Dinesh Dubey
One of the longest ongoing conflicts in the history of post-World War-II, the Arab -Israel wars involved unprecedented political tension in the Middle-East. With Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza Strip 53 years back, interspersed with wars and conflicts at varying scale intermittently, there appears to be no sign of a permanent peaceful solution so far.
The sudden attack by Palestinian Hamas extremists not only caught people and government of Israel unawares, it also holds the same audacity and element of surprise as it was half-a-century back when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel on the day of Yom Kippur, a Jewish festival, in 1973.
Unlike the series of clashes with Palestinian forces in Gaza over the last few years, this appears to be a full-scale conflict mounted by Hamas and its allies, with rocket barrages and incursions into Israel proper, and with Israelis killed and captured.
Only two years back, there was a huge sigh of relief by the peace-lovers all over the world when a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, with the due mediation by the United States and Egypt, was agreed upon by both the parties after 11 days of deadly hostilities in May 2021.
The psychological impact of the latest conflict on Israelis, however, is being compared to the shock of 9/11 in the US. So after the Israeli military repels the initial Palestinian attack, the question of what to do next will loom large. There are few good options for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declared war and is being pressured into a major military response.
Given that 250 Israelis have died so far and an unknown number been taken hostage by Hamas, a full-fledged Israeli invasion of Gaza — and even a temporary reoccupation of the territory, something that successive Israeli governments have tried hard to avoid — cannot be ruled out.
As PM Netanyahu told Israelis in declaring war: “We will bring the fight to them with a might and scale that the enemy has not yet known,” adding that the Palestinian groups would pay a heavy price.
Cost and Consequences
But a major war could have unforeseen consequences. It would be likely to produce sizable Palestinian casualties — civilians as well as fighters — disrupting the diplomatic efforts of U.S. President Biden and Mr. Netanyahu to bring about a Saudi recognition of Israel in return for defense guarantees from the U.S.
There would also be pressure on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group that controls southern Lebanon, to open up a second front in northern Israel, as it did in 2006 after an Israeli soldier was captured and taken prisoner in Gaza. Iran, a sworn enemy of Israel, is an important backer of Hamas as well as Hezbollah and has supplied both groups with weapons.
The conflict will obviously unite Israel behind its government, at least for a while, with the opposition canceling its planned demonstrations against Netanyahu’s proposed judicial changes and obeying calls for reservists to muster. It will give Mr. Netanyahu “full political cover to do what he wants,” said Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution.
Nevertheless, he added, Mr. Netanyahu has in the past had rejected calls to send thousands of troops into Gaza to try to destroy armed Palestinian groups like Hamas, given the cost and the inevitable question of what happens the day after.
Historical Perspective
The birth of Israel in 1948 was followed by half-a-dozen wars beginning with an armed conflict in the very first year of its foundation as a separate homeland for Jews. The first war (1948–49) began when Israel declared itself an independent state following the United Nations’ partition of Palestine. Protesting this move, five Arab countries—Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria—attacked Israel. The conflict ended with Israel gaining considerable territory.
The 1956 Suez Crisis began after Egypt nationalized the Suez canal. A French, British, and Israeli coalition attacked Egypt and occupied the canal zone but soon withdrew under international pressure. In the 1967 conflict, popular as the Six-day War, Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The war ended with the Israel occupying substantial amounts of Arab territory. An undeclared war of attrition (1969–70) was fought between Egypt and Israel along the Suez Canal and ended with the help of international diplomacy.
Three years later, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel (1973) better known as the Yom Kippur War, but despite initial Arab success, the conflict ended inconclusively. In 1979, Egypt made peace with Israel. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in order to expel Palestinian guerrillas based there. Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon by 1985 but maintained a narrow buffer zone inside that country until 2000.
Israel and Gaza
Israel and its longest serving Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been wary of sending ground forces into Gaza. Even in 2002, when Ariel Sharon was prime minister and Israeli forces crushed a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank, the government chose to avoid sending significant extra forces into Gaza, where it then had Israeli settlements.
Israel had unilaterally withdrawn its soldiers and citizens from Gaza in 2005, while retaining effective control of large parts of the occupied West Bank. The failure of that withdrawal to secure any sort of lasting peace agreement has left Gaza a kind of orphan, largely cut off from other Palestinians in the West Bank and almost entirely isolated by both Israel and Egypt, which control Gaza’s borders and its seacoast. Palestinians often call Gaza “an open-air prison.”
After the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conflict of 2006, an internal struggle between the Fatah movement of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the more radical Islamist Hamas movement ended with Hamas taking control of the territory in 2007, prompting Israel to try to isolate Gaza even further.
Even in an extended conflict of 2008 and 2009, Israeli forces entered Gaza and its population centres but chose not to move too deeply into the territory or to reoccupy it, with a cease-fire brokered by Egypt after three weeks of warfare.
Israel and Saudi Arabia
While Hamas has not been clear about why it chose to attack now, it may be a response to growing Israeli ties to the Arab world, in particular to Saudi Arabia, which has been negotiating a putative defense treaty with the United States in return for normalizing relations with Israel, potentially to the neglect of the Palestinians.
Saudi Arabia has not recognized Israel since it was founded in 1948 and until now had signaled that it would not even consider normalizing relations until Israel agreed to allow the creation of a Palestinian state. But recently even the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has gone public with affirmations that some sort of deal with Israel seemed plausible. In an interview with Fox News last month, MBS had said that talk of normalization was “for the first time, real.”
That will now be in question, depending on how long this conflict lasts and with what level of dead and wounded.
The question will always remain what happens afterward, as nearly every year there have been limited Israeli military operations in the occupied territories, but they have not provided any permanent solution.
(Writer is our regular foreign policy columnist—EW)
