrats and Republicans are hostage to a febrile domestic political environment that gives interest groups leverage far beyond what is reasonable in a pluralistic democracy. In normal circumstances, Biden might have been more intent on pushing Netanyahu towards a ceasefire; the fact he failed to do so has contributed to an even bigger mess.

The combination of a weak president, an unpredictable alternative and an Israeli leader desperate to get out of a political corner means that an already volatile situation is rendered even less predictable.

If there is a rule of thumb in the history of conflict between Israel and its neighbours it is that there will be no end to conflict until a comprehensive Middle East peace is struck. The question today is whether conflict can be contained. As things stand it’s not clear that is likely, or even possible. •

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The remote-controlled explosions in pagers and hand-held radios used by Hezbollah officials and fighters have exposed the organisation’s vulnerabilities in about the most humiliating way possible. Its leadership will be consumed by the question of what else and what next after a stunning series of security breaches over the past several months. These include the elimination of Hezbollah commanders and leaders of its ally, Hamas, in drone strikes and targeted assassinations.

Israel’s motivation is clear: it is striving to re-assert its policy of deterrence against its enemies. The longstanding strategy was badly shaken by the 7 October Hamas breakout from Gaza, which tore apart Israel’s confidence in its ability to ward off acts of terror. Its vulnerabilities were exposed, its deterrent capabilities called into question. An aura of invincibility was shaken.

Two questions will now be paramount in the minds of Hezbollah leaders. What steps are required to rally their legions in the face of a crippling strike at the organisation’s communications network, effectively its nerve centre? And what form retaliation should take?

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and his commanders are under enormous pressure. They can’t appear to be allowing Israel to get away with what is arguably the most destructive strike against the militant group since its formation in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In Arabic, the word for revenge is antiqam, which carries enormous weight in a region where restoring one’s honour passes down through generations. The generational Israel–Palestine conflict is defined by the blood of its martyrs in Palestinian antiqam mythology.

It’s not clear that Sheikh Nasrallah will subscribe to the notion that revenge is a dish best served cold, although his responses since the war began in Gaza have been carefully calibrated. He will be considering the extent to which Hezbollah will use its rocket arsenal to rain terror down on Israeli cities in the certain knowledge that Israel will respond with overwhelming force. He need look no further than the Gaza wasteland to apprise himself of the consequences of precipitate action.

On the other hand, a limp response would run the risk of failing to satisfy a desire for antiqam among the militant group’s legions, and would also diminish Hezbollah’s aura of invincibility in Lebanon.

Israel’s scarcely believable use of modern technology had two main motivations. As well as helping restore its deterrent capabilities, the explosions were aimed at easing pressure on Israel’s northern towns and settlements. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet asserted the latter as a priority on the eve of the strikes against Hezbollah.

Whether Israel will follow up with an assault on Hezbollah’s ability to hold much of the country’s northern region hostage to its rocket arsenal remains to be seen. But the latest Middle East conflict has clearly entered a new and even more dangerous phase.

What is certain is that shoes will continue to drop. Short of an Israeli land invasion of Lebanon, as we’ve witnessed in the past, it is hard to see pressure on Israel’s northern settlements being alleviated. Would Netanyahu commit his country to another push across Lebanon’s borders, thus opening up a two-front war? Israel’s success on the ground in Lebanon over the years has been patchy, to say the least.

Its 1982 invasion to root out the Palestine Liberation Organisation from its strongholds in Beirut ended in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by Israel’s Maronite militia allies. Its thirty-four-day incursion into Lebanon in 2006 failed to put a stop to Hezbollah’s threats to northern Israel.

In all of this, American nervousness is understandable. While US secretary of state Antony Blinken continues his desultory efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza, the last thing Washington needs is an all-out conflagration between Israel and Lebanon. Other Middle East players could well be drawn into the conflict, and the limp ceasefire efforts in Gaza would undoubtedly be made more complex.

It’s little comfort to America that its Israeli ally is playing a high-stakes game in highly volatile circumstances. While Washington is seeking to calm the situation, Netanyahu is upping the ante.

In an election year, with a shaky administration anxious to avoid being seen to exert undue pressure on an ally, ruthless political operators like Israel’s prime minister will pursue their own agendas. Netanyahu’s agenda is not separate from his own circumstances — his hold on power is unlikely to survive an end to conflict and a frank appraisal of the events that led to war — and nor is it separate from the corruption charges that hang over him.

Then there is Iran, and its proxies across the Middle East. Tehran won’t be content to be a bystander: not only has its principal Middle East ally been humiliated, its own officials have been harmed. The injury of its representative in Beirut in one of the pager explosions comes on top of the assassination in July of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guest house, the result of a stunning breach of Iranian security. What Iran does now is no less important, and in some ways more important, than Hezbollah’s response, given its region-wide ramifications.

Conditioning prospects of a wider conflagration is the fact that neither Hezbollah’s nor Iran’s interest are served by a confrontation that spirals out of control. Nor, of course, are the interests of the United States and its allies. In the end, the question will be whether a Hezbollah response can be contained, and whether Iran itself will elect to avoid wider conflict. •

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The deaths of six hostages, five Israeli and one American, in what appears to have been a rescue operation that ended disastrously has crystalised opposition to Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war. Hostage families are at the forefront of protests against failure to negotiate an end to the conflict.

This revolt has been a long time coming in a country riven by disagreement over what is widely perceived to be Netanyahu’s self-serving efforts to prolong the conflict. Israelis are conflicted over their backing for a ruthless campaign to eliminate Hamas, on the one hand, and a desire to see an enormously destructive war brought to an end, on the other.

At a distance, it is easy to understate the involvement of Israelis in defence of their country at virtually every level. In war, their traditional default position is to put aside political differences. But such is the level of disquiet over Netanyahu’s motivations in continuing the conflict to buy himself time politically that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are saying enough.

The phrase “existential threat” is too frequently used for propaganda purposes to describe pressures that Israeli might be under. In the case of the Hamas pogrom against Jewish people on 7 October, however, and subsequent conflict on Israel’s northern border with an Iran-backed Hezbollah, the phrase is not out of place.

That said, Netanyahu’s brutal conduct of the war, his lack of flexibility around negotiations for a ceasefire, and indeed his arrogant disdain for efforts of Americans and others to bring about a halt to hostilities has vastly complicated efforts to cauterise an open wound.

Has he overplayed his hand? The answer to that question will depend on the next few days, as he faces the wrath of his own people, the open resistance of his defence minister and the disdain of Israel’s security establishment. Adding to public disquiet is the willingness of former heads of Israel’s security agencies, its military and political leaders to speak out against Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

In the eyes of Israelis and the international community, whether Netanyahu likes it or not, this is his project and it is being pursued at tremendous cost for all concerned, and not least Israel’s for reputation.

A meeting of Israel’s war cabinet last week descended into a shouting match between Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant over negotiations towards a ceasefire and release of hostages. Netanyahu is refusing to budge on what is known as the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Removing Israeli troops from the corridor is a sticking point: Gallant wants to yield on this issue to enable a ceasefire agreement.

In a tense exchange, Gallant, who was sacked by Netanyahu and reinstated last year over disagreements about the conduct of the war, reportedly called the Israeli prime minister’s attitude towards the hostages a “moral disgrace.”

What this exchange, along with the mass protests, reveals is that the Israeli consensus on the war is deeply fractured. Gallant’s belief in the need for flexibility almost certainly reflects views among senior military, who are opposed to an endless urban conflict at tremendous cost for all concerned. On Sunday he called for an immediate cabinet meeting to reverse Thursday’s decision to keep troops in the Philadelphi corridor.

Israel’s casualties from war, leaving aside economic costs, run into the hundreds. In a small country, this is a heavy burden. (The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000, according to Gazan health authorities.) Among the concerns of the Israeli military is that Israel’s political leadership refuses to describe what might constitute a political solution to a conflict that shows little sign of ending militarily. Netanyahu’s refusal to address this question in pursuit of total victory is not the least of the impediments to a lasting ceasefire and the release of surviving hostages.

In all of this, a feckless American leadership has been exposed. President Joe Biden might express understandable outrage at the death of an American hostage in Hamas hands, but Washington has had ten months to bring this war to a negotiated conclusion that would enable the political and physical rebuilding of Gaza. Thus far, it has failed.

This will not be regarded as a high point in American diplomacy. •

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History hangs heavy on Labor’s relationship with Israel. Its foundational support for Israel; its traditional ties to Israel’s labour movement; its alignment with Israel’s social democratic values; its connections to a Jewish establishment — none of these is reflected in the sort of country Israel has become.

Labor’s two great champions of  the Jewish state, 1940s external affairs minister Bert Evatt and 1980s prime minister Bob Hawke, would have difficulty recognising the proto-nationalist settler state of today. Indeed, Hawke’s attachment to an Israel dominated by the labour movement for its first three decades had begun to dissipate towards the end of his life.

Behind the scenes, he used his influence in 2012 to persuade prime minister Julia Gillard to allow Australia to abstain rather than oppose a vote to give Palestine observer status at the United Nations. Gillard resisted tooth and nail, to the point where she risked alienating much of caucus. Her decision to appoint a senior member of her staff as an “envoy” to the Jewish leadership in Australia baffled colleagues.

Whether Anthony Albanese and his frontbench like it or not, they won’t be able to separate themselves from the complexities of an issue that animates a big — and growing — section of the Australian population.

Concern about the Palestine question is not restricted to members of the Muslim faith: a large non-Muslim constituency within Labor’s rank-and-file is also exercised by the issue. Beyond the party’s footsoldiers, concern is widespread, especially among younger members of the voting public who were already drifting towards the Greens.

Put simply, Labor’s fumbling response to the Gaza war has exposed deep-seated contradictions for all to see in the party’s policies towards Palestine. On one hand Labor’s espouses its support for two states, one Palestinian, one Israeli; on the other, it indulges Israeli policies that sabotage any prospect of compromise. This is Labor’s “two state confusion.”

Whatever else might be said, the Palestine issue is now indelibly embedded in Australian domestic politics. Graphic television images  of death and suffering in Gaza are heightening public sensitivity. Senator Fatima Payman’s stand in support of recognition of Palestine drew attention to an issue that has moved decisively from the margins of politics.

Payman might be dismissed as a political ingénue not sufficiently marinaded in the traditions of the Labor collective. This misses the point. In her defiance of the party whip she spoke for a wider community, many of them young people increasingly estranged from Labor.

Pro-forma resolutions at Labor conferences designed to deflect rank-and-file concerns are no longer sustainable. Leaving them on the books like rusting ordnance on a Middle East battlefield mocks their intent.

In the history of Labor foreign policy, going back to the party’s earliest days, there has hardly been a more vexed issue. This includes differences  over conscription in the first world war; attitudes towards the Soviet Union that prompted the split of the 1950s; intramural arguments over the Vietnam war; and, most recently, the white-anting of Simon Crean for his courageous decision to oppose the rush to war in Iraq.

Arthur Calwell’s fine speech in 1965 opposing the Menzies government’s decision to commit Australia to Vietnam was subject to sniping within the party. Among those with reservations was Calwell’s deputy, Gough Whitlam. In contemporary politics, it would be out of character for an Albanese government to follow the example of a Calwell or a Crean — or the lead of social democratic countries like Spain and Norway — by adopting a bold stance on recognition of Palestine.

The long history of Australia’s engagement in Middle Eastern conflicts stretches back to 1885, when a NSW expeditionary militia was mounted to relieve General Sir Charles Gordon, whose forces were under siege in Khartoum by the Mahdi’s whirling dervishes. This quixotic antipodean force in support of empire landed on the shores of the Red Sea but never got to Khartoum. It saw very little combat.

Gordon died in the siege, but his memory is preserved in statuary in Australia, in the naming of Geelong’s Gordon Institute of TAFE and in the middle name of the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Gordon Menzies.

Australian involvement in the Middle East has persisted since then, in war and peace, in ways that have a habit of intruding themselves jarringly into domestic politics. The Gaza war is merely the latest example.

In Australia’s history there is hardly a more important event than the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, in which Australians served and died in a Middle Eastern theatre of war.

Unremarked by historians, Australians fought alongside a contingent of Jewish volunteers, known as the Zion Mule Corps, which had been raised in Palestine. The corps was the forerunner of the Jewish Legion that served in the British army during the Palestine campaign against the Ottoman Turks — a campaign notable for the role of the Australian Light Horse in the defeat of the Ottomans and the reshaping of the modern Middle East.

The Light Horse’s involvement has been a useful prop for those seeking to embellish Australia’s role in the birth of the Jewish state. The causal link is not much more than a historical happenstance, a generation ahead of Israel’s creation.

This leaves aside the role of the ninth division in the defeat of Rommel’s legions at El Alamein during the second world war, and the courageous exploits of the Rats of Tobruk in Libya in resisting a protracted siege. In that sense, Australia played a role in the defeat of Hitler’s war machine in the Middle Eastern theatre and events that flowed from it — including, as things turned out, the partition of Palestine, driven significantly by Western guilt over the Holocaust.

Thus is Australian history embedded in the Middle East, for better or worse — John Howard’s ill-starred decision to join the American cavalry in the rush to invade Iraq in 2003 being one example of the latter. Israel’s supporters in Australia, amplified by the conservative media, were among those most outspoken in their advocacy of that rush to war; the consequences, as it turned out, were disastrous.

For Labor, its own history since 1945 weighs heavily on its Middle East policies and its relationship with Israel and its supporters in Australia. It is at least arguable that without Bert Evatt’s energetic advocacy at the United Nations in 1947, the partition of Palestine may not have happened, and certainly not as expeditiously.

Evatt’s backing for a separate Jewish homeland is the stuff of Labor mythology and a source of gratitude among Australian Jews, although this gratitude is conditional on the party’s continued support for Israel, irrespective, it seems, of its excesses.

As chair of the UN Special Committee on Palestine, Evatt worked tirelessly to bring about partition. In the words of a Polish envoy to the UN, Australia’s external affairs minister “bullied, pleaded, cajoled and  coaxed until he got the right numbers for them.” In the event, the UN voted twenty-five for partition and thirteen against (including all Arab states), with seventeen abstentions, hardly an overwhelming endorsement.

Then, as president of the General Assembly in 1948, Evatt pushed for Israel’s admission as a sovereign state. This happened in 1949. Under Ben Chifley’s Labor government, Australia was among the first countries to recognise Israel.

Since 1917, and British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s declaration of support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, Australia had followed the waxing and waning of Britain’s policy towards Jewish aspirations in Palestine. British policy generally waned in the interwar period, which was marked by Jewish terrorist activities against Britain’s mandated post-Ottoman oversight of  Palestine.

Evatt’s interventions at the UN effectively set a benchmark for Australian support for the embryonic Jewish state, and one that infused Labor history. It persisted through the Menzies years and beyond.

The election of Gough Whitlam in 1972, with his declaration that Australia would adopt an “even-handed” approach to Palestine, caused a schism between a Labor government and the Jewish leadership in Australia. Where Evatt had acted as a midwife to the birth of the Jewish state, Whitlam was proposing to sever the umbilical cord.

An “even-handed” policy was not something that found favour in the salons of Melbourne, since it implied a willingness to listen to Palestinian grievances and engage with the “terrorist” Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Whitlam’s defeat in 1975 was welcomed by a Jewish establishment since it meant that Australian policy towards the Middle East could return to a comfortable status quo under Malcolm Fraser. That stance persisted under Labor’s Bob Hawke.

Considerable mythology is attached to Hawke’s connection to Israel. It is true that his close relationship with Peter Abeles and other prominent Australian Jews meant he had an emotional attachment to Jewish people and the State of Israel — an attachment borne out by his advocacy for Soviet Jews.

On the other hand, his government was a less reliable supporter of Israel at the UN than its predecessors. In its latter years, it exhibited greater willingness to criticise. As foreign minister, Bill Hayden condemned Israel’s settlement policies, for example.

Later, under Paul Keating’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans, Australia proved a sharper critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. It welcomed the PLO’s acceptance of Israel’s existence and the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and it shared Washington’s dismay at the assassination by a Jewish zealot of Israel’s prime minister and peace advocate, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995.

A relatively unquestioning policy towards Israel returned under John Howard and his foreign minister, Alexander Downer. At the UN and in other global forums, Australia became a reliable voice for Israel. Canberra ceased referring to territories seized in the 1967 war as “occupied.” Downer observed that Australia admired the “strength and courage of Israeli for those are traits Australian see in themselves.”

From 2007, the prime ministerships of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Rudd again, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison coincided with various aimless efforts by Washington to advance a peace process. Morrison pleased the Jewish establishment in 2018 when he recognised West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and pledged to shift Australia’s embassy from Tel Aviv. Labor, under Albanese, reversed the decision to recognise Jerusalem.

Australian policy reverted to the mean: that Jerusalem should be left to final-status negotiations. In other words, there should be realistic negotiations on a two-state solution. As a battle continues to rage in the Gaza Strip, those negotiations seem very far away.

Given the unsteadiness it has displayed in the face of pressure from within its own ranks and the wider community, what is the fair assessment of the Albanese government’s management of the Palestine question?

Or, put another way: what burden does history place on a government that is seeking to be faithful to its social democratic ideals and Australia’s role in the birth of Israel, on one hand, and demands by a wider constituency that it live up to its commitments to a two-state solution, on the other, when it is faced by a vociferous campaign to delegitimise legitimate criticism of Israel?

The fair judgement at this stage is that the government is having enormous trouble managing the Gaza war issue, trapped as it is between its own history, the expectations of its rank-and-file, community disgust over the slaughter of innocents, and an extraordinarily effective pro-Israel lobby given virtual carte blanche in the pages of the national daily.

Under these sorts of pressures the government has wilted. Initially, foreign minister Penny Wong creditably advanced a proposal to recognise Palestine as a “pathway” to realistic negotiations on a two-state solution. No sooner had she put forward this relatively mild initiative than a near-hysterical reaction obliged Labor to retreat to the point where its policy on Palestine is at best passive and at worst a contradiction of its own platform to recognise a Palestinian state.

One is tempted to ask what a Whitlam, or a Hawke with Hayden as foreign minister, or a Keating with Evans as foreign minister might do in these circumstances? Evans himself has in recent times advocated the implementation of Labor policy on recognition without delay.

In the wash-up of all of this one other observation might be made. Politicians from the factional left of the party — figures like Gillard, Albanese and Wong — have a tendency to overcorrect on issues like Palestine.

It is interesting to recall that in September 2002 Albanese, as convener of the parliamentary Friends of Palestine, delivered one of the most resolute statements in support of Palestinian rights. It bears rereading in light of the difficulties he is having in aligning policies with the principles he enunciated then. In his grievance-debate speech, he engaged in a far-reaching critique of Israel’s occupation and demanded implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the wake of the 1967 war.

Resolution 242 — agreed fifty-seven years ago — calls for combatants to withdraw to pre-1967 boundaries and expresses the clear principle, under international law, of the inadmissibility of the seizure of territory by force.

Like a thunderously dark cloud, history hangs very heavily indeed over the Albanese government’s Gaza policy, and indeed over the prime minister’s own record. •

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War between Israel and Lebanon need not be inevitable, but the two are edging closer to open conflict. A mistake, a miscalculation, a desire by one side or the other to inflict mass casualties could set off a chain reaction that results in war. We have seen this movie before.

In this latest period, the Middle East resembles a tinderbox, with Israel embroiled in conflict on three fronts: the Gaza Strip, its northern border with Lebanon, and pin-pricks from the Yemeni Houthis to the south. Standing behind the three is Iran, which supplies munitions, training and, in the case of Hezbollah, on-the-ground engagement via its Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Not since the Yom Kippur war of 1973 has Israel found itself grappling with a strategic challenge of this complexity. In some ways, the situation is more multifaceted because of threats to Israel’s heartland from a Hezbollah rocket arsenal.

The Gaza war is now the longest and in some ways the most debilitating in the country’s history. Israel’s international reputation is scarred on a daily basis by horrible scenes of carnage among civilians, including women and children subjected to merciless bombing.

Conflict with the Palestinians has exerted an enormous strain on Israel militarily, diplomatically and — given the political fractures it is causing within Israel itself — politically. The exhaustion factor cannot be discounted for a small country beset on different fronts.

While Hamas and the Houthis have a limited capacity to inflict damage on Israel proper, the Gaza war has been enormously costly in Israeli lives and ordnance. Benjamin Netanyahu’s sounding off this week over America’s withholding of a shipment of 2000-pound bombs is a sign of Israel’s concern over depleted stocks of munitions and the risks to resupply. There is a sense in the region that something will have to give.

Israeli military commanders are letting it be known they have dusted off war plans. Hezbollah militia leaders are preparing for open warfare. The two sides are mobilising along Israel’s northern frontier.

Washington is concerned, as well it might be. Being dragged into a wider Middle East conflict is the stuff of American nightmares. Understanding that open conflict between Israel and Lebanon may cause a wider regional war, US envoy Amos Hochstein has been in the region seeking to calm the situation.

Iran’s direct support of its Hezbollah proxy, on the ground or in the air, adds to the bad-case scenario. Alert to the risks early in the Gaza war, Joe Biden ordered two US carrier groups into the eastern Mediterranean to forestall such a possibility.

History is important for understanding the faultlines in the troubled Israel–Lebanon context. In 1982, following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and faced by the risk of the country falling apart, US president Ronald Reagan committed a stabilisation force to Beirut. American mediators had negotiated the Palestine Liberation Organisation leadership’s move from Beirut to distant Tunisia and its fighters’ dispersal to the far corners of the Middle East.

American involvement on the ground proved catastrophic. An April 1983 suicide bomb attack on the US embassy in Beirut killed thirty-two people. Later that year, in October, 241 American servicemen perished in another suicide bombing, this time in Beirut’s southern suburbs. For Washington, this was carnage on a mass scale.

Much chastened, Reagan withdrew US troops in 1984, vowing never again to commit American ground forces to the region. But the lesson hadn’t been learned by George W. Bush when he rushed to war in Iraq in 2003.

In Israel’s case, its involvement in Lebanon since the Israeli state was declared in 1948 has been militarily challenging, to say the least. Following the PLO’s bloody ouster from Jordan in 1970 — the event the Palestinians call Black September — the organisation’s leadership had moved to Beirut, from where it directed guerrilla attacks against Israel from southern Lebanon.

To push back the Palestinian threat to its northern towns and kibbutzim, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. In the process it set up a buffer zone along its northern boundary in alliance with a Christian-led South Lebanese Army, which it supplied with arms and trained as a proxy force.

Four years later, following an attempt by Palestinian terrorists to assassinate its ambassador in London, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. The aim was to neutralise the Palestinian threat once and for all, but Israel paid a heavy price for its adventurism in the court of international opinion.

Between 16 and 18 September 1982, under the gaze of an occupying Israeli army, Christian Phalange militiamen massacred hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. Ariel Sharon, who was held accountable his sickening development, was obliged to resign as Israel’s defence minister.

The episode also prompted the resignation of Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, who felt Sharon had misled him about the war’s scope. Sharon had sold the war on the basis that Israel’s army would limit itself to an invasion of southern Lebanon. Instead, under Sharon’s direction, it went all the way to Beirut, with disastrous consequences.

Out of all of this, there has been no more malign result, at least from Israel’s perspective, than the evolution of Hezbollah as a threatening Iranian Shiite proxy. Hezbollah — the “Party of God” inspired by the rhetoric of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini — dates its formation to 1982.

In its invasion of Lebanon and its occupation of southern Lebanon up until 2000, Israel inadvertently acted as midwife to Hezbollah. The organisation evolved from an embryonic resistance movement to its now-dominant role in Lebanon and the principal Iranian-backed threat to Israel’s security.

Tactically, strategically and politically, 1982 proved to be a jagged moment in Middle East history, a moment whose consequences are playing out in the contemporary environment. It’s a cliché, but the 1982 invasion proved to be an own-goal for Israel.

Another date is also important in considering the tensions between Israel and Lebanon. In 2006, Israel caused considerable damage to Lebanese infrastructure during a thirty-four-day war against Hezbollah in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. Its aim was to put Hezbollah on notice that it would pay a heavy price for actions that threatened Israeli security across its northern boundary.

That was the intent, but the best that can be said for Israel’s 2006 foray is that it met with limited success, and the more accurate way to characterise it is as a failure. Hezbollah is immeasurably stronger than it was eighteen years ago, both militarily and politically.

During those years, Lebanon has been a cauldron of ferment and instability, with Hezbollah gradually tightening its grip on the country and its institutions, to the point where it is now the dominant political player.

A construct of the French colonial era, Lebanon is barely recognisable from the country that Paris sought to foster in 1943 with a weighting towards Christian dominance. Eight decades later, the Christian, Sunni and Druze components of the population are more or less subservient to Hezbollah Shiite domination.

Beyond that, Hezbollah has become Iran’s most lethal proxy in the region, with something like 130,000 rockets in its arsenal that could be used to threaten Israel’s defences. Just this past week, it engaged in what can only be described as a blatant provocation by releasing a nine-minute video purporting to show Israeli military assets deep inside Israel.

The point it was making was that Hezbollah had the capacity to surveil Israel’s military facilities; the implied threat was that those facilities were within range of its own Iranian-supplied missiles, which are far more sophisticated, and thus lethal, than Hamas’s relatively rudimentary rockets.

Since Hamas’s 7 October pogrom and hostage-taking, it has been assumed that Iran wants to avoid a wider conflict. This is probably still true, but the heightened tensions along the Israel–Lebanon frontier risk fuelling a wider conflict. Drawing lessons from history, America and its allies need to find a way to persuade Israel and Hamas to agree to a permanent ceasefire with plans in place for a governing body in Gaza and its reconstruction.

Until and unless that happens, the prospect of de-escalation between Israel and Lebanon remains remote. It’s sometimes forgotten that 60,000 Israelis have been displaced in northern Israel by persistent Hezbollah rocket attacks. Experience tells us this situation is unsustainable. •

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Not a natural politician, nor a compelling speaker, Gantz is a decorated former head of the Israel Defence Force. He follows in the footsteps of Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, all of whom converted distinguished military careers into political office with varying success. Gantz hasn’t performed particularly convincingly in his political roles in and out of government.

If Abraham Lincoln’s observation that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” holds then a deeply fractured Israel is at its most perilous moment since its war of independence in 1947–48. Even the Yom Kippur war of 1973, in which Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal in a surprise attack, didn’t rise to the same level of threat.

The challenges are from within and without. Israel is not only at war with Palestinians under occupation and trading blows with Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, to its north, it is also beset by some of the deepest internal political cleavages in its turbulent history. On top of all that, its international reputation is under siege as the horrifying death toll in Gaza mounts.

Israel desperately needs a unifying figure to displace the divisive Benjamin Netanyahu — a man reviled by swathes of its own population, as evidenced by mass demonstrations that persist against him in time of war. Can the centre hold in Israel in the person of Gantz and other centrists? Or will the country’s allies be obliged to continue living with a nationalist regime tugged to the right by extremist partners?

We have seen the effect of this internal stalemate in the Biden administration’s efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. Peace plans brokered by the Qataris and Egyptians in collaboration with American envoys have been blocked by extremist elements in Netanyahu’s coalition.

This is precisely why Gantz says he has had enough. In his resignation statement he made clear it was Netanyahu’s failure to outline a plan for Gaza once the fighting stops that prompted his decision. “Fateful strategic decisions are stuck due to hesitancy and procrastination out of political considerations,” he said in long-anticipated television remarks.

Gantz declared in mid-May that he would withdraw from the war cabinet unless Netanyahu embraced a “plan of action” including the creation of an “international civilian governance mechanism for Gaza.” This is the “day after” question that has bedevilled debate about the Gaza conflict from the beginning: what arrangements might be made to administer Gaza once the bombing stops?

Netanyahu’s steadfast refusal to answer that question has been allied with his insistence that the mainstream Palestinian Authority must have no role. By threatening to leave a vacuum or, worse, conveying the impression that Israel intends to remain an occupying force indefinitely, this refusal has vastly complicated efforts to bring about an end to hostilities.

Gantz’s resignation coincides with the arrival in the region of US secretary of state Antony Blinken on what is his eighth peace mission, all of which have so far proved inconclusive. On this occasion Blinken is focused on marketing a peace plan advanced by president Joe Biden on 31 May.

In latest developments Hamas has attached conditions to its acceptance of the Biden plan, including a more detailed timeline for a permanent end to hostilities. Israel has not provided an explicit acceptance publicly, with Netanyahu insisting the war “will not end until all of its goals are achieved, including the return of all abductees, and the elimination of Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities.”

The first phase of the American plan would provide a six-week window while three things happened: an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza’s populated areas, Hamas’s release of some Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and a surge in humanitarian assistance.

Phase 2 would involve the release of all remaining hostages. Israel would withdraw from Gaza and, and, depending on Hamas living up to its commitments, hostilities would cease permanently. Phase 3 would involve a “major reconstruction plan” for Gaza.

In contrast to Netanyahu’s obstructionism, Gantz has expressed support for the Biden plan.

Those opposing views raise the question of the hour: will Gantz’s resignation hasten the end of the Netanyahu government? The short answer: probably not, although Israel’s domestic politics is so volatile that defections from the Netanyahu’s ruling bloc can’t be ruled out.

As things stand, Netanyahu’s fractious coalition holds sixty-four of the 120 Knesset seats. A handful of defectors would be needed to jeopardise his grip on power.

Gantz has called for fresh elections in the second half of this year to try to resolve the country’s bitter divisions. Opinion polls indicate that his National Unity bloc would outpoll Netanyahu’s Likud.

But a continuing war in Gaza, risks of escalation across Israel’s Lebanon border, and Middle East instability more generally render any prediction risky.

By withdrawing from a war cabinet, Gantz has tugged a thread from a flimsy political façade in Israel. Whether he has left it too late, and whether Gantz himself has the political acumen, the force of personality and, most importantly, the ability to rally support remains a very open question.

Irrespective of international pressure for a permanent ceasefire, Netanyahu will be reluctant to give up war aims that involve the complete destruction of Hamas. The Gaza conflict now rests between two objectives: Hamas’s demands for a timeline on a permanent ceasefire and Israel’s requirement that Hamas play no further role in Gaza’s governance. These are difficult objectives to reconcile. Over to you, Benny Gantz. •

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I was in the middle of reading Apeirogon, the Irish writer Colum McCann’s novel based on the lives of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. You may already be familiar with these two men, one a West Bank Palestinian, the other a Jerusalem Israeli, who in separate incidents lost their schoolgirl daughters to what has been euphemistically called a “conflict.” Together, they have gone around the world speaking of how profoundly the girl’s deaths changed them, presenting themselves to whoever is willing to listen as living examples of the possibility of peace.

You may have seen the documentary about them; you may have been in the audience on one of their speaking tours. Though the incidents they speak of occurred long before 7 October, their stories have thrown much light on what has gone wrong on that tiny sliver of land I prefer to call Israel–Palestine.

And who today hasn’t been thinking about Israel–Palestine?

Though A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a brilliant work of non-fiction and Apeirogon a magnificent fiction (McCann himself calls it a “hybrid novel”) they are nonetheless remarkably similar. Each is a window on life as it has been lived on that portion of land the Los Angeles Times compares with “the slice of California from San Diego to Fresno.” For over half a century, since Israel became Israel in what Palestinians call their Nakba, it’s been the site of a preposterously unequal struggle between a nation obsessed with the need for security and an occupied people seeking to break free from the harsh oppressions imposed on them.

What makes both Thrall’s book and McCann’s novel so rivetting is that, while each account is based on true events, the authors skilfully navigate between their stories of real people and the historical and political complexities that enmesh them.

Since 7 October this struggle has erupted into what may become a Middle Eastern, or possibly even a global, war. In the intervening months Israel has invaded and mercilessly bombed the Gaza Strip, with an estimated 34,000 Palestinians dead and those still alive enduring unimaginable suffering, including the risk of starvation. The crisis threatens all the players — Israel, Hamas, the United States and its allies to boot. More and more people around the world are out on the streets demanding an immediate ceasefire.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama had its genesis in a fifty-page article published in the New York Review of Books in 2021. But Thrall insists that what he wrote there forms a very small part of the book, which came out only eighteen days after Hamas had breached Israel’s seemingly invulnerable defences. So who is Abed Salama, and what is it about this man that made Thrall write these two substantially different works about him?

When we first meet him it is 2012 in the West Bank town of Anata, some time after he’d learned on the radio of a road accident involving a semi-trailer and a school bus taking kindergarteners to a picnic at a nearby theme park. Salama had lived most of his life in Anata, once a Palestinian village but today encircled by the separation wall and lying within Palestinian Authority–governed East Jerusalem.

The changes began around the time Salama was born, after Israel had won its war of 1967. “Year by year,” writes Thrall, “Palestinians from Anata found themselves absorbed into the urban fabric of an expanding Jerusalem, which had swallowed up the Old City and the rest of East Jerusalem, as well as the lands of more than two dozen outlying villages, all annexed by Israel.” In the process the Salama family’s fortunes plummeted.

When the first intifada broke out in 1987 Abed was a year and a half out of high school. His hopes for a Russian law degree were dashed when the Soviet Union dissolved; then Israel shut down the Palestinian universities. He couldn’t even get a passport to study in Jordan. Needless to say, he was radicalised. He rose as a construction worker in the union controlled by a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, organising protests, clandestinely disseminating literature and spray-painting texts on walls. Eventually a faction leader, it was only a matter of time before he was arrested.

Israeli soldiers came for Abed at night, which appears to be standard operating procedure. Beaten and tortured, he landed in a prison near Hebron where security officers interrogated him and tortured him again. He was then moved to another detention facility in Anatot, a nearby Israeli settlement ironically “built on land confiscated from his family,” Thrall writes.

From there he was shunted between various prisons before being shipped to one earmarked for political prisoners in the Negev (what Palestinians call the Naqab). Nearly 13,000 Palestinians were in Israeli jails at the time. Yet when the Oslo Accords got underway, ending the intifada, restrictions on Palestinians actually increased.

Released from prison, Abed was issued with a green ID card. This was to distinguish him from those issued with orange or blue cards, each of which indicated the extent of movement permitted for their holders. His card not only marked him as an ex-prisoner but indicated the length of his incarceration.

It was soon apparent that the efficacy of the system depended on its baffling arbitrariness. Abed was back at his old construction job once he managed to get the orange card that meant he could enter Jerusalem, though newly installed checkpoints slowed movement along the way. After a doomed Romeo and Juliet–style love affair, he agreed to an arranged marriage. His wife bore him four daughters, but the marriage failed. He married again, this time by choice. It was Haifa, his new wife, who gave birth to a boy, Adam, and three years later another boy, Milad.

All the while Israeli control of the Occupied Territories intensified and Jewish settlements spread on the West Bank. Palestinians were neither free nor independent. As Thrall writes:

In fact, Oslo had furthered Israel’s goal of holding on to maximal land with minimal Palestinians on it. The agreements had fractured the West Bank into 165 islands of limited self-government, each one surrounded by a sea of Israeli control. Trapped in these islands and watched over by PA [Palestinian Authority] security forces that were subservient to Israel, Palestinians mocked the impotence of their Authority, their sulta, calling it a salata, a salad instead.

The second intifada erupted from these accumulated frustrations. Its immediate trigger was Ariel Sharon’s incendiary visit to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. When Palestinians protested, Israel reacted, killing four unarmed Palestinians and wounding 200.

That intifada ended when Palestinian leaders eschewed violence as their method of resistance, opting instead for black South Africa’s example. To halt the murderous cycle of suicide bombings and Israeli reprisals they sought international community support through boycott, sanctions and divestment, or BDS as it’s known.

Israel quickly intervened after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, reinstating the PLO’s Fatah on the West Bank and pulling Jewish settlements out of Gaza and leaving Hamas in control there. It was a brutal, classic divide-and-rule tactic, its realisation too convoluted to detail here. But we know the rest — all of which affected Abed Salama — in broad outline, though some of us more than others.

On the morning of the school bus crash, Salama slept in. It was his day off work. While he was sleeping, five-year-old Milad and his friends climbed onto the bus. Rain was falling heavily by the time Abed rose. He left with a cousin to buy meat from a butcher in another part of Jerusalem, but the friend who was to accompany them rang to say he’d been stuck in traffic. Then a nephew rang to ask if Milad had gone on an outing. “There was an accident with a school bus near Jaba,” he said.

Abed left his cousin’s vehicle immediately and ran through the rain to find the bus. Spotting an Israeli army jeep, he hailed it down, saying in Hebrew that he thought his son was on the bus. The driver refused to give him a lift. He ran again. He didn’t spot the bus at first — a large, jack-knifed semi-trailer blocked the way. People had gathered, among them other parents.

Then he saw it, “flipped on its side, an empty burnt-out shell.” Where were the kids? Where were their teachers? Nobody could tell him much. “They carried the burned bodies out of the bus and laid them on the ground,” said a Palestinian Authority official, one of Israel’s enforcers.

At that stage, all any parent could do was hope that their child hadn’t died. Rumours swirled. The children appeared to have been taken to different hospitals, but no one could tell which of them had been taken where.

The rest of Abed Salama’s day was a nightmare pilgrim’s progress, with impediments every single step of the way. Along that way, Thrall narrates the stories of many others caught up in the tragedy. We learn about the bus driver, the paramedics, an onlooker, teachers, social workers, nurses. So many; all enmeshed in the horror. And looming above them all, that wall.

Called the “separation wall” or the “apartheid wall,” for Palestinians it’s as much a symbol as a barrier. Originally meant to follow the 1967 “green line,” it has proceeded in stages, departing from that line considerably, wiggling in and out of the Occupied West Bank, surrounding or segmenting towns and villages, cutting off farmers from their fields, kin from kin.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a granular damnation of its effects. Small things: from a soldier’s refusal to give a terrified father a lift in the rain to the narrow, winding, pot-holed road the kids take to a picnic site, contempt for the occupied rules. Kids disappear into different hospitals, some in Ramallah, none of them to far-closer ones in Jerusalem. The checkpoints, overseen by gun-toting adolescents, ever delay.

The stories Thrall interweaves are cumulatively scarifying. Even readers like me, who have known of such oppression for some time, will learn much about the utter injustice of the present situation. Others who should learn are unlikely to pick up A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. But for those whose hearts and minds are still open, this is the book.

As for Abed Salama he, like Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, is talking around the world to those who are willing to listen. Peace may very well depend on them. •

A Day in the Life of Abed Salara: A Palestine Story
By Nathan Thrall | Allen Lane | $36.99 | 255 pages

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Take the phrase “two-state solution,” which has become the political currency of the moment. Few, if any, longer historical shadows have fallen across the Middle East than this reference to an ideal of two countries, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side in relative harmony.

In the absence of a realistic pathway towards resolving the longest-running conflict in modern history, this hollowed-out phrase serves an obvious political purpose.

I use the word “pathway” deliberately. This was the terminology chosen by foreign minister Penny Wong last week when she outlined Labor’s approach to resolving the Israel–Palestine conflict. “We need to build a pathway to a peace that is enduring and just,” she told the ANU’s National Security College in a landmark speech. “Because the simple truth is that a secure and prosperous future for both Israelis and Palestinians will only come with a two-state solution.”

Wong went on to canvass the possibility that Australia might accord recognition to a Palestinian state as a “pathway” towards a revitalised peace process. Controversially, recognition would take place ahead of final-status negotiations on all the vexed issues that have stymied a peace process over many years.

Leaving aside the wisdom of this approach, her remarks were aligned with views expressed by the leaders of several of Australia’s close allies, including, principally, Britain. Conservative foreign secretary David Cameron had suggested a similar step a few weeks earlier, on the basis that whatever had been tried before was not working.

Wong’s alignment with Cameron produced a reaction in Australian domestic politics that was as discordant as it was ill-judged. Opposition leader Peter Dutton indulged in the sort of hyperbole that defines his leadership, declaring it “the most reckless act of a foreign minister I have seen in my twenty-two years in the parliament.”

His remarks were echoed by conservative media, which has adopted an Israel-right-or-wrong culture-wars approach to the Israel–Palestine issue. So invested have sections of the media become in this point of view that headlines appear regularly in which Wong is “lashed” by spokespersons for an assortment of Jewish organisations — including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council — all espousing very similar viewpoints.

I’ll leave it to the reader to judge whether the views of particular lobby groups who are in the habit of “lashing Wong” are given more credence than is justified.

Wong’s act of “recklessness” was, of course, not reckless at all. It may have been naive, given an unpromising situation on the ground; it may have been contrived, given the complexities of the issue; it may have aimed to ease political pressures in Labor’s heartland seats. But reckless? Hardly.

For argument’s sake, and without much hope of genuine progress towards illusion becoming reality, let us consider prospects for a “two-state solution” in light of the terrible conflict in Gaza.

First, it might be useful to trace the evolution of the concept from the 1917 declaration by British prime minister Arthur Balfour, in which he pledged support for a national home for Jewish people in Palestine, up to the present. Like rusting tanks left in the desert after one of the Middle East’s innumerable wars, the signposts have found themselves submerged in shifting sands of subterfuge, mendacity and ill will.

From Balfour to the 1937 Peel Commission, which first proposed separate Jewish and Arab states; to the United Nations “partition plan” of the 1947; to the wars of 1967 and 1973 that redrew the maps of Israel and Palestine; to the Camp David Accords of 1978 that ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt; to the still-born Oslo peace process of 1993; to subsequent attempts to achieve an historic compromise — all have added layers of complexity.

This was certainly the case at Camp David in 1999 and at Taba in 2000, when a last-minute effort by US president Bill Clinton’s administration to bring Israelis and Palestinians together foundered in a sea of mistrust, with much of the blame for this failure accruing to the Palestinians. Desultory attempts were made during George W. Bush’s administration, and a more purposeful effort was launched by Barack Obama to bring the parties together, but such efforts trickled into the sand.

Donald Trump advanced his own solution by proclaiming that he was intent on bringing off what he called the “deal of the century.” As far as the Palestinians were concerned this was no deal at all, rather than an attempt to expunge their legitimate rights to a sovereign state undiluted by increasing numbers of Jewish settlers. In truth, Trump’s deal was a confidence trick detrimental to Palestinian interests, as if anyone should have been surprised.

Along the way, and apart from the Oslo process and the Clinton initiative, other significant two-state proposals have included the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, also known as the Saudi Initiative, which laid down terms for a resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Broadly, it called for Israel’s withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war and the creation of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The chances of Israel agreeing to this formulation are, to say the least, remote. But the formula, agreed at an Arab League summit in Beirut and reaffirmed in 2007, remains the cornerstone of Arab demands.

Since no resolution of the Palestine issue remains remotely possible without  a regional consensus, the Saudi initiative can’t be disregarded, however far-fetched its demands may seem in light of current circumstances. Separate from efforts to embed a two-state solution into Middle East peacemaking, a binational state in which Jews and Arabs co-exist has its advocates. However, the likelihood of such a “one-state solution” gaining traction is negligible given that Jewish people would risk ceasing to be a majority in a combined state.

History hangs heavy on the Middle East and nowhere more so than in a conflict whose contours are now further complicated by threats of a regional war between Israel and Iran. Israel’s colonisation of swathes of the West Bank, and the subjugation of a resident population to stifling military rule, remains the greatest single impediment to a settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict based on a two-state solution. Put simply: how do you unscramble the egg?

Again, history is important.

The phrase “two-state solution” didn’t gain traction in peace-making efforts until Jordan’s King Hussein relinquished his claim to represent the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1985. The role had been assumed by the Hashemite monarchy in 1950, not long after Israel’s 1947–48 war of independence, when Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The king’s reluctant acceptance of reality enabled an animated discussion about two states, one that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was able to exploit. This important historical moment is dealt with in my book Arafat: The  Biography.

By 1985, the Palestine Liberation Organisation under Arafat had long abandoned the illusion of armed victory over Israel. After King Hussein’s intervention that year the PLO moved hesitantly towards endorsing Israel’s right to exist under a two-state formula. At a press conference on the sidelines of the 1988 UN General Assembly, Arafat reluctantly accepted Israel’s right to exist, de facto and de jure, by endorsing UN Security Resolution 242, which implicitly recognised Israel. He also renounced terrorism as a means for the PLO to achieve its objectives.

This was the PLO’s down payment on a “two-state solution,” and one that embedded the phrase in Middle East peace-making.

That was thirty-six years ago. Apart from an all-too brief moment between 1993–95, following the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, and the Clinton initiative of 1999–2000, a two-state solution has remained elusive, and never more so than now.

The current conflict will not retire the phrase, of course, since politicians need to be seen to be making constructive suggestions, even if they have no intention of doing anything about them.

Foreign minister Wong should not be censured unduly for this: at least she was suggesting an alternative “pathway” in an effort break the mould of a tired debate in which “final status” discussions have served as a barrier to progress. Her critics offered not much beyond restatements of an allegiance to Israel under an extremist nationalist leadership whose impulses are to crush Palestinian aspirations.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to those who have sought to create “pathways” to peace has been to pursue an aggressive annexationist policy in the Occupied Territories built on ever-expanding settlements.

In all of this it is hard to disagree with Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. In an essay for the Guardian last week, “A New Abyss: Gaza and the Hundred Years War on Palestine,” he derides the lip service paid to a two-state solution by the Biden administration.

“There was no sign,” he writes, “that the US would demand implementation of the essential prerequisites for such a solution: a rapid and complete end to Israel’s nearly fifty-seven-year military occupation and to its usurpation and colonisation of Palestinian land, which has planted nearly 750,000 illegal settlers in 60 per cent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

With no indication these measures would be firmly enforced, says Khalidi, “a call for a ‘two-state solution’ has always been meaningless, a cruel Orwellian hoax.” •

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The raid took place at a critical moment in the Gaza war. The Biden administration has been seeking to dissuade Israel from launching a full-scale military assault on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where a million or more displaced Palestinians are huddled.

Under international law, diplomatic missions like Iran’s Syrian consulate are regarded as sovereign territory. Leaving aside the seniority of the commanders killed in Damascus, the missile strike thus represents a direct assault on Iran’s interest in the region. Iran has vowed retaliation, but its leaders have not indicated what form this will take or given any indication of the extent to which they are prepared to risk a wider conflict.

In its responses so far to American and Israeli strikes — including the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani, another senior Revolutionary Guard leader, in January 2020 — Iran has been restrained. Leaders in Tehran clearly want to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States and Israel that would quickly become a regional conflict with devastating consequences — including for Iran itself, whose oil-dependent economy is brittle.

So, the question becomes twofold. How is Iran likely to assuage Zahedi’s slaying? And what are the risks of a further deterioration in regional security?

It is important to bear in mind that Zahedi, like Soleimani, was a commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force, which is deeply engaged in supporting Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy. Indeed, the Quds commander is credited with overall responsibility for overseeing Hezbollah’s build-up of a missile capability aimed at targets in Israel.

For that reason alone, his death during an Israeli airstrike is not coincidental. Nor are the casualties of a number of other such Israeli strikes conducted over recent months against Iranian commanders in the region.

Late last year, for instance, Israeli forces killed Iranian general Sayyed Reza Mousavi in an airstrike in Damascus. Mousavi had been directly responsible for procuring missiles, rockets and drones for Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. Strikes like these highlight the fact that Iran prefers to use its proxies to conduct operations against the US and its interests in the region. The Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, for example, would not be possible without supplies of Iranian-manufactured drones and missiles. It has seriously disrupted container traffic in a waterway that previously carried around 30 per cent of global container trade.

But that disruption is happening at some distance from Gaza. What will be more concerning for Israel and the United States is the prospect of an escalation across the Israel–Lebanon frontier.

Until now, Hezbollah’s cross-border rocket and drone strikes have been sporadic, but the risks of an escalation are ever-present. A full-scale war would have destructive consequences for both countries, and for the region more generally. It would recall the devastating impact on Lebanon of the war it waged with Israel in 2006. Destruction of infrastructure was widespread, further setting back Lebanon’s fragile economic recovery after years of civil war.

The risks of such a conflict are real. With Iran’s assistance, Hezbollah has stockpiled thousands of missiles capable of striking targets deep inside Israel. Given such a threat to Israel’s security, any US administration would find it hard to remain indifferent.

President Joe Biden’s relocation of two aircraft battle groups into the eastern Mediterranean early in the Gaza war was aimed at forestalling a wider regional conflagration of this kind. But what has been noticeable in recent weeks has been an uptick across the Middle East of the proxy war between United States and Israel, on the one hand, and Iran and its allies — from Yemen itself to Iraq and Syria — on the other.

Early this year, for example, Israel killed Hamas’s deputy political head, Saleh al-Arouri, in a drone strike in the heart of Hezbollah’s seat of power in west Beirut. Al-Arouri was the Hamas leader regarded as closest to Iran. His assassination was designed to remind Hamas leaders across the region that they are not immune to Israel’s ability to exact revenge.

Israel has clearly decided that its security would be best served by region-wide pre-emptive actions. It is testing Iran’s tolerance for provocative strikes against its frontline military commanders and allied proxies while reminding Iran and other regional powers that its military reach is long and lethal.

At this stage, Iran seems unlikely to want a wider regional conflict, though the risks of such an outcome can’t be discounted. But Israel’s actions at this intensely dangerous moment, whether or not they are coordinated with Washington, are pushing Iran towards decisions that could spark a wider regional conflict. •

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We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the  Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic  interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.

In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

The post Too little, too late appeared first on Inside Story.

Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

Most tellingly, the vote demonstrates a fracturing in what has been a fairly solid wall of support for Israel’s war against Hamas among its allies, led by the United States.

Given the tormenting scenes emanating from Gaza of civilian casualties pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings it is surprising, even unconscionable, it has taken countries like Australia as long as it has to say “enough.” Prime minister Anthony Albanese has been under considerable pressure from within his own party to detach Australia from the United States and Israel on this issue. That he managed to do so in partnership with two of Australia’s close allies — Canada and New Zealand — gave him the diplomatic cover he no doubt wanted.

In effect, Australia averted its eyes for too long from Israel’s slaughter of civilians in response to the pogrom conducted by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October. No reasonable argument can be advanced to deny Israel the right to wreak vengeance on those responsible for that heinous crime. However, what are the limits on Israel’s war against Hamas? How many non-combatant Palestinians, including children, need to die to satisfy Israel’s declared aim of “eradicating” the terrorist group?

In other words, how much longer will Israel persist in its efforts to eliminate Hamas, and at what cost to a civilian population that has been displaced in its tens of thousands, and traumatised? And is it even possible to kill off a movement and an ideology, however repugnant?

After weeks of some of the most intense bombing of civilian areas since the second world war, another question presses in: where lies the exit strategy for Israel once the guns fall silent?

Unless they are inhabitants of another planet, members of Israel’s war cabinet can’t be unaware of Washington’s increasing uneasiness over Gaza’s civilian casualties, made more pressing by the horrendous images playing out on the nightly television news.

At a 2024 election fundraiser this week president Joe Biden voiced some of his strongest criticism of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza. He warned that Israel was beginning to alienate Europe and the rest of the international community. Although his remarks were made at a private function, they have been reliably reported. He is also quoted as saying that Israel can’t continue to say no to a Palestinian state.

Biden’s intervention on the twin issues of Israel’s disproportionate use of force and its reluctance to embrace a Palestinian state will be troubling for Israel and its supporters globally. While the United States voted against this week’s General Assembly resolution on grounds it didn’t condemn Hamas, its diplomatic support is weakening. Whatever might be said by Israeli hardliners and their friends in the West, Israel can’t afford to alienate Washington, which provides both diplomatic cover and armaments.

In all of this a reasonable question arises: could Biden and his national security team have done a better job managing a highly combustible situation? The answer is not simple, and comes in two parts. Biden responded well to the risks of a wider conflagration by quickly bolstering a US naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf to deter a regional spillover. But his embrace of Israel’s strategy — literally, for he travelled to Tel Aviv in October and hugged Israel’s prime minister on arrival — relayed a message to the region that Washington would indulge Netanyahu’s war aims and practices.

That this was a mistake has become increasingly obvious in recent days as Israel continues a merciless bombing campaign that has reportedly killed more than 15,000 Gazans, including thousands of children. Casualty numbers are imprecise, but may well exceed 20,000, including those buried in rubble and not recovered.

Having given Netanyahu the impression that the United States was offering virtual carte blanche to Israel, Biden is now trying to rein in the Israeli leader. This will not necessarily end well.

Of course, Israel will be hoping it can capture key Hamas leaders, including political supremo Yahya Sinwar and military commander Mohammed Deif, either dead or alive, to parade before the international media as evidence of the success of its mission.

All of this leaves unresolved the fundamental conundrum: what happens once the guns fall silent and the bombing campaign and other offensive measures have run their course?

No one, not the American president, nor the United Nations, nor Arab states, nor the international community more generally, and certainly not Israel itself, has come up with a realistic way forward. The reason is simple: no clear-cut avenues exist for resolving an Israel–Palestine dispute vastly complicated by the devastation wrought on the people of Gaza.

Central is the question of who will take responsibility for managing Gaza in the war’s aftermath, assuming Hamas has been disabled. Would it be a UN trusteeship using the organisation’s humanitarian resources? Would it be the Palestinian authority, currently governing the West Bank? Would Arab states fill a vacuum until the devastated Strip could be rebuilt? Or will Israel remain in Gaza as a garrison occupier much as it did in South Lebanon after its invasion in 1982 to rid that country of the Palestine Liberation Organisation?

On the face of it, none of these options seems particularly attractive, or even plausible. Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have warned Netanyahu that they won’t tolerate an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza or Gazans being forced to leave. They have also made clear that Israel needs to engage meaningfully with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s response has been to say he won’t deal with the Palestinian Authority in a Gaza context and that he is against a two-state solution in any case. This is hardly encouraging. But if there is a glimmer of hope in all of this, it is that Netanyahu himself will not be a spoiling factor.

Israel’s leader is living on borrowed time, and will almost certainly be pushed aside after the war ends. This is not the least of the reasons why it remains in his interests to continue to prosecute a war that is proving devasting for Israel’s support among its close friends and allies, including Australia.

Israel and its supporters would be unwise to misread the message emanating from the UN General Assembly this week. Global patience, including that of the United States, is wearing awfully thin. •

The post A turning point for Gaza? appeared first on Inside Story.

This year, though, the series would have to be pitched as a documentary. COP28 opened on Wednesday in the improbable location of Dubai, where futuristic glass towers and a palm-shaped luxury resort raised from the sea cater for the world’s gas-guzzling classes. Dubai is the principal city of the United Arab Emirates, the world’s eighth-biggest oil producer. The head of the UAE’s state-owned oil giant ADNOC, Sultan Al Jaber, is the person its government has appointed to be president of the UN climate conference. And last week the BBC published leaked briefing notes for Al Jaber’s meetings with twenty-seven countries over the past year revealing that, as well as discussing the COP negotiations, he was pursuing energy investment deals for ADNOC and another UAE investment company he heads, Masdar.

For the climate NGOs this was merely confirmation that the UAE should not have been made host of the COP in the first place, and that Al Jaber was a completely inappropriate person to preside over it. “A brazen conflict of interest,” said Amnesty International, calling for him to resign.

But there was never any chance of that, and most of the country delegates in Dubai have reacted to the revelations with a world-weary shrug. “So the UAE is pursuing its oil interests?” said one. “And your point is…?”

The UAE’s energy interests overseas are large. The Financial Times estimates that it has invested almost US$200 billion in energy projects in the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe in the last year alone. Around half of this is in oil and gas, including for a major expansion of new drilling. This blatantly ignores the International Energy Agency’s warning that meeting the agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial times effectively means no more fossil fuel exploration. The UAE’s plans alone will blow the global “carbon budget” out of the water.

The UAE argues that the finger of blame is being pointed in the wrong direction: it is merely responding to demand. On all realistic projections, countries will still be using oil and gas till well into the mid-century, and the UAE’s is the cheapest and among the least polluting.

And look at the other half of the UAE’s energy deals, adds Al Jaber: huge new solar, wind and geothermal investments helping provide power and air conditioning to developing and emerging economies from Azerbaijan to Zambia, China to Turkey. For many poorer countries, the UAE’s investments are critical — and far larger than anything they receive from Western governments or private sector companies. You don’t hear many developing country delegates criticising the UAE here.

Yet the revelations about Al Jaber’s Janus-like activities in the run-up to COP28 can’t be wholly dismissed. The UN rules are clear: the COP president must be neutral and impartial, and must not act to further their own interests. In Dubai over the next two weeks probably the single most contentious issue on the agenda will be the future of fossil fuels.

A distinctive feature of this year’s COP will be the “global stocktake.” This is one of the key processes set out in the landmark Paris climate agreement of 2015. Every five years, the agreement says, countries must take stock of their progress, or otherwise, over the last five, and set out global ambitions for the future. In this way the stocktake should inform the Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, countries must make two years later, in which they must each set out new and stronger emissions reduction targets. The next round of NDCs is due in 2025.

Over the past year the global stocktake negotiations have been fraught. Climate scientists have made it very clear that collectively the world is not remotely on track to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5°C. In its annual report on the emissions gap, the UN Environment Programme observes that the difference between the emissions trajectory the world needs to be on for 1.5°C and the one it actually is on has widened rather than narrowed.

Last year it looked as if countries’ plans would take the world to around 2.6°C of warming; today it is probably 2.9°C. At that level much of the world’s agricultural output and water supplies will be at serious risk of failing, the incidence of extreme weather events regularly catastrophic, and large numbers of species would be wiped out. Countries’ current plans for emissions in 2030, UNEP says, need to be cut by another 42 per cent to be on a 1.5°C-compatible pathway.

The stocktake negotiators have focused on the future rather than dwelling on past and present failures. Everyone agrees there should be more investment in renewable energy: COP28 is likely to set a new goal of tripling global renewables capacity by 2030. That will not be easy: solar and wind power are being installed around the world at record rates, but market forecasts currently expect capacity only to double by then.

The COP will also agree on a doubling in the rate of energy efficiency improvements. Energy efficiency has long been the cheapest way of cutting emissions — the International Energy Agency describes it as the “first fuel” — but has always been something of the Cinderella of energy policy, requiring regulatory tightening in many different sectors. Doubling the rate of global improvement will require accelerated innovation in heat pumps, vehicles, consumer goods and industrial processes.

COP28 may well also reach an agreement on methane. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, more powerful as a cause of warming than carbon dioxide. It is produced by livestock, by waste disposal and as a by-product of fossil fuel production. Here the UAE is playing up its status as an oil giant. Only a country like his, says Al Jaber, can bring the global oil and gas sector to the COP table. Expect a historic announcement of a new tough methane target for 2030, and the major oil and gas companies — traditional opponents of climate policy, and enemies of the climate movement — pledging their support.

As ever, though, it won’t be the things that everyone can agree on, however important, that will dominate negotiations. The major battle this year will be over what the COP says about the future of the fossil fuel industry itself.

The small island states and other nations most vulnerable to climate impacts are insisting on the science. The goal of 1.5°C means reducing carbon emissions to net zero by sometime before 2050. That means ending fossil fuel use more or less entirely. (“Net” zero allows some residual emissions, but only if they are captured and stored, either by increased vegetation or geologically.) So COP28 should agree that fossil fuels must be phased out.

The European Union, with its strong pro-climate-action lobby, is sympathetic. But for China, India, the United States and Saudi Arabia it is a step much too far. They want the text to say merely that fossil fuels should be “phased down,” not out. They also want this to cover only “unabated” fossil fuels: if coal, oil and gas plants are fitted with carbon capture and storage technology to capture the emissions and bury them underground, then they should be exempt from the phase-down.

With the two groups of countries so far apart, agreeing on the text will be very difficult. So the question being asked is: will the UAE be a neutral and impartial chair of the negotiations on this crucial issue? Many observers think it is hard to believe so. Al Jaber is only COP president for a year; he will be chief executive of ADNOC for much longer. The interests of the UAE are not exactly a secret. So expect another bruising conclusion to the conference, we are told, with NGOs crying foul, and the negotiations running acrimoniously into extra time, as they so often do (last year by nearly two whole days).

But there’s another possibility. Al Jaber is a deal-maker. That’s what he does in the day job, and what he’s been doing at those meetings over the last year. He wants to show that this is what you get with a serious player from a serious oil state. So he’ll find some clever new wording to bridge the gap between “phasing out” and “phasing down,” acknowledging that the use of fossil fuels will no doubt come to an end, eventually, but in the meantime they are needed to help the world’s poor escape their poverty. And then he’ll bring the gavel down on a successful COP before, not after, the scheduled end.

In fact, he’s shown what he can do already. The first day of a COP normally manages to do no more than agree on the agenda — and that often takes hours of wrangling in itself. But the first day of COP28 on Wednesday ended with an unprecedented agreement on one of the most significant issues of the entire two weeks.

Developing countries have been arguing for years for a fund to compensate them for the “loss and damage” climate change is now inflicting on their economies. Last year they won the fund — but it had no money in it, and everyone expected the negotiations about how it was to be organised to last several more years. Yesterday, though, the UAE pulled a remarkable rabbit out of the conference hat. Not just an agreement on the arrangements for the fund, but US$440 million of financial pledges to it — including US$100 million from the UAE itself.

Curmudgeons noted that these sums are not nearly enough — the economic costs of loss and damage already run into the billions, and with the UAE’s oil revenues having soared last year to almost US$100 billion a group of former world leaders led by Gordon Brown urged it only this week to provide US$3 billion for climate change. In comparison, US$100 million is small beer.

But Al Jaber didn’t look too worried at the press conference closing the day. He had pulled off a stunning coup, developed and developing nations alike expressed themselves delighted, and the UAE was in its rightful place. •

The post Big deal in Dubai appeared first on Inside Story.

From the 7 October Hamas pogrom against Jewish residents on the borders of the Gaza Strip to the obliteration of much of the civilian infrastructure of North Gaza by Israel in retaliation, this is a merciless conflict. How will it end so that the “day after” question can begin to be answered?

The short answer is no one knows how this war will end, nor how many will be killed beyond the 1200 Israelis who have perished and, according to Gaza’s health ministry, the 11,000 Palestinians. These are the raw numbers, but they hardly reveal the extent of the destruction of a Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people in a narrow strip of land on the Mediterranean, and nor do they account for the extent of the trauma experienced by both sides.

The day after will not simply involve a reckoning of casualty figures or physical destruction, but will also leave a traumatised Palestinian population in Gaza and an Israeli population haunted by what happened on 7 October. These are wounds that will not be healed for generations, if at all.

All wars end sooner or later, even the Hundred Years’ war, but in the case of the Gaza war it is hard to envisage how this conflict can be brought to an end in a way that will avoid further conflict in that conflict-ravaged space between the Jordan River and the sea.

Israel’s stated aim is the complete destruction of Hamas, its leadership inside Gaza, its military infrastructure and indeed its ability to reconstitute itself as a viable player. Whether this is achievable remains to be seen, since Hamas is not simply a military organisation to be defeated in the field. Like the Irish Republican Army it has a political wing and, most definitely, an ideology, whatever we might think of it.

The Israeli government has said repeatedly that what happened on 7 October means it won’t deal with Hamas, not now and not ever. What it has not made clear is the sort of arrangement that might satisfy it in Gaza once the shooting stops.

Will Israeli forces occupy Gaza and oversee the toxic aftermath of war? Will a global community shocked by the ferocity of the conflict mount a peacekeeping operation under a United Nations supervised trusteeship or some other such arrangement? Who will be responsible for the enormous cost of reconstruction that will run into billions of dollars?

Only those with direct experience of a war-ravaged wasteland pulverised by the most intensive bombing campaign since Richard Nixon’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam in 1972 can have any idea of the extent of damage wrought by modern weaponry. Would Israel, in any case, be prepared to hand over the governance of what remains of Gaza to a depleted and discredited Palestinian Authority in faraway Ramallah in the West Bank?

Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel won’t be yielding responsibility for Gaza to the PA. He deflects questions about the circumstances in which Israel would remain in Gaza.

In any case, it is unlikely that any of this will be within his control. Politically, Netanyahu is a dead man walking given the degree of disapprobation with which he is regarded by Israelis, who blame him for security failures that enabled the 7 October attack in the first place.

PA leaders have said they won’t be reasserting responsibility for Gaza in present circumstances, weakened as they were by the election there in 2006 and having yielded control altogether to Hamas the following year. They have said they will certainly not be re-entering Gaza on the “back of an Israeli tank.”

Then there is the overarching question of whether the savagery of the Gaza conflict will bring about a full-on attempt, backed by the United States, the European Union, Arab states and the United Nations itself, to force-feed a political settlement more broadly to Israelis and Palestinians?

Here, we are talking about a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would be granted a state of their own behind secure borders in exchange for peace. This was the aim of the Oslo process of 1993–95 that delivered an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation designed to lead to a permanent settlement after a transitional period.

The breakthrough agreement was consummated in 1993 by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat in the presence of US president Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. Two years later, before the Oslo process took root, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians. That terrible moment, whose main political beneficiary was Netanyahu, effectively killed a nascent peace process.

In the generation since, attempts have been made by successive presidents to re-energise the peace process, Clinton at Camp David in 2000; Barack Obama in the early stages of his presidency before he foundered on Israeli obduracy and Palestinian fecklessness; George W. Bush, half-heartedly, at Annapolis in 2007; and Donald Trump with his “deal of the century” that was no deal at all as far as the Palestinians were concerned.

The Trump administration’s strategy was to persuade Arab states, principally Saudi Arabia, to make peace with Israel. The Palestinians would then be left, the strategy proposed, with little choice but to fall into line — in other words, to accommodate themselves to whatever morsels were left to them. This process was marketed by Trump as the “Abraham Accords,” as if the memory of the revered Jewish patriarch would cast a biblical spell over the region.

Among Hamas’s clear aims on 7 October was to derail that process. In that regard it has succeeded for the time being, but in the longer term it may have galvanised an international community to actually try to do something about the issue beyond mouthing empty platitudes about a “two-state solution.”

The next question is why Hamas chose to attack Israel in the way it did in the certain expectation that retaliation would be brutal and the civilian population of Gaza would bear the brunt. The answer is complex but might be explained by a nihilistic terrorist mindset that pays less attention to the consequences than to the act of terror itself.

Hamas’s branding of its military operation by reference to the violation of Jerusalem’s  Al-Aqsa mosque by an extremist member of Netanyahu’s cabinet underscores the jihadist component of what took place. But beyond all this is the possibility that Hamas may have hoped to provoke a regional conflict involving Israel in a several-fronts war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Syria in the north, and may even have believed Iran could be drawn into the conflict.

None of this, apart from fairly desultory rocket salvos from Hezbollah in northern Israel, has come to pass. US president Joe Biden’s decision to deploy two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region was aimed at forestalling a wider conflict. It appears to be working, for the time being.

As Israel continues to dismember what is left of the northern section of Gaza, which had been home to one million Palestinians, we come closer to the existential question: what next when, and if, the guns fall silent over a wasteland?

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, having reported from Israel and the occupied territories and having written a book about Israel–Palestine, I find it hard to be optimistic about a resolution of the longest-running conflict in modern history. For the sake of argument, though, let’s consider a scenario that harks back to the lost opportunities following the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist, as dramatised by the Rabin–Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Under this optimistic, even improbable, scenario, America would lead a comprehensive process to impose a settlement on Palestinians and Israelis that would enable the two sides to accommodate each other in separate states living in relative harmony side by side. The contours of such an arrangement were negotiated up hill and down dale in the 1990s, with territory to be set aside for land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for Jewish settlements contiguous to Israel that could not be dismantled under any reasonable circumstances.

An agreement with the Palestinians would have four main pillars: the putative state of Palestine would be demilitarised, Palestinians would not have the right of return to Israel proper among families displaced in 1947–48, settlements on the boundaries of Israel would remain in place and, tackling the thorniest issue of all, East Jerusalem would be the Palestinian capital under a shared sovereignty with Israel over the Holy places. Jerusalem would be left for “final status” talks, in other words the concluding chapter of a peace settlement.

When those bare-bones details are exposed, what becomes apparent is how difficult, if not impossible, a comprehensive settlement would be. The above was more or less on the table — without the Jerusalem issue being close to being resolved — at Camp David in 2000 and in a final desultory attempt by the Clinton administration at Taba in 2001 before Bush was inaugurated.

What has happened in the meantime to further complicate the picture? Quite simply, a very great deal has transpired to make realising a two-state solution even more complicated, if not impossible. This might be described as the multidimensional Middle East Rubik’s cube.

For a start, Israel’s settlement-building in territory occupied in the 1967 Six Day war has continued apace. By 2022, Israel had 199 settlements and 220 outposts in the West Bank with something like 500,000 settlers on land occupied in 1967. Under international law those settlements on territory seized by Israel in 1967 are illegal; even Israel itself regards many of the small settler outposts as renegade establishments.

On top of that are the 250,000 Israeli residents of East Jerusalem. That adds up to three-quarters of a million Israelis who would be anxious about, if not bitterly opposed to, any peace settlement that involves relinquishing those areas.

Under present circumstances Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are subject to military rule and don’t enjoy the same civil and political rights as Israeli settlers. Human rights groups describe this as apartheid.

This is the reality of 2023. It is one of the main reasons why there are many advocates for what is described as a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in a single state with equal rights. This is not an outcome that would be favoured by most Israelis, and certainly not those on the nationalist settler right. It is not idle to say that the country would risk falling apart on the concessions that would be required to secure an honourable settlement.

Here it might be useful to clarify a misunderstanding surrounding the failure of Camp David in 2000. Arafat got, and deserves, much of the blame for its failure; the Palestinians were deeply divided on the concessions required for an agreement. But blame should also be attached to the Americans for poor preparation of the process, and to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one at Camp David.

What is often overlooked is that it was not in Barak’s gift to deliver an agreement without strings attached. He had undertaken to take the Camp David II formula to a vote of his compatriots with no certainty of a positive outcome.

If the lessons of Oslo and the other attempts at Middle East peace tell us one thing, it is that no positive outcome will come without American leadership, and not simply leadership but a willingness to take control of the process in partnership with its allies, including Arab states fearful of further destabilisation in the region.

Does America have the time and energy for such a process given challenges it faces from China in the Indo-Pacific and from Russia on NATO’s western flank, not to mention a domestic political environment that could hardly be less stable.

America and its allies have always been at pains to say it is up to the protagonists to make peace. A settlement cannot be force-fed. In light of what has happened since 7 October the question becomes whether the West in partnership with Arab states can afford to allow the situation to continue to fester.

American supporters of the Israeli settler right would certainly mobilise against a process that involved widespread dismantling of settlements. Yet no agreement will be possible without a comprehensive arrangement that respects Palestinian sovereignty, removes impediments to freedom of movement in a West Bank desiccated by settlements and, most likely, creates a secure and elevated transit route between the West Bank and Gaza that itself would need to be open to the outside world.

Only a supreme optimist would believe that all this will come to pass in very many days after the guns fall silent, and certainly not “the day after,” but it is the only plausible scenario that has emerged so far. •

The post The day after appeared first on Inside Story.

Deterrence’s conceptual framework developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war given the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.

Israel also practises nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is for potentially hostile governments to be aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.

For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas operating out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored. It is more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. Unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.

It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and may never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.

WHY DETERRENCE?

Before it became so dependent on deterrence, Israel sought to control threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence proved too high.

In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation, having been kicked out of Jordan, took up residence there in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally entered its territory to push the guerilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving north until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (with some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (in which it failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.

The Israeli Defence Forces, or IDF, eventually withdrew to a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak decided the presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory and a result of its constant harassment.

Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, decided as prime minister that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained at an inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. In the face of protests from their residents, the IDF closed down the settlements. (Sharon suffered a stroke and went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank.)

The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes didn’t last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.

With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling supplies and getting fighters into Israel.

DETERRENCE BY DENIAL OR PUNISHMENT

With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.

Deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it will be unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent, and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.

Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. But the fences couldn’t stop rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system — the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also use air raid shelters to protect them from rockets that get through.

The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids on the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.

The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political figures or military. Israel’s many “targeted killings” may have disrupted the enemy’s command structures and operations in the short term, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Other commanders step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee they will be less capable or effective.

Second, the IDF targets the military assets that make the attacks possible. Again, this can make a difference in the short term but in the long term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug and more fighters recruited.

Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately near schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the name of self-defence and military necessity, it is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.

But intense strikes against military targets, especially involving tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings or individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often hard to discern.

Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats can’t be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working, there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.

DOES IT WORK? (I) HEZBOLLAH

In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two abducted to Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. It responded instead with air and artillery strikes, against not only Hezbollah military targets but also Beirut airport and other civilian targets. It launched a land attack against well-prepared Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon that turned out to be costly and difficult.

Eventually the United Nations arranged a ceasefire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to twelve of his commanders and went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.

On the question of whether Hezbollah’s operation would have proceeded if it was felt there was “even a 1 per cent chance” it would lead to a war like the one that eventuated, he responded, “I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.” Israel had been waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, he added — yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that deterrence can perhaps work.

But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is less so than Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese political system. While it is the most substantial force in that country, it still has to be responsive to factions and persuasions that are less interested in its feud with Israel, and to present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and still being run by a caretaker government, it is in no position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.

This is not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. It sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, for example, where they worked (not particularly effectively) with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad.) It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. It has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.

DOES IT WORK? (II) GAZA

The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory, the periods of calm on the border have been few. Clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. Each case involves rocket fire by Hamas (and its junior partner, Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes by the Israelis; the casualties are starkly asymmetric, with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially for civilians.

The suffering of Palestinians in these flare-ups leads international organisations, governments and campaigning groups to denounce Israel for acting disproportionately. Other than in 2021, when unrest spread to Arab communities in Israel, supporting protests have been held in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. After weeks of fighting, a ceasefire of some sort has been struck and nothing much has changed once the fighting subsided.

The regularity of the clashes suggests that deterrence has worked poorly in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective the priority has mainly been to show that it is not rattled by provocations and will respond forcefully each time. These responses were described by some Israelis as “mowing the lawn,” a phrase capturing the idea of an indefinite conflict containable by occasional forceful action.

Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that its approach was working, to the extent that it was starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. Islamic Jihad was a problem, but Hamas didn’t seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was a failure not only of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.

The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity. Many individuals connected with Hamas and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. Despite Hamas’s original provocation, this has led to international anger and demands for a ceasefire.

We can question whether deterrence was ever operating effectively, but it certainly isn’t now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it never has the capacity to do so.

But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. The latter’s network, including the Houthis in Yemen, has been busy. So far, much of that has been largely posturing, with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that the deterrence offered by Iran/Hezbollah has failed because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war, though they might claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.

If Hezbollah did want to get involved, it would have had more effect if it had done so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This doesn’t mean Hezbollah won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to worry its leadership. But the key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue with which to take on the United States. A tweet from Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — “Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action” — suggests that no decision has yet been made.

The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have already “normalised” relations with Israel or were preparing to. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.

NEXT STEPS

Israel’s land invasion of Gaza was undertaken despite US misgivings and Saudi objections — one a country on which Israel relies, the other that it has been courting. The foreign ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the ceasefire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to UN secretary-general António Guterres because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on Israel’s people and the ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.

Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against Islamic State and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop will only grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars, it will be resisting pressure for a ceasefire until its objectives have been achieved.

Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy, so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still potential mediators, including in efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.

Israel has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory, but that is not a serious option. This is where the other flaw in Israel’s deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza were turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.

Given how Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if it is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world, and regardless of what happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate and to return to power if there is no alternative government in place.

There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans, and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of its constantly provoking Israel into attacks that it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept, corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.

If Israel can’t find a government for Gaza, someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the United States. This seems to be what many analysts anticipate happening after this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, given the job of coming up with a viable government for Gaza and managing the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks and look to possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.

In principle, this process could be confined to Gaza, but Arab governments are unlikely to cooperate unless the future of the West Bank is also tackled. The trade that Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the “two-state solution” is put back on the agenda. Most Western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.

Netanyahu has been around long enough to know that dismissing the two-state solution out of hand isn’t realistic, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea. That’s why he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote.

All one can say is that this war changes a lot. When the two-state solution has come up, as it did for example in the prewar talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea and pointed to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to show why progress is impossible.

But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas out of Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this, Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. If there is to be any resolution of the current conflict, the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel. •

The post How Israel’s deterrence policy came undone appeared first on Inside Story.

Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamas’s recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assault’s surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a “total system failure on Israel’s part.” Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for “a ragtag band of terrorists” to beat the “mighty” Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, “was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israel’s two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, “the most extreme ever,” downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies — which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison” — Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with “defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping.” Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there. Haaretz editorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as “the IDF provided security for every settler whim.”

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be “erased.” This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a “pogrom.” A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrich’s comments as “irresponsible… repugnant [and] disgusting.” Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”

Last August, Netanyahu’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his family’s right to move around the West Bank “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s nominal partner in any “peace process.”

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, commented recently that Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahu’s policy to “nearly topple” the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamas’s “sense of impunity and capability.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israel’s inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion “as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.” Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a “strong reaction” around the Arab world. President Biden’s whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamas’s military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamas’s embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israel’s bombardment — 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 —  suggested that “the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.”

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces’ Major General Ghassan Alian declared that “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamas’s rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the New York Review of Books Fintan O’Toole wrote that “Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s.” That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its “atrocious war crimes.” He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marles’s claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was “poorly briefed.”

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval “complete siege” of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. “A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas’ sins.”

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war, “parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.” Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, “Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israel’s main cities.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the question of “what now?” only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price. •

The post Netanyahu’s war appeared first on Inside Story.

Bowker is the “dean” of an exceptional group of Australian diplomats who dedicated their careers to understanding the region. That description comes from Nick Warner, a wise owl of Canberra foreign policy, defence and intelligence, who says Bowker throws much light “on the history of our relationship with the Middle East, where we have gone wrong and right, and what we should do now.”

The book’s title — Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World — gives a taste, in several senses. Bowker explains that the apricot prophecy is a Syrian saying similar to “pigs might fly.” The hope for apricots, he writes, “captures an unquenchable, droll optimism which, together with the deep appreciation of culture and hospitality, ranks highly among the virtues that define what it means to be Arab. It also reflects an abiding scepticism towards the pretensions of those in positions of authority.”

In just 300 pages Bowker offers two books. The first traces his career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, as a Middle East specialist, after he joined as a diplomatic cadet in 1971. The second, “Reflections,” is an analysis of the big issues confronting the region.

The two-in-one package is a fine blend of the personal and the policy, describing a fifty-year journey: thirty-seven years with DFAT and twelve years as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments and an academic at the Australian National University.

“Being an Australian diplomat in the Arab world was more than a career: it was an adventure,” Bowker writes. “In many ways it was my life.” He reminds us that former prime minister John Howard labelled himself a cricket “tragic” because he was tragically in love with the game. Bowker embraces the hopelessly-in-love thought, titling the first half of the book “The Career of a Middle East Tragic.”

It’s notable the book starts with that light-hearted reference to Howard, because one of the great policy fights of Bowker’s career was Howard’s shifting of Australian policy on Palestinian self-determination to lean towards Israel. The diplomat notes he was “trumped by the prime minister” and “went down in flames.”

A great scene in this flame-up has Bowker locked in a shouting match with the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser at the annual conference of the Zionist Federation. Howard was sitting only metres away, preparing to address the conference dinner. His breach with Canberra is an example of Bowker’s observation that the policy choices the Middle East must live with are divided between bad and much worse.

Tragically in love with the Middle East in all its tragic complications, Bowker offers great yarns, finely told. He has an ear for the telling quote and an eye for a good scene.

Heading off for his first overseas post as a third secretary only seven months after joining the department, he records the three pieces of advice given him in the conversation that amounted to his consular “training”: “Never take possession of a corpse. Never take possession of a madwoman. Use your common sense. And that was it.”

At his second post in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, his struggle learning Arabic is illustrated by his regular visit to a roadside stall: “I later realised that when I thought I was asking, in terrible Arabic, for a freshly cooked chicken, I was actually asking for a fresh wife. The stall owner didn’t seem to mind.” But Bowker’s “colloquial Levantine Arabic” had uses beyond talking to stallholders and taxi drivers. To impose ceremonial pain on Sudan’s president for atrocities by his tribal proxies in Darfur, the ambassador gave “my speech on presentation of my credentials in Arabic.”

A gem of a chapter entitled “Touring Tobruk by Moonlight” captures Libya’s “blend of chaos and impenetrability under the Ghaddafi regime” by describing Bowker visiting, as the non-resident ambassador, as scout for a visit to the war cemetery by the Australian defence minister. Two Libyan minders drive Bowker from Benghazi in a car that “sounded very sick indeed” to visit a range of war cemeteries — British, French and German — but can’t find the Australian site until the moon is out.

At the end, the minders have an animated discussion about the report they must file “on why the ambassador chap had been scoping out the port area and surrounds of Tobruk, especially the high ground overlooking the harbour, quizzing the locals about the layout of the urban area, and doing so in execrable Arabic.” When they got back to Benghazi at 1.30am, one of the minders “shook my hands and planted kisses on both my cheeks. When you are kissed by a Libyan security official, you know it is time to go home.”

Writing of his time in Syria in the 1970s, Bowker recounts a local quip: “Saudi Arabia exports oil, Iraq exports dates, Egypt exports jokes and Syria exports trouble.” The three-line description of president Hafez al-Assad, the late father of the incumbent, is a miniature masterpiece of disdain: “his smile was like moonlight on a tombstone,” he had a “penchant for delivering historical lectures” and he dominated meetings with “his awe-inspiring bladder control.”

Bowker’s sad conclusion is that the Assad family — Hafez and now his son Bashar — has become the regime that outlasted its country. The bedrock of Bashar’s rule is its brutality, he writes, and father and son always avoided “questions about the appropriate relationship in Syria between state and society.”

Among his reflections, Bowker considers the department that made his career, lamenting how the role of Australia’s diplomats in Canberra has changed, “and not for the better.” DFAT, he argues, gives priority to trade and consular crisis management ahead of the research and thinking needed for effective foreign policy planning and advocacy. Policy is made in ministerial offices, with the department seen as mere implementor. “This is a deeply problematic direction for any government, or government department, to take.”

DFAT no longer debates with itself and the rest of Canberra through despatches and cables: “The final decade or two of my time in the department saw a shift to reporting by cable that was prone to be concise rather than nuanced. It was directed in its brevity towards immediate briefing needs, rather than the evaluation of trends and their consequences for Australian interests.”

Under the Howard government, he notes, the lengthy despatch from an overseas post became a thing of the past: “By the time I retired it had become almost unthinkable to reflect on broader issues, let alone to challenge policy settings, in cable traffic.”

In this second half of the book Bowker considers three core questions:

• “How do you build peace between two peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — with compelling national rights, human rights and historical narratives, but who have a clear imbalance of power?”

• How do you connect the present, the past and the politics of Palestinian identity? This is an intellectual who twenty years ago wrote a book called Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. As a diplomat, he offers the answer (“if there is one”) of negotiating on interests, because beliefs are “organic, structural and fundamentally non-negotiable.”

• How does the Arab world confront its demographic fate (a Middle East population of 724 million people by 2050) and its economic and social challenges while preserving its Arab and Islamic identity? “None of the current leaderships of the major Arab states and Iran have answers to the problems of legitimacy and governance,” Bowker writes. His fear is that governments will “grow more authoritarian, transactional and violent in their instincts and behaviour.”

Defending privilege and predictability, rulers have found that repression works for them, arguing that “freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division rather than bread and social justice.”

The Arab outlook, Bowker observes, feels like being on the bridge of the Titanic smelling the ice. It took the Titanic a long time to sink, though, and the modern Arab world has no way to stop the drivers of change, which are “generational and societal as well as political.”

On the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Bowker declares that the two-state approach pursued since the 1990s is “dead.” He pointedly calls it a two-state “approach” because no solution is in sight. If that option is mired in fundamental conundrum, the path to justice is by “building a foundation for Palestinian rights and dignity among Israelis.”

Israel can facilitate a new, more positive future for Palestinians and Israelis, he says, without raising existential questions for Israel: “The absence of sovereignty is a legitimate grievance for Palestinians, but in practice it is the absence of dignity and economic security that matters much more.”

If the two-state vision/solution is dead, as Bowker avers, then Palestine’s dream of independence must fade. As the Economist observed recently, the Palestinian diaspora has “begun to call for a one-state solution, where Jews and Arabs between the Jordan rivers and the Mediterranean would live together in a single democratic state — and where Arabs would have a slender overall majority.”

For Israel and the Arab world, demography should meet democracy, and history must reconcile with geography.

Bowker concludes that the fun and frustrations of his life as a Middle East tragic have forced him to accept key realities. Middle East policy is not a morality play; expediency shapes decisions: “The logic of strategy is not always consistent with the logic of politics.”

Diabolical complexity rules. It is in the nature of the Middle East for problems to linger and become more complex: “We must accept that views, interests and values within Arab societies are more likely to differ from our own: any apparent synchronicity of views should be cause for caution, as well as celebration.”

The final sentence of this tragic’s meditation on his life’s works reads: “And, despite almost fifty years of exposure to the Arab world, I remained free of tribal delusions, except where Collingwood is concerned.”

Ah, the Melbourne conundrum of the Collingwood Football Club — the only passion running through this fine book that (in the tribal view of this reviewer) does not bend towards truth and logic. •

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World
By Robert Bowker | Shawline Publishing | $24.95 | 307 pages

The post Memoirs of a Middle East tragic appeared first on Inside Story.

Nothing about Vatikiotis’s life is straightforward. Born in 1957 of parents forced to leave postcolonial Egypt, ending up in suburban Indianapolis where his father got a teaching job, Vatikiotis was educated in England and has spent most of his life in Southeast Asia. He went to Asia first as a BBC correspondent, then joined the staff of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He now lives in Singapore.

Vatikiotis’s published works are an indication of the depth and range of his knowledge of the region, and include four works of fiction. But with Lives Between the Lines he leaves Southeast Asia behind to delve into his own complex lineage.

The book opens with one of the most arresting sentences I’ve come across in reviewing: “The Ottomans were poor timekeepers.” It quickly becomes clear that Vatikiotis isn’t emphasising how backward that empire’s timekeeping was — the usual kind of response when that bygone polity is mentioned — but highlighting its success.

Timekeeping was initially needed primarily to facilitate the Muslim call to prayer, but with successive dynasties and the arrival of a mix of different peoples and their disparate religions, each with its own calendar, time grew ever more complicated. Even after mechanical clocks began appearing (the gifts of visiting Europeans) the Ottomans “set the hand to twelve at sunset.” Public clocks and bells were generally outlawed into the seventeenth century, and each different means of measuring time was accommodated.

How did this work? As it happened, reasonably well. For more than 600 years, until its final dismantling after the first world war, the Ottomans presided over a vast plurality with surprising harmony.

But time sped up, leaving this empire behind. Beginning with Napoleon’s conquests, British–French rivalry set in motion the decline of the Ottomans. Napoleon invaded Ottoman Egypt in 1798 to further his plan to wrest India from Britain and dent its commercial supremacy. It was Egypt’s misfortune to straddle the isthmus connecting Europe with Asia, and Napoleon’s to be defeated. But Europe had established its beachhead.

A succession of Ottoman viceroys of Egypt, eager to corner its share of the global trade, negotiated with the two European rivals over digging a canal to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. In 1859, the year that Darwin published his Origin of Species, work began.

As Vatikiotis explains it, the Suez Canal changed everything. Its building brought a host of surveyors, architects, and other European entrepreneurs and professionals to Egypt at a time when Europe was in chaos and the Levant was stable and thriving. For visionaries and hopefuls alike it was the place to be.

Yet for all the material progress the canal represented, it left the Egyptians seriously indebted, and Egypt itself something of a vassal state. It was the beginning of the end for the pashas, but it also ushered in a period of increased cosmopolitanism: a hundred years in which Europeans were added to the Ottoman mix.

The author’s forebears were part of this great eastward migration. Vatikiotis set out in 2019 to uncover their stories, and as is the way of these journeys, to discover his own. He began in Port Said, the city where his parents met, now a sad remnant of its glory days. His mother, Patricia, was the daughter of a former British soldier who joined the colonial service and married into an Italian–Jewish family that had settled in Egypt during the previous century. Vatikiotis’s father, Panayiotis, was of Greek-Palestinian heritage, so his searches also took him to Israel.

From these pivotal points, the narrative branches out in space and time. We meet the Soragnas from northern Italy, the first Vatikiotis from Hydra, and other twigs on the spreading family tree. Greeks from Palestine who’d never seen Greece; Italians from Egypt, few of whom saw Italy: all of them were imbued with a sense of themselves that crossed national borders, formed by the tolerance that marked an empire where Jews and Muslims and Christians lived in messy if mainly happy accommodation.

Vatikiotis never claims, though, that the Ottoman arrangements were perfect. Inequality existed along with plurality, a matter of class as much as religious or ethnic identity — all of which he explores in detail.

After the spell in America, his father, a noted scholar, moved the family to England, where the author grew up in relative privilege, attending a British boarding school and then Oxford University. Yet he hasn’t much good to say about the British, or the blind intolerance that characterised their empire. Nor is he happy about the British penchant for neatness, divide-and-rule and partitioning being their standard solutions to problems of imperial governance. Thus were Britain’s parting shots in India and Palestine, with horrific effects in both cases.

The Middle East is seen today as a region of intractable conflict, the very reverse of what it was in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, when Europe was being torn apart by revolution and war. Almost a century after the Suez Canal was built, Britain and France together enlisted Israel in an attempt to stop Egypt from nationalising it, and thus cutting off their supply chains. But the Americans had left the two old rivals behind, establishing their own empire in opposition to the Soviets in the rising cold war, and intervened in what we now know as the Suez crisis. So, in a sense, Lives Between the Lines is the story of the fate of empires, and a clear-eyed assessment of the achievements and failings of each.

As for the Ottomans, Vatikiotis cites two main reasons for the demise of “this constructive cosmopolitan complexity”: “European imperialism with its uni-dimensional line-drawing… and the parallel emergence of puritanical strains of Judaism and Islam.” Instead of what he calls “the fluid lattice of overlapping transactions that characterised Ottoman society” we’ve been left with a world rigidly bisected, with immeasurable suffering in consequence.

To help us on our travels with Vatikiotis, his publisher has supplied maps, an index and an excellent timeline of significant events. With all this and its fascinating perspectives to ponder, it seems churlish of me to remark that I could have used a family tree as well. Then again, given the complexity of his lineage, it might have proved too broad to fit comfortably on a page. And we might find, if we dare to look at ourselves through the lens of his thought-provoking book, that we too are — or at least are increasingly becoming — cosmopolitans, despite those hard lines the powers have insisted on drawing for us. •

The post On being cosmopolitan appeared first on Inside Story.

After more than a year of disruption and uncertainty — a time when coping with anxiety was a major challenge — this might seem like the last perspective we need. In spite of its portentous title, though, this is no empty indulgence in doomsaying. Grant wants to make an urgent case for a fundamental political reorientation.

With the Falling of the Dusk is mainly a book about China, and about Grant’s experience as correspondent for CNN in Hong Kong — during 1997, the year the territory began its long reckoning for a century and a half of British control — and Beijing. Recent events in Hong Kong have served to confirm a grim challenge: how many times does the Communist Party leadership need to tell the West that they reject liberal democracy before we accept the reality?

Grant has chosen the politically potent metaphor of the virus deliberately. Under Stalin and Hitler, targeted populations were characterised as infections to be eradicated. The totalitarian state itself, as Francis Fukuyama warned in his 1989 book, The End of History and the Last Man, “could replicate itself throughout the world like a virus.”

Fukuyama’s big-picture view of history is in tune with Grant’s way of thinking. Both acknowledge the influence of the early nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who drew an arc from imperial China through the foundations of democracy in the classical world to the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath.

Mention Hegel, and you have to explain him, or at least explain enough to justify the allusion. That’s no easy task in a book designed for readers unlikely to be interested in the metaphysical wranglings of the Enlightenment. Grant devotes only a few pages to the task, though he insists that “Hegel looms over us” and we cannot understand our own political environment without some grasp of his ideas.

Hegel may also throw light on Grant’s enterprise in a way that he doesn’t mention. According to the great German theorist, history can be done in three ways: through first-hand witness and documentation; by situating events in the longer sweep of time; and as a form of philosophy, identifying overarching patterns in the march of civilisation. By braiding all three strands, Grant builds a sense of urgency.

The reporter who has been sent to Papua New Guinea, North Korea, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq to witness some of the darkest scenes in recent history is backed up by the historian who places them in the larger scheme of things. The philosopher is compelled to ask where all this is heading, and whether we still have the time or the awareness to stave off the worst of what the future may hold.

Many foreign correspondents write books, but few do so with such intellectual ambition and historical sweep. And I doubt many of them read Hegel, who may seem a remote and abstruse figure to most of those who front world crises. Yet the work of bearing witness to human cruelty and derangement also prompts a need for larger structures of understanding in which reason holds its place as an article of faith.

Rationality and optimism, though, don’t necessarily go together. When Fukuyama, in a mood of Hegelian buoyancy, rashly proclaimed the end of history, he believed that the grand narrative of humanity’s march towards freedom was at last being brought to its conclusion: capitalism had triumphed; the totalitarian regimes of communism were a spent force.

Fukuyama himself has clarified and largely retracted those predictions; and Grant’s ongoing determination to wrestle with them, which he has done numerous times in reports for the ABC, seems driven by a conviction that Fukuyama was not just wrong, but wrong in a critical way. History has returned with a vengeance, with China as the model towards which the major political traditions are converging. And now the virus may prove to be the instrument through which freedom itself is terminally weakened.

Grant’s brief as Beijing correspondent involved covering major political moments, such as the accession speech of Xi Jinping, but also gave him licence to hunt the length and breadth of the country for stories illustrating all aspects of contemporary life. He provides a distressing account of the wet markets in Guangdong at the time of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Poverty shapes destinies in many ways. Near Lanzhou in the northwest, where the suicide rate is high, a fisherman adapts his inherited trade to make an income hauling in the corpses of those who have jumped from the bridge. He posts the photographs online, and relatives can then pay to view the corpse for identification.

Ever-present official minders and trackers must be evaded on an expedition to Chengdu on the Tibetan border to speak to Buddhist monks protesting about the crackdown in their homeland. Reporting in this country is a cat-and-mouse game that is by turns dangerous and absurd: new tactics are constantly needed to hide footage and outwit the surveillance.

The assiduous journalist alternates between chasing emerging stories in the provinces and delving into the background of the people who steer events, but the weave of destiny is always his underlying story. The roles of reporter, historian and philosopher merge seamlessly in Grant’s narrative.

In search of insights into how a new form of leadership has emerged in China, he visits Mao’s living quarters in Yan’an, where the Long March ended. A photo hanging outside shows the young Mao still in political exile, weakened by hunger and depression, who was spending days and nights alone in the mountains planning the guerilla campaign that would change the course of the revolution.

Mao and Xi carried bitter experience of privation and exclusion into positions of supreme power, and the consequences are still playing out in the reign of Xi, who calls himself “son of the Yellow Earth.” Like Mao, Xi has ridden the wheel of political fortune. Tainted by the reputation of a father who was purged from the party, Xi spent his childhood in a re-education program, so ragged and underweight he lacked the strength for the farm labour to which he was assigned.

Such reversals of fortune are emblematic of revolution itself, expressing the capacity of the people as a whole to rise from the worst of human conditions to become a force of destiny. This is Hegel with a twist. How is it that the rise of the people as an expression of the world spirit has led only to a worse form of despotism?

And there is no cause for complacency in the West, where a very different narrative of freedom has led us to a state of delusion. “History hisses at us like the devil,” Grant warns, yet we fail to hear it. There are parallels with 1914, when the worst-case scenario played out because so many believed it could not. Even since the publication of this book, talk of potential conflict with China is recklessly leaking onto the front pages in Australia.

But might such pessimism itself be a dangerous indulgence? If we are at a crucial hinge point, perhaps a journalist who has supped full of horrors from the worst places of human suffering and cruelty is not the best guide to the way forward. “The things I have seen weigh heavy on my soul,” Grant acknowledges. But these things do exist out there in the world.

Just over halfway through the book the focus shifts to Pakistan, where Grant made several visits in the mid 2000s, and found another order of horror unfolding, one without even the pretence of reason and justice that inspired the revolutionary leaders of China. It is there that he finds his way to “a place beyond grace,” in a town square in the Swat Valley where headless bodies are dumped and the heads impaled on posts or left on doorsteps.

Zibahkhana Chowk, or “Slaughter Square” as it is now called, is an exhibition of extreme human pathology. There may be versions of it in any war zone. It is the heart of darkness that Conrad found in the Congo and Coppola recreated for Apocalypse Now in an abandoned Angkor Temple near the mouth of Cambodia’s Nùng River. In Coppola’s version the presiding spirit is Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a colonel in the US army who has gone into full-blown psychosis and used his military authority to create hell on earth.

Grant finds “the devil incarnate” in the very different guise of Imran, a tall, red-haired Pashtun man taken captive by Pakistani troops. Imran has a voice like honey — smooth, quiet and alluring — and the demeanour of a holy man. It has been his job to mentor the boys who will become suicide bombers, poisoning their minds with visions of a higher destiny. Reason, the core business of Hegelian history, has no place here.

The world is what it is, and journalists must report it as they find it. If Grant’s primary aim were to provide an overview of his experiences as a foreign correspondent, the accounts of what he witnessed in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan would clearly belong here. But he is attempting something much more. He wants to do the historian’s work of analysis and correlation, and the philosopher’s work of interpretation.

His Hegelian paradigm is convincing when it’s applied to China, where the long march of history is a drama by turns heroic, tragic, harrowing, euphoric and ominous. As he was told repeatedly during his ten years in the country, there’s no China without Mao, no Mao without Marx. And no Marx without Hegel. In a revolutionary scenario, big ideas lead to big events, not vice versa.

The chapters on China have a cohesiveness and depth that is missing from the rest of the book. There’s an atmosphere, too, created from the opening paragraphs, where Grant recalls the train journey into China with his family on Christmas Day in 2004, feeling “the pull of the earth” in a land that seems to pulse with memory.

As the landscape unfolds in the morning light, his attention is caught by a solitary figure working in the field. The man looks old, and must have lived through tumultuous changes: the birth of the People’s Republic, the reign of Mao and the Great Leap Forward. Grant, as a Wiradjuri man bearing a heritage of dispossession, senses a fellow time traveller. “We were twinned with fate,” he writes. “We belonged to old cultures whose worlds had been upended by the march of modernity.” This upending brings with it a legacy of anger towards the modernising nations, with their presumptions of moral authority and powers to enforce it.

Grant’s style may be cool and measured, but at its heart this is an angry book. Civilisations have long memories, he warns, while nations think only of tomorrow. As China and Australia face off in an absurdly mismatched game of sanctions, and our great ally America is trying to work its way out of a political quagmire, a reckoning looms.

So what are we to do? No world-historical individuals are in sight, at least from our side of the picture, which could be a blessing. One of the bitterest lessons of a failed democracy is that the people have only themselves to blame. Perhaps they are also to blame for states of post-revolutionary dictatorship. At the end of his documentary novel Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman launches into a tirade against the people, seeing the underlying cause of Stalin’s regime in a resurgence of “the soul of the serf” among the Soviet citizenry.

When things get fraught, it feels good to lay some blame, even if it means blaming oneself. It may feel good, but whether it does any good is another matter, and that depends on whether the hinge point is a point of no return. This would not be the first time the spectre of 1914 has reared its head and faded again. If we are not there yet — and as Grant claims, “destination is a Western idea” — a moment of reckoning may be to some purpose.

Grant contrasts his vision of the Chinese peasant working in the fields at daybreak, heralding a world of possibility and a new story to tell, with the image of his title, taken from Hegel. “Wisdom is not gained in the dawn; the owl of Minerva spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk.”

Hegel wrestled with the question of whether the long march of history was on some predetermined course. He rejected such a view, believing it left no real place for human freedom and agency. There are times when events seem to converge in inevitable ways, and it is perhaps this, above all, that is the most dangerous assumption.

For all his apparent pessimism, Grant raises the alarm with the conviction that a change of course is possible. The reckoning he calls for involves recognition of political responsibility at all levels: not just by governments, elected or otherwise, but by all of us who in our diverse ways may have some influence on the course of events. This is in many respects a compelling and convincing book, though not one that will help you sleep easily. •

The post At a hinge point in history appeared first on Inside Story.

Now the questions are very different: have we entered an altogether new era of violence, more akin to past conflicts in Yugoslavia or Rwanda than to any of Israel’s? And never mind who started it, who can make it stop?…

Read the full article here

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If Netanyahu was contentious then, he is even more so now. Two Sundays ago he achieved another first as prime minister, appearing in a courtroom on corruption charges, having felt no obligation to resign from office and having announced his intention to annex large swathes of West Bank territory previously earmarked for an eventual Palestinian state.

Perhaps not surprisingly, events in Israel have caused a shift within Australia’s 120,000-strong Jewish community, and it has been reflected in the formation of their delegation to the World Zionist Congress in October. The five-yearly congresses are an important opportunity for political representatives from Israel to hear how diaspora supporters of Israel as a Jewish homeland feel about their policies.

In a consensual process just completed, eight members of the small Australian delegation (just thirteen out of 500 congress delegates) will be representatives of “progressive” or liberal Jewish organisations, either secular or from the like-minded religious streams known as “Reform” and “Conservative.” The other five delegates will speak for the Orthodox religious stream and groups like Friends of Likud, which generally support the steady push by Netanyahu and his Likud party for Israel to fully absorb the West Bank areas they call by their Biblical names of Judea and Samaria.

A notable new voice in the progressive majority is a secular coalition calling itself Hatikvah (“The Hope”), the title of the nineteenth-century poem that became the lyric of Israel’s national anthem. It wants Israel to “fulfil its destiny as a just, free homeland for the Jewish people” that also “lives in harmony with its neighbours and upholds the rights of all its citizens.”

Hatikvah has managed to pick up two places in the delegation. Leading the push for support during the formation of the delegation were Liam Getreu and Maddy Blay, respectively from local groups Ameinu, which is aligned with the Labour Party in Israel, and Meretz, aligned with the greenish-secular Meretz party. Behind Hatikvah is a new voice in the Jewish community, the online magazine Plus 61J, established in April 2015 and edited by liberal journalist Michael Visontay. Strongly focused on the Israel–Palestine question, Plus 61J declares itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro–human rights” and supportive of a two-state solution.

Joining the Hatikvah ticket was the Melbourne venture-capital entrepreneur and longstanding supporter of Israeli–Palestinian contact, Ron Finkel, who modelled the push for places at the World Zionist Congress on a Hatikvah ticket for the big United States delegation organised by his American friend Kenneth Bob, long active in Ameinu and a board member of the American liberal Jewish group J Street.

Finkel says that the Jewish community in Australia, “or at least a large chunk of it,” had begun to “tune out” from Israel because of alienation from the values shown by the Netanyahu government. “The drift has been clearly in the direction of non-engagement,” he tells me.

That was not the Jewish voice heard by the wider public, however. “You have those who are dyed-in-the-wool Israel über alles and they seem to have by and large effective control of communal institutions,” says Finkel. “They are the voice you hear through the ECAJ [Executive Council of Australian Jewry], through various state councils, and if that is all that there is you would come to the very rapid view that these sentiments reflect ‘the Jewish community.’”

A group of Jewish Australians decided they wanted to promote a different viewpoint. “We have got to make it clear that there is a voice in the community that reflects core progressive Zionist values, that they’re still relevant,” says Finkel, “even though progressive Zionists don’t have much say in Israel at the moment. And that’s good because it’s the first time in a long time that progressive Zionists of all ages have decided to stand up and say: this is what’s going on.”

As well as sending representatives to the congress, Hatikvah wants to work in a more engaging, structured way to gain a voice within the Jewish community. “We don’t want to be outside the tent pissing in. We want to be inside the tent and being part of the shaping of communal strategies.”

Already the group has put out two statements, one on climate change and one on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. “We are not trying to replace organisations that are active in this space, but we want to make it clear these are issues that speak to us, that are important to us as Australian progressive Zionists, and we’re involved,” says Finkel.

All this is encountering some resistance among some older, established community figures. “They can’t grasp, they can’t get their heads around the idea that you can be critical of policies of the current government of the state of Israel, fight for the rights of oppressed minorities in Israel whether they be Ethiopians or different segments of the Arab populations, or point out Israeli soldiers can do obnoxious things,” says Finkel.

He believes these sentiments are understandable, especially in Melbourne, which had the highest postwar concentration of Holocaust survivors, per capita, outside Israel. “You can’t blame them when your family has gone through the horrors and as a young person in 1967” — during the Arab-Israeli war — “you thought there was a likelihood that a new holocaust was going to be perpetrated on the state of Israel.”

After the past year’s three Israeli elections, each of which resulted in a stalemate, Netanyahu is still in power. He has stared down his rival, former defence chief Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party, and persuaded him to accept second place in a governing coalition. So precarious is the political balance that the government includes fully thirty-six ministers and sixteen deputies, some with invented portfolios and no clear responsibilities, in a Knesset of only 120 members. Crucially, Netanyahu retains control of the law-related portfolios.

Israel’s High Court allowed Netanyahu to stay in office while being tried on charges of receiving gifts and favourable media coverage in return for political favours, partly because of the presumption of innocence and partly because prime ministers, unlike ordinary ministers, are not explicitly prohibited from doing so.

“A situation in which a defendant charged with serious ethical crimes forms a government and heads it raises a public and moral problem whose magnitude is hard to overstate,” said Justice Menachem Mazuz in his judgement. “Such a situation reflects a social crisis and a moral failure by both society and the political system.”

Still, Netanyahu is doubling down, announcing he will start annexing some 30 per cent of the West Bank, including many of the Jewish settlements there, on 1 July. Gantz has acquiesced as part of the coalition agreement. Cynics believe that Netanyahu, while advancing the Israeli right’s perception of an ancient destiny, also hopes to project himself in court as a heroic statesman rather than a slippery politician.

The start on annexation may be more token than real. While the American right and its evangelical component might support the aim, even Donald Trump’s administration seems to be telling Netanyahu to slow down. It wants presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “peace plan” — land for Israel, cash and connecting freeways for the resulting Palestinian enclaves — to stay in play.

Formal annexation would sever Netanyahu’s new dialogue with conservative Arab governments and possibly set off a new Palestinian intifada. It would not be recognised by most European nations, nor by Washington if Joe Biden becomes president.

Hatikvah still holds the hope that the two-state solution can be revived. “What’s happening in the trajectory of both sides has been a continuous path of delegitimisation to now, unfortunately, many elements of dehumanisation,” says Finkel. “And so that chasm is getting bigger, so we have to try and bridge it, and the only way to bridge it is bringing people in touch with each other so they can realise that not every Palestinian is a murderous terrorist and not every Israeli is a bloodsucker. The need to inject humanity into the relationships is paramount.”

Palestinians would find “an incredibly receptive” audience in Israel if they changed their discourse to frame their aspirations as a civil society alongside Israel, Finkel believes. At the same time, Israel should restrain its “messianic” expansion. “All these steps towards colonisation or the settlement enterprise are a cancer on Israeli society,” says Finkel. “They are really going to put a stake through the heart of the Jewish future in Israel if they don’t step back from it.

“But I am an optimist and I certainly believe we can get to a two-state solution,” he adds. “You’ve got to have the will in order to find the way.” •

The post Can the drift be stopped? appeared first on Inside Story.

But the tentacles of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute spread right across the Arab and Islamic world, and any efforts to resolve it, well-intentioned or otherwise, could have significant knock-on effects.

Now into the second half of his term, Trump has systematically shaken the props behind the “rules-based world order,” even though he has failed to find anything better to replace them with. In the Middle East, he has clearly decided to trust a new generation of players who seem set on remaking the rules.

Ideally, in his view, these players would be the Saudis plus other key Gulf states, who would then take on Iran and those Arab states willing to act as Iranian proxies in alliance with Russia. But he is oscillating between the hawkish scenarios promoted by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security adviser, John Bolton, on the one hand, and the more sober assessments of his generals and diplomats, on the other.

Most American presidents would avoid bouncing around like this, but Trump lacks thought-through plans of his own. His instinctive tool is “disruption”; he has no patience for history or theology. We may well be at the most critical phase of his attempt to sweep old paradigms off the table and see what can be picked up from the floor in the way of new “deals.”

By deliberately courting disorder, Trump is abandoning the logical thinking that might be expected of the leader of a superpower and allowing himself to be manipulated by a new figure in the Gulf, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, who has adapted the customary Saudi formula of an aggressive form of Sunni Islam backed by profligate oil funds.

MBS’s role is amplifying the difficulty of resolving the stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians. Rivalries across the Gulf go back thirteen centuries and still define the way the Sunni–Shia divide is perceived. Most outsiders have long seen the divide as something to stay well clear of, conscious that the tensions have largely been kept in check since the middle of the eighth century by leaving small theological differences to theologians.

Instead of working through issues patiently and cautiously, though, and at least paying lip service to international mechanisms, Trump wants to try it his way. In the process, the United States is being sucked into disputes its president neither comprehends nor has patience for.

The current confrontation in the Gulf is largely a result of Trump’s willingness to do Salman’s bidding, and secondarily Israel’s bidding, by attempting to reduce Iran’s role in the region and ditch the exactingly negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, rather than build on it. The JCPOA got in the way because it was working. Its other members — China, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and Britain — have been bypassed and even threatened with secondary sanctions for actions that are essentially legal under anyone’s law except Trump’s. The signal is clear: only Washington makes the international framework from now on.

Underneath this heap of disruption lies the compost pit that is the Israel–Palestine problem, with its huge overburden of UN and human rights resolutions. Trump has abandoned the traditional role of helping, or at least ostensibly helping, to unpick the issues between the parties, and has instead embarked on a course of serial disruption designed to replace UN resolutions and international law with disorder based on an impossible paradigm.

This week’s Bahrain meeting furthers that plan. In playing along with MBS’s vision of a Middle East in which Saudi Arabia is Trump’s deputy sheriff (or is it vice versa?), Trump has accepted another breathtaking leap of Salman’s logic. The same logic delivered an unwinnable war in Yemen, tried to hold a Lebanese prime minister to ransom and had a regime critic hacked to death in a backroom in Istanbul. On these performance parameters, Saudi Arabia’s chances of persuading scores of Arab League and Islamic states to accept Israel’s 1948 takeover of Palestine as a fait accompli are slim indeed.

The Bahrain plan is not only overwhelmed by the drama in the Gulf. In Jared Kushner’s hands, it also shows every sign of poor design and clumsy execution. Even if a brace of Arab states can be summoned to Bahrain to endorse a new economic “plan” for Palestine, little can be done unless Israel commits to lifting its blockade of Gaza and its stranglehold on the West Bank. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now so beholden to extremists that any hope of coopting him appears remote, even if some would find tempting the prospect of banishing the Palestinians to a series of Arab Bantustans and closing down their access to Jerusalem.

Middle-power countries like Australia have always argued that this dispute will only be resolved by a rules-based approach. Their interests lie in avoiding the nastier complications caused by disruptive tactics with no defined outcomes. Australia may be faced with difficult choices if Trump seeks support for hastening the dismantling of the JCPOA, or in endorsing the Bahrain game plan as a way of bypassing many decades of support for a two-state solution in Palestine. To join the disruption game is to put at risk structures that have largely served Australia’s interests well.

Scott Morrison’s ill-informed lurch towards the recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem last year was a foretaste of what life might be like if we rely on deals in the age of America First. Australia has maintained a policy of engaging with Iran, for example. It is perhaps ominous that Pompeo is currently in the Gulf pressing a range of countries to join a “global coalition” against Iran — “a coalition,” to use his words, “not only throughout the Gulf states but in Asia and in Europe.” This is a deal-making game Australia would be well advised to stay out of if it doesn’t want to find itself a victim of Pompeo and Bolton’s dark obsessions. •

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Tempting as it is to believe that Morrison is prone to thought bubbles, that might not be the whole story.

First, what “Jewish vote”? Jewish voters, like other religious people, consider many issues before they vote. A senior Wentworth rabbi last week reminded his congregation to take account of the “moral issue of climate change” when casting their votes — hardly a ringing endorsement of a Liberal candidate.

Second, we shouldn’t assume that the prime minister’s signalling is all about Jewish voters, let alone Wentworth. Conservative Christians are also in the mix.

A few days earlier, the prime minister, who attends a Pentecostal church, had offended those Coalition members and senators who think that “religious freedom” means defending the right of religious schools to expel gay kids — in the memorable phrasing of former Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace — “in the most loving way.”

In agreeing to bring a bipartisan end to religious schools’ exemptions from anti-discrimination law for LGBTIQ children, Morrison effectively conceded that gender identity and sexual orientation are part of a person’s make-up rather than a disorder or a set of behaviours that can be prayed away. The Australian Christian Lobby hasn’t conceded any such thing.

Morrison may well have felt that he needed to do something fast to show he is still the Christian right’s man. Praying on megachurch stages is a start, but policy signals also help.

In Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, published last week, Sean Durbin (whose PhD I supervised) analyses an important undercurrent of the Christian right, known as Christian Zionism. Durbin shows that America’s largest pro-Israel organisation is, in fact, made up of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, led by megachurch pastor John Hagee.

When Donald Trump moved America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the cheer squad was only partly Jewish. The ceremony was blessed by two Christian pastors, one of them being Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, who believes that Jerusalem is “the preordained capital of Christ’s 1000-year empire.”

For these conservative Christians, identifying with Israel is a means of attaining God’s blessing, for themselves and for their nation. For politicians, the blessings are more immediate: appeals to an important Christian constituency.

In a chapter on “the eternal enmity of God’s enemies,” Durbin points out another reason for this new-found “philo-Semitism” among many conservative Christians in the United States: a common post-9/11 distrust of Islam. Morrison’s other recent pro-Israel thought bubble — a reconsideration of Australia’s support for the Iran nuclear deal — has a similar appeal.

The power of the US Christian right is well documented; Australia’s version is far from a potentially election-swaying critical mass. Intra-party politics, however, is another matter.

Durbin studied US Christian identification with Israel through church-organised, pastor-led tourism to Israel. The tours encourage participants to develop a sense of spiritual affinity with Israel and to “bless” (that is, give money to) Israel, to the degree that they have become important to the Israeli economy.

Australian megachurches offer something similar. For example, Metro Church on the Gold Coast offers the Israel 2019: Treasures of Grace tour, led by that federal Liberal frontbencher and lavish internet user, assistant treasurer Stuart Robert, for $5800.

To Christian-right party colleagues spooked by the announcement about religious exemptions for schools, the PM’s thought bubbles act as a reassurance. He has shown he cares. Observers of US politics call this kind of coded gesture to a specific religious constituency “narrowcasting.” In Morrison’s variety of politics, they call it “virtue signalling.” •

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Other potential flashpoints remain. West of Deraa, on the volcanic plain that stretches to the Golan escarpment, another patchwork of rebel groups includes residual elements of Islamic State hemmed in by other Islamist and militia elements. Israel is keen to see Islamist forces, particularly Hezbollah, kept away from the disengagement lines west of Quneitra. West and north of Aleppo, meanwhile, Turkish forces occupy the Afrin Valley and the hill country stretching around Aleppo from the west. To the east, the territory from Menbij to the Iraqi frontier has been taken by a joint American–Kurdish operation, its future undefined. Other areas outside the Syrian government’s direct control include much of Idlib province, the destination for fighters who refuse to accept “reconciliation” deals with the government.

Significantly, all the reconciliation deals have been negotiated under Russian supervision, and Russian military police and other units have monitored the local ceasefires. Russia is also acting as intermediary between Israel and Iran to ensure that Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah units are kept well back from the line of division on the Golan. Turkey’s role in the north is less easy to define; in many ways it seems to be settling in as a long-term supervisory power.

The real tinder box at the moment covers most of Idlib province south of the road running between Aleppo and Antioch. Its population has been augmented by rebels who refused to stay in the zones selected for reconciliation deals over the past three years, and the local, largely Sunni population is consequently living in pitiful conditions. Little information emerges from what is effectively a “black hole,” filled with rebels armed with the light weapons they took when they were evicted and free of any stabilising outside presence. Internet postings indicate sporadic clashes between al Qaeda units and more secular competitors as well as firefights along the southern edge of the province immediately north of Hama.

In eastern Syria, stay-behind Islamic State units survive in remote parts of the steppe on either side of the Euphrates, and there have been isolated reports of engagements with Syrian forces. And, finally, there is the curious case of the stretch of Syrian territory well to the east of the Jordanian border crossing at Nasib: except for its long common border with Jordan, and the fact that it straddles the main highway link to Baghdad, it is devoid of any sizeable population or strategic interest.

All conflicts, no matter how visceral and violent, have a natural half-life. But like the civil war in Lebanon (1975–90), they can also linger senselessly. A turning point finally came in Lebanon when the Arab League, notably Saudi Arabia, stepped in as arbiters and re-established more or less the same power-sharing formula as the National Pact of 1943. In Syria, the situation is a little clearer: there is now every sign that the regime will survive and take control of virtually all the state’s territory, assuming covenants can be reached with residual occupation forces and with Syria’s allies in the conflict.

The keys to this process are Russia, Turkey and Iran. Early in the conflict, Russia and Iran read the situation correctly and identified where their interests lay. Iran had been building relations with Syria since 1979, encouraging a greater role for Shiite Islam. The Soviet Union had been a long-term backer of Syria, though at some points during the rule of Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president, it was clearly bamboozled by the country’s complicated manoeuvring. After Hafez’s death in 2000, Russia probably found his son Bashar a little easier to read. Turkey, for its part, had been a backer of Bashar al-Assad’s mildly reformist economic agenda before 2011. It switched 180 degrees in the early stages of the conflict, allowing the rebels to use the Syrian border crossings as revolving doors — a policy it came to regret when Islamic State extended its campaign of violence into Turkey.

The missing element was the major Western powers. Most of them read the protest movements of 2011 as another phase of the Arab Spring and hoped that, given the right encouragement, a tide of popular enthusiasm would sweep Bashar al-Assad out of power. This was a fatal misreading: Syria was not Tunisia or Egypt. The call for Assad to go offered no identifiable basis for a post-Assad order, but many Syrians believed that the democracies would follow through and impose a solution.

Soon the encouragement turned more lethal, with the United States beginning to provide light weaponry. While the gesture was too ineffectual to make an impact, it deprived Western democracies of any role in calming the situation. When both Turkey and the United States turned a blind eye to the role of Gulf interests intent on unseating Bashar and reversing the drift towards a Shiite identity for Syria, the conflict flared to peak intensity.

Perhaps a few lessons have been learned, but they may not be enough. The US presence in the northeast and its enigmatic foothold in the south may be a Pentagon armchair strategist’s idea of a claim to a seat at the final negotiations. But even a token presence can bring dangerous and unexpected outcomes. By inserting itself between Turkey, the Kurds, the local Arabs and the Syrian government, the United States faces home-grown skills way out of its league.

In a recent paper for the Hoover Institution, the French political geographer Fabrice Balanche notes that all scenarios in the northeast of Syria suggest a no-win for the United States: “US troops could be pushed out of northern Syria, giving the Syrian regime and its allies free rein,” he writes. “Iran will then control the entire Syrian–Iraqi border and the corridor between Tehran and the Mediterranean Sea.” The US strategy, once again oblivious to complex dynamics on the ground, is likely to hasten one of the very aims it professes to oppose.

Whatever credibility as a great power the United States had before 2017 is now irrelevant if Trump continues to see the world as akin to a reality TV show. Whether we like it or not, Russia, by contrast, has played its role expertly and consistently. Before 2011, it was a guarded marginal player in the wider region; now it holds a master key to any solution. So, too, does Iran. Adopting tactics designed to exclude Russia and Iran is simply counterintuitive. In a regional order clumsily forged by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the likely winners will continue to be those who know the environment and play the long game. ●

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It’s nearly six years since a Syrian official confirmed what had long been suspected or assumed — that Syria possessed chemical weapons. But Syria wouldn’t use those weapons against its own people, he claimed; they were reserved for responding to external aggression.

Yet sporadic reports of chemical weapons use were emerging from Homs and outside Aleppo, and they attracted condemnation from Western leaders citing the century-long effort to ban their use. Concerns intensified in August 2013 when evidence emerged that chemicals were being delivered by rockets aimed at opposition territory in the satellite towns around Damascus in the Eastern Ghouta. With around 1400 deaths reported, the issue jumped to the top of the list of horrors unleashed during the Syrian conflict.

At a press conference during a visit to Stockholm the following month, US president Barack Obama appeared to assert that the use of chemical weapons had crossed a “red line.” He was probably referring to a red line long observed by the international community rather than a red line drawn by one nation — the United States, for instance — acting alone. In fact, the international outcry after the Ghouta attack was so strong that the Russians and even the Syrian authorities seemed to accept that a threshold had been reached.

Syria announced that it would do three things: join the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international mechanism to counter the use of chemical weapons; agree to allow a team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, to inspect its facilities; and abide by the inspectors’ findings by dismantling the network of production and storage facilities. Russia stepped in as co-sponsor of the process of dismantling and destruction, which was carried out over the period October 2013 to January 2016. It was an unprecedented achievement with massive technical support from many countries.

So far, the sequence of events resembled a textbook case of the international system working as it should — working, for example, like the methodical and consensual process that oversaw the dismantling of South Africa’s small nuclear arsenal in the 1990s under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

What went so wrong since then? Why is Russia now seen as part of the problem, not of the solution? It’s convenient, of course, to blame Obama. He flagged a red line and then failed to enforce it, didn’t he?

Well, not exactly. He could have sent in the Tomahawks straight away, and taken out the network of chemical-weapon facilities in Syria. But he seized another opportunity — to wrestle the Russians into agreeing that chemical warfare was a no-go area, and should be recognised as such by all warring powers. His strategy, in other words, was to get Moscow to sign up the Syrians to the international mechanisms and then take the process to its conclusion. It was an opportunity no reasonable leader could pass up, particularly when both British and American legislators were not keen to get involved in the Syrian war.

Nowadays, though, almost every media commentator sees Obama’s strategy as shilly-shallying rather than statesmanship. What changed?

We have passed two more landmarks in the blatant use of chemical weapons to hasten an end to a prolonged war: the attack in Khan Sheikhun in April 2017 and, this month, the unleashing of chlorine and possibly sarin on Douma in the Eastern Ghouta. Though the death toll may only represent a fraction of the carnage wrought in the 2013 attack, these attacks look like a deliberate flouting of the Chemical Weapons Convention/OPCW framework, or the use of material that slipped through the earlier dragnet, or both.

An international response was clearly warranted, but it needed to be carefully linked to a strategy. As British prime minister Theresa May has noted, it is essential to ring-fence chemical weapons from the modern practice of war. This is not because chemical warfare has brought slaughter on a massive new scale — not yet, anyway. But it could so easily be adopted widely as a weapon of choice for parties able to harness the relatively small-scale technology and resources involved, especially in contests where no side seems able to gain a commanding advantage through conventional firepower.

There is also a shock value in highlighting the risk of resorting to chemical weapons. Ideally, the response should come through mechanisms such as the OPCW and the Chemical Weapons Convention. It is clear that the century-old consensus — Obama’s red line — needs reinforcing, but it would best be accompanied by efforts to strengthen rather than marginalise the international mechanisms.

Chemical warfare is only a small part of the disaster that has overwhelmed Syria but it shouldn’t overwhelm the need to deal with the fact that Russia, Turkey, Iran and the United States are fighting proxy wars within the wider conflict. Unless those wars are dealt with, the next horror could be the unleashing of chemical weapons on the hundreds of thousands of opposition members dumped in Idlib Province as part of the country’s “deconfliction” agreements — a target likely to be more difficult to overwhelm than Aleppo or the Eastern Ghouta. •

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Does that mean the Iran deal is finished? No. He is directing his administration to “work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal’s many serious flaws so that the Iranian regime can never threaten the world with nuclear weapons.” And if a solution is not reached with Congress and the allies? Simple: “then the agreement will be terminated… our participation can be cancelled by me, as president, at any time.”

Nothing could be less clear. This formulation puts the responsibility for a solution on Congress and on America’s “allies.” Iran is not considered a party to this elaboration of the JCPOA. The allies have made their views known: while they might agree with many of the other issues of concern to President Trump, they want first and foremost to preserve the deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Even Australia has been willing to publicly defend the agreement.

As rightly pointed out by Iran and other parties to the deal — the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States) plus Germany and the European Union — the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement and no one party can unilaterally end it. That said, it is hard to imagine the deal surviving a head-on US attack.

The certification requirement was a gesture to a sceptical Congress enabling Barack Obama to lift sanctions on Iran as part of the nuclear deal. The implied threat now is that sanctions could be reintroduced.

THE RECORD

The “factual record” underlying Trump’s policy was set out in a four-page White House statement on the same day — titled President Donald J. Trump’s New Strategy on Iran. The strategy is described as having been arrived at in consultation with Trump’s national security team and after “nine months of deliberation with Congress and our allies on how best to protect American security.” I wonder if Australia and other allies feel comfortable being so implicated?

As laid out by Trump, the record has frightening parallels with the gilded and airbrushed arguments used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Trump describes the Iranian government as being a fanatical, radical dictatorship “with a long campaign of bloodshed,” indeed a “murderous past and present” — but stops short of calling for regime change. The new strategy recounts historical attacks by Iran on US interests in Iran and elsewhere (which are indeed shocking) and itemises other antisocial behaviours: its development of missiles, promotion of terrorism and harbouring of terrorists, support for Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, hostility to Israel, threatening of shipping in the Persian Gulf, cyber-attacks against the US and Israel and other allies, human rights abuses, and arbitrary detention of foreigners.

THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAL

The Iran deal did not seek to solve all issues of the Middle East. It focused on the very clear and present danger that Iran was about to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The White House is now asserting that Iran is not observing the “spirit of the deal,” which was to contribute to “regional and international peace and security.” Instead, according to President Trump, Iran is posing an increasing menace to the international community.

What is to be done? The US will work with allies to address Iran’s malign behaviour in four ways:

• Counter Iran’s support for terrorism: scarcely a new policy direction.

• Sanction the Revolutionary Guards: as some observers have noted, now that the threat of Islamic State in Iraq has receded, the US has little to lose in taking on the Revolutionary Guards; and it plays to the Sunni regimes of the Arabian Gulf and to Israel, which see Iran as the mortal enemy.

• Address Iran’s “asymmetric” missile weapons program: but there is no explanation as to how this will be achieved.

• Deny the regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.

Worryingly, except for the fourth issue. we are given no clue as to how the success of these far-reaching ambitions will be measured.

ALL PATHS TO A NUCLEAR WEAPON

Apart from accusing Iran of being in breach of the spirit of the deal, the White House is charging Iran with specific failings.

First, President Trump’s speech, but curiously not the Iran Strategy, accuses Iran of committing “multiple” violations of the deal, for example on the two occasions when it exceeded limits on its holdings of heavy water. But the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the international body entrusted to verify the deal, does not consider that the discrepancy amounted to a material breach and has confirmed that holdings are now below the agreed level. What the president fails to acknowledge is that the IAEA is implementing in Iran the world’s most robust nuclear verification regime, with an inspection effort more than double that deployed before the deal (and with the US meeting much of the cost of this extra effort).

A second charge is that Iran has been exploiting loopholes in the deal — but no detail is provided (perhaps Trump is obviously pointing to the fact that the agreement does not address Iran’s missile program).

Third is the vexed issue of access to military sites in Iran, which the US argues might provide insights into Iran’s progress in developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials have aggravated the debate by suggesting that international inspectors would never be permitted into military facilities, which Trump depicts as intimidation of the IAEA. The deal does allow for such access, and IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano has confirmed that he would seek it were there to be a need — but in a clear rebuff to the United States, he said he would not authorise a “fishing expedition,” and has confirmed that the IAEA had been granted access to “all locations that it has needed to visit.”

The fourth issue: what happens after the current deal runs out? This is a critical concern to all parties to the deal. In 2015, buying time was the immediate goal. No one disagrees that the biggest challenge ahead will be to close all paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon, and the United States and its partners should be directing maximum attention to engaging Iran on that issue. This requires negotiations for the period after the deal, not walking away from the deal.

THE FOG OF WHITE HOUSE POLICY-MAKING

Much of Friday’s speech was directed at the domestic American audience. The Obama administration was attacked for its failure to conclude a better deal and for numerous other foreign policy mistakes. A foreign policy distraction temporarily diverts attention from the administration’s many woes.

But the president’s tendentious assertions, relentless bombast and threats do not enhance US standing. The Iran nuclear deal is imperfect and its sunset provisions need attention: there is an urgent need for global leadership, but instead the president has passed the parcel back to Congress and unnamed “allies.”

US allies in the Middle East, the Gulf states and Israel will take comfort from the assertive anti-Iranian stance. But key allies in Europe and North Asia must be horrified by the president’s implications that they have somehow endorsed the new US strategy on Iran. To add insult to injury, Trump also appears unhappy that some countries have taken advantage of the economic openings in Iran and hints at dire consequences for any that might engage with the Revolutionary Guard, now a major player in the Iranian economy. The US only has itself to blame for failing to seize these opportunities.

The fog surrounding White House decision-making is creating a more dangerous environment for policy-makers around the world. It is becoming increasingly difficult to paper over the gaps between the interests of key US allies. We insist we stand for strengthening a rules-based international order, yet freely negotiated agreements between states are trashed before our eyes.

A final thought for our region. Some sixty eminent experts from the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament recently issued an appeal to the US to respect the Iran nuclear agreement. They argued that abandoning the deal would cast doubt on the integrity of the global nuclear monitoring system of the IAEA, which has assessed that Iran remains compliant. It would also threaten the viability of the multilaterally negotiated JCPOA, and reopen a pathway to an Iranian nuclear weapon. The cascading effect would further deepen the East Asian nuclear crisis, raising doubts about the commitment of the US administration to any international negotiations to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis peacefully. This would benefit Pyongyang and damage the East Asian non-nuclear weapon states. The logic of these experts is compelling. •

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Numerous frontlines still need to be resolved before we see anything approaching a stable outcome across Syria, as does the question of who will control many existing and likely “liberated” areas. But there are reasons to believe that the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies have locked in a favourable swing in the conflict’s direction. While ISIS has used every desperate ploy to delay the inevitable, it is now virtually finished west of the Euphrates, clinging only to small, isolated areas east of Hama and Homs.

ISIS elements are also holding out in some pockets of Raqqa city (amounting to perhaps 20 per cent of the urban area) against the Syrian Democratic Forces, a predominantly Kurdish grouping with on-the-ground backing from US special forces. The role of the Kurds on that front highlights the wider conundrum posed by Turkey’s unwillingness to accept large swathes of Kurdish-controlled territory across northern Syria and the Syrian Jazira. Whether Ankara has reached an understanding with Washington about a future Kurdish presence is unclear, but Turkey has moved decisively to take a major role in restoring normal life north of the Euphrates. None of the players seems to envisage a return to Syrian control.

Turkey has also made particularly vigorous efforts to ensure that the Afrin Valley, east of Turkey’s Hatay province, does not come under Kurdish control.

Map of Syria by Ross Burns

In the Lower Euphrates, where many of the oil and gas fields are located, US-backed forces were competing with Syrian units to take the town of Abu Kemal, the crossing point to Iraq. Although the United States made a sudden decision to withdraw, it seems to have established a new red line to prevent the Syrians from crossing the Euphrates. It is difficult to define what US interest might be served by this gambit: does it envisage a “Shia corridor” stretching from Iran across Iraq, southern Syria and on to Lebanon — a new tentacle of Iranian influence — as some observers argue? This imaginative scenario seems poorly based in terms of practicality.

A little further up the Euphrates, the town of Deir al-Zor (the main base of the Syrian oil and gas extraction industry) is also largely back in government hands. Backed by Russian air power, the Syrian army has steadily rolled back the ISIS contingents holding out on the steppe east of Palmyra. Russia has been quick to wheel in logistic support so that Syrian forces can move into the Syrian Jazira, north of the Euphrates, and along the Khabur River.

In southwestern Syria, from the Jordanian border up to Damascus, firefights involving a range of groups are reasonably common but short-lived. Further north, east of Damascus, al Qaeda offshoots are still holding on within two kilometres of the eastern walls of the old city. This conflict has perhaps lost some of its intensity but none of its persistence.

To the west of the capital, and also in the mountain crossings into Lebanon to the north, via the Anti-Lebanon Range, exchanges of fighters under “de-confliction” agreements have taken much of the intensity out of long-simmering firefights. The process has been managed within the broad framework of the multi-party Astana talks, often under Russian and international humanitarian supervision.

The final, and by far the toughest, challenge is in the area largely covered by Idlib province, between Hama and Aleppo. Many fighters (now virtually all al Qaeda–aligned) have been consigned to this zone following the de-confliction agreements reached around Damascus, Homs and Aleppo.

For the moment, the Syrian regime seems to be treating this pocket of the overall conflict as a too-hard case, perhaps confident that the fighters will weary of their internal rivalries, wear out the patience of the two million civilians trapped inside, and take their turn at the end of the queue for de-confliction. The latter would require Turkish cooperation to prevent the free passage of arms, funding and personnel across the border. Ankara’s initial tolerance of ISIS operations across the northern Syrian border eventually led to a series of brutal ISIS bombings in Turkish cities; a more positive role in a reconstruction phase might now be a better option.

Dismantling these confrontations would be difficult enough if they could be sealed off from the outside world. But it is external backers that have made these conflicts possible and sustained them. We would be fooling ourselves, though, if we believed that outsiders can now simply snap their fingers and call off the fighters, allowing peace suddenly to descend. The fall of Aleppo and the rolling back of ISIS have been important turning points but another factor is required.

Syrians themselves, who have spent more than six agonising years watching their country being torn apart, would have to accept that their hopes of outside intervention to implement the dreams of the peaceful demonstrators of 2011 are not going to be fulfilled. Well-meaning countries, mainly in the West, made numerous calls for Bashar al-Assad’s regime to dissolve itself. This stoked a confrontation that rapidly turned violent, providing platforms for numerous externally backed groups, whose ambitions were in many cases even more vicious than the regime’s.

Nikolaos van Dam, who has been following the politics of Syria since his posting as a Dutch diplomat in Damascus four decades ago, has recently published a uniquely well-informed analysis of the course of the conflict. Van Dam reminds us of how dangerous it was for Western leaders to let hearts overrule rationality on Syria, giving the impression to Syrian protesters (and later the civilians who tolerated the presence of armed insurrections) that help was coming. In van Dam’s words, Western politicians “unintentionally contributed to prolonging the war and helping Bashar al-Assad move towards partial (or total) victory.” It is a perfect case of the old “ethical war” dilemma: the desired outcome may be morally right but is it ethical to promote it without making an informed calculation of whether it can be delivered without even worse suffering?

In Syria’s case, we now have the answer. From September 2015 on, the regime felt compelled by the strength of the rebels’ offensive in the Orontes Valley to invite the Russians and the Iranians to scale up their support for Syria’s own forces. From that point on, there was no chance that the regime could be persuaded to deal other domestic players into the power equation that had long locked Syria’s generals and intelligence chiefs in a Faustian pact with the Assad family. As a result, the levers for positive intervention by the international community are virtually non-existent, save for working through Russia and Iran.

With no common factor joining the postwar ambitions of the regime and those broadly grouped under the “coalition,” numerous flashpoints may still ignite. The embers of lingering confrontation could still be fanned by wishful thinking, even by the best-motivated outsiders. Any thoughts that the intensity of the confrontation can be fixed by lopping off bits of Syria, for example, should immediately be set aside. The integrity of Syria has to be a common starting point if the present conflict is not to be an abundant source of new conflicts for decades to come.

While the endgame may still be some way off, for the exhausted and demoralised people of Syria it can’t come soon enough. In a situation in which Syrians might increasingly be asking themselves whether the struggle was worth it, it is too late simply to hope for miracles. ●

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Funds to the tune of $110 billion were promised to the Saudis to buy what President Trump describes as “lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States.” US secretary of state Rex Tillerson maintained that the deal was directed at preventing “malign Iranian influence” and went on to assert American support for those “elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.”

In between these two events, on 7 June, twin Islamic State attacks targeted two of Tehran’s most symbolic sites, Iran’s parliament and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, killing many civilians. The attacks were motivated by Islamic State’s belief that the Shi’a, who dominate in Iran, are apostates. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accused the Saudis of “complicity.”

In the United States, the Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher described the attacks in Tehran as a “good thing,” adding that “it’s a good idea to have radical Muslim terrorists fighting each other.” President Trump’s response was to “underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.” The military and economic pressures seemed designed to escalate an already dangerous confrontation. Equally strikingly, they also overshadow developments taking place inside Iran that hold out the possibility of a very different future.

After all, the Riyadh summit had begun just a day after a landslide re-election victory by Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, who sealed Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers during his first four-year term. At campaign rallies and in televised presidential debates, Rouhani promised to bolster civil society, fight corruption and open up Iran to the world, going beyond the normal realm of Iranian electioneering rhetoric. He attacked human rights abuses and spoke of the populace’s disapproval of the “executions and jailings throughout the last thirty-eight years.” He denounced the group of young extremists who stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran in January 2016 for stoking regional tensions. He accused the Revolutionary Guards of trying to sabotage the nuclear deal by writing anti-Israeli messages on test-missiles, and scorned their “cheering” of Trump’s pre-election promise that, in Rouhani’s words, “he would tear up the [nuclear] agreement.”

Rouhani had gained the endorsements of many prominent political figures, including Mohammad Khatami, the former reformist president (1997–2005), as well as Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, key protagonists of the “Green Movement” that erupted after the contested 2009 presidential election, who are now under house arrest. In the end, his victory over the conservative Ebrahim Raisi was decisive, by 57 to 38 per cent on a 72 per cent turnout.

Earlier, the parliamentary elections of February 2016 had seen reformists gain a working majority in the Iranian majlis. Many conservative MPs and prominent opponents of the nuclear deal were decisively rejected by voters. The city and village council elections, held on the same day as the presidential vote, also saw sweeping victories. In the key Tehran city council, all twenty-one seats were won by reformists, six of them women.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the powerful Guardian Council, which vets all parliamentary candidates, described these elections as a “vast calamity.” The vetting of candidates for council elections is carried out by designated local parliamentary groups, circumventing the Guardian Council. In April, Jannati issued a communique that “non-Muslims” and religious minorities be barred from running. The reformist-dominated parliament ignored the Council’s assertion that the ruling was binding.

City and village council elections were initiated in 1999, and are a legacy of Mohammad Khatami’s efforts to strengthen civil society during his presidency. In one province alone – Sistan and Baluchistan, a predominantly Sunni province bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan – 415 women councillors. In the village of Afzalabad, ten out of the eleven candidates were women. One candidate, a thirty-three-year-old named Farahnaz, told reporters that “our men are either border guards or farmers; they do not have time to deal with village affairs.” Having gained her high school diploma, she had given up a university place after family opposition. Her aim was to improve paths to further education, because “educated women can create jobs.”

Fatemeh Kazemi is the returning councillor for the village of Beshareh, near the holy city of Qom in Iran’s conservative heartland. One of six sisters, she is single, believing that “marriage would create limitations for me.” When she was elected, not a single woman in her village had health insurance. She tapped into regional training and job creation schemes that allowed the women to work as carpet weavers, and managed to gain insurance cover for them. “When a lady can pay her own way, why freeload or get beaten on the head?” Kazemi says she told the women.

Another councillor, Nahid Eskandary, returned to her ancestral hometown of Sarakan equipped with a degree in law and criminology. She recounts having to overcome sexist attitudes and a local governor who persistently ignored her. With determination and after manoeuvring around the caveats of the health ministry’s funding programs, she established a screening clinic that offers mammograms, ultrasound and health checks to the residents. In Shahrekord, in Iran’s Kurdistan province, Parichehr Soltani argues that “society will not be developed” until women are fully represented in the political process, as “unfortunately some of our men are a hundred years behind the times.” Soltani was a prominent campaigner for Rouhani, maintaining that supporting him “would keep the shadow of war and sanctions at bay” and allow opportunities for women to continue to grow.

Only time will tell if such civic activism will increase accountability and prove to be “great free schools” of democracy. For now, a bulletproof glass ceiling bars women from running in the presidential race, and countless obstacles are placed in the way of political candidates in Iran. For many, though, the council elections have been a path to more senior positions. The governor of Hamoun, Masoumeh Parandvar, recalls telling the state governor, “I don’t want to be the token woman governor on display,” to which the governor responded, “Well, prove that a woman can do the job.” Parandvar maintains that ultimately constituents “don’t care about your sex” as long as you get the work done.

All this may well read like a list of inconsequential anecdotes, especially as it is often said that elections in Iran don’t herald tangible change. Yet these examples should not be too easily discounted. It was the city and village council elections of 2003 that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad elected mayor of Tehran, paving the way to his becoming president two years later. His 2003 victory was made possible by a 12 per cent turnout during a voting boycott by many who had lost hope in the promises of the reformist government.

The decisive election victory of reformists in 1997 had inspired hope in the electorate. Khatami’s victory was based on an astounding 90 per cent turnout, of which he garnered 70 per cent of the votes. His tenure saw a temporary blossoming of grassroots movements and of the press. Even relations with the United States seemed on the up, and Iran actively supported the US campaign in Afghanistan after 9/11. Yet the government faced a brutal backlash at home and met with hostility abroad, with president George W. Bush branding Iran as part of “an axis of evil.” Khatami’s promise to end economic and political isolation collapsed, allowing the belligerent Ahmadinejad to come to the fore.

Following Ahmadinejad’s dubious re-election in June 2009, Iran saw the largest street protests in the history of the Islamic Republic. The demonstrators’ unifying mantra was “where is my vote?” They met a brutal crackdown: killings, arrests and purges. With the election of Rouhani and the signing of the nuclear accord, many Iranians believed that they were about to consign a revolutionary clique that thrived on war and isolation to the dustbin of history.

Zohreh, a senior academic sacked from her job following the purge of university faculties during Ahmadinejad’s tenure, describes her reaction to Rouhani’s re-election as “cautiously hopeful.” “For years I’ve lived with the sense of fear,” she goes on, “trying to second-guess people around me as I make my way round Tehran. Now they have to look over their shoulders knowing that we are the majority, we have the councils, parliament and now the presidency – and we made it impossible for them to steal our votes again.”

But she adds, “Let’s just hope there’s not another war.” Like many Iranians, she cannot ignore the eerily familiar pounding drums. In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, starting a war that would go on for eight long years and leave more than a million dead. Iraq was backed by the United States and its Western allies; Saudi and Gulf rulers fearful of Iranian-style uprisings joined in.

“It’s a pity both sides can’t lose” was Henry Kissinger comment on that war. Saudi Wahhabism was championed as a counter to the Shi’a by the United States and its allies, and its extreme ideology spread to mosques around the world, from the streets of Karachi and Mumbai to Brussels, Paris and London. Then the “war on terror” made Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq a hospitable breeding-ground for extremist groups. The precursor of Islamic State/Daesh was founded in 1999 by Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; it thrived in the battlefields of Afghanistan and grew more powerful during the ensuing conflicts in Iraq and Syria, sending millions of people in search of refuge. The deadly wars of the Middle East now play out in Western capitals, and the “great game” is no longer a spectator sport. In the end, we were all losers.

The opening salvo of the Iran-Iraq war began on 30 April 1980 with the siege of the Iranian embassy in London. The building was seized by a quasi-Iranian Sunni Arab “separatist” group, trained and equipped by the Iraqi regime, which claimed to be acting on behalf of Iran’s deprived border province of Khuzestan. There is no denying the difficulties that face that area of Iran, or others such as Kurdistan. But unlike much of the Middle East, the borders of Iran date back over two millennia; they are not lines in the sand drawn in 1916 by Messrs Sykes and Picot. The Arabs of Khuzestan were at the bitter frontline of the Iran–Iraq war, but a much-touted “fifth column” didn’t transpire then and is unlikely to emerge today.

What always emerges from war is brutality and retribution, hawks and jingoes. Before that war, in its post-revolutionary ferment, Iran had myriad political groups. Once the war began, they became brothers in arms fighting a greater enemy. The 1979 revolution and the aftermath of the Arab Spring are proof enough that the mere fall of dictators does not free a people.

Iranians know too well that freedom must come from within. During Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906, hopes of democracy were dashed and authoritarian rule was implemented with the help of colonial powers. A generation later, the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh was finished off in a coup backed by the United States and Britain.

What has emerged today is an Iranian populace that voted in large numbers for civil liberties and greater engagement with the world. They again face entrenched opposition at home and hostility abroad in their uphill struggle for democratic change. •

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It’s worth recalling the circumstances of the mosque’s construction 845 years ago. Nur al-Din was the first Islamic leader to see the need to unite the central Islamic lands under one leadership, a goal he saw as a precondition for any successful campaign to expel the Crusaders from the Middle East. What Nur al-Din lacked, however, was the manpower and materiel needed to conduct a sustained offensive against Jerusalem.

Twenty years after taking control of the territories of Damascus and Aleppo, he still lacked control of the resources of northern Mesopotamia, which were centred on Mosul. His opening came in 1170 with a dispute over the succession to the Zengid dynastic line installed there by his father. Nur al-Din used allegations that the designated successor was subject to excessive Christian influence as an excuse to take direct control.

One of his first acts in Mosul was to build a splendid new Great Mosque. In a brilliant article published in 2002, the Syrian-American expert on Islamic architecture Yasser Tabbaa analysed the building and its Koranic inscriptions and came to two conclusions: that the minaret – with its forty-five-metre cylindrical form piercing the sky – pays tribute to the influence of the Iranian Seljuk style in architecture, and that the building as a whole conveyed the message to Christians that they should stay out of higher politics in the city. Nur al-Din died two years later but Mosul’s entry into the jihad program was sustained under his successor, Saladin, who ushered in a new phase of aggressive Holy War.

Why, then, would ISIS have a problem with the mosque’s message? It’s a mystery. It may well be that no rationale exists for the masterfully planted detonations that ripped the building apart in seconds on Wednesday, and then toppled its minaret, some distance away on the northern side of the courtyard.

Many Iraqi commentators have rightly seen the explosions as a sign of ISIS’s desperation as the struggle for Mosul enters what looks like its last days and the offensive against their Syrian co-capital, Raqqa, is about to open. With Raqqa’s inevitable fall, ISIS will have lost virtually all the major population centres it held in Syria and Iraq. Its hold on the territories in between – mostly sparsely settled semi-arid lands – has also been made precarious by the relentless coalition bombings and the recent campaigns by the Syrian army via the oil and gas fields east of Palmyra in Resafa (south of Raqqa) and east of the Hauran in southern Syria, and through the constriction of ISIS-held terrain along the middle stretch of the Euphrates.

If ISIS were anything more than a bunch of spoiled, thrillseeking delinquents – inspired and lavishly funded by the very protectors Donald Trump claims to have enrolled in his version of the “war on terror” – then sparing Nur al-Din’s great lighthouse of jihad might have been a wise move. No greater signal of the impoverishment of its cause could have been chosen.

The demolition echoes ISIS’s ahistorical selection of the remote north Syrian village of Dabiq as a rallying point on the basis of a couple of obscure Islamic legends that suggest the village would lie at the centre of an “end of days” confrontation with unbelievers and the West. Again, it might have been wiser to have read up on history a little more closely. In reality, Dabiq was the mustering point for an Islamic offensive against seventh-century Constantinople that petered out without success, and was also the scene of the heart attack that felled a Mamluk commander in the heat of battle and gave rise to the Ottoman Turks’ conquest of Syria in 1516. Historical analogies are always tricky, particularly if badly researched.

It would be rash, however, to see ISIS’s role in Syria as definitively over. The organisation has shown a capacity for profligately suicidal missions that can still do great damage and distract from any sustained efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Numerous battlefronts remain in Syria, and the number of outside parties to the conflict is growing rather than declining. Whatever surgical interventions the sponsors of these campaigns might have in mind, virtually no fights in Syria come out as planned. A selected list of the current conflict fronts helps underline their complexity:

• Raqqa is yet to fall, but at least four parties to the conflict – US-backed forces (both Syrian Democratic Forces and the Kurdish YPG), elements of the Turkish army and the Syrian official armed forces – are intent on taking it in a “race for Berlin” scenario. There is little evidence that any exhibit a strategic understanding as to the likely outcomes.

• Kurdish-controlled areas in the north highlight a host of problems in relations with Turkey that American intervention could further empoison.

• Little information has emerged from the black hole of Idlib province, west of Aleppo, the dumping ground for Islamist fighters and supporters evacuated from Damascus, Homs and Aleppo under “reconciliation agreements.” There, the largely al Qaeda–based forces now control the numerous villages along the Turkish border so tightly that even Facebook and Twitter can’t breach the gravitational field created by their restrictions on the internet. It isn’t at all clear whether efforts are focused on standing down the squabbling Islamist factions, sending them over the Turkish border, forcing a tighter siege on the whole province to secure its submission, or some other strategy.

• Confrontations with largely Islamist-based factions still splutter into life around Damascus, in and around Deraa, and east of Homs and Hama, though the Islamists’ attempt to move on Hama seems to have petered out.

• American efforts to revive the Free Syrian Army are proceeding east of the rich agricultural lands of the Hauran in southern Syria. The strategy seems to envisage a race across the steppe north of the Jordan–Iraq border to prevent official Syrian forces from retaking territory still nominally in ISIS’s hands. Though no explanation has been offered, the strategy is presumably intended to give the United States and its preferred surrogates a seat at any peace settlement. But given the lack of any success so far for the main surrogate, the Free Syrian Army, this looks like a risky operation that could backfire, with the rebel elements again defecting, with their weapons, to one of the Islamist factions or vanishing back over the southern borders.

This list leaves out many other instances of outsiders backing local factions. Among others, they include Hezbollah, Russian “advisers” on the ground, Russian Air Force support for Syrian official operations, Iranian support via Hezbollah, possible continued Turkish replenishment of the Idlib enclave, coalition air strikes, and local militias and Palestinian units vaguely operating at the behest of the Syrian Defence Forces. The risk of misunderstandings is great.

While the conflict may not be in its final days, the trend is towards the Syrian government’s holding a greater spread of territory, the restoration of some semblance of normal life in a few areas retaken in 2016, and a growing capacity among Syrian infantry to sustain campaigns (in tandem with militias and foreign contributors) without being surprised by conflicts breaking out to their rear.

Few reports are emerging from areas recently taken back under government control. The little we hear suggests a fitful return of essential services coupled with freely operating militias or gangster elements, all of this under little or no government control (or indeed with some encouragement). The task of reconstruction is enormous; where to start is still impossible to say.

The demise of ISIS would represent a scaling down of at least one element of the conflict that has intensified in many areas since 2015. It would clear the way for a restoration of something resembling normal life to civilian zones subject to the worst brand of Islamic fundamentalism and the regime’s efforts to bomb or shell the opposition into submission.

But the proliferation of non-Syrian parties still threatens to push the conflict into new forms. Unless Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf states and the United States see the need to stop stamping their agendas on Syrian territory, no end seems possible. It’s time that a few of these players read up on Nur al-Din, the Zengids and why it took 120 years from the building of the Great Mosque in Mosul to end the confrontation with the unbelievers. •

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This is not to argue that the American attack was reckless or high-risk. It could have been much more effective, though, if it had been more carefully planned and executed. Damage to the base was not extensive and the Assad regime has endured worse humiliations. The fact that president Donald Trump may have been partly motivated by a desire to be seen as decisive may have worked against the effective use of military power for defined ends.

Chlorine has been used as a weapon in Syria on several occasions since 2013, and not just by the government. But Assad’s decision to resort once again to binary chemical agents, such as sarin, represents an open defiance of the norms it agreed to be bound by under the inspection-and-disposal program overseen by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, and underwritten by Russia. For the outside world to turn a blind eye to use of the same weapons would amount to standing with arms folded while the level of savagery in this conflict rose to new heights.

Although the Syrian armed forces are the likely perpetrators, an independent assessment is vital in underlining the seriousness of the red line the regime has crossed. Reports relayed via Syrian opposition forces, particularly those close to al Qaeda, or by the Turkish authorities should be counter-checked carefully before being recounted.

Doubts have been raised as to whether the Syrian regime would have been bent on self-destruction so soon after its retaking of Aleppo on 6 December last year. But this is a total misreading of what is happening on the ground. The Syrian conflict has one key theme: the regime has huge difficulties in holding terrain because of two things: the poor quality of its conscript-based armed forces, and the capacity of its opponents to crop up almost at will, crossing the vast central steppe to suddenly appear in inhabited areas around the western rim and in the Euphrates River valley.

This misreading has been on vivid display in the news media’s reporting since Aleppo fell, which has overlooked numerous firefights along the southern rim of Idlib province, where Islamist fighters have been dumped following “ceasefire” deals concluded in and around Aleppo, Damascus and Homs. These fiercely committed forces (mainly al Qaeda offshoots) have been resupplied across the Turkish border and have begun pressing south towards the next provincial capital, Hama.

Hama is one of a handful of Syrian cities to have remained relatively quarantined from the conflict. It is no coincidence that it was the final battleground in the Muslim Brotherhood’s rebellion against the government thirty-five years ago. The punishment meted out in the regime’s bombardment of the city in 1982 was so brutal and decisive that Hama has remained in clampdown ever since. If Hama can be drawn directly into the struggle, the regime will suffer a moral loss that would more than outweigh the victory it has claimed in Aleppo.

The skirmishes over the past month in the Orontes Valley rim area between Hama and Idlib thus pose a new challenge to the government. Rather than Assad’s being on a high – and therefore concerned not to offend the community just as he hoped to be acknowledged as a winner – he was possibly experiencing the opposite, more like panic. The risk is that he might choose to echo his father’s brutal razing of central Hama. And being tough in the face of a US president who seems to have no stabilising principles (and is isolationist at heart) might seem like an opportunity not to be lost.

The probability is that Assad saw the chemical attack as a means of discouraging any drive by Islamist forces towards Hama. The Russians’ counter-claim – attempting to pin the incident on the town’s rebels, who were said to have concocted sarin in an empty shed – simply signals that there is no credible alternative explanation and that the Russians might have been caught flat-footed. Assad may not have told the Russians he was scrapping the 2013 agreement they underwrote, though it could not have escaped their notice given their shared use of the base at Shayrat.

Trump has promised a strategy, but does he have the makings of one? The OPCW admits that 5 per cent of identified chemical weapons have still not been accounted for. Trump’s improvised rhetoric tried to give the impression that the Shayrat raid addressed that problem. But the fact is that it was Obama’s measured working through of the options (now endlessly recycled as an example of irresolution) that saw the removal of 95 per cent of the nerve agents held in Syria. The Shayrat raid has done nothing to neutralise the other 5 per cent, sufficient for a few more Khan Sheikhuns. Obama had the credibility to engage the Russians in the OPCW process; Trump seems intent on using Khan Sheikhun to shake off the charge that he has been soft on Putin.

The only way of replacing Assad is to engage Russia (and Iran) in the process. Getting rid of Islamic State still remains the logical first objective in the fighting. Will Assad provide further distractions to taunt Trump, demonstrating that the president of Syria still calls the tune? He has never given any indication that he cares how long the war lasts and how many more die in agonising circumstances. He seems determined to wait out all his opponents.

Perhaps, though, Assad needs to be more careful with his friends. Moscow must wonder whether it should have him on a tighter lead. Trump, meanwhile, plays a dangerously short-term game, obsessed with old animosities, driven by impulses and uninterested in strategy, preferring the one-off deal. Given the big battles that still await Syria in Idlib province and around Raqqa, the conflict’s capacity to regenerate itself stretches on endlessly. Shayrat was barely a blip on that horizon. •

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If it was recounted in a work of fiction it might satisfy conspiracy theorists, but otherwise strain credulity. Yet we now know how and why it happened.

It went like this. On 12 April 2003, as Iraq descended into chaos after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the government of prime minister John Howard and the then chief of the defence force, Peter Cosgrove, ordered the armed forces to fly emergency medical supplies into Baghdad, possibly the most dangerous city in the world at the time. The supplies were flown in by RAAF C-130 Hercules, which during the actual invasion had been deliberately restricted to relatively safe areas. The plane carried with it three journalists, who up till then had been kept away from any Australian military operation. The medical supplies were rapidly off-loaded but never left the airport. Instead, they were left to rot.

As a manufactured news exercise, Operation Baghdad Assist was a triumph, played out not for the benefit of desperate Iraqis but for a domestic audience in Australia. It’s taken thirteen years for Australians to learn the facts. They come to us now thanks to a long-suppressed and still heavily censored account of the army’s role in Iraq, written by military historian Albert Palazzo of the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis.

We only know about Palazzo’s book thanks to a freedom-of-information request by Fairfax journalist David Wroe, whose reporting of its contents rightly focused on Palazzo’s key finding – that John Howard joined US president George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq solely to strengthen the alliance with the United States. The story attracted little follow-up, which is a pity because Palazzo’s history contains more than one insight.

What’s clear from Palazzo’s account is that the aim of winning maximum diplomatic credit from a minimal military contribution involved deft handling of purely domestic politics, which ultimately took precedence over our strategic alliance aims. Since the war was deeply unpopular and the Labor opposition was against it, the need to minimise casualties, control information and manipulate the media were all interlinked.

Controlling the message continues. Palazzo’s book, classified SECRET AUSTEO (Australian Eyes Only) and submitted to the army in 2011, has been locked away. In the version released under FOI, some 500 passages are redacted.

In releasing the censored version, the defence department gratuitously distanced itself from its contents, stressing that it is an “unofficial history” even though it was commissioned by the army and written in Palazzo’s capacity as an official historian with access to classified material. The current chief of the defence force, air chief marshall Mark Binskin, has questioned the book’s validity, status, academic rigour and conclusions, even though he’s admitted that he hasn’t read the full document.

Information and media control during the Iraq war predated Operation Baghdad Assist. It was central to the initial planning stages, when the ADF was sorting out the bare minimum of forces it could offer Washington in the event that Howard formally committed to supporting the invasion. Palazzo reveals that Cosgrove insisted on a direct line of command to officers in the Middle East so that he could “provide timely and accurate advice to the government” on a range of matters, including “any issue, no matter how tactical in nature, which may attract significant parliamentary or media interest.” As Palazzo notes, “almost everything fell within this mandate.”

It was in this context that Cosgrove, a soldier with sharp political skills honed during his time commanding troops in East Timor, could micro-manage from Canberra a media event like Operation Baghdad Assist. As Palazzo puts it, a nominal relief operation was quickly transformed into “an information operation targeting the Australian public rather than the humanitarian mission as it was first described… [T]he mission’s target was the Australian media and the Australian nation.”

It’s worth pausing to consider the term “information operation.” According to one official Australian definition, it means information-related activities involving the “execution of coordinated, synchronised and integrated lethal and non-lethal actions against the capability, will and understanding of target systems and/or target audiences.” Clearly, by this definition, these are operations directed at an enemy. Yet in this instance, the operation was aimed at swaying the minds of Australian voters, in which case “political propaganda” might be a more apt term.

Palazzo relates how, in a middle-of-the night call, Cosgrove instructed the Middle East commander, Brigadier Maurie McNarn, that the operation was going ahead and to facilitate media coverage. When McNarn protested that Baghdad airport was not secure and there was no way to distribute the supplies, he was told to “make it happen” by Cosgrove, who was about to announce the operation at a news conference in Australia. Palazzo doesn’t mention this, at least in the redacted version, but the insistence that journalists be given seats on the flight sharply contrasted with the suffocating restrictions the ADF usually imposes on media coverage. Palazzo notes that the mission “attracted considerable and highly favourable attention from the Australian media and achieved the objective of portraying the ADF in a good light. In a war that some had questioned, it was a definite ‘feel good’ story.”

While it was a public relations coup, it raises a troubling question for Palazzo about “the acceptability of government manipulation of the media” to influence the domestic politics. “In seeking a media effect on the Australian public Cosgrove and the Howard government played a dangerous if calculated game, perhaps the most risky act they committed” during the war, he writes.

This is a serious charge to make against the Cosgrove and Howard, and it’s worth restating: the government and Cosgrove are accused of using the apolitical armed forces to carry out a dangerous and partisan political stunt in the midst of a war. Yet it’s a conclusion Palazzo and his readers can reasonably draw, based on the accounts of McNarn and special forces commander Lieutenant Colonel Rick Burr. McNarn regarded the operation as a complete failure, cynically describing it as “photo opportunity.”

Burr was appalled, writing in his diary:

This was unbelievable. We had not been allowed to do anything without getting CDF [Cosgrove’s] approval, and only then after painstaking detail and risk assessment etc. next thing we know we are throwing a group into the supposedly the most dangerous location, with no preparation as a team, with no idea, and with no identified C2 [command and control] structure, and with no advice to me on the risk my blokes will be subjected to (because no one has thought of that). With regard to our C130, they couldn’t fly anywhere near western Iraq to support us, in what is a known low threat environment now, but out of the blue, they are allowed to fly into Baghdad.

Baghdad Assist confirms high-level military sensitivity towards the government’s domestic political interests. At the very least, it raises questions about the limits of the military’s obligations in a democracy to carry out the wishes of an elected civilian government.

Domestic politics – more than any military need – clearly influenced what forces Australia was prepared to offer the US in Iraq. Army planners who considered sending the cavalry’s light armoured vehicles to the war were acutely aware that the government was “uncomfortable with the prospect of losses due to the possible negative effect on the domestic political environment.” This was a key factor in the army ruling out sending in the cavalry for the invasion. Later, when they were despatched after the invasion phase, the government ensured they were assigned to an area where there was little chance they would actually have to fight. The obsession with controlling the news reached what Palazzo labels absurd levels when defence officials drafted an elaborate media strategy in the event word got out that a soldier had been involved – but not hurt – in a minor traffic accident. In all of this, the ADF “succeeded in meeting the government’s desire to avoid allowing Iraq to become a larger domestic concern than it could otherwise have been.”

If controlling the message and media manipulation are threads in Palazzo’s history, official secrecy has stifled his attempts to tell it. His book started as an effort to write an account of the army’s role in Iraq, with junior officers the intended audience. It was meant to be unclassified. But he recounts how this original mandate soon unravelled as his access to secret information meant the book would have to remain classified. His work “was not helped… by the ADF’s practice of minimising the amount of information it released to the open domain.”

The extent of the redactions in the version released under FOI – whole pages are blacked out ­– confirms the defence bureaucracy’s deeply entrenched tendency to overclassify information. Material that’s already in public– such as the fact that the army used bases in Jordan, Kuwait and Doha – is redacted. A footnote suggests that one redacted passage cites material already published in the Australian.

As to why the book was suppressed, defence chief Binskin gave a confused answer when questioned in a Senate estimates hearing on 1 March. He confirmed the “document’ was commissioned by the army, but then described it as “unofficial.” Palazzo’s conclusions, based on three years of research and the accounts of more than seventy current and retired military officers, were his “opinions.” Binskin dismissed the book as lacking “academic rigour.” Yet questioned by Greens senator Scott Ludlam, he conceded he had only read the redacted version.

In an exchange with Ludlam, Binskin disputed Palazzo’s conclusion that Australia’s sole strategic objective in joining the invasion of Iraq was to improve relations with the US. Pressed on whether such an objective was sufficient reason to put soldiers in harm’s way, Binskin replied, “Again, it is his [Palazzo’s] opinion. We operate in accordance with what the government's strategic intent is on the day.”

Ludlam: “What strategic objectives did Australia achieve through its involvement in that war?”

Binskin: “I think if we go back into that we could be here all day. I am happy to take all of that on notice and provide those details to you.”

While the chief of the defence force ponders what, if anything, Australia achieved in Iraq, there seems little chance the army is willing to overcome what Palazzo calls the “challenge” imposed by secrecy to allow the book to be distributed as widely as possible. Yet, he says: “The memory and recognition of those who served in Iraq warrants no less.” •

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The signs of trouble were on display during the election campaign. Among Trump's security themes, three were particularly prominent: a promise to destroy radical Islamic terrorism, especially Islamic State, within months if not weeks; a commitment to greatly increase US military strength; and a pledge to put “America First.” He also criticised America’s overseas allies, advocated better relations with Russia, and called for a tough line on China and Iran. In each case, he brashly advocated a break from past practice.

One thing that worked in favour of Trump the iconoclastic candidate was the failure of US strategic thinking following the declaration of a war on terror after 11 September 2001. The weapons of mass destruction fiasco; the invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed; and dropping the strategic ball in Afghanistan – these have cost trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives and an incalculable amount of American credibility. Meanwhile, China’s resurgence continued, Iran’s role in the Middle East grew, and Russia became aggressively self-confident. Civil war continued in Iraq and Afghanistan despite the moral and legal obligation on the invading powers – America, Britain and Australia – to ensure a basic level of post-war order.

A new approach seemed to be in order. Perhaps the new president could bring something valuable to the table, as he promised?

Typically, Trump had claimed back in 2015 to know more about Islamic State than American generals. He had a “foolproof” plan to bring about “total victory” over ISIS “very, very quickly.” Later, he said:

There is a way of beating ISIS so easily, so quickly and so effectively and it would be so nice… I know a way that would absolutely give us absolute victory…

[It’s] so simple. It’s like the paper clip. You know, somebody came up with the idea of the paper clip and made a lot of money and everybody’s saying, “Boy, why didn’t I think of that, it’s so simple.” This is so simple, so surgical, it would be an unbelievable thing.

Trump said his plan had to be kept secret to avoid tipping-off the enemy. But there’s no evidence he had any special insight into ISIS or the best way to deal with it. Time will tell if the commander-in-chief really has a heavily camouflaged magic bullet, but he’s already passed his implied deadline to destroy the organisation. ISIS has indeed been squeezed hard on the battlefield, but this reflects strategies adopted before Trump’s election. In any case, the difficulties ahead are considerable.

Thwarting potential terrorists is an ostensible aim of Trump’s immigration policy. Critics see his position here as essentially racist and encouraging the inflammatory and counterproductive idea of a war against Islam. Add to this his earlier comments suggesting families of terrorists ought to be killed, and the claim that torture works (and should be “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and it’s easy to understand why US officials might be alarmed about how relations with the Islamic world could unfold.

America’s fight against ISIS hasn’t been hampered by lack of money. Despite Trump’s claim that US forces are dangerously depleted, the defence budget is running at a relatively high level in historical terms. In any case, aside from a small fraction of the air force, the military component of the war on terror mostly involves special forces rather than the big-ticket items that dominate the Pentagon’s budget. Even so, Trump has called for an extra US$54 billion per year (an almost 10 per cent increase), despite the fact that the United States continues to spend more than double the combined totals for Russia and China.

Trump’s thinking is simple: the stronger the US military, the safer the country. This is not a new idea; every president has said much the same thing. Indeed, President Barack Obama had already set in train significant and costly military upgrades. But Trump’s bombastic rhetoric suggests he wants to go further:

We’re also putting in a massive budget request for our beloved military. And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military – all of our military. Offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before… nobody is going to mess with us, folks. Nobody.

It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history. No one will dare to question – as they have been, because we’re very depleted, very, very depleted… Nobody will dare question our military might again.

Strategic dominance is being equated with security. The overwhelming focus is on hard power. This point was underlined by the fact that the military spending boost would be partly funded by cuts to the US foreign service and overseas aid, something that 120 retired American generals and admirals described as short-sighted and counterproductive.

The prominence given to the US military is often difficult to separate from one of the oldest tricks in the book – highly politicised flag-waving. This merges with another conspicuous feature of Trump’s agenda, “America First,” a close relative of his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

On one level, strident nationalism has been standard fare in US politics for as long as anyone can remember, mostly playing to a domestic audience and without significant ramifications, at least since the Second World War. This time, though, it seems different. First, Trump disparaged longstanding US allies. During his election campaign, he called NATO – a cornerstone of post-1945 American foreign policy – obsolete, and suggested he favoured the break-up of the European Union. He generally considered traditional US allies to be freeloaders who had become prosperous at America’s expense. He also implied that the US security guarantee could no longer be taken for granted, which critics worried would undermine deterrence in Europe, South Korea and Japan.

Since his election, though, Trump has back-pedalled, presumably at the prompting of those in his cabinet with more experience in world affairs. The US security umbrella over South Korea, for example, is currently being strengthened by a new missile defence system.

Most remarkable is the fact that the nature of the relationship between the Trump administration and the Kremlin is unclear. At one extreme are suggestions that President Putin is a brilliant puppet-master, or has significant leverage over Trump’s administration. Trump’s defenders, on the other hand, say that he simply wants to break through the deadlock of the past several years and take US–Russian relations into an era of peaceful cooperation. This would presumably mean working closely together on Syria, for instance.

When it comes to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, candidate Trump appeared to lean towards letting bygones be bygones and moving away from sanctions. If Democrats had proposed this sort of reset, Republicans would have shouted appeasement. Yet it makes sense for two of the most heavily armed states in the world, which between them account for a very large proportion of the world’s nuclear weapons, to try to get along. Not that this is predestined: their perceived national interests often diverge, and Putin might be just as uncertain as anyone else about where Trump will jump next.

And Beijing? During the election campaign, Trump said China was “raping’” America with unfair financial and trading practices. He has also questioned America’s “One China” policy, a hot-button issue for Beijing, though he soon backed off. In January, Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said that Chinese access to disputed islands in the South China Sea “is not going to be allowed.” If the threat had been followed through, this could easily have started a shooting war; in the event, the idea seems to have been shelved or abandoned.

But the waters off China remain a combustible mix. In addition to the South China Sea and Taiwan, a dangerous dispute has been simmering between Beijing and Tokyo in the East China Sea. And both Beijing and Trump seem prepared to play the nationalist card, although in the South China Sea it is Beijing, with a more direct stake, that has the stronger hand. Whether that’s enough to contest America’s strategic edge remains to be seen. Perhaps in a crisis Trump will imagine himself a brilliant poker player, in which case the scope for miscalculation and inadvertent escalation will be considerable.

Something similar might be said of the Iran issue. Candidate Trump heavily criticised the complex multilateral deal struck in 2015 between the community (led by the United States) and Tehran to defuse Iran’s nuclear program. The agreement was the subject of one of Trump’s more worrying campaign pronouncements on security: “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran… it is catastrophic for America… I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me.”

On advice from his more level-headed colleagues, Trump could back away from this overheated rhetoric. That would be a good thing: the deal was the best that could realistically have been hoped for. Yet he has kept the door open to ditching it, which might spur Iran to resume its nuclear program. Where US policy would go after that is anyone’s guess. Abandoning the diplomatic answer worked out in 2015 would imply moving towards armed conflict.

Trump has so far been remarkably quiet about two other major security challenges: Afghanistan (and the related problems in Pakistan) and North Korea. This is despite the fact that the military operation in Afghanistan represents America’s longest war, with still no end in sight. It’s probably fair to say that Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do (although it must be said that his predecessors were also short on effective answers).

North Korea – less integrated into the system (and more dangerous) than Iran – is a wildcard that could destroy North East Asia. Apart from containment, though, it’s unclear what Washington can do. Time will tell whether the blustering showman in Trump will be provoked into reckless behaviour by the even more reckless North Korean leader. Both men seem animated by the “performance” aspect of their roles, something that could work out well or very badly.

This brings us to who, if anyone, will become the central figure in Washington’s foreign and defence policy-making. Will it be Trump, possibly steering policy via hit-and-run tweets? Or secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who (apart from his early South China Sea comment) has so far kept a low profile, and may already have been sidelined? It could be the dubious Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist, perhaps working with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, neither of whom is likely to inspire much confidence outside the administration. Many US soldiers and diplomats, as well as most foreign leaders, are probably hoping replacement national security advisor H.R. McMaster and secretary of defense James Mattis (both well regarded former generals) will provide a steadying influence.

Trump’s presidency started inauspiciously. The crassness of his campaign style carried over into his tenure and looks set to continue. Within weeks, he lost his first national security advisor, the deeply unsuitable Michael Flynn. Trump’s first high-profile security initiative, to prevent entry into the US from a range of Muslim countries, ran into constitutional and court challenges. His response was a swaggering “See you in court.” It didn’t happen; he pulled back and his team spent weeks redrafting the ill-conceived executive order.

All this feeds concerns that Trump prioritises self-importance and dramatic impact (including unpredictability) over the likely consequences. Apparently convinced of his superior gut instincts, he shows little sign of reflecting deeply on issues. Applied to global security matters, this self-belief often looks like strategic illiteracy. Stay tuned. •    

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The Arab world accounts for 36 per cent of global terrorist attacks, and 43 per cent of global deaths from terrorism. It supplies around 58 per cent of the world’s refugees. And while it has had some success with specific social and economic reforms, the upward trend in human development indicators has slowed.

When the report turns to its focus for this year, the prospects for young people, it is especially bleak. The region’s education systems are struggling, and student performance is poor and below average for the size of most countries’ GDP. Young people face private labour markets that don’t provide enough work, and governments that can no longer absorb them into the public sector either. The youth unemployment rate, at nearly one-in-three, is double the global average. With some two-thirds of the region’s population under thirty years, this state of affairs matters.

A common lament from those of us who observe and analyse the Arab world is that there is so little space for optimism. In my time working in both government and academia, I’ve had numerous debates with colleagues about whether our assessments of the region are excessively grim. To a majority of observers, there is no alternative: the region’s overall outlook is grim, they argue, and to claim otherwise is to deceive oneself and perform a disservice for others. A couple of colleagues who have tried to write more optimistic analyses have become more negative as their research has evolved. There are pockets of success and some room for optimism in certain countries and in some respects, but any holistic analysis of the region is likely to be quite sombre.

But is there nevertheless room for a more optimistic view? Perhaps. I sometimes wonder if there is too much caution among scholars and other observers of the region: to print a positive perspective and be proven wrong is far riskier than to present a negative one and be erroneous. Partly this is because when things go wrong, the evidence is very clear: a civil war, revolution or economic collapse is an emphatic thing. When things go right, it can take years for the outcome to be noticeable, and risks will still remain. So erring towards the negative is perhaps the safer thing to do: a broken watch, as the saying goes, still tells the time correctly twice a day, while a working watch can constantly report the wrong time.

Nicolas Pelham’s Holy Lands is a brief and highly readable analysis covering much of the Middle East region. He is well-qualified to write such a book, having been a reporter in the region for most of the last twenty years, a career punctuated by roles at the International Crisis Group and the United Nations. He doesn’t provide a blindly negative or positive analysis of the region; rather, he steps into the debate about what has gone wrong by putting it into an historical context. What he ultimately offers, after a rather pessimistic tour of the region, is an optimistic possibility for the region that would require it to look back in time.

Pelham argues that sectarianism is the key to understanding both what has gone wrong with the region in recent times, and what could fix it. He shows that sect has become an overstated and abused part of identity politics, with twentieth-century secular nationalist leaders either trying to deny the region’s religious – and religiously tolerant – heritage, or using sect as a tool to mark themselves out or legitimise their rule. The results were territorial exclusionism, sudden new suspicions and hostilities, and more inward-looking and repressive governments. Islamic State represents the most extreme case, with its medievalist brutality not only towards non-Muslims, but even more so towards Shia. But Pelham’s critique covers much of the region: the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars are tainted with sectarian hostility, and tensions and suspicions between sects and ethnic groups is a feature of politics from Afghanistan to Bahrain to Lebanon.

In making these points, Pelham argues – a little too earnestly perhaps – that the inclusivist ways of the Ottoman Empire are a partial solution to the region’s maladies. The Ottomans were Sunni Turks who ruled much of the region from the 1500s to the end of the first world war, although they spent the better half of that time in decline as European power grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pelham argues that this Ottoman-era tolerance is the real tradition of the region, not the hostile and divisive intolerance that is now so ubiquitous.

The Ottomans had a remarkably liberal political and social outlook compared to most of the region today: key political figures were Christian, for example; European culture was sought out and often embraced; and a great deal of power was devolved to religious communities. This was not egalitarianism, Pelham is quick to stress: non-Muslims were a special, submissive category at most times, paying a special tax and sometimes lacking equality in law. They were the source for slaves and concubines, but even then, as Pelham argues, there was social mobility: “From the lowliest captive, a slave girl could rise to the most powerful person in the empire [as the mother of a Sultan]; an Albanian guttersnipe could become a grand vizier.”

This is largely true, but Pelham probably stretches this claim to breaking point. The Ottomans were indeed remarkably open-minded, and some of their cities at times were cosmopolitan, even by today’s measure. But while Christians and Jews were accepted by the Ottomans, others – especially polytheists – were not. In giving Muslims more rights than others, the Ottomans were also seeking to convert non-Muslims. These non-Muslims also had many social outlets closed to them, from mosques, perhaps fairly obviously, to less obvious places such as coffeehouses, which undermined their ability to build the same social, political and commercial connections enjoyed by Muslims. Muslims rioted in some cities when, in the mid eighteenth century, the Ottomans announced plans to give all citizens equality under the law.

As the empire weakened, communities became increasingly isolated from each other. The education system split into a dual system, one of them provided by the Ottoman rulers and a separate set of schools funded by minorities and outside powers. And at times there was communal conflict: Christian–Druze conflict in Lebanon in 1860, for example, and most infamously, the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman officers during the first world war. Overall, though, the Ottomans were more tolerant and inclusive than much of Europe, but not as much as, say, post-revolutionary France, or arguably even nineteenth-century Britain.

Pelham’s argument is that the region needs to recapture the sort of tolerance and communal inclusiveness that very broadly and commonly marked the Ottoman Empire. He gives some examples of how some of this tolerance already exists, but is rarely reported on. He cites a firebrand Hamas preacher who spouts vehement Islamist rhetoric yet also has a noteworthy tolerance towards other “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians). He discusses the Shia holy city of Najaf, in southern Iraq, where around a quarter of marriages still cross sectarian lines – and given Iraq’s recent history of civil conflict, this is indeed extraordinary. He looks for hope in the words and actions of Jewish, Armenian and other groups as well.

But is there really hope to be found? Can the region return to a decentralised pluralism and the more tolerant communal relations that were once routine there? Certainly, Pelham should be lauded for offering a rich argument that it is possible, and it’s true that there are plenty of examples of communal harmony and inclusiveness in the region if one is willing to look for them. But the possibility that the region can revert to what it once was, after so much conflict and hampered by so many pressing problems, should not be exaggerated. Unfortunately, analyses such as the latest Arab Human Development Report, along with the nightly news beamed to us from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Libya and elsewhere, provide a pretty strong incentive to keep erring on the side of cautious pessimism. •

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The inquiry found that “the judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, WMD, were presented with a certainty that was not justified” and that “despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.”

The sequence of events Chilcot describes has its parallel in Australia. From the early preparations for war through to the post-invasion excuse-making, George W. Bush, Blair and John Howard kept strictly to script. The reasons for going to war – principally the threat of a WMD-armed Saddam – were carefully coordinated in terms of timing and content.

In the war’s aftermath, there have been no admissions of guilt or wrong-doing. In response to Chilcot, Blair expressed “more sorrow, regret and apology than you will ever know” for the war’s outcome. He apologised for the failures in planning, but maintained that he had not misled his country: that he had taken the right decision and that it was taken in good faith. In his National Press Club speech this week, Howard, too, maintained that he had made the right decision but that the intelligence was flawed.

In Britain and Australia there have long been questions about when, and on what terms, Blair and Howard committed British and Australian military support to Bush. Chilcot found that Blair had agreed to provide British troops long before he acknowledged it publicly, writing to Bush in July 2002 that “he would be with him ‘whatever’ – but if the US wanted a coalition for military action, changes would be needed in three key areas: progress in the Middle East Peace Process; UN authority; and a shift in public opinion in the UK, Europe and the Arab World.”

Many believe that Howard made a similar commitment to Bush during his June 2002 visit to Bush’s Crawford ranch. Howard’s own memoir, Lazarus Rising, certainly leaves the reader with that impression:

In our discussions during that visit, President Bush and I were careful to avoid specifics about Australian troop commitments to a possible invasion of Iraq. He knew that close discussions were under way between the US military and their Australian counterparts. He was entitled to assume on the basis of that, and also the tenor of our discussion, that if the military option was chosen by the United States then, in all likelihood, Australia would join. But he knew that I had not made any commitment to this effect and that for understandable political and other reasons I would keep my options open until the time when a final decision was needed.

Howard and Blair helped Bush create the Coalition of the Willing and engage in what former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright described as the “greatest disaster in American foreign policy… in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.”

The 2003 decision of the US-appointed head of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, to institute a de-Ba’athification program and dissolve the Iraqi army left disaffected Ba’athist military leaders to join with Islamists to create the precursor of Islamic State. The combination of religious fervour and strategic calculation has proven deadly for Iraqis now forced to live with shocking levels of violence and bloodshed. Estimates of Iraqi deaths as a result of the war vary between 150,000 and 382,000. Just this week, we have seen images of Baghdad residents picking through bombed sites for the charred remains of their relatives on the deadliest day since 2003.

Chilcot found that “the planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.” Blair was also warned that “attacking Iraq with cruise missiles would ‘act as a recruiting sergeant for a young generation throughout the Islamic and Arab world’” and that the “terrorist threat to Western interests would be heightened by military action against Iraq.” Despite these explicit warnings, he pushed ahead.

The inquiry found that “the assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued.” At the time, Blair’s speeches argued for military intervention to address the “threat of chaos and disorder” arising from “tyrannical regimes with weapons of mass destruction and extreme terrorist groups” prepared to use them.

Chilcot’s findings echo those of the December 2003 report of the Australian Joint Parliamentary Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD chaired by government MP David Jull. It found that:

the case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq’s WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations. This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the committee by Australia’s two analytical agencies.

The Jull committee detailed Australian intelligence agencies’ advice to the Howard government that made it clear there was no compelling case for war. According to the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Office of National Assessments, Saddam Hussein “did not have nuclear weapons,” had “no known chemical weapons production,” and had conducted “no known biological weapons testing or evaluation since 1991.” At most, Saddam may have had some residual, ageing and depleted stocks of the chemical weapons he had used against the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Under sanctions, said the ONA, “Iraq’s military capability remained limited and the country’s infrastructure was still in decline.”

Surprisingly, the fallout from Jull’s report was muted. It sparked media interest for just a couple of days, but failed to gain longer-term traction. On 2 March 2004, the day after the report’s public release, the Australian ran the headline “PM’s Spin Sexed-Up Iraq Threat” over a front-page article by their defence journalist, Patrick Walters. Howard announced a further inquiry, headed by former senior diplomat Philip Flood, and then went silent, starving the “sexing up” claim of oxygen. Inexplicably, Labor senator Robert Ray took the wind out of his own party’s sails when, in an interview with Tony Jones on ABC’s Lateline on 1 March 2004, he said that he did not believe the government had been deliberately misleading.

The lack of media interest may have had its roots in an incident two weeks earlier. In a clear breach of parliamentary privilege, sections of Jull’s draft report were leaked to a leading political journalist from the only major Australian daily that took an anti-war editorial position. The same media management strategy had been used in Britain to contain the media response to the Hutton inquiry into the death of scientist David Kelly. In this case, judging by the Sydney Morning Herald’s17 February 2004 front-page headline, “Case for War Not Sexed Up, MPs Find,” only those sections of the report favourable to the government appear to have been leaked. (Howard denied he had either leaked or authorised the leaking of the report.)

Deflecting attention away from the government, the leak framed the key issue in the Jull report as the divergence in advice between the two intelligence agencies, ONA and the Defence Intelligence Organisation, with the ONA “tend[ing] to produce material to fit with government policy objectives.” This framing of politicisation of the intelligence persisted for almost two weeks without contradiction and clearly influenced the public view, as well as other journalists’ reading of the Jull report when it was finally released. Several news organisations suggested that the report had cleared the government – which it had not. The “dead cat on the table” trick had worked.

Both Howard and Blair have accepted responsibility for their decisions to go to war but blamed flawed intelligence. In Howard’s case, his claim does not square with the advice of his own intelligence community, which failed to find a compelling case for the invasion. This detail was hidden in plain sight. Would another inquiry succeed in engaging our political elites in honest reflection where the Jull inquiry failed? •

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He was an adviser to US general David Petraeus and helped design the “Surge” in Iraq. He worked for US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, served as a strategist in the US State Department, and has advised, among others, the British and Australian governments. He founded a Washington DC–based consultancy that specialises in complex and frontier environments. As an Australian army officer, he served in East Timor in 1999, where he played a central role in a fatal cross-border exchange of fire with Indonesian forces that could have got much worse had he not helped defuse it. He has a PhD in guerilla warfare. Blood Year is his fourth book.

But if he’s not really an ordinary guy, he has written an informed account that’s accessible to any ordinary citizen who hasn’t paid close attention and wants to know what’s gone wrong in the fifteen years since the United States launched the War on Terror.

His focus is on the rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq and Syria during the bloody year that started in mid 2014. Despite his professional background and front-row seat in some of the events he describes, he insists Blood Year is a personal account of “an ordinary guy caught up in extraordinary events.” He seeks to explain not only why the War on Terror has failed, but also “where ISIS came from, what it all means, and what happens next.”

The War on Terror began well, or so it seemed back in 2001, with the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Then it went off course, diverted by George W. Bush’s folly in invading Iraq in 2003, which, after the rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein’s forces, descended into a debacle. The invasion, Kilcullen concludes, was “the greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia.”

This is familiar territory for anyone who’s taken more than fleeting notice of the news from the Middle East, but it’s worth traversing again. Kilcullen tells it with a punchy, crisp and engaging style and the bare minimum of military jargon, informed by a perspective that comes from having witnessed the screw-up.

He is scathing in his assessment of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice-president Dick Cheney, who ignored the need for post-invasion planning. As a result of their ignorance, hubris and complacency, things went downhill from the start. Iraq’s elites squabbled, resistance festered, sectarian slaughter ripped the country apart. Al Qaeda in Iraq emerged from the ruins and added to the mayhem, and a war-weary Washington soon looked for a way out. And when al Qaeda in Iraq morphed into ISIS, things got even worse.

All of this, Kilcullen says, was not merely predictable, it was predicted – by military, intelligence and academic analysts whose advice was ignored by the Bush White House and the coterie around Rumsfeld and Cheney.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, and Kilcullen tries to spread it evenly. Yet having blamed Bush for the biggest strategic blunder since 1941 – for leading the West into the wrong war in the wrong country with disastrous results – he also praises his leadership of the 2007 Surge.

But while he tries to give a balanced account of Bush, he makes no allowances for the political realities confronting his successor, Barack Obama. Bush had committed to withdrawing US troops from Iraq, and Obama had been elected on a promise to extricate his war-weary nation from the war. In both cases, military strategy was not drafted in isolation from these political realities.

Kilcullen doesn’t resolve the tension between an ideal strategy and the political facts, and this failure leads to basic flaws in his outline of what should come next in the War on Terror.

He is particularly scathing of Obama’s performance after he took office in January 2009, faulting him for squandering the gains made during the Surge, and for conflating leaving Iraq with ending the war. He faults him again over his failure to act in 2012 when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad used chemicals weapons, crossing one of Obama’s “red lines.” Kilcullen likens Obama’s failure to act against Assad to Bush’s decision to act against Saddam Hussein: “Where President Bush was reckless, President Obama seemed feckless, and it was hard to know which was worse.”

Kilcullen’s best insights and most compelling writing are in his sweeping account of the rise of ISIS and its eventual dominance of the Iraqi battlefield. His sparse style and grasp of detail help make sense of the madness ISIS unleashed.

Born of the bloody mess created by the US invasion of Iraq, ISIS had its origins as a Sunni extremist group that fought American forces while simultaneously seeking to foment a sectarian civil war. It was more or less destroyed after Sunni tribes partnered with Americans during the Surge, according to Kilcullen. Yet it managed to re-emerge, this time under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, showing its ability to morph and adapt.

When the Americans left, ISIS fed on the resistance to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s pro-Shiite agenda, emerging from the shadows to wage a conventional war of rapid manoeuvre, fighting like a state. In the face of the ISIS blitzkrieg, Maliki’s army “collapsed like a rotten outhouse.”

In its May 2015 assault on Ramadi, ISIS used tactics that were simultaneously intelligent, precise, determined and relentlessly savage. “No wonder [the Iraqi] troops broke,” Kilcullen writes, “almost any troops in the world would have done so.” (When Ramadi fell, by the way, Australian army advisers were less than sixty miles away, where Australian voters had been assured they were safely “behind the wire.”)

The collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014–15 wasn’t just a military defeat, Kilcullen writes, “it was the collapse of the entire post-Saddam social and political order.” It represented not only a failure of Iraq’s leadership, but also US complacency and the failure of the West’s military and police assistance to produce Iraqi forces capable of defeating a terrorist threat.

In areas ISIS controlled – and by mid 2015 it accounted for half the territory and people of Iraq and Syria – it imposed its savage rule through a combination of slaughter and civil works, or “exemplary violence then essential services,” as Kilcullen puts it.

In these passages, Blood Year is compelling reading. Yet when it comes to the strategy Kilcullen proposes, a truly ordinary guy might find frustrating contradictions in his suggested approach to a devilishly complex conflict.

Kilcullen accuses Obama of dithering in the face of the initial ISIS offensive. At the same time, he says the Pentagon moved fast in response to the disaster. American troops returned in small numbers, special operations advisers helped the Iraqis plan and train, and US aircraft went into action. On whose orders, one wonders?

In Kilcullen’s eyes, the White House was in disarray. But another way of looking at it suggests that perhaps Obama was adopting a cautious, incremental, prudent and nuanced approach, constrained by the lessons of recent history and his own political reality. Given his predecessor’s calamitous performance, it’s not surprising that Obama reportedly regards the first task of a US president in the post-Bush international arena to be “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Kilcullen condemns the political “timidity” of western capitals, reluctant to take on ISIS and commit combat forces. Yet which Western leader had the domestic political capital then or now to expend on such a decision? Tony Abbott, who apparently had the inclination but didn’t follow through? Or would Britain be willing to retake the field after its disastrous experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan?

And what is a truly ordinary guy to make of Kilcullen’s call for a full-scale conventional campaign to destroy ISIS, one that would require only a “moderately large number of ground troops”? How many is a moderately large number, and who would provide them?

He suggests the campaign be backed by projects similar to the US Lend-Lease program and the Marshall Plan, which supported allies and rebuilt Europe during and after the second world war. Who would fund these programs? The logical answer is the United States, but could it afford it and, more importantly, would the American people allow it?

The strategy would require the West’s Middle East partners to improve their governance and human rights standards, something they haven’t shown they’re capable of. Kilcullen is not blind to the challenge. He concedes that if Iraqi governments won’t change, and continue to treat Sunnis with disdain, then even if every ISIS fighter disappeared overnight “a new ISIS would simply emerge in another year or so.”

To his credit, Kilcullen quotes counterterrorism strategist Audrey Cronin, an American academic and, like Kilcullen, an adviser to US governments, who argues that a full-on conventional war against ISIS “would be folly.”

“After experiencing more than a decade of continuous war, the American public simply would not support the long-term occupation and intense fighting that would be required to obliterate ISIS,” Cronin argues. “The pursuit of a full-fledged military campaign would exhaust US resources and offer little hope of obtaining the objective. Wars pursued at odds with political reality cannot be won.”

Kilcullen acknowledges the force of this argument, yet fails to counter it. Instead, we’re left with the feeling that he’s frustrated by the failure of political facts to bend to strategic theory.

Even so, an ordinary citizen shocked by recent events in Brussels and Lahore might still accept Kilcullen’s melancholy and sobering conclusion about what’s ahead of us.

“This conflict will not be going away anytime soon, and it certainly won’t end quickly or cleanly,” he writes. “On the contrary: this is, and will be, a multigenerational struggle against an implacable enemy, and the violence we’re dealing with in the Middle East and Africa is not some unfortunate aberration – it’s the new normal.” •

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As events unfolded in the Middle East, an element of synchrony came to sharpen the loss. Halliday was an extraordinary public intellectual. His work of four decades covered many fields, as the titles of his twenty books indicate: among them are Arabia Without Sultans, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, The Ethiopian Revolution (co-authored with Maxine Molyneux), The Making of the Second Cold War, Revolution and World Politics, and Two Hours that Shook the World.

Moreover, its wide range was combined with great social depth. Halliday’s mind was capacious and forensic, his lens panoptic and microscopic. (“The personal is the international” was one of his many aphorisms.) His rights-based universalism, reached via a lengthy marxisant prologue, was never arid, and was watered by immensely rich and loving empathy with national and local particularities, from architecture and dialect to cuisine and humour. Never was this more true than in connection with his beloved Yemen, one of his book-length studies being Arabs in Exile: The Yemeni Community in Britain. (“My one remaining ambition in life,” he once wrote, “is to have a bookshop, library or street named after me in Yemen.”)

Halliday was also unafraid: ready in argument to express uncomfortable truths and test lazy assumptions, bold in rethinking his own ideas and absorbing new ones, but also prepared to contest breaches of fundamental principle from whatever source. Two very different examples of the latter are his defence of Kuwaiti sovereignty following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the emirate in 1990, which was reinforced by inside knowledge of the nature of the Ba’athist dictatorship, and opposition to his own London School of Economics accepting money from the Gaddafi coffers in Libya. The first caused a permanent breach with many former allies, the second – which emerged posthumously – fuelled a burgeoning scandal (though Halliday’s forewarning sought only to uphold the LSE’s integrity and self-interest).

Such stances were far from contrarian. Halliday’s compass took its bearings from the ground, “the analysis of what actually happens,” and from solidarity, “the shared moral and political value and equality of all human beings, and of the rights that attach to them.” Whether the topic was Cuba or Libya, terrorism or 1968, his work matched detailed familiarity with independence of political judgement. His grasp of complex subjects, and his ability to explain them clearly, informed his contributions in every forum: from seminar room and lecture hall to journal and broadcasting studio, and in hundreds of articles and dozens of chapters on top of those books. Halliday was one of those rare people who appear a lot on the intelligent media while never becoming a “media figure,” his voice – lucid, informed, careful, robust, educative, morally serious – a force for reason as well as the healthy contention he loved.

Behind it all lay Halliday’s inimitable presence, or anima, which flourished in those public or semi-public arenas where a wealth of personal memory, cultural reference or vernacular insight made bonds and gave his ideas sparkling life. The insights had been earned, not merely acquired, by a lifetime’s vigour, curiosity and empathy: learning those languages, travelling and listening (and he was as good a listener as he was a linguist), looking behind; what he liked to call “doing the work.” (Halliday, who spoke nine languages fluently and others more than passably, including several dialects of Arabic, was fond of saying, “You get to speak a language the way you get to swim: learn a few basic moves, and then dive in!”) Whether a solitary study, a warm cafe, a bubbling salon, a teeming street, a yawning lecture room, or a desert or mountain night among men with guns – Halliday was at home in the world, and capable, time after time, of turning that faculty into enlightenment.

These textures were revitalised when, after two decades at LSE’s department of international relations, he began to shift base towards a “new professional triangle,” the IBEI/CIDOB/CCCB research institutes in Barcelona, a city whose genius for conviviality matched his own. Carmen Claudin recalls his arrival from the airport as a one-month guest researcher: “He came directly to CIDOB, as we had agreed and, coming through the door, before as much as saying hello, he exclaimed with a knowing smile, ‘I think I could live in this place!’”

The incremental move sealed Halliday’s recovery from an illness partly induced by overwork during the post-9/11 period. A new balance was reflected in several books, including The Middle East in International Relations, 100 Myths About the Middle East, and Shocked and Awed: How the War on Terror and Jihad Have Changed the English Language, and in prolific media output, including columns in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and frequent essays in openDemocracy. The Latin America historian James Dunkerley, latterly a neighbour in London’s Tavistock Square (where Halliday stayed when working in the city), offers a characteristic, and suitably newspaper-related, vignette from this period:

He liked to read the morning papers in the beautiful garden centred on the statue of Gandhi and dedicated to the cause of peace. Always jovial, even when palpably suffering, he would regale me in his burnished baritone with the latest news from Bishkek, ask about the balance of forces in Quito, and deconstruct conspiracies in Sana’a.

Barcelona’s benign influence on Halliday leavened the coincident darkening of world politics, not least in and around Iraq following the United States–led invasion of 2003. Much of Halliday’s reputation had been built on prodigious engagement with the Arab and Iranian worlds. He came to see their modern experience of revolution, dictatorship and war in terms of a “greater west Asian crisis,” a term he coined in 2001, denoting the impact of post-9/11 geopolitics on “a wide arc of nation-states – the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In the same period, ideas forged in the preceding decade found fresh relevance: ideas about the modernity of nationalism and of the Middle East itself, about the fates of solidarity and about “patriarchy with guns.”

In 2010–11, the uprisings of the “Arab spring” – beginning in Tunisia, then spreading to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria, but leaving nowhere untouched – opened tantalising hopes of a historic turn towards freedom and democracy in the region, many soon to be drowned in blood. A year earlier, Halliday had written about the student-led protest wave in Iran after the presidential elections. No one was better qualified to make sense of these new events – their origins, character, dynamics, and place in the global map. Yet when people looked around, he was gone.

A natural consequence of death is to invite attention to a person’s whole life. In Halliday’s case, the first of three commemorations held in London, attended by a large crowd at London University’s Senate House, suggested that his intellectual and ethical wellspring was intimately linked to his family and social milieu. (The other two events were a panel discussion and day-long seminar focusing on his work, both at the LSE.)

Simon Frederick Peter Halliday was born, the youngest of three brothers, in Dublin on 22 February 1946 – the very day, as he once noted, that the American diplomat George Kennan despatched his “long telegram,” the cold war’s formative document, from the United States embassy in Moscow. (The text was published early the following year as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym “X,” in Foreign Affairs. Halliday would interview “Mr X” at Princeton in 1995, as part of a series of conversations with strategists of the era; the others were Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara and Robert Gates.) He was brought up in the town of Dundalk, on the border of a politically divided Ireland, which was often a refuge or base for Irish Republican Army operatives (as in the stuttering “border campaign” of 1956–62). His father Arthur was from Yorkshire in England, the caring owner of a shoe factory, and of Quaker background; his mother Rita was Irish and Catholic.

These dualities may account for a lot. Halliday observed of his hometown in 2004: “The whole agenda of international relations is there: state formation, frontiers, revolutionary struggle, nationalism, industrial rise and decline, illegal transnational flows, environmental damage, and perhaps now a bit of international cooperation.” Yet it’s worth recalling too that such “mixed” backgrounds, in politically charged contexts, often result in demonstrative nativism. (Ireland has prominent examples, as have Scotland and Wales, to name only those.) Halliday himself was always highly critical of ultra-nationalism, in Ireland as elsewhere. He also had a ready answer to any safety concerns while on the road: “I was brought up in Dundalk!”

During his early years, Ireland was establishing itself in the international arena, becoming a republic in 1949–49 and joining the United Nations in 1955. Frank Aiken, the pioneering foreign minister of the 1950s–60s, carved an activist foreign policy that included championing the rights of beleaguered Hungary, Tibet, Algeria and Taiwan, and bold advocacy of pacts over nuclear weapons and the Arab–Israeli conflict. The patriotic internationalism represented by Aiken, whom Halliday greatly respected, may also have exerted an influence.

The closing speaker at the Senate House was Halliday’s elder brother Jon, whose books include a biography of Mao Zedong, co-authored with Jung Chang. His contribution ended on a moving note by quoting Fred’s reference to him on a past occasion, using an affectionate Irish phrase, and then, very quietly, returning the words. “Here’s to me sound man.” The bonds between home and world never seemed so close.

Halliday’s schooling was at Ampleforth, a Catholic college in north Yorkshire with roots in the nearby Benedictine abbey. Edmund Fawcett, a co-pupil, recalled Fred, around the time of China’s invasion of Tibet, studying a Tibetan-language textbook to try to grasp more of what was happening. A reference backing his Oxford application in 1963, quoted in a thoughtful survey by Adam Roberts for the British Academy, described him as “a most conscientious person of high ideals and admirable performance.”

Halliday stood out even amid the student ferment of mid 1960s Oxford, where he gained a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics and, as political editor, wrote for the student magazine Isis. His invitation to Francisco Caamaño Deñó, the exiled ex-president of the Dominican Republic, in 1966 is an example of his outward-facing maturity at this time. Their meeting had a profound impression on Halliday, whose later research produced a valuable book (“heteroclite,” in his own description) on Caamaño and this moment in the country’s history.

There followed more study at SOAS, work in London’s innovative radical press, membership of the editorial board of the influential New Left Review, or NLR (which would last fifteen years, until 1983), a translation of Karl Korsch from German and an editing of essays by Isaac Deutscher, and extensive travel, including for his books on the Arabian peninsula and Iran. All were underpinned by vital partnership with the international sociologist Maxine Molyneux. What’s notable too is that for all the atmosphere of the time and Halliday’s political leanings, his travels were at heart those of an honest, empathetic inquirer, not a “tourist of the revolution.” (A photo of him sitting on the ground and tapping on a typewriter among his Dhofar radical hosts is emblematic.) The Harvard historian Roger Owen, a decade older, said of Halliday that “he always seemed to have been somewhere first, to have summed up the situation there before I or those with similar interests had even begun to put a few first incoherent thoughts about it together.”

Amsterdam’s Transnational Institute and Washington’s Institute for Policy Studies gave important sustenance at a time when the “international left” seemed more than a chimera. But the broader authority of Halliday’s work was reflected in 1984 with his appointment (against some internal opposition) to a lectureship at the LSE, and later a chair. Thus began a mutually productive association of over two decades. (In 2015, the LSE’s Language Centre inaugurated an award in his name.) He taught, supervised and mentored generations of students, played a leading role in the international relations department, and encouraged younger scholars such as Katerina Dalacoura, Umut Özkirimli and many others towards professional achievement. His emphasis on the centrality of gender to the field, as in Rethinking International Relations, had a keen influence on the discipline.

Dalacoura, also a speaker at that London meeting, began in the present tense by saying that Halliday “influences us by what he does and who he is as well as what he writes. We were it, part of his wider engagement with the world. He made us think, he was without discrimination, and liberal with time and praise. His generosity of spirit will stay with me more than anything.”

In a fine valedictory, his colleague Christopher Hill noted the wider respect in which Halliday was held (he “carried personal, intellectual and political weight, and thus could never be taken for granted”). He saw the department not “as a home, in which to retreat behind closed doors,” Hill said, but as “a castle, from which he could venture out,” including “to the world of policy debate in which he continued to join so vigorously.”

The point carries weight. For Halliday, the instruments of enlightenment, used well – reason, dialogue, research, analysis, knowledge-based argument – were also means towards a better world. James Dunkerley remembers an unusually harmonious NLR party to mark Halliday’s unexpected (and in a red-baiting redoubt of the press, scandalous) elevation to the LSE. “What does it mean, Fred?” he asked. “It means I have twenty-six years to make a difference!”

The years since Halliday’s death have seen excellent assessments of his work by academic colleagues of the calibre of Stephen Howe, David Styan, Toby Dodge, and Alejandro Colás and George Lawson, as well as Susie Linfield’s fine essay in the Nation. In addition, scrupulous work by a small team at the LSE, led by Benjamin Martill, has catalogued Halliday’s academic bibliography, almost a quarter of whose eighty pages is composed of unpublished manuscripts. It is open to researchers, as is Halliday’s personal archive, a separate project also under the LSE’s auspices.

These are foundations of what might one day become an intellectual–intellectual biography, which by default would also encompass the history of the post-1945 world (and several of its tributaries, including the cold war, communism, jihadism, and the left, and ideas of revolution, nationalism, and solidarity.)

Yet there is also a sense that in an international arena threatened by insecurity, violence and extremism of attitude, Halliday’s work and example could contribute far more than they are being allowed to do. At any rate, the rational principles to which he gave large-minded and grounded expression – above all the “unceasing belief in universal values” he shared with an ally, Maxime Rodinson – are acutely relevant.

Such universals, moreover, are not at odds with the particular, but crystallised in it. Halliday had little use for “identity” or “tradition,” far less essentialist, relativist or postmodernist conceits. The pithy sparks lighting his trail included: “No nation is older than the oldest living person claiming to be a member of it,” and “When I hear the word ‘community’ I reach for my exit visa!” Among his list of “the world’s twelve worst ideas,” number four was “The world is divided into incompatible moral blocs or civilisations.” Politics and culture are not the same. Separate them, reinstate politics, and much could follow.

Halliday’s last article before the onset of his final illness was about Barcelona. It describes a lively debate, or tertulia, he took part in on Catalonia’s TV3 channel, then moves outwards. While attentive to the city’s “dark” and “grey” worlds, the tone is life-affirming:

This is the Barcelona, above all, that I have come to know and love: the Chilean waiter in Sant Gervasi who teaches me left-wing slogans in Mapuche justifying mass land seizures; the Moroccan family I met on the beach at Barcelonera, who speak only Berber and Catalan; a sprightly gentleman of some eighty or more years, sipping coffee with his wife in a bar next to the offices of La Vanguardia, who, when I drop my pen, immediately jumps down and picks it up, and then presents his card, identifying him as the president of the Catalan Association of Republican Aviators, a veteran not only of the civil war, but, in exile, of the French air force as well; an Australian co-author, long resident in Papua New Guinea, now a leading translator of Catalan literature, ensconced in her book-lined eighteenth-century flat in the Born, with the volumes of Joan Corominas as backdrop; a man in his shorts, alone on the Carrer de Comercio on a torrid Sunday afternoon, singing the “Mediterráneo” of Joan Manuel Serrat; my Icelandic designer friend who brings a small bottle of Brennivin, a 40 per cent proof northern liquor from her country; the Filipino waiter who, on advising me of the best meat dishes in his country, after indicating which can be taken with chicken, pork or beef, then whispers that, of course, the best is dog; an Italian student, expert in Romance languages, and now working on Occitanian poetry, who consults me on the possible Arabic roots of this vocabulary; and my Catalan language teacher, a Palestinian translator from Los Angeles, to whom I have awarded the nickname Abu Tarjoma, “the father of translation,” whom I meet once a week for coffee and an exchange of linguistic and intercultural anecdotes. And many more.

That this comes from a man of deep political seriousness, whose life’s purpose was to understand the world in order to change it, only adds another layer. For once, forget the evidence. The world has not seen the last of Fred Halliday. •

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Perhaps regimes across the Arab world have failed to see their own volcanoes, too. They manifestly failed to grasp how their interests would be affected by growing educational opportunities, evident in a rise in literacy from 18 per cent to 82 per cent since 1960. There was a thirty-fold increase in the number of Arabs online between 2000 and 2012, but regimes paid little attention to the impact of the internet and social media on alienated Muslims in Arab and Western societies. They welcomed foreign direct investment without appreciating that it also brought the values and disciplines of global business models and raised expectations of individual empowerment and gender relations.

Most importantly, perhaps, they failed to recognise the significance of each of those factors in shaping inchoate desires within their societies to be modern, and Arab, and in many cases Muslim, in the twenty-first century.

Western policy-makers shared in that analytical failure. We were too close to, and too comfortable with, Arab regimes. We wanted to believe their assurances about how they were reshaping their countries. Like all good diplomats and salespeople, they made us feel good about ourselves, and so we were inclined to discount our concerns about the real-time performance of ageing, sclerotic, parasitic leaderships. We anticipated that their time at the helm would pass, to be followed, surely, by a new generation more attuned to our vision of a globalising world.

In short, we didn’t pay enough attention to the gaps between rhetoric and political and social reality. We underestimated the resilience of elites determined to protect their privileges and identities from encroachment by others. We conflated popular enthusiasm for elections with a coming triumph of democratic values.

With a handful of exceptions, we didn’t see the uprisings of 2011 coming. We didn’t think we had to look. We had missed the enthusiasm for change on public display. And we failed to see that reform, when it came, could modify the functioning of systems but not the values underpinning them.

So when Mohamed ElBaradei arrived at Cairo airport in early 2010, having completed his term as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to a tumultuous reception by Egyptians who saw him as a fresh political force, and then left again barely forty-eight hours later, we missed the point. We focused merely on what we saw as his political ineptitude, or on the capacity of the Mubarak regime to stare him down.

We also missed, and most Arab intellectuals dismissed, the significance of the rejoining of student and labour activism in Egypt from 2009 onwards, mostly because that initiative at first went nowhere. We did not appreciate how it could rebound, leveraged by the internet and social media, into a key factor in the unfolding events of 2011.

We should have been focused, in other words, on the underlying factors making the turmoil of the Arab Uprisings a real possibility.

In 2002, under the sponsorship of the United Nations, Arab intellectuals had begun publishing a series of detailed analyses, known as the Arab Human Development Reports, identifying key regional social, economic and political deficits. Together with publications by Arab experts in other think tanks in the Western world, they warned that the Arab world was “richer than it was developed.” We were placed on notice that reform was urgently required in areas ranging from gender empowerment to education if the gaps between the Arab world and other countries were to be closed.

Clearly written, evidence-based, intellectually cogent and devoid of self-pity and excuses, the analyses identified the causes of Arab ill-performance as arising for the most part from institutions Arab governments had created but failed to reform. The political implications of the analyses were not clearly stated, but they were obvious enough.

Within the Arab world, the analysts were mostly ignored, condemned or dismissed for their lack of political correctness. They had failed, in effect, to pin responsibility, or even causality, elsewhere, and that was unacceptable.

As the fifteenth anniversary of the first of those reports approaches, it’s clear that none of the key concerns articulated by those Arab intellectuals have been addressed. Nor have the changes in the region during that decade and a half made achieving the reforms they called for any easier.

Instead, the collapse of the Arab Uprisings has seen a reaffirmation of authoritarian values and practices. This has been reinforced by the abject failure of supposedly liberal Arab voices to rise above their political differences and defend a robust separation of powers. No one (except perhaps in Tunisia, and even that is questionable) is insisting on respect for the values of inclusive politics and empowerment. Nor is there evidence that Arab governments have harnessed, mobilised and empowered creative talent in business, politics or the arts.

Meanwhile, across the Middle East, the demographic time bomb ticks on. Amid ongoing weakness in oil prices, budget deficits are worsening. Graduate unemployment is at a record high. Timorous responses to consumer demand for cheap energy and water, and the impact of global warming on ill-equipped infrastructure have created increasingly obvious environmental problems. Government have shied away from unpalatable choices in response to financial pressures, for fear of the political and security consequences.

By failing to capture the political imagination of the young middle class, governments in the region have struggled to find a sustainable balance between satisfying the expectations and demands of their political audiences and meeting the imperatives of national survival in a globalised security environment.

In seeking to find that balance, some countries will cope better than others. In Syria, Libya and Yemen, the structures of government have effectively collapsed. Iraq is unlikely to see a full restoration of central authority. Egypt, long the Arab centre of gravity, is regressing politically: its human rights record is appalling but few Egyptians appear to care; its economic and environmental problems are manifest; and it maintains – with the blessings of its major Gulf financiers – a steadfast refusal to accept inclusive politics as part of an effective response to persistent domestic security woes.

The small Gulf oil exporters are in a different situation. Although the sustained downturn in oil prices is hitting the property market and consumer spending, sovereign wealth funds are amply resourced. If necessary, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar can introduce a value-added tax, impose excise duties on vehicles, and tax expatriates in order to manage financial pressures. Risks exist within the patriarchal, intimate political systems that have applied since the 1970s, but in general they appear relatively stable.

The challenges for Saudi Arabia are greater. The Saudi population is larger, the relationship between the House of Saud and its conservative religious allies is complex, and the leadership is undergoing generational change. Concerns about an ascendant Iran are linked to anxieties about the Shia minority in the kingdom and the challenge to the political authority of the Sunni leadership in Bahrain.

There are fewer high-income expatriates in Saudi Arabia who can be taxed to help reduce growing financial deficits. Capital expenditure can certainly be cut back. Introduction of a value-added tax is being considered. But unless the country’s leaders persuade Saudi citizens to move from a culture of entitlement to one that can cope with diminishing oil revenues, and unless they introduce tax-based revenue streams from Saudi nationals to supplement their income from oil, they face the prospect of a major financial crisis within a decade.

As with the smaller Arab oil producers, these are manageable problems for Riyadh. But they also steer Saudi priorities towards securing a predictable regional order in which to deal with the complex challenges they present.

Always inclined to be risk-averse, the Saudis are set on shaping that regional order to counter not only the perceived challenge of Iran but also, where possible, the demands and values that flowered briefly across the region among the popular and Islamist activists of 2011.

The counter-revolutionary impulse – a gadarene rush back to the familiar comforts of authoritarian rule at the expense of creativity, empowerment, human rights, accountability and transparency in government – can only succeed, even in the short term, with a strong, balanced economic performance. To be sustainable, it also requires a demonstrated sensitivity to popular expectations of dignity in circumstances where interaction with the state is unavoidable.

Political leadership, not terrorism, is the key to meeting that demand, and critically important to the Arab future. But such leadership is in short supply. Nor is there necessarily a political solution to be found to many of the most pressing challenges of the coming decade.

Significant gaps remain between urban and rural Arab populations, and between elites and others, not only in terms of literacy and numeracy but also in terms of their daily experience of dealing with instruments and agents of state authority, from police to bureaucrats and teachers.

Webs of privilege, patronage networks and corruption, and fear of open-ended change in social and political spheres limit the scope for systemic reform. The avowed secularism of “modernising” Arab regimes was always a phenomenon of the urban elite, closely linked to issues of class and visceral rejection of the Islamist “other.” But whereas political Islam is now in retreat, the sophistication, connectivity and lethality of jihadist forces has increased dramatically.

The vast majority of Arab populations are unlikely to experience a closing of the gaps between their economic and social circumstances and those that prevail in the rest of the developed world. State authority – a critical factor if programmatic reform is to be delivered rather than merely announced – is increasingly at risk. Ordinary people feel little connection to national events and policies. Localised struggles for turf, or in some cases for survival, are privileging militias, traditional power-brokers and other regressive forms of rule.

Competing narratives of victimhood, and the newly fashionable rubric of grassroots empowerment are both open to exploitation by forces that are in practice deeply disempowering and increasingly sectarian in their behaviour and beliefs. They may prove to be the death knell of the progressive and creative elements within Arab society.

These circumstances bode ill, not only for Arabs but for all of us. There is little that Western countries can do directly to help in the rebooting of Arab values. But we do need to avoid policy approaches and rhetoric that can make matters worse.

The states and societies of the Middle East have had more than their share of unequal and conflictual dealingswith outside parties. Western policy-makers have eroded our own credibility by accommodating the corruption and human rights abuses of regimes – sometimes out of expediency, and sometimes for want of an alternative under the pressure of events – and failing to apply the same moral standards to Israel as we apply to other parties in the Middle East. Our failures have damaged the standing of those in the region who respect our values and sometimes pay heed to our advice.

A rarely acknowledged consequence (in the West, at least) of those failures, and one that is coming to haunt the region, is the fostering of Arab identities (both national and sectarian) framed by collective memories and mythologies of grievance where the West is concerned.

Like most other nations, Arab societies are shaped by their own versions of history and of popular aversion, in many cases to near neighbours. The region has too much history, and not enough geography, to expect anything else. Memories and mythologies in which external players – primarily the United States – are cast in such negative terms have been important in shaping the overall strategic outlook for parts of the Arab world. They influence Arab responses to efforts to restore balanced relations between Iran and the West; they are seized on by non-state actors to validate their antipathy to an established regional order in which the United States has long played a key part.

Australia’s increasingly close relations with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, as well as the alliance relationship with the United States, mean that such perceptions matter to us. Our wider interests, including the protection of Australians at home and abroad, are also at risk when Arab governments are challenged from within by those they have been alienated or marginalised from national politics.

We need to be directing our attention to the likelihood, and the possible consequences, of these institutional and policy failures continuing. Indeed, we need to ask whether the political cultures in the region that remain bound by collective memories of victimhood, or dogma claiming divine sanction, will ever be able to understand, let alone compete in, a global market of ideas dominated by political cultures and institutions that draw primarily on mythologies of promise, achievement and adventure, intellectual and otherwise.

Heroism and heroes – whether they are politicians, artists, business leaders, scientists or educators – shape visions of the possible. And among its many deficits, the deficit of heroes in the contemporary Arab world is alarming. Different as they are in almost all other respects, Nobel Peace Prize laureate ElBaradei – surely the sort of positive role model that is required if the Arab world is to realise its creative potential – and Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have in common that they inspired hope for an alternative future.

In the case of Baghdadi and others like him, we focus at our peril on their failures and shortcomings rather than on the groundswells – the volcanoes – into which they tap. In her magisterial analysis of the factors contributing to the outbreak of world war in 1914, Margaret MacMillan argued that popular mobilisation in Europe arose not as a result of despair and economic adversity, which was growing among the working classes, so much as in response to the promise, and excitement, of visions that proved to be catastrophic. The same can be said of the Arab world today.

Radicalisation is fed by humiliation and despair, but 2011 reminds us that Arab mobilisation is also driven by hope. There will be a surfeit of adversity across the Middle East in the next decade, including ethnic cleansing, sectarian conflict and economic malaise. The human cost of conflict will have corrosive social and political consequences enduring for generations to come.

From a strategic perspective, however, we face the further possibility that, after decades of unfulfilled promises, hope will be offered, possibly to increasingly radicalised audiences, by those whose views and values are deeply antagonistic to our own. We may well succeed over time in degrading the potency of the vision offered by Islamic State and other jihadist groups, partly through military measures to reverse their momentum. We can, and should, highlight their cynicism, debunk their narratives, castigate their brutality and condemn those governments who travel with them.

We should be consistent in upholding and defending our own values while we do so. The rules of war must be respected on our side, even when those we fight, and some of those who fight for us, choose to ignore them.

But if we fail to support hope among the peoples of the region for a future consistent with the values we would like to see emerge there, we will not have secured our future, or helped them to secure theirs. •

The post The Arab outlook: beware the return of hope appeared first on Inside Story.

The underlying situation in Ukraine did not improve, but the steady drip of casualties suddenly halted. For many Western commentators and politicians, this fuelled a hope that lasting peace was not far off. Few sufficiently noted the point made by political scientist Alexander Motyl, that the sudden suspension of the proxy aggression against Ukraine showed that Russia’s claims that it hasn’t been involved in Donbass were absurd. And what can be so easily turned off can easily be turned back on again – and in recent weeks has been, to some degree.

Other crises affecting Europe have been competing with Ukraine for space. The many permutations of the Greek insolvency crisis were sorely preoccupying EU leaders as well as attracting media attention, until it was pushed into the background by a growing avalanche of migrants. Increasing numbers were coming from Syria (and elsewhere) via refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and crossing from Turkey to adjacent Greek islands rather than taking the longer and more hazardous journey from North Africa. Then, while the European Union struggled with its migration crisis, Russia launched itself forcefully into the already crowded Syrian war zone.

Next came the downing of the Russian Metrojet passenger plane over the Sinai Peninsula, followed by the terrorist atrocities in Paris, both claimed by ISIS, and exerting their usual hypnotic effect on Western publics. Most recently, the shooting down of a Russian military aircraft on the Turkish–Syrian border, after its incursion into Turkish airspace, led to yet another crisis involving an aggrieved and aggressive Russia.

All of these things relate to Ukraine’s still very precarious position in significant ways. What they have in common is that not only do they occupy column inches, but they also take a heavy toll on the attention spans, financial resources, political capital and collective resolve of Western decision-makers, all necessarily at the expense of other priorities. From Putin’s point of view, they offer a chance to change the subject from Ukraine and sanctions.

Most independent Russian observers thought that pursuing a better settlement in Ukraine and relief from sanctions was probably the most important motivation for Moscow’s Syrian intervention. But it was clearly also aimed at other objectives: to shore up Russia’s oldest ally in the Middle East, to lay a claim to great power status and a place at any negotiating tables, to demonstrate that Putin, unlike Obama, is loyal to his friends (compare Assad with Mubarak), and to defend and extend Russia’s only military base in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The intervention may even have been motivated in part by a desire to take on ISIS, as Putin proclaimed at the outset, though for weeks 90 per cent of Russia’s attacks ignored ISIS targets and were aimed rather at Western allies among the anti-Assad forces. It was certainly intended to impress on Western minds that Russia was a necessary ally against ISIS, an ally worth placating to bring on board.

After it became clear that Western governments rejected Putin’s pretence to be taking on ISIS, and particularly after the attacks in Paris, Moscow changed its line, belatedly acknowledging that the Russian passenger jet had been blown up by ISIS, which till then it had energetically denied, and offering sympathy and armed support to French president François Hollande. Russia summoned other countries to join a united front against terrorism, which it presented as analogous to the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, a line it has been pushing since well before its Syrian intervention. These siren calls often explicitly proposed that Western countries put issues like Ukraine behind them. But while indicating a readiness to coordinate efforts against ISIS, most Western majors made clear that they were not ready to overlook other issues dividing them from Russia. The politically beleaguered Hollande, by contrast, responded with alacrity and enthusiasm to Moscow’s appeal, raising further doubts in some minds about the strength of his commitment to maintaining a strong line over Ukraine.

Like the Metrojet disaster, the Turkish shooting down of a Russian bomber was a severe reverse for Putin. This time he immediately went on the front foot, moving more forces into the region, launching the usual Russian trade war despite the considerable cost to Russian consumers, tourists and small businesses, and demanding a public apology from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A rising crescendo of propaganda was directed against this new enemy, much of it personal to Erdoğan. All this was probably an expression of Putin’s personal feelings of humiliation, but clearly such an affront could not be tolerated by a great power. Russia is maintaining its rage, and further escalation is possible, though unlikely.

The rights and wrongs of the incident may take some time to become fully clear, but it should be remembered that Putin has been deploying aircraft close to, or in, other countries’ airspace for well over a year. These overflights, especially though not exclusively directed at NATO members, often seem deliberately provocative or intimidatory. The Russian aircraft fly with their transponders turned off so that the air defence and air traffic control systems in targeted countries cannot contact the pilots. Nor was this the first time Russia had treated Turkey in this way during the current operations. The Turkish claim that the Russian crew had not responded to successive warnings is therefore plausible. Moreover, the bombers were attacking ethnic Turkish anti-Assad forces rather than ISIS. Putin has made much of Russia’s supposed right and duty to protect anyone who can be classed as belonging to the rubbery entity known as the Russian world – ethnic Russians, that is, or even just Russian speakers in foreign countries. Why should Turkey not feel some responsibility to its own co-ethnics?

While it may not have been the primary purpose of these dangerous operational procedures near the Turkish border, Russia has shown signs of satisfaction with the nervous NATO response the border incident evoked. This seems to have been the first time a NATO country has shot down a Russian or Soviet aircraft. Moreover, Erdoğan is not flavour of the month with either NATO or the European Union. Though Brussels is offering Ankara some $4 billion in funding and other concessions to persuade it to cooperate in stemming the vast flow of would-be migrants who have come through Turkey, this is a sign of EU desperation rather than esteem.

NATO is, of course, obliged under Article 5 of the NATO treaty to consider what it can do to aid any member whose security is under threat. But some NATO members will be asking themselves whether they want to come to the aid of a Turkey that feels emboldened in ambiguous circumstances to shoot down a Russian aircraft. Russian commentators are clearly hoping this will prove to be the case.

What these events illustrate is that while Moscow may not have provoked or planned all these situations, it has been quick to turn them to its strategic advantage. If Russia deals with Turkey in a contemptuous and threatening manner and NATO responds mainly by declaratory support and mediation efforts, tempered by evident unease, this may suggest that NATO membership is of uncertain value. And if the Paris atrocities in tandem with the Metrojet disaster do generate a wave of sentiment in favour of a new alignment with Russia, that may well weaken Western solidarity in defence of Ukraine. Divisions and uncertainty within NATO or the European Union are always welcome in Moscow.

Even Moscow’s involvement in the Grexit issue was clearly aimed at more than simply supporting a traditional Russian ally, particularly one gripped by anti-Brussels sentiment. Mutual high-level visits between Moscow and Athens, and symbolic gestures of support were timed in such a way as to encourage Athens’s resentment of the tough conditions attached to the EU bailout. Of course, Russia itself was not able or prepared to come to the financial rescue, given the vast sums involved. But the contrast between warm-hearted, sympathetic Russia and mean, hard-hearted Germany was good political theatre and stirred up extra trouble in the European Union. In the end, however, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras proved more soberly calculating than Putin had hoped, and he did not withhold his support for extending EU sanctions.

Though some Eastern European commentators believe otherwise, Putin appears to have had no significant role in creating the migration tidal wave in Europe, though his intense bombing raids in Syria might well add to it and perhaps partly reflect a desire to bring about such a movement. And Russia has indeed facilitated a rapidly increasing flow of some 5000 would-be migrants into Norway across the remote northern border linking the two countries, overwhelming Norwegian reception facilities. Oslo has demanded an explanation and amended its regulations to stem the flow. The numbers are small at this stage, but the intent is clear.

Putin would be delighted with the spectacle of EU embarrassment and disarray in the face of this human rights policy debacle. It threatens to open up a new and damaging divide between “core Europe” and new members in the east who are vigorously resisting efforts to make them accept allocations of refugees for resettlement. The refugee crisis is also a gift for Putin’s allies and admirers on the European hard right, including Marine Le Pen and her National Front in France. Le Pen is frequently invited to visit senior figures in the Kremlin, and her party has received funding from a Kremlin-friendly bank. Moscow supports all hard-right Eurosceptic parties, as well as hard-left parties, valuing their disruptive role in a European Union staggering under the weight of successive crises. The migration issue promises to be the mother of all of them, and of long duration.

Russia itself has a severe problem with its increasingly radical Muslim communities, which comprise over twenty million in a total population of 142 million if migrant workers from the “-stans” of former Soviet Central Asia are included. This may have been a key factor inclining Putin initially to avoid stirring up ISIS unduly in Syria, as that organisation had been recruiting substantial numbers of Muslim radicals from Russia, and especially from the turbulent north Caucasus. Stalin committed barbarous crimes against some of those national groups, including the Chechens and also the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatars who have strong links with and enjoy official and public sympathy in Turkey. The Chechens and Crimean Tatars, like the overwhelming majority of Russian Muslims, are Sunni.

For all these reasons the Sunni Erdoğan keenly resents Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and his support for Shiite regimes in Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, as well as for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In fact, Putin himself has done much to fan the flames of Muslim resistance in Russia and to push it in an increasingly Islamist direction, by his violent repression in the north Caucasus, especially in Chechnya. Having conducted a brutal war to pacify the province at the outset of his presidency (a war that greatly boosted his popularity), he has increasingly outsourced rule in Chechnya to the brutal but efficient and increasingly Islamist dictator, Ramzan Kadyrov.

So Putin has a serious problem with radical Islam domestically, which is one reason why he had till recently steered clear of armed involvements in the Middle East. The Soviet regime tended to support supposedly “modernising” anti-Western autocracies and movements in the region, including Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and the Baathist regime of the Assads in Syria. In the post-Soviet period, at least until recently, Russia has been less actively engaged in the Middle East, but Putin now seems ready to risk greater involvement.

Especially since Putin came to power, Russia has deeply resented Western support for regime change not just in former communist states in Eastern Europe, but also in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (where Putin seemed to take the fall and execution of Gaddafi personally). Moscow was, perhaps wisely, sceptical that the Arab Spring would lead to any kind of sweetness and light. Putin is convinced that the real Western motivation there is to strengthen its influence in the region at the expense of Moscow’s political and economic interests.

And he is apparently genuinely mystified that the West should repeatedly invest so much blood and treasure in such dangerous and volatile situations. It is not just damaging to Russia, it is damaging to the West as well, so why do it? To quote the rhetorical question in his UN address in September 2015 referencing Western-led regime-change operations in the broader Middle East: “Do you at least realise what you’ve done?!” It’s not an unreasonable question. Yet he now seems on the brink of a dangerous double investment of his own, first in the whole Middle Eastern Sunni–Shia civil war, and second in a vengeful feud with a man after his own heart, Erdoğan, which could severely damage his carefully cultivated relationship with Turkey, and possibly much more besides.

Russians generally, including opposition voices, find the Western attitude to the wider Middle East, and particularly to Muslim immigrants in their midst, deeply strange. The once prominent Russian banker Elena Kotova, writing about the Paris atrocities for the independent Russian online publication Snob, expressed amazement that Western elites react to all Islamist terrorist attacks in Western countries with the same clichés about solidarity, tolerance, courage, civilised values inevitably triumphing, and so on. After years of changing reality, she wrote, the tolerance mantras remain the same. They defy common sense, she argued, but more importantly they defy the wishes of the majority of ordinary citizens of Europe. And she went on to make some mordant observations about the tyranny of political correctness in Western Europe.

The common thread in all these recent headline issues from the Putinist perspective is that they carry the promise of, or present opportunities for, the weakening of NATO and the European Union, and the West generally. As Putin once frankly told a secretary-general of NATO, his mission was not to build a better relationship with NATO, but to destroy the organisation. And his attitude in recent years towards the European Union, especially its trade and governance outreach to its eastern neighbours, has become similarly hostile.

For Putin generally, as for his senior colleagues, the objective of policy is not to reach an honourable compromise, or to achieve peace as such, but to be in conflict with and defeat his numerous adversaries. All relationships are zero-sum games, and win–win solutions are an illusion – or would be if Russian had a word for them. What he wants is victory, not peace, domination not partnership (despite his frequent sly references to his Western enemies as “partners”). Kto kogo (who will dominate whom), as Lenin famously said; the weak get beaten, as Putin himself said. And he assumes that behind their hypocritical facades everyone else operates in the same way.

Because of the dismal state of Western education about the Soviet and post-Soviet operational code, Western foreign policy–makers (and often commentators, too) seem unable to internalise these sorts of basic Russian realities. They continue to try to create resets or peaceful win–win solutions, to “rebuild the relationship,” to reach out, until their patience runs out, or they lose the election, or they are replaced by a democratic party colleague with superior insight into the nature of things, who will also see a need to rebuild the relationship supposedly damaged by her predecessor. •

The post Making nice and making enemies appeared first on Inside Story.

Russia backed the resolution partly because its military actions in Syria have propelled the country to a more central position. If its intervention expresses Vladimir Putin’s aim of restoring his country’s status as a great power, its support for the resolution also reflects awareness of the Islamist challenge in Russia itself. The Chinese signed up out of concern over instability in the Gulf, the source of so much of their oil and gas, but also with their own Uyghur challenge in mind.

The practical outcome will be a concentration of the air war and the wider use of special forces. Russia has substantially expanded its air forces in Syria, France is once again deploying its aircraft carrier to the region, and Britain’s prime minister David Cameron may now get his parliamentary vote to bomb Syria.

But as the war escalates, three ominous elements present a cause for real concern.

The first is that the war against ISIS in Iraq and, especially, Syria is becoming ever more a Western war, with Russia included in what can relentlessly be publicised by ISIS to great effect as a “crusader onslaught” on Islam. All four Middle East states previously involved in airstrikes in Syria – Jordan, Beirut, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have withdrawn. Even if they can be persuaded to mount renewed attacks, these will be little more than symbolic. In any case, the view from ISIS is that these states are the willing lackeys of the crusaders.

The second is the question of whether the heightening of military operations against ISIS, now clearly aimed at its complete physical destruction, can be remotely successful. The experience of the fifteen-month air war is a caution here. As of 13 November, the US-led Operation Inherent Resolve had seen attacks on 16,075 targets including 4517 buildings and 4942 fighting positions. Pentagon figures report that the strikes have killed 20,000 ISIS supporters, up from the 15,000 reported in July. On this basis, the 20,000 to 30,000 ISIS fighters reportedly facing the coalition a year ago should have been torn apart, yet the figure for active members remains unchanged.

Perhaps most notable of all, the estimate of a year ago that 15,000 people had joined ISIS from eighty other countries has now been increased to 30,000 from one hundred countries. In short, the persistent refrain from ISIS of being the defender against the crusaders is proving uncomfortably effective.

Moreover, destroying ISIS in Syria and Iraq will not be possible without ground troops, which is just what ISIS wants. And even if such destruction were possible, what would come next? Would it involve long-term Western occupation of Iraq and Syria, and what effect would that have? Would the war then extend to air and ground operations against ISIS in Libya and Yemen, and many more troops going back to Afghanistan? What about the al Qaeda groups across the Sahel, including those responsible for the attack in the Mali capital, Bamako, on 20 November?

The third element reflects a more long-sighted view. I began writing a weekly column for openDemocracy about security issues immediately after 9/11 and it has now run for over fourteen years, with most of the emphasis on trying to analyse the unfolding “war on terror.” If there has been one underlying concern, expressed as each of the major confrontations has evolved, it has been the persistent and dangerous reliance on the “control paradigm” and its consequences.

The attack on Afghanistan three months after 9/11 dispersed al Qaeda and led to the Taliban melting away. The prospect for the country looked superficially bright, yet fourteen years later the war there is once again intensifying. The rapid military success against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq was celebrated by George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech on 1 May 2003, yet US troops stayed another eight years before leaving behind a rapidly evolving ISIS. The intervention in Libya in 2011, which had a semblance of UN approval, saw Gaddafi’s lynching and the regime’s overthrow, yet four years later Libya is a collapsed state. The cascading of arms and ideas down across the Sahel has resulted in yet more conflict, as exemplified by the Bamako attack.

An enhanced war against ISIS may be the inevitable, and indeed fully understandable, response to the appalling events in Paris. Sadly, though, that does not make it any less of a mistake. That is especially so given that other options will do much more to prevent ISIS gaining further strength and may even end up undermining it.

What, then, should we do?” It is not enough to say, for example, that we should not have invaded Iraq in the first place, true though that is. But there are some clear steps that can be taken to start the multi-year process of curbing ISIS.

An early priority is to put far greater emphasis on ending the Syrian civil war, the necessary precursor to constraining ISIS in Syria. There are some small signs of progress here with the two recent meetings in Vienna involving all the proxies to the war including Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. But the process must be accelerated and, however difficult, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and key militia leaders must somehow be engaged. It is the most difficult of all the tasks and will require the best skills of highly competent conflict resolution specialists.

Close behind that in importance will be a huge and immediate effort to aid the three million or more refugees from Syria and Iraq, principally in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, many of them facing an appalling winter while the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and other agencies struggle to provide support. The core motive must be humanitarian – but if help is not provided, these camps will provide a remarkable recruiting ground for ISIS.

A third task is to work as hard as possible to encourage the Abadi government in Baghdad to reach out to the Sunni minority, especially in those many parts of Iraq where persistent neglect of that minority is helping maintain support for ISIS.

Finally, there is the issue of the expansion of ISIS, not least in Libya. The need to support UN attempts to bring stability to that country is urgent yet efforts are seriously lacking at present.

In this context, perhaps the most urgent need for any state seriously interested in preventing the further growth of extreme Islamist movements is to foster a change in the repressive policies of the Sisi government in Egypt. With more than 1000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters killed and well over 10,000 imprisoned – many under sentence of death – this is the main country that is ripe for Islamist expansionism.

None of these measures provides anything like a full answer to the many challenges of ISIS but they collectively point us in a different direction. We have recently entered the fifteenth year of what used to be called the war on terror – and that war is about to be intensified with little thought for the long-term effects or the reasons for past failures. If we do not take a new direction then we should prepare for a thirty-year war. •

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These barbarians of God… want France to be in a state of shock. To stun her, paralyse and divide her. But in the name of the real martyrs of yesterday, innocent victims, and in the name of the Republic, France shall remain united and stand firm.

Le Monde was also stoic:

In the face of panic, dignity. In the face of the sowers of death, resolve. In the face of desperation, lucidity. In the face of terror, sangfroid… And above all, the unity of the nation when put to the test.

These are undoubtedly fine words. But what would the stoicism they suggest really mean?

This question is one focus of attention on the website of Modern Stoicism, a group whose members are primed from their recent exchanges during Stoic Week, which ran on 2–8 November. Stoic Week, an internet forum with a wide following, is concerned with the application of principles from ancient stoicism to modern everyday life. Participants are guided through a succession of exercises and meditations based on the work of the Roman statesman Seneca and the second-century philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism differs from other philosophical traditions in its determination to focus on the realities of human life, including the political realities. It is not so much a school of thought as a school for the training of thoughts, in order to promote better action and reaction amid the circumstances we face. Extreme situations and experiences of ordeal are the real tests of the doctrine. It places much stress on the control of emotion in order to foster calm and stability.

Le Monde’s commitment to lucidity in the face of desperation and sangfroid in the face of terror is in accord with Aurelius’s identification of the stoic virtues as resilience, balance, dignity and grace. But to keep your cool in the face of terror is a tough challenge. The question of where that kind of psychological strength may come from is complex, and signals a point of departure between the modern rhetoric of stoicism and the mental disciplines practised in the ancient tradition of the stoic school.

“France is strong,” President François Hollande proclaimed, as he called “for unity, for a collective spirit and for cool heads.” The idea that national unity provides a centre of gravity from which all citizens can draw strength in times of war and crisis is deeply embedded in modern democracy. Calm and unity are inextricably related, as they were in Margaret Thatcher’s speech immediately after the bombing at the Brighton hotel where she and her cabinet were meeting in 1984. “The fact that we are gathered here now,” she said, “shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.” 

Thatcher’s idea of unity was strictly nationalistic, and nationalistic leaders tend to divide nations. Her rhetoric leading up to the Brighton conference had been full of venom about “the enemy within.”

Hollande may speak with a more consciousness, especially since he has been answered by a chorus of support from leaders of other nations, but he also speaks for a nation under attack. And a nation on a war footing typically looks to its borders, accentuating the distinctness of its historical identity.

Here is where the philosophical heritage of stoicism carries a more radical challenge. When Marcus Aurelius talked about unity, he was thinking on profoundly different lines. “Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected,” he wrote in his Meditations, “of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another, and in sympathy with one another. This event is a consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.”

This sounds more like a spiritual vision of unity than a political perspective, but Marcus Aurelius was a head of state, and lived in turbulent times. He fought wars, and was witness to the atrocities of the battlefield. Politics was a way of life for him, and day in day out, he dealt with the crises of government. Seeing himself, his life and his sphere of action as part of a planetary cycle of creation and destruction was a technique for maintaining psychological stability amid the turbulence. Yet it was much more than self-therapy.

As a doctrine brought to bear on public life, stoicism aimed to lay the foundations for civil society. “When we talk of fellow citizens,” Aurelius wrote, “our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it – from this state that we share – come thought and reason and law.”

There is much here to bring European and Islamic traditions of reason and law onto common ground. Indeed, stoicism may be said to have as enduring an influence in Islam as in Europe. While it is hard to imagine any contemporary head of state addressing his or her people as “citizens of the world,” the idea can come naturally to the people themselves.

During the night hours following the Paris attacks, when many people were stranded in a city under lockdown, residents welcomed strangers into their houses, sending the message around through the campaign #PorteOuverte. Cab drivers gave free rides to those who wanted to take up the offer. The #I’llRideWithYou campaign following Sydney’s Martin Place siege worked explicitly across a divide that threatened the unity of common citizenship.

When the unwieldiness and chequered history of the United Nations has made us sceptical about the political viability of being citizens of the world, campaigns like these are important acts of faith. It’s a form of collective consciousness that has to be built from the ground up. Social media have a part to play in it, albeit a somewhat volatile and contrary one – though that, after all, simply reflects human nature.

On Facebook on Sunday morning the tricolour wash spread from one post to the next, across profile pictures, shots of the Sydney Opera House as it was illuminated on Saturday night, and romantic images of the Eiffel tower. “We are all Parisians now” was the prevailing message, though it wasn’t long before a new wave of recognition began to break. Why just Paris? Only twenty-four hours before the attacks began there, Beirut had suffered a similar onslaught, leaving forty-one people dead and 300 injured. One man sacrificed his life to intercept a suicide bomber he’d spotted heading for the doors of the mosque.

By the end of the weekend, Beirut and Paris were appearing in parallel images on my newsfeed, and the tricolour wave was receding. You could call this political correctness, but perhaps that’s only a term to hide behind when the challenge of inclusiveness catches you out. There’s one post from the day that has burned itself into my mind. It’s a simple white card bearing a couple of verses by the young Somali poet Warsan Shire:

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere

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As the focal point of Daesh – to use the Arabic acronym the organisation detests – Syria is especially prominent at the moment. In Iraq, by contrast, the group is more constrained. Hemmed in by capable and hostile Kurds to the north and Iraqi Shiites to the south, it has few choices except to launch a major new offensive, an impractical proposition when it needs to fight off Iraqi forces and coalition air power to retain the areas it controls. Its alternative is to focus on Syria, which is what it seems to be doing.

The news of its destruction in recent weeks of several temples and towers at Palmyra – one of the great archaeological sites of the Middle East, which Daesh seized in May – is grim, if not entirely unexpected. Even more obscene was the beheading of the retired head of Palmyra’s antiquities, Khaled al-Asaad, for not divulging the whereabouts of various treasures, some of which had reportedly been buried when Daesh was advancing on the city. He reportedly survived a month of torture, giving nothing away, before he was murdered.

For the wider dynamics in Syria, however, the news is grimmer still. Over the northern summer and into the autumn of 2015, four risks and portents have converged. If even some of them come to pass, then things in Syria are likely to get much worse. These can be titled, if a little simplistically, as consolidation (of Daesh); isation (of the conflict); catastrophisation (of the human side of the conflict); and disintegration (of the Syrian regime).

Consolidation refers to the fact that Daesh is becoming increasingly entrenched in the parts of Syria that it controls. The community is extremely cautious about military intervention in Syria, and not only because they don’t want to strengthen the president, Bashar al-Assad. The legal basis for any substantial military action in Syria is much less certain than in Iraq, where coalition forces have been invited by the Iraqi government to assist.

The renewed involvement of Russia in support of its ally Assad is one of the few developments to have strengthened the Assad regime. This is part of the second dynamic, isation. In supporting Assad, Russia is not only being loyal to an old ally and protecting its economic interests; it is also protecting its longer-term strategic goals in the region, including its naval access to the Mediterranean port of Tartus and its image in other Arab countries. Perhaps above all, Russia’s actions also illustrate Vladimir Putin’s concerns about extremism among Russia’s own Muslim population; past incidents such as the uprisings against Moscow in Chechnya mean that Russia shares the same concerns as many other states about the radicalising effect of Daesh. About one in eight Russians is Muslim.

Russia’s role has shifted in the past couple of weeks. Once focused on diplomatic support and arms, it is now taking on an expanded role that includes Russian troops providing detailed training and advice to the Syrian army, possibly along with advanced weaponry and perhaps even with Russian airstrikes against Daesh to follow.

But the growing isation of the civil war goes beyond Russia. Recent weeks have seen a sudden and deep engagement by Turkey in the fight against Daesh, although it is motivated as much – or more – by its fight against the Kurdish PKK. It also seems likely that the United States will intensify its air campaign in Syria. And, of course, last week the Australian government announced that it would expand its air operations from Iraq into Syria as well.

What all these examples suggest, however, is an increasing risk of third parties either getting tied up in Syria for their own reasons, or perhaps even clashing with each other if they fail to coordinate their actions and focus on Daesh. Low on Western hostages, having murdered several of them over the past year, Daesh can be expected to make a very gruesome spectacle out of any coalition aircrew or others they might capture – as if the immolation of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh last December was not dreadful enough.

The third dynamic – catastrophisation – has dominated the news over the northern summer as Europe has been thrust further into a refugee crisis, driven in large part by events in Iraq and especially Syria. Almost one-fifth of Syria’s population has fled the country, with most of them forced into camps in neighbouring countries. With little hope of resettlement in these Middle Eastern countries – most of which are poor and overwhelmed by the numbers of Syrians they are hosting – and with an end to the fighting as remote as ever, mid 2015 was obviously the moment when a critical mass of refugees decided to take the risk of trying to reach Europe.

The refugee crisis is a sign of how grim the prospects in Syria must be: those with the most at stake in the country are not just staying away, but risking their lives to try to find a better, permanent place to resettle. Around 120,000 Syrians applied for asylum in the first seven months of 2015, but this could be only the start of a real crisis, given the numbers waiting in Turkey (around 1.9 million), Lebanon (over 1.1 million) and elsewhere.

Finally, disintegration. This year, Bashar al-Assad has lost Idlib, a northern provincial capital, and Palmyra, important not only for its archaeology but also for its location on the main road between the west of Syria – Daesh territory – and the capital, Damascus, with its populous surrounds in the south. He now faces a more concerted effort by another of his myriad opposition militias, the al Qaeda–linked al-Nusra Front, which has built a coalition of Islamist forces in the north of the country that, as Robert Fisk pointed out in the Independent in June, almost certainly has Aleppo, Syria’s second major city, in its sights.

Meanwhile, Assad is going through troops faster than he can recruit and train new ones, and is failing to ensure that many basic economic needs such as fuel are available in regime-held areas.

Then again, as Aron Lund of the Carnegie Endowment noted back in January, the Assad regime “is always either crumbling or on the verge of victory.” Assad’s fall has been predicted many times before, but although he may yet hang on, his position now is probably the weakest it has been since 2011.

If it came, his collapse would probably spell the end for Syria as a nation-state. At the humanitarian level, it could lead to a second phase of civil war between, for example, Daesh and al-Nusra; despite the fact that both are “Islamist extremist” in the broadest sense, their fundamental differences would very likely see them fight to the bitter end. In the process, Daesh could become further entrenched not only in Syria, but also in the wider region, and some religious minorities could face the prospect of extinction in Syria. Syria’s youth more generally would fare little better.

A victory by either of these groups would undoubtedly undermine Middle Eastern security, and the only question is how badly. A Daesh victory over al-Nusra could see the group try to expand into new areas, and even into Jordan – which could then draw the Israelis into a direct fight. The converse, an al-Nusra victory, would be little better; in effect it would give quasi-statehood to an al Qaeda offshoot.

If Assad fell, Russia and especially Iran would lose a key regional ally, and Iran its only Arab ally. If they judged Assad’s demise to be the product of direct US action or intervention, they would probably respond – although how, it is impossible to say.

Even if Assad falls by virtue of his own miscalculation, and even if alternatives like Daesh and al-Nusra are neutralised, the most likely prognosis is that Syria will fragment. This scenario is quite frightening, because the various groups in Syria are deeply intertwined. The population movements would be enormous, as would the aid needed for Syria to transition into several smaller, more ethnically or religiously coherent states.

Many years ago, at a conference in his honour, I met the famous secular Syrian intellectual Sadik al-Azm. It was not too many years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and he made a surprising comment: 9/11, he said, was not the start of a great war between Islamism and the West. Rather, he said, “it’s proof that the West has already won that war – at least the war of ideas between the two sides.” No one who can convince others of the virtues of their political views flies aeroplanes into buildings, he observed, and so terrorism like that on 9/11 is an inarticulate, enraged scream by proponents of an ideology that could never build any real or lasting appeal. It was a swan song, an acknowledgement of defeat.

Watching the rise of Daesh since mid 2014 brings those comments back to mind. Events seem to have confirmed his assessment in the case of al Qaeda, but does the same argument apply to Daesh? Probably: its focus on the spectacle of violence is a deliberate strategy, after all, to cow its opponents and appear stronger than it actually is. Yet even if al Qaeda’s fate is also to be Daesh’s, the Syrians, like the Iraqis, will have paid a devastating price for that swan song. •

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Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, Patrick Cockburn would undoubtedly argue that bin Laden’s messages seem stale and passé because they are stale and passé. The slickly produced, seamlessly edited and uber-violent videos now coming from ISIS, or “the Islamic State,” reflect the new face and the new methods of Islamic extremism.

ISIS is the acronym for the “Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” (“al-Sham” being an old Arabic term for what is now Syria), self-proclaimed as “the Islamic State” to reflect its claim to be the restored and resurrected Caliphate, the sole legitimate theocratic polity succeeding the Prophet Muhammad and governing the world’s Muslims.

ISIS’s claim to be the new Caliphate reflects both its theology and its political ideology. In fact, it would probably argue that the two are inseparable, even indistinguishable, politics being a necessary mechanism – and an opportunity – to spread and consolidate the group’s ideology. As Patrick Cockburn reminds us in The Rise of Islamic State, however, few if any groups have been able to master earthly necessities such as politics and military capability while propounding a religious interpretation as zealous, violent and selectively literalist as ISIS’s. Despite this tension, ISIS seemed to emerge suddenly when it conquered swathes of northwestern Iraq in June last year, and after a raft of military successes now covers an area of Syria and Iraq “larger than Great Britain,” as Cockburn reminds us, “and inhabited by some six million people.”

Several new books on ISIS have hit the bookshops recently: not only Cockburn’s, but also Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger’s ISIS: The State of Terror, Jay Sekulow and others’ Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can’t Ignore, and several more. It may be tempting to see these as hasty attempts to cash in on one of the great issues du jour. Yet Stern and Berger, for instance, have extensive backgrounds in terrorism and Islamic extremism, and Cockburn himself has a very impressive pedigree on Iraq. Yes, his book was obviously written and published in a hurry, with some silly errors (“July” rather than “June” on page 15) and some messy transliterations here and there, but he writes as a veteran observer of Iraqi politics and the waves of violence that have shredded its social fabric over the past dozen years.

Cockburn has spent close to a quarter of a century in the Middle East, first as a correspondent for the London Financial Times and later reporting for the Independent. He was co-author, with his brother Andrew, of the 1999 book Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, one of the best works on Iraq in the 1990s, a time when few journalists paid the country much attention. Even during the worst violence of the mid to late 2000s, he was one of the few journalists who, at great personal risk, ventured out into Iraqi streets, shops and homes, reporting with what must have been a depressing frequency on the awful bloodletting of those years.

All this makes Cockburn as good an observer and analyst as any on ISIS, and his book is, overall, a welcome contribution, useful not only for its specifics about ISIS but also for the broader insights it unveils in the process. Cockburn never spares ISIS, but nor does he shy away from identifying actions and policies of the United States and its allies that have handed the organisation opportunities it has so cleverly exploited.

A few of the scrutinies and assessments in The Rise of Islamic State are worth citing and dwelling on to illustrate the book’s style and some of its arguments.

To begin with, Cockburn takes us back a few steps. “The ‘war on terror’ has failed,” he writes, “because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement.” This is a central theme of his book: the view that the “war on terror” and its various manifestations have failed or, indeed, have done more harm than good by driving people into the embrace of Islamic extremists. It is a theme he returns to many times.

He recognises that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were quarantined from the anti-terrorism standards applied to regional states less closely allied to Washington. Yet he tends to underemphasise the domestic settings in which Pakistan’s then-president, Pervéz Musharraf, and the Saudi monarchy operated. In the days following 11 September 2001, Washington gave Musharraf effectively no choice but to cooperate with the US-led war in Afghanistan; in fact, according to Musharraf, the only alternative offered by an American official was that Pakistan would be “bombed back to the stone age.” Yet a swathe of Musharraf’s support base, both among the Pakistani elite and in the population at large, resented the US intervention in Afghanistan, and even more so the fact that Pakistan was dragged into it. Musharraf would probably argue, rightly or wrongly, that in this case he had no choice but to be a political hypocrite.

The Saudi royal family also deserves some of the criticism Cockburn directs at it, but again the realities of Saudi politics get too little attention. The Al Saud do indeed head a wealthy, oil-rich state. But money flowing from the kingdom to extremists is not itemised in the national budget and managed by officials; it is mostly private money, or funds secretly siphoned from state or public sources, sent surreptitiously by sympathetic individuals and groups. Cockburn seems to assume that the Saudis can control every branch of their extensive royal family and all the individuals across their complex political system. No state can.

Cockburn is perhaps on stronger ground in criticising the strategy – or lack of one – of the US war on terror, a set of campaigns conducted in a haphazard fashion and with no central, long-term strategy to guide it (and to avoid such unwanted side effects as the rise of ISIS). For better or worse, though, the fitful US policy is probably mainly the product of a hesitancy in Washington about becoming bogged down fighting wars in the region – much as it has become mired there anyway. To be fair to the Americans, the only recent war they have fought by choice in the region is that in Iraq in 2003. Cockburn is right that ISIS has fed off US back-footedness and indecision, but had things been different there is still no guarantee that such a group would not have emerged. As Cockburn argues, ISIS has its origins in a variety of forces, problems and disastrous misjudgements.

Then there’s the “Arab Spring” and its impact. “The revolutions and popular uprisings of 2011 were as genuine as any in history,” Cockburn writes, “but the way they were perceived, particularly in the West, was often seriously awry. Real revolutions come into being because of an unpredictable and surprising coincidence of people and events with different motives coming together to target a common enemy such as Hosni Mubarak or Bashar al-Assad.”

Whatever the initial optimism, these upheavals have not delivered much substantive change. Only Tunisia has been somewhat successful (despite this week’s museum attack) in making a peaceful transition from autocracy to a more democratic political order. Egypt has struggled to stabilise since Mubarak was removed, while Libya and Yemen teeter on the brink of violent collapse. In Syria, the initial protests morphed, within barely a year, into what is now the nastiest civil war in modern Middle Eastern history.

ISIS is not just the mongrel offspring of al Qaeda and some like-minded clusters, it is also the product of the chaos that came from the Arab Spring; of the violence that accompanied the reactions to it, especially by extant regimes; and of the underlying social and political divisions of Syria and Iraq, which, ominously, exist across much of the region. Cockburn offers a set of insights into what went wrong with the post-2010 Arab uprisings, and these, for a book as brief as this, are quite nuanced. He shows how Western governments and media simplified the uprisings and skewed expectations about their potential; and he also delves into the failings of old authoritarian regimes – their repressiveness, poor economic policies and tolerance or even nurturing of corruption – and how they have fragmented and wedged societal forces and driven some Sunnis in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere into the arms of ISIS and other extremists.

The civil war in Syria, Cockburn writes, “has become like a Middle East version of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany four hundred years ago. Too many players are fighting each other for different reasons for all of them to be satisfied by peace terms and to be willing to lay down their arms at the same time. Some still think they can win and others simply want to avoid defeat.” In Syria, he says, “all sides exaggerate their own strength and imagine that temporary success on the battlefield will open the way to total victory.”

The Syrian conflict is complex even by the standards of the Middle East, where social and other divisions, intervention by regional and other outside players, the use of proxies, and shifts in alliances have often created complicated and opaque dynamics. (The 1975–91 Lebanese civil wars are another obvious example of this level of complexity.) The civil war began as an uprising, not much different in its early months from those that had just overthrown the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt. But, as Cockburn explains, the Syrian regime’s repression of the protests, and the rise of armed opposition gradually turned the conflict into a violent insurgency and then into a civil war shaped by dynamics beyond Syria itself. Sunni–Shia rivalries elsewhere in the region, regional power plays, even to some extent the new cold war–like tensions between the United States and Russia – all these have shaped the conflict.

(The comparison with the Thirty Years’ War may not be as extreme as it sounds. That conflict ultimately killed over a quarter of the population of the German states and claimed perhaps eight million lives all up. The main belligerents took up to a century to rebuild their societies, populations and economies.)

In Iraq, the dynamic is almost as complex. Saddam Hussein’s wars, the 2003 American invasion and subsequent civil conflict reduced Iraq’s GDP to roughly what it was in 1950. Iraq’s violence and the eventual rise of ISIS is a product of Saddam’s brutality, Sunni dominance during his rule, mistakes made by the United States at various points since 1990, sectarian and ethnic problems, and a host of other factors. Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014, Nouri al-Maliki, also deserves – and receives from Cockburn – a good share of the blame.

Like much of what we see and read about the Middle East these days, Cockburn’s book makes for depressing reading. Sadly, but convincingly, he argues that Iraq and Syria are almost certainly unsalvageable as modern nation-states. Syria as it was has either been physically destroyed or had its social bonds ripped apart. The Sunnis are so embittered towards the Alawites (from which Bashar al-Assad and his father hail), and various other social groups so wronged by Sunni extremists, that communal relations can probably never be restored.

In Iraq, Sunni–Shia tensions, already exacerbated by both sides, were pushed past breaking point by ISIS. Arab–Kurdish tensions were amplified by the Kurds’ opportunistic seizure of Kirkuk in mid 2014 while the Iraqi government and military were distracted by ISIS’s conquest of Mosul.

For the outside world, especially in the West, these events should not be dismissed as just a distant rumble. The Middle East matters to us. We should all be appalled by the beheadings, crucifixions and immolations ISIS conducts and films in order to terrorise us or attract the confused, the marginalised and the foolish. The Middle East is a cradle of civilisation and the origin of many of our religious and social values. It is a region that can shape our economic prospects because of the centrality of oil and gas in the world economy. And it is a region in which the Western world, including Australia, has intervened and, in the process, made plenty of mistakes.

We owe them something, including right now some assistance to counter and defeat the influence of ISIS and other such affronts to universal human values. This must include military support. While Cockburn argues, weakly I believe, that military intervention is bound to fail, I would certainly agree with him on the need for support across humanitarian, economic, governance and other spheres if ISIS’s appeal is to be eroded and the group brought to the point of irrelevance.

Otherwise, as Cockburn reminds us about ISIS, “it may not be long before an organisation renowned for its ruthlessness when seeking revenge sends its suicide bombers to destroy American targets.” Or Australian ones. •

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Up until the late 1940s, of course, the Jewish people made up the largest stateless nation. Despite the horrific slaughter by the Nazis, they numbered perhaps twelve million worldwide at the end of the second world war. The creation of Israel in May 1948 delivered them a homeland, even if Israel still remains to be recognised by some states and is yet to negotiate all of its final borders.

The creation of Israel highlighted the statelessness of the Palestinians, and to this day the Palestinians attract perhaps the greatest attention among stateless national groups around the world. Yet for all this attention and the tragedy of their modern history, there are barely eleven million Palestinians in the Middle East, whether in the West Bank, Gaza or Israel itself, or living in the states surrounding the Holy Land.

Other groups beyond the Middle East occasionally make the headlines, but in the case of the Uyghurs in China the numbers are perhaps eleven million, and the Tibetan population is in the low millions. Among the other groups that occasionally make it into our nightly news bulletins – Spain’s Catalans, the Canadian Québécois, the Kashmiris in South Asia, the Roma in Europe – numbers are nowhere near thirty million. The few “stateless” ethnic groups that exceed that figure – African Americans in the United States, for example, or the Tamils in India – make no widespread demands for independence.

So what is the answer? By most calculations, it is the Kurds.

The Kurds dominate the mountainous regions around the borders where Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey meet one or more of each other. Accurate demographic figures for the region are scarce, or at least rarely published, but very roughly, there are perhaps twelve to thirteen million Kurds in Turkey (which would make them around 15 per cent of Turkey’s population); seven million or more in Iran (about 10 per cent of the population); at least six million, and probably considerably more, in Iraq, mostly in the north (accounting for over 20 per cent of the national population); two and a half million or even three million in northeastern Syria (around 10 per cent); about a quarter of a million in the Caucasus, and perhaps another one and a half million scattered through Europe and further afield.

After the better-known Arabs, Persians and Turks, the Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East. While they broadly share a sense of national identity and ethnicity, they are also quite diverse: in fact, many Kurds question the “world’s largest stateless nation” tag because they believe it brushes over the cultural, linguistic and other diversity. Kurdish dialects, for example, have separated almost into distinct languages. They may have the same origins, and sit next to each other in lists of Indo-Iranian and, within that, Persian language groups, but the two main Kurdish tongues, Kurmanji and Sorani, use different scripts and have patent grammatical differences, including such fundamental features as whether nouns have genders and use case endings. (Kurmanji has both, Sorani neither.)

The Kurds also have a variety of cultural traits, not only because they are spread across multiple countries but also because the mountainous regions in which they most commonly live are often a barrier to national cohesion and communication. Thus the strength of tribal affiliations, the stories they tell about culture, and even elements of their foods and handicrafts often vary, even if the basics of their culture derive from the same starting point and are still, for the most part, shared among the various Kurdish groups.

Thanks to geography, the Kurds have been unable to secure a state of their own. Any national homeland would need the blessing of several Middle East states – which have often opposed Kurdish independence or any moves, such as local autonomy, towards it – and would be a mountainous, landlocked territory. But it would also occupy a strategically important position, containing either oil fields or the pipelines that send oil off to the Mediterranean. It would also probably have enough water to support its population and a strong, viable agricultural industry, which is a rarity in the region.

The Kurds of northern Iraq showed both their strategic importance and their military capabilities in June last year, when the forces of the Islamic State, or IS, were seizing Mosul and other key areas of northern Iraq. As the Iraqi army fled in the face of the IS surge, the Kurdish peshmerga (their militia, meaning “those who confront death”) stood their ground. The IS fighters dared not challenge them directly or on any scale. To be blunt: the size of IS’s “caliphate” would be much larger than it is, and life would be more miserable for many more people than at present, if it were not for the reputation and capability of the peshmerga.

At the same time, the rise of IS gave the Kurds the chance to seize the contested and oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which lies on the line between the Arab-dominated centre of Iraq and the Kurdish-dominated north. This has boosted their economic power and their financial autonomy from Baghdad, and emboldened some to start talking more openly about an independent Kurdish state in what is currently northern Iraq.

The rise of IS and the conflict in Syria – where Kurdish groups have fought to protect their areas from Sunni extremists while also trying to push out the Assad regime – are only two very recent reminders of how central the Kurds often are to the dynamics of the Middle East. Yet they receive too little attention when the region is discussed in the media or, for that matter, among scholars. Among the academic specialists, the work of the University of Exeter’s Gareth Stansfield is one notable exception, as is that of Denise Natali at the Institute for National Strategic Studies and Michael Gunter at Tennessee Technological University.

Kurdish Iraq–based Mahir Aziz is rapidly establishing a reputation in the field as well. His latest publication, The Kurds of Iraq: Nationalism and Identity in Iraqi Kurdistan, is a revised version of a book that first appeared, with a different subtitle, in 2011. His focus is on Iraq’s Kurdish population, who are governed by the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, based in the northern city of Erbil. The KRG covers the three Kurdish-dominated northern provinces of Erbil, Sulaymaniya and Dohuk, and unofficially spreads into parts of other neighbouring provinces – including, famously, the contested city of Kirkuk and its surrounds.

Aziz goes back to the early 1920s – when the British had just taken control of the area from the defeated and disintegrating Ottoman empire – to develop his core arguments. The British encouraged the Kurds, and others, to think in nationalist terms but certainly not to seek independence. Although they were promised their own national state by the US president, Woodrow Wilson, as early as 1918, and also in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, the Kurds were unable to translate their growing sense of identity into an independent nation-state. Indeed, the role of external powers in denying independence to most of the Middle East at that time still infuriates many in the Middle East, and the Kurds are certainly not the only minority group that feels aggrieved by the British and the French, or by the local nationalist leaders who followed.

Aziz’s focus is on the Kurdish manifestations of what scholars call “ethnonationalism,” by which he means, in essence, the convergence and overlap between ethnicity and nationalism, and more broadly between ethnic community and national identity, among a self-consciously national group. This approach has considerable merit, given the sense of overall “Kurdish-ness” shared by so many people of Kurdish ethnic background in the region. Kurdish ethnonationalism is also shaped – and limited – by political and geographical divisions, including the experiences of the Kurds under different governments that have shown varying degrees of tolerance for sub-national Kurdish identities or historical narratives.

The political maturity and strategic shrewdness of the Kurds emerged, he argues, after the 1990–91 Gulf war and the creation of a Kurdish safe haven in northern Iraq following the failed uprisings against Saddam Hussein in early 1991. This autonomy allowed for a strengthening and consolidation of Kurdish nationalism which, over previous decades, had been smothered by the Kurdish elites’ preference for making friends in powerful regional and global capitals.

Aziz makes the convincing point that independence is not a prerequisite for a political tradition. The Kurds, he says, may never have enjoyed the former, but on any of a broad range of measures have created the latter. There is a Kurdistani loyalty and pride, he shows, and there is a sense among most Kurds of a link to particular “Kurdish” locations and areas where they are clustered. And there are exclusive Kurdish social and cultural markers, including particular Kurdish attachments to family, tribe and other primordial political units, as well as a unique language, or languages.

What should please – and benefit – non-specialist readers above all is that, despite its ethnonationalism approach, Aziz’s book is not predominantly a piece of academic loquaciousness, nor is it overly focused on theoretical intricacies. Aziz talks a lot about the complexities of identity and nationalism in order to make his approach work, but he also spends considerable time explaining and profiling the Kurds in a more general fashion. The Kurds of Iraq contains a useful background chapter on the Kurds’ history, their language and the types of communities they have formed. This leads into two chapters looking at the period 1921–2008, which provide a solid and very engaging modern history of the Kurds’ politics and social dynamics. Aziz’s final two main chapters bring this material together by looking at university students as an in-depth case study on Kurdish identity and nationalist sentiment, and making some wider observations about the characteristics and permutations of various features of Kurdish nationalism and Kurdish identity. It is only in a couple of early chapters, and again in Chapter 8, that there is a strong dose of academic theory to the book.

Aziz ends with a set of clear and convincing ideas. He shows that territory, and common or shared territory in particular, is central to “Kurdish-ness.” Yet he also acknowledges that there is only a very limited tradition of empowered civil society among the Kurds of Iraq. This means that they lack “a solid base upon which to build or develop a sense of responsible citizenship and the democratic mindset that would enable it [a Kurdistani state in northern Iraq] to stand on its own.” Loyalties are local and patriarchal, most strongly focused on the family and tribe, and Aziz argues that this fosters an inward-looking and miniature sense of group and of society. To formalise, institutionalise and democratise such societies is no mean feat, he writes, and it explains why Kurdistaniyeti (roughly, the promotion of Kurdistani identity, ethnicity and culture) is a complex process that could only begin with the quasi-independence that came after 1991.

Yet the KRG remains geared to governing, at best, a de facto state, not a fully recognised, self-sufficient, sovereign one, Aziz argues. The Iraqi–Kurdistani political elite has held elections, and representatives have come and gone on the basis of the popular vote, but “there is no broad-based democratic culture or fully developed civil society.” Aziz immediately adds that there is, therefore, a great deal of uncertainty about “the prospects for the emergence of a de jure Kurdish political state in the future.” With a growing likelihood that the KRG will take the political leap of seeking recognition as a full, sovereign state, Aziz’s assessment of its political readiness should also act as a warning about the risks of acting too prematurely or extemporaneously. •

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Fatema is the lively matriarch of a family of twenty. Quick to laugh and brimming with stories from five decades of life in Syria, she explains how she ended up in the camp. “I saw myself dying,” she tells me. “We were all threatened. It was really hard for us. It was war. Would you stay in a place that had war? I had to take all my kids and flee. There was no food, there was nothing. Airstrikes every day.” She laments the loss: “Oh my village, oh my village. It is all demolished now. It is empty now.”

Jamal Ahmed is another of the millions of victims of the war in Syria. Although he isn’t part of Fatema’s family, he has joined us while we have been talking. With his greying stubble and moustache, he sits opposite me, smoking, next to Fatema’s son, Ibraheem. He has something to tell me, but I am preoccupied for a while with what others are saying. Eventually, though, our attention moves to Jamal, who tells me he was tortured by the Syrian regime and wants to show me the evidence. I am reluctant: I have seen enough of the remnants of torture, and it seems voyeuristic to comply. He also wants to show me YouTube videos of Syrians being tortured. I refuse the latter, but finally agree to look at his injuries.

He turns and lifts his shirt to reveal a scar the shape of a hawk stretching from one shoulder to the other. The skin, he says, was melted with a cigarette lighter by Syrian government torturers in the shape of the regime’s coat of arms. Now it sags unevenly.

“You have all that you want, but you can’t go out of here”: Jordan’s Zaartari refugee camp. Photos: David Corlett

Jamal was arrested after a neighbour reported him to Syrian intelligence, falsely and for profit, he says. What followed was a nightmare. For a year, he was incarcerated only a kilometre from his home in Sayeda Zainab. But it could have been a whole world away, and his family believed he was dead. As well as having his back mutilated, Jamal says that he was beaten with a hose and given electric shocks. His fellow prisoners thought he was doomed. “No one thought I would go out,” he says. “They slaughtered other people.” He saw these executions, he tells me, with his own eyes.

After his escape, he fled to Jordan with his wife and four children. Now he lives in the Al Zaatari camp.

From its highest point, barely a rise in the flat, barren landscape, the extent of the Al Zaatari camp becomes clear. Two and a half years after it was established here in northern Jordan, its seven square kilometres are home to more than 80,000 Syrian refugees, living just ten or so kilometres from the Syrian border as the crow flies.

This is an orderly camp, organised into districts and numbered streets. A remarkable variety of international agencies provide assistance with a wide range of services including housing, education, food and healthcare. The refugees are given vouchers to exchange for food; some sell them, losing value in the exchange, in order to have the greater flexibility that cash offers. Goods and services are bought and sold in the camp’s commercial district.

Although conditions are good compared with many other refugee camps around the world, and certainly preferable to the horrors that Syrians continue to flee, refugees in Al Zaatari are frustrated. Jamal Ahmed, for instance, complains that the medical care in the camp is inadequate. When he sought assistance, he tells me, his injuries, dramatic and unforgettable as they are, were documented as problems with his leg. He has trouble sleeping because of the pain, but says that he has not been given medicine to ease it. He believes that “no one cares.”

If you consider the international community’s commitment to Syrian refugees, he has a point. The UNHCR suggests it needs just over US$1 billion to respond adequately to Syrians who have fled to Jordan. It has received just over half that amount. This is consistent with the international response to the broader Syrian crisis, more than three million refugees and about six and a half million internally displaced persons, half of whom are children.

Fatema’s son, Ibraheem, is also dissatisfied with life in Al Zaatari. As we talk, he rolls cigarettes that are so strong that Fatema says they have branded them “Diesel.” His young sons come and go, variously sitting on or beside him; his niece asks him to repair a colourful and ornate hair clip. Someone brings him the newest addition to the family – the baby of one of his brothers. He delights in the children and they in him.

”I want to find a place where I can work,” says Ibraheem. 

But, having escaped his hometown, Ghabegheb, in southern Syria about a year and a half ago, after a Syrian army attack, Ibraheem says he is now “like a bird living in a cage.” It’s not that he doesn’t have his basic material needs met: “You have food, you have water, you have all that you want, but you can’t go out of here. It’s really hard. It’s really difficult for me to be in a place where I can’t leave and I can’t see anything around me. Our kids, they can’t see anything outside.” If the Jordanian government let refugees leave the camp, he says, “we would be able to enlighten [the children] and show them other stuff.”

Conditions, although safe, are austere. Housed in configurations of tents and demountable buildings, these refugees feel that their lives are on hold and unfulfilled. “Our daily life is that we go for water, go back to our tents,” Ibraheem says. “Then we bring the bread.” For him, and many others, employment is key. “I want to work. I want to find a place where I can work,” he says. He wants to be able to provide for his family.

Complaints about conditions at Al Zaatari are at once understandable and unfair. It’s hardly surprising that refugees who face an uncertain and extended period in limbo are enormously frustrated. Their lives are in turmoil, and now, years after Syria began to implode, a resolution seems an ever more distant hope.

But Jordan – like other countries in the region – shoulders a considerable burden. Officially, it is home to 618,000 Syrian refugees, but some estimates put the figure as high as 1.3 million. Most of the refugees don’t live in camps like Al Zaatari but in increasingly perilous circumstances in cities and towns, despite the relative generosity of a host government that allows them access to state education and healthcare.

With Jordan’s population standing at around seven million people, the ratio of Syrian refugees to long-term Jordanian residents is one-to-eleven, on the official numbers, or around one-to-five using the unofficial estimates. By comparison, even at the peak of overall refugee arrivals in 2013, when 20,500 people reached Australia by boat, there was just one asylum seeker for every 1150 Australians. In the financial year 2013–14, following the success of the government’s efforts to stop asylum seeker boats, Australia’s humanitarian program included 13,768 places, 11,016 of which were granted to offshore applicants; in other words, Australia accepted refugees and others in need of protection at a rate of one to every 1700 Australians in that year.

If the numbers of refugees in Jordan and Australia are of different orders of magnitude, so are the capacities of the two countries. Jordan has a per capita GDP (standardised to international dollars) of $11,782, less than a third of Australia’s per capita GDP. (Cambodia’s is less than one-fourteenth of Australia’s.)

Australia hasn’t entirely ignored the situation in Syria and its neighbouring countries. In August, the Abbott government announced that it would take 2200 refugees from Syria and a further 2200 from Iraq. It could do this, the government said, because “stopping the boats” had freed up places in the humanitarian program. This is disingenuous: the Coalition had already walked away from its bipartisan acceptance of the recommendation by the Gillard government’s Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers that the humanitarian program should be increased to 20,000; had it kept to that commitment, Australia could have resettled a further 6000 refugees this year. (Earlier this month, as part of the deal to get the Senate to pass radical new legislation granting the immigration minister almost Caesar-like powers over the lives of asylum seekers, the government announced that it would increase Australia’s offshore refugee intake to 18,750 over the next four years.)

But more significant than the government’s obfuscation is the broader discourse into which it fits. Asserting a link between boat arrivals and offshore refugee resettlement feeds into the longstanding claim that refugees who arrive in Australia by boat are not only “jumping the queue” but also taking the places of other, more vulnerable refugees stuck in camps and slums around the world.

Stripped of its specificity, this is a claim to fairness, a notion that seems to be central in the Australian national psyche. As David Marr argued recently, Australians “hanker as much for fairness as we do liberty.” This emphasis on fairness is linked to notions of egalitarianism, tolerance and decency and is encapsulated in the notion of a fair go. It was the offence to fairness that landed the Abbott government’s first budget in trouble. And it is the perceived lack of fairness that leads many to disapprove of asylum seekers who can afford to board boats for Australia.

Many people on the political left have failed to grasp the significance of fairness in debates about “boat people.” When they dispute claims that asylum seekers who come by boat are queue jumpers, their argument rests on the assertion that there really is no queue. Strictly speaking, this is true, but the deeper issue is left unaddressed.

By failing to understand the meaning of the queue jumper construction, the left dodges an important ethical (and political) question: how fair is it that people like Jamal and Ibraheem and their families languish in Al Zaatari while others who can afford it gain access to Australian territory and its refugee protection processes? Some might argue that they are all refugees, regardless of whether they have sought to enter Australia by boat or are in Al Zaatari. This may be correct in law – if they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” then they are refugees and entitled to protection – but international law is insufficient for dealing with the issue of fairness. It deals with rights, not with differing and disparate needs.

But if the left fails to look squarely at this impossible moral question because it would mean conceiving of ways of prioritising people with competing needs, then the right fails to articulate the ethical issues for other reasons. It is prepared to brutalise those it considers to be breaching the fairness principle, for example in Australia’s offshore detention system. If we are not just paying lip service to fairness then we need to confront the extraordinary unfairness in the realm of refugee protection.

“Like a bird living in a cage”: the commercial district in the Al Zaatari camp. 

From start to finish, the refugee experience is unfairness actualised. It is profoundly unfair that people are forced to flee their homes, families and friends because of war and the gravest of human rights violations. It is unjust that the poorest nations of the world do the heavy lifting – to use a phrase that has become popular in Australian political life – by hosting 86 per cent of the world’s refugees.

The unfairness extends to the resettlement programs of countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, which only provide places for a total of around 80,000 refugees annually. Of course, not all refugees want to be resettled in countries like these; many would prefer to return to their homes as soon as it is safe to do so. But according to the UNHCR, 960,000 refugees are in need of resettlement because returning home is not a realistic medium-term option. (Even with this disparity between supply and demand, the full global resettlement quota, strangely, is generally not met.)

Of course, resettlement is not the only way wealthier countries contribute to dealing with the problem of forced displacement; they effectively fund the international refugee system. For its part, Australia committed A$112 million to United Nations humanitarian agencies, including the UNHCR, in the 2014–15 federal budget. While this is not an insignificant amount of money, it is miserly in the context of the needs of refugees and Australia’s capacity to contribute.

In fact, the 2014 budget cut Australia’s overall overseas aid funds – money that might be directed towards assisting refugees or building capacities within countries to prevent the emergence of refugee-producing situations – by $8 billion over five years. In real terms, the Australian aid budget will fall by 10 per cent over the next two years, and will go only a third of the way towards meeting the OECD’s goal of each member country spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid. By 2016–17, Australia’s percentage will have fallen to 0.29 per cent.

Naturally, there are those who argue that Australia’s economy is not in a position to assist more refugees or other humanitarian crises. Viewed from afar, however – from Jordan, Lebanon or Syria, or from Pakistan, Ethiopia or Kenya – the claim that Australia is in a weak economic position is hardly compelling. Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, ranking sixteenth by national income, with GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) of three times the global average.

It isn’t a budget shortfall that prevents Australia from offering the UNHCR more funds: the federal government spent as much on its “stop the boats” policy in the first six months of Operation Sovereign Borders as the entire annual budget of the UNHCR. Or, to view the equation from a different angle: the United Nations has requested US$2.28 billion to assist 12.2 million Syrians in need within Syria – that’s a lot of people and a lot of money – yet Australia spends 3.8 times that amount (to take just one possible example) on superannuation tax concessions to the wealthiest 5 per cent of Australian earners. We are clearly dealing with priorities of a different order here.

Refugee children at Al Zaatari. 

Australia’s response to asylum seekers and refugees is rarely seen in its global context, and so the debate here never takes account of the full complexity of global displacement. Nor does our political discourse deal fully with the ethical questions involved. We don’t view the question of fairness in its totality, even as we obsess about that very issue. Our approach seems to reflect the provincialism of our debate – its exclusive focus on our domestic politics – as well as our inability to see the broader ethical frame. Now that the Abbott government seems to have stopped the boats, there is a real opportunity for Australia to engage more fully in questions of global displacement.

This is also an opportunity to deal with the plight of people who remain caught in the trap of Australian policy. There has been much discussion about the “legacy caseload” – about 30,000 people detained or living in insecurity within Australia’s borders – whose unnecessary suffering could be alleviated without a significant cost to the government’s absolutist border-control policies. There are also a handful of Syrians in Australia’s offshore detention regime who have no real prospect of returning to Syria and no real possibility of building a life in Papua New Guinea or Nauru. It is difficult to imagine that relieving them of their suffering by recognising that they are refugees, as the rest of the world does, would lead to a renewal of boat arrivals in Australia. The cost would be little; the benefits to these people, enormous.

Back in Al Zaatari, Fatema talks of her own powerlessness and resistance. When her granddaughter was born prematurely, she tells me, she was concerned about the baby’s health. She approached the Jordanian police and asked permission to take the baby to hospital. The police refused, saying she needed to go through the bureaucratic process. Lacking faith in the system, Fatema took the child, escaped the camp, and made it to the hospital. To her great relief, she discovered that her granddaughter was well.

With a twinkle in her eye, Fatema says that she wishes she could take me to Syria, where the water is clear and she would give me organic tomatoes from her land. But that seems a long way off. The millions of displaced people – internally and externally – are unlikely to be repatriated in the near future. And Fatema knows the risks. She doesn’t want me to take her photograph or film an interview. She is afraid that if her face becomes known then she may be in danger if she ever returns to Syria. Four women from her village in Syria were arrested the day before I met her.

“What will the government do to them?” I ask.

“What would you expect them to do?” she answers. •

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In 2012, I wrote that “US policy responses to recent events [in the Middle East] appear to be incoherent. There is, however, a much deeper problem underlying these specific failures: there is no clearly defined US national interest at stake.” At that time, the US administration was:

• debating how much support to give to a Sunni insurgency against Bashir Assad

• cautiously endorsing the overthrow of longstanding, and dictatorial, US ally Hosni Mubarak and his replacement by a democratically elected government

• continuing its support for the government of Nouri al-Maliki, who had demonstrated his credentials by defeating anti-American Sadrist militias

• pressuring the regime in Iran, seen as the primary adversary of the United States in the region

• uncritically supporting whatever policies the Israeli government chose to pursue.

Although Washington’s policy was criticised from a variety of perspectives, the predominant theme was that it was not doing enough, particularly in relation to Iran. Senator John McCain was among the strongest critics, rejecting any notion of engagement with the Iranian government.

Two years later, everything has changed, and nothing. The US administration is now:

• debating how much support to give to Assad against the Sunni insurgents, now dominated by the ISIS group

• quietly accepting the emergence of an even more brutal military dictatorship in Egypt

• engineering the replacement of Maliki by new leaders who can mobilise the support of the Sadrists, needed to fight ISIS

• effectively allied with Iran as the main supporter of the Iraqi government

• uncritically supporting whatever policies the Israeli government chooses to pursue.

And, as before, the criticism is primarily that the Obama administration is not doing enough. McCain is yet again calling for military intervention, this time in effective alliance with Assad and the Iranians. Others are suggesting that if troops had not been withdrawn from Iraq (despite the refusal of the Iraqi government to countenance any extension of the schedule agreed with George W. Bush) the United States would somehow have been better able to impose a government of its own choosing. And, of course, the marginal qualifications of Washington’s support for the Netanyahu government have been the subject of bitter condemnation.

The current policy failures continue a long history, stretching right back to the early postwar era, when the United States inherited the poisoned chalice of Anglo-French imperialism, reflected most notably in the secret Sykes–Picot agreement (partitioning the area into British and French spheres of influence), the Balfour declaration (promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine) and the McMahon–Hussein correspondence (promising the same land to the Arabs).

The United States had some apparent successes along the way: the CIA coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected nationalist Iranian prime minister; the Camp David agreements between Israel and Egypt; and the first Iraq war. But these only paved the way for greater disasters to follow: the overthrow of the US-installed Pahlavi regime by the Iranian ayatollahs, decades of failure on the Israel-Palestine issue and, most of all, the second Iraq war.

How could it be otherwise? A rich and militarily powerful country has taken it upon itself to govern the affairs of millions of people on the other side of the planet, of whom it knows nothing. Its emissaries routinely elevate particular individuals, ethnic groups, religious sects and political parties as favourites, then just as quickly dump them in favour of new friends. Its tools vary randomly from overwhelming force to plaintive exhortation, with no clear or consistent rationale.

Unsurprisingly, the United States has no genuine friends in the region. The one constant beneficiary of US support, the Israeli government, correctly views the US state with contempt, recognising that Israel’s political powerbase within American domestic politics means that it need take no account of US national interests or of any attempt by Washington to maintain its long-discredited position as an “honest broker” in the dispute with the Palestinians.

Along with support for Israel, the only constant element in the US approach to the Middle East is a concern to maintain control over the flow of oil (even though the United States is effectively self-sufficient and European oil users are far more concerned about Russia). Both of these seem perfectly calculated to arouse the hostility and suspicion of the vast majority of people in the region.

The horrors now being perpetrated by ISIS on ground prepared by the 2003 invasion of Iraq are such that it is, effectively, impossible for the United States to stand by and do nothing. But its current actions are already producing the de facto partition of Iraq widely advocated a decade ago. A coherent strategy for intervention in Syria is as far off as ever, as is any constructive contribution to the Israel–Palestine dispute.

The best policy option for the Obama administration in the short term would be to stabilise the front lines in Iraq in a way that confines ISIS to Sunni strongholds. Assistance to the less extreme components of the Syrian resistance might also be tried, though this is unlikely to succeed for the reasons set out by Juan Cole.

The ideal follow-up would be an announcement that, from now on, the people of the Middle East would be left to sort out their problems for themselves. In particular, it would be useful to state that the United States has no strategic concern with Middle Eastern oil, and that energy policy is a matter for individual countries to determine according to their own priorities.

Given domestic political constraints, it would be necessary to maintain a commitment to defend Israel against any armed attack. But, as a lame-duck president, Obama could do a great service by honestly admitting that the United States has no capacity to promote a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine. Of course, it would be necessary for his successor to repudiate this admission. But once the truth was stated, it would be impossible to unsay.

In Australia, rather than pretending that we have any genuine concerns of our own in the Middle East, we ought to admit that the only question at issue is whether it makes sense to go to war whenever Washington calls us, and if so, how much we need to spend on this. There are good arguments on both sides, but the need to pretend to be something more than a client state means that they are never made openly.

The trillions of dollars and thousands of lives the United States and its allies, including Australia, have spent trying to direct events in the Middle East have produced nothing but bloodshed and chaos. Rather than waiting for today’s allies to become, yet again, tomorrow’s enemies, it’s time to let the people of the region make what they can of it, with whatever assistance the usual forms of foreign aid may be able to provide. •

The post Will today’s allies become, yet again, tomorrow’s enemies? appeared first on Inside Story.

By any conventional measure, Hamas should now be more than ready to agree to a ceasefire in its bitter war with Israel. Since the bombardments started on 8 July 2014, Israel has expanded its airstrikes on targets concentrated in heavily populated areas, leading inevitably to a gradual increase in casualties, the vast majority of them civilians. The damage to infrastructure in an already weak economy adds to the misery.

Hamas has continued its rocket attacks on Israel. Israel is intent on destroying Hamas’s launchers and munitions stores as well as its “infiltration tunnels.” It has the means to do this, given time; its military capacity is huge, it is the most powerful state in the Middle East, and it enjoys both close cooperation with the United States and technical reliance on its advanced weapons and radar systems.

Hamas has little external support, at least at state level. It is adamantly opposed by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Egypt; Syria and Iran have also withdrawn much support because of Hamas’s backing of Islamist movements. Qatar may remain an ally, but a more cautious one.

All this makes for a reasonable assumption that Hamas must be getting desperate and will shortly sue for peace, perhaps on terms falling far short of its aims. There may well be a ceasefire in the coming days, but the assumption nonetheless has two deep flaws. These must be grasped if any search for a tolerably stable peace is to be grounded in reality.

Israel’s troubles

The first is that Hamas, though facing great problems in Gaza, does not appear to be losing support among the population as a whole. There, Israel and of course the United States are being blamed for the destruction. There is also an upsurge in public support for Hamas across the region, enhanced by coverage of the war on Al Jazeera and other TV channels and the many social-media outlets. These show the human suffering and destruction in Gaza at a much starker level than the largely self-censoring Western media.

The second is that aspects of the conflict are very troubling to Binyamin Netanyahu’s government in ways that are just becoming apparent. Israel’s great projection of power, for example, has not stopped rockets from being fired; one even evaded the missile-screen to land in the Yehud suburb of Tel Aviv close to Ben Gurion airport. The airport was then closed on safety grounds to some of the major carriers (including Delta, US Airways, Lufthansa, Alitalia and Air France). The government immediately opened Uvda airport, north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat, to more traffic.

Ben Gurion airport may reopen to many foreign carriers, but the psychological impact of even a short closure is substantial, especially because many Israelis look much more to their contact with the world beyond the Middle East rather than the region in which they actually live.

The airport closure, as well as affecting national morale, has also damaged Israel’s tourist industry. This is one of the country’s main foreign-exchange earners, and losses are already estimated at $200 million. Here is a powerful symbolism: an impoverished, densely populated and hugely constrained community with hardly any external support was able to put together crude weapons that can affect the economics and psychology of a hugely more powerful country convinced that it can ensure its own security.

The only winners

Another particular worry for Israel is Hamas’s use of the infiltration tunnels it has built. The early phase of Israel’s direct military intervention has been a real shock to the army, for it has revealed a network of tunnels of astonishing complexity – far more wide-ranging than expected. In addition, the fact that Hamas paramilitaries could use a tunnel to penetrate Israeli territory at the height of the war is profoundly disturbing for Israel’s military and government.

Their concern is deepened by the level of casualties being inflicted as the army tries to find and destroy the tunnels. Much of the impact has been on the elite Golani brigade, one of Israel’s five regular army brigades, whose role dates from February 1948 and the war of independence. On a single day, 20 July, thirteen members of the Golani were killed, including a battalion deputy commander; the brigade’s commanding officer, Colonel Ghassan Alian, was wounded.

By late on 23 July, Israeli forces had identified twenty-eight tunnels with sixty-eight entry points, six of which had been demolished. But there were reported to be far more, and it will not be hard for Hamas paramilitaries to utilise many of them in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. If demolition is the only option to prevent further attacks, it also means the risk of continued occupation and more casualties.

Israel is now facing considerable pressure even as it intensifies the war. In a hard military sense this is not surprising: a force with overwhelming firepower facing entrenched urban paramilitaries will use that firepower rather than expose its soldiers. The result is almost certain to mean more civilian deaths and injuries, and greater opprobrium.

Israel is also turning its attention to Hamas supporters elsewhere. That includes destroying their houses on the West Bank, enhancing its existing program of demolitions. The result is more likely to increase than reduce backing for Hamas and hatred of Israel, even among Palestinians who would not normally be sympathetic to the movement.

Binyamin Netanyahu is now facing an unforeseen dilemma. He has both raised expectations of an end to the rockets and insisted that the tunnels must be destroyed; yet it’s almost certain that his armed forces cannot achieve this without recourse to a long-term occupation of Gaza. Such a move, however, would increase casualties on both sides and invite further condemnation.

In this situation, Israel may well accept something short of its own aims. John Kerry may therefore be in a stronger position than supposed. That makes a ceasefire possible within the next week. But even if it is, the greatest beneficiaries of the conflict will be the extreme Islamist movements in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. A continuation of the war would serve these movements’ interests even more. Israel’s actions, as so often, are aiding its worst enemies. •

The post Israel vs Hamas: the flawed assumptions appeared first on Inside Story.

The spectacular emergence of ISIS – the acronym stands for “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or, more precisely, “the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams,” “al-Shams” effectively meaning the Levant – appears remarkable at first glance. Seemingly out of nowhere, it has overrun several key towns and cities in the central-north and central-west of Iraq, including Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul. As they advance, ISIS fighters have brutally abused their enemies and imposed their extreme interpretation of an Islamic state on local populations. They seem to combine the fervour of an ideologically driven terrorist group and the strength of a well-organised militia, and few people appear willing to resist them.

But these are early days in this newest battle for Iraq’s future. ISIS may prove to be much less potent than it appears; certainly, it speaks for very few Iraqis. It faces formidable challenges in holding territorial gains and transforming into anything close to a functional government. And it has a lot more enemies than friends among the foreign governments with a stake in Iraq’s future.

ISIS’s dramatic rise is not so much a reflection of its capabilities as it is of the weak opposition it has encountered thus far. Its forces are highly motivated, for sure, and its leadership has “sold” ISIS very skilfully on social media and deftly created local sources of revenue in Syria. Many of its fighters have extensive combat experience in Iraq or Syria. This sounds ominous, especially since around 800 ISIS fighters overran some 30,000 Iraqi army soldiers and took Mosul on 10 June. But in Mosul, the Iraqi soldiers probably fled out of surprise and because of an unwillingness to fight for an unpopular government and prime minister in Baghdad, not just out of ineptness or cowardice. Because many of the soldiers were Sunni, moreover, they are less threatened by ISIS than the Shiites, who are seen as apostates by ISIS’s Sunni extremists. And Mosul, while certainly a mixed Sunni–Shiite city, is disproportionately Sunni and has long been in violent disarray. In other words, it was an easy target for a group like ISIS.

On the same day, the Iraqi army also fled from Kirkuk in disarray, this time in the face of Kurdish peshmerga militia who took the chance to seize the disputed city. The lesson here is that the peshmerga is a strong, very disciplined and well-trained fighting force, far superior to most units of the Iraqi army.

These events do not mean that ISIS is about to take Iraq as a whole, or even the Arab parts of it. There is even a chance that they will defeated on the battlefield – although what is left of them would almost certainly regroup in the future as a new group, just as ISIS is the successor of al Qaeda in Iraq.

The challenges to ISIS in the longer-term are several. Perhaps most obviously, the organisation is extreme and small in number. It probably has no more than two or three thousand fighters in Syria and perhaps 7000 in Iraq, although these figures are little more than guesstimates. Any higher number, however, would probably include like-minded or opportunistic Sunni militias. Weak as it is in many respects, the 270,000-strong Iraqi army is so much larger, and among its ranks are many Shiites who see ISIS as a grave threat to themselves and their families. More importantly, ISIS would have little chance against up to 200,000 well-organised and well-trained peshmerga from the Kurdish north.

As several observers have noted, ISIS has proven effective at taking territory, but holding it is another matter. To control, exploit and govern a territory, it would need a sympathetic (preferably ideologically supportive) population, almost certainly Sunni. Only a few places in Iraq will give it that base – the mostly Sunni provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin, and corners of a few other provinces; otherwise, it will have to operate in unfriendly areas, perhaps even outright hostile ones in areas where there are sizeable Shiite populations.

Finally, ISIS has few friends and plenty of opponents beyond its own territory. It has been quite effective at taxing the population in areas of Syria under its control, for example, and it might attract a few donations from sympathisers abroad. But it has no real external sponsor. As much as some Gulf monarchies might prefer ISIS to Iraq’s Shiites, they are not likely to openly support it if that means clashing with the United States. Above all, ISIS is opposed by Iran, which would go to great lengths to support the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. It is noteworthy, and bad news for ISIS, that one of the few things on which Washington and Tehran agree is the need for ISIS to be stopped.

The fall of Mosul to ISIS and Kirkuk to the Kurds means that, although Iraq is not necessarily lost to the central government, it has now changed significantly and irreversibly. Even if ISIS doesn’t gain substantial control in Iraq – say, by capturing several provinces and establishing themselves there – it might still prove to be a spoiler. It could also end up controlling a small, unhappy corner of the country, using it as a base to create wider mischief in Iraq or elsewhere.

ISIS could be defeated and all but destroyed as a military force, but this would probably only come through US or Iranian intervention. If Iran intervenes, it would exacerbate Sunni grievances; in saving al-Maliki and his colleagues from the immediate ISIS threat, it would thoroughly undermine him as prime minister.

US intervention is now looking quite likely, but the exact nature of any support is being very vigorously debated in Washington – and with good reason. Not only do many policymakers equate Iraq with past policy failure and an eight-year quagmire – meaning that the chance of ground troops being sent to Iraq in any significant number can be ruled out – but the United States will also limit its actions so as to avoid handing Tehran any advantages. If al-Maliki stays as prime minister – which is looking less likely by the day – he’s close enough to Tehran that American intervention will focus not on helping him, but on defeating ISIS.

The United States only has a few safe options. In the short term, to stop ISIS and then roll it back, the Americans could provide the kind of intelligence that the Iraqi army has little capability to collect. Unmanned aircraft could help collect this material, and could also conduct limited but opportunistic strikes as ISIS targets are identified. More extensive airstrikes are possible, as are a special forces commitment on the ground.

Washington is reportedly considering both of these options: airstrikes, of course, would be easiest to sell to American voters, but would not be very effective without better tactical intelligence on ISIS locations, movements and key figures. For that, they need either Iraqi human intelligence, which is probably not available, or their own special forces on the ground helping gather information and coordinate Iraqi army operations. It is not surprising, therefore, that as the United States considers its options more closely, it is reportedly leaning increasingly towards special forces (although if they do choose this option, it may not become public until well after the fact).

Washington probably has no choice but to intervene somehow. If Iraq collapses, it will pose new threats, both as a base for terrorism and to the stability of other states in the region. If Iran steps in instead, the United States risks handing Tehran a victory, or at least greater influence in the region. Many American allies in the region will be unnerved by a lack of US action against ISIS. At the same time, doing something requires a delicate balance and a great deal of care to avoid getting dragged into supporting Iraqi security or serving Iran’s interests.

The only real winner from these events so far has been Iraq’s Kurds. They have long had semi-autonomy, administering three of Iraq’s northern provinces through the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG. Almost a quasi-state, the KRG has its own parliament and makes many of its own laws, and its peshmerga militia as, in effect, its army. It has been the only part of Iraq that has been stable and safe over the past decade. Under Iraq’s 2005 constitution, the KRG is promised 17 per cent of Iraq’s oil income, although it has started trying to supplement or replace this with oil contracts of its own in recent years: in fact, the news about ISIS has obscured the other major event related to Iraq in the past week, the KRG’s attempt to sell oil directly on the market. A tanker with one million barrels of oil is currently sitting in the Mediterranean while the KRG and Baghdad argue over whether the Kurds have the right to sell it.

Events since the rise of ISIS have strengthened the Kurds’ position but also increased the risk of Iraq fragmenting and falling apart. The KRG’s leadership must be quietly satisfied with events. The Iraqi army’s flight from Kirkuk has shown the peshmerga to be, by far, the superior military force, an assessment arguably endorsed by the fact that ISIS has been careful not to engage the peshmerga in fighting. The KRG will not let Kirkuk go: expect to see the KRG integrate it into the rest of their territory as quickly as possible.

Reportedly the Kurds have already connected the main Kirkuk oilfield up to their own pipeline, letting them drill and export to Turkey. The KRG now will almost certainly meet its goal of exporting 400,000 barrels of oil a day by the end of the year, which would come close to equally the revenues it is promised from Baghdad under the constitution. If it can expand and secure its pipelines the Kirkuk superfield could produce 1.4 million barrels a day or more. If the KRG can fully exploit this field, or even develop it further, they would do so at Baghdad’s expense. Iraq’s planned daily 2014 production rate of four million barrels, with up to one-sixth going to the KRG, would instead see the KRG produce about half of this figure and Baghdad the other half. The impacts on Iraq’s central government and its capabilities would be substantial, and would be a further incentive for the Kurds to seek full independence.

The challenge for the Kurds remain significant, however, and include significant opposition to them formally becoming independent and breaking up Iraq, as well as practical concerns in Turkey especially that this would motivate Turkey’s own Kurdish population to seek independence from Ankara. The Turks have enormous power over the KRG, since Kurdish oil has to travel through Turkey, along pipelines and out of Turkish ports, and they could yet use this power if they thought Iraq’s Kurds were pushing for independence and saw this as a threat.

In other respects, however, the current crisis is probably a boon for the Kurds. Few other Iraqis would take any joy in events, however. Iraq has a violent modern history, but its last decade has been especially horrid. Sectarian and ethnic identities have become entrenched, politics has become fragmented, and a weak state has given often-extreme groups, ISIS among them, the chance to gain a foothold.

To avoid yet further catastrophe, a number of things probably need to happen. Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki needs to withdraw from politics; he has become too divisive, too pro-Shiite, and too authoritarian to unite Iraqis against ISIS. This is becoming increasingly likely. Far less likely, a longer-term reconciliation effort needs to be made, including a final agreement over the control and exploitation of Iraq’s enormous oil wealth, but also a program to give all the main groups in Iraq a stake in its stability. And least likely of all, the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia need to agree on what roles they will play long-term in Iraq.

Otherwise, Iraq’s future is bleak, and there will continue to be extremists who will fight to control the country or a part of it. If ISIS does not succeed this time, another group will quickly succeed it, exploiting the same fears and grievances and soon posing just as much of a threat to its security and that of the region. •

The post Avoiding a catastrophe in Iraq appeared first on Inside Story.

By now, one thing is obvious: there is no single story of Israel–Palestine. In the broad sense, what we have are two competing narratives: Israeli and Palestinian. There is the War of Independence and there is the Nakba – the Catastrophe – and there is all that unfolds from each of these radically different perspectives. The conflict at the core of the creation of a Jewish state in what was Palestine elicits powerful, personal, often heartbreaking responses among Jews as well as Palestinians, whether they live in the region or not.

In 2006, Antony Loewenstein published My Israel Question, his open repudiation of Israel as an Australian Jew. As an American-born Jew with family links to the pioneering Zionists whose history I was researching, I had come to agree with Loewenstein’s position, and penned a long review of his book during Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in that same year. For non-Jews, especially those who have struggled to overcome their prejudices in the light of the Holocaust, these stories can seem impenetrable. What is at issue? Israel is a modern miracle, the Middle East’s only democracy, Western civilisation’s bulwark against Islamic extremism. What’s to argue? they will ask.

Inside Israel, the spectrum of opinion has been wider, the controversies more nuanced. There are human rights groups like B’Tselem, Machsom Watch and Breaking the Silence; and there are the West Bank settlers, supported by the government and, brutally, by its army, yet blatantly contravening international law (the Abbott government’s position notwithstanding). But as Israel’s existential predicament becomes ever more apparent, as its internal contradictions become sharper, Israelis have retreated into what its critics have dubbed “the bubble,” a technocratic, hedonistic, consumerist sanctuary where Palestinians are unseen and attitudes have hardened.

Ari Shavit is such a critic, if not an unsympathetic one. A leading public intellectual, he has been a civil rights activist and is a regular contributor to Haaretz, Israel’s left-of-centre newspaper. His new book, My Promised Land, is one of the best to come out of Israel, up there with Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete, Susan Nathan’s The Other Side of Israel, and the trenchant works of Jeff Halper or Ilan Pappé. Unflinching in its revelations, highly readable, it has been warmly received in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, barometers of shifting American liberal opinion. Like Loewenstein’s book, it is a memoir that breaches the parameters of the genre with a patient, detailed exposition of Israel’s history. It remains idiosyncratic, of course, and Shavit has omitted whole swathes of opposing interpretation, which I will come back to later.

Shavit begins by identifying intimidation and occupation as the two key factors that inform Israeli policy and determine the kind of state Israel has become. In May 1948, by the very act of unilaterally declaring itself a state, it became a colonial power, the Catastrophe for the displaced Palestinians and an affront to the surrounding Arab nations. Its enemies vowed to “push into the sea” this mere sliver of land on the shore of the Mediterranean. Tempered by spells of truncated negotiation, Israel managed to maintain a fragile peace in what might otherwise be characterised as an ongoing state of war. Victorious in the Six-Day War of 1967, when Shavit was a boy of nine, Israel occupied yet more Arab land. Retaining the occupied territories was initially justified as a way of securing peace but, as Shavit concedes, it has only intensified the sense of intimidation: “For as long as I can remember, I remember fear.” It might have been exacerbated by years of Israeli intransigence, but the Israeli feeling of being intimidated cannot be denied. It is buried deep in the Israeli psyche and that of many Jews in the Diaspora.

ZIONISM began as a reaction to nineteenth-century European anti-Semitism and the parlous condition of the Jews in tsarist Russia. It had significant support among English evangelical Christians, men like Lloyd George who saw Hebrew irredentism in Palestine as both a just resolution of Jewish statelessness and a means of establishing a British foothold in the Levant (a similar, though in many ways strikingly different, championship to that of today’s American Christian Zionists). In April 1897, four months before the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Ari Shavit’s great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, participated in a fact-finding tour of Palestine charged with reporting to the Congress. A prominent London solicitor and pillar of the Anglo-Jewish community, the fervently Zionist Bentwich was blind to the pastoral runs, the tenant farms, the mills, the fields, the olive groves and villages dotted through the land. Instead, he saw backwardness and emptiness. When he emigrated to Palestine years later, he joined in what had already become a dedicated colonial project.

By 1920 that project was in full swing. With the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Palestine was now ruled by Britain, mandated to provide the Jewish people with “a national home,” though not to the “detriment” of the existing inhabitants. American Zionists bought a large swathe of land in the lower Galilee known as the Je’ezreel Valley, and there the Gdud HaAvoda, or Labour Brigade, a roving collective of Jewish pioneers, began replacing local farmers. The Gdud drained the swamplands, built the roads connecting the Galilee with the coast, and set up their kibbutz, Ein Harod, at the base of Mount Gilboa. Ein Harod represented the socialist Zionism of the Third Aliyah – in Shavit’s reckoning, the true “genesis of the Zionist adventure.” But British complicity in wholesale Jewish immigration and the consequent removal of Arab tenant farmers from their holdings provoked riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929. As a result of the last incident, the British introduced quotas for Jewish immigrants, at the very moment when the threat to European Jews was deepening and countries like Britain, Australia and Canada were closing their doors.

Patiently, courageously, Shavit tells his story. It is not a pleasant one. Even in the 1930s, when the British Mandate economy was finding its feet, with the citrus groves of Rehovot and Petah Tikvah carving out an English market for their “Jaffa” oranges, tensions between the colonists and the Palestinians sharpened. A reprise of the 1920s riots, but far bloodier and more widespread, segued into an outright revolt that lasted three years, from 1936 to 1939, on the brink of the second world war. The Arab Mufti aligned himself with Hitler, and as Rommel achieved his early successes in North Africa it looked for one truly frightening moment as if Palestinian Jews would share the fate of Jews in Europe.

It was that fate, the industrialised murder of six million Jews, that clinched it for the Zionists. On the one hand was a determination that such a calamity would never be repeated, that the Jews would have a refuge; on the other was the guilt of the entire Western world. It is no little irony that the Holocaust made the state of Israel possible. After the British washed their hands of Palestine (and its seemingly irreconcilable internecine conflict, largely of their own making) the member states of the new United Nations proposed a partition. The Zionists were content with almost half the loaf, but the Arabs were appalled that with three-quarters of Palestine’s population they were being asked to forfeit so much of it. A civil war erupted. In the following year the Zionists unilaterally declared the independent state of Israel and the United Nations voted its support. The surrounding Arab states came to the aid of the Palestinians but failed in their mission in the face of Israeli resolve. The driving belief among the Zionists was that, while Palestinians could find a home in neighbouring Arab countries, the Holocaust was undeniable proof that, when push came to shove, Jews had nowhere else to go.

NINETEEN FORTY-EIGHT: Israel’s War of Independence; Palestine’s Nakba. These are the opening chapters of the two narratives that have shaped the region’s history. Shavit negotiates between them fearlessly and fairly. For a long time Western understanding held that Israel lost its innocence with the occupation, but historians with access to the archives have knocked that notion on the head. There was no innocence in 1948. Though we don’t like the term applied to a country like Israel, ethnic cleansing was there at its inception. Shavit doesn’t deny this. To illustrate what happened, he focuses on the destruction of the Palestinian city of Lydda, a modernised city of 19,000 that enjoyed the boom of the 1930s, and the forced dispersal of its inhabitants. But he doesn’t claim that Lydda was unique, a single unfortunate incident. The Jewish National Fund, which I contributed to as a teenager, helped plant the pine forests that cover what remains of hundreds of obliterated Palestinian villages. As it is in so many settler societies, the landscape of modern Israel is a palimpsest, with its barely suppressed layers of pain and bitterness.

But having acknowledged this, what does Shavit make of it? Or of the occupation, approaching its forty-seventh year? The reason his book has been so well received in quarters where you’d expect these unpleasant facts to be denied, and excoriated in those you’d expect to applaud his acknowledgement of them, is that Shavit believes they were necessary. It was necessary for Jewry to settle in Palestine because of Russia’s Jewish Pale and its pogroms, and because of the strident anti-Semitism gathering force in Europe. It was necessary to remove Arab peasants from their holdings to make way for the kibbutzim. It was necessary to discriminate against Arabs when the very existence of Jews was at stake. It was necessary to refuse to negotiate with “terrorists.” It was necessary to bomb Iraqi and Syrian nuclear reactors, as it’s been necessary to nip Iran’s nuclear capacity in the bud, if not by outright bombing then by assassinating its nuclear scientists. Only the illegal West Bank settlements may have been a mistake, but now that they exist they are just another fait accompli, another “fact on the ground” that cannot be undone. Threaded throughout Shavit’s narrative is his own blind acceptance that all along the way Zionist intransigence was necessary. There was no choice and, however sadly, it must ever be so:

The Jewish state does not resemble any other nation. What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge. The adrenaline rush of living dangerously, living to the extreme.

The trouble with all this is that it’s far from the whole story. Shavit omits the Zionism that, right from the start, was eager to find a homeland in Palestine but wary of establishing a Jewish state. He ignores those who gave voice to the necessity of a binational state, and were jailed for their views. Theirs was the road not taken, but it’s salient to realise that there was such a road. The push for a specifically Jewish state came from Theodor Herzl and the political Zionism that was essentially his creation. It was opposed by a Zionist thinker we rarely hear of these days: Ahad Ha’am, or Asher Ginsberg, whose cultural Zionism had a significant following in Zionism’s early years.

Shavit’s selectivity is particularly marked in his chapter on the Gdud HaAvoda’s work in the Jez’reel Valley and its kibbutz Ein Harod. I know about this because of my research into the life of a great-aunt who was a member of the Gdud, and Ein Harod was only part of its story. The Gdud split into factions, only one of which was involved in the settlement at Ein Harod. The rest preferred to proceed as a roving collective, and after leaving the valley they took what jobs they could get, mining potash by the Dead Sea, lending a hand in building Tel Aviv. They took a stand against the exclusion of Arab workers in the Histadrut, Labour Zionism’s Jewish trade union, and were crushed for their socialist views and Arab sympathies. A group of them became communists and were jailed by the British for supporting the Arab riot of 1929. The jurist Judah Magnes spoke out strongly for a binational state, as did the philosopher Martin Buber, but they too were sidelined.

It’s important, if tragic enough, to recognise that these strands of Zionism existed. And it’s arguable that had that road been taken, the conflict Shavit claims can only be resolved by further war might have been dealt with differently. Despite that alternative, however, critics like me are invariably reminded that Israel, the Jewish state, has been in existence for nearly seven decades, and is an undeniable “fact on the ground.” But this has always been political Zionism’s way, right back to the 1890s: bit by bit, establishing these “facts on the ground.” It is the way today with the West Bank settlements, which Ariel Sharon encouraged by offering cut-rate mortgages to prospective buyers when he was demoted to housing minister after the disgrace of Sabra and Shatila. The combined effect of the settlements, with populations nudging half a million, and of Sharon’s “security wall,” which sliced off even more bits of occupied Palestinian land, is to render any future Palestinian state unviable, even as it’s finally been accepted in principle and promoted as a means to peace by Israel and the Western powers. “Israel will never be the ideal nation it set out to be,” Shavit writes, “but what has evolved in this land is not to be dismissed.”

The supremest irony is that it looks as though the single-state proponents have won the day after all. Israel, along with the occupied territories, or Judea and Samaria, or Greater Israel, as the right wing is disposed to call it, or Israel–Palestine as it is in more leftist parlance, does in fact comprise one state. Only it’s an apartheid one. Moreover, flanked by unstable regimes in danger of succumbing to Islamic extremism, its fate is uncertain, to say the least. Instead of contemplating giving Palestinians and Jews equal rights within a single political entity, Shavit would have Israel revert to the pioneering zeal of old – the macho militarism that put backbone in the Zionist struggle and made of its dream the nation it is today – and fight to the death for it. For what could be the result if one way or another Israel were overrun, or if Israel–Palestine were no longer essentially Jewish?

The answer is to be found in Shavit’s introduction. It is his profoundest belief, shared by many, that were it not for Israel’s existence, Jewishness as we have known it was destined to fade away. In a sense, what kept it going was the ghetto, the very ghetto we sought to escape. In reality, though, most Jews have found their freedom in English-speaking countries like Shavit’s great-grandfather’s, and of course here and in America. But Shavit seems to fear assimilation more than he does war, and only in the Jewish state has the erosion been halted. But if that is its raison d’être, the question to ask is whether the price is too high. Is assimilation really the danger, the lamentable alternative Shavit makes out?

The truth is there has never been a single Jewishness. Rather than our disappearing into a Jewishless space, think how we have made that space Jewish, with our Yiddishisms, our humour, our talents and cuisine, and how such a culture could enrich rather than deny the Palestinian one, and vice versa. Even WASPS eat bagels now, and Jews love hummus. Yes, we’ve had a tragic history; but bending may well be our most humane, our bravest option. Far, far better than defending another ghetto, and blowing up the Middle East in the bargain. •

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
By Ari Shavit | Scribe | $45

POSTSCRIPT, APRIL 2026

Sometime in the late 1980s I received a phone call, or perhaps it was a letter, from Peter Browne, who in those days was editor of the monthly magazine Australian Society. He wanted me to alternate with Stuart Macintyre writing a monthly national affairs column. Stuart was a professor of history; I was carving out a living for myself as a freelance writer.

Around the same time I starting working on what I hoped to be a biography of my grandfather’s sister, a woman I had no idea existed until my mother spoke of her back in the 1970s when I was still a public servant heading up what had been a somewhat unfortunately designated women’s affairs section in the prime minister’s department. All this while I’d harboured the dream of uncovering my great-aunt’s story, and after publishing a couple of novels, a National Library fellowship gave me the wherewithal to focus on the project.

Elisaveta Fich was, like my grandfather, a Jew from Bessarabia, now Moldova, but then a province of the tsarist Russian empire. Unlike my grandfather and two of his other sisters who migrated to the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, great-aunt Lisa stayed in Russia until after the first world war. Then she left for British Mandate Palestine and joined the Gdud HaAvoda, the roving kibbutz whose major work was building the roads connecting the early Jewish settlements there.

It wasn’t long before she became disillusioned with the Zionist project, and by 1929 she had joined the Gdud’s communist faction and was supporting the Arab riot of that year. For this the British jailed the faction’s members and soon dispatched them to what had become the Soviet Union. They set up a commune in the north of the Crimea and, disavowing Zionism altogether, replaced their hard-won Hebrew with Esperanto.

My many years spent researching Elisaveta’s story opened my eyes to the deeply problematic elements in Zionism. Like most diaspora Jews after the Holocaust I had welcomed Israel’s creation. I came from a family of prominent American Zionists, all of whom had known their share of antisemitism; some helped set up the Anti-Discrimination League, one even becoming a World Jewish Congress president. Right into the 1980s I was collecting coins in a tin provided by the Jewish National Fund, which claimed the money was to plant trees in Israel on what had purportedly been a beautifying project. But by the time I sat down to write the book that was to become As the Lonely Fly, I knew that was a lie, one among the many lies Israeli hasbara has perpetrated.

I was living in Canada when Penguin Australia cancelled their contract for the book, and although I was an established Australian writer it was next to impossible for me to find another publisher.

All through the years with Inside Story, Peter has given me interesting, often quirky books to review, and supported my coverage of current events, among them the 2019 battle for Warringah, in which Tony Abbott was toppled by Zali Steggall, now a doyen of the teals. Yet even with my lasting absorption in my great-aunt’s story and the interest it spurred in Jewish history, I’d forgotten all about my 2014 review of Ari Shavit’s The Promise. Given events over the last two and a half years, I am amazed by how pertinent it still is. •

The post The land of living dangerously appeared first on Inside Story.

It is often said that when a film pitched in an area of major conflict draws disapproval and argument from both sides, they must be getting something right. What, on the other hand, can we conclude when both sides actually approve the representation of the struggle in question? This seems to be the case with Dror Moreh’s superb feature documentary The Gatekeepers, which presents the retrospective thinking of six former directors of the Israeli intelligence organisation Shin Bet. Its functions have been (and still are?) like those of ASIS and ASIO, the CIA and FBI combined; counter-terrorism, counter-espionage. The evidence from the six eloquent talking heads should set John le Carré fans off into an ecstatic spin: take these and these tracks into problem-solving, and you become part of the problem in no time flat.

As documentary, the film deploys a conventional range of tactics: the interviews, which take up most of the film’s time; archival film from many sources; and air-surveillance footage, with sights sliding and wobbling as a vehicle moves on an urban grid far below the helicopter, and then a fix on a suburban house, with fragmentary dialogue on the intercom: take them out or not? How much collateral damage? Still shots from the archive, and eloquent moving footage from the Six-Day War: never has that much-referenced chapter of recent history seemed so real. Footage of the Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin moving round, deliberating and arguing, in the days before his assassination on 4 November 1995, letting us see that he wasn’t so saintly; and his busy presence in the huge, surging pro-peace rally in the moments before the event. Here, I’d have liked more on the mentality of the assassin, Yigal Amir, and the part played by religion in impelling his action (he’s still there, jailed for life).

The assassination is the film’s pivotal moment; before it, The Gatekeepers takes in snapshots of the history, including the famous hesitant handshake on the White House lawn, with Yasser Arafat as the more willing of the two, and Bill Clinton (surely intent on his own role in the drama) standing back and between. These registrations of history provide the field in which each of the Shin Bet leaders speaks reminiscence and evidence, beginning with the first in sequence, Avraham Shalom. He’d be quite endearingly elderly, in check shirt and braces, if it weren’t for his unabashed ownership of Shin Bet’s tactics. One of the film’s chapter headings notes that it’s a story of tactics without strategy, a point reinforced by Shalom’s and his successors’ accounts; in supporting the settlements on the West Bank (and failing to comment on the overwhelming oppression of Gaza) they have a lot of trouble reaching the conclusion that – as I once heard a Jewish Australian mildly concede – “yes, the Palestinians do have a case.”

The other, younger witnesses are somewhat more ready to recognise the claims of the dispossessed; and speaking out as they do from privileged positions in the Israeli political establishment, they offer hope against hope. Shalom sees the future as dark; if there’s any light it can be glimpsed in the manifest honesty of the last speaker in the sequence, Ami Ayalon. With his lean, troubled face, he emerges as the most searching of all these highly intelligent operatives; as a presence, he could have been cast by Ingmar Bergman. Moreh gives him the last devastating line: “We’ve won all the battles, but lost the war.”

That clear assessment is the framework for the film’s making, and its circulation. Across the Western world, the recognition of the rights of the Palestinians and the extent of their oppression has been gathering force through the past decade. Thus the film’s appearance assumes a degree of receptivity in the audience; but when it comes to the Australian audience, a question floats around, as it were in the air in the cinema; how many understand what’s happening here? How many see and feel how startling it is that a film thus allows Israel’s agents to answer for their own record? The audience can only do so if they know Middle Eastern history, at least in outline, for the time since 1948. There have been many films; we can retrieve, among others, Paradise Now (2006), Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008); then this year’s The Other Son and The Attack, seen at the film festivals. All these filmmakers get beyond the obvious terms of conflict (and there’s one book I know that lengthens the view invaluably, Ilan Pappe’s History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples). The struggles in this arena are everybody’s business, not least when we too belong to settler societies; and more than ever in this particular moment here, when one unmerciful government is followed by another which seeks to apply always colder and harder forms of examination, exclusion and surveillance to the strangers within the gates.

YOU may have experienced the delights of the much-awarded The Rocket at the film festivals; they are worth revisiting now that this modest local film is on the circuits, not least its evidence of anthropology transformed as cinema. Entirely suitable for children from nine or ten upwards, it carries political freight, legibly but lightly; when governments and rulers, of whatever political stripe, determine on major construction projects, and small sustainable villages are swept away, who really benefits? A boy of ten, Ahlo, contemplates a giant dam, from the base of its wall and then from the walkway above. He goes swimming, and finds drowned statuary, pieces of a lost culture. A second dam will be built; Ahlo, his family and their neighbours will be dragooned away, and chivvied from one campground to another in the mountains of northern Laos. The filming of the settings, the forests and pathways, the beautiful open timber structures which are not quite houses, has both conviction and poetry; these places are well and truly known, and we can therefore be taken a long way into them.

The producer and director team, Sylvia Wilczynski and Kim Mordaunt, were there earlier for their documentary Bomb Harvest (2006); some of that film’s political elements are registered here, when we see that these forests are still littered with lethal ordnance. The story of a lone boy’s high aspiration is a very old one, but here it is stronger because Ahlo’s ambition, and a good deal of his screen time, are shared with his sane and determined little girlfriend Kia; both are motherless, but they have attending angels in Ahlo’s father Toma and Uncle Purple, who is something like a magician. The two kids are wonderfully played by Sitthipon Disamoe and Loungnmal Kaisano – and for them, the film leaves a trail of questions: what next for them? will other films be made in Laos? They should be; these filmmakers have opened a trail into a landlocked, poverty-stricken country which could well be better known. If The Rocket is something of a fairy-tale, there’s documentary bedrock underneath it. •

The post Losing the war appeared first on Inside Story.

IRRESPECTIVE of the popular and military moves against political Islam in Egypt last week, the likelihood of an Islamic state emerging in the Arab world has always been extremely low.

Over the 1352 years since the death of Imam Ali (Prophet Mohammed’s cousin and the fourth “Rightly Guided Caliph”), not a single Islamic state has emerged in the Arab world. None has had a legislative structure based exclusively on Koranic jurisprudence; none has been ruled by a leader selected on a theological basis; and all have been conspicuously based on national, tribal or familial foundations, with Islam only an overarching frame of reference.

There is no space here to analyse every Arab (not to mention Persian or Turkish) state over the past thirteen centuries. But it is useful to dissect the ruling structure of the largest and most important of them.

The Umayyads, the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the death of Ali, anchored their rule in a familial hereditary system that was established after fighting (and massacring) Prophet Mohammed’s own offspring. They subjugated North Africa, Andalucía and Iran, and also entered the Islamic republics in southern Russia. The Umayyads’ legitimacy – which was never fully established – rested on the buy-in of the religious establishment, initially in Al-Hejaz (Islam’s birthplace) and later in various Islamic learning centres in the Levant.

The Umayyads never claimed that their family-heads (the Islamic caliphs) were the religious leaders of the Islamic nation; that position was left to the venerable scholars of Mecca and Medina (and later in Damascus). The Umayyad rulers were emperors of the expanding state that bore their name, and it was no coincidence that their courts were modelled on those of the eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople. On the many occasions when the Umayyads’ rule was challenged by those who had a solid claim to be the real guardians of the principles and teachings of Prophet Mohammed, their response came in the form of military campaigns. In one instance the Umayyads’ armies burnt down the Kabba, Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca.

Over the past thirteen centuries, numerous dynasties in the greater Middle East have copied the Umayyads’ ruling scheme. First, grab power militarily. Then uphold the notion that the state is “Islamic.” Next, ensure the recognition and obedience – though not necessarily the approval – of the most venerable (and famous) of the Islamic scholars of the age. Afterwards, rule as you please without any serious regard to Islamic jurisprudence, principles or identity.

An Islamic pretext was sometimes used to establish legitimacy, or to gain momentum before militarily challenging the ruling dynasty of the day. The Abbasids, descendants of an uncle of the Prophet Mohammed, used the notion of a “just Imam from the house of Mohammed” as the slogan for a vast clandestine operation that built an army of followers (the majority of them were Persians). They developed a sophisticated funding and money-distribution system spanning what is today Iran, Iraq, and the eastern Mediterranean, before openly challenging – and obliterating – the Umayyads. Around 250 years later, in the tenth century, the Fatimids used their claim of descent from Prophet Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima (Imam Ali’s wife), to entrench their rule in what is today Tunisia, and later to launch a military challenge to the Abbasid rule in Egypt, conquer the country, and establish their new capital, Cairo (the city victorious). The Ottomans followed a similar path in the sixteenth century, only cementing their claim as the political leaders of the Muslim world after expanding their rule to the Levant and Egypt (the home of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most venerable seat of learning), and after taking control of Al-Hejaz and assuming guardianship of Islam’s holy shrines.

In all of these examples, and others, the ruling format remained the same. And never did these different rulers, even those directly descended from the Prophet, claim that they were the theological authorities of the Muslim world. That remained the job of the scholars in the centres of Islamic learning, towns that were increasingly detached and geographically distant from the political capitals.

THE format has continued in modern times. The state that Mohammed Ali Pasha established in Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century became the model for almost all the states that emerged in the Arab world in the second half of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. Ruling Egypt until the 1952 coup d’état that ended the country’s monarchy, the successors of Mohammed Ali maintained the “Islamic nature” of their state and ensured cordial relations with – and control over – Egypt’s powerful religious establishment, Al-Azhar. But all the legislative, judicial, economic, social, educational and political systems that they built were imported from Europe. Even in Arab states whose ruling families anchored their legitimacy in a religious pedigree – the Hashemites in Jordan and the Alawites in Morocco, for instance – the same pattern endured.

The social and political modernisations that accompanied the Arab liberal age from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century posed a significant threat to religious institutions. Secular education, Western social norms (the mixing of men and women in public spaces, for instance), and the new cultural orientation of Arab societies (towards Paris, London and Vienna) in the early twentieth century not only diluted the religious establishments’ traditional sway over their societies; more importantly, they were perceived – and not just by the religious establishments but also by different social segments – as a challenge to the overarching Islamic identity of these societies. Some luminaries sought a meeting of minds between “modernity and the heritage and teachings of the religion of rationality,” in the words of Egypt’s grand scholar at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mohammed Abdou. Others saw an impending confrontation: a need to defend Islam from the “West and its subjects,” the subjects being the Arab and Muslim liberals who spearheaded advancements in Arabic education, translation, literature, theatre, music and, later, cinema.

Two narratives gradually emerged. The first, fuelled by the cultural developments of the Arabic liberal age, invoked the Arabic or Mediterranean identity of the societies in this part of the world. Some of the thinkers of this movement completely ignored the influence that Islam has traditionally commanded in these societies, and their highly secular Arab philosophical currents had their days in the sun (mainly in the 1930s and 1940s) but quickly vanished from the limelight. The views that lasted were those of leading thinkers who tried to merge the traditions of the Islamic heritage with modern thinking. Although they emphasised that Islam (loosely defined as a “civilisation”) is the overarching frame of reference for Arab societies, they worked to build the emerging Arabic states on modern political, economic and even cultural institutions. The results were the 1923 Egyptian constitution (the model for many constitutions in different Arab countries), the acceptance of the notion of a constitutional monarchy (initially in Egypt and later to a lesser extent in Syria, Iraq and, briefly, Libya), and the beginnings of credible checks and balances between different authorities (the monarchy, the parliament, the judiciary, in addition to formidable political-economy power centres).

The support of the religious establishment, a key pillar of the old ruling formula, was increasingly waning, and Arab nationalism further strengthened this trend. The tsunami that Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser unleashed in the Arab world from the mid 1950s to the late 1960s, which continued for roughly a decade after his death in 1970, was strictly secular, though the notion of independent state institutions was sacrificed to hero-worship. Arab nationalism, at least in its first two decades, imbued Arab politics with something new: the consent of the middle and lower middle classes to a conspicuously secular governing ideology – one not imposed by Europeanised elites but supported by the masses.

The potency, momentum and immense success of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s antagonised not only religious establishments across the Arab world but also the movements born in the early twentieth century to “defend the religion” – most notably Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. But in the 130 years between the emergence of the Arab state in the 1880s and the “Arab Spring,” the forces of the Islamic movement never managed to stall the advance of secularisation.

OVER the past two years, the rise of political Islam across the whole of North Africa and its commanding presence in the Eastern Mediterranean (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the various Islamist groups in the Syrian opposition forces) have fuelled the belief that some Arab countries face the prospect of a gradual Islamisation. This movement takes many forms, but two are paramount. The first is the attempt of various Islamist groups to Islamise state institutions: stressing the Islamic nature of their societies in the new constitutions of their countries, linking the penal code of their countries to the laws of the Islamic jurisprudence, putting religion-related restrictions on freedom of expression, and significantly enhancing the influence of Islamist political economy power centres. The second form, championed by some assertive Salafist groups, aims to Islamise “societies,” which such groups see as having strayed from the “correct Islamic path.”

These forms of Islamisation – and of course the rapid rise of Islamist groups to power – have overwhelmed many Arab liberals, most of whom are isolated and leaderless and have tenuous links to the masses of the lower middle classes and the poor. The result has been nervousness, antagonism, detachment, increasingly violent social confrontations and, sometimes, emigration. In fact, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean are witnessing alarming levels of departure among the well-educated who are able to find jobs ly.

But this Islamisation will not succeed. First, despite the piousness of the vast majority of Muslim Arabs – the commanding majorities of the region – Islamisation inherently challenges the national identities of each country. Despite clever rhetoric, it means the domination of one component of Egyptianism, Tunisianity or Syrianism over other components that have shaped these entrenched identities. This is especially true in the old countries of the Arab world, the ones whose borders, social compositions and, crucially, identities had been carved over long, rich centuries. And the more the Islamist movements continue to thrust their worldviews and social values, the more they will disturb these national identities and the more agitated – and antagonised – the middle classes will become.

Second, these efforts at Islamisation take place when almost all of these societies are undergoing difficult – and, for many social classes, painful – economic transitions. And there is no way out. The ruling Islamist executives are compelled to confront the severe structural challenges inherent in the economies they inherited. Some can buy time and postpone crucial reforms with foreign assistance (which comes at a political price). But sooner or later they will have to make the tough socioeconomic decisions that these structural reforms require, and they will be blamed for the pain that ensues. Some of the constituencies that had voted them into power will rapidly seek other alternatives.

Third, demographics will work against Islamisation. Close to 200 million of the Arab world’s 340 million people are under thirty. As a result of the many failures it has inherited, this generation faces myriad socioeconomic challenges. A culture of protest and rejection has already been established in its ranks, and young people will not accept indoctrination – even if it is presented in the name of religion. Almost by default, the swelling numbers of young Arabs, especially in the culturally vibrant centres of the Arab world (Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, Damascus, Casablanca, Kuwait and Manama), will create plurality – in social views, in political positions, in economic approaches and in social identities and frames of reference.

Finally, this Islamisation project will suffer at the hands of its strategists and managers. The leaderships of the largest Islamist groups in the Arab world have immense experiences in developing and managing services and charity infrastructures, in operating underground political networks, and in fundraising and electoral campaigning, especially in rural and interior regions. But they suffer an acute lack of experience in tackling serious political-economy challenges or administering grand sociopolitical narratives. This lack of experience will translate into incompetence.

These factors will take time to unfold. The second decade of the twenty-first century will be transformative not only for Arab politics, but more importantly for Arab societies. Amid the gradual fall of the old order and the highly likely failure of Islamisation, young Arabs will be searching for their own narratives. In some countries the process will be smooth, in others it will be bloody, and in most it will be protracted with spikes of tension. The result will be a plethora of different, competing social narratives. In many cases, we will see interesting mixes of various ideologies (Arabism, Mediterraneanism, Islamism and others). But just as Arab states have never been exclusively Islamic for over thirteen centuries, Arab states will not be Islamic in the foreseeable future. •

The post The Islamic state in context appeared first on Inside Story.

THESE days, any Israeli story can also be an Australian one. The case of Ben Zygier, the Australian Jew who migrated to Israel, took out Israeli citizenship and ended up working for Mossad, the Jewish state’s notorious overseas intelligence unit, puts this in high relief. Despite the fact that fighting in Syria is illegal for Muslim Australian citizens, Jewish Australians can volunteer with impunity for service in the Israel Defence Forces.

Yet there’s a deep reluctance to address such anomalies, for reasons that aren’t too hard to find. In the decades after the second world war, Australia had the highest per capita concentration of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. The Holocaust legitimised Zionism as had no other event in Jewish history, giving tragic credence to Herzl’s warning fifty years earlier about the lethal results of European anti-Semitism. In that light, to criticise Israeli policies or even to question the wisdom of opting for a Jewish-dominated state in the Middle East is tantamount to heresy in the mainstream Australian Jewish community. While claiming that all Jews ever wanted was to have a nation like any other, with its own respected legitimacy and undisputed territory, Israel and its supporters maintain that the Jewish state is special, that it is not bound by the laws that hold for other countries, and they defend this position with a combination of denial, indifference and that specifically Jewish sophistic argumentation that has its origins in the Talmudic tradition of pilpul.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the ongoing refusal to acknowledge that the rights of the Palestinian people – the majority in British Mandate Palestine – have been ruthlessly and cunningly abrogated. After the opening of archives on the 1948 war of independence, or what Palestinians remember as the Nakba, Israeli “New Historians” such as Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev and Benny Morris drew on the record to revise the official history. Yet almost as soon as the archives were opened they were closed again. Pappé, effectively in exile now at a British university, has been ostracised for his work on the expulsion of Palestinians, including those who were forced from their homes but were able to stay within the 1948 borders. Segev has moved further towards a binational narrative. Of the three, only Benny Morris has recanted, accepting that Jewish forces did commit atrocities but claiming they were justified.

It is perhaps in Israeli fiction that the existential complexities of the legacy of 1948 have been most sensitively dealt with. A caveat here: I can no more keep on top of the fiction than absorb the wealth of historical material. But there aren’t many recent novels I’ve come across (though I confess to a reliance on books written in English or translated) that haven’t exhibited concern for the Palestinians.

A case in point is Edeet Ravel’s 2003 Ten Thousand Lovers, the first in a trilogy that was completed in 2005. Born and raised on a kibbutz in the Galilee, Ravel divides her time between Israel and Canada, and writes in English from a Canadian perspective.

Lily, the narrator of Ten Thousand Lovers, is also half-Canadian, a student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who hitchhikes on weekends to Tel Aviv. She’s picked up by Ami, a well-paid ex-actor who is immediately upfront about his job as an interrogator of war prisoners. Lily makes clear her uneasiness:

We should try a little harder to make peace. We should withdraw unilaterally from the territories for a start. It’s the least we can do. A Palestinian state would solve everything. It’s only fair.

As they get closer Ami reveals to Lily that it isn’t the army he belongs to but Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, though the work has become increasingly difficult for him. “This is what we’ve decided,” he says, trying to justify it. “We’ve decided torture is OK. Detention is OK, war justifies everything. We’re doing this to survive, to avoid repeating our history.” Yet when he makes a crucial decision to reject that life, it’s a Palestinian friend who will play an important role in the novel’s resolution.

The most celebrated recent Israeli novel – and possibly the most celebrated of all time – is David Grossman’s Woman Flees Tidings, published in 2008 and published in English as To the End of the Land. Near the novel’s beginning, after a prologue set in the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel won what we call the occupied territories, the heroine, Ora, takes a taxi ride. It is now July 2000, the time of the Second Intifada, and the Israel Defence Forces are mobilising. Ora is accompanying her soldier son to the Gilboa region, where the forces are meeting. Their Palestinian taxi driver Sami, who has driven for the family for decades and is almost, in the way of these things, considered part of it, came without question when Ora called, but is quieter than usual. Fixated on what she feels is the certain loss of her son, Ora overlooks how Sami might feel about this journey. Israel is a tiny country for such overwhelming considerations, and a taxi ride from Tel Aviv to Gilboa is no great distance. But the road, a convoy now, is crowded, and no one, not even Ora, can fathom where it might actually lead.

Both these novels have Israeli Palestinian characters who are central to their themes yet remain somehow peripheral. Perhaps there’s a limit to how much Israeli Jews, even the most sympathetic, can afford to arrogate to themselves the sensibility of the “other.” It’s not that they may not comprehend it, though that is too often the case, but writers can be reluctant, even when empathy does exist, to usurp that sensibility for their own aesthetic purposes. Whatever the limitations, though, these fictions were an advance on much of what preceded them.

WE MIGHT expect that the latest fiction would move forward from that position. If we’re to read Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid for signs of this, though, we can only be disappointed. There are hardly any sympathetically portrayed Palestinians in this book. In fact, there are few sympathetically portrayed characters full stop, although their stories, perhaps for that very reason, do elicit compassion. They are narrated by each of the three protagonists: Lea, Yael and Avishag, born in 1983 – adolescents when we meet them, women in their twenties at the novel’s close. The subject of their stories is the rite of passage they share with all Israeli Jews, male and female, aside from the orthodox, after they graduate from secondary school. That is to say, their stints in the army.

It’s noteworthy too that the women come from Mizrahi or Sephardic backgrounds, the children of Jewish immigrants hailing from Middle Eastern countries, one step above Israeli Palestinians in the peculiar Israeli pecking order that has had the European Ashkenazim as its aristocracy. Only Lea, with a German-Jewish parent and “European looks,” has access to this privilege, pitifully played out on the high school playground where other girls clamber round her for acceptance. But Lea’s claims are compromised by her other, Moroccan parent, and consignment to this dusty ghetto-like village, dangerously close to the Lebanese border and peopled for the most part by Mizrahim and struggling single mothers. “A whole town of crazy bitches,” a teenage boy casually, cruelly, remarks. Avishag’s family has been shattered by the suicide of her older brother Dan. Yael, whose first-person voice opens the novel, has been in love with Dan, yet so much of the tragedy is buried under that special brand of toughness Israelis have cultivated since the earliest pioneer days and which, by the 2000s, has spread to every corner of society.

Everything is blanketed by the ubiquitous presence of war. Both Lea’s and Yael’s mothers work for companies making machine parts that one way or another end up in planes. Soon enough the girls are in boot camp, suffering the standard, sanctioned humiliations. Then they are given postings in the army proper.

For Yael it’s on Route 433, close to a Palestinian village, where she is a weapons instructor. Discovering that boys from the village have managed to steal her helmet, a colleague observes, “These boys are like rats… they’d steal the entire base if they could.” Next, the boys take the “closed military area” signs off the base fence, and then the bullets from target practice. Then they are shot at.

Apart from the ramped-up tensions with Israeli Palestinians, Israeli society has been increasingly separated from West Bank Palestinians ever since the building of the wall. Lea is sent to the military police, guarding the Hebron checkpoint, in a year when Israel “closed the sky” for other foreign workers and needed Palestinians for construction work again. “We needed them, but we were also a little afraid they’d kill us, or even worse, stay forever. These were both things the Palestinians were sometimes into doing. That’s why I existed.”

In both these instances, the girls’ interaction with Palestinians takes place through a military barricade; for neither of them is it possible, as it is in previous Israeli novels, to begin to know Palestinians as people. Palestinians, separated by the roads and the wall, are now entirely “other.” In Avishag’s case, down at the Egyptian border, Sudanese refugees appear as mere pixels on her green computer screen.

Shani Boianjiu was born in Jerusalem in 1987 and is the youngest-ever recipient of the American National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. That means she’s younger than her characters, though Yael, for one, appears to be at least partly autobiographical. As well as this first novel, released in the United States last September, she has published stories in the New Yorker and other US literary journals, making her something of a wunderkind, especially when the fact that she is writing in English rather than her native Hebrew is taken into account.

The reviews of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid have been mixed, the book frequently panned for the very reasons I like it. Its terse, colloquial prose, the irony, its shifting tenses and points of view all lend the novel a rhythm that overcomes the anomie to which her characters seem condemned. That many parts of the narrative betray their origins as stories might bother some but poses no problem for me. Yet I admit that my interest in this novel has as much to do with how it demonstrates what has happened to Israel over the years, especially since 1977 when Likud first came to power, as it does with my passion for literature.

SO WHAT has been happening? Diana Pinto’s Israel Has Moved charts these developments from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider. She describes herself as an intellectual historian and policy analyst, and comes across as a kind of Jewish-intellectual Eurocrat. Based in Paris, she’s been associated with London’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research and has spent many years studying the place of Jews in post–cold war Europe. Most pertinently for us, she relates how she told an Israeli friend that “I had never personally considered Zionism to be a valid life choice for me, that I criticised Israeli politics, but at the same time I could not conceive of a world without Israel.”

Pinto argues forcefully that Israel is thumbing its nose at its European benefactors and at this juncture is even prepared to ignore the United States. The reasons are manifold, but largely derive from the creeping Jewish settlement of Palestinian land since 1967, the changing demographics within the Jewish population, and the current engagement with the non-European world through Israel’s new emphasis on consumerism and developing and marketing its cybertechnology. In other words, like the rest of us, Israel is looking towards Asia, and especially China.

But Pinto delineates a paradox. As Israel looks ever outward, away from its European origins and the boiling Middle East tensions, its gaze is inward in a way it has never been before. Again, both the cause and expression of this – Israel’s “autism,” as Pinto calls it – are complex. The old Ashkenazi attachment to the land, manifest symbolically and materially in the kibbutz and its agricultural base, has all but disappeared, while the strident if often cynical militarism born from the need to protect the land has grown exponentially in size and power.

When the children and grandchildren of the generals who fought in Israel’s many wars are conscripted for their mandatory two years’ service they are not to be found on the frontline posts where Boianjiu’s characters serve, but in the elite branches of military command and civilian intelligence where Ben Zygier sought to make a name for himself. But, as Pinto tells it, Israel isn’t all that interested anymore in Diaspora Jews making our aliyahs. Our role is to remain where we are in order to better defend her, though Israel is making it harder than ever to do so, and many, like me, have given up pretending.

Yet this fascinating group of essays gripped me throughout. Pinto is skilled at plucking out details of everyday Israeli life and highlighting their significance – noting, for instance, the efflorescence of intricately decorated skullcaps (kippot) on more and more male Jewish heads, even those of secular Jews, or walking the streets of the Muslim quarter of old Jerusalem and seeing “young ultraorthodox women with their strollers coming out of houses that seem to contain no visible sign of previous Jewish life.” She writes of the roads that separate Jews from Palestinians, among them Route 433, where Boianjiu’s Lea is stationed, the route that “incarnates perfectly the schizophrenia of Israel’s history.”

Pinto’s text is crowded with intriguing symbols – the menorah, the Hill of Evil Counsel, the bubble, the tent. And if in one sense they are telling, and in another their very abundance can unmoor their separate meanings, the argument is clear. The Oslo Accords are dead; the “two-state solution” is merely the rhetoric of Western politicians. Israel is going its own way, global in its economic orientation while ever more insular in its politics, with the Palestinians ever more invisible in this evolving outlook.

Israel Has Moved is depressing and oddly futuristic in its outlook. “Israel’s old agronomy,” Pinto writes,

the one of much-heralded orange and avocado miracles, sang the praises of an ever deeper rooting in the nation’s soil, whereas the military values of the young state were all based on the notion of defendable terrestrial borders. The new technology instead is all about mobility and flexibility, with little, if any, anchoring in any soil or with any clear national identity. Can this change hearken back to the Middle Ages when the Jews, before their emancipation, incarnated these same values in the financial and commercial realm?

With the proliferating start-ups having global transnationals like Google as their clients, Pinto asks, “Does this strategic choice echo in its own way the old Jewish tradition of dialoguing with kings rather than their people?”

If this, indeed, is the future, it threatens to be as scary as the past. But the fact remains that the old agrarian Zionist solution has borne its own crop of bitter fruit. •

The post Israel’s shifting moorings appeared first on Inside Story.

THE French film Le fils de l'Autre, currently in circulation as The Other Son, has been dismissed in various critical quarters for reasons which are of some interest in themselves. Because of its reservedly hopeful view of Israel–Palestine relations, it’s been put down as a superficial, feel-good exercise; Slant magazine’s respected critic Chris Cabin wrote that while there might be hope for peace with younger generations, “another sentimental film made by a blatant outsider doesn’t make this hope any clearer or convincing.” He misreads; he also fails to listen to the film, in which dialogue is conducted in four languages, Arabic, Hebrew, English and French. Lorraine Lévy’s winning lightness of directorial touch isn’t sentimentality; the intractable problems are not shortchanged. If there’s a smear of soap at the end, a certain comedy rescues it. More importantly, she is not an outsider. It could be argued that when it comes to the Israel–Palestine conflict, nobody is; the tension is registered in one way or another in every Western community. In this film, however, France is recurrently present offscreen; with Israel and Palestine, it works as an operative third term. One of the two young men at the centre of the story has been studying in Paris; returning, he brings in the consciousness that there are wider worlds from which to think about his life as a Palestinian – or an Israeli – and he has to work out which of those he is.

The film is built from the ancient plot device of switched identities – go back to The Comedy of Errors and its sources in antiquity. Two male infants, born in Haifa on the same day in 1991, are evacuated during a Scud bombardment, then handed back to their supposed parents; the Jewish couple’s son is raised in a Palestinian family, the Palestinian child by Israelis. When they reach eighteen, and the supposedly Jewish son must prepare for military service, a blood test triggers investigation; the truth comes out, and all concerned must deal with it. Here we’re called on to suspend disbelief, as the fable solidifies into realism in real settings. In the tense, austere sequence in which a doctor brings the two couples together and offers the hospital’s inadequate, long-overdue apology, the film takes off from its moorings. The doctor sets out to explain in Hebrew, but the Palestinian couple won’t understand; he continues in English, which is the language generally used by both of the young men (“you’ve got my life – don’t mess it up”).

Thus two decent, ordinary families, cast by history as opponents in a seemingly deadlocked struggle, must engage with each other through their children. Nothing could be harder, since they are quite literally on opposite sides of the fence, the massive concrete wall that cuts through communities, separates workers from workplaces, friends from friends and kin. It is seen recurrently in the film, not to force political points but as a grimly inescapable part of the environment. The stages of the story are marked by passages through the checkpoints, where the guards treat Israelis and Palestinians rather differently. Israeli teenagers disport happily on a beach, where we can see the Tel Aviv Sheraton in the background; there, Joseph (Jules Sitruk), the young Palestinian who has grown up as a Jew, moves away from his contemporaries to struggle with the news. The depth of the problem, and the force of Jewish identity, emerge in his interview with the rabbi (Ezra Dagan). The Palestinians’ supposed son Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi) returns from study in Paris to discover that he is in fact Jewish.

The French–Israeli mother, Orith (Emmanuelle Devos), is seen running her medical practice, and, when she wants time to think, walking out on a pier to watch the waves: images of freedom and authority unavailable to her Palestinian counterpart, Leila (Areen Omari). They make friends, however, with an ease that’s impossible for their husbands, and despite the manifest inequality of households and living conditions; we’re given a strong sense of the ramshackle lanes and cramped quarters in the homes of the West Bank. The Palestinian father, Said Al Bezaaz (Khalifa Ntour), is an engineer who can’t get professional work inside the fence, and consequently works as a car mechanic. Sharing an uneasy social visit with Orith and Alon (Pascal Elbé), an Israeli military officer, Said breaks into rage; the word occupation is used. Later, the men move into a stop-start process toward co-existence – there’s little prospect of friendship. They’re seen sitting, in wordless discomfort, over coffee. That emotional gulf; the men’s struggle to deal with it; the anger of Leila and Said’s older son Bilal, who feels not only the loss of the brother he thought he had, but also a deep sense of betrayal – all these build an account in which none of the problems are softened or abbreviated.

The mistranslation in the title becomes pertinent: Le fils de l’Autre (with a purposeful capital A) means not “the other son” but “the son of the Other,” and that’s rather different. It sets the viewer in a strange double position, a kind of suspended ambiguity; she must try to look on that otherness from both sides, and also from within its force-field of questions. She is sitting in an audience in this Western country where pro-Palestinian expression, even when it comes from respected academics, can incite charges of anti-Semitism and quite vicious abuse; where Australians of Middle Eastern origin are subjected to taunting and violence; and where the first Australians themselves are – still – marginalised, impoverished and derided. The film invites a liberal, humane response, and some proper discomfort as well. We note, repeatedly, that there’s no way you could sit on that fence; it’s topped with coiled razor wire from end to end.

MIRA NAIR’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was written, in part, by Mohsin Hamid, whose novel was the film’s groundwork. In a cafe in Lahore, handsome young Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), caught up in a high-profile kidnapping, sets out to tell his story to an American journalist, Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). The privileged son of an esteemed Pakistani poet, Changez found his way through Princeton to a financial world mentor (Kiefer Sutherland) and thus to a promising Wall Street career. Sutherland does a great job projecting the certainties, and the half-masked unease, of the masters of the universe (from his part of the story, go back and take another look at the documentary Inside Job; it’s around on DVD, and very much worth having). Then the twin towers fell, and as a Muslim abroad, Changez found himself harassed, arrested on no pretext but his appearance, strip-searched and humiliated; and his American girlfriend (Kate Hudson) disastrously underestimated the effects of anti-Islamic stereotyping. Here, a certain sexism threatens; she is guilty of American cultural blindness, while it’s the young man who takes the ethical journey. As he must; in the present of the film, Changez is back home, entangled in events, teaching and questing, a kind of prodigal son.

The central dynamic is in his complex interplay with Bobby in the cafe, where each has reason to doubt the other’s credentials; perhaps Changez really is, or could become, a terrorist; perhaps – a lot more likely – Bobby is really working for the CIA. The Lahore marketplace mills around them, vibrant, overcrowded, vivid; in stark contrast, the New York offices are glassy and cold. All a bit simplistic, too much of us-and-them, and it’s not surprising that American critics have attacked the film for heavy-handedness. With Islamic religious fundamentalism in play, Nair poses the notion that there’s another kind of fundamentalism, that of capitalist money markets; Changez has refused that one too. The suggestion of a conceptual symmetry doesn’t really work; the worlds are too far apart. But the film is still a noisy, commanding entertainment. Mira Nair films from the Indian diaspora, looking across and back from west to east; it’s a very powerful storytelling position.

IN THE Portuguese Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, story and allegory entangle in beautiful black and white. In the first section, “Paradise Lost,” aged gambling addict Aurora (Laura Soveral) is found in terminal illness and distress; her long-ago lover appears to return; her vanished daughter will not. Here, in present-day Lisbon, there are strong presences around her, a black African servant called Santa (Isabel Cardoso) and a concerned neighbour, Pilar; the latter, for whom Aurora’s plight supplies her need for a role, is made a particularly interesting character by Teresa Madruga.

“Paradise Lost” was shot in 35 mm; the second section, “Paradise” comes from further off, in 16 mm, and therefore has a different kind of beauty. There’s a crocodile watching in a river, and an African estate below a mountain named Tabu. The old lover, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) recalls the story of his adulterous love affair with the young Aurora (Ana Moreira); his own younger self (Carloto Cotta) evokes all the stories he belongs to, wearing pith helmet, old-time explorer’s gear and an Errol Flynn moustache. Music and natural sounds are heard, while dialogue is silent. Memory and history take over; we don’t get back to Lisbon. It’s as though the end of colonialism meant the end of Portugal too, and Portugal is condemned to remember.

Tabu has divided the critics, not all of whom are cinephiles. Some saw it as so much overwrought home movie; they fail to imagine how the lengthening past of cinema can be called back to serve new perspectives in the present. In a rather struggling interview (seen on ABC1’s At the Movies on 21 May) Gomes seemed to me to be explaining his aspiration for a cinema that reaches through the visible to the invisible, one that has to do with memory, both its vitality and its possible deceits. If that was the goal, he has reached it; this is cinematic poetry and fable, release from realism into reimagined reality. •

The post Sons and others appeared first on Inside Story.

“A king is history’s slave.” It is tempting to view Tolstoy’s reflection as an apt comment on British military policy in the early twenty-first century. So much in Britain’s invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and so much of the draining campaigns against local insurgencies that followed, seems predestined by the experience of forgotten ancestors. From the Afghan wars of 1839–42 and 1878–80 (with a reprise in 1919) to the seizure of Mesopotamia from the Ottomans in 1916–17 and its troubled suzerainty over subsequent decades, Britain’s later violent involvement in these two regions can be read as eternal recurrence.

A long imperial history with its sheer abundance of precedent lends itself to the idea that the deeds of the powerful are “not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history” (War and Peace again). Where Afghanistan and Iraq are concerned, such determinism has potent right-realist and left-populist variants (respectively, our leaders never learn from history or their conquering instinct is perennial) which often overlap, and converge on the need to break the cycle of martial adventurism. At the same time, the modern architects of these wars – step forward, Tony Blair – are seen as free agents whose responsibility for the resulting disasters is limitless. Trapped by the past and blind to the present, yet refusing to choose a better future, Britain’s political elite lives down to the worst of a shameful imperial record: deceit and illegality on the road to war; murder and torture in its waging; humiliation and abandonment in the retreat.

This, at least, is the dominant media and public view a decade after the launch of the “shock and awe” attacks on Iraq on 20–21 March 2003 and the tumbling of Saddam Hussein’s statue on 9 April. YouGov finds 53 per cent agreeing that “the US and Britain were wrong to take action against Iraq,” 27 per cent thinking it right. Half of the respondents agree that Blair “deliberately set out to mislead the British public in the run-up to the war over Iraq’s possession of ‘weapons of mass destruction’,” and 31 per cent disagree. Moreover, asked if Blair “knowingly misled parliament and the public about the scale of the [WMD] threat and should be tried as a war criminal,” 23 per cent agree. A thousand columnists, a hundred comedians, and a score of poets have echoed Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy”: I met Murder in its lair / He had a mask like Tony Blair.

There is also, though, a notable contrast in much of the local coverage around the anniversary. The most enlightening focuses on conditions in Iraq itself and highlights the lives and views of people there. Roula Khalaf’s fine survey in the Financial Times, the formidable Patrick Cockburn’s reports in the Independent, and David Blair’s conversations with Baghdadis in the Telegraph all come into this category. (According to the latter, the Iraqis he meets “tend to qualify whatever opinion they hold” about the war, and voice “no easy judgements or strident opinions.”) In addition, there have been several conferences around London hosting in-depth assessments from academics and other specialists, again including Iraqis from the country and the diaspora.

Overwhelmingly, by contrast, the domestic political media has fixed its gaze on the moment of invasion (with the question “was it worth it?” framing almost every discussion). High-profile polemicists such as Mehdi Hasan, Max Hastings, Owen Jones, and Seumas Milne tick off familiar arguments: about the invasion’s illegality and its catastrophic impacts on Iraq and the region, the corruption of British governance by an elite culture of secret deals, and the cynical use of phantom WMDs as a pretext for war – all of which vindicates its opponents and discredits its advocates. Again, the evidence of the polls suggests that a good part of this case has in effect won the public debate (though the fine detail is often more nuanced than the headline numbers). On the other side, prominent supporters of the invasion such as David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd and John Rentoul have restated their case, citing Saddam Hussein’s exceptionally brutal record, legitimate uncertainties over WMDs, the demands of solidarity, the tense but defensible calculations of Blair’s diplomatic and legal strategy, subsequent progress in Iraq and recent events in Syria. (On my own account, I believed that force alone could remove Saddam, that this was justified and, most importantly, that it was the only way that Iraqis could reclaim their ability to shape their own history.)

But if Iraq’s brief, concentrated return to Britain’s public arena creates the impression that the argument over the invasion is stuck while discussion of Iraq’s new realities is moving ahead, taken too far this would be facile, for there is a deep connection between the two. A decade of war – invasion, occupation, insurgency, sectarian conflict and local campaigns – has affected every Iraqi, transformed the country’s political and social landscape, and released forces that will endure for years to come. A decision that eventuated in the killing of at least 111,000 civilians (as recorded by the meticulous Iraq Body Count project, though the total is almost certainly thousands more), and led to a displacement and refugee crisis that uprooted four million Iraqis, will long influence the lives of survivors.

Charles Tripp, the doyen of historians of Iraq – and one of a number invited in November 2002 to meet Blair, ostensibly to impart their expertise – makes the important point that violence of this scale and nature carries its own effects deep into society. The violence intrinsic to the invasion “precipitated much that followed”: for “the use of violence, whatever its motive, has its own baneful logic. The deeper and more prolonged its use, the more distinctive and disturbing the consequences will be.”

It is far too early, then, to close the invasion file and everything that surrounds it. Nor will that be possible, as the official inquiry into the United Kingdom’s involvement in Iraq, appointed by Gordon Brown in June 2009 and chaired by John Chilcot, has yet to report. When it does (perhaps in 2014), the establishment verdict will be in on the most traumatic episode in British foreign policy since the Suez crisis in November 1956. At over one million words so far, it will be exhaustive if not definitive. The Chilcot inquiry succeeds two others: the Hutton inquiry of 2003–04 on the media–political furore that followed the death of the weapons inspector David Kelly, which toppled the BBC director-general and provoked a carnival of conspiracism, and the Butler review in 2004 of the use of WMD-related intelligence (chaired by Robin Butler, cabinet secretary 1988–98), which criticised the government’s embrace of unreliable sources to make the case for war.

In minute detail and mandarin prose, these documents seek to reconcile the judgements of the powerful across various agencies. As part of the methodology of elite British governance, it is impressive to behold. But it is also a performance in which all involved are conscious of their core function, namely to record, criticise, recommend, move on – while leaving everything fundamentally as it is. What they leave untouched is the deeper context of policy: the accumulated inheritance of experiences and impulses that help to frame and influence state behaviour. Yet where this inheritance is germane to decisions such as the one to join in the United States–led invasion of Iraq, it deserves to be included as part of the total picture.

IRAQ came late to modern statehood, with Britain present at its creation. The process, as messy and contingent as any colonial episode, was part of the remaking of the Middle East after the great war, when the retreat of the Ottoman empire from its eastern flank left a political vacuum that the rulers of France and Britain saw a need to fill.

The opportunity to “take” Mesopotamia – the ancient land of two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates – was forged in war, and initially had less to do with oil than Britain’s desire to so weaken the region’s Ottoman overlords that their subjects would be inspired to revolt. Such is the case made in the historian Charles Townshend’s tremendous book, When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914–21. The book’s centrepiece is the disastrous late-1915 campaign by an Anglo-Indian force led by Major-General Charles Townshend (apparently no relation) that moved north from Basra, stalled at Ctesiphon, and retreated to Kut-al-Amara, where a four-month siege ended in surrender and the death in captivity of over half the 17,000 exhausted survivors.

The baton was passed to Lieutenant-General Frederick Maude, whose rebuilt force – like Townshend’s, operating under the authority of the imperial government in India – retook Kut in February 1917 and entered Baghdad on 11 March. A week later the latest of Baghdad’s many conquerors issued a reassuring proclamation: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”

The two Ottoman provinces of Basra and Baghdad were now in British–Indian hands (with the political tensions between London and Delhi very real). As so often, a fluid strategic environment encouraged imperial minds to consider how the temporary spoils of war could be turned into something permanent. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company had begun production in 1912, its local oilfields and pipeline to the refinery at Abadan on the Shatt al-Arab – the very border between Persia and the Ottoman empire – thus acquiring geopolitical significance. But Mesopotamia’s own sources of oil “did not loom large in British strategic calculations when the war broke out,” says Townshend. “By the time it ended, this was changing. The potential oil resources of Mosul province were beginning to exert an influence on the developing idea of establishing an Arab state in the conquered territory.”

In Europe, collapsing empires gave way after 1918 to a swathe of independent nation-states. Across the post-Ottoman lands, the postwar settlement thwarted local aspirations to the same status. In the event, the surviving empires’ instrument of choice was the League of Nations’ territorial “mandate,” under which Mesopotamia, Transjordan and Palestine were allocated to Britain, and Syria and Lebanon to France. The latter enforced its rule in Syria only after suppressing a revolt and ejecting the Hashemite ruler, King Faisal – to which the British responded, following the tireless advocacy of the indefatigable Gertrude Bell, by installing him on the throne of the new “Kingdom of Iraq.”

An entity born of imperial war, with borders drawn in the interest of its overlords, lacking the natural allegiance of its many nationalities and faiths: Iraq was always going to be interesting. The incorporation of territory, such as Mosul, largely populated by Kurds emphasised both the artifice and the self-interest of Iraq’s construction. The sporadic Kurdish resistance was met by aerial bombardment from the early Royal Air Force, in a crude campaign governed by the larger aim of facilitating oil exploration in the north. (An invaluable source on this innovation in colonial policing is David Omissi’s Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939, which notes that it had also been used against “rioters in Egypt, tribesmen on the Frontier, pastoralists in the Southern Sudan and nomads in the Somali hinterland.”) The process reached a critical stage in 1927 when oil in commercially viable quantities was found around the northern city of Kirkuk.

To the south, opposition to British domination had been evident from the start: in the landmark Ath Thawra al Iraqiyya al Kubra (“great Iraqi revolution”) in 1920, in the formation of several incipient anti-colonial organisations, and even in indifference towards King Faisal, whose noble descent the British presumed would accord him legitimacy among the faithful. (“I’ll never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain,” wrote Gertrude Bell.) A bitter dispute over oil concessions in Mosul was a focus for these sentiments, and heralded the nominal equality Iraq acquired under the Anglo–Iraqi Treaty of 1930. (A superb account of this period and the shadow it cast is Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied).

Britain retained oil rights, military bases and influence, in a settlement described by Hanna Batatu as having “virtually reduced Iraq into an appendage of the British Empire.” But the instruments of control were becoming less certain. An anti-government coup in 1936, quickly reversed, was a signal, but far more significant was the seizure of power by a nationalist (and pro-German) military cohort in April 1941. The strategic risk to Britain, already at a low point in the new global conflict, was acute; if the popular acclaim that greeted Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s venture was alarming, even more so was the prospect of seeing Iraq move towards the Axis camp. The old order had to be restored, and was – by force, and via the “second British occupation.” But a new course had been set amid a complex social landscape where a range of forces – religious notables, merchants and landowners, workers and peasants, administrators and officers, many ethnic and confessional groups, and emerging movements such as communists and Ba’athists – was in movement.

It was hard for London to make sense of it all, let alone to see how effective dominion could be maintained. (A foreign office telegram of September 1943 confesses the “weakness of our long-term position in Iraq.”) The trend was again made visible by Al-Wathbah (“The Leap”), a popular revolt in January 1948 sparked by protests against a revision of the 1930 treaty that would guarantee dependency on Britain for another generation.

The Portsmouth Treaty was passed, but – this time – there would be no “third occupation.” A year after the Baghdad Pact of 1955 had linked Iraq and Britain (along with Turkey, Pakistan and Iran) in an anti-Soviet alliance in southwest Asia, the humiliation of Britain’s Suez imbroglio changed the regional terms of trade. Baghdad’s political ferment led to a republican coup in July 1958 that eliminated the monarchy and brought to power the “Free Officers,” led by Abdul al-Qassem. This kicked off a tumultuous decade that culminated in the decisive Ba’athist takeover of July 1968.

The sweep of the era is indicated in the full title of Hanna Batatu’s great work of historical sociology, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Ba’athists and Free Officers, published in 1978. Its 1300 pages of astounding scholarship open with the judgement that the events of 1919–20 began “the painful, now gradual, now spasmodic growth of an Iraqi national community” and end by stating that the main task of the regime in power in the late 1970s should be “one of elaborating the institutions and building the skills that could employ the huge oil revenues in a socially effective way.” Britain seems barely visible in the whole story, also an indicator of the way its colonial power was exercised. But the next three decades were to reposition this now fainter relationship in unimagined ways.

THE renowned Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, born in 1950, once replied to a question about her upbringing in Baghdad by saying, “Everything was modern, modern, modern!” Despite periodic instability and violence, the 1960s and 1970s were indeed good years for many. But the larger project of using the fruits of oil wealth to modernise Iraq was to take a new direction around the time Batatu’s book was being finalised. Its architect was the Ba’athist functionary Saddam Hussein, who had risen unobtrusively to Iraq’s vice-presidency before pushing aside the weakened Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr in July 1979. He inherited his party’s pan-Arab and nationalist ambitions, but turned them into an instrument of aggression against neighbouring states (in the war with post-revolution Iran of 1980–88 and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990) and domestic enemies (with large-scale purges of political rivals, including fellow Ba’athists, communists, Shi’a and Kurds).

The 1980s were a time of fear and national mobilisation, as a centralised security apparatus imposed a form of totalitarian control on a newly cowed society. The Ba’athist debt to Europe’s fascist models of the 1930s is familiar, but Saddam’s biographer and sometime confidante Said Aburish also cites direct evidence that Stalin was the leader’s inspiration. None of this prevented Western (and of course Soviet-bloc) states trading with and indulging him in the 1980s, not least because of hostility to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. But when Saddam’s forces occupied Kuwait in August 1990 – fulfilling a territorial claim Iraqis had harboured since Britain (who else?) had separated the Gulf emirate from former Ottoman land in 1921 – the result was diplomatic isolation and then military retreat amid a pulverising US-led assault.

Saddam’s regime was exposed, as Shi’a in the south and Kurds in the north stirred in expectation of change. But they needed help, and in a turning-point moment the United States and Britain allowed Baghdad to regroup. Saddam crushed the Shi’a, with an estimated 50,000 killed, and only the desperate recourse to a “no-fly” zone in the north protected the Kurds from a repeat of the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s, when up to 100,000 had died. In the aftermath, the regime was squeezed by a UN-approved sanctions package and a weapons-inspection process to curb the regime’s WMD capacity. The ensuing decade of “containment” allowed Saddam to consolidate power with sufficient boldness to seek to thwart sanctions, circumvent the “oil-for-food” program and stymie the inspectors’ work. By December 1998, a year after the inspectors had been expelled, American and British warplanes were being dispatched to conduct raids of doubtful value, which prompted the other three members of the Security Council to call for an easing of the sanctions on Iraq (including the crucial oil embargo).

The combination of 9/11 and the new political environment in the United States was decisive. Plans were laid inside the George W. Bush administration to “deal with” Saddam almost as soon as the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001 was concluded. A year of inflationary rhetoric, diplomatic manoeuvring, bureaucratic infighting, exile politicking, military preparation and intense worldwide protest culminated in the air assault and land invasion of March 2003. Britain was foremost among the forty-nine states that committed themselves to a role in military operations or (the vast majority) post-war security and governance. Its initial deployment, tasked with occupying Basra and the region, reached a maximum of 18,000 troops in May 2003. (The US figure at this point was 150,000.)

So this British invasion of Iraq sent the infantry and naval forces of 2003 to the very place from which their (predominantly Indian) antecedents had trudged north in the ill-fated venture of 1915. As ever, most performed with valour and a few were responsible for gross abuses and violations of discipline (some of which are still going through the courts). By the end of operations in April 2009, 179 had been killed, 136 in action. Troop numbers had fallen gradually over these six years, to 4100 at the point of withdrawal.

In military terms, the verdict on the overall strategy and performance is as bleak as in 1915. The case is made in Frank Ledwidge’s book Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, a pitiless analysis of inadequacies in understanding, leadership, planning and operations. The author, a former officer in naval military intelligence, charts the British forces’ inability to prevent Basra’s descent into chaos or to subdue the militias who took control of the city. He exposes their retreat to ineffectual confinement in a local base and the unfounded complacency of their claim to superior expertise in counterinsurgency vis-à-vis the Americans. His judgement is stark: “The British were at sea in both places, devoid of viable doctrine, without awareness of their environment, lacking adequate forces and minus any coherent strategy to pursue. All this was coupled with a hubris which attracted its inevitable riposte – nemesis.”

The Chilcot report will provide the official version of the military and political aspects of the Iraq campaign. But even if it confirms Ledwidge’s assessment, it won’t turn a searchlight onto the much longer context of British military involvement in the country, and nor will its equivalent do that for Afghanistan. This is in part because Britain’s inquests on matters of state tend to remain circumscribed, not just by their terms of reference but also by the informal formalities of the elite political culture. It’s also because much of the past – empire and all that – is still too uncomfortable to examine closely. All the more reason, many would say, to do just that.

BUT Afghanistan and Iraq are not just a retread of old wars. They also belong to the geopolitical era that arrived with – or perhaps was bookended by – the collapse of communism in 1989–91 and the collapse of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. The end of a “short twentieth century” dominated by world wars, superpower rivalry and grand ideological schisms vindicated the West’s economic system and political values, and seemed to herald a “unipolar” world in which American-led power would secure a “new world order.” In the 1990s, however, a series of regional conflicts and ethno-nationalist eruptions – from Somalia to Rwanda, from the Caucasus to the Balkans – put the schema to the test of reality and made it look naive. (The sparkling analyst Ivan Krastev even suggests that 1989–2001 might be regarded as “the short twenty-first century.”)

Britannia, as is her wont, claimed more vindication from the fall of the “evil empire” than anyone bar the United States itself. The evidence included Margaret Thatcher’s co-starring role with Ronald Reagan in the “second cold war” of the 1980s, and the profile she had established in the Soviet Union and its bloc. More broadly, London was both Washington’s most loyal ally and a nuclear-armed state that had never quite abandoned its pretensions to an independent world role (indeed, these elements worked at different times to reinforce each other). But these certainties, too, were put under pressure by the changed strategic circumstances of the early 1990s.

The wars in a disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1992–95 became the crucible of trans-Atlantic tension when the Conservative government of John Major made strenuous efforts in every diplomatic arena (NATO, the United Nations, the European Union) to resist any “humanitarian intervention,” far less measures that could halt the “Greater Serbia” genocide project. (The fiasco of British policy in these years is dissected in Brendan Simms’s brilliant work, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia. One of Simms’s themes is the astonished fury of American politicians and diplomats at the lengths to which their British counterparts would go to block any initiative that might constrain the perpetrators.)

The massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995 at last shamed – or at least forced – Britain’s government into giving consent to a more proactive NATO policy. But the Dayton diplomatic agreement that ended the war also left the Albanian-majority province of Kosovo in the line of fire. When the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic prosecuted his latest ethnic-cleansing campaign there, the inglorious NATO air campaign of March–June 1999 – of which the government of Tony Blair (prime minister since May 1997) was the most vigorous advocate – eventually precipitated his withdrawal.

It was in the very midst of the eleven-week war that Tony Blair, in a speech in Chicago, made Kosovo (“a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values”) the instance of an ambitious “new doctrine of international community.” His sweeping appeal was to “a new internationalism” bound by “new rules” and backed by “reformed international institutions with which to apply them.” He cited Saddam Hussein alongside Milosevic as “two dangerous and ruthless men [who] have been prepared to wage vicious campaigns against sections of their own community. As a result of these destructive policies both have brought calamity on their own peoples.”

The speech made almost no reference to military action, beyond saying that war “is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators.” If this echoed the protection of the Kurds in 1991, the “Desert Fox” operation of 1998, and even the modest peacekeeping contingent sent to East Timor in 1999, it also anticipated the British operation in Sierra Leone the following year. This saw an 800-strong military force charged in May 2000 with ensuring safe evacuation of foreign citizens from a vicious civil war supporting, by default, a weak government and a fragile UN military mission against the threatening Revolutionary United Front militia. This force and its replacements altered the dynamic of the war, which ended in January 2002.

The Sierra Leone operation was shadowed by fears of “mission creep” and – like Kosovo – conducted against vocal domestic political and media opposition. Perhaps because it can be judged – again like Kosovo (albeit more qualified in that case) – a success, not least in the eyes of those in whose interests it was fought, it tends in Britain to be consigned to the memory hole. (A rare and neglected study is Andrew M. Dorman’s book Blair’s Successful War: British Military Intervention in Sierra Leone.) In any event, these four interventions in the three years of Blair’s premiership – which also saw the settlement, in April 1998, of the thirty-year war in Northern Ireland – represented a new burst of military activism justified by national interest now clothed in internationalist and humanitarian dress. Blair’s “Chicago doctrine,” as it was inevitably called, seemed more the beginning than the end of something, or more accurately part of a wave that had been gathering force since Bosnia and Rwanda.

In September 2000, for example, an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty – founded by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, and working under the auspices of the Canadian government – began to examine how the international community should respond “to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity.” This culminated in a report, The Responsibility to Protect, which was published in December 2001.

The timing was fateful. Two months after the commission was created came the election of a new US president armed with a self-aggrandising vision of restoring the country’s greatness after the perceived drift of the 1990s. The George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration was committed not to any sort of revived internationalism, but to securing “a new American century.” Where Iraq was concerned, this meant completing the unfinished business of 1991. Whatever else happened in coming years, here at least Bush and Blair were bound to converge, even if in other respects they were slaves of different histories.

The immediate post-9/11 global mood plausibly supported the belief that something like “R2P” – the responsibility to protect – would gain real traction. The gathering response over Afghanistan just about kept the hope alive, though the stridency of Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2002 – whose “axis of evil” included Iran, which had condemned the 9/11 attacks, as well as Saddam’s Iraq, which had celebrated them – drenched it. After all, it was indeed the beginning of something else, although Tony Blair was not about to concede it.

BEFORE it could be waged, the “war of choice” over Iraq had to overcome immense diplomatic and political obstacles. How and when Britain’s participation was assured continues to be bitterly controversial. But the thing about history is that it doesn’t stop, and ten years on the argument is being restaged in an environment part-shaped by that war but also transformed by subsequent events, and by the popular uprisings in the Arab world in particular. The success of Tunisians and Egyptians in replacing their rulers by their own efforts and with relatively little bloodshed was the high point of the “Arab awakening.” But the repression of the second wave of revolts in Libya and Syria, as well as the Islamist advance in Mali, made the issue of intervention relevant again in ways that not only echoed the concerns of the 1990s but also posed fresh challenges to a new generation of British politicians.

As the poisonous fallout of Iraq seeped across the public culture, the Conservative opposition leader David Cameron qualified his admiration for Tony Blair with notable scepticism about any foreign adventures. It was a stance he carried into government in 2010 and shared with most of his senior colleagues, including foreign minister William Hague (though the clever Michael Gove, now education minister, and the ambitious hawk Liam Fox, briefly defence minister, had always been more gung-ho). The eruptions of 2011 forced a rethink, in practice if not in doctrine. Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy were in the vanguard of military and diplomatic support to the anti-Gaddafi rebels in Libya, and the prime minister forged a similar alliance in 2013 with Sarkozy’s successor François Hollande over Mali. The jihadi offensive there, in the wake of an insurgent assault on a multinational gas facility in Algeria, provoked Cameron to Blairesque rhetoric about the need for a “generational struggle” against Islamic extremism.

This more proactive stance is partly a reaction to Washington’s greater caution after its chastening decade and its strategic tilt towards Asia. The tone of command also has something of the enthusiasm of the convert, though even without grand foreign-policy ambitions Cameron has never had a problem looking “prime ministerial” (an important requirement in Britain, and a facility his Labour opponent Ed Miliband has still to acquire). There is also a certain relief in the government’s repositioning, even amid widespread suspicion that it might entail further open-ended wars. (That sentiment has helped restrict engagement with Syria, where the death toll in two years is fast approaching Iraq’s.) Britain, after all, seems to prefer leaders who cut a dash – within limits that they must periodically renegotiate – on the world stage.

But the domestic circumstances in which this new phase of intervention is evolving are also very different from even a decade ago. Under way, for example, is a welcome “process of introspection, reappraisal and adaptation within the military” in light of the recent wars (see the well-judged study by Aaron Edwards, Britain’s “9/11 Wars” in Historical Perspective: Why Change and Continuity Matter). But the most obvious constraint comes from the seemingly permanent slowdown of Britain’s economy, where a mixture of zero growth, low productivity and escalating debt is reinforcing structural weaknesses. Any international security policy has to be calibrated in terms of what a state can afford, and Britain, with its multiplying spending obligations and its shrinking capacities, is able to afford ever less.

The mismatch between ambitions and resources is exacerbated by the longstanding problem that Britain continues to “want it all” in strategic terms. The headline commitments are an expensive upgrade or renewal of its notionally independent Trident nuclear force and the construction of two giant aircraft carriers (both to guarantee a “global reach”). The routine commitments are to maintain its core services and upgrade their capability, defend overseas territories such as the Falkland Islands, and play a full part in NATO. The low-profile commitments are to protect domestic security and core infrastructure (including from terrorist threats) and sustain a strong intelligence network with up-to-date risk-assessment. And the emerging commitments involve adapting to new challenges such as cyberattack and biosecurity.

For a middle-ranking European power with an infirm economy, amid international trends that press ever harder on its ability to compete in a “global race” (a favourite David Cameron phrase), this range of tasks looks Sisyphean. Even more so since, under the strategic and defence review published in October 2010 – A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty – spending in these areas is being reduced by 8 per cent over a decade. The personnel of all three services is being cut, with Britain’s army scheduled to have only 82,000 regulars by 2020, its smallest in modern times.

Yet any major rethink seems remote. The review says that “Britain’s interests remain surprisingly constant,” and that “in order to protect our interests at home, we must project our influence abroad” via “continued full and active engagement in world affairs.” For Britain’s leaders, the desire to “punch above our weight” (as Douglas Hurd put it in 1993) is a given. Britain, it seems, both needs and can have it all.

THE broad public opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and scepticism over any further large-scale interventions, might be expected to pose a challenge to this elite consensus. But as so often in Britain, behind the brutal certitudes of public argument – on full display in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death on 8 April – there is much ambiguity. For example, the military experience of the past decade and more has worked its way into the media, popular culture, and the orchestrated routines of national memory. (The Armed Forces Memorial, for instance, instituted in 2007, honours those killed “in more than fifty operations and conflicts across the world” since 1945.) There has been a palpable increase in the social visibility of Britain’s military, from homecoming parades and charity collections to public demonstrations and TV programs (which in their focus on women personnel or family members, for example choirs of “military wives,” reflect a notable gender shift).

The media aspect of this phenomenon at least tends towards a glutinous patriotism, and more generally recycles a discourse of the brave, chivalrous British soldier that – as Michael Paris’s Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 shows – has been current for generations. At the same time, some senior military figures reportedly worry about the consequences of sentimentalisation: that bringing the army closer to the people may, for example, also undercut the latter’s ability to “take” mass casualties in any future conflict. The deeper point, though, is that the military history of the post-2001 years is being assimilated into what went before, and this works – in a coded but also powerful way – to legitimate the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq if not the wars themselves.

A striking illustration hit me when visiting my local branch of Waterstones – the only national bookstore chain to survive the Amazon hurricane. The history section has sixteen large stacks arranged according to category: one on Ancient history, two on World, two on European, four on British – and seven on Military (“chronological by campaign/war/conflict”). Beside the narrative accounts and scholarly analyses, a few of them admittedly dealing with wars in which Britain was not involved, are many autobiographical tales of derring-do in regiments, bomb-disposal units, or “special forces” such as the SAS whose clandestine image reinforces their glamour.

Perhaps this gradual assimilation of the recent past into the national story is yet another example of “the way Britain, and especially England, works” – namely the ability to “keep everything as it was, so that everything can change.” It hints that the appeal of what might be called military patriotism is capable of taking new forms which too can become part of the legacy of wars otherwise regarded as inglorious. In turn this will make the argument for a substantial reorientation in Britain’s security policy – including intervention – even harder to carry through. After all, martialism in Britain is self-replenishing: since the late nineteenth century, 1968 is the only year that no British soldier has died in action (and that was the very eve of troops being deployed in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the long “troubles”).

From the imperial and colonial eras, through world wars, cold war and small wars, to the present age of multipolar governance and asymmetrical threats, Britain’s military adventures have remained at the heart of the way the country likes to see itself. Iraq and Afghanistan, like Suez, have left Britain chastened. But it is hard for kings, even – perhaps especially – when reduced to pauperdom, to break free from one history and begin to write another. •

The post Britain’s military complex appeared first on Inside Story.

IT WAS an ordinary Monday morning in Australia when the White House announced that Barack Obama was about to give a special televised address. The internet buzzed with speculation about what could be important enough to warrant a presidential speech, at short notice, very late on a Sunday evening Washington time. And then Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted the bombshell: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”

Broadcasters across the world scrambled to prepare for the president’s announcement and cover what looked like being the biggest news story of 2011. In Australia, ABC television decided not to break into regular ABC1 programming, instead running rolling coverage on its twenty-four-hour news channel from lunchtime on. As the scale of the story outgrew the network’s limited resources, ABC24 handed over to one of its partners. Aunty’s choice on this particular day – Al Jazeera English, or AJE – surprised some people. As the Australian’s Caroline Overington wrote, the ABC “normally uses BBC coverage of world events.” At one point in the coverage, she added, “bin Laden was being described as a ‘hero’ to some in the Arab world.”

A few commentators were incredulous. “When the ABC switched to live coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden on Monday, it didn’t take the BBC or CNN. It took the Middle East network, Al Jazeera,” reported the Australian’s media diarist. “The ABC says that wasn’t because no other feed was available. It actually took Al Jazeera by choice.” “What on earth is the ABC’s agenda?” asked News Limited’s Andrew Bolt. Implicit in these criticisms was the view that AJE couldn’t possibly deliver rigorous and balanced reporting on bin Laden’s death because it is based in the Middle East.

In my experience, criticisms like these often come from people who haven’t seen much of AJE’s news output, which has been extremely difficult to view on broadcast TV in Australia. (AJE has only recently been added to Foxtel’s basic package, and since the end of 2011 it has been broadcast for a few mostly overnight hours each day on ABC24 and SBS1.) Add the fact that AJE sports a calligraphic Arabic logo and its name starts with “al,” and the misreading of its character is even easier to understand.

So why did the ABC decide that a relatively new Middle Eastern satellite channel was a more appropriate source for its coverage of bin Laden’s death than the BBC or an established American network? What propelled AJE from little-known foreign satellite channel to key news partner for Australia’s national broadcaster?

IN JANUARY 2011, I was in Sri Lanka cursing the fact that I’d flown out of Qatar just six days earlier. My first freelance contract as a director for AJE had concluded but, despite having a very pleasant holiday, I would have preferred to have been back in the control room. Instead, here I was, sitting in a guesthouse watching AJE on my laptop as Cairo descended into urban warfare. It was the Day of Rage – day four of what we now call the Egyptian Revolution. Despite an uncertain internet connection and faltering, pixelated images, the scale and significance of the events were clear. Through the window of its bureau, AJE cameras were capturing unprecedented scenes in the Egyptian capital: dramatic parabolas of white smoke trailing behind canisters of tear gas fired by riot police on one bridge towards protesters on another; protesters stumbling through the streets, tears streaming from their eyes and handkerchiefs held over their mouths and noses; crowds of men running away from armoured vehicles, blood streaming from their heads, while others ran towards the vehicles armed only with rocks. It was incredible news and incredible television, and Al Jazeera was about the only place you could watch it.

That night, AJE’s live internet streaming figures rose by an almost unbelievable 2500 per cent as people around the world, desperate for coverage and finding nothing on other twenty-four-hour news channels, turned to the internet. Partly by luck and partly by design, Al Jazeera found itself best equipped and most capable of covering the revolution, and it felt the eyes of the world on it.

By 11 February, when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down after eighteen days of protest, AJE had simply outplayed and outclassed its competitors. According to Robert F. Worth of the New York Times, the network “provided more exhaustive coverage than anyone else”; Laura Washington in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the channel was delivering “first-rate, incisive content”; it has been reported that White House television sets were tuned to AJE during the revolution.

As I watched during those weeks, I couldn’t help but wonder how the workplace I’d come to know over the past three months was dealing with such a massive and all-consuming event. Former colleagues told me that they were working double shifts and seven-day weeks, and my experience directing the channel’s output gave me some insight into what was going on behind the scenes. Having worked hand-in-hand with journalists and producers, I also understood the size and complexity of the organisation.

After Mubarak’s fall, AJE’s attention turned from Egypt to a more prolonged and complicated crisis in Libya, and I continued to watch its coverage on the internet in Australia. Then, two weeks after the announcement of bin Laden’s death, I flew from Sydney to Doha and began my second freelance contract, back in a newsroom that had changed in subtle but significant ways since the Egyptian Revolution.

WHEN we talk about Al Jazeera, it’s important not to conflate its constituent parts. Al Jazeera Arabic, or AJA, and AJE are related but separate entities with largely independent newsrooms and operations. They share content, some bureau resources, and a commitment to the same editorial charter, but not much else. Recently, however, there have been efforts at upper management levels to integrate the two channels more closely, with cost-cutting being one of the most frequently mentioned motivations.

The sprawling Al Jazeera Network features no fewer than sixteen sports channels, a children’s channel, a documentary channel and a live events channel. In news coverage, AJE and AJA are complemented by the newly launched Al Jazeera Balkans, and plans are well advanced for Turkish and Urdu channels. And anyone who has been following the recent battles over TV sporting rights in the United States will know that Al Jazeera’s non-news reach is expanding at a similar pace to its news operation. Yet this media giant emerged from the sands of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar just seventeen years ago.

Its genesis is found in the story of one man, the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. After he seized power from his father in a peaceful coup in 1995, Sheikh Hamad set about liberalising the country’s media by abolishing the Ministry of Information and launching a major new broadcast network. Al Jazeera (“The Peninsula”) was launched on 1 November 1996 with an initial grant of 500 million Qatari rials (approximately US$137 million) and a recurring annual grant of about US$100 million.

Most analysts agree that Al Jazeera was, and is, a diplomatic exercise by the rich and savvy ruler of a small and geopolitically vulnerable nation. But from the moment it was launched, this news network was a radical departure from the kind of state-owned television that is standard across the Middle East. Al Jazeera expert Philip Seib argues that it “reshaped the Arab public sphere by discussing government corruption, the role of women in Arab society, and other matters long ignored by the staid government-run news organisations in the region.” Nor was the fledgling channel afraid of making enemies in the region – by 2002, most Arab League countries had protested at Al Jazeera’s coverage of their affairs, and six (Saudi Arabia, Libya, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan and Tunisia) had at some stage withdrawn their ambassadors from Doha. By 2005, over 450 official complaints had been made to the Qatari government by other states.

Even on that most fraught of Middle Eastern issues, Israel–Palestine, Al Jazeera was breaking new ground, even if it didn’t always get the balance right. As the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hassan writes, AJA was “the first Arab broadcaster to offer a voice to Israeli officials.” Hassan refers to British journalist Hugh Miles’s observation that “the interviews with Israeli army officers and military spokesmen were ‘truly shocking for the Arab public,’ especially because ‘many Arabs had never seen an Israeli speak before.’”

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, there was nothing much to worry about. Al Jazeera, broadcasting in Arabic and to a fairly limited audience from a global perspective, was not perceived as a threat to Western interests. If anything, in its early years, it was seen as something of a democratic force in a region light on democracy. But then everything changed on 11 September 2001.

With the Middle East suddenly central to US foreign policy, Al Jazeera’s coverage of events in the region now came under intense global scrutiny. The channel’s reporting on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, coming from a very different perspective than that of Western media organisations, attracted severe criticism from governments and commentators. Al Jazeera was called “Jihad TV,” “killers with cameras,” and “the most powerful ally of terror in the world.” It earned a reputation for airing terrorist videos and bin Laden statements (even though these statements were newsworthy enough to be played by other networks including CNN) and for broadcasting beheading videos (which it never did). For many in the West, Al Jazeera became synonymous with al Qaeda.

AL JAZEERA English went to air for the first time on 15 November 2006 after months, if not years, of delay. It was launched to eighty million homes around the world, costing the Qatari government around US$1 billion on top of existing funding for Al Jazeera.

Conceived as early as 2002 as a translated, subtitled and dubbed repackaging of the Arabic broadcast, the AJE model transformed a number of times before it eventually went to air. An English-language website, run somewhat separately from the Arabic operation and as a precursor to a future television operation, had come online in 2003 but was immediately brought down by repeated cyberattack.

At around the time planning began for AJE, the Qatari government was attempting to moderate the excesses of the original Arabic-language operation in reaction to foreign pressure. In late 2003, the Bush administration downgraded the status of planned visits by the Qatari foreign minister and the emir’s wife, and Qatar cancelled the trips because of this perceived insult. “According to AJE architect Steve Clark,” writes Shawn Powers, a media specialist at Georgia State University, “it was this cancelled trip that solidified [the emir’s] decision to invest substantially to create a news network that would once and for all clear Al Jazeera’s name in the West.”

Al Jazeera International (AJE’s pre-launch moniker) was designed not only to fill a perceived market niche, but also to be another cog in Qatar’s foreign policy machine. As William Stebbins, AJE’s Washington bureau chief until 2010, recalls, “There was an expectation that the English channel would be a more sober and sophisticated Al Jazeera, less parochial and operating with higher journalistic standards. While this perception may have played to the English service’s favour, it reflected poorly on the broad Al Jazeera brand, and that implication was never strenuously enough denied.”

Originally slated for launch in late 2004, there was still no sign of an on-air date by early 2006. At the original Al Jazeera operation, animosity was growing as staff watched their English-language counterparts working in a larger building with superior technology on better pay and conditions. “We felt used, unappreciated, and even ‘colonised’ a bit,” one AJA presenter told Powers. “Over the short period of two years, we had gone from Kings and Queens of the Arab world to peons when compared to a ‘British Boys Network’ that is trading on our names, our blood, and our reputations. Many of us are heartbroken.”

In an effort to ease the tension, Wadah Khanfar was promoted from managing director of the original Al Jazeera operation to director-general of the entire Al Jazeera Network. In May 2006, Ibrahim Helal, one of the launch recruits of Al Jazeera, was appointed deputy managing director at Al Jazeera International, and he set about integrating the new channel with the old. Helal was successful in having the launch put back to the end of 2006 and used the time to recruit from around the world in order to spice up the relatively monocultural flavour of the channel.

A mere three weeks before the channel’s launch – scheduled to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the launch of Al Jazeera – its name was changed from Al Jazeera International to Al Jazeera English at the urging of Helal. He argued that the new name signposted that AJE and AJA would be sister channels of equal status rather than one being a superior worldwide version of the parochial other. And so, by the time AJE launched, it was a very different machine to that envisaged by the Qatari government. “The initial Qatari design to launch a news network independent from the Arabic channel’s origins had failed due to core opposition from the network’s journalists and managerial core,” writes Powers. “As a result, at the time of its launch in 2006, AJE’s operations and mission were very much tied to the overall management and reputation of the Al Jazeera Network.”

To this day, AJA and AJE are defined by their different audiences – AJA’s in the MENA countries (Middle East and North Africa) and the Arabic-speaking diaspora, and AJE’s in the entire English-speaking world. Naturally, this means that each channel has its own set of news values and reporting methods and its own on-air tone. The distinction also allows AJE to cover events taking place in Qatar’s immediate neighbourhood more freely than AJA might for fear of causing domestic political concern.

The official line at AJE is that there is a high level of cooperation between the two sister channels. But AJE’s head of news-gathering, Heather Allan, told me that the two work “totally separately” and that AJA services a more “conspiratorial” audience. Head of output, Sarah Worthington, said AJA’s news planning is more “ad hoc” and its approach to reporting more “aggressive” than AJE’s. While both channels excelled in covering the Egyptian Revolution, each did so in its own way.

BY THE time Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt two weeks after the Day of Rage, AJE had cemented itself in many viewers’ minds as the channel of record not just for the Egyptian Revolution and the Arab Spring but also for news more generally.

Even after the incredible spike in viewer numbers during the Egyptian protests, more and more people continued to tune into AJE throughout 2011. Because it is distributed by global satellite, viewership is very hard to gauge with accuracy, so traffic to the internet live-stream is a better measure. After the record highs of Egypt, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami set a new benchmark, and AJE claims that four weeks after Tripoli fell to anti-Gaddafi forces in August 2011 it had retained around 28 per cent of the surge in new traffic generated by that event. Around 40 per cent of AJE’s total web traffic comes from the United States, where the reluctance of major cable providers to carry the network means that it is available to only a few tiny pockets of viewers.

There’s no denying that AJE’s capacity to provide broad, in-depth and responsive reporting is due largely to its generous budget and freedom from commercial pressures. AJE maintains twenty-eight bureaus around the world and shares another few dozen with AJA – a news-gathering footprint simply unrivalled by competitors. The newsroom and television operations are robustly staffed, and little expense is spared on technology and the day-to-day activities of journalists and producers. This financial advantage was obvious throughout its Egypt coverage.

During the eighteen core days of the revolution, AJE had more reporters in more places across the country than any other network, including no fewer than five correspondents who were either Egyptian-born or who had Egyptian heritage. Other reporters boasted long experience covering Egypt and were supported by producers with similar backgrounds. On the Day of Rage, AJE had at least five reporters plus their teams in three cities across the country, coordinated from the channel’s bureau in Cairo. And unlike other networks that largely relied on journalists “parachuted” into the story, AJE’s journalists were equipped with local knowledge and often spoke the language.

As most viewers during the revolution would have noticed, AJE broadcast the developing crisis in Egypt to the exclusion of very nearly everything else. For over two weeks, the schedule was cleared and the regular day-to-day pattern of news bulletins and recorded programming was suspended. AJE dedicated itself to reporting events in Egypt and airing special in-depth current affairs programs, which meant that viewers knew they could tune into the channel at any time for information on events in Egypt.

Crucially, AJE could afford to move people and equipment around the world at a moment’s notice and drop (already scarce) commercial breaks for days at a time without fear of diminished revenue streams. Once the decision was made to roll with the Egypt story, the prevailing attitude at AJE was “whatever it takes,” and it had the resources required to do whatever it took.

WHEN I arrived back in Doha in May 2011, the AJE team was still on a high from the success of its Egypt coverage. Everyone was conscious of the need to continue their efforts in reporting news from around the world, but coverage of the latest countries playing host to the Arab Spring, Libya and Syria, was obviously going to be a priority. There was a definite sense in the newsroom that the world was watching – a tangible burden of expectation.

For the next few months, the Libyan rebels’ conflict with Gaddafi dragged on with no signs of significant progress for either side. But AJE continued to feature fresh, on-the-ground, daily reporting while other networks lost interest or bumped the story down their running orders. And as with other news organisations, AJE’s coverage of the uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was hobbled by an inability to operate journalists within the country, but it did its best despite a necessary over-reliance on Syrian activists’ YouTube material. In the cases of Libya and Syria – and earlier, Bahrain – legitimate questions were asked about how the Qatari government’s involvement in the Libyan and Syrian conflicts may have affected AJE’s editorial lines.

And then, in September 2011, to the surprise of employees and commentators alike, director-general Wadah Khanfar resigned. The reasons behind his decision still remain unclear, but Khanfar is adamant that he departed on his own terms, that it was simply time to move on. Some have suggested the Qatari government forced him out, noting that Khanfar’s replacement is a member of the royal family and has a background in natural gas. Frequently highlighted are allegations in leaked US diplomatic cables that Al Jazeera, at Khanfar’s direction, altered editorial content in response to pressure from Washington.

The cables, published in 2010 by WikiLeaks, paint an interesting picture of the relationship between Al Jazeera and the US embassy in Doha. They reveal frequent meetings between the two parties on a range of issues including content, guest selection, quality control and the airing of sensitive material such as hostage videos. Taken together, it is easy for readers to form the impression that Khanfar and other Al Jazeera employees were responsive to the US embassy’s concerns about the network’s output. On at least one occasion, according to the cables, Khanfar allegedly agreed to alter specific content.

Speculation about Khanfar’s departure led the New York Review of Books to wonder if “the Qatari government may now be more concerned about the appearance of foreign influence than of its own.” It’s an interesting point given that when analysts and commentators have searched for editorial weakness at the network, they have usually gone straight to the emir’s diwan.

In the newsroom, however, there is certainly no evidence of systematic interference in editorial matters from inside or outside the building. I’ve interviewed around two dozen AJE managers, journalists and operations staff, and most of them argue fiercely that the newsroom is independent of the Qatari state. A few alluded to isolated incidents involving possible attempts by upper management to change a line or suppress a story – and these incidents should not be discounted or dismissed – but in most cases the newsroom fought back. This is key.

AJE’s twenty-four-hour newsroom is staffed at all times by dozens of journalists drawn from a pool of employees representing over fifty nationalities. Internal editorial disputes are frequent and fierce; people stand up for what they think. This active streak of independence in the newsroom, combined with the increased global scrutiny of AJE’s output in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution, are the channel’s best (although not flawless) defence against editorial interference by the network’s benefactor.

The Al Jazeera network is still a teenager and AJE is not even six years old. The company has expanded at such a rate that its organisational structures haven’t had even a remote hope of keeping pace and adapting to the ongoing change. There is a certain controlled chaos about the way AJE and the Al Jazeera network operate, quite at odds with conspiracy theories of an unbroken and compliant chain of command direct from the emir’s palace to the newsreader’s autocue. As an employee and journalist this chaos can be extremely frustrating – from constant and soul-sapping battles with the human resources bureaucracy to amorphous newsroom workflows – but it can also be inspiring. Everyone feels like they’re part of something a little bit pioneering.

Like any news organisation, AJE has its editorial quirks; and a critical news consumer should never blindly accept the reporting of only one news network, whether it’s Al Jazeera or another. But with a news-gathering operation that dwarfs that of most other broadcast news networks, a unique perspective born of having one foot in the Middle East and one in the West, a growing reputation for intellectually robust reporting, and a broadcasting ethos that eschews brainless chat and empty opinion, AJE’s place within the ABC’s portfolio of broadcast partners back here in Australia makes an awful lot of sense. •

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GÜNTER Grass has done it again: he’s put himself on the front page and at the head of the evening news bulletin by styling himself as the lone voice defending the truth and speaking out against an injustice.

On 4 April, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Italy’s La Repubblica and Spain’s El País published a poem in which Grass articulated his concerns about Israel’s arsenal of atomic weapons and criticised Germany for selling it a submarine capable of firing missiles armed with nuclear warheads. For more than a week, the poem, or rather the outrage it triggered, dominated the German print and electronic media. Never before in the history of the Federal Republic had a work of poetry caused such a storm.

Most of the response in editorials and from politicians, fellow writers and other public intellectuals was damning. Outside Germany, the reaction was overwhelmingly unfavourable, ranging from irritation to outrage. The Israeli government went so far as to blacklist Grass and ban him from entering the country. Only the government in Tehran, predictably enough, was delighted by his intervention: “I read your literary work of human and historical responsibility,” deputy culture minister Javad Shamaqdari was quoted as telling Grass in a letter, “and it warns beautifully.”

Ordinary mortals who want to voice their concern, indignation or outrage resort to writing to the letters pages of their local paper or to calling talkback radio. They might share their views on blogs, via Twitter or on Facebook. Those more confident of their standing might issue a press release. The eighty-four-year-old author of The Tin Drum and other highly regarded novels, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, poet, sculptor and graphic artist, a man often portrayed as “the conscience of the German nation” – who is also (and this is important for understanding the response to his words) a former member of the Waffen-SS – penned his thoughts in the form of a prose poem, “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be Said”) . He would have known that whatever German broadsheet he approached, the poem was going to be printed in full, appear on the front page, and capture Germany’s full attention.

While the text’s content has been controversial, there has been no dispute over its merits as a poem. “A literary mortal sin,” prominent songwriter Wolf Biermann found. A professor of aesthetics, Bazon Brock, believed Grass’s scribbles gave poetry a bad name. Fellow Nobel laureate Herta Müller called Grass a megalomaniac for sending his text to three newspapers in different countries, and said it contained “not a single literary sentence”. Wordy, clumsy and overly didactic, “What Must Be Said” would have to rate among the worst of Grass’s poems. Reminiscent of the didactic poetry of Bertolt Brecht, but without the latter’s rhythm and economy, it is little more than an unedited stream of consciousness. Obviously the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a highly regarded liberal broadsheet published in Munich that has one of Germany’s best arts sections, hadn’t made the decision to publish on the basis of its merits as a work of art.

In the poem, Grass takes issue with the delivery of a German-built submarine to Israel. He objects to the arms deal because the submarine is capable of carrying nuclear missiles which could be used to attack Iran and “wipe out the Iranian people.” He criticises what he regards as the West’s hypocrisy: insisting that Iran not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, while condoning Israel’s nuclear capability, which, Grass claims, “jeopardises an already precarious global peace.”

Grass devotes much of the poem to pondering his failure to speak out earlier. He says that a German who criticises Israel is likely to be punished, not least by being labelled an anti-Semite. But, in what reads like an act of heroism, he has decided to “break his silence” because the matter is urgent and because “we, who as Germans are already sufficiently encumbered, / could become accessories to a crime / that is predictable, which means that our complicity / could not be erased / by any of the usual excuses.”

Grass has been taken to task, rightly, on several accounts. He misrepresents the situation in the Middle East. The Israeli government has indeed considered a pre-emptive strike against Iran to foil that country’s nuclear program. These plans have been hotly debated in Israel itself, and have engendered critical responses from Israel’s allies. “What must be said,” the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev noted in Tel Aviv’s liberal Haaretz newspaper, “did not have to be said because it has already been said by many others, in Israel as well.” Such a strike would almost certainly target Iran’s nuclear facilities rather than its people. And the rationale for an Israeli attack would be the declared intention of the Iranian leadership to wipe out the people of Israel – something Iran could conceivably do quite easily once it has built an atomic bomb.

Grass also suggests that it is impossible to criticise Israel in Germany. If by “Israel” he means the Israeli government, then such a claim is patently wrong. German politicians and intellectuals have long criticised Israel for its policies in the Occupied Territories, in particular. In February last year, Angela Merkel called Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu to remonstrate with him on account of Israel’s dilatory approach in its negotiations with the Palestinians. In December, Germany, together with three other members of the UN Security Council – Portugal, France and Britain – condemned Israel’s settlement policy. After a visit to Hebron only last month, the leader of the Social Democrats, Sigmar Gabriel, opined on Facebook: “This is an apartheid regime which cannot be justified by any means.” Gabriel was roundly criticised for this comparison and eventually apologised, but his comment nevertheless is evidence that Grass’s insinuation of a taboo against such criticism was not justified. Incidentally, Gabriel has been one of only a handful of prominent German politicians who has stood by Grass in the current controversy.

GABRIEL’s intervention may have been prompted by loyalty as much as by sympathy for the sentiments expressed in the poem. Grass has long been associated with the moderate left and has often campaigned for the Social Democrats. As a prominent public intellectual of the left, he is intensely disliked by many on the right. The poem presented his political opponents with a golden opportunity to remind the public of Grass’s achilles heel.

In 2006, Grass published his memoirs, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (published in English as Peeling the Onion). A few weeks before the book’s eagerly awaited release, he gave an interview in which he revealed that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the elite military units that were formally the armed wing of the Nazi Party and which existed alongside the regular army. While the Waffen-SS was not in charge of concentration camps, some of its units were responsible for war crimes; after the war, the SS as a whole was declared a criminal organisation.

The interview may well have been designed to raise the public’s anticipation ahead of the memoir’s publication. But it set off a discussion about Grass’s war record which also ensured that the 479-page memoir is known mainly for an episode that Grass explores in a little more than a page.

The mere fact that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS should have mattered little. He was born in 1927, and drafted for the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old. He did not join the Waffen-SS as a volunteer (although he had volunteered to join the regular army as a fifteen-year-old). He was not involved in any war crimes.

In Peeling the Onion, he doesn’t try to reinvent himself as a seventeen-year-old anti-fascist: “There is nothing carved into the onion skin that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror… I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent.” Nor is he professing innocence: “Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.” When he was taken prisoner by the Allies, Grass didn’t hide the fact that he belonged to a Waffen-SS unit.

The reason that the revelation in 2006 caused a sensation was because it came so late. For sixty years, he had chosen not to own up to the fact that he had once belonged to an organisation that was instrumental in the Holocaust.

Mathias Döpfner, chairman of the board of the Springer Corporation, the publisher of the tabloid Bild and one of Grass’s perennial targets, would have taken pleasure in denouncing Grass in an opinion piece titled “The Onion’s Brown Core,” which appeared in Bild the day after the publication of the poem. His opening sentence identifies why he (and many others on the political right) dislike Grass so strongly: “Günter Grass likes nothing more than to remonstrate with the Germans and appeal to their conscience.” Döpfner draws a connection between Grass’s self-confessed silence before the publication of the poem, and the silence that preceded Peeling the Onion: “‘But why did I remain silent thus far?’, Grass writes. One is inclined to ask in return: Why did he remain silent for sixty years about his membership of the Waffen-SS?… ‘Peeling the onion’… Grass has now arrived at its very centre. And the onion’s core is brown and stinks.”

The claim that Grass forfeited the right to speak out because he was coy about his Waffen-SS membership may be a vengeful ploy by those who have long borne the brunt of Grass’s moral indignation, and a cheap attempt to match the poet’s self-righteousness. But Döpfner and others have also accused Grass of being a Nazi and anti-Semite, suggesting that the seventeen-year-old and the eighty-four-year-old shared a hatred of Jews and a fondness for Nazi ideology. Their argument is anything but subtle: whoever criticises Israel by failing to distinguish between the Iranian aggressor and the Israeli victim is guilty of anti-Semitism.

Yet the suggestion that Grass’s poem reeks of anti-Semitism shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. The poem is remarkable not so much because of its ludicrous claims about supposed Israeli designs to annihilate the Iranian people, but because of its insinuation that a taboo prevents Germans from speaking out against Israel and that anybody violating that taboo would be accused of anti-Semitism. Such an argument is reminiscent of the claim that there is a taboo preventing, say, non-Aboriginal Australians from criticising Indigenous people, or Americans of European descent from criticising African or Native or Asian Americans, and that any violation of such a taboo triggers accusations of racism. It resembles the tactic of the racists who introduce an odious statement with the preamble, “political correctness prevents me from saying this,” and then go on to say exactly what they think. A variant of the “but one of my best friends is Aboriginal/ African American/ …” line also appears in “What Must Be Said”: Grass refers to Israel also as “a country I am and always want to be close to.”

While Grass is no anti-Semite, his poem gestures towards the vocabulary and the mindset with which he grew up. Nazi ideologues successfully conjured a Jewish conspiracy that thwarted legitimate German ambitions and could therefore be held responsible for German ressentiments. Grass does not blame Jews or Israel for feeling resentful – but there is no doubt that his views about the legacy of the Nazi past, both Germany’s and his own, are tainted by resentment. He resents the fact that he has to live with “it” – be it guilt, responsibility or shame – “for the rest of [his] life.” In the poem, he is concerned about potential German complicity in an Israeli pre-emptive strike because the burden Germans have to carry is already heavy enough. Raphael Gross, director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London and of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, has rightly pointed out it is so difficult to overcome National Socialism precisely because of the failure to recognise the longevity of Nazi mentalities and morals.

Günter Grass is one of the greats of postwar German literature (although, in my view, he does not come close to being the greatest). His reputation as a writer shouldn’t be mixed up with his standing as a public intellectual. In his latter capacity, he did play an important role on many occasions, not least because he could be counted on as somebody who wouldn’t shy away from speaking out in the face of a seemingly overwhelming consensus. Thus he criticised the rushed process of reunification, and he resigned as a member of the Social Democrats when his party agreed to the so-called asylum compromise of 1992, which led to a change of the German constitution’s guarantee of a right of asylum. In both those cases, it was courageous of him to take a stand.

But when it comes to his own past, he has been a troubled soul. And since he has long been convinced that his views deserve a broad audience, the readers of his books and the public at large have been privy to his inner conflicts. Much of his writing, while purporting to be about Germany (or, in the case of “What Must Be Said,” about Israel), is in the last instance about his own demons. It is telling that his controversial poem begins with the words, “Warum schweige ich,” “Why do I remain silent,” and thus with the writer’s “I” (rather than with Israel, which is mentioned only twenty-eight lines later).

The publication of “What Must Be Said” was not the first time that Grass got into trouble in Israel. Only six months ago, in an interview with Tom Segev, Grass opined that “the madness and the crime were not expressed only in the Holocaust and did not stop at the end of the war. Of eight million German soldiers who were captured by the Russians, perhaps two million survived and all the rest were liquidated.” The use of the verb “liquidate” and the (incorrect) reference to six million dead German POWs could be read as saying that there was a German equivalent to the Holocaust and that Germans were as much victims as Jews. At the time, Segev himself excused Grass, saying that the figure of six million German victims came up “in the heat of the moment.” That was a kind interpretation, but perhaps one with more than just a grain of truth to it.

In the poem, Grass refers to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a Maulheld, a loudmouth. It is one of Grass’s mistakes in the poem not to take seriously the man who wants to wipe Israel and its people off the map. If there is a Maulheld in this story, it is Grass himself. He has the tendency to pontificate at the top of his voice, to speak before he thinks, and to exaggerate first and qualify later.

NOTWITHSTANDING his prominence, Grass’s recent intervention, much of it politically silly and artistically of little merit, should not have preoccupied the German opinion pages for many days. Neither should it have prompted Israel’s government to declare him a persona non grata (which then prompted Grass to liken Israel’s interior minister to Erich Mielke, the East German minister responsible for the Stasi, who once banned him from visiting the German Democratic Republic). It is unfortunate, too, that the controversy failed to raise a few issues that are probably worth more consideration than the Nobel laureate’s ill-chosen words.

First, Grass actually made a suggestion in his poem that is worth further discussion: namely that an agency ought to have the right to inspect Israel’s nuclear facilities. In an ideal world, that agency would also have unfettered access rights in all countries, including the United States and Russia.

Second, the spectre of anti-Semitism, raised by Grass himself, deserves closer attention. What is the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, particularly in Germany? And what is the link between anti-Semitism and the rabid pro-Zionism that has long been advocated by the Springer Corporation via Bild?

Third, the controversy over “What Must Be Said” has been remarkable more because of the response to the poem than because of the poem itself. What moved so many of Germany’s public intellectuals to rush into print or onto television shows to distance themselves from Grass? What does it mean when fellow writer Rolf Hochhuth told Grass in an open letter, “I am ashamed as a German of your preposterous silliness”? Did he seriously believe his reputation would be tarnished by Grass’s intervention?

German newspaper editors and talkshow hosts seem to have concluded that this particular debate is over. All those who conceive of themselves as opinion-makers have said their piece. If it was a contest then Grass’s critics seem to have won it convincingly. Besides, Grass himself retired hurt; he fell silent because he was admitted to a Hamburg hospital on 16 April, apparently with heart problems. But a survey of opinion pages and of Germany’s famed Feuilleton, the culture sections of the print media, provides a skewed picture. Grass has had his backers. During the last TV debate about the poem, on 15 April, the studio audience applauded those who defended Grass (and criticised Israel) rather than Grass’s critics. The German blogosphere, the comments sections of news media websites, the letters pages and numerous non-representative opinion polls suggest that a majority of Germans sympathise with Grass’s views.

Some of Grass’s critics, such as the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen or Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung editor-in-chief Martin Vogler, noted that his views resemble so-called Stammtischparolen, opinions uninhibited by political correctness and informed by prejudice and jingoism. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the Stammtisch, the proverbial regulars’ table in the pub, came out in support of Grass, and that its views appear to be at least as much informed by a deep-seated resentment as Grass’s. Grass himself, by the way, has been surprisingly unconcerned about the applause he has been receiving from unreconstructed anti-Semites, and about the legitimacy he has bestowed on certain Stammtischparolen.

Perhaps the week-long debate, which, as many observers noted, was peculiarly German both in its tone and in its intensity, reflected a realisation that the silly claims of a self-obsessed old man have provided a glimpse of something unpalatable that has no place in how the new Germany likes to be seen by the rest of the world. Today’s Germans have tried hard – building memorials, prosecuting war criminals and paying restitution to former slave labourers – to prove that they have nothing to do with yesterday’s Germans; yet the past tends to catch up with them. Günter Grass seems to have been only too aware of the past’s propensity to insert itself uninvited into the present. “History,” he wrote in his 2002 novel Im Krebsgang, published in English as Crabwalk, “or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” •

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THIS month’s outbreak of violence in Gaza sent thousands of Israelis into bomb-shelters and left twenty-five Palestinian militants and civilians dead. While Hamas forces in Gaza did not participate in the exchange of fire, the movement failed to rein in competing militants. Groups affiliated to the Popular Resistance Committees responded to the assassination of one of its leaders by the Israeli military with a barrage of rockets and mortars, and within hours the situation escalated. For now, it seems that Egyptian mediation has re-established a fragile ceasefire.

While Hamas’s decision not to return fire is certainly a welcome development, the internal political struggle over how the movement should position itself in relation to Israel is far from over.

As Israeli planes circled the skies of Gaza, representatives of different wings of Hamas embarked on two competing diplomatic missions. Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas political bureau and overall leader of the movement, paid a surprise visit to the Turkish capital, Ankara, a fortnight ago, briefing Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on what was described as “recent developments in Palestinian politics” and the prospects for reconciliation between the competing Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.

Meanwhile, the Gaza-based leaders of Hamas dispatched strongman Mahmoud Zahhar to Tehran. Zahhar, one of the closest aides of Ismael Haniyeh, the Gaza prime minister, thanked Iran for its “unlimited and unconditional support.” Zahhar also underlined the fact that the “principles and strategies of Hamas” – synonymous with the movement’s commitment to armed struggle and terror operations – had “not changed” despite the ceasefire.

Both diplomatic initiatives are clear attempts to rally support behind competing wings of Hamas. As such, they are only the most recent examples of a series of regional moves in the past few weeks that illustrate growing tensions within the organisation, as separate centres of power vie to determine the future course of the movement.

The contenders are the leadership in Gaza, represented by Haniyeh and his interior Minister Fathi Hammad, and the exiled overall leadership represented by Meshal. While Haniyeh maintains control of a breakaway branch of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza strip, Meshal is supported, by and large, by Hamas members from the West Bank and the Palestinian Diaspora, though he also enjoys the backing of many Gazans critical of Haniyeh’s authoritarian regime in the coastal strip.

Early assessments assume that the struggle centres on the implementation of reconciliation documents signed by Meshal and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is leader of Fatah. Agreements were ceremoniously concluded in Cairo in May 2011 and again in Doha in February 2012. Both agreements were welcomed by many Palestinians but were concluded in the face of ill-concealed opposition by Haniyeh’s Gaza branch.

The Gaza prime minister, fearing a challenge to his position in the coastal strip, attempted to torpedo the initial Cairo agreement by praising the “martyr Osama bin Laden” on the eve of the concluding ceremony. Likewise, the Gaza leadership opposed the Doha agreement by labelling it “unconstitutional” and by refusing to accept President Abbas as an interim acting prime minister, as stipulated in Doha.

The question of who will lead the interim Palestinian government until elections are held is still far from concluded. But there is clearly more at stake than personal ambition. What lies at the core of the conflict between the Hamas leaders in Gaza and the leadership abroad is a fundamental struggle over the future of Hamas as a movement. Certainly, recent shifts within Hamas suggest the possibility of a transformation from terrorist organization to legitimate political party. While the outcome remains unpredictable, signs of internal strife have escalated to a tipping point.

In December, Ismael Haniyeh embarked on a western-bound Mediterranean tour in an attempt to gather political support from post-revolutionary regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. He was granted a hero’s welcome. In mid-February, he started a second diplomatic circuit that brought him to Qatar, Bahrain and Iran. To the dismay of more conciliatory Hamas members, Haniyeh vehemently and repeatedly stressed Hamas’s commitment to “armed resistance,” “the futility of peace negotiations” and the movement’s commitment to fight “until all Palestinian land has been liberated.” Haniyeh’s hosts in Tehran reacted warmly, swiftly increasing the flow of financial support to Gaza.

Emboldened by this wave of outside recognition, Haniyeh has continued to lobby against the implementation of the reconciliation agreements. By preventing the Palestinian Central Election Commission from updating voter registers, he is effectively preventing elections that were scheduled in the Cairo and Doha agreements in order to cement his hold to power.

Haniyeh’s regional rallying of support has not gone unnoticed by Khaled Meshal. In contrast to the Gaza prime minister, Meshal silently backed “exploratory talks” between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators hosted by the King of Jordan in Amman in January. Likewise, Meshal has on numerous occasions expressed his acceptance of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – a tacit acceptance by the faction of the right of the State of Israel to exist in secure borders side by side with a future Palestinian state.

At the same time, Meshal has attempted to bring Hamas closer to the secular institutions of Palestinian political life as he pushes for the organisation’s integration into the Palestine Liberation Organization, which at the moment does not include the movement. Integrating Hamas into the PLO would close Palestinian ranks and effectively mean a formal cessation of violence from Hamas. At the same time, it would represent a further implied acceptance by Hamas of agreements previously signed between the PLO and Israel.

Meshal’s change of heart can be partly attributed to the ongoing public revolt against Syrian President Bashar a-Assad, who has hosted Hamas’s diaspora leadership since the 1990s. Assad’s violent response to an uprising that is at least partly backed by Hamas’s umbrella organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, has strained relations. Reacting to turmoil in Syria, Meshal has been forced to relocate Hamas’s diaspora headquarters from Damascus to Doha, the Qatari capital, in February. This relocation from Iran-backed Damascus to Washington’s closest remaining Arab ally in the region is an important symbolic gesture towards what Meshal may very well envisage for the movement: a comprehensive re-invention of Hamas.

Whether or not Hamas as a unified movement would follow Meshal on this change of course has been the subject of much speculation. Notably, Meshal recently expressed his outrage at Gaza’s refusal to fall “in line” by announcing he would step down as leader of the political bureau. Elections for the Hamas Shoura Council, the group’s highest decision-making authority, which appoints the movement’s leader, are due in April. It is unclear whether Meshal will ultimately follow through on this threat, as observers speculate that he could be re-elected despite his recent declaration. Alternatively, it seems he might be elected to head a new and independent Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The outcome of this power struggle within Hamas is far from pre-determined. Current developments present Western decision-makers with an opportunity to influence the outcome and to support the shift from a renegade terrorist militia to a necessary partner in what could very well be an all-encompassing peace process with Israel.

Hamas leaders such as Khaled Meshal need to be engaged not isolated. Washington has embraced moderate Islamists in Cairo and Tunis, and representatives of political Islam in the Palestinian territories should not be treated any differently. Instead of resorting to ineffective undifferentiated boycotts, Washington and European governments should engage with reformist groups from within Hamas.

While it does carry political risks, such an approach might just tip the scales in the right direction. Violent escalations such as this month’s exchange of rockets in Gaza will continue to bring suffering to Israelis and Palestinians, but will also strengthen forces from within Hamas that thrive on a political vision that fosters isolationism and extremism. •

The post The Hamas split and the future of the Palestinian peace talks appeared first on Inside Story.

IT was a year of protest: uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa that overturned governments; encampments in southern Europe that resisted economic austerity; an occupation of Wall Street that incited the seizure of financial centres and town squares in many hundreds of places across the planet. Why did this happen? How was it organised? What is the lasting significance of this rising of popular energy and anger?

The commercial media were inconstant and unreliable chroniclers of the unrest during 2012, and few reporters posed these questions. Cyberspace is awash with documents, and fragmentary perspectives, but their proliferation can provoke uncertainty and confusion at least as much as illumination. Thankfully, two recently published books attempt to record current events and to provide careful if frankly sympathetic analysis. They also provoke further questions concerning the role of the writer and of the book in the unfolding of contemporary political movements.

Paul Mason is the economics editor of the BBC’s current affairs program, Newsnight, the author of several books, and a blogger of some notoriety. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a highly ambitious combination of traditional reportage, primer in radical social theory, and original analysis of contemporary global crises and campaigns. As Mason explains, he has attempted to “capture the moments of crisis and revolution” around the world, to “give them context,” and to explain their “links.” Structurally, the work is something of a hodgepodge: reportage sits cheek-by-jowl with tweets and anecdote; episodes of radical history are recalled alongside essays on the stuttering of the global economy and ventures in cyber-psychology.

The mixture is inconsistent, but heady. Mason is a consummate journalist, and in reports on Egypt, Greece, the United States and the Philippines he provides sensitive and insightful accounts of life and struggles among the world’s poor and dispossessed. In his respect for individual experience, he offers sometimes startling and moving stories; in his capacity for synoptic description, he helps to convey the excitement and the terror of history being made.

Why It’s Kicking Off also realises its aim of providing a context to the increasing visibility and success of recent radical campaigns. Mason outlines the role of new technology in the promotion and organisation of protest that even those hopeless dinosaurs without a mobile phone (such as this reviewer) can easily understand. His knowledge of the dismal science helps him to connect recent economic changes not just to the Wall Street protests and to European unrest, but also to campaigns in the Middle East and elsewhere. Equally, his impressive knowledge of radical history helps him to discern points of commonality with – and the influence of – earlier moments of revolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book will help readers to better understand why 2011 was a year of protest. It will also help to persuade sceptics that these campaigns matter.

If Mason’s book succeeds handsomely as reportage and explication its wider aims are perhaps less fully realised. The author’s attempt to find a commonality in so many distinct campaigns sometimes smothers important points of difference. If all of the protests he examines seek to “defy fatalism,” as he argues, they do so in quite distinctive ways, and for particular purposes. In his emphasis on the common use of new technologies Mason sometimes overlooks the continuing importance of mobilisation in physical space, as well as the many uses of the printing press, radio and television by radical activists. In his stress on the capacity of networks to defeat hierarchical institutions he tends too often to overlook the tensions within decentralised and often short-lived combinations, and the evidence of failure alongside admitted success. His attempt to show that a new kind of “individual” is emerging through interaction with new technologies is similarly challenging but one-sided. Mason insists early on in the book that he is writing journalism rather than social science, so presumably this releases him from the requirements of disciplined argumentation and systematic evidence. In its most ambitious sections the book works better as a provocation than it does as an integrated explanation.

But perhaps the seriousness of these criticisms is itself open to dispute. As Mason notes, the status of “the book” as an object of superior prestige and public intervention is increasingly being rethought by contemporary activists. Why It’s Kicking Off is in part a reworking of a blog post Mason composed in early 2011, “Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere.” This piece promoted discussion and some dissent among many activists around the world, and traces of that debate are included within the pages of this book. The new movements seek no oracles and Mason aims to act as a source of education and incitement rather than a philosopher-king. In this sense, the incomplete and fragmented nature of his book may be considered a mark of its interest and novelty rather than a simple deficiency.

A RETHINKING of the notion of “authorship” is perhaps a more obvious feature of another welcome publication, Occupying Wall Street. This book was composed by “Writers for the 99%”: a collective of some sixty participants in the Occupy Wall Street campaign. Though not an officially sanctioned work (the wider movement could not agree on the need for such a book, or on the principles that might guide its production), it bears the obvious traces of a radical construction: dozens of interviews; reflections on personal experiences and tensions; vivid prose; evocative cartoons and illustrations; a listing of pertinent websites; an attempt to counter common misunderstandings; a sometimes breathless preoccupation with tactics pursued and victories won.

Occupying Wall Street aims to “tell the story” of the “beginning” of the Occupy campaign, an aspiration it fulfils completely. In just a little less than twenty concise chapters, the authors relate the many events that spanned the few months of the New York encampment, ranging from the initial call to protest in July through to the eviction of activists from Zuccotti Park in December. Far more than a simple chronology, the book also provides much more: an account of the movement’s international inspiration; a clear explanation of the importance and operation of democratic processes; a record of official harassment by police; a reflection on the alliances that underpinned local success; a sensitive analysis of media reports; and an interesting if not exhaustive consideration of the movement’s influence on others around the world.

Two features of the book grant it particular import. First, it provides a very detailed portrait of the experience of squatting in central Manhattan and of the diurnal round of committed activism. The movement was notable for its attempt to model an “intentional community”: a space of democratic openness and respect that embodied the values of an alternative society. This means that those who hope to understand its contribution, and its significance, must try to comprehend the sometimes prosaic details of its daily life. In helping to provide insight into these matters, the book performs a fine service.

But if the Occupy movement attempted to anticipate the methods of a new and better way, then this has in fact been a quest marked by tension, criticism and many defeats. Doubt has been cast on the representativeness of those who gathered in Wall Street (apparently they are too educated and too white) and their methods of decision-making (too slow; marked by the hidden hand of power), and the viability of tactics and appeals has been subject to the most searching and persistent critique. Here the book performs its second valuable role. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Occupying Wall Street is its willingness to register the movement’s problems, to record the attempts to struggle for solutions, and to admit of the imperfection of this experiment in radical democracy. It is only in a confrontation with these failures that the movement might hope to learn the lessons of its recent history. In discharging this function, the book offers something significant to the broader cause.

Australia, of course, has been marked by its own version of the Occupy campaign. While the complacent huffed that our national economy has so far avoided a recession, they were not as quick to grapple with the broader challenges of the year of protest now passed. Like most other societies, Australia is marked by great and increasing inequality: the wealthiest 1 per cent of us earn around 10 per cent of national income. The power of business has no counterweight in the power of labour or government. Formal politics, like the established media, is regarded by many with indifference or contempt. Equal provision of public goods is now barely contemplated as a realisable aim. Young people are more educated than ever before, but also far from certain of their future prospects. One of the lessons of 2011 is that uneven and alienated societies such as what we have become will not remain forever quiescent. These excellent books incite reflection on why that might be and on what it might mean in the years to come. •

The post The new global rebellions appeared first on Inside Story.

PETER Kosminsky’s four-part drama series, The Promise, has produced the same deeply divided response in Britain, France and Australia. From official Israeli and Jewish establishment sources there has been fierce condemnation, nowhere more so than in the formal complaint to SBS, which screened the series in Australia, by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, or ECAJ. From most other sources the series has received high praise, both as a film and as a contribution to the discussion of the tragic Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

The Promise takes up a problem that has troubled Jewish thinkers since the Zionist project of creating a Jewish homeland or state was first mooted. Since the world had run out of uninhabited lands, what would happen to the people who already lived in the chosen territory? The question was debated with admirable frankness and calmness, but little consensus, by theorists who did not foresee the terrible urgency that the Holocaust would one day bring to it. They asked whether the inhabitants could be lured away by bribery or subterfuge or whether force would be needed. The optimistic view, expressed in Theodor Herzl’s novel Altneuland, was that life in the Jewish state would be so attractive that the indigenous people would happily submit – Israel’s “immaculate misconception” as the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit described it to me.

That was never going to happen in Palestine, the land ultimately chosen. The Arabs believed they too had a historic right (some saw it as a divine right), and a British promise, to what an American analyst has dubbed the “much too promised land.” To the Arabs of Palestine it was already their home, where their ancestors had lived for generations, and where they had a right of self-determination as part of the Arab homeland promised by the British in return for Arab help in the first world war. When they were told that the fine print left Palestine out of the Arab promise, and that Britain would instead honour its promise of a Jewish homeland, the Arabs felt betrayed and threatened, and predictably resisted.

As the ECAJ’s complaint about The Promise notes, Arab objections to Zionist-inspired immigration go back to its beginning in the late nineteenth century. But the objection was not, as the ECAJ may expect the reader to assume, an irrational objection based on prejudice; as the historian Benny Morris emphasises, it was a well-grounded, and indeed prescient, fear that the Zionists wanted to take their country. The official recognition and support of the Zionist project resulted in acute and growing conflict during the British mandate, and open warfare when a Jewish state emerged with UN blessing. Although Israel triumphed in the wars of 1948 and 1967, and remains in military control today, the question remains: what is a just solution to the competing claims of Jews and Arabs? What could once be debated as a historical or theological problem is now an existential human problem: what is going to happen to the five million Jews and five million Arabs who today live in Palestine? They all need a home.

This is the question implicitly asked by The Promise. Kosminsky does not answer it, but he gives a powerful reminder to a readily forgetful world that the question has always been there and remains there, and that the failure to answer it has had and continues to have terrible consequences. He does this by interweaving two stories, one of Len, a British sergeant serving in Palestine in 1946–48, and the other of Len’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter Erin, who visits Israel in her gap year in 2005. Initially the purpose of Erin’s trip is to give moral support to Eliza Meyer, her Jewish school friend who is returning home to Israel to do her military service. But in her grandfather’s diary she finds a house key that Len had promised to return to its owner, and she sets out to fulfil his promise.

The interwoven stories, rich in incident, character and plot, provide two snapshots of the ongoing conflict between two peoples seeking to live in the same land. In 1948 the Jews are the people without a home, desperately seeking to create not just shelter for the wretched refugees from the Holocaust but also a refuge for all potential victims of anti-Semitism in the future. The snapshot shows the length to which desperate people will go, and shows how the conflict is starting to make Arabs into refugees. The second snapshot, in 2005, shows that Jews now have a homeland but Palestinians do not. Established but isolated in their homeland, symbolised by the Meyer family in the bubble of the coastal town of Caesarea, Israelis are ignoring the needs of the Palestinians, who see Israel taking more and more of the only land that could provide their home. Israel has a monopoly of military force and Palestinians respond with the shocking weapon of the weak, suicide bombing, to which Israel retaliates by demolishing houses.

Kosminsky has emphasised that he did not set out to take sides or offer solutions; his first responsibility was to present an image that did justice to the complexity of the situation. Historians and political commentators have written many volumes about this complexity, and the film was based on years of research. In contrast to a historian, the artist and film-maker must choose a few characters and events to capture the viewers’ attention, stimulate their minds, fire their imaginations and touch their consciences. It is inevitable that people with an existing view about Palestine will be disappointed that this or that point dear to them was not made or emphasised, but they can still be grateful that Kosminsky has put the fundamental problem on the table in a high-quality film with great human impact.

Apologists for special interests have a choice. They can be open to The Promise as one of many ways a film about the Israel–Palestine conflict could be made, they can accept its challenge to seek solutions, they can learn from it, even if some of the lessons may be painful, and they can offer competing views and interpretations and emphasise different points if they wish. Alternatively they can firmly close their minds, refuse to recognise the challenge or seek solutions, resist any lessons they could learn, and seek to suppress the film. In that endeavour they may seek to place stereotyped and demeaning interpretations on the film. Antony Loewenstein, in his 2006 book My Israel Question, was far from the first to deplore the tendency to portray criticism of Israel and its policies as anti-Semitism, a practice he saw as wrongly conflating Zionism and Judaism.

IN ITS thirty-one-page complaint, the ECAJ compares The Promise with Jud Süss, a “Nazi propaganda film” praised by Goebbels and made compulsory viewing for Nazi death squads. The complaint asserts, without particulars, that “the ancient libel that holds all Jews throughout history to be collectively guilty of killing Jesus has been segued into the equally ludicrous proposition that all Jews are collectively guilty of the wanton shedding of innocent blood.” It complains about the historical background but its major allegation is that “all of the principal Jewish characters (and thus by implication Jews generally) are portrayed negatively and, ultimately, without any redeeming virtues. They are cast as variously cruel, violent, hateful, ruthless, unfeeling, amoral, treacherous, racist and/or hypocritical... The series also panders to stereotypes about Jews being immoderately wealthy and having acquired their wealth unfairly.”

In contrast, an English reviewer for the Israeli website Eretz Acheret noted that “the Israeli characters are drawn sympathetically and realistically, with not a hint of demonisation.” The ECAJ reaches the opposite conclusion only by itself imputing unfavourable attributes to the Jewish characters, judging them by harsh and unrealistic standards, interpreting their conduct in the worst possible way, and making quite absurd comparisons. There is a striking irony in a Jewish organisation’s striving to show that every Jewish character is a demon and every Arab character a saint. One by one, the ECAJ’s submission proceeds to do a hatchet job on every Jewish character of any importance, rejecting the humanity with which Kosminsky endows each of them, and substituting an anti-Semitic stereotype of its own manufacture.

The ECAJ gives what it calls “seventy-five examples of negative stereotyping of Jews” in its complaint. I can only deal with a few here, but an extended response to the complaint can be found here. The complaint itself can be found here.

Much of the calumny is directed at Erin’s hosts, the Meyer family. The complaint says that “none of the Arab characters speaks with a raised voice, in stark contrast to the violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled Jewish families.” It is in the nature of the plot that viewers see an Arab family only briefly on the special occasions of entertaining an important visitor, when they are naturally on their best formal behaviour. In contrast, Erin is asked to treat the Meyer household as her home, and becomes a part of the family. She sees everyday family life, in which a father has heated arguments with his youthful son over politics but rushes frantically to his side when he is injured, a younger sister calls her older brother insane but has deep affection for him, a mother reacts angrily to those who blow up her son by calling them “animals,” and parents treat their daughter’s friend with great care and responsibility. Erin finds the parents “the kindest and most generous” people she has known and, despite his despair at their politics, their argumentative son agrees.

By no stretch of the imagination is this a “violent, quarrelsome, hate-filled” family. It is a normal family. Its members are human beings, neither demons nor saints. Viewers who have been confronted for the first time by someone experiencing an epileptic fit will know that when the Meyer parents are momentarily paralysed with shock when Erin collapses in front of them, they are not being shown as “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous, cruel,” in the ECAJ’s words.

It is, however, a family whose members are awkward and at a loss for words or actions when, owing to Erin’s naivety, they find Omar, a real, live Arab peace activist, in their luxurious home. Omar shows similar unease, his only conversational gambit being to needle his hostess by asking where her family came from. In its search for an anti-Semitic interpretation, the ECAJ accuses Kosminsky of using this incident as “the vehicle for conveying the alien-ness of Leah and her husband Max (and by extension all Jews) to the land, further estranging them from the audience’s sympathy,” and of portraying them as “ungracious and racist,” “cold, insensitive, unfeeling, callous”and “cruel.”

Such an interpretation may appeal to anti-Semites who are trying to discover an anti-Semitic meaning. They will miss the more reasonable interpretation. What the film is doing, in effect, is dramatising Benny Morris’s observation that a “mutual lack of empathy” has characterised the Palestinian conflict from the beginning. Palestinians, he says in his book, Righteous Victims (1999), “never really understood the Zionist claim to the land” and Zionists “were uninterested in the Palestinian Arabs’ nexus with the soil.” “Thus, the Zionist–Palestinian conflict, which was the origin and remains the core of the Israeli–Arab conflict, has been characterised by a crude and brutal perceptional symmetry.” The message of The Promise is that Israelis and Palestinians must get beyond this and see each other as human beings who, among other things, need a home.

The lengths to which the ECAJ will go is illustrated by its attempt to demonise the convicted terrorist Avram Klein by comparing him with the Zionist leader Dov Gruner, on whom he is loosely based. The ECAJ presents Gruner as admirable in every respect, whereas Klein is said to be portrayed as “a blinkered fanatic who could have saved his own life by appealing his sentence to the Privy Council,” who uses “words that demonstrate that he refused to do so in a vainglorious quest for martyrdom,” and who in contrast to Gruner failed to win the respect and admiration of his guards. In fact, the film depicts Klein more favourably on all three scores.

First, Klein refuses to appeal whereas Gruner refused to defend himself at all. Second, speaking to Len in a friendly tone, Klein quietly utters the succinct and dignified words, “If you kill me you’ll regret it. Every movement needs its martyrs,” whereas Gruner bombastically told the court that nobody “could sever the tie between the Jewish people and their one and only land” and that “whosoever tries to sever it – his hand will be cut off and the curse of God will rest on him forever.” And, third, whereas Gruner won the respect and admiration of his guards, Klein is given a greater accolade: he wins the respect and friendship of Len, the sergeant who is the leading British character.

The ECAJ complains that because of the lack of certain background historical detail the film “shuts off any possibility that the viewer might understand how Jews who saw themselves as fighters for a noble cause could commit atrocities.” The reverse is true. The sympathetic portrayal of the terrorist Klein has been mentioned. Eliza Meyer’s grandfather, who lost most of his relatives in the Holocaust, was also a 1948 terrorist, and explains that after the Holocaust members of his generation were determined to carve out a land that could be safe for Jews forever. The British stood in their way, so the Jews “wiped them out. It was as simple as that.” Far from shutting off the possibility of understanding his implicit claim to act in a noble cause, the film shows a concentration camp and wretched refugees. It presents Eliza’s grandfather as an ordinary, civilised human being and passes no judgement on him. It is the ECAJ, not the film or the normal viewer, who finds him “obdurate and unapologetic for his part in an atrocity” and “lacking a moral compass.” Why does the ECAJ make this harsh judgement? The case put in his mouth is the case made by the real-life terrorist Menachem Begin, who blew up the King David Hotel and was later prime minister of Israel; it is the case made by Benny Morris, a historian admired by the ECAJ, when he justifies the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinian villagers from Israel as necessary for its ethnic “cleansing” (the term used at the time).

Viewers who have lived comfortable lives in peaceful countries like Australia and never faced challenges like those faced by Jews in Palestine in 1948 may be horrified by what was done and unable to identify with the case made in support. It does not follow that they will share the ECAJ’s harsh condemnation of those involved as people without a moral compass. Rather they will see them as vulnerable human beings with strong moral compasses pulled off course by experiences of anti-Semitism, culminating in the overwhelming effect of the Holocaust and all the tragedies that went with it. They will not join the self-righteous rush to judgement of those individuals, and certainly not the ridiculous extension to Jews generally that the ECAJ postulates.

What the ECAJ seems incapable of understanding is that the film is not making or inviting judgements. It is implicitly saying that it is too late for that; here is a terrible human problem that has to be faced.

AN IRONY of the ECAJ’s complaint is that Kosminsky has gone out of his way to discourage people from drawing anti-Semitic inferences from his film. Far from trying to blacken Israel, he shows that practices for which Israel is unfavourably known have been practised, and indeed were invented, by others. He shows the gratuitous humiliation of Palestinian civilians by soldiers and political assassinations as practised only by the British, and the retaliatory destruction of houses used by terrorists as practised by both Britain and Israel.

It would have been very natural for the film to mention the history of Caesarea, where Erin is staying, and it would have helped explain why the Meyers are so taken aback when an Arab turns up in their home. The Caesarea community website records without any indication of embarrassment or regret the expulsion of all Arabs in 1948. Benny Morris adds the details that they were expelled by the Haganah (which the ECAJ invokes as a symbol of Jewish rectitude) in mid February 1948 (three months before the Arab invasion to which the ECAJ attributes the war), despite the fact that according to Jewish sources the villagers had “done all in their power to keep the peace in their village and around it… [and] supplied agricultural produce to the Jewish market in Haifa and Hadera.”

Telling this story would have been easy pickings if Kosminsky had really been out to put Israelis or Jews in a bad light. It would also have pre-empted the ECAJ’s criticism that The Promise shows a Jewish swimming pool but not an Arab swimming pool in Caesarea. Perhaps the ECAJ is unaware that in Israel generally, far fewer Arabs than Jews can afford swimming pools. In Israel 58.5 percent of Arab families (as compared with 20.7 percent of Jewish families) are defined as living below the poverty line

The ECAJ is not only ungenerous in failing to recognise Kosminsky’s restraint. It acknowledges his Jewishness by a quotation about “self-hating Jews” who “betray their own people,” and speculates that he set the film in 2005, instead of 2010 when it was filmed, so that Erin could say to the soldiers about to blow up a house in Gaza: “Don’t drive them out of Gaza.” It ignores Kosminsky’s explanation that, having done his research before 2005, he wanted to include events like suicide bombing, which had ceased several years before 2010.

IT IS reassuring that the SBS complaint process rejected ECAJ’s complaint and showed no difficulty in recognising the true character of the film. But this does not mean that no harm has been done, or that no harm would be done by similar baseless attempts to smear individuals, organisations, books or films in the future. A number of groups are entitled to feel fearful, angry or dismayed by the ECAJ’s attempt to use the smear of anti-Semitism to suppress access to this film.

First are the viewers of SBS, who watch its programs because they are distinctive and open windows on the world not readily available elsewhere; they do not want it confined by unjustified rulings and, more importantly they do not want its future decision-making intimidated by the mud that will stick from this exercise or the fear of other baseless attempts to smear it in the future.

More generally, the people of Australia want freedom of access to information, points of view, and artistic representation in all their media in order to conduct their intellectual, political and moral life, without its being confined because some people are so sensitive to criticism of themselves or their cherished interests that they will go to any lengths to protect them. As citizens they also want those who make decisions on their behalf to be able to exercise Australia’s influence in the world not only on an informed basis but also free of similar intimidation. Those who have a special concern about the achievement of just solutions to problems of the Middle East, and would like the millions of Jews and the millions of Palestinians who live there to do so in freedom and justice, uncorrupted by the temptations of power or the temptations of powerlessness, will be particularly concerned.

There are many who value the great contributions that Jewish people have made to the intellectual, moral and artistic life, and particularly to the pursuit of social justice, in our civilisation. They are dismayed to see their contributions limited and their moral compasses sometimes distorted by the acceptance of the duty of short-sighted and uncritical defence of Israel, right or wrong, which the ECAJ’s complaint exemplifies. There are many, too, who believe that it would be a tragedy if all the courage and sacrifice and idealism that has gone into the building of Israel should result only in a pariah state because of its denial of justice to Palestinians.

If it is to maintain balance among the destabilising forces raging within and without, Israel is in desperate need of trusted but frank and independent critical voices such as the Diaspora could provide. Australian Jews can play such a role only if they open their eyes and ears and hearts and minds to the messages of the writers, artists, thinkers and people of insight and goodwill in the world, rather than attempt to shoot the messengers. Fortunately more and more are doing this. •

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IMAGINE waking one morning to the news that you will be given an instant pay rise of 60 per cent – 120 per cent if you are lucky enough to be a military officer. For those Qataris who work in the public sector – which is most of them – this was exactly what happened last September, when just such a proclamation was made, out of the blue, by the government.

Almost as quickly, locals began debating what had prompted such a pay hike. After all, as the country’s main employer, the government was taking on an astronomically larger wages bill because of the decision. Productivity was nowhere near high enough to justify such lavishness – in fact, it was not long since inflation had been a real worry for the country, running to double-digits for a couple of years in the late 2000s. Perhaps, some mused, the government was being truthful when it said that the rises were to offset cost-of-living rises over the past couple of years and help people lower their very high levels of household debt. But the timing and the manner of the announcement made that claim seem dubious to many people.

Instead, most people linked the announcement to the Arab Spring, the uprisings which had already claimed the political scalps of the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and were about to claim the Libyan former leader’s life. Although Qatar’s royal family and political system are widely tolerated by Qataris, and indeed are quite popular in most quarters, the Arab Spring ought to have caused some nervousness. In neighbouring Bahrain the two centuries–old dynasty nearly fell after massive protests in February and March last year, surviving only through a combination of wily political tactics against the protesters and the deployment of friendly Saudi security forces. In Saudi Arabia itself, pockets of poverty, the prospects of Sunni radicalism, and an unhappy Shi’a minority made the monarchy there nervous as well.

Just as the Saudi leadership had promised some US$130 billion – yes, billion – in “gifts” to their population in February 2011, many Qataris assumed that their own 60 per cent pay rise, although arriving a few months later, was a gift from their own leaders in exchange for political compliance. For all of Qatar’s economic success in the past decade, coming as it did as an accompaniment to Qatar’s high profile and yet murky domestic politics, the pay rise was almost certainly some form of patronage.

QATAR has come a long way in recent years, and its economic development since the mid 1990s has been nothing short of spectacular. Twenty years ago, most people – even those who considered themselves quite well-travelled or knowledgeable about world affairs – would have had trouble rubbing together two facts about this tiny Arab state or even finding it on a map. A great many still would. Despite the popularity of Qatar’s Al Jazeera television, and then its successful bid to host the 2022 soccer World Cup, it is a small Arab Gulf state that few know much about and fewer still have visited. At 11,586 square kilometres it is considerably smaller than East Timor or Fiji, and its population of about 1.7 million are mostly foreign workers – only perhaps 300,000 are Qatari citizens.

But Qatar is now, by most measures, the wealthiest country in the world per person; its nominal GDP is just under US$100,000 per person, but per citizen the figure is several times higher. Its total GDP, at about $110 billion in 2010, was about one-tenth that figure when the current emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, took power in 1995. Qatar’s wealth has been built on its gas reserves, which are among the largest in the world: its North Field, which it shares with Iran (where the field is known as South Pars), is the single biggest reserve in the world, holding about 13 per cent of the world’s proven gas reserves just on the Qatari side.

The physical look of Qatar has changed greatly too. A visitor to the capital, Doha, in the 1980s would have thought the place to be quiet and only modestly developed. While by no means poor back then, it was a backwater among Gulf states and nowhere near the present-day city of high-rises, shopping malls, urban developments and cultural attractions. As recently as a decade ago, the capital had only one modern shopping mall, basic sports facilities, and decent but no-frills infrastructure. Now, it’s on a building spree, constructing new hotels, residential complexes, shopping centres and major assets including a new airport and educational institutions. After hosting the 2006 Asian Games, Doha can boast world-class sporting venues, but even these are slated for redevelopment before the World Cup teams arrive a decade from now.

PERHAPS the most interesting change since the mid 1990s is in the style and ambitions of Qatar’s government. Where the previous emir was cautious, reserved and keen to keep Qatar’s large neighbour Saudi Arabia happy, Hamad has been an activist force for change, turning Qatar into one of the most high-profile states in the Arab world.

First, it is an economic trendsetter. Of course, it is normal for governments in the Gulf to make much of their wealth from oil and gas sales, and to use this money to both repress and co-opt citizens – in effect, to buy legitimacy or at least toleration. With its bold plans for economic diversification, new infrastructure and the education of the population, Qatar’s government is different. It is a little like Dubai in terms of its energy and vision, but – unlike Dubai – its vision is backed by hydrocarbon wealth.

Problems do exist with these plans. Qatar’s economic diversification is still in many ways subsidised by oil and gas revenue. Despite massive improvements in education, a rapidly rising number of young people are entering the labour market, often poorly prepared for most jobs and willing only to accept the more prestigious and secure ones. Still, Qatar is one of the few states that has enormous energy wealth and is nonetheless trying seriously to diversify its economy and build the basis for a more global and competitive economy.

To this end, it has made several strides. It has reformed education, both in primary and secondary schooling and especially in the higher education sector. Qatar University, the flagship institution, was dramatically reformed in the early and mid 2000s. At around the same time, Education City was established in the suburbs of Doha as part of a bid to persuade the best universities in the world to set up campuses in Qatar. Texas A&M is there teaching and researching on engineering; Cornell University runs the medical program; Georgetown runs courses in affairs and diplomacy. There are many others, among them Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern, and one of France’s grandes écoles, HEC Paris.

Beyond education, Qatar has cleverly leveraged as much wealth as possible from energy – through joint ventures with firms and the state-sponsored creation of key firms along the oil and gas supply chain – and also by developing world-class firms in other areas. Qatar Airways has very quickly become a global airline, while several Qatari banks, construction firms and transportation companies rank among the largest in the Gulf. It has done this, it must be stressed, in the pattern of what the political scientist Ian Bremmer calls “the new state capitalism”; Qatar is not an experiment in economic liberalism, even if it has made some market reforms. Instead, it has supported national “champions” – the mostly state-owned or heavily regulated and state-supported companies that are pushed to be efficient and profitable but also have near-monopolies or other advantages. It is a new and growing approach to development and diversification, but one which so far is showing considerable promise.

A second feature of Hamad’s Qatar is how uniquely and aggressively the country is “branded” to the world. Again, this has been a deliberate strategy of the emir. It began, most observers would argue, with the creation in 1996 of Al Jazeera, a trend-setting satellite television channel which, almost alone, transformed broadcasting and new media in the Arab world. The staid, distorted, state-owned media of the past has given ground – indeed, is almost extinct – in the face of Al Jazeera’s blend of informative and entertaining media and current affairs. The network has done wonders for Qatar’s image in the Islamic world, even if the glare of its journalistic gaze rarely pierces Qatar’s politics.

More recently, Qatar has branded itself as a modern, cosmopolitan and liberal state. By hosting major events such as the 2006 Asian Games and now the 2022 World Cup – and hoping to add a summer Olympics to the schedule too – the country is creating a global image way out of proportion to its size. Such events link to its plans for economic diversification, feeding as they do sectors such as aviation, tourism, construction and the media.

Finally, Qatar under Hamad has become a diplomatic leader in the Arab world. It was the only Gulf state to establish links with Israel during the Israeli–Palestinian peace process in the 1990s. It has been active in peacemaking in Lebanon and at the United Nations as a non-permanent member of the Security Council in 2006–07.

More recent has been Qatar’s military role in supporting the anti-Gaddafi revolution in Libya. It has given vocal support to the anti-Bashar opposition in Syria, including a call in mid January for foreign military intervention – the first Arab state to do so. Its military commitment to Libya was not just a token effort: it contributed around half of its entire air force capability to the NATO-led air operation, and accounts are starting to emerge of the on-the-ground special forces role Qatar played in support of the opposition.

IF ALL of this makes Qatar’s rise seem too good to be true, perhaps that will prove to be the case. There are many panegyrics to Qatar in the media, and the country markets itself very slickly, but impressive as its economic transformation and global political role have been, the changes since the late 1990s are not without a catch or two.

Perhaps the starkest observation to be made about Qatar is that there has been little political change or democratisation. Some see this as reason for Qatar’s progressiveness in other areas: economic change being the means by which the regime buys support from its constituency, and its diplomatic activism being a deflection of attention from its own very limited political reforms.

There is, perhaps, some truth to such claims. Certainly, thus far Hamad and the regime have been very successful in avoiding criticism or calls for democratisation from the United States, although this could just as easily reflect how effectively it has built up its diplomatic and military links with Washington. Qatar’s new constitution, which was endorsed by referendum in 2004, called for the creation of a popularly elected parliament. For a long time the emir seemed to be delaying this reform, which would have been a more significant step towards democratisation, even though the parliament’s powers under the constitution are limited. It was only late last year – again, many assume, as a result of the Arab Spring happening around him – that the emir finally announced that the long-anticipated polls would take place in 2013.

Regardless of this foot-dragging, the fact remains that there is a strong level of support for the emir – not least of all for the active global role he has created for Qatar – and there is little interest by most Qataris in challenging his dominance of politics. Perhaps that is to be expected in an environment where 60 per cent pay rises occur overnight, but there is also a genuine belief that the country is changing, overall, for the better. Qataris I met during a recent visit spoke positively about the image their country now has abroad, and seemed to relish the fact that Qatar had as much name recognition and “soft power” as much larger neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If there were complaints, they were mostly about the pace of change; and among younger Qataris there was frustration at the strong hierarchies that remain in society and in major companies and public service agencies. Few saw such things as a failing of the emir, however.

There are occasional political complications, of course. In early 2011, according to local rumours, a coup attempt – the second in a few months – had to be violently, if discreetly, suppressed. By most accounts it involved a group opening fire on the emir’s palace, a normally graceful building in a fairly serene city. But this was not a popular uprising or anything like it; in fact, Qatar has had none of the Arab Spring protests that most countries in the region have witnessed in the past year or so. If the coup even occurred, it reflected elite discord and, in particular, sharp divisions within the large royal family itself.

As it builds and expands its economy, if it truly wants to diversify and develop at both a social and an economic level, other problems will have to be overcome. Women are a woefully underutilised resource, and still face considerable social pressures to put family and domestic roles ahead of their careers. But women are also some two-thirds of university graduates, and by many accounts they are generally more reliable and diligent employees than their male counterparts. So not to welcome them into the workforce is costing Qatar dearly.

Similarly, there is a concern that although Qatar is educating many more of its young people, it is not preparing them very well for working life. Few want to work in the more demanding or less prestigious areas of the economy – as tradespeople, technicians and the like – and, perhaps because of the country’s enormous wealth, there is an expectation of good, low-stress jobs among many Qataris. This occurs elsewhere, of course: in Saudi Arabia it’s sometimes called the “mudir (manager) syndrome.” Even in Australia, it could be argued that too many young people flock to universities while there is a shortage of labour in trades because of the prestige attached to the professions. This is why Qatar has such an enormous population of “guest” workers: about 1.3 million people, the majority of them South Asian, work in poor conditions and for very modest wages (if still attractive enough to entice them to come and work in Qatar). Critics are quick to point out, however, that foreign workers enjoy few rights, and even wealthier Western expatriates will acknowledge that their Qatari sponsor has most of the power in the relationship.

Many Qataris believe that Qatar has too many foreign workers, and local people ought to be trained to take over the roles they occupy. But for as long as most Qataris lack a sense of competitiveness and are unwilling to take on many (of the most in-demand) roles, and foreign workers remain preferred by employers, plans to nationalise (“Qatarise”) the workforce and build a globally competitive, diversified economy are likely to fail.

IN DOHA, the Qataris I met gave me what seemed like contrasting, even clashing, perspectives. They appeared to agree about where the country is headed, and to support the emir’s vision of a wealthy, cosmopolitan, ly active country, yet they disagreed about whether it is going about this transition effectively and smoothly. For many older Qataris, reform is alluring but dangerous, something to be done cautiously, with economic change setting the pace and social change happening only very, very slowly. For younger Qataris, however, this very idea is the problem with the current reforms. They felt as though changes in the economic arena were having little impact in their daily lives, while the more conservative or traditional forces continued to restrain them socially and in their careers. Young people, men and women alike, often feel as if there is an underlying conflict between the need for development and the unwillingness of older Qataris to allow change.

If there is a failing in Qatar’s development approach, then perhaps this is it. It is a very conservative society being transformed rapidly in many ways. Its economy, the face of its cities, and the size and composition of its expatriate workforce have all changed beyond recognition in just a decade or so. Yet in other ways too little is changing. There are frustratingly few opportunities for young people in the social and political realm, constraints still on women, and only haphazard and cautious changes in many of the institutions and social structures that guide everyday life. This is the real challenge of development: not just to use gas wealth wisely while moving gradually but successfully to a sustainable economic base, but also to manage all of the social and cultural demands that go with such change. Although the emir has handled all this quite aptly so far, it is a long-term challenge, much of which remains incomplete. •

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THE sense of crisis that preceded Palestine’s application to the United Nations for admission as a state has entirely dissipated. The issue has disappeared from the media, the familiar deadlock over construction in the Israeli settlements has returned and – with the provocative timing to be expected from the present Israeli government – new construction has been approved in the disputed area in East Jerusalem, prompting the familiar ineffective Western protests. A return to business as usual? In all probability the answer is affirmative, at least in the short run, unless Western European governments can bring themselves to take an uncharacteristic initiative.

First, what of the crisis? It has become clearer that the tension was generated mainly by Israel and the United States. Both proclaimed that a unilateral move by the Palestinians would mean an end to negotiations for a two-state agreement and both threatened to withhold much-needed funding for the Palestinian Authority – in Israel’s case, taxes that it collects on behalf of the latter, in the United States’ case, that Congress would terminate financial support provided in recent years. The Palestinians’ claim that the move was intended, rather, to place the negotiations on a new foundation was more convincing, and points to the more plausible reason for the American and Israeli reaction: the move signalled an end to the acceptance of the US role as sole mediator in the relations between the two parties; in other words, it threatened the loss of American control over the “peace process” and the privileged position, and protection, that Israel enjoys within that framework.

As soon as the application was lodged, common sense returned. It was clear that it would be self-defeating for Israel to terminate negotiations or, even more so, to withhold financial support, opening the way for more extremist forces in Palestine. These dangers could be averted by the simple device of delaying decisions in the Security Council, which also saves the United States from a hostile Arab reaction should it veto the Palestinian application.

But the crisis was not wholly artificial. If a crisis is a moment when established practices have become untenable and new approaches suddenly become conceivable, then it is a moment of rare opportunity but also of serious risks. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in May showed that the US-mediated “peace process” had become moribund, and the Arab Spring provided a favourable setting for a Palestinian initiative to place negotiations for a two-state agreement on a more favourable footing. But the move also held serious risks. If it proves fruitless the Palestinian Authority will be weakened or even wholly discredited, and Mahmoud Abbas will forfeit his newly won prestige; at worst, Palestinian frustration may lead to serious outbreaks of violence. The perception of a volatile regional environment provides a more valid reason for the Western sense of crisis, and Israel’s provocative move in approving new settlement construction shows a remarkable insensitivity to this environment.

The speeches to the United Nations by Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas did not bring much new enlightenment. Obama’s was surprisingly one-sided, highlighting Israeli concerns but not Palestinian rights, reaffirming his support for a two-state solution but reiterating the implausible contention that statehood and negotiation were alternatives. Netanyahu went further, claiming that the Palestinians wanted a state but not peace, giving no hint of endorsing Palestinian rights, and roundly condemning the United Nations for its bias against Israel. Abbas had the far easier task of presenting to a sympathetic audience the case for recognising Palestinian statehood after so many years of fruitless negotiation, but also reaffirmed his readiness to resume negotiations based on the 1967 frontiers and conditional on a settlement freeze.

Within a few hours of the debate the Quartet on the Middle East (made up of representatives of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations), which had been deadlocked during the preceding weeks, issued a statement calling for negotiations without preconditions to achieve an agreement by the end of 2012. This might be seen as undermining the argument that the Palestinian initiative ruled out negotiation, but perhaps assumed that a decision on statehood would depend on the outcome of the negotiations. The statement called on the parties to agree on a timetable within a month, to make proposals on frontiers and security within three months, and to reach substantial agreement within six months.

The statement had serious limitations, however. It omitted all reference to the “parameters” long regarded as necessary for an agreement – the 1967 frontiers, subjected to agreed exchanges of territory, each state to have Jerusalem as its capital, and adequate measures to ensure Israel’s security – and there was no mention of the settlements issue. It may be inferred that these omissions were at the insistence of the United States. The proposal was entirely to the liking of the Netanyahu government: it was committed to nothing, all the fundamentals were open to discussion, and it could engage in endless negotiation without having to move toward a two-state agreement, blame the Palestinians for obstructing agreement and continue unrestricted construction in the settlements. Not surprisingly, Israel accepted with alacrity, leaving the Palestinians to appear less accommodating by insisting on their precondition regarding the settlements.

Unless the “ community” is prepared to move beyond the Quartet’s formula, it will prove as abortive as Obama’s ill-fated call a year ago for a two-state agreement by the time of this year’s meeting of the UN General Assembly. The United States, it has become obvious, will do nothing constructive before the presidential election. The question is whether there is any other actor prepared to fill the ensuing vacuum and provide an impetus to the negotiations. In particular, might “Europe” – either the European Union or some of its leading members acting with its approval – be prepared to assume this role?

Major European interests are at stake, and European values have long been engaged. A loss of control by the Palestinian authority, desperate acts of violence by Palestinians and massive Israeli reprisals could prompt much wider disorder in the present regional environment, threatening Western economic interests (not only oil supplies, but also wider trading relations), and would make for unrest in Europe’s Muslim communities. And “European values” would appear ineffective and hollow if Europe passively watched such a process. But can it summon up the energy to intervene before such a deterioration becomes unmistakably clear? Can its leaders, under extreme pressure owing to the euro crisis, pay attention before it is too late? In the next phase, in all probability, the United States will press the Palestinians to abandon their precondition. Will the Europeans be prepared to take a contrary stand? There are likely to be frequent reminders of the dangers in the situation, such as recent acts of violence by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian lives and property.

The Israeli government’s spectacular deal with Hamas, exchanging over 1000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, introduces new complications. More than a little ironic in view of Israel’s expressions of outrage over the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah – announced earlier this year but yet to be implemented – it is seen as strengthening Hamas against its rival, and thus sending the message that violence pays. Abbas appears to be losing the initiative and may find it difficult to retain broad support for seeking a negotiated settlement. The situation surely calls for a move from outside to revive the ailing “peace process.”

The new diplomatic machinery available to the European Union under its foreign affairs and security policy representative, Catherine Ashton, provides it with the capacity to formulate policy. After a shaky start, Ashton is beginning to gain a certain diplomatic credibility. But her role could be no more than an initiator of proposals for the EU governments, and agreement among all member governments would require protracted negotiation, making for delay and lowest-common-denominator decisions. What might be conceivable would be agreement in principle to a course of action, the details to be worked out by whoever was authorised to implement the policy.

Alternatively, the initiative might come from a few members – the Libyan model – who would likewise have to seek broad agreement before taking up a position. The success of the Libyan intervention – at least as perceived by its initiators – might encourage this approach. But what might such an initiative attempt to achieve? The immediate aim, presumably, would be to overcome the present deadlock such that meaningful negotiations toward a two-state agreement could proceed.

But it would need to recognised that the Netanyahu government is fundamentally opposed to such an agreement, notwithstanding his own lip-service to it. Substantial progress is unlikely under the present coalition. It would seem prudent to focus on the first steps – the first three months of the Quartet’s schedule, and in the first place the immediate obstacle, the settlements issue. Here the Europeans would lose all credibility if they simply endorsed the American and Israeli approach.

But could a European stand, however determined, influence the Netanyahu government after it had successfully defied Obama on that issue? It would, of course, win strong support in the region, and the heightened isolation might disturb some Israeli officials, but this would not be decisive, as the recent rigidity towards Turkey would suggest. While any communication would have to be addressed to the Israeli government, its real message would have to be to the Israeli people – as always, divided but with many surely uneasy over the issue. The tone and content of such a démarche would be important, but so would its manner of presentation. A major address by a prominent European leader, delivered in the region, would have an impact of a different order from an anonymous statement issued in Brussels. It is not difficult to envisage themes that might form part of such an address: that the settlements constitute a form of aggression against a neighbouring people, the strength of feeling that they are illegitimate as well as illegal, that they have no place in the present century, that they are unworthy of a great nation, that they foster the kind of violence by extremist settlers that has recently been observed, and so forth. Needless to say, the speech would also have to be supportive of Israel’s well-being and security.

A successful diplomatic initiative would call for unorthodox thinking. Many commentators have recognised, for example, that if left to themselves, the two parties will be unable to reach agreement. The US approach, remaining in the background, favours the party that is stronger and averse to the kind of changes that any agreement would entail. A more active mediator would have to question and cajole both parties, but the logic of moving towards an agreement requiring asymmetrical “concessions” would tend to lead it to be more supportive of the party pressing for changes from the present status quo. The potential task for diplomacy is daunting. It must be hoped that, if Europe takes up the challenge, it will be equal to its demands. •

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