With the threat of assassination by Israel plaguing each of Hamas’s successional figureheads, the killing of Yahya Sinwar on October 17 will lead to yet another forced restructuring of the group. Sinwar, 61, took over the organization after Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination and, in contrast to his predecessor’s more cautious approach, was known for his overzealous methodology. He had anticipated years earlier that Israeli forces would kill him; he lasted only two-and-a-half months as Hamas’ leader before he was indeed killed.
This most recent killing of another influential leader has forced a shift in Hamas’ operations. Militants who had previously exited the tunnels to fight Israeli forces head-on in the city are returning underground, biding their time. Meanwhile, outside of Gaza, a five-person council consisting of top officials and advisors has been appointed to replace Sinwar. Reportedly created after Haniyeh’s assassination, it may be that Hamas was anticipating Sinwar’s demise and preparing to change tactics. A day after Sinwar’s death was confirmed, Hamas’s deputy director Khalil al-Hayya declared that the group would only become stronger.
In the meantime, Israel is continuing its three-pronged military campaign in Gaza to end Hamas, destroy its military capabilities, and recover the hostages. These aims have not changed since they were announced by an Israeli war cabinet following Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2023 attack. Since then, policymakers in the region and beyond have begun to develop “day after” scenarios for the Gaza Strip on the assumption Israel will meet its stated objectives.
These scenarios, however, have so far proven to be premature, focused on only one aspect of the conflict—who is qualified to take over governance in the Gaza Strip after Hamas is supposedly destroyed. They have neglected to address with equal vigor Hamas’ fate as a resistance movement, a social service system, and a government that has ruled the Gaza Strip since June 2007. A parallel question is the fate of its military capacities that will undoubtedly remain after the war’s end.
To date, the Israeli campaign against Gaza has significantly weakened Hamas’ fighting capabilities at the cost of a catastrophic civilian death toll and the most extensive wholesale destruction of infrastructure on a scale unprecedented in modern history. Hamas has lost control of some areas of the Gaza Strip, especially in Gaza City and the northern regions, and its leaders have admitted that the war had destroyed 20 percent of the movement’s capabilities. According to a June report from the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations, however, Hamas’ fighting capabilities in personnel have been cut by half.
In late June, Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told local media that the central objective to wipe out Hamas may not entirely be met: “The idea that it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make Hamas vanish—that is throwing sand in the eyes of the public.”
Politically, Hamas still maintains negotiating clout, both directly with Arab and regional partners—Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, China, etc—and indirectly with the United States and Israel, to reach a ceasefire and release the hostages. Furthermore, the senior Hamas leadership outside Palestine is still able to communicate with its cadres inside the Gaza Strip.
Despite analysis and speculation that Hamas—with all its components as a movement and a government—will succumb to Israeli military might, predictions of its departure as a critical Palestinian entity have not materialized. A careful study of Hamas’ evolution in structure, orientation, and pursuits since its inception is necessary to chart the possible futures available to the movement once the guns fall silent.
Between Resistance and Governance
Hamas was founded at the end of the 1980s as an Islamic resistance movement embodying the Palestinian people’s struggle to end the Israeli occupation and achieve freedom and independence. Within a few years of its creation, it became a powerful rival to many factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), especially Fatah. Fatah had been leading the PLO since 1965 and the Palestinian Authority (PA) since its return to the West Bank as part of the provisions of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. However, over time it became clear that the Oslo Accords had failed to realize Palestinian ambitions for statehood or curb Israeli settler expansion into the Occupied Territories. As Fatah’s popularity slowly declined, Hamas’ support grew. In contrast to Fatah, Hamas staunchly rejected any negotiations with Israel, criticized the PLO for bowing to Western demands through the Oslo Accords, and provided extensive social and economic services.
In 2005, Israeli unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, emptying 21 illegal Jewish settlements and leaving the area under the PA’s control. The disengagement, as the Israeli government called it at the time, was designed to boost Israel’s security; it would also pave the way for the January 2006 legislative elections, the first exercise in Palestinian democratic institution-building.
The Palestinian legislative elections provided the Hamas’ political bureau with the opportunity to abandon much of its clandestine operations and move to more publicly engage in comprehensive Palestinian life, particularly in the Legislative Council. This decision was also due in part to Hamas’ popularity among the masses at home and abroad, rooted in its committed resistance to the Israeli occupation. It also presented itself as an alternative to the PA’s increasingly unpopular administrative program by advocating for reform.
Not surprisingly, and largely due to its social services and economic assistance to Gaza’s beleaguered civilian population, Hamas won a majority of seats during the 2006 elections. Almost overnight, the resistance movement was now expected to engage in politics and governance of a civilian population.
Hamas’ political victory surprised both Israel and the PA. Israel declared Gaza a hostile territory run by an organization it and its Western allies classified as terrorist. The Israeli military, which had unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, besieged the territory and arrested hundreds of Palestinians, some of whom were candidates who had won at the ballot box. American and European donors, who had hoped to fund a peace process and democratic transition after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, failed to pressure Hamas from disavowing its goal of destroying Israel. A few months later, Hamas fighters kidnapped Israeli soldiers and fired rockets at Jewish settlements as Israel retaliated with the first of many deadly operations in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the PA refused to relinquish power, and the two Palestinian factions were soon engaged in fatal skirmishes. “The schism between Abbas and Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza exploded in a bloody set of battles that saw Hamas violently wrest full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007,” the Washington Post wrote at the time.
According to the World Bank, the impact of the conflict with the PA, the consequent economic embargo, and repeated Israeli military campaigns left Gaza with the worst-performing economy in the world. Nearly two million civilians suffering from a punitive economic stranglehold struggled to find work, food, medicines, and materials to rebuild after each Israeli onslaught.
Nevertheless, Hamas maintained its hold of Gaza and enjoyed increased popularity. Its involvement in public rule increased when it formed its first government in June 2006 after repeated attempts from neighboring Arab countries, particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to persuade the two factions to form a reconciliation government failed. These initiatives would continue well into 2024, with the latest efforts undertaken by Chinese diplomats.
Since its 2006 election win, Hamas has amalgamated what it sees as its dual roles: as a political movement with a military wing that resists Israeli occupation, as well as its public service role as a government with administrative responsibilities. The duality of its operations in Gaza has significantly affected the nature, priorities, interests, and direction the organization has taken in the years following.
Foremost amongst these shifts is Hamas’ transformation into a public agency responsible for the welfare and security of Gazans. Following the election win, Hamas faced a new set of priorities, such as upholding laws, developing legislation, managing a judiciary, addressing women’s rights and human rights, and working with the international community—elements of governance entirely alien to the nascent underground movement. Here, a new dynamic began to form within Hamas: an authority that employed tens of thousands of employees with multiple government bureaucracies, all dedicated to handling the public, finance management, promoting good governance, and allowing transparency.
The second shift is that since 2006, Hamas has engaged with regional and international political players, transitioning from its former status as a minor player to an influential power broker in domestic Palestinian politics. However, Hamas also became vulnerable to pressures from other countries by entering the global stage and establishing relations with sovereign states such as Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, Malaysia, and others.
For instance, Israel approved a multi-million dollar grant from Qatar to Hamas in 2018 to help the organization pay public salaries and medical services. Since then, Qatar has given Hamas a total of $1.8 billion and has been an indirect influence on negotiations between Hamas and Israel. No longer is Hamas engaging with Israel as an isolated unit; now, it must balance the opinions and goals of its neighbors who support it.
These changes repositioned Hamas as an organization with international dimensions and not merely a local Palestinian resistance movement considered an offshoot of the global Muslim Brotherhood. In addition to its partial transition into a political government in Gaza, Hamas has also manifested itself into a dynamo of stability (and, some may argue, instability) in the region, with supporters and allies worldwide.
Therefore, decisions to determine the movement’s future must consider international dimensions and alliances. In short, the future of Hamas is no longer in the hands of the movement alone—it is now a political body that influences and is influenced by other international players.
Qatar and Turkey, for example, are considered the most closely aligned with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and maintain strong ties with Hamas. Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah have also cultivated a closer ideological and military relationship with Hamas in the last ten years, forming a sphere of influence known as the “Axis of Resistance” to counter U.S. geopolitical machinations in the region.
Hamas’ future is also linked to Israel, which—as an occupying power—controls the Gaza Strip’s crossings and has waged several deadly military forays with U.S. support against the Palestinian people.
The positions of these key players, including their interests, the shifts that have occurred in their policies due to the Israeli war on Gaza, and their interactions with each other will help provide a forward-looking vision for Hamas’ future.
Wearing Down Hamas
Its poor performance in governance and inability to provide essential services, particularly under the suffocating blockade imposed by the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip since June 2007, persistent Israeli military campaigns, and its (often deadly) political rivalry with the PA (and regional Arab powers), have cost Hamas some of the popularity it had established in the late 1990s.
Subsequently, following the surprise Hamas military operation on October 7 (known as Al-Aqsa Flood) and the retaliatory and punitive 13-month Israeli war on Gaza, most of the civilian population view the movement through two prisms.
The first is through the prism of resistance to Israeli occupation and the pursuit of national independence and liberation of Palestinian lands. In this, Hamas is viewed favorably both within Palestine and abroad.
The second prism is more critical and relates to homegrown opposition to the group. With the outbreak of the war, the intensification of the pace of killing and displacement (at least 42,000 have been killed, more than any 100,000 injured, and 80% of residential buildings and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed), and the inability of the Hamas government to provide minimum services to the population under the war (as more than one-and-a-half million residents of the Gaza Strip are displaced in tents), criticisms of Hamas policies are increasingly heard on the streets of Gaza.
In the 13 months since the war began, the beleaguered residents of the Gaza Strip have begun to question Hamas’ decision to launch Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The Palestinian street in Gaza has been hardened by pragmatic thinking influenced by the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe in the Strip and the daily scrimmage for survival. It is worth noting that the increase in grumbling and anger in Gaza is in stark contrast with Palestinian perceptions of Hamas outside of the Strip, where the movement for armed resistance remains remarkably popular.
Nevertheless, for the civilian population in Gaza, the first and foremost issue is immediately ending the genocidal war against them by the Israeli military. When it comes to post-war governance and administration of the Strip, Palestinians in Gaza will support whichever entity actively contributes to stopping the war and working toward reconstruction and rehabilitation in all respects—societal, economic, psychological, and political. Given the above, Hamas’ ability to provide for the needs of the Palestinians is in question.
But does this mean removing Hamas entirely from the political map in Palestine and the region? The most pragmatic answer is, no. Hamas is a resistance movement with an Islamic ideology that is deeply woven into the Palestinian popular fabric and has become an ideological mainstay in the Palestinian lexicon.
Intellectual Crossroads Within Hamas
The Israeli war on the Gaza Strip has caused an intellectual—if not existential—debate within Hamas, primarily questioning whether governance should be abandoned in favor of the advocacy and social works that had empowered and popularized the movement in the 1990s.
The ideological faction within Hamas calling for this return to its roots is weak and lacks influence. Still, it is the most realistic in its read of the Israeli and American positions on the future of Hamas. Israel and the United States agree on a common goal of destroying Hamas politically and militarily, leaving an ideological manifestation as the most likely to survive.
On the other hand, another faction realizes the severity of the diametric challenges facing the group as a resistance movement and a governing authority. They are attempting to negotiate with the international community and the Americans by making substantial concessions on the level of resistance in exchange for being allowed to exercise power within a Palestinian political coalition.
Khalil al-Hayya, the recently appointed deputy head of the Hamas Political Bureau in Gaza, drove this point home when he said that the movement is prepared to agree to a five-year (or more) truce with Israel, and will lay down its weapons to turn into a political party if a Palestinian state is established.
However, other factors, such as the regional interests of the leading Arab powerbrokers, will also significantly impact what type of entity Hamas becomes.
The group’s main ally Qatar has no interest in excluding it as a central force in the Palestinian political scene, as this means losing its regional and international influence—Hamas has long been its ace in the hole in the region. Some, such as the Wall Street Journal, claimed in April that Hamas’ senior leadership is considering moving its headquarters from Qatar to another undisclosed country. This has not happened.
In light of the failure to reach a ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip, some media reports claimed that the United States was pressing Qatar to eject Hamas. In June, Hamas denied that it had planned to relocate to Iraq. Nevertheless, there are rumors that before Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran, Hamas representatives were considering moving to Turkey.
Turkish diplomats have been marketing Hamas to the international community and the Americans as a group ready to make substantial concessions regarding its ideology, policy, and goals and to turn away from armed resistance toward political participation. It is not surprising, then, that Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was the first to state that Hamas leaders had expressed their willingness to dissolve the movement’s military wing if a Palestinian state is established on the 1967 borders, indicating that the movement’s leadership had agreed to turn the movement into a political party.
Turkey wants the international community to visualize a Hamas that can be recycled into an entity that can be trusted to govern Gaza. However, although both Turkey and Qatar wield considerable influence over Hamas, there are limitations to how much they can do.
There may be an understanding in Washington that the American containment of Hamas, in which Qatar has played a central role, may no longer be working. Doha, although a chief mediator in all talks for hostage and ceasefire deals, has earned the ire of the Israeli government and citizenry for funding Hamas in the first place. This move was given both American and Israeli blessings as part of the containment paradigm, empowering Hamas to focus more on governance rather than resistance with Qatari money paying public salaries.
The Americans may have also become convinced that Qatar is hosting a cadre of the Hamas leadership that is not as influential inside Gaza as previously assumed. The final say in any truce agreement and prisoner exchange comes from the Hamas military leadership inside the Gaza Strip, the most important of whom was Sinwar, followed by the leadership of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. His removal from the political question now poses uncertainty about the future of Hamas and the Strip.
Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the decision to carry out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood likely came from within Gaza alone; Qatar likely could not have prevented it or provided preliminary warnings for the simple reason that the Hamas leadership abroad was not aware of it. It was most probably a decision taken unilaterally by Sinwar and the Brigades. It is also likely that Sinwar distanced Hamas leaders who were incompatible with his vision outside the Gaza Strip after his win in the movement’s elections in 2020.
The formerly Sinwar-fronted military wing became central to the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance”. As such, Iran’s influence on Sinwar and the Brigades, what happens in Gaza, and the fate of the hostages cannot be ignored. The Brigades are still fighting Israeli forces in Gaza and essentially control the fate of the remaining Israeli hostages. In the meantime, the Hamas leadership abroad had not been able to reach any political agreement in talks with the United States and Israel without Sinwar’s approval. Until recently, Sinwar and the Brigades had remained defiant in their conviction that their military and ideological power could defeat Israel. It remains to be seen how Sinwar’s death will influence the Brigades in the mid-to-long term.
Vision and Zeal: Hamas’ Future
The Gaza-based leadership relied on key points for its continued strength, foremost of which is its perceived legitimacy as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation and its steadfastness inside Gaza.
Second, the Sinwar-led Hamas had relied on Israel’s inability to free the remaining hostages through military operations. Hamas is taking advantage of Israel’s desire to prolong the war; for Israel, as long as the war continues, it will be impossible for Hamas to rebrand in a more palatable fashion to the international community.
The Hamas leadership outside Gaza hopes that future elections for the Hamas politburo (originally slated for 2024, but now to be announced) will lead to fundamental shifts in the group’s governance. Most prominent among these desired shifts is the return of former Hamas power broker Khaled Meshaal to the leadership of the politburo. Sinwar, who held this position since 2016 (two consecutive terms), is now dead and no longer an obstacle to Meshaal’s resurgence.
In the interim, and with the ongoing Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, Hamas currently has three options. The first is laying down arms and altogether abandoning the armed resistance option in exchange for continuing to rule the Gaza Strip with international guarantees—Hamas is leveraging its allies Turkey and Qatar to market this option. This position contradicts the desires of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, who want Hamas to remain a resistance movement.
Hamas’ second option is to reconcile with the PA and Fatah and form a national consensus government, where it will play a reduced role in Gaza governance. This avenue is a byproduct of Hamas realizing that it is unable and unwilling to return to power in light of the international community’s—Israel included—opposition to the status quo.
Hamas also realizes that the Israeli war has dramatically weakened its capacities and that its popular support in the Gaza Strip has sufficiently declined to allow it to rule effectively. Nevertheless, Hamas still asserts that it maintains a degree of power that prevents any force or government from operating in the Gaza Strip without Hamas’ consent and coordination. Governing Gaza requires enormous resources and international acceptance, which Hamas does not currently have, but Hamas does have the ability to sabotage its potential replacement. In this scenario, if Hamas approves of the new governing power, it would step back from ruling Gaza and offer its support to the new organization.
Hamas’ third option is to leave Gaza apolitical: a technocratic entity would be established to administer the Strip, composed of statesmen and experts in relief, post-war development and rehabilitation, and humanitarian assistance. This body would not include Hamas or its supporters; however, Hamas would support it from the sidelines and be permitted to communicate with the Israelis and the international community for reconstruction. Meanwhile, Hamas would work to rehabilitate its damaged structure. This proposal is consistent with that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who rejects the return of the PA to the Gaza Strip and the idea of Palestinian reconciliation, and has vowed to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. However, PA Mahmoud Abbas rejected this proposal under the pretext that it isolated the Gaza Strip from his control and prevented the PA from facilitating the reconstruction process.
It is still uncertain how the war will end and what the day after will look like in the Gaza Strip. In the meantime, Hamas is facing an existential crisis that some believe will take three to five years to resolve. During this period, Hamas will likely not return to rule and instead make significant concessions to any entity wishing to govern the Gaza Strip, provided it is given a consulting role. The military wing that has previously enjoyed a considerable budget will likely become defunct. Those funds will be reallocated to social, health, and educational programs and efforts to rebuild the organization. Hamas will spend this time repairing itself, counting its losses in equipment and people, and rebuilding its popular support locally and internationally.
Hamas “From the Heart of Battle”: Analyzing Abu Obaida’s Discourse
Despite Israel’s vows to decimate Hamas, military analysts in the country and beyond believe the resistance movement is unlikely to be completely uprooted. Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari himself admitted that Israel “cannot eliminate an ideology”. Indeed, Hamas has been able to continue fighting and inflict losses on one of the world’s most sophisticated, modern, and professional armies for over a year now. The movement continues to conduct limited strikes on Israeli forces in spite of Israel destroying over sixty percent of the strip’s physical infrastructure.
While Israel claims it has killed 15-20,000 Hamas fighters, and caused upwards of 186,000 deaths according to a letter published in The Lancet in July, Hamas continues to inflict casualties on the Israeli military—including killing senior officers—forcing the army to return time and again to areas of Gaza that were presumably free of fighters.
How Hamas has managed to keep standing—shifting from open combat to guerilla tactics in the process—deserves closer scrutiny. This is especially the case as Israeli military operations have partially shifted to Lebanon in the meantime, with the consequence that Gaza risks sliding slowly off the international agenda.
Just as guerilla tactics can frustrate an occupying force—Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam come to mind as examples—so can wartime discourse build psychological dominance over the battle space, especially its political framing. This is because language plays a powerful role in shaping our understanding of conflict contexts, participants, and the scope for action. It frames what is happening, defines who we are, and provides options on what can be done. Control of the narrative, particularly during conflict and war, is critical as it helps build support among constituencies and can instill fear among adversaries.
Analysis of how Abu Obaida, spokesperson for Hamas’ armed wing—the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, or al-Qassam for short—has framed the fight of the brigades against Israel, mobilized support, sowed dissent, and portrayed victory after October 7 offers insights into the group’s goal of psychological dominance in the war theater.
Twenty-six of his speeches, which vary between two-minute voice clips and 20-minute video addresses aired between October 7, 2023 and May 29, 2024, were converted into a textual corpus to allow a quantitative analysis of key terms and structural features which informed a qualitative thematic analysis of the aforementioned issues. A deeper understanding of the sources and prospects of the resilience of Hamas’ military wing—including the organization’s internal cohesion and public support, both of which are influenced by the movement’s discourse—can inform policymakers about its motivation and strategy.
As the central figure of al-Qassam’s media campaign, Abu Obaida has appeared before crowds and cameras since 2006, when the group kidnapped the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, to explain the operations and strategy of the Brigades. Always dressed in military fatigues and characterized by his iconic red keffiyeh, he is seen as a symbol of resistance across the region.
Addressing his audience “from the heart of the battle”, as he puts it, Abu Obaida’s speeches include briefings on the battlefield, the hostage situation, statements on negotiations, and details about the performance of resistance fighters in Gaza. Looking into discursive practices like direct address, anecdotes, and moral as well as religious appeals helps understand how al-Qassam—an entity that is part of Hamas, but not identical to it—views its fight against Israeli occupation. The analysis adheres closely to the frames, language, and symbols used by Abu Obaida in a bid to render and interpret these as clearly as possible.
Framing the Conflict
Abu Obaida consistently justifies armed resistance as a legitimate response to Israel’s enduring and violent occupation—a counterforce that will always emerge in a dialectic with the forces of occupation.
Abu Obaida claims that the intensity and senselessness of Israel’s indiscriminate killing and destruction of infrastructure “show the criminal, Nazi occupation for what it really is, stripped of all the cosmetics with which it tricked the world for decades”. He also asserts that these features put the resistance on par with other national struggles for rights and freedom in terms of its morality and legitimacy. Abu Obaida contextualizes the violence of the al-Qassam Brigades by depicting them as waging an existential struggle on behalf of a people striving for the liberation of their land against an occupier bent on their displacement.
He describes the state and nature of the violence as the “Zionist Occupation”, supported by the “oppression and tyranny” of “Zionists in the White House”, directly linking Israeli practices to U.S. foreign policy. By naming “Zionism” as the target of the resistance, he shifts focus away from the state of Israel and the Jewish people, and toward a political ideology, its policies, and its supporters. He also broadens the scope of the conflict by referring to the history and ideology of the nineteenth-century Zionist movement that, steeped in Europe’s colonial attitudes of the time, encouraged and increased Jewish settlement of Palestine. By connecting historical and contemporary violence against Palestinians with a foreign political project, Abu Obaida develops an anti-colonial narrative in which settlers from Eastern and Western Europe emigrated to Palestine. He justifies resistance violence as part of a “decades-long” battle against the political ideology that accompanied that emigration. He constructs Zionism as an ideological adversary that cannot be reasoned with since its very goal is Palestinian destruction. In this context, Abu Obaida frames armed resistance as the only remaining option, which “speaks to the enemy in the language it understands”.
Ultimately, Abu Obaida views the discriminatory ideology of the Zionist project, Western in origin and protected today by the United States, as the root of the conflict. He challenges mainstream Western perceptions of Israel as a democratic state under threat, and instead defines it as a country that is inspired by a discriminatory ideology and facilitated by a dysfunctional international system that serves the interests of powerful states. In his reading, the existential threat posed by Zionist ideology leaves the resistance with no other response than violence. July and September polls by the Palestinian Center for Polling and Survey Research indicate that around thirty to forty percent of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza support Hamas, and about fifty percent of all Palestinians see armed struggle as the best way to end occupation. The other half is split between favoring negotiations and peaceful resistance.
Mobilizing Resistance, Sowing Dissent
Abu Obaida portrays October 7 as the storm that unleashed the al-Aqsa Flood (toufan), “a battle that is taking shape” to “change the face of the region” and “end the occupation once and for all”. To achieve this goal, he needs to mobilize support and challenge the enemy’s narrative and integrity. Abu Obaida’s key linguistic device is his use of the term “resistance” to describe the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas, and the broader anti-occupation movement. He constructs “the resistance” as a cross-factional, coordinated fighting force that is bound by its commitment to preserving Islam’s sanctities and achieving Palestinian liberation. While Hamas and the al-Qassam Brigades play a leading role in his vision of “the resistance”, it encompasses anyone around the world that opposes the occupation of Palestine. Naming the campaign after the al-Aqsa Mosque and focusing on mounting violations of the Waqf—Islamic charitable endowments of land or buildings—connects the occupation of the Palestinian Territories with pan-Islamic concerns about the sanctities in Jerusalem. Equating Israeli violations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock (Al-Aqsa wa al-Misra) with showing deep disrespect for all Muslims, Abu Obaida calls on the entire Ummah (Muslim nation) to resist by all means available. He points to the actions of religious extremists in Israel as evidence of religious encroachment, with examples ranging from trespassing on the al-Aqsa compound to the acquisition by the Israeli religious organization Temple Institute of red heifers that are considered essential in the Old Testament to the ritual purification required to build the Third Temple.
Using the vast differential in military might between occupier and occupied, Abu Obaida adds another layer to his mobilization discourse by juxtaposing a righteous indigenous resistance force of the people with an impersonal and foreign, almost mechanical adversary engaged in an unequal battle. He characterizes the contest between the Israeli military and resistance factions as a parallel of “David and Goliath”, with Israel’s “unbeatable army and the indestructible Merkava”, supported by air and naval forces “capable of occupying whole countries”. On the other side stands Hamas as a force that has nothing but “what we have between our hands, which we made from nothing and built from the impossible”. He depicts the Israeli military as relying on “dumb technology and tools” rather than well-motivated soldiers. Anecdotes of clashes depict the “steadfast” resistance as “aware, conscious” and “prepared for a long war of attrition” while Israeli soldiers are depicted as “not ready for this battle and not understanding its consequences”. By layering images and anecdotes that symbolize a conflict he claims is between technology and grit, money and righteousness, weakness and strength, Abu Obaida hopes to craft a subliminal image of courageous human warriors fighting a soulless mechanized enemy. In these depictions, resistance fighters reclaim agency that is lost in a context of forced displacement, imprisonment, and occupation.
A final dimension of importance of Abu Obaida’s discourse is how he constructs the October 7 attack and the subsequent months of slaughter in Gaza as steps toward victory. Essentially, he emphasizes the necessity of the violence of October 7 as the only response that could halt the relentlessness of Israeli occupation and annexation. Abu Obaida portrays the current fighting both as evidence of the enemy leadership’s sense of defeat and as the price of outlasting them. By representing suffering and steadfastness as necessary sacrifices, he attempts to legitimize the consequences of the attack on Israel. By revealing the al-Qassam Brigades as effective and the Israeli military as beatable, he also seeks to instill a sense that tenacious resistance underwritten by sacrifice can and will overthrow the occupation.
From the beginning of Toufan al-Aqsa, Abu Obaida seeks to construct an image of transparency and openness by explaining and detailing the preparations, deception, and coordination that went into the October 7 attack. He frames the nonconfrontational posture of Hamas between 2021 and 2023 as part of preparation for the attack by creating a false sense of security among Israeli forces—a strategy which appears to have been highly effective in influencing the Israeli intelligence and political frames for thinking about Hamas as a threat factor. He asks Gazans to forgive this temporary departure from al-Qassam’s usually uncompromising position. In detailing the intelligence gathering, stockpiling of weapons, and coordination of personnel required for the attack, he underlines the technical and tactical professionalism of the Brigades as well. He even shares in some detail how they monitored Israeli army observation posts, patrols, border crossings, digital surveillance systems, and the status of the border fence in an effort to enhance their image of competence. Generally, Abu Obaida portrays the Israeli military as weak, divided, and unprepared for battle. By mocking the fear of its soldiers to raise their heads out of their armored vehicles, listing numbers of vehicles destroyed and detailing ambushes, he seeks to shatter the image of “the undefeatable army”.
By citing al-Qassam’s outgunned but unbowed resistance, Abu Obaida holds out the prospect of victory. By underlining and repeating names of every neighborhood across the strip where al-Qassam clashes with the Israeli military, he creates an image of a resistance force that engages the enemy everywhere “at zero distance” and from “behind enemy lines”.
At every turn, Abu Obaida attributes the success of the resistance fighters to the steadfastness of the people of Gaza, thus making them part of their struggle and their victories. Polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research suggests Hamas has managed to retain a substantial level of support among Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, around thirty to forty percent, despite all the destruction and death that October 7 arguably brought about. Humbling himself before Gaza’s refusal to give in to chaos and destruction, he builds on the Palestinian principle of sumud, steadfastness and commitment to the land. Abu Obaida paints the people of Gaza as the noblest, worthiest, and strongest people the region has ever seen, glorifying their sacrifice as the resilience that will lead to victory. Mobilizing key local images—Gaza as a graveyard for invaders and the Palestinian spirit as a “thorn in the throat” of the enemy—he reinforces identity characteristics of toughness and readiness. By ascribing the success of the resistance in battle to the steadfastness of the people, he connects their tolerance for suffering directly to the outcome of victory and encourages them to hold out in the face of the continuing violence.
Force versus Prospects for Peace
The intent of Abu Obaida’s discourse is clear. He seeks to firm up resistance in the face of terrible suffering of the Palestinian people and an enduring occupation that is based on structural violence—before and after October 7—by depicting Zionist designs on Palestinian lands as an existential threat that can only be countered by violence and sacrifice; obtaining rights and freedom requires blood, death, and destruction. In this sense, Abu Obaida hopes to echo the stories of Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh. By positioning October 7 as the parting shot of a longer campaign, Abu Obaida makes it clear that this struggle will be neither brief nor successful in the short-term. But he also seeks to assure his audiences that the resistance will emerge victorious due to the commitment, tenaciousness, and steadfastness of the Palestinian people, as well as the support of the wider Ummah underscored by links with al-Aqsa. Purely on the basis of Abu Obaida’s discourse, it is possible to identify a few pointers for future conflict resolution efforts.
First of all, his message is rooted in decades of violent occupation that are amplified by the failures of Oslo and now underlined by the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Despite the ensuing death and destruction, a September 2024 poll suggests that Palestinian support for the October 7 attacks remains significant even if it has decreased. In other words, Abu Obaida’s discourse has resonance among Palestinian and, likely, Arab audiences. Public statements of Israeli politicians only strengthen Abu Obaida’s frames and exhortations. For instance, when Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz recently called for “temporary evacuation orders” in the West Bank, he seemed to replicate the military’s display of utter disregard for humanitarian law in Gaza, which might amount to advocating for the war crime of forced displacement in the context of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of June 19, 2024.
Second, Abu Obaida’s discourse makes clear what al-Qassam has on offer, namely a recipe of violence for violence that produces devastating suffering. It also happens to play to Israeli military strength. Yet, violence may be(come) the only route that many Palestinians see as viable given the failure of Oslo, the weakness of the Palestinian Authority, the unpopularity of its president, Mahmoud Abbas, the unconditional U.S. support for Israel, international neglect, accelerating annexation of the West Bank, and the destruction of Gaza. Paradoxically, Israel may even have unshackled Hamas by removing it from its governance and service delivery obligations of running the Gaza Strip.
Finally, the discourse indicates that ending, undoing, and repairing occupation is a feasible route to “defeating” Hamas militarily in the sense of disarming and mainstreaming it as a political party. There is ample precedent for groups formerly labeled as “terrorist” to become political parties when the moment was right, including the Zionist Irgun and Lehi groups and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, for example. The specific conditions for Hamas to lay down arms—creating a Palestinian state on the 1967 boundaries with East Jerusalem as capital—are, however, outlined explicitly only in speeches by the assassinated head of Hamas’ Political Office, Ismail Haniyeh. In any case, the possibility of Hamas disarming and operating solely as a political party in a two-state scenario runs counter to conventional wisdom among U.S. and Israeli political elites who maintain that it should be eliminated and the occupation continued.
All in all, Abu Obaida’s discourse points us to the fact that Hamas is a product of Israeli occupation. As long as this repressive condition persists, a movement like Hamas is likely to exist and can and will anchor its discourse in the grievances thus produced.
Is Israel’s Star Fading in Latin America?
At the “Israel at 75: The Views From Latin America” conference held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC in June 2023, Guatemala’s Ambassador to the United States Alfonso Quiñonez said, “Being a friend of Israel pays off.”
In less than six months, however, such sentiments would be challenged by a growing number of Latin American countries expressing concern, and some severing ties, over Israel’s targeting of civilians and infrastructure, its blocking of international aid, and charges of genocide and war crimes in Gaza.
As more Latin American countries elect leftist leaders who grow publicly more impatient with Israel’s military conduct in Palestine, the once-strong alliances with Tel Aviv in the region appear to be diminishing. This shift illustrates the decreasing allure of once unwavering friendship as Latin American countries prefer distancing themselves from, rather than cozying up to, Israel. It also presents opportunities that must be seized by Arab countries to deepen strategic relations with Latin America.
To fully understand these opportunities, it is essential to examine both the history and current state of Latin American ties with Israel and the Arab World, and the growing challenges faced by the “reactionary international”, defined by sociologist Juan Gabriel Tokatlian as a growing network of transnational alliances between right-wing political actors.
Israel–Latin America Relations from Founding to Floundering
Israel–Latin America relations date back to the 1947 UN vote on General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), recommending Partition of Mandatory Palestine, and the subsequent establishment of diplomatic ties.
Of the fifty-seven UN member states in 1947, twenty were Latin American countries. Out of the thirty-three votes for partitioning Palestine, thirteen came from Latin America, accounting for a third of the necessary positive votes. This led to the opening of embassies in the newly established Israeli state the following year.
The reasons behind Latin American support for the partition plan vary. Political scientist Edward Glick highlighted the influence of Zionist elites and Arab diasporas in the vote for or against the partition plan to push votes toward their preferred outcome.
Former CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt suggested that Israeli lobbying successfully swayed the United States to support the plan, with Washington’s influence remaining significant against the backdrop of 1930s interventions in Central America and therefore influencing the outcome of Latin American votes. Contrary to Glick, historian Ignacio Klich argued that the Argentine government’s policies at the time were based on national interests rather than the lobbying by specific groups.
In subsequent years, Israel actively pursued foreign policy initiatives to establish and strengthen ties with developing nations. Former Israeli director of international cooperation and affairs Amir Shimeon argued as early as 1974 that Israel “committed its experience and skill to projects of cooperation with other developing nations”.
Conversely, political scientist Bishara Bahbah emphasized Latin America’s importance to the Israeli military industry as an export destination. Human rights advocate and public intellectual Israel Shahak highlighted the problematic nature of Israeli weapons transfers when delivered “to the most contemptible and hated regimes in the world”, such as Guatemala. Israel provided technical, logistical, and material support to Guatemala’s military-led government during the country’s bloody civil war. The support provided by Israel contributed to “scorched earth campaigns, the bombing, burning and bulldozing of entire villages in the countryside, and death squad killings in the city”, leading to the deaths of 200,000 people, Bahbah said.
In that regard, the benefits of Israel–Latin America relations were unevenly distributed, favoring conservative elites and non-democratic regimes.
This legacy persisted despite political shifts in Latin America. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that Israel provided El Salvador with eighty-three percent of the weapons acquired by the bureaucratic-authoritarian Third Revolutionary Junta in 1980.
The military hardware was used to equip death squads and paramilitaries involved in human rights violations, such as the U.S.-trained Atlácatl Battalion responsible for El Mozote and El Calabozo massacres where over a thousand civilians were killed. Such ties were also representative of Israeli relations with Costa Rica, among other South American authoritarian-bureaucratic regimes. Interestingly, Argentine governments, regardless of regime type and their political orientation, engaged with the Israeli military industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s—demonstrating how interests oftentimes come before ideology in the calculations of policymakers.
Understanding Israel’s interest in Latin America also requires considering the legacy of thePink Tide—a political movement characterized by the ascendency of left-wing governments, deeper regional integration, and reduced U.S. influence. During this period, most Latin American countries between 2005 and 2018 recognized Palestinian statehood—with a few exceptions such as Barbados, the Bahamas, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago—thanks to Arab diaspora lobbying in Brazil and Argentina, among other places, and the ideological alignment with the Pink Tide’s values of decolonization, a core principle for leftist governments.
The establishment of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2008, and subsequent recognition of Palestine by eight of its twelve member states between December 2010 and March 2011, reflects the high level of regional integration and policy coordination achieved under the Pink Tide. As U.S. influence waned, Latin American countries began to exert greater political autonomy and muscle.
Brazil’s role in challenging neoliberal policies at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its opposition, alongside Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, to a hemispheric free trade agreement at the Fourth Summit of the Americas—along with the establishment of UNASUR and other regional mechanisms—illustrates this shift.
Enhanced Latin American political autonomy has strengthened Arab-Latin America relations through a desire to diversify partnerships and reduce reliance on the West. However, the decision was not automatic. Former Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorimcited the stalled peace process and Israel’s refusal to halt settlement expansion as contributing factors to the recognition of Palestinian statehood. The disproportionate Israeli response to the October 7 Hamas attacks has also fueled public criticism from Latin American countries.
While Bolivia and Venezuela have been known to criticize Israel, La Paz went a step further and severed relations with Israel, citing crimes against humanity while Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced Israel as committing genocide. Brazil, Chile, and Colombia recalled their ambassadors from Tel Aviv.
This points to a new low in Israel–Latin America relations, challenging the narrative that Israeli friendship must be sought after. In fact, recent developments reveal a widening gap in values and principles with regards to life, dignity, and human rights. The International Court of Justice’s genocide deliberations and the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants for Israeli officials have further strained relations as Mexico joined South Africa’s case at the ICJ against Israel. Most notably, Colombian President Gustavo Petro has suspended the purchase of Israeli weapons.
The Reactionary International
But there are countercurrents to the leftist criticism of Israel’s policies in Palestine, and in Gaza specifically. The rise of some right-wing pro-U.S. governments in Latin America since 2009 presented Israel with an opportunity to deepen its influence in the region. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2018 Latin America tour, the first by a sitting Israeli premier, aimed to recoup loss of influence sustained in the early 21st century, and reset Israel–Latin America relations.
The trip also sought to strengthen relationships with the ‘Reactionary International’ right-wing elite such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Mauricio Macri in Argentina, with Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei emerging later in El Salvador and Argentina respectively.
Netanyahu’s 2018 tour sought to counter earlier setbacks and reinforce ties with these new governments, including visits to Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil. Bolsonaro’s enthusiastic support for and visit to Israel, and Netanyahu attending the former’s inauguration in 2019, exemplified the emergence of this new alignment between reactionary counterparts.
Tokatlian characterizes the reactionary international as nostalgic, self-righteous, blaming progressive thinking for the world’s problems, and as having a “negative, even anger-driven, populist perspective on history, politics and morality”. This lens helps explain the connections and mutual support between the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, as well as the good relations between political leaders Santiago Abascal, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Mauricio Macri, Bolsonaro, and Milei, among others.
The proliferation of the Reactionary International in Latin America has been challenged and slowed due to the current rise of leftist governments in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, coupled with the United States’ increasing focus on China and Russia and away from Latin America. This has breathed new life in regional integration and autonomy, going hand in hand with public criticism of current Israeli policies in Palestine. Most importantly, it presents an opportunity for revitalized Arab–Latin American relations, advancing strategic interests for both sides.
The State of Arab-Latino Relations
The aforementioned shifts present an opportunity to advance Arab strategic interests through international cooperation and commerce. Not only do they offer a chance to further take advantage of longstanding cultural connections for commercial purposes, they frame bilateral relations within a broader interregional context, enhancing political autonomy for both parties through international cooperation.
Arab–-Latin American relations originated from significant Arab migration waves in the late 19th and early 20th century. The cultural link is substantial: an estimated eighteen million Brazilians, representing about nine percent of the population (and four times the size of the Arab community in the United States), —can trace their ancestry to Syria or Lebanon. This is a percentage mirrored in Argentina. Additionally, Latin America is host to the largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Middle East.
Cultural exchange between Arabs and Latin Americans is evident in various aspects. South America’smate, a caffeinated tea-like drink, is enjoyed throughout the Levant, while Argentine and Brazilian football jerseys are popular in the region. Conversely, Levantine sfiha (flatbread with minced meat) has become a staple in Latin American bakeries, and Arab descendants have succeeded in various professional fields, including the highest political offices in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Paraguay and El Salvador.
Despite this rich cultural exchange, Arab–Latin American relations do not fully indicate successful interregional integration, and their renewal in the 21st century warrants particular attention.
Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s active foreign policy between 2003 and 2011, for example, focused on fostering diplomatic and commercial relations with developing countries and led to renewed and unique Arab–Latin American relations. His efforts were bolstered by a favorable South American political climate, the Pink Tide, and manifested through the creation of UNASUR, a key institution and counterpart to the League of Arab State (LAS) at the South American-Arab Countries (ASPA) summits from 2005 to 2015.
On the Arab side, the fallout from the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2007 global financial crisis drove Arab countries to seek new allies and markets beyond the Global North. Consequently, trade between Brazil and MENA countries grew between 2003 and 2008 from 5.5 billion to 20.3 billion U.S. dollars, and the ASPA summits offered a formalized space for policy coordination and conflict resolution.
For Latin America, developing relations with Arab countries—among others—contributed to political autonomy from the United States by finding new allies in international forums and diversifying export markets. This was reflected in Lula’s and former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez’s foreign policies, which targeted the Middle East and North Africa through state visits, new diplomatic offices, and business missions.
Moreover, investment was directed toward infrastructure and food staples in line with Arab strategic interests associated with food security.
According to researcher Abas Tanus Mafud, Argentina received a total of six billion dollars in investment from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, the Investment Corporation of Dubai and Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, and the Qatar Investment Authority for the construction of aqueducts, development of maritime ports and hydroelectric energy, and food commodities respectively during the period between 2010 and 2015. Moreover, “commercial exchanges between the GCC and Mercosur grew by 330 percent between 2001 and 2010,” reported political scientist Cecilia Baeza.
This commercial growth is mirrored by the proliferation of chambers of commerce during the first decades of the 21st century. Arab chambers of commerce were reactivated in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, while the UAE and Qatar established new chambers throughout Latin America, and Egypt signed a free trade agreement with the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) in 2010. These developments signify an expansion in Arab–Latin American commerce and trade as Gulf countries add to Levant and North African countries.
However, challenges persist. One significant issue is policy coordination. For instance, during the vote on the LAS-sponsored UN Security Council Resolution 1973 in 2011 and which called for armed intervention in Libya, Brazil abstained while Colombia voted in favor—highlighting the difficulty in achieving regional consensus in Latin America to support Arab initiatives. Arab countries must recognize that Latin America’s diversity and Washington’s political influence complicate regional foreign policy coordination. In fact, not all Latin American countries adhered to the values espoused by the Pink Tide of deeper regional integration, greater policy coordination, and increasing autonomy from the United States.
Another challenge is the engagement of Arab countries with right-wing Latin American governments that promote anti-Arab and anti-Muslim narratives and policies. For example, former Brazilian President Bolsonaro made racist remarks about Muslims, and the Macri administration falsely accused Arab diaspora members of terrorism. Despite this, Bolsonaro visited Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, and Macri was received by then-crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. These issues went unaddressed during these visits, suggesting a pragmatic approach at best or a lack of understanding at worst.
Finally, the commercial dimension of Arab–Latin American relations contributes to social and economic inequality. Scholar Kevin Funk noted that “existing interregional connections largely serve to buttress global capitalism (and the role of corporate actors therein), while also extending its reach deeper into the Global South and reshaping it through the rise of South-South chains of accumulation.” This capitalist focus is most evident when considering, for example, the absence of academic exchange programs between the regions. While Latin American universities offer respected graduate programs focused on the MENA region, there are no similar academic initiatives in Arab countries, and existing agreements between Arab and Latin American universities are limited to public events.
An Opportunity
The criticism of current Israeli military conduct in Palestine expressed by leftist Latin American governments points to declining Israel–Latin America relations and challenges the solidarity built by the Reactionary International.
At this juncture, the potential benefits that Arab countries may extract from stronger interregional political and commercial cooperation with Latin American peers go beyond financial considerations. For example, a majority of Latin American countries supported UN General Assembly resolutions calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Furthermore, the slow but steady growth and diversification of interregional commerce has contributed to Arab food security since the early 2000s.
To unlock further benefits, interregional cooperation must exceed the political and economic dimensions to venture into soft power by focusing synergies in the education sector, for one.
Currently, there is a surprising lack of contact between the leading academic institutions in Latin America and MENA countries. This can be remedied by focusing on two areas of strength. First, the regions have developed political and economic relations over the base of cultural relations, as previously noted. Second, there are respected education institutions with widespread international cooperation and networks in both regions.
These include Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Lebanese University, Qatar University, and Universidad Nacional de México excel for arts & humanities; King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, The American University in Cairo, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro for petroleum engineering; King Abdulaziz University and Universidade de São Paulo for science & medicine; El Colegio de México and Holy Spirit University of Kaslik for area studies; Ain Shams University and Universitario de Idiomas for language courses; The American University of Beirut and Universidad Torcuato Di Tella for politics and international relations, among others.
Many of these leading institutions teach courses in English, offer compatible graduate programs, or developed area studies research programs enabling initial student exchange programs, institutional academic agreements, and graduate research cooperation.
Improving mutual knowledge leads to a better understanding of the other’s general and specific strategic interests. This is fundamental to finding new opportunities for greater political cooperation and economic trade. Enhanced more robust relations in the field of collaborative education should be viewed as potential policy for developing Arab–Latino relations as part of something bigger.
“Instead of a clash [of civilizations], there is a phenomenal [power] readjustment at a global level. Unprecedented! Because the transfer of power has always been within the West. Now, it is shifting to a part of the world about which we have a profound ignorance,” explained Tokatlian. Most importantly, he suggested a complete overhaul of the education system and advocated for students and business people to study and visit the East “to understand the other”. He underlines his argument by pointing to the growing importance of Asian economies in Argentina’s international commerce.
In that sense, the role of the ministries of foreign affairs and education on both ends of the relationship are especially important for setting the basis and standards leading to successful Arab–Latino academic cooperation, exchanges, and research. In other words, it is the development of soft power that will guarantee a brighter future for Arab–Latin American relations.
Within a context of greater Arab–Latino solidarity rising from concerns over Israeli military conduct in Palestine, it is time for policy makers to make a fresh push for stronger interregional relations. Most importantly, the effort must focus on education to improve mutual understanding and unlock new opportunities for political cooperation and economic development that may underpin social and political stability at a time of significant global upheaval and potential power redistribution.
Looking Backward into The Future: Why the United Nations Has Failed to Prevent Genocide
This essay is adapted in part from a keynote speech delivered by Dr. Stanton on April 26, 2024 to a conference on “Teaching About Genocide” sponsored by the Educators Institute for Human Rights, the Alliance Against Genocide, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. It is published under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license.
With the death toll of World War II at 85 million killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history, the victors founded the United Nations in 1945 to prevent future wars. To avert another Holocaust, the UN General Assembly passed the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948.
But the United Nations has failed to prevent war or genocide.
Since its founding, the UN has been crippled by the veto of the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council. The colonial era had not ended by 1945, and the colonial powers, including the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China wanted to keep their empires. The most powerful nation, the United States, wanted to maintain its military and economic dominance. These five nations insisted on having vetoes in the Security Council, the only UN body with the power to authorize the use of military force. If even one of the P5 vetoes a decision, the UN cannot authorize military intervention anywhere in the world.
It is a fatal flaw in the UN Charter, which must be amended.
The Making of Uniting for Peace
In 1950, North Korea, with Soviet support, invaded South Korea. The USSR had made the mistake of walking out of the Security Council from January through July 1950 because the UN refused to recognize Communist China’s claim to China’s seat in the UN. During the USSR’s absence, the United States, United Kingdom, and France pushed through the creation of a UN force to intervene in Korea.
To get around Soviet vetoes once it returned to the Security Council and to provide a future alternative to that body, the United States sponsored General Assembly Resolution 377A, widely known as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution. It states that in cases where the Security Council, because of a lack of unanimity among the P5, fails to act as required to maintain international peace and security, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately and may issue appropriate recommendations to UN members for collective measures—including the use of armed force when necessary. It was adopted on November 3, 1950, by a vote of 52 to 5, with 2 abstentions. The resolution was designed to provide the UN with an alternative avenue for action when at least one P5 member uses its veto to obstruct the Security Council from carrying out its functions mandated by the UN Charter.
To facilitate prompt action by the General Assembly in the case of a deadlocked Security Council, the resolution created the mechanism of the emergency special session (ESS). Emergency special sessions have been convened under this procedure on eleven occasions, with the most recent in February 2022, to address Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sessions can be suspended and reconvened when needed.
Although the United States originally sponsored the Uniting For Peace Resolution, it has become very reluctant to use it. When I was a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State Department, State lawyers told me, “Oh, we don’t favor Uniting For Peace anymore. In the General Assembly, the U.S. has no veto.”
Nonetheless, the United States again supported the use of Uniting For Peace after Russia invaded Ukraine because Moscow would have vetoed any UN action in the Security Council.
The critical point here is that the United States and other members of the P5 should use Uniting For Peace much more often to call for armed UN peacekeeping missions to stop genocides and prosecute their perpetrators. But there could be an even more powerful solution to the P5 veto: The Charter can be amended by calling a General Conference of the United Nations under Article 109(3) which requires only a majority vote of the UN General Assembly and a vote of any seven members of the UN Security Council to convene. A General Conference of the UN cannot be blocked by a P5 veto.
It appears that the P5 are afraid of a General Conference to amend the UN Charter because it would almost certainly call to abolish their veto. The P5 would face pressure to give up their stranglehold on the effectiveness of the UN.
Unable to Prevent Genocide?
In the meantime, the United Nations has failed to prevent war and genocide because it is built on the old nation-state system, which allows national governments to claim the right to commit crimes against their own citizens and justify genocide under claims of sovereignty.
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine was supposed to overcome claims of national sovereignty. R2P posits that sovereignty doesn’t come down from rulers, but rather rises up from the people. Underlying R2P is the Enlightenment concept in Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson of “popular sovereignty”, which holds that when a nation is tyrannized by its own government, its citizens have the right to overthrow that government. Under R2P, the United Nations and relevant regional organizations have the right to intervene in nations that are murdering their own citizens. However, very few nations are willing to sacrifice the blood of their own military troops to carry out such R2P interventions.
R2P has not yet become enforceable international law. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is an aspirational doctrine. It is still rejected by genocidal states. Moreover, many Asian and African nations, as well as Russia and China, see R2P as an attempt by Europe and the United States to reimpose colonial rule.
The lack of a United Nations Military Force also makes genocide prevention difficult.
A UN Military Force consisting of forces from UN member states is authorized by Articles 43 through 47 of the United Nations Charter. The Military Staff Committee, composed of Chiefs of Staff of P5 Security Council members, has never been operationalized. The main reason is that none of the P5 want a strong UN military force that could oppose their own armies.
Current UN peacekeeping missions are too weak to overpower national armies—they cannot stop genocides. It is time to create a UN Military Force like NATO’s, but without NATO’s requirement of unanimity to take military action. Genocide Watch has proposed an Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention that would reaffirm the empowerment of regional organizations—acting in a consistent manner with the purposes and provisions of the Charter—to take collective action to maintain international peace and security under the UN Charter’s Chapter Eight.
It sets forth procedures to determine whether genocide is underway or at significant risk of being committed, and it provides procedures for assembling armed forces to intervene to prevent or stop genocides.
Further hindering efforts to prevent genocide is the fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no police force to arrest people it charges. Courts cannot work without police forces to enforce their arrest warrants.
Today, there is no effective international police force to arrest people charged with crimes by the ICC or by international tribunals. National police forces usually refuse to arrest perpetrators of genocide because the police often serve under the same leaders charged by the ICC. Meanwhile, Interpol functions only to exchange intelligence between national police forces. It is not an international police force itself. The UN still lacks such a force to prevent genocide by arresting national leaders who are planning or perpetrating genocide.
The world needs an international police force. But injecting such police into a nation-state is still considered a violation of national sovereignty by many governments, especially genocidal regimes. R2P, as an emerging international norm, may be invoked in answer to such arguments.
But how many nations are willing to send their army or police into other countries to face heavily armed national military forces determined to keep them out? The answer can be seen in the difficulty the UN has in recruiting troops for its peacekeeping operations, especially from countries with powerful militaries like the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China. If the UN can’t muster the forces, other means must be found.
One way to create an International Police Force would be to pass an Optional Protocol to the Treaty of the International Criminal Court to authorize one. It would have authority only to execute arrest warrants for persons charged by the ICC with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression. But even such a police force would face resistance from genocidal states. The fundamental problem is the persistent paradigm of national sovereignty.
Genocide Watch’s proposed Optional Protocol to the Genocide Convention would reaffirm the authority of the UN General Assembly to recommend the use of force when the UN Security Council is paralyzed by a P5 veto. This authority already exists under the Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950.
Rethinking the Law of Genocide
As a lawyer trained by Myres McDougal and Michael Reisman at Yale Law School, I was taught that law and policy are not two separate realms: that law is concretized policy, and law should be evaluated as policy. I am also a cultural anthropologist, trained by Victor Turner, Marshall Sahlins, and Leo Kuper. They trained me to look beneath the surface for the deeper structures and schisms that underlie societies and conflicts.
An anthropological analysis of lawyers in the international sphere may help us understand why the Genocide Convention has thus far failed to prevent genocide. Sadly, the Convention was born toothless, and lawyers have kept it from ever outgrowing its baby teeth.
The training of lawyers creates a backward-looking, adjudication-oriented view of genocide. At a conference at Cardozo Law School in 2011, a lawyer colleague put it this way, “The convention was primarily meant to adjudicate an individual’s criminal responsibility”. Lawyers in the U.S. State Department and U.K. Foreign Office even say they cannot use the term genocide until a court does.
One purpose of the Convention is certainly to punish genocidists. But if that is all it is, then we have forgotten the very name of the Convention: the “International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. The Convention was meant to be forward-looking and preventive, not just a law for punishment.
The Precautionary Principle
In 2007, with my epidemiologist colleague, Dr. Elihu Richter, we submitted a proposal to the Albright-Cohen Commission convened to recommend ways to strengthen the U.S. response to preventing genocide. The Commission recommended establishing the U.S. Atrocities Prevention Board. We told the Commission that The Precautionary Principle should be applied by the Board when risks of genocide appear.
The Precautionary Principle states that when there is uncertainty concerning the possibility of the occurrence of a major catastrophic event, the costs of inaction far outweigh those of anticipatory preventive action. The Precautionary Principle shifts the burden of proof from those suspecting a catastrophic risk to those denying it. In everyday terms, the Precautionary Principle states that it is better to be safe than sorry.
We were ignored. The default policy of diplomats and world leaders when there are warning signs of genocide remains to do nothing and wait until the genocide is underway. Even then, because the cost will be so high: do nothing.
We know the political risk factors for genocide. Statistical studies by Barbara Harff have outlined them as: ongoing civil or international war; past genocide that has gone unpunished and is still denied; rule by an ethnically exclusive elite; official exclusionary ideology; autocracy or totalitarianism; closure of relations with the outside world; massive human rights violations such as torture and extrajudicial killings.
The anti-genocide movement should work against war and for punishment of perpetrators. We should press for broadly-based democratic governments. We should oppose ideologies of racial or class superiority. We should favour free trade and free speech. We should strongly oppose violations of fundamental human rights by any regime. Nevertheless, these factors cannot tell us when genocide is likely to happen, and therefore are of limited use in prevention.
That is why I developed a model of the genocidal process, “The Ten Stages of Genocide.”I now regret choosing the word “stages” because it implies linearity in the model. In the first paragraph of the model, I stated that “the process is not linear. Stages may occur simultaneously”.
I should have just called the “stages” processes. They are what structural anthropologists call a transformational structure—a system of transformations. The Ten Stages of Genocide provides the outline of a transformational grammar of genocidal processes. I owe these concepts of structure to Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky.
Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable, but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop genocide. The process is not linear; many stages operate simultaneously. It is a logical model for thinking about the genocidal process and what we can do to prevent or stop it.
The model helps analysts organize the precursors of genocide so that strategies can be prescribed to stop each process that may lead to genocide. It is like organizing the processes that lead to diabetes so that methods can be prescribed to reduce each process; weight loss, reduction of sugar in the diet, medications that remove sugar from the body, and other methods may be prescribed to hold off the disease.
The Ten Stages of Genocide are Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial. A fuller description of the Ten Stages can be found on the Genocide Watch website.
The original memo I wrote in 1996 was intended to educate State Department officers about the genocidal process and how to stop it. I knew it had to fit on one page, back and front, or it would not be read. Little did I know that it would become a paradigmatic model used by teachers and policymakers around the world.
Overcoming Ethnocentrism, Racism, Nationalism, and Religious Intolerance
Genocide is committed by people who have lost sight of our common humanity. Though we are born into thousands of ethnic groups that speak thousands of languages and belong to hundreds of nations and have scores of religions, all humans belong to one family. Some think there are many races, but there is really only one race: the human race.
Genocide is committed when we become ethnocentric, racist, nationalistic, or religiously intolerant. Genocide is idolatry. We worship our ethnic group, race, nation, or religion instead of God. We build golden altars and sacrifice human beings upon them. Instead of blessing all humans as God’s creations, we bathe our weapons with their blood.
Several steps must be taken to overcome these centrifugal forces that divide human beings and lead to wars and genocides.
We must build educational systems that create anti-genocidal cultures.
Genocide requires popular participation; 200,000 people participated in the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Churches in Rwanda could have played a powerful role in creating a culture resistant to genocide because many Hutus and Tutsis are Roman Catholics and attended the same churches, but the church was as ethnically divided as the rest of Rwandan society. Some clergy even participated in the killings.
Today in Rwanda, churches are finally fulfilling the role they should play by fostering forgiveness and reconciliation.
In rethinking genocide prevention, we should pay special attention to the “bottom-up” dimension of genocide. How can anti-genocidal cultures be built? Religion has far too often been a cause of genocide. But what if every major religious establishment regularly affirmed the core principle in all religions: that all human beings belong to one race—the human race? We need to spark the efforts of people at the grassroots in schools, universities, seminaries, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples all over the world.
What if the Roman Catholic Church made one of its core doctrines the unity of the human race and the prevention of genocide? We have already talked to Pope Francis about this proposal. He has embraced the idea.
Many more nations must elect women as their leaders.
To end genocide and war, women must be empowered. Women bring a different dimension to conflicts and conflict resolution processes compared to those dominated by men. Women have played a consistently positive role in fostering dialogue, reaching peace agreements, and addressing root causes of conflict.
To put the difference between men’s and women’s approaches to conflict perhaps too simply:
When men have conflicts, they fight.
When women have conflicts, they talk.
Talking is a lot better way to resolve conflicts than fighting.
An example of this difference can be found in the efforts of women to bring an end to the deadly divisions of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. After men had tried to negotiate peace for a hundred years, women stepped in and became a powerful force to stop the sectarian killing.
Another example is the extraordinary story of how Leemah Gbowee and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf led a women’s non-violent resistance movement that forced the murderous dictator Charles Taylor out of office and brought democracy back to Liberia.
In an era of nuclear weapons that could destroy life on earth, and a century when more people are killed by their own governments than from all wars combined, it is time to campaign for a new world order with many more societies and political systems led by women.
We must create the political will to prevent genocide.
The UN, EU, and U.S. failure in the Rwandan Genocide, in Bosnia, and in Darfur was not the absence of early warning of the coming catastrophes. It was the absence of political will to prepare for and prevent them.
Even when UN Peacekeeping Missions have been deployed, they are not given strong mandates to protect civilians by fighting and defeating genocidal armies. Yasushi Akashi, the pacifist head of the United Nations Protection Force in former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR), refused to authorize the bombing of Bosnian Serb sniper nests across the river from Sarajevo. Akashi was finally replaced after the Srebrenica genocide. NATO bombed Belgrade and forced Milošević to make peace at Dayton.
In Rwanda, there were 2500 UNAMIR troops on the ground when the genocide began. Rather than reinforce them as General Roméo Dallaire requested, the United States, United Kingdom, and France led the UN Security Council to order withdrawal of all but 400 UNAMIR troops. Even the 400 Ghanaian troops who elected to stay against orders saved hundreds of lives.
Meanwhile, two thousand French and Belgian troops were able to airlift all French and Belgians out of Rwanda, along with their pets. Not a single Rwandan was allowed to board the planes. The U.S. embassy drove out to Burundi protected by UNAMIR peacekeepers and Marine guards.
Political will is not a mystery. It is not mystical mumbo-jumbo that is impossible to analyze and understand. Anyone who witnessed the triumph of the political campaigns of President Barack Obama should see that political will can be built from the ground up.
It is time that we hold our leaders to account. We must no longer accept their excuses. President Clinton’s “we did not know” speech in Kigali after the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda was a lie—of course he knew. I had top secret codeword clearance in the State Department in 1994 and read the same cables that were used to brief Clinton. A cable to the State Department and National Security Council from the Department of Defense on the first day of the genocide on April 7, 1994 called the mass killings “genocide”. Our Deputy Chief of Mission in Kigali, Joyce Leader, has told me she called the massacres “genocide” in her daily phone calls to the State Department from the first day, April 7 onward.
But the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda, David Rawson, who had grown up a missionary’s son in Burundi, didn’t know what genocide is. Neither did the State Department Office of the Legal Advisor. They thought the killings were part of a civil war, rather than a genocide. They didn’t understand that most genocides occur during civil or international wars; wars and genocides are not mutually exclusive, they usually go together.
Secretly, the United States had ships filled with thousands of U.S. Marines right off the coast of East Africa when the genocide began. But President Clinton never authorized their deployment to Rwanda.
Leaders of genocides must be arrested or killed.
I have always been perplexed by the unwillingness of the world’s leaders to send in heavily armed commandos to arrest the leaders of genocides and take them for trial to the Hague. The ICC should require preliminary hearings and arrest warrants. But currently there are no international police to arrest Omar al Bashir and General Hemedti who led or are leading genocides that murder thousands of people.
Assassinations of national leaders who are ordering or directing genocides would be a direct violation of the principle of national sovereignty that accords immunity to heads of state. It has been a doctrine in the law of nations since Grotius. But it is not recognized by the Genocide Convention. No one is granted immunity for the commission of genocide.
The International Criminal Court has the legal authority to charge heads of state and their accomplices with genocide. It is time for the ICC to be given a police force to carry out its arrest warrants. If the ICC police are violently resisted, they should be explicitly authorized to use force to take suspects into custody.
Indeed, why is it out of the question to send in commandos to kill genocidal leaders if they resist court orders and can’t be arrested? Dietrich Bonhoeffer was part of the plot to kill Hitler. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded that Bonhoeffer was morally right.
Using any moral calculus, Utilitarian, Rule Utilitarian, Kantian, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu, it should be justifiable to kill one leader who is committing genocide and causing the deaths of thousands of people.
It is time to build an international anti-genocide movement on the scale of the anti-slavery movement. We must build the political will for international intervention when genocide is imminent.
When I founded Genocide Watch in 1999, there was not a single organization in the world entirely devoted to the prevention of genocide. At the same time, we founded the Alliance Against Genocide to create the coalition necessary to mobilize a mass movement.
Today, there are hundreds of anti-genocide organizations. The Alliance Against Genocide has 120 member organizations in 31 countries with thousands of employees. There are many other anti-genocide organizations that are not yet members of the Alliance. We share the same vision. It is especially important to build anti-genocide organizations in countries at risk of genocide.
The more I have worked against genocide, the more I have become convinced that genocide must be defeated locally. It can be prevented only by teaching people the empathy for their neighbors that will make them “upstanders” who will oppose the dehumanization necessary for genocide.
Empathy is the ability to place oneself in the shoes of another. It is the measure of a person’s moral capacity. Empathy is the expression of Satyagraha, that great truth force that Gandhi rediscovered, and that was also taught by the Buddha, Amos, Jesus, Muhammed, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Empathy is expressed in both justice and love. It has revolutionary power because justice and love flow from the same Force: the divine Force that made every star and created every human being.
Don’t Forget About the Red Sea
The ongoing Israeli war on Gaza has escalated into a multifaceted conflict involving not only Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas but also key regional actors such as Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthi rebels. The recent Israeli military actions against the Houthis in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, against Hezbollah in Beirut, and in Tehran against Hamas-linked entities, underscore the growing complexity of the Gaza War. The involvement of multiple regional actors, each with its own interests and alliances, has transformed the Gaza crisis into a potential trigger for a larger regional war. Operating from Yemen, for instance, the Houthis have the capability to target vital maritime routes and energy infrastructure in the region, which could have significant economic repercussions. Iran’s role as a major supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is particularly crucial in this context because it raises the stakes significantly. Any confrontation between Israel and Iran, whether through proxy forces or directly, could rapidly escalate into a broader regional conflict, drawing in other Middle Eastern countries. The repercussions of such a conflict would destabilize an already volatile region, potentially leading to further large-scale humanitarian crises, mass displacement, and economic disruption.
In parallel, the United States, Russia, and European powers all have significant interests in the Middle East, whether in terms of energy security, military alliances, or broader geopolitical strategy. The United States, for instance, has steadfastly supported Israel and has a vested interest in ensuring the security of its regional allies. A broader conflict could force the United States to become more directly involved, possibly leading to a confrontation with Iran. Russia, which has cultivated ties with Iran and Syria, could also be drawn into the conflict, particularly if its interests in the region are threatened. Moreover, the involvement of global powers in the Gaza crisis could deepen existing global tensions, particularly between the United States and its allies on one side, and Iran and its allies on the other. One region that stands out as particularly sensitive, and a catalyst of potential further global tensions, is the Red Sea.
The response of Red Sea countries to the conflict involving the Houthis and the broader regional tensions has been marked by caution and strategic calculation. While the United States has pushed for a joint military response, many countries in the region have opted for a more restrained approach, prioritizing diplomatic efforts, internal stability, and humanitarian concerns. This reluctance underscores the complexity of the Red Sea’s security environment, where regional actors must navigate a web of alliances, threats, and interests in a volatile geopolitical landscape.
Connecting the World
The sea serves as a critical maritime route for global trade and energy transportation, making it a hot spot for geopolitical power struggles, regional conflicts, and international interventions, as recent Israeli and Houthi activity demonstrates.
Having become one of the most important shipping routes for merchant ships, especially since the Suez Canal’s inauguration in 1869, the Red Sea has a special strategic significance, connecting the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal in the north and the Gulf of Aden through the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the south.
One of the consequences of insecurity in the Red Sea is a major increase in the cost of global trade and global energy transportation. An oil tanker leaving the Gulf would reach the port of London, 12,000 kilometers away, in fourteen days (at a speed of twenty-two knots) via the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. If that route was unavailable, the tanker would have to go around the southern tip of Africa—a 24-day journey covering 20,900 kilometers.
This is critical when taking into account that approximately 20,000 ships pass through the Suez Canal annually, and approximately 12%-15% of the world’s trade volume originates yearly from the Red Sea basin. Additionally, four of the seven major oil hubs in the world are in the Middle East, and three of them are linked to the Red Sea.
The Bab al-Mandab Strait between Yemen in the Middle East and Djibouti in the Horn of Africa is one of the world’s busiest oil transit points. It’s a historically significant trade transit route whose proximity to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf reduces shipping distances and facilitates trade. About 33,000 merchant ships pass through the strait every year.
After World War II, the Red Sea became a highly competitive area, especially between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a global struggle for influence, and their competition played out in various ways across the world, including in the MENA region.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in efforts to influence the political direction of various countries by supporting different factions, governments, or revolutionary movements.
The Soviet Union often supported revolutionary movements that aimed to overthrow colonial or pro-Western governments. For example, the regime that emerged out of Egypt’s 1952 revolution, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, was supported by the Soviet Union as the Egyptian leader adopted policies that were anti-imperialist and socialist in nature.
Conversely, the United States typically supported existing regimes or counter-revolutionary forces that were aligned with Western interests and opposed the spread of communism. This included support for monarchies and conservative governments in countries like Saudi Arabia.
Sudan remained close to the socialist bloc for a while but then moved closer to the American bloc. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel have been U.S. outposts from the beginning. Yemen, on the other hand, was divided into North Yemen and South Yemen. Djibouti is another important country in the region due to its strategic location. Until recently, it was under French occupation as an ally of the West.
The regimes that emerged often became heavily dependent on either the United States or the Soviet Union for military and economic support. This dependency made these governments vulnerable to changes in international relations or shifts in superpower policies. Many of the regimes that came to power during this period did so with significant external support, which undermined their legitimacy in the eyes of their own people. This lack of legitimacy often contributed to ongoing instability as these governments struggled to maintain control without widespread popular support.
Today, powerful states still maintain a military presence in Red Sea countries. For example, Djibouti became independent from France in 1977, but through a series of treaties, France was given the right to maintain military bases in the country. Then, after four years of the dissolution of the USSR, the United States established two military bases in Eritrea in the cities of Asmara and Massava.
Beyond the Red Sea, Russia has retained a significant military presence in Syria, particularly through its naval facility in Tartus and the Hmeimim Airbase near Latakia. The United Kingdom retained sovereign military bases in Cyprus since the island gained independence in 1960. The United States has significant military bases in several Gulf countries, including Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.
Most of the neighboring crisis regions, which are essential topics in global and regional politics, are linked in some way to the Red Sea. Regional crises such as the Arab Spring, the Yemen crisis, and the Sudan and Qatar blockades directly impact Red Sea stability. During Yemen’s civil war, the Arab coalition’s operation against the Houthis through Djibouti caused severe problems for the country. Similarly, during the 2017 Qatar blockade, the UAE and Saudi Arabia pressured countries such as Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea to take their side, affecting the regional balance. Somalia’s neutrality on the issue has resulted in the UAE supporting separatists in the autonomous regions of northern Somalia (Puntland and Jubaland). The occupation of Palestine had similar consequences for the region, with Red Sea countries like Eritrea facing pressure from Israel. As a result, every Middle Eastern political, economic, and strategic developments affects the countries bordering the Red Sea in some way.
An Arena for Geopolitics
The ongoing conflicts between and within countries in the region present the greatest threats to the Red Sea region. Disputes over the affiliation of islands, border disputes, territorial claims, conflicting economic interests, ideological differences, and ethnic divisions have been cited as the main reasons for the ongoing wars and internal conflicts in the basin. Additionally, terrorism, civil war, regional competition, political and economic instability, piracy, and the spread of crime all impede opportunities in the Red Sea basin. Regional political, financial, and social issues in neighboring Red Sea countries are also increasing regional tensions.
As a security hotspot, the Red Sea draws in countries that sit on either side of it, such as Yemen and Eritrea, as well as countries much farther afield, such as the United States and China. Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, China, the United States, Italy, France, and Japan all have military bases in the area to protect oil and merchant shipping. Transit and trade projects in recent years have sought to either integrate the Red Sea in its plans—namely China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the EU’s Global Gateway—or replace it, such as with the US-backed India – Middle East – Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), and Iraq’s Development Road project. The Red Sea is, therefore, an area where complex global relations can play out. Transit routes, islands, waterways, and other sites within the Red Sea borders have less clear legal status internationally and stand out as areas that riparian states and some global actors seek to dominate. The situation has long been controversial, but recently discovered underground resources and struggles for control of energy routes have put the Red Sea back at the center of geopolitical calculations. So, politics and, above all, military developments and alliances are changing the Red Sea.
The Bab al-Mandab Strait, for example, located at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, is a critical choke point in global maritime trade, particularly for oil and gas shipments. The legal status of the strait is governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which designates it as an international strait. This means that all vessels, including military ships, have the right of transit passage, which cannot be impeded by the bordering states (Yemen and Djibouti). However, the strait’s proximity to conflict zones, particularly Yemen, where the Houthi rebels have targeted shipping, complicates its security. The presence of non-state actors and the involvement of regional powers like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran exacerbate the legal and security issues surrounding the strait.
Under UNCLOS, coastal states have the right to establish exclusive economic zones (EEZs) extending 200 nautical miles from their shores, within which they have sovereign rights over natural resources. However, in the narrow waters of the Red Sea, the establishment of EEZs often leads to overlapping claims. These overlaps can lead to disputes, especially when valuable resources like hydrocarbons are at stake. Countries like Sudan, Eritrea, and Saudi Arabia have overlapping claims, and these disputes are often complicated by the lack of clear legal frameworks or bilateral agreements.
The Hanish Islands, located in the southern Red Sea, are another example of territorial dispute between Yemen and Eritrea. In the 1990s, a brief military conflict occurred over control of these islands. The dispute was eventually resolved through international arbitration, which awarded most of the islands to Yemen. However, tensions remain due to the islands’ strategic location near the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
In the same vein, the Tiran and Sanafir islands, located at the entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba, have historically been under Egyptian control. However, in 2016, Egypt agreed to transfer sovereignty over the islands to Saudi Arabia, a move that was controversial both domestically and regionally. The legal status of this transfer was subject to judicial review in Egypt and sparked debates about the islands’ strategic importance, especially regarding access to the Gulf of Aqaba and Israel’s maritime routes.
The Rise of Non-state Armed Groups
The Houthis are currently the Red Sea basin’s most pressing security concern. Backed by Iran, they’ve been involved in armed conflicts with the Saudi and Emirati-backed Yemeni government. The civil war has exposed the country to foreign intervention: in 2015, the United States supported Saudi Arabia’s intervention to prevent the Houthis from invading all of Yemen.
However, this is not to say that the Houthis are a monolithic entity with a single common agenda; they are a complex and volatile coalition. Houthi soldiers have hounded, assaulted, and taken control of many ships since 2016. Their earliest techniques, such as rocket-propelled grenades, were not very sophisticated, but their strategies have evolved to be more hazardous and successful. They have employed mines, drones, and anti-ship missiles. The biggest casualty of their attacks are Saudi ships and ports. Since October 2023, the tactics employed by the group have significantly evolved, featuring a mix of diverse and adaptable methods. These tactics include the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as for one-way explosive attacks. Additionally, the group has employed anti-ship ballistic missiles and land-attack missiles, while also integrating multidomain and multi-access attacks. This strategic shift highlights the Houthis’ capacity for quick adaptation and refinement of their tactics, which presents new challenges for their adversaries, particularly the United States and its allies operating in the region.
Besides the Houthis, the activity of non-state armed groups is increasing day by day, especially in Yemen and Somalia, south of the Red Sea. Organizations such as al-Hirak, Yemen’s al-Qaeda, Somalia’s al-Shabab, and Ansar al-Sharia will continue to cause problems for the region. The presence of armed groups such as the Islamic State Sinai Province, formerly Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, affected not only Egypt’s domestic security, but also the stability of the Red Sea. The fact that some states either ignore these groups or actively support certain groups indicates that non-state armed groups operating in the region play a significant role in its stability, or lack thereof. These non-state armed groups may receive support from local factions or regional and global powers. The manipulation of regional ethnic and religious differences for political gain creates an environment ripe for terrorism.
As part of its “global war on terror”, the United States built a military presence at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti in 2002. It serves as a key hub for U.S. counterterrorism operations, particularly against al-Shabaab in Somalia and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. The base supports drone strikes, surveillance missions, and special operations forces deployments. It helps safeguard U.S. and allied economic interests in the region, particularly the flow of oil and gas from the Gulf states through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, which proved its vital role in the global economy after the attacks on the ships in the region.
Human Trafficking, Smuggling, and Piracy
The routes used for human trafficking and smuggling of various types of goods are often a source of funding for civil wars and terrorist activities in the region. The increase in unemployment, displaced persons, and refugees has led to the emergence of many organized crime groups with political, ideological, or commercial motives. The Red Sea, due to its location as a transit point near conflict zones, is one of the regions with the highest concentrations of arms and human traffickers. The influence of the illegal sector has had a detrimental impact on regional stability and has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Piracy is also a significant issue in the Red Sea, particularly in and around the Gulf of Aden, which impacts global trade and regional stability. While piracy was more prevalent around 2008 and 2009, practical efforts by NATO, the European Union, and the United Nations have significantly decreased such attacks. Despite the challenging geopolitical environment, the movement of vessels has remained largely unrestricted and secure in recent years.Recent events with the Houthis have raised concerns about the previously assumed safety of the Red Sea passageway, as it becomes apparent that there may be potential for new disturbances.
The region has combined task forces (CTFs) to solve security problems with 45 volunteer nations from all continents. CTF 150 covers regions beyond the Arabian Gulf, CTF 151 concentrates on combating piracy, and CTF 152 covers activities inside the Arabian Gulf. Previously, the organization had three task forces with particular geographical areas or tasks. The Red Sea is the main topic of the newest fourth task force, CTF 153, established in April 2022. It covers some of the world’s most important shipping lanes, including those through the Suez Canal, Bab al-Mandab Strait, and the Arabian Sea. The task force is crucial in ensuring these routes remain safe and open, protecting the flow of global commerce, including energy supplies. Vice Admiral Brad Cooper of the U.S. Navy stated that the goal of CTF 153 is to “improve security and stability” in the area, adding that the mission also includes preventing human trafficking and the smuggling of drugs and weapons. Houthi marine assaults are undoubtedly another risk that the task force would try to prevent, even if authorities have not been clear about the task force’s involvement in fending off threats from Houthi troops in Yemen.
Growing interest in the area, fueled by piracy in the Indian Ocean and the Gaza War, has sparked a considerable increase in military action. The free flow of business and essential collaboration between nations with shared interests in regional security fall under this category. CTF 153 and The EU’s Operation Atalanta are crucial examples. Operation Atalanta is the EU’s counter-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia that launched in 2008. Its primary objectives are to protect World Food Programme (WFP) vessels delivering aid to Somalia, deter and prevent piracy, and safeguard other vulnerable vessels in the region.
In response to the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, new multilateral initiatives were created. Operation Prosperity Guardian was established in December 2023. The U.S.-led Red Sea coalition, involving almost 20 nations, is a maritime security initiative designed to address growing security concerns in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab Strait, and Gulf of Aden—strategic waterways crucial for global trade. The Aspides Mission was established by the EU in February 2024. It provides maritime situational awareness, accompanies vessels, and protects them against possible multidomain attacks at sea in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, and the Gulf of Oman.
Diplomacy and Competition: An International Game
The seriousness of the regional power conflict has shown itself with the establishment of the Red Sea Council in 2020. It emerged with the establishment of the “Council of Arab and African States Bordering the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden”, signed in Riyadh in January 2020 by Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Eritrea, Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan, which have borders on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Council aims to maintain security and stability in the Red Sea and consult and coordinate to combat the dangers encountered, but does not constitute a military alliance. It was established through the Egyptian–Saudi Arabian initiative with the support of the European Union, Germany, and the African Union.
The platform-building initiatives, which were initially carried out under the leadership of Egypt, have been passed into the purview of Saudi Arabia since mid-2018. The formation of the Red Sea Council was completed at the beginning of 2020, despite various disputes over membership, goals, finance, and procedures. The multidimensional collaboration platform is not intended to create a military alliance against Iran and Ethiopia. It is organized to prevent any potential conflicts in the region. Its scope will be limited to the defense of the riparian countries to keep threats away and to address the necessary preventative measures within the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea.
Without the participation of a central country, namely Ethiopia, in the council, new tensions could be created rather than cooperation between the region’s countries. Based on Saudi Arabia’s economic power and political authority, it would be seen as a new instrument of the regional power struggle rather than an effective, unifying platform. Accordingly, it is believed that the new council is aimed at limiting the ability of Qatar and Türkiye, along with Iran, to move into the Red Sea.
While many nations have competing interests, they all have a stake in the Red Sea region’s security and freedom of navigation. For instance, Washington and Beijing battle for influence in Africa and the Middle East while simultaneously wanting functional trade lines. Egypt seeks support in maintaining security but also wants to preserve its independence and restrict the influence of non-littoral powers. The Gulf Cooperation Council countries are spending money to increase their naval capabilities, but although they have much in common, their goals differ. For instance, Saudi Arabia prioritizes maritime border security, whereas the UAE generally strives to secure commercial vessels. Maritime security will be more crucial as more players try to advance their influence and safeguard their interests in the Red Sea region. Increased coordination and collaboration between adversaries and allies with shared interests are necessary to ensure security.
A new era of reliance on security has started as foreign nations attempt to gain control of strategic ports in the region. These external parties seek to establish connections between important sea lanes by negotiating with the Red Sea states, and sometimes exploiting their vulnerabilities. This new period of turmoil could lead to various events, as we have seen with the coup in Sudan, the emergence of the radical right wing in Israel, and the war in Gaza. These potential outcomes will not only impact the stability of the countries bordering the Red Sea but also global safety in terms of freedom of navigation, supply chain management, and reliance on resources.
China Tests the Water in Palestinian Diplomacy
Said Abdel Salam Haniyeh, son of the recently assassinated head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, emphasized national unity as a top priority for all Palestinians in the eulogy he presented for his father’s passing. “Our confidence is great in the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian leadership that the pure blood (of the martyrs) must unite us,” he said.
Interestingly, the speech then moved to discuss China, specifically, the Beijing Declaration. He called on “all the brothers in the Palestinian leadership who met in Beijing to move toward national unity for all our people, as the cruel enemy does not differentiate between a Palestinian and another”.
Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel (although Tel Aviv has not formally taken responsibility) in Tehran on July 31, was keen on finding alternative political platforms that could help break the deadlock of factional division which has defined Palestinian politics for years. The Beijing Declaration was his last contribution to this ambitious goal. Whether the agreement, signed by Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas, will finally unify the Palestinian ranks, is yet to be seen. What is clear, however, is that China is finally ready to take a leadership role in Middle East politics.
The New China Factor
By hosting a historic signing of a unity agreement between fourteen Palestinian political parties in Beijing on July 23, China has, once more, shown its ability to play a global role as a peace broker.
For years, China has attempted to engage with Middle East politics, particularly in the region’s most enduring crisis, the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In 2021, China announced its four-point plan, aimed at “comprehensively, fairly and permanently” resolving the Palestinian question. Whether the plan itself was workable or not, it mattered little, as neither the Israeli government nor the Palestinian Authority (PA) were prepared to ditch Washington, which has dominated Middle East diplomacy for decades.
For the Israelis, their interests lie largely within their historic alliance with the United States, which has translated into very generous aid packages, military support, and political backing. As for the PA, since its inception in 1994, it revolved largely within a U.S.-foreign policy sphere. With time, the Palestinian leadership grew even more reliant on American and Western financial handouts and validation. Thus, allowing China to flex its diplomatic muscles in the Middle East, at the expense of the United States, would be considered a violation of the unspoken agreement between Washington and Ramallah.
Consequently, Chinese efforts over the past several years have yielded nothing tangible. But China’s success in ending a seven-year rift between Saudi Arabia and Iran re-introduced Beijing as a powerful new mediator in a region known for its protracted and layered conflicts. The latest horrific war in Gaza has further highlighted the possible role of China in Palestine and the region at large.
End of the Balancing Act?
In recent years, China attempted to find the balance between its historic role as a global leader (with clout and credibility in the Global South) and its economic interests (including those in Israel). That balancing act began eroding soon after the start of the Gaza War since the Chinese political discourse on the conflict was mostly committed to the rights of the Palestinian people and their historic struggle for freedom and justice. This notion was highlighted in the words of China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Fu Cong, when he said that “the establishment of an independent state is the indisputable national right of the Palestinian people, not subject to questioning or bargaining”.
Such language, which came to define China’s strong stance against the war, the numerous human rights violations, and the urgent need for a ceasefire, continued to evolve. For example, on February 22, China’s representative to the Hague, Ma Xinmin, said that “in pursuit of the right to self-determination, [the] Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression … is (an) inalienable right well founded in international law”. His statement was made during the fourth day of public hearings held by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to address Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine.
The efforts of China and other countries paid dividends, as the ICJ released its Advisory Opinion on July 19, stating that “the sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying Power” and “continued frustration of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, violates fundamental principles of international law”.
The Beijing Declaration
It is within this context that “The Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity” was signed. The agreement was not a mere document, like those signed between rival Palestinian parties in the past. It proposed a three-step initiative that includes a “comprehensive, lasting and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza”, followed by a post-conflict governance plan, which is itself predicated on the principle of “Palestinians governing Palestine”.
The final step seeks long-term peace, all of which is achieved through broad-based participation of regional and international players. In other words, ending the domination of a single country over the future of Palestine and her people.
There will certainly be attempts—largely led by Washington—to undermine, if not cancel, the Chinese efforts entirely. But there are reasons to believe that the diplomatic push by China may, in fact, serve as a foundation for a change in the global attitude towards justice and peace in Palestine. Indeed, China’s growing role in Palestinian and Middle East politics is taking place amid changing global dynamics and the practical end of the U.S.’ traditional role as the “honest peace broker”.
The fact that Western European countries like Spain, Norway, and Ireland have recognized Palestine is a testament to the claim that the U.S.-dominated Western diplomacy in the Middle East is breaking apart. Moreover, the growing role of the Global South in supporting the Palestinian struggle suggests another seismic shift—away from a U.S.-dominated political process that, from the start, tilted in favor of Israel’s political, military, and strategic objectives.
Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, much of the world has been sidelined from the struggle in Palestine by this U.S.-centric approach. This is no longer the case. The war on Gaza has presented China with the opportunity to play the role of an advocate for Palestine. This has given Beijing the needed credibility to achieve a comprehensive agreement among Palestinian groups.
Time will tell if the agreement will be implemented or thwarted. But the fact remains that China is now officially a peace broker in Palestine and, for most Palestinians, a credible one at that. This credibility was demonstrated in a poll conducted in May 2023 by YouGov, which revealed that 80 percent of Palestinians supported a Chinese role in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
Global Diplomacy
Even before Beijing successfully managed to achieve reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran in April 2023, Chinese diplomacy had shown an increased maturity. For many years, China has been perceived to be an outsider to global affairs—at least outside its Asia-Pacific domain—supposedly contenting itself to economic expansion or integration.
Inadvertently, former U.S. President Donald Trump forced, or rather, accelerated China’s global outreach in 2018 when he launched an unprecedented trade war with the powerful Asian country. Trump’s plan backfired. Not only did Washington fail to force Beijing to bow to American diktats, but it also inspired what became known as China’s “wolf diplomacy”—a self-assertive Chinese approach to foreign policy.
From an American—or Western—viewpoint, the new tactic was perceived to be hostile and aggressive. But from a Chinese perspective, the new policy was necessitated by the relentless trade and diplomatic wars launched against China by successive U.S. administrations, along with their Western allies.
The Russia-Ukraine war, too, accentuated China’s role in international conflicts and diplomacy. While Beijing’s March 2023 “12-point peace proposal” to end the war in Ukraine was ostensibly welcomed by Moscow, it failed to impress the West. Despite this, the proposal highlighted an important shift. The fact that China found it necessary to develop an elaborate political position as a potential mediator conveyed that Beijing is no longer content with playing the role of the supporting actor in international forums.
At that time, China’s diplomacy was dismissed by many, especially in the West, as a non-starter, if at all serious or even well-intentioned. Yet, merely three weeks later, the Chinese-brokered Iran-Saudi agreement was signed. Major political actors in the region, including Washington, appeared to be taken by surprise. The Chinese success story was juxtaposed by many journalists in the Global South with Washington’s conflict-prone, dead-end diplomacy in the Middle East.
Buoyed by its success, China ventured further into new diplomatic territories, offering to mediate between Israel and Palestine. The Palestinian leadership welcomed a Chinese role; the Israelis were disinterested, preferring to maintain Washington as the primary broker.
Historic Relations
Israel’s importance to Beijing has been predicated on three major principles: one, China’s need to compete with the United States in a region that has been perceived as an American domain for many years; two, China’s desire to access Israel’s (till recently) stable ports in the East Mediterranean, particularly the port of Haifa; three, China’s interest in Israel’s advancement in certain industries that are crucial to the Chinese technological sector. However, for Israel, Beijing’s geopolitical worth for Tel Aviv is simply incomparable to that of Washington. It would also make little sense for Tel Aviv to grant Beijing any political leverage at this time of significant geopolitical transition, especially because China has historically supported the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom.
Indeed, for decades, China served as a vanguard for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and, later, the State of Palestine at the United Nations, insisting on the respect and implementation of international laws relevant to ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Unsurprisingly, China recognized the PLO’s political status in 1965 and the State of Palestine in 1988. Now, China is pushing for full Palestinian membership in the international body.
The Chinese position was fundamental to Beijing’s strategic alliances in the Global South after World War II, particularly during the era of successful national liberation struggles. However, the economic growth of China and its integration into a Western-centric economic system, starting in 1978, progressively weakened China’s trade and political relevance in the Global South. This was a direct outcome of two independent but overlapping processes: first, China’s increasing dependency on the Western-controlled global market; second, the fact that the global economy, including that of the Global South, was reprioritized to meet the needs of Western markets. Though the era of globalization proved crucial to the growth of the Chinese economy, it also redefined the relationship between China and its economic, strategic, and political depth in the Global South.
China’s reliance on the West, however, is now being reversed. First, because of Washington’s trade war and the hesitance of Western countries to join Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative—even western countries, like Italy, which joined the initiative in March 2019, ultimately pulled out under U.S. pressure in December 2023. Second, because of the U.S.-led Western sanctions on Moscow. The Western economic war on Russia was another reminder that China cannot fully rely on Western markets and financial systems.
China’s slow drift from a Western-centric economic system is being coupled with a whole new approach to foreign policy—executing “wolf diplomacy” in the West while employing a gentler approach in the Global South.
Even before former Foreign Minister of China, Qin Gang, phoned his Palestinian and Israeli counterparts in April 2023, offering peace mediation, China had already introduced a peace initiative known as the “four-point proposal”. The proposal called for cessation of hostilities, humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians, greater international involvement, and a permanent end to the conflict based on the two-state solution. The initiative highlighted China’s readiness to move past its role as a trade partner into that of a political actor on the global stage. For China, this transition is not only a matter of prestige, it offers tangible benefits as well. Muslim and Arab countries, along with Israel, are critical parties in the ambitious BRI project as they host critical land and sea routes. China’s new role as mediator could help strengthen these relationships. Indeed, in recent years, China’s interest in being a peace mediator increased exponentially, especially amid the near total absence of Washington.
It is in this context that China showed readiness to mediate between rival Palestinian groups. Though the recently signed agreement has signaled an evolution in China’s approach to Palestinian politics, Beijing’s mission ahead is fraught with challenges.
Challenges Ahead
The Beijing Declaration was not the first attempt at unifying Palestinian groups. Such efforts were earnestly launched with the Cairo Declaration of 2005 and ended with the Algiers Declaration of 2022. Between the two events, over 10 rounds of negotiations took place, hosted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, and Algeria. One of the main obstacles that thwarted all previously signed agreements, aside from the lack of will to move forward on the part of the Palestinians, was outside pressure, namely from Washington. While Hamas is often accused of tailoring its political agenda to accommodate that of the interests of its allies in the region, mainly Iran, the Palestinian Authority is almost entirely beholden to U.S. funds, Western validation, and often outright political diktats. A combination of all of these factors has made the political reunification of Palestinian factions neary impossible.
According to U.S. political logic, Palestinian unity, which would have to include Hamas and other groups that Washington and Israel consider “terrorists”, cannot take place in parallel with the U.S.-sponsored so-called “peace process” between the Palestinians and Israel. This sentiment has been communicated frequently by the U.S. State Department, which, as recently as July 2024, stated that “when it comes to governance of Gaza at the end of the conflict, there can’t be a role for a terrorist organization” and that “Hamas has long been a terrorist organization”.
In contrast, China’s nascent Middle East diplomacy sees the two processes, that of Palestinian unity and a future peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, as very much compatible. Despite this, adopting China’s approach is not a simple matter.
The PA’s financial security is largely linked to Washington and other Western capitals. Though top Palestinian officials, like Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki in August 2023, often threaten to “turn to China” due to the PA’s “disappointment” in Washington, such a shift will not be easily permitted—if it is not blocked by Washington, then by Tel Aviv itself.
The PA is aware of its limited margins for truly independent diplomacy. The official visit of PA President Mahmoud Abbas to Beijing in June 2023, although touted by the PA-run media as an earth-shattering event, was hardly a game changer. Though it highlighted China’s growing interests in Palestine, it was not followed by substantive action on the part of the Palestinian leadership. Instead of building on the outcomes of that agreement by granting China a permanent role, the PA produced flashy press releases merely highlighting the historic ties between Palestine and China. An alternative could have been a Palestinian insistence on a central role by China in any future negotiations as a starting point of further political and economic integration between the aid-dependent PA and Beijing.
Despite Abbas’ visit, China understood the complexity of the Palestinian political landscape. Thus, by facilitating a Palestinian unity agreement in July 2024, Beijing has succeeded in overcoming a foreign policy trap that other countries are yet to resolve. The Palestinian agreement has allowed China to engage with all groups on an equal footing, without appearing to side with one group against the other.
Nonetheless, the major changes underway in the world’s geopolitical map, and the rising importance of the Global South—as demonstrated in Africa and South America’s response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza—present Palestinians with unique political, in fact, strategic, opportunities. These newly carved margins, if genuinely explored, could help Palestine break away from U.S.-Western hegemony and to reconnect with Palestine’s former strategic depth in Asia, Africa, South America, and the rest of the world.
For this to occur, Palestinians must present their cause as one united front, not as political fragments or separate factions. Only then, emerging global powers can view Palestine as a serious geopolitical asset in a rapidly changing world.
What also makes the Beijing Declaration different from previous efforts is that this is the first time that a global power, aside from the U.S., took it upon itself to play the role of the mediator and the guarantor of the agreement. Whether Palestinian factions implement or ignore the declaration will largely depend on the outcome of the Gaza War, U.S. pressure on the PA, and the interests of the factions themselves. However, the Beijing Declaration has once again demonstrated not only China’s keen interest in Middle East diplomacy, but a degree of maturity and credibility rarely enjoyed by other parties.
Excerpts of this essay were previously published in Gulf News.
The Olympics: Arenas of Contention
The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris were hosted against the backdrop of active conflicts involving participating (and suspended) nations. Historically, the Games have promised a period of peace between warring nations under the banner of the Olympic Truce, which recommends the pause of any warfare between countries from one week before the opening of the Olympics to one week after the conclusion of the Paralympics. Paris 2024 marks the first Olympic Games since the end of the Cold War to be hosted during active conflicts involving the hegemonic interests of major powers such as the United States, China, and Russia.
Military confrontations and diplomatic contentions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia complicated arrangements for the 2024 Olympics from the outset; organizers ultimately implemented extensive security measures to safeguard the Olympic sites and athletes from the potential repercussions of these nations in conflict. Several symptoms of the escalating hostilities in those regions emerged during the Games, both inside and outside the sporting arena.
Russia and Ukraine
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended Russia from taking part in this competition due to its invasion of Ukraine four days after the conclusion of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, which the IOC deemed to be a violation of the Olympic Truce. Belarus was also barred because the Belarusian government backed the Kremlin’s military campaign. Moscow condemned the IOC decision to sanction the Russian and Belarusian Olympic teams as being politically motivated.
The IOC, however, permitted athletes with Russian and Belarusian passports to participate in the Paris Games as neutral individuals insofar as they were not actively supporting the Russian forces in Ukraine, reasoning the solution was a way to objectively address this sensitive situation. Additionally, athletes from Belarus and Russia were banned from competing in track and field events since these are staged by the governing body World Athletics, which had issued a total ban. Ultimately, only fifteen Russian neutrals competed at Paris 2024 and they won just one Olympic silver.
This shows a dramatic fall of Russian athletic performance. Until the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Russia was never ranked below the fifth position at the medal table. Since the time of the Soviet Union, sport has been an important way for Russia to demonstrate its ideological superiority and international prestige. In contrast, the performances of the neutral individuals from Russia were barely noticeable in Paris.
Even before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian athletes at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing protested against Russia’s looming hostilities in the border area. When the IOC announced the decision to invite Russian athletes to Paris as neutral individuals, Ukrainian officials questioned the neutrality of any athletes participating in international sporting competitions because even though they do not carry national flags, they still represent their nations in practice. On this ground, Kyiv initially considered boycotting the 2024 Olympics.
Later, Ukraine reversed their stance and dispatched 140 athletes to Paris. This marked the smallest delegation from the country since their first appearance at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. In the shadow of active warfare, it was not easy to mobilize the Ukraine Olympic team, largely due to the destruction of many training facilities by Russian missiles. Despite such adversities, the Ukrainian delegation won twelve medals, including three golds. The athletes used these triumphs to demonstrate Ukraine’s determination to fight at all costs to the international community; the playing of the national anthem at the Olympic stadium indicated their hope and will to the world.
Russia promptly filed an appeal against the IOC sanction to the Court of Arbitration for Sport but the court upheld the suspension. In response, the Kremlin announced its intention to host the World Friendship Games in Moscow a few months after the Olympics in Paris. This plan prompted the IOC to warn Russia not to politicize international sport and the alternative competition was later postponed until 2025.
It appears that the suspension had a limited impact on the Kremlin’s military aggression in Ukraine. For instance, Russia intensified its bombing on a few strategic areas in Ukraine during the Olympics and Kyiv also admitted that its forces had attacked military targets in Russian territory in retaliation. Moreover, the IOC’s ban only increased the level of tension between Russia and the sport governing body. The majority of Russian athletes declined the invitation from the IOC to attend the Olympics as individual neutral athletes, the 15 Russian neutrals in Paris were dubbed traitors by the Russian media which, after the opening ceremony, branded Paris 2024 the “Olympics of Hell” and the “Games of Satan”.
Overall, Russia dismissed this year’s Olympics as a politicized event, claiming that such a unidirectional disciplinary action reflects bias against Russia within the IOC and arguing that while sport and politics must be separate, the IOC was mixing the Olympic Games with “racism and neo-Nazism”. In turn, the IOC also accused Russia of politicizing sport, disparaging the International Friendship Association as a political institution funded by Russia. Ironically, both the IOC and Russia accused each other of politicizing sport.
Israel–Hamas War
At the opening ceremony in Paris, both the Israeli and Palestinian delegations were on their boats, cruising the River Seine. This first-ever Olympic ceremony on the water attracted global attention but the presence of athletes from Palestine and Israel was especially notable because the conflict was still ongoing in Gaza when they arrived in Paris, despite the rules of the Olympic Truce. However, the IOC appeared reluctant to make a statement on the worsening situation in the region. Before the Olympics, the IOC announced that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine were not of the same nature, adding that the National Olympic Committees of Israel and Palestine showed mutual respect despite the conflict. This statement would prove incorrect as the Games progressed.
Peace negotiations between Israel and Hamas failed a few weeks before the start of the Olympics and there was no sign of improvement in the region when the curtain was raised in the French capital. While the two sides seemed to be violating the Olympic Truce, it is difficult to clearly apply the rules in this context because technically the conflict in Gaza is not an inter-state war, rather, it is the resistance of Hamas against the Israeli state occupation. Yet, Israel’s retaliatory military operations in Gaza continued during the Games and the conflict was escalating throughout the region after the assassinations of Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr in Lebanon and Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh in Iran.
As Israel’s attacks continued to claim the lives of many innocent civilians in Gaza, Palestine’s Games Committee appealed to the IOC to ban Israelis from the Paris Olympics because these athletes had visited Israeli troops and posted photos of signed missiles.
So much for Olympic peace. With the assassination of Haniyeh and Shukr (Israel took responsibility for the killing of Shukr but has not commented officially on Haniyeh), the geopolitical circumstances in the Middle East have become increasingly volatile. This may indicate that the idea of the Olympic Truce is no more than a symbolic gesture for nations in desperate armed conflict.
Recurrent wars in the region have often made Palestine’s Olympic journey bumpy since its Olympic debut in Atlanta in 1996. Their preparation for Paris 2024 was particularly challenging because of the complete blockade of the Gaza Strip. On June 11, 2024, Majed Abu Maraheel, the first-ever Palestine flag bearer at the Olympics, died at the age of 61 due to the shortage of medical supplies in Gaza. Abu Maraheel had dedicated his life to developing sport for his country and his death symbolized all the suffering that the Palestinian Olympic team had endured before Paris 2024.
The Palestine delegation consisted of eight members and while their prospect of winning a medal was not optimistic, their Olympic mission seemed to be more than just sporting success. In Paris, the Palestinian athletes volunteered as messengers to remind global audiences of the atrocities occurring in their home nation. Jibril Rajoub, the chief of the team, also vowed that he would never shake hands with Israelis at the Olympics and would call for the suspension of Israel from the Games. On his way home, Rajoub was arrested at the border crossing and his passport was confiscated. While he was released after a few hours of interrogation, this detention may be related to his active voice against Israel during the Olympics.
Meanwhile, Israeli athletes appeared uneasy while observing Palestine’s political gestures in Paris. At the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Black September, a Palestinian militant group, attacked the Olympic village and killed eleven members of the Israeli Olympic delegation. In the second week of Paris 2024, the Israeli Embassy in the French capital hosted a commemoration to pay tribute to those who were murdered at Munich 1972, which the IOC president and the mayor of Paris attended.
The event was unusual because no such commemoration had ever been observed. Perhaps the timing provides an answer; with increasing international criticism over its military operation in Gaza, Israel may have intended to emphasize the vulnerability of their athletes by reminding the international community of their past tragedy. This ceremony seemed to be Israel’s tacit public diplomacy to protect Team Israel in the face ofpro-Palestine campaigns.
The memory of this massacre was also rekindled when several Israeli athletes received death threats via email from unidentified entities during the Games. The elite French police and the Israel Security Agency jointly guarded the Israeli delegation in Paris and the athletes were also advised to stay in the Olympic Village whenever possible. In the face of deepening concern about the welfare of their national team, Yael Arad, the president of the Israel Olympic Committee, assured her fellow citizens of the safety of the Israeli athletes at the competition. Yet, such high-security measures indicated genuine anxiety plaguing the Israeli competitors.
Despite the IOC’s insistence that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are different and that the Palestinian and Israeli delegations would maintain cordial relations, it seems evident that the two were in conflict both inside and outside the arena.
The United States and China
Team U.S.A. and China were the two largest delegations at Paris 2024 and the top two nations in the Olympic medal table. Their exceptional sporting prowess represents their superpower status in the world, and their race for Olympic glory also reflects their rivalry in global politics. The two countries have repeatedly collided in the field of international trade and Indo-Pacific geopolitics, and the Paris Games became another place for the two to boast their superiority.
The tension between China and the United States was ostensible in the Olympic Aquatic Centre. On August 1, Pan Zhanle from China won an Olympic gold in the men’s 100-meter freestyle, setting a world record. Three days later, swimmers from the two nations competed in the men’s 4 x 100 meters medley final, and the Chinese quartet outperformed their American counterparts. However, the American and Australian media questioned the exceptional strength that the Chinese swimmers displayed, implying they took illegal drugs.
Before the Olympic Games in Tokyo, 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for banned substances. They were allowed to take part in Olympic swimming because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) concluded that the positive result was caused by the consumption of contaminated meat. Two of the Chinese men’s medley team, Qin Haiyang and Sun Jiajun, were among the group of Chinese swimmers who tested positive but later cleared. Nonetheless, Chinese doping allegations were still prevalent in the West.
The United States in particular was suspicious of WADA’s ruling. In July 2024, ahead of the Olympic Games in Paris, the U.S. Department of Justice began independently investigating the 23 positive cases among the Chinese swimmers. WADA was uneasy about this American investigation because it directly challenged the jurisdiction of the anti-doping agency. In 2019, the U.S. Congress institutionalized the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act which gives the United States the power to intervene in the global anti-doping system. The U.S. inspection of the Chinese athletes before Paris 2024 was the first enforcement of this law; in practice, this indicates that the American authorities are defying the hegemony of WADA in the established anti-doping regime.
China expressed displeasure with the doping allegations against its swimmers. Zhanle, the Olympic champion, complained about the disrespectful manners of the American swimmers during the practice session. Zhang Yufei, who won a bronze medal in the women’s 200m butterfly, defended their team’s sporting excellence asking, “Why does no one question Phelps or Ledecky?”. Moreover, in response to the U.S. challenge to WADA, a Chinese state media opined that “[t]he US has polluted the supposedly pure sports arena with its own dirty political maneuvers”. Apparently, the accusations in the Olympic swimming pool have escalated into a diplomatic row between the United States and China.
This is not the first time the two superpowers have confronted each other at the Olympics. Ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, prominent American politicians such as Nancy Pelosi called for a diplomatic boycott of the Olympics in the Chinese capital due to China’s suppression of the democratic movement in Hong Kong and the alleged operation of a re-education camp in Xinjiang province. China categorically denied any human rights violations in the country and warned that the United States should not interfere with its internal affairs. This dispute never subsided. As a result, no Western leaders, except those from the IOC and the UN, attended the opening and closing ceremonies of Beijing 2022.
In recent years, emerging power states, most notably China, have begun to challenge American primacy in the liberal international order. As the second-largest economy in the world, China embraces an expansionist foreign policy (such as its Belt and Road Initiative) and Washington seems to be wary of the growing influence of the communist giant. The U.S. tariff imposed on Chinese goods since 2019 and Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy appear to be some measures to curtail China’s growth. Adding to this complexity, China is strategically allied with Russia, and this alliance is further deepening the chasm in Sino–American relations. Indeed, Vladimir Putin was one of the few foreign guests who attended the opening ceremony of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing while most Western VIPs were absent.
As U.S. –Chinese diplomatic and geopolitical tensions continued, the Olympic Games turned into a symbolic battlefield between the two superpowers. While the fact that both nations won 40 gold medals may have been coincidental, the tying of these two great powers symbolizes the fierce political rivalry between the two.
Sport and Politics
While few Olympic Games are completely free from political influence, Paris 2024 was especially vulnerable to external political factors due to the bouts of active warfare during the Games. The war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, and tense U.S. –Sino relations all affected the organization of the Olympics in the French capital. Although the IOC praised the Olympic athletes for their fair play and friendship despite various political strains, an undercurrent of aggression simmered beneath the Olympic ceremonials.
Above all, the idea of neutrality at the Olympics is the most controversial. The IOC invited Russian and Belarusian athletes to the Games as neutral individuals. While they were officially non-affiliated competitors at the international championship, it is unlikely that the five Olympic rings on their tracksuits completely replaced the national flag in their hearts. In practice these Olympians competed for the pride and glory of their nation. As Ukraine protested, it was questionable whether “neutral” is an identity that an athlete can truly adopt.
The Olympic Truce also triggers debate. The modern Olympic ceasefire was first introduced in 1992 by the IOC and endorsed by the United Nations in 1993. Yet, this nearly two-month truce period is not legally binding, rather, it is an expression of the IOC’s desire to promote intentional peace through sport. There is no outlined process for enforcement; the Olympic Charter contains no rules about disciplinary actions against any party who violates this peace principle.
As a result, it seems the application of the Olympic Truce is left entirely to the whims of the IOC. For instance, when Russia annexed Crimea by force a few days after the end of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the sport governing body awarded no penalty for this illegal occupation. The Russian delegation was barred from the 2018, 2020, and 2022 Olympics because of their systematic doping, not their military aggression. WADA finally lifted this doping-related suspension in 2022, however, Russia was still banned from Paris 2024 because it invaded Ukraine. The IOC may have considered this second violation to be a more serious offense, but this was arguably an inconsistent imposition of the sanction.
Likewise, the IOC took no action against parties involved in the conflict in the Middle East. Palestine wanted Israel to be excluded from the Olympics due to the atrocities committed in Gaza but the IOC paid little attention to this request, presenting another symptom of the IOC’s inconsistency. This begs a question about the IOC’s political independence. While the ongoing active wars during the Games have put additional burdens on the IOC, particularly in terms of the safe and secure delivery of the Games, it is difficult to dismiss the criticism that the IOC’s approach to such political troubles displayed irregularity and double standards.
It may be unfair to call the IOC a politicized or Western organization as the Kremlin and pro-Palestinian groups have accused. Nevertheless, this global institution does not appear politically independent either. Rather, it calculated its interests within the atmosphere of the current geopolitical turmoil. Ideally, sport and politics should not mix. In reality, they often do. This is particularly evident when world politics are rife with tension, mistrust, and conflict. What was meant to be a global festival of sport with an aura of peace, love, and solidarity, instead became an arena for warring nations to display their rivalries and hostilities.
Iranians Don’t Want a War With Israel
The current state of heightened tensions in the Middle East is not the first time in recent memory that Iran finds itself on the precipice of an all-out military conflict. Threats of an imminent invasion or coordinated attacks on its nuclear facilities originating from its chief adversaries Israel and the United States have been consistent in the past twenty years, wielded in tandem with speculations about the timing of a hypothetical blitzkrieg.
Since the late 2000s, when Iran’s nuclear program emerged as a source of constant controversy, warranting intervention by the United Nations Security Council, American and Israeli leaders have intermittently brandished the specter of the use of force as a sword of Damocles. The warnings were rehashed so routinely that Iranians often dismiss them as hollow rhetoric.
Why a country that has never sought to colonize its neighbors or others has evolved into the pivot of the region’s war talk is in and of itself a riddle. Still, the external image of Iran as an entity perennially implicated in one conflict or another has been so globally ingrained that many who do not follow the headlines closely often conjure a war-torn, starved nation whenever they hear the name Iran.
A Ben-Gurion University professor who had served in the Israeli military for 23 years wrote in a July 18, 2008, New York Times opinion piece that Israel would strike Iran within the “next four to seven months”. Ben Morris laid out the specifics of such an operation, explaining the benefits for the Middle East and the world.
In 2011, an Israeli air force general told the Tablet Magazine, “We have no illusion. We will attack Iran successfully but that won’t be the end of it. Two, or three, or five years later, we will have to go back there again.”
A year later, mainstream media unanimously agreed an Israeli aerial assault against Iran was inevitable. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius quoted U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta as saying Israel would attack Iran in April, May, or June 2012.
A while later, Israeli media reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had planned an attack in October of that year, but called it off at the request of then-U.S. President Barack Obama running for reelection. Obama had argued that an Israeli act of aggression could interfere with the U.S. electoral process.
The apparition of military action was so vivid that The Atlantic set up an Iran War Dial in 2012, enlisting experts to share their predictions of a showdown between the Islamic Republic and its two primary nemeses, the United States and Israel. The archives of the countdown are no longer available online, but at one point in March 2012, the odds of war were calculated at 48%.
The impressive roster of political scientists chiming in to this doomsday clock run by Swarthmore College Professor Dominic Tierney would make any observer wonder if the clarion calls of war could really be heard. Distinguished authors and scholars such as Stephen Walt and Kenneth Timmerman were seriously debating the statistical chances of a flare-up, so it couldn’t have been taken lightly.
War of Words
Unfulfilled prophecies about Israel pounding Iran reciprocated by Tehran’s apocalyptic reprisal have constituted an unvarying theme of catastrophic scenarios imagined in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979.
The two states have been locked in a bitter struggle since, and their proxy fight has remained one of the trappings of political life in the Middle East. But it was only after the ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president in 2005 that they drifted into a high-octane undeclared war, actively undermining each other’s security without descending into a one-on-one collision.
In different phases of the indirect spat, Tehran and Tel Aviv eliminated each other’s nationals in third countries, spied on each other, and transmitted computer viruses to cripple the rival’s critical infrastructure, but still avoided direct armed conflict. For news organizations and individuals perceiving war forecasts as a fancy activity, it’s been useful to have a potential battle looming large to generate headlines and interest.
These stabs at political fortunetelling complement the entreaties made to both the U.S. government and Israel to administer the coup de grace against the Iranian regime. From the late Saudi king Abdullah and his ambassadors extorting their U.S. counterparts to set off the war to U.S. administration officials John Bolton, Thomas P.M. Barnett, and Matthew Kroening identifying different occasions as the “right time” to attack, saber-rattling has been in vogue and uninterrupted in frequency.
But the fact that the full-fledged confrontation envisioned by doomsayers hasn’t yet happened doesn’t mean the voices of peace have silenced the hawks. First, much of the rhetoric has been about warmongers bluffing to scare off the opponent without intending to take action. Despite the dominant immaturity that has defined their behavior, both Iran and Israel have shown restraint at times when the slightest missteps could have triggered a transnational conflict.
The Islamic Republic has been imprudent enough to repeatedly deny the Holocaust and invite notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, from David Duke to Robert Faurisson, to give talks in Tehran and meet senior politicians in intimate settings. Israel has been insensitive enough to browbeat former U.S. President Donald Trump into abandoning the 2015 nuclear deal that had momentarily alleviated the strain of decades of sanctions against Iranians.
No matter how ill-advised their postures have been, both Iran and Israel have shown the degree of circumspection needed to keep a bloody conflict at arm’s length. After all, even if disregard for the lives of civilians has been the common denominator of words expressed and actions taken by the stakeholders in the fracas, they have equally been concerned about their survival. A clear and mutual understanding of the other side’s track record of recklessness has functioned as an inhibitory mechanism staving off untamed violence.
Iran and Israel had long settled on an unspoken agreement to confine their mediated squabbling to a low-intensity altercation. Their respective motives vis-à-vis each other have predominantly been existential, and even their most soft-spoken politicians have expressed their desire for the obliteration of the other. But these ideologues, too, appreciated that unbridled warmongering would come at a price they might not be able to afford.
There are nations whose relations are built solely on perpetual enmity. But in the case of Iran and Israel, the underlying animus has been much deeper, and they’ve been committed, at least nominally, to eradicating each other.
Before Iran emerged as a camouflaged belligerent in the Gaza war, the two adversaries sought force projection in targeted killings, acts of sabotage, and diplomatic humiliations. These ploys marked the crescendo of their exchange of animosity.
Iran understood that Israel remained an undeclared nuclear state enjoying support from the world’s mightiest militaries. Israel understood that Iran’s proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Afghan Shia Fatemiyoun Brigade, were dotted in its neighborhood and, as non-state actors, would not adhere to the rules of the game.
Upping the Ante
In the wake of the Hamas attacks last year and Israel’s ongoing response, their mutual animus appears to have advanced to a new level. October 7 and what ensued dismantled the proverbial shock absorber that prevented the two states from aiming at each other directly; they now appear to have thrown caution to the wind.
On April 1, 2024, Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members, along with 10 others. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “punishment”.
“When they attacked our consulate, it is as if they’ve attacked our soil, and this is the world’s convention,” he said in a public address. On April 13, Iran launched 300 missiles and drones against Israeli territory for the first time. Most of the projectiles were intercepted before landing, but some inflicted damage. Israel hit back on April 19, destroying parts of an S-300 air defense system in the city of Isfahan.
Then, on July 30, shortly after the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, the state’s VIP guest Ismail Haniyeh, the top political secretary of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, was killed in a predawn airstrike at his guesthouse in Tehran. Israel never acknowledged responsibility, but Tehran inculpated Tel Aviv as the perpetrator.
In the cyclical, ongoing tug-of-war, Iran believes it must now take the turn to retaliate for the killing of a foreign official in its capital. This will serve both as a cover-up for a mortifying security breach, and as a much-needed face-saving gesture. Warnings of a “harsh revenge” have spawned a collective climate of unease and anxiety.
But from the taxi driver in the city of Rasht trying to secure a minimum wage to support his children’s school tuition to the widow in Karaj floundering to make ends meet with the mediocre disbursements from the state’s relief fund Komite Emdad, are Iranians willing to be caught in an onerous game of ghost in the graveyard while their allegiance to the ideology that has bred the ongoing clash is diminishing?
Attitudes toward an armed conflict with Israel, or any other party for that matter, are not homogeneous in a society where there’s no unanimity on any given question. The divisions stoked by the Islamic Republic have become so deep-seated that people even wrangle on such uncontroversial matters as whether to cheer on their national athletes clinching medals in the Olympic Games. It is understandable, then, that perceptions of how a war may affect their fortunes are incongruous.
Defying the Official Narrative
Debate on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has taken a more rebellious turn, however, courtesy of the relative freedoms occasioned by the growth of social media. Piecemeal deviations from the official narrative have resulted in academics and commentators still tolerated by the establishment speaking out about the epistemes of hostility against Israel. These discursive departures have not emerged overnight.
In the not-so-distant past, the very articulation of the idea of negotiations with the United States would have been construed by the Islamic Republic as sacrilegious. Countercurrents introduced as part of the reform movement, gaining momentum with the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997, have depleted the theocracy’s dogma. The proposition of the “heroic flexibility” neologism by the all-powerful supreme leader Khamenei made direct Iran–U.S. talks a possibility in 2013. The inking of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, was facilitated as a result.
The rare compromise faltered when Donald Trump walked away from it in May 2018. But the world had obtained new evidence that even the most stubborn autocracies couldn’t say no to good deals. The JCPOA wasn’t flawless. With its imperfections, it set a new precedent in overcoming diplomatic gridlocks. Above all, in the middle of what wasn’t short of a Cold War, armistice triumphed, even if briefly.
With Israel, the dynamics have always been more complicated. The expectation of the easing of hostilities, at least by the Islamic Republic, remains a non-sequitur. Iran has consciously reproduced the tensions and wouldn’t be open to diffusing them. Yet, the ruling elite’s intransigence doesn’t mean ordinary Iranians navigating the complex web of survival while wrestling with domestic repression and international sanctions ever had a penchant for military adventures.
At home, multiple cycles of uprisings against corruption and authoritarianism have been quashed in recent decades, the most glaring instance being a violent crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that exploded across Iran in September 2022. Externally, the international community has burdened Iranians with draconian economic sanctions that have scarcely weakened the ruling clerics but made daily life taxing for the citizens. Still, none of these hardships have made Iranians a warlike nation.
The architects of Iran’s political and religious establishment certainly have sympathizers who happily chant “death to Israel” in state-sanctioned demonstrations. Empirically, this is not the line of thinking the plurality of Iranians subscribe to. Those chants should be contrasted with the surreal sights of students on Iranian university campuses changing their walking routes so that they don’t trample on American and Israeli flags painted on the ground.
The status quo, notwithstanding, is one of turbulence and frenzy. Muscle-flexing between Tehran and Tel Aviv has almost never sounded more alarming. And the Iranian people’s alacrity for peace has never been more pronounced. Partisans of the ruling elite benefit from beating the drums of war, but excluding those fringe voices, it is unlikely that the average citizen will admit they’d like to see a new bout of conflict upending their lives.
A large segment of Iranian society cannot relate to the possibility of a full-scale war with Israel. Many believe that their country inserting itself in the battle for Palestinian emancipation is intrusive and uncalled-for. There is consensus among middle-class Iranians and the more educated youths that the establishment is better off if it extricates itself from the Arab–Israeli conflict.
These sentiments are echoed by Palestinians, who do not find Iran’s footprint particularly constructive. Princeton University’s Arab Barometer 2020 showed only 34% of Palestinian public supported improved economic relations with Iran. A survey conducted last December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found a mere 30% of West Bank residents and 41% of the people of the besieged Gaza Strip were “satisfied” with Iran’s role in the conflict that followed the October 7 attacks.
In the same vein, Iranians are resentful that their government has been expending the nation’s assets on an extraterritorial pursuit while the national economy is nosediving. Hyperinflation, unemployment, devaluation of the rial, and unrelenting international sanctions have worked in lockstep to render the economy nearly insolvent. Iranians would rather see their abysmal living conditions improve before the establishment hunkers down to “export the revolution”.
Public disavowal of the unpopular policy of anti-Israel warmongering is not solely driven by a fraught economic landscape. A nation that has lived through a war of expansion waged by the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein knows what it means to be gripped in the throes of another strife. Iranians recognize odds will be stacked against them, and are not convinced about the raison d’être for a confrontation with Israel.
Polls reflecting the attitudes of Iranians toward a potential flareup are sporadic, if not totally absent. Polling in the country has been one of those contraband ventures the government is deeply skeptical about. Every independent poll can potentially indicate the extent of the gap between the state and the people. Last October, an online survey conducted by the Shargh Daily revealed that 84% of the respondents objected to the enforcement of compulsory hijab. The newspaper’s managing director was immediately convicted by the judiciary of spreading falsehood. He issued an apology but defended the authenticity of the results.
The absence of yardsticks like polls not manipulated by the state makes it difficult to pass judgment about the Iranian people’s preference for or opposition to a face-off with Israel.
Experiential evidence isn’t scant, though, and it points to an overwhelming resistance to ominous outcomes such as a regional conflagration. Also, available data appear to corroborate the hypothesis that Iranians aren’t in favor of war. In a 2021 poll conducted by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran to gauge the Iranian people’s attitude to international relations, 65% of the respondents said they were opposed to the government-manufactured motto “Death to Israel”.
As part of parliamentary legislation, Iran’s Ministry of Culture has been conducting a periodic survey of the “values and attitudes of Iranians” since 2000. The last publicly-available survey was conducted in 2015, and results from the fourth edition, completed last year, remain confidential. Media organizations that have been able to access the partial results note that the most significant development, which the Raisi administration probably wished to withhold from the public, is the marked decline in the religiosity of Iranians.
The 2015 study showed a military invasion of the country was the second-most immediate concern in a list of 16 life-threatening events that could potentially affect respondents. Road accidents and unsafe driving habits were cited as the most serious concern. Participants were asked to assign a value of 1 to 10 to each factor, with 10 being the highest level of threat perception. War scored 7.708 on average.
There are enough problems Iranians grapple with that they probably aren’t prepared to countenance the misery a conflict of this caliber can bring about.
Voices of Aggression
An upshot of the heterogeneity of Iran’s complicated social collective, despite the leadership’s lack of tolerance for diversity, is the amplification of voices making a case for war. The suit-wearing progenitors of inimical relations with the world are unapologetically advocating for a morally outrageous position—one with a uniquely esoteric appeal. They are urging the Islamic Republic to “finish the job”, knowing that they won’t be paying the price.
On state TV and in Friday prayer sermons in different cities, Iranian hardliners have been restlessly espousing a Game of Thrones-style match-up against Israel. Earlier in March, a pundit flaunting his Ph.D. in international relations and the array of books he has published, stated in a live interview what many of his like-minded allies are whispering these days.
“Israel is currently playing the role of the Nazi regime [of Germany]. It means if it doesn’t receive a harsh response and is not confronted, the magnitude of war will expand,” Mehdi Khanalizadeh said.
“The missiles we are seeing, the beautiful footage we’re seeing, these drones, they all preclude the war and lay the groundwork for the realization of peace in West Asia,” he said in a show on Iran’s TV 3 after Tehran’s April 13 operation targeting Israeli territory.
Khanalizadeh is a former member of the Basij militia—the repressive volunteers group affiliated with the IRGC—and is being touted as one of the faces of the Islamic Republic’s well-traveled, English-speaking intelligentsia. He had taken part in the November 2011 storming of the British embassy in Tehran. That event underpinned the suspension of Tehran-London ties; Iran had to pay£1.3 million in damages to the British government before then-Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond agreed to the resumption of diplomatic relations in 2015.
Voices like Khanalizadeh’s are not scarce. Deluded by the assumption that swagger would deter an archvillain and forestall further provocations, they aspire to a much-awaited confrontation with Israel, which they think should happen sooner rather than later. This mindset is powered by a blend of their Shia nationalism and militant appetites.
Shortly after the Gaza war started last year, a cryptic group named the Popular Cyber Network of the Islamic Revolution, operating under the aegis of the IRGC, launched an online campaign titled “I am your opponent”. The function of the petition was to recruit volunteers to travel to the Occupied Territories to fight Israel.
The website currently shows 12.5 million people are prepared to join the battle. Still, the way the platform is designed has made it possible to cheat. Every user clicking the “expression of readiness” button adds the fighters’ count by one. An individual can be counted as five applicants if they use five different devices to click the same button.
An illustration printed on the occasion of the petition surpassing 10 million signatures reads, “Millions of Iranians love the annihilation of Israel.” This is, of course, factually misleading as there’s no gauge of the Iranians’ propensity for the upending of political order in Israel or the country ceasing to exist.
In January 2021, a group of lawmakers submitted a motion to the parliament meant to canonize a set of retaliatory measures in response to the January 3, 2020, killing of the IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. One of the provisions of the bill that eventually failed to muster support to become law demanded the government leverage its resources and pave the way for the dissolution of the State of Israel by 2041.
Ahmad Naqibzadeh, a professor of political science at the University of Tehran, had said that the parliamentary action was “dramatic” and “ludicrous”, and that it had embarrassed the Iranian people. Calling such proclamations the output of a populist parliament, he questioned in an interview with the Etemaad Daily, “How can the parliament obligate the administration to destroy another country that is a United Nations member state?”
In 2013, Seyed Abdollah Hosseini, head of the Islamic Center of Johannesburg run by the Iranian government, published a book titled “2022, Year of the Collapse of Israel”. The Shia seminarian had predicted using religious scripture and “mathematics” that by 2022, the State of Israel would disappear. The promised year lapsed, and the cleric is still in charge of the well-heeled institution, having faced no accountability.
In the symphony of pro-war protagonists, what’s more counterintuitive is the increasing tendency of diasporic Iranians to root for war. Some of the most hardcore anti-regime activists have joined the hawks in Tehran and Tel Aviv, encouraging the two rivals to bring their standoff from the sidelines to the center. Their motives may be different, but their conduct is equally startling.
Their calculations are premised on the conviction that Iran and Israel going to war will wreak so much havoc that as the next step, the theocracy in Tehran will intrinsically implode. They expect the path will be paved for a resurrection of the pre-1979 monarchy or at any rate a secular government that will replace the unpopular ayatollahs.
On social media and in programs aired by the London and Los Angeles-headquartered Persian-language broadcasters, tacit pleas for war are a common thread. As if a military expedition against a country of 85 million people will not involve any civilian casualties, the figureheads of the exiled opposition don’t believe they need to put on a false front of being worried about the safety of their siblings, grandparents, and friends back home.
Against this backdrop of confusion, the people of Iran are largely firm in their position. They believe there’s no logical justification for such an entanglement, and they don’t wish to be the collateral damage of quests for supremacy. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been a key, and often irresponsible, actor in many of the fault lines of the Middle East. But a full-fledged conflict, initiated by either side, is a no-go zone for a lot of Iranians—even if we don’t know the exact numbers.
Why Hamas Cannot Be Destroyed
Hamas members are “ants”, Yasser Arafat declared during a speech in Yemen in 1990. While the future Palestinian president invoked the aspersion to declare Fatah’s military strength over its newly established Islamist rival, it became clear over time that Fatah was not up to the fight. At each stage, Hamas has emerged scarred but triumphant from attempted defeat. Israel’s experience in managing the group has proven eerily similar.
Almost a year after Hamas’ attack on Israel, the deadliest single day for world Jewry since the Holocaust, the war in Gaza shows few signs of abating. The intervening months have been marked by widespread death, destruction, civilian displacement, hunger, and disease. And yet Israel’s key identified aim for its Gaza offensive—the complete elimination of Hamas—remains an elusive prospect. As Gaza lies in ruins, Hamas remains intractable, a deadly guerrilla force that is still in de facto control of large swaths of the Gaza Strip. Hamas’ ongoing resilience is a function of both bureaucratic and ideological factors that have historically proven to challenge Israeli counterterrorism efforts and defy easy solutions.
Leadership Decapitations and Targeted Killings: A Tried and Tested Tactic Leadership decapitations, also known as targeted killings, have featured prominently among Israel’s tried and tested counterterrorism tactics, particularly in times of heightened tensions. In his study of Israeli targeting killing trends, scholar Steven David found that during the Second Intifada (2000–2005), Israel embarked on such operations more than any time in its history to both deter and impede further terrorist attacks against Israelis. While in the First Intifada (1987–1993) the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was roughly 25 to one, well-armed Palestinian militant groups, making use of suicide bombers, had reduced that proportion to three to one during the Second Intifada. Israel responded to these increasingly lethal attacks through increased control of Palestinian movement, military incursions into Palestinian Authority (PA)-controlled areas, and a wave of targeted killings of Palestinian militants. According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, between September 2000 and 2006, Israeli security forces conducted at least 208 targeted killings.
As part of its post-2000 decapitation efforts, Israel targeted both Hamas rank-and-file members and its leadership. Most of these attacks involved the use of Apache helicopters or unmanned drones firing laser-guided missiles while others employed booby-traps and undercover “Arabized” agents to conduct close-range killings. In July 2002, Israel assassinated Salah Shahada, one of Hamas’ top military leaders, using 16 bombs that also killed 15 people, including seven children, and destroyed 12 homes. Two years later, in March and April 2004, Israel killed Hamas co-founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor, Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, in missilestrikes. An irate Hamas proclaimed that, with these deaths, Israel had “opened the gates of hell”, and promised to kill “hundreds of Zionists”.
Research into Hamas’ lethality and attack patterns following the deaths of Yassin and al-Rantisi suggests that, in some ways, its threats failed to materialize. In a 2006 Foreign Affairs piece, security analyst Daniel Byman wrote that the cumulative lethality of Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians declined—from 185 at the highest point in 2002 to 21 in 2005.
While this drop was at least in part the result of Israel’s targeted killings, as conceded by al-Rantisi prior to his death, there is little compelling evidence that decapitation efforts reduced the overall long-term terrorist threat to Israel. Even as individual attacks became less deadly, the number of Hamas attacks steadily increased as the Intifada progressed: there were 19 attacks in 2001, 34 in 2002, 46 in 2003, 202 in 2004, and 179 in 2005 (following the Sharm el-Sheikh Summit, a de facto armistice agreement which ended the uprising in February, though violence continued).
Public support for suicide attacks also continued to increase as the insurgency developed. Three years into the Intifada, a poll conducted by the reputable Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 74.5 percent of Palestinians supported suicide bombings.
Empirical studies probing the effectiveness of decapitation tactics provide some insight into Hamas’ resilience. Some scholars and proponents of targeted killing tactics argue that attacking a terrorist group’s leadership, particularly when hierarchical structures are in place, reduces its operational capability by eliminating skilled members and forcing a group to divert its time and resources to protect remaining leaders.
Decapitations are also intended to exploit the violent and clandestine nature of terrorist groups, making leadership succession challenging and deterring others from assuming power. The argument would hypothesize that a consistent policy of targeted assassinations against leaders of terrorist groups that recruit, organize, and carry out attacks against Israeli targets would raise the cost of violence and force existing or potential militants to abandon the struggle or change tactics.
Yet, decapitation strikes have rarely been the silver bullet against terrorist organizations, and irrespective of the normative and legalistic questions surrounding the practice, most extant literature rejects the notion that removing enemy leaders can, on its own, help achieve a state’s military and political goals. As analyst Patrick Johnston wrote in his 2012 study on counterinsurgency leadership targeting, “the scholarly opinion has been that high-value targeting is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.” Studies on the effectiveness of Israel’s counter-Hamas efforts have reached similar conclusions. Indeed, in a recent Foreign Affairs article, one of the field’s most acclaimed scholars, Audrey Kurth Cronin, noted that targeted killings conducted over the decades “have not affected the group’s long-term capabilities” or intentions. Its bureaucracy is partly the cause.
The Liability of Newness and Its Effect on Terrorist Bureaucracies Bureaucratized terrorist groups, like other bureaucratic institutions, tend to have a clear division of administrative responsibilities, roles, and functions, increasing organizational stability and efficiency. In the aftermath of a decapitation, terrorist groups are able to rely on these developed diversified functions and resource bases to withstand the sudden removal of key members or leaders. With age, bureaucracies also become larger, more complex, and durable.
Reflecting this trend, older terrorist organizations are more resilient to decapitation tactics compared to younger ones that have not yet developed a similar organizational capacity. This “liability of newness” means that the earlier leadership decapitation occurs in a terrorist group’s life cycle, the greater the effect it will have on the group’s existence. As terrorism experts Bryan Price and Jenna Jordan found, these effects diminish in the first ten years and, once a group crosses the 20-year threshold, are unlikely to have any impact on a group’s demise.
Now well into its fourth decade, Hamas is both a well-established and diversified bureaucratic institution. The existence of separate political, military, and social wings attests to the specific functions within the organization, each with its own roles, responsibilities, and hierarchies. Over the years, Hamas’ bureaucratic functioning and deep bench of leaders has allowed for ongoing political representation and, at the same time, has enabled the group to weather the loss of senior staff operationally.
The overlapping power structure between Hamas’ Gazan (internal) and diasporic (external) leadership, meanwhile, has created an opportunity to garner international political and moral support for the movement while also forming an indispensable organizational backup. Following the 2004 removal of al-Rantisi, for instance, Khaled Mashal, head of the Hamas political bureau, assumed effective control of the group from his exile in Damascus. From 2017 to 2024, Ismail Haniyeh was the diplomatic and political figurehead of the group, shuttling around the Middle East from his Qatari home base, including—in recent months—to engage in indirect ceasefire negotiations with Israel. Upon his assassination in Tehran in late July, likely by Israel, Haniyeh was swiftly succeeded by Gaza-based leader Yahya Sinwar, a decision reflecting both Hamas’ symbolic defiance and internal support for a known hardliner.
Legitimizing Terrorism: Winning Hearts and Minds Highly developed groups that enjoy widespread communal support have proven particularly difficult to displace. Indeed, one of the dilemmas that has faced Israel—and the Palestinian Authority—is that Hamas is deeply rooted in Palestinian society and, through its political–societal dimensions and services, daily life. The reasons for Hamas’ popularity, as Middle East policy analyst Khaled Hroub has argued, are not difficult to find. Hamas continues to be seen “as the voice of Palestinian dignity and the symbol of defense of Palestinian rights, a force that refuses to capitulate”.
Popular support is also essential to a terrorist group’s ability to maintain organizational strength, capacity, and legitimacy following leadership removals. Popular support enables a group to recruit, raise money, and rebuild critical resources, ensuring its continued ability to operate as a covert organization and plan future violent acts. Targeted killings can equally increase public support for the terrorists’ cause through, in counterterrorism speak, winning the “hearts and minds” of local—or international—communities. Civilian deaths resulting from the euphemistic “collateral damage” or miscalculated attacks can intensify such backlash effects, allowing terrorist groups to both enhance their ideological or political relevance and grow in popularity.
In the case of Hamas, Israeli counterterrorism efforts, including targeted killings, have increased the movement’s legitimacy. A botched 1997 attempt to assassinate Mashal in Jordan (likely in reprisal for a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that summer), went so awry that the ensuing public and official outcry forced the Israeli government to provide an immediate antidote to the administered poison and release dozens of Hamas prisoners. Among them was Sheikh Yassin.
According to Hroub, the 2004 assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and his successor, al-Rantisi, triggered renewed outrage and calls for vengeance, creating a paradox: even as the movement had been militarily weakened, its popularity reached new heights. Between 2000 and 2005, Palestinian support for Islamists, of which Hamas was the largest faction, rose by almost 20 percent. Aided by the perceived failure by the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization-backed Fatah to bring an end to the Israeli occupation, Hamas won 44.5 percent of the popular vote in the 2006 elections. Similar trends have unfolded after other spouts of violence and war; in a forthcoming book, analysts Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell explain that, “from its birth as the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, Hamas has operated on the working assumption: when Palestine burns, its support grows.”
Hamas Post-October 7 Eleven months after the start of Israel’s Swords of Iron operation, Hamas is, once again, enjoying a “rally round the flag” moment—even as it has endured significant military losses. From the early days of its Gaza offensive, top Israeli officials referred to Hamas members as “dead men walking” and they have sought to make good on this promise. Israel has publicly claimed to have dismantled 18 of Hamas’ 24 battalions, killed or incapacitated 14,000 Hamas fighters, and destroyed a significant portion of the group’s underground tunnel system. Since last October, Israel has reportedly also killed over 100 Hamas leaders, among them Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’ military wing in Gaza, and Haniyeh, chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau. Some of these strikes have led to high numbers of civilian casualties. An early July strike on a designated safe zone targeting Mohammad Deif, the leader of Hamas’ military wing, for instance, reportedly killed at least 90 people and injured 300.
Indeed, the attempted dismantlement of Hamas has come at a steep price to Palestinian civilians, a testament to the complexities of urban warfare, Hamas’ long-established strategy of embedding itself among the civilian population, and the reported loosening of Israeli constraints regarding expected civilian casualties in attacks on higher value targets—particularly in the early months of the war. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, as of mid-August, more than 40,000 Gazans have been killed since October, including at least 15,000 children. As of March, sixty percent of Palestinians reported having a family member killed while 80 percent report having a family member killed or injured. Daily life for those who have survived is no longer the same; almost the entirety of Gaza’s population—some 1.9 million people—have been displaced, many repeatedly, while access to basic necessities remains wholly insufficient.
At the same time there is little evidence that suggests that the group’s longer-term ability to threaten Israel has been significantly compromised. Hamas has, in recent months, relied both on guerilla tactics, including close-range ambushes on IDF troops, and more conventional cross-border rocket attacks on Israel. Renewed Israeli clearing operations, particularly in northern Gaza, meanwhile, suggest that Hamas fighters—along with other insurgent groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad—have been able to reconstitute amid security vacuums and even rebuild some governing authority.
A Defiant Hamas “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Hamas leader Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials working to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials. The inference here, according to the Wall Street Journal, was that Sinwar believed further Israeli hostilities and mounting Palestinian casualties—even those resulting from Hamas’ actions—played into his organization’s hands. Despite some claims to the contrary, polling conducted in the aftermath of October 7 supports his case, especially in the West Bank. Few Palestinians, it seems, blame Hamas for their suffering while the group’s commitment to violent resistance, including support for the October 7 attack, remains immensely popular.
A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that, as of late May, 63 percent of Palestinians blamed Israel for the current suffering of Gazans; only 8 percent placed the blame with Hamas. At the same time, almost all Palestinians (97 percent) believed Israel has carried out war crimes and atrocities during the current conflict; only 9 percent believed Hamas has committed such acts, a sentiment further exemplified by the high level of satisfaction with Hamas’ performance in the current war (64 percent in Gaza and 82 percent in the West Bank, the highest recorded numbers since December 2023). Most tellingly, a majority of Palestinians appear committed to Hamas’ future in the Gaza Strip and its theory of resistance. As of June, 56 percent of Gazans believed that armed struggle is necessary to create a Palestinian state. Hamas’ long-term position, as evidenced by these numbers, is far stronger than Israel would like. The extreme devastation created by the Israeli campaign, combined with perceptions of a clear culprit, has, as security analyst Robert A. Pape recently warned, filled Gaza with angry and vengeful young men, ripe for recruitment by Hamas.
While Israel’s post-October 7 response to Hamas is both different in kind and degree from the four other offensives that have taken place in the last 15 years, the latest war’s legacy may simply come to constitute another indefinite “grass-mowing exercise”. Indeed, while (attempted) targeted assassinations may be useful as a political tool to signal determination to punish those deemed responsible and placate an angry public, they will not bring about the end of Hamas or its ideological resonance. Hamas, in the words of analyst Adam Shatz, “feeds on despair produced by the occupation”. To starve it, then, Israel might try the opposite.
Politics of Apathy and All-Out War in the Post-Gaza New World
More than 11 months have passed since Hamas’ October 7 attack, which claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians. Since then, Israeli military and economic retaliation has subjected Gaza and its mostly civilian population to systematic obliteration and genocide. The flood of reports from human rights organizations, charity institutions, and relief agencies uncovering Israel’s policies to starve, maim, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians has shocked the world. Even United Nations relief infrastructures have not been spared in this conflict; warehouses have been targeted and relief workers and volunteers have been killed. As a result, a number of UN agencies are accusing Israel of violating international law and are continuing to demand an immediate ceasefire.
Meanwhile, unwavering American support for Israel and general Western complacency to compel it to accept a ceasefire have prompted states from the Global South, including Chile, Columbia, Nicaragua, and South Africa, to file accusations of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. At the same time, regional groups aligned with the “Axis of Resistance“, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and Yemen’s Houthis, have engaged militarily in various ways.
The short- and long-term consequences are evident through five closely linked ramifications of the relentless Israeli genocide. These include the erosion of the international rule-based order, regional de-democratization (encouraged by the West), increased regional and global radicalization, rising threat of conflict spillover, and the strengthening of Iranian ideology in the region.
The End of Rules-Based Order?
The question that emerges from the ongoing genocide is its impact on a global order which has been traditionally claimed to be founded on international law and humanitarian principles. There is growing skepticism about the continuity of such an order in light of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. The faltering of this system can be seen in other conflicts; Russia exploits the post-Gaza “unorder” to deflect criticism of its violations of the rules-based order regarding its invasion of Ukraine. The world has regressed to an era of “might makes right”.
The rupture in trust between the Global South and North has severely undermined this rules-based international order, especially regarding the shared values of human dignity, rights, and security. The schism has been evident since the beginning of the conflict: In November 2023, 120 countries in the UN voted for a humanitarian truce in Gaza, 14 voted against, and 45 abstained. In general, the lines of division were clear: The Global South supported the resolution; the Global North did not.
Israel’s violations of the order have continued to strain the international community; by targeting civilians, shelters, hospitals, places of worship, schools, and other non-military infrastructure, Israel’s military campaign is in violation of the Geneva Conventions and its additional protocols. In a firm reaction to these violations, as early as October 24, 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated, “Even war has rules” during a speech calling for a ceasefire and adherence to international law.
“We must demand that all parties uphold and respect their obligations under international humanitarian law; take constant care in the conduct of military operations to spare civilians; and respect and protect hospitals and respect the inviolability of UN facilities which today are sheltering more than 600,000 Palestinians.”
A week later, Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), warned “an entire population is being dehumanized” in Gaza. And yet, Israel’s military campaign appears relentless and unstoppable.
Despite numerous draft resolutions from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) calling for an end to Israel’s campaign, the United States repeatedly utilized its veto power to protect Israel’s continued assault on the Palestinian population in Gaza. Even when the United States finally abstained and allowed a ceasefire resolution to pass, Israel disregarded the UNSC order. Consequently, adherence to international law, UNSC resolutions, and ICJ rules, has waned. The outcome of this genocide remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: the rules-based order, originally conceived as a mechanism for conflict resolution, global security, and the protection of human rights, is not enough and requires reinforcement. This echoes what General Secretary of Amnesty International Agnes Callamard said when she argued that the post-Gaza era means the end of the rules-based order in its current form. This, in combination with the weakening presence of democratization in the region, poses serious human rights concerns.
De-democratization
While Western countries have long claimed to be advocates for democratization and political reform in the Middle East and North Africa, Israel’s war on Gaza and the ensuing regional instability have forced them to compromise and bolster governments which had been criticized for their sub-par human rights record. For a long time, economic assistance from the West to these countries was contingent on improving and protecting human rights. In light of the Israeli war on Gaza, discussions about fundamental rights and democracy have been sidelined while conversations about stability and security have taken precedence.
A number of countries in the region have benefited from this shift. Qatar, which had previously been criticized for its record of human rights violations (as seen in the controversy surrounding the World Cup 2022), is now being praised as an honest and peace-loving country working to stabilize the region. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has been embraced by the West as a friend and influential figure while Egypt has received financial assistance from the World Bank and a financial package of over €7 billion from the European Union.
However, this shift comes at a cost. It will widen the gap between the people and their governments, both in the West and in Arab states. In the MENA region, Europe has begun supporting what it has long fought against, the Chinese model, where the state controls economic development while suppressing political freedoms. This model prioritizes the ideas of safety, stability, and economic development at the expense of democracy, liberalism, and freedom of speech and participation. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt are among those countries that have been aiming to adopt and market this model. As the conflict persists, this trend appears to be solidifying as Western countries continue to ensure the political and economic security of MENA countries while intentionally sidelining concerns of human rights. This has contributed to de-democratization, erosion of the rule of law, and decreased political participation both at the individual and civil society levels.
Radicalization of Youth
A notable repercussion of the ongoing genocide is the radicalization of younger generations. This does not necessarily connote an embrace of Islamist ideologies or similar doctrines, but rather a rejection of peaceful solutions such as the two-state model to the Palestinian issue. This trend is not confined solely to Palestinian youth but also extends to Arab youth in the region and beyond.
These shifts are underscored by a 2024 survey conducted in 16 Arab countries by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS), which revealed that 59% of respondents firmly believed there was no prospect for peace with Israel, while 14% harbored serious doubts, and 9% had never believed in the possibility of peace with Israel to begin with.
As a result, any endeavors toward peace that do not address Israeli colonization and illegal settlements are bound to fail in deterring youth from radicalization, irrespective of the methods of struggle they may adopt. For the Palestinians, the armed struggle, non-violent resistance, and Sumud will continue. Beyond Palestine, intellectual and political resistance will continue to grow. These frustrations may develop into the use of violent methods and recruiting fodder for such groups as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.
These fears come into focus amid the turmoil engulfing countries neighboring Palestine and Israel, where social and economic pressures piggyback on the current Gaza War. For instance, Jordan is simmering with tension and any missteps by the government could yield undesirable outcomes. When protests erupted in October 2023, they were swiftly quelled out of fear that they might escalate into anti-government demonstrations. However, anger, frustration, and the relentless images of Gazans being killed during Ramadan, the holiest month for Muslims, prompted tens of thousands of Jordanian protesters to flood the streets of the capital Amman, where they gathered near the Israeli embassy for nights on end. Jordanian security forces beat protesters with batons, used tear gas on the crowds, and detained hundreds.
The chasm of distrust between the people, particularly the youth, and the governments and politicians of the region is widening significantly as the Gaza War continues with no peaceful resolution in sight, and is likely to fuel further radicalization. Despite diminished resources and influence, even marginal political actors (such as Sunni Islamic groups like the Islamic State or far-left ideological groups) at local, national, or regional levels may find it easier to mobilize, recruit, and establish a support base.
Long-term Regional Tensions and Wars
Given the status of the intricate dynamics of Israeli politics, including his ongoing corruption trials, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be heeding the advice of right-wing, ultranationalist members of his cabinet such as Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has called for the resettlement of the Gaza Strip. Despite international and domestic pressure to prioritize ceasefire negotiations over continuing the military campaign, Israel recently assassinated Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Beirut, increasing the likelihood of continued violent engagement with Lebanon. Shortly after, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran (Israel has not formally taken responsibility for the killing). More recently, Israel launched rockets into Lebanon claiming to be preventing an imminent Hezbollah attack; Lebanon responded with its own attack. The exchange did not trigger a war, however tensions remain high between the two. The assassination of Haniyeh and attacks in Lebanon clearly indicate that Netanyhu is prepared to escalate the conflict rather than resolve it, which could drag the United States into a military confrontation it does not want with Iran and its allies.
In response to Haniyeh’s assassination, Iran has stated that it will only refrain from severe retaliation against Israel if a ceasefire in Gaza is reached. In the face of this unprecedented risk of escalation, the United States has been pushing hard for the deal and sent Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Tel Aviv to assist in the talks. However, discussions ended with no deal, meaning an Iranian attack is still very possible. Additionally, even if a ceasefire is achieved, there is still a remaining risk that the Houthis, Hezbollah, or Iran may attack Israel in the future, especially if Israel resumes its attacks on Gaza after the hostages are freed.
Regarding Lebanon, although we do not know exactly how an all-out Israeli war with Hezbollah will develop, we do know that regional actors will be engaged. The “Known Unknowns” of the situation include how Iran would respond to an Israeli attack on Lebanon and Hezbollah. Iran considers Hezbollah a strategic asset, carefully cultivated over decades; allowing Israel to dismantle it is not an option. Consequently, Iran would likely activate its proxies from Yemen to Iraq at full capacity to support and relieve pressure on Hezbollah.
While Israel’s war on Gaza has already become regionalized (Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi groups have all launched attacks linked to achieving a complete ceasefire), the conflict could still expand further. An attack on Lebanon could open the Syrian front, leading to a direct confrontation between Iran and Israel as Iran deploys troops from its proxies in Syria (such as the Pakistani Zeynabiyoun Brigade and the Afghani Fatemiyoun Division).
A war on Lebanon or Iran may exert pressure and consequences on countries that have normalized relations with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan (as already seen with Jordan’s domestic unrest). If Israel were to employ the same level of force in Lebanon as it has in Gaza, including targeting civilian populations and infrastructure in similar genocidal tactics, it could lead to heightened tensions and strain diplomatic relations further.
While a complete severance of diplomatic ties may not currently be on the table, it may be forced if Gazans were to be ethnically cleansed toward Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Although such ethnic cleansing has not yet occurred, the potential for catastrophic consequences remains even in the absence of forced displacement out of Gaza.
In May, Israel seized control of the Rafah border crossing. In response, Egypt deployed armored personnel carriers mounted with combat gear to its border with Gaza, despite this being a violation of the Camp David peace agreement and its annexes. Tensions have continued to rise since then as Netanyahu recently announced Israel’s intention to take control of the Philadelphi Corridor (the buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza). Egypt responded by emphasizing that such an action would violate their peace agreement and that Egypt would defend its national security interests if Israel pursues such goals.
Increasingly strained relations with Jordan and Egypt indicate that even those countries which have normalized ties with Israel seem prepared for relations to rapidly deteriorate. As the region balances on the brink of war, Iran’s influence is filling the vacuum left by Arab leadership to end the Gaza war, and has consequently grown significantly.
The Strengthening of Iranian Islamic Ideology
With all the scenarios and developments outlined above, one conclusion is evident: the Middle East that existed before October 7 has been forever changed by the Gaza genocide. The apparent winner in this transformation is likely to be the Islamic ideology of the Iranian regime.
Should Hamas’s military become incapacitated and incapable of mounting any future military resistance against the ongoing genocide, an already angry, frustrated, and radicalized generation will be emboldened to rally behind the long-standing calls of Iran, Palestinian resistance movements, and other radical groups for a military struggle against Israel.
Such sentiments have long been a counterpoint and recently gained further traction to the peace process agenda. In January, a survey by the ACRPS of 16 Arab countries found that 63% of the Arab population expressed support for Hamas, 92% expressed that the Palestinian question is a critical issue for all Arabs, and 89% rejected recognition of Israel. Compared to Turkey, China, and Russia, Iran received the most support, with 48% of the Arab population considering it positively.
Conversely, if Hamas continues to maintain control over the Gaza Strip and emerges from the current conflict with its political and minimal military capacity intact, Iran—as its principal backer—will also claim a victory of sorts. In this scenario, Hamas will continue to govern, while Israel retains control of Gaza’s entrances and exits, transforming the Strip into a concentration camp and creating a calculated humanitarian catastrophe. Iran’s call to resist Israel’s control of Palestine will still remain a popular sentiment.
A national unity government and return of the Palestinian Authority is not feasible at this stage since Fatah and President Mahmoud Abbas are presenting barriers to reconciliation. Abbas and Fatah require that Hamas ratify all the agreements the PLO has previously made with Israel, including the Oslo Accords, which Hamas has rejected.
The most recent deal signed in China by Fatah and Hamas (promising to end their division) has yet to materialize any tangible outcomes, suggesting it is merely another symbolic agreement and the two groups will remain separate. This outcome, particularly the isolation of Hamas, would solidify Iran’s relationship with the group, allowing it to demonstrate its role as a steadfast ally that never abandons its partners.
While Tehran has supported Hamas as a response to the U.S. (and Arab allies) blacklisting and cash-strapping of the organization in 2003, Hamas is not a proxy of Iran in the literal sense but retains a degree of political independence. While Hamas’ military wing has the closest and most open relationship with Tehran, Iran’s influence is minimal at best. It appears that Iran is actively working to reshape the region, based on the ongoing coordination, meetings, and messages exchanged with the various sections of the Axis of Resistance, including the Palestinian forces (Hamas and the Islamic Jihad), Hezbollah, Iraqi militant groups, the Houthis. This influence may be extending further, as reports of the Houthis connecting with Al Shabab groups in Somalia may indicate Iran is angling for a new foothold in Africa.
While Israel’s war on Gaza is ongoing and the outcome is far from being determined, it is clear that the conflict has caused major disruptions to the status quo by destabilizing regional powers and allowing Iran to grow its influence. The United States and its partners in the region are working feverishly to head off a war with Iran and/or its proxies that grows more likely with Netanyahu’s intransigence in the face of global efforts for a ceasefire. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert directly blames Netanyahu for the prolonged conflict and has accused him of wanting anall-out war.
Washington seems to be running out of ideas to prevent a widening conflict, instead rehashing an old script that has proven to be a set of temporary measures for new and worsening realities in the past 11 months. Regardless of when and how the war ends, it is evident that both local and international players are engaging a region that has been irrevocably changed. With domestic pressures against Netanyahu increasing and a U.S. presidential election just two months away, time is running out to stave off a devastating turn in the Middle East.
Summer 2024
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Gaza war, a ceasefire remains elusive. Not only does the conflict rage on and continue to claim a horrific toll on the lives of innocent Palestinians, but the spill-over effects of the war threaten to ignite an all-out regional confrontation. A box of matches has been spilled beneath the region’s many powder kegs.
This is a grim editorial note, written against the backdrop of what seems to be a region-wide breakdown. Escalation continues unabated between Israel and Iranian-backed proxies across the region. An eruption of violence looms ever closer in the occupied West Bank. Perhaps most significantly for the region’s stability, Israel and Iran have crossed the threshold from their decades-long shadow war to direct armed confrontation in the form ofreciprocal aerial attacks.
Of these numerous conflict fronts, the one between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah is the most explosive, with the latter continuing tolaunch regular drone and rocket attacks at military targets in retaliation for Israel’sassassination of Fuad Shukr in July. Israel is nowthreatening a wide-scale military confrontation to break the dynamic of tit-for-tat retaliation, pushing Hezbollah forces away from the Israel-Lebanon border and allowing the return of Israeli citizens displaced from the north since October 7. Should these ominous trends go unchecked, the situation could devolve into a third Israel-Lebanon war, following previous rounds of conflict in 1982 and 2006.
As casualties mount in all of these conflict fronts, each side claims that they do not want an all-out war, which seems to have to deescelated tensions so far. Despite this rhetoric, however, this ongoing limited exchange of fire is an unwieldy and risky lose-lose venture.
This issue of the Cairo Review looks at how tensions have been steadily rising and new forces drawn into the conflict, such as Yemen’s Houthis and Iraqi militia groups—both backed by Iran—threatening to widen the Gaza War into a deadly regional settling of scores.
Sovereign states must comply with international law, a pillar of the global order which seems to have been bombed into irrelevance and dying a slow death in the Gaza rubble. Political scientist Abdalhadi Alijla examines how the erosion of the international rule-based order, regional de-democratization (encouraged by the West), increased regional and global radicalization, rising threat of conflict spill-over, and the strengthening of Iranian ideology in the region paint an alarming future for a crisis-prone region.
Middle East analyst Grace Wermenbol looks at why Israel’s attempts to wipe Hamas off the map have failed so far. In the wake of the killing of Haniyeh in Tehran, she writes that decapitation counter-terrorism strategies have rarely, if ever, succeeded. She explains how, despite significant losses, Hamas remains a formidable actor in Gaza.
Hamas’ chief backer, Iran, surfaces again and again in fiery rhetoric from American and Israeli leaders, but as journalist and media researcher Koroush Zibiari finds, the average Iranian is hoping to avoid a widened war. In fact, he writes, many Iranians believe there’s no logical justification for such an entanglement and they don’t wish to be the collateral damage of Tehran’s or Tel Aviv’s quests for regional supremacy.
This issue also comes on the heels of the 31st Anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords which took the first steps toward ultimately establishing Palestinian statehood. More than thirty years later, a Palestinian state is still out of reach. American University in Cairo Professor of Political Science Sean Lee explains that “even proponents of the two-state solution in the West do not envision a truly sovereign or secure Palestine; instead, these advocates promote a state subjected to Israeli security and political priorities”.
Cairo Review Co-Managing Editors,
Karim Haggag
Firas Al-Atraqchi
Less Than a State
One irony of the Hamas-led attack on October 7, and the mass violence meted out by Israel that has followed, is the resurrection in official circles of what is commonly referred to as a “two-state solution”. The majority of the Global South and formerly communist countries have already recognized Palestine as an independent state. Several European holdouts, such as Spain, Norway, and Ireland, have finally joined most of the rest of the world in recognizing a Palestinian state, while others like the United States, France, and the United Kingdom continue to drag their feet. Yet, even those proponents of the two-state solution in the West do not envision a truly sovereign or secure Palestine; instead, these advocates promote a state subjected to Israeli security and political priorities.
In her first remarks on the region since replacing U.S. President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate in the upcoming elections, Vice-President Kamala Harris declared that she remains “committed to a path forward that can lead to a two-state solution”, emphasizing that, “a two-state solution is the only path that ensures Israel remains a secure, Jewish, and democratic state, and one that ensures that Palestinians can finally realize the freedom, security, and prosperity that they deserve.”
There has been a similar movement in perceptions of the feasibility of a two-state solution among academics who had previously pronounced it dead. In their survey of scholars of the region in the spring of 2023, Shibley Telhami and Marc Lynch reported that 63 percent of academics thought the goal of a “sovereign state of Palestine established within the territories that Israel occupied in the 1967 war” was “no longer possible”. By 2024, however, this number fell to 45 percent, with a drastic increase—from 2 percent to 43 percent—in respondents confident that such a goal was “possible, but improbable in the next ten years”.
This comes despite movement toward a popular academic consensus that the situation between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including the continued occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the constant construction of illegal settlements, constitutes a “one-state reality akin to Apartheid”. This state of affairs is commonly referred to as a “one-state reality”, where there has been a single sovereign state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea since 1967, when Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, along with Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights.
The reasons cited for the difficulty (or impossibility) of a future two-state solution in a one-state reality that has lasted over half a century have been well rehearsed. They include the presence of some 620,000 well-entrenched Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel’s wholesale destruction of the Gaza Strip and genocidal mass violence against Palestinians there, and the relegation of roughly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel to the permanent status of second-class citizens.
One reason that is often overlooked, however, is that the so-called “two-state solution” actually only involves one sovereign state: Israel. In other words, the Palestinian state that has been on offer has never been conceived of as sovereign by Israel or the United States.Without actual sovereignty, there can be no two-state solution.
The Issue of Statehood
The Palestinian position, as represented by the Palestinian National Congress (PNC) of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), has transitioned from a strategy of “total liberation”—embodied in the PLO’s much-cited charters of 1964 and 1968—to a position aiming for a single, democratic, and secular state in historic Palestine in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to the eventual acceptance in the 1990s of a Palestinian rump state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
Such a state looked like it might be on the horizon in 1976 when then-newly elected U.S. President Jimmy Carter answered a question about what his administration could do to foster peace in the Middle East by stating that there must be “a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years”. But a Palestinian state, much less a sovereign one, was never really on the table. Through a confluence of U.S. domestic pressures, Israeli and American insistence on excluding the PLO from regional negotiations, dogged Israeli determination to settle Palestinian territories, and Egyptian concessions that led to a separate peace, the creation of a Palestinian state was prevented under Carter’s administration.
Instead, Israel’s then right-wing Prime Minister Menachim Begin produced a proposal for Palestinian “autonomy”—which he also referred to as “home rule” or “self-rule” for “the Palestinian Arabs”,—intended to “maintain full Israeli control” over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This plan (and the assumptions that underpin it) have served, whether explicitly or implicitly, as the basis for Israeli and American conceptions of Palestinian self-determination from the Camp David Accords through today. It is not just Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has opposed a Palestinian state, other Israeli politicians like opposition leader Benny Gantz and assassinated prime minister Yitzak Rabin have as well. The latter—who has been mythologized by many—explicitly and publicly opposed a Palestinian state in a 1995 speech to the Knesset presenting the Oslo Accords shortly before his assassination by a right-wing Israeli law student:
We view the permanent solution in the framework of the State of Israel which will include most of the area of the Land of Israel as it was under the rule of the British Mandate, and alongside it a Palestinian entity which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.
This “entity which is less than a state” is typically what is meant by the second “state” in a two-state solution. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” serves as a clear example of this concept, laying out what it called a “realistic two-state solution”:
A realistic solution would give the Palestinians all the power to govern themselves but not the powers to threaten Israel. This necessarily entails the limitations of certain sovereign powers in the Palestinian areas (henceforth referred to as the “Palestinian State”) such as maintenance of Israeli security responsibility and Israeli control of the airspace west of the Jordan River.
Although certainly unintentional, the Trump administration’s quotation marks around “Palestinian State” are appropriate, since such an entity would be a state only in name. A pseudo-state is exactly what the Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi warned about when he argued for a Palestinian state in the late 1970s. The cornerstone of such a state, he wrote, must be Palestinian sovereignty: “Not half-sovereignty, or quasi-sovereignty or ersatz sovereignty. But a sovereign, independent Palestinian state.” He warned against the sort of Palestinian “state” that has preoccupied advocates of the peace process for the past four decades, describing it as “an Israeli mosaic of Indian reserves and hen-runs, crisscrossed by mechanized patrols and police dogs and under surveillance by searchlights, watchtowers, and armed archaeologists”. It is impossible to see the map proposed by the latest iteration of the two-state solution without recognizing how accurate Khalidi’s description proved to be.
Figure 1: Trump Administration’s Vision for Peace Conceptual Map for the State of Israel, Source
For all its faults, the Trump administration’s plan is at least clear about U.S. and Israeli priorities in Israel/Palestine. Such concerns, which systematically prioritize Israeli conceptions of security over Palestinian sovereignty, have been reproduced time and again in American conceptions of Palestinian self-determination. One recent example includes State Department officials in the Biden administration reportedly looking for a model of Palestinian statehood in the “compacts of free association”, the structure of non-sovereign statehood for U.S. colonial possessions like the Federated State of Micronesia and Palau.
Such hierarchical arrangements are not unique to the U.S. and Israel, of course. Rather than using Micronesia and Palau as a model, U.S. State Department officials could look to Israel’s erstwhile ally, South Africa. Besides the increasinglynumerousdescriptions of Israel’s 57 years of occupation of the West Bank as apartheid, it is worth comparing Israeli schemes of managing Palestinian self-determination with the Bantustan program laid out in 1959 by M.D.C. de Wet Nel, South Africa’s minister of Bantu Administration and Development. Fearful that the dominant white minority would eventually be “dominated by the political power of the Bantu population”, he saw the creation of non-sovereign Bantustans—some were formally independent and some were autonomous, but all were actually controlled by Pretoria—as a way of managing the rising “demand for self-determination on the part of the non-White nations” of South Africa. Almost all of the Bantustans were non-contiguous inland archipelagos that bear a striking resemblance to the remnants of Palestine in the Trump administration’s Vision for Peace.
Managing the Palestinian right to self-determination while denying Palestinian sovereignty is a goal shared by both proponents of permanent subjugation and Jewish supremacy through so-called Palestinian autonomy (like Menachim Begin and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman) as well as proponents of a demilitarized, non-sovereign Palestinian state (like Dennis Ross and the late Martin Indyk). The various plans for either Palestinian autonomy or ersatz statehood differ only in the degree to which Palestinian sovereignty is subjugated to Israeli security concerns. A recent debate on the two-state solution hosted by the U.S.-based think tank the Council on Foreign Relations is instructive on this point. While disagreeing on whether or not Palestinians could ever deserve a state in the first place, former director of Policy Planning Staff of the United States Dennis Ross and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Elliot Abrams both agree that any Palestinian state would be demilitarized and thus non-sovereign. Likewise, the Clinton parameters from 2000 propose a “non-militarized state” as a compromise between the Israeli demand that Palestine be defined as a “demilitarized state” and the Palestinian position of “a state with limited arms”.
Security and Sovereignty
Why is the question of sovereignty so important in Palestine? It matters because the Palestinian state, once established, would need a guarantee of security, which it clearly cannot get from Israel. The current mass violence perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel only reinforces the longstandingverity that Israel cannot be trusted to ensure Palestinian security. Besides today’s genocide in Gaza and the current settler violence that Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem describes as “pogroms” aimed at further ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their West Bank villages, there is a throughline of Israeli violence against Palestinians that goes from the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 through the Rafah massacre in 1956 up to the seemingly never ending death and destruction we are now witnessing. Israeli mass violence in Gaza has become so common over the last two decades that it is referred to as “mowing the lawn”.
A lack of Palestinian sovereignty, whether under the auspices of “home rule” beneath full Israeli sovereignty or within a Palestinian “state-minus” (as proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu and American peace processors), would require Palestinians to be at the mercy of Israel’s military might. This is the same military that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza since last fall while perpetrating “gang sexual violence and assault” against detained Palestinians in what B’Tselem has described as a “network of torture camps”. It is the same self-described “most moral army in the world” that defends settlers carrying out pogroms in the West Bank, whose soldiers film themselves mocking killed or displaced Palestinian women by dressing in their underwear, and force Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields in military operations. Who could reasonably expect any rational Palestinian to rely on the Israeli military for their security?
Even in scenarios that involve security guarantees by international forces, incidents like the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps of Beirut have proven such security guarantees to be untrustworthy. The unreliability of the international community has been criticized by scholars of political violence who have begun to ask why the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect is never exercised to protect Palestinians from Israeli violence. Those who dispute this assessment might ask themselves if they would ever turn to the Israeli state to demilitarize and rely on Palestinians for their security.
The Biden-Harris administration has repeatedly said that it is “committed to promoting equal measures of freedom, justice, security, and prosperity for Israelis and Palestinians alike”. Washington’s insistence on providing a seemingly unconditional and unending supply of weapons and munitions to Israel that are used to destroy Gaza and further the settlement enterprise in the West Bank should definitely put paid to that claim. So far, such rhetoric has remained a diplomatic talking point rather than an actual goal. Despite that, a real commitment to Palestinian security that is not subjugated to Israeli interests should be a guiding principle in any honest attempt to broker a lasting peace in Israel/Palestine.
A Future Past
Plans to partition Palestine have always had an end goal of manufacturing and maintaining an overwhelming Jewish majority as a means of establishing “a national home for the Jewish people”, as laid out in the Balfour declaration and later codified in the British Mandate for Palestine. This was true in the United Nations plan for partition in 1947, and it remains true for conceptions of a so-called two-state solution described by many Americans, Europeans, and Israelis as the only way to ensure Israel remains a “Jewish and democratic state”. Such a goal has long been opposed by Palestinians who understood the Zionist project as an attempt at “turning a majority into a minority in its own country” and “withholding self-government until the Zionists are in the majority and able to profit by it”, Albert Hourani explained on the eve of partition in his testimony to the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry in 1946. In that same testimony, Hourani also noted with pessimistic foresight shortly before the Nakba that despite the higher birth rates of the Arab demographic majority in Palestine, “there are more ways than one of obtaining a majority”.
Zionist leaders rejected the idea of a pluralistic Palestine as proposed by thinkers like Hourani and George Antonius that would guarantee equal rights to Jews, Muslims, and Christians, instead insisting on exclusively Jewish territorial sovereignty at the expense of the majority, or what the Mandate referred to as the “non-Jewish” population of Palestine. Partition and massive Jewish immigration were meant to cement a Jewish majority in the new state, which was approved by 33 of the then-57 UN member states in the General Assembly in 1947. The ensuing war and ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians both expanded Israel’s territory and increased the homogeneity of its population. In 1967, the Israeli state brought to an end the twenty-year interregnum of partition, once again creating a single state, but one that has enshrined exclusive Israeli sovereignty between the river and the sea, as set out in the original Likud platform.
In a move seemingly calculated to embarrass the United States on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit to the White House in July, the Israeli Knesset voted overwhelmingly (68-9) to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state of any kind. Even a non-sovereign Palestinian “state-minus” is apparently a bridge too far for Israel. For the Israelis and their international backers, it seems that historian Walid Khalidi was right that a sovereign Palestinian state that could guarantee Palestinians’ security and “terminate their dependence on the mercy, charity, or tolerance of other parties” remains “unthinkable”. Even Israel’s total rejection of a Palestinian state has not deterred international diplomats from pretending that the peace process still exists, which in practice has served only to give diplomatic cover for Israeli apartheid in the decades since the Oslo Accords. Many Israelis and Americans thought that this status quo, bolstered by normalization with regional autocracies, could continue indefinitely. If the constant Israeli violence against Palestinians did not convince these decision-makers that the status quo is not sustainable, the surprise attack from Gaza by Hamas and its allies surely did. The question, then, becomes whether the actually existing single state between the river and the sea can democratize, giving equal rights to the more than half of the population who are not Jewish.
Prioritizing Palestinian Self-Determination is Long Overdue
Last June’s United Nations Security Council Resolution 2735 brought hope that Israel’s assault on Gaza would come to an end, and the beginning of a path to peace paved. Over a month later, that hope remains unrealized, with the Palestinian death toll surpassing 39,000 directly killed by Israel since October 7. The resolution, put forward by the United States, after it had vetoed three others which had also called for a ceasefire, was groundbreaking in that it was the first coming out of the Security Council to call for an “immediate, full, and complete ceasefire”. It also contained a reflection of the position of the international community on solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It reiterated
its unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-State solution where two democratic States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders, consistent with international law and relevant UN resolutions, and in this regard stresse[d] the importance of unifying the Gaza Strip with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.
But this position is reflective of the international community’s problematic approach toward ‘solving the conflict’. United Nations experts have declared what is happening in Gaza as genocide, and many international law scholarsbelieve that the International Court of Justice will eventually find that the legal standard for genocidal intent exists in South Africa v. Israel.
While the resolution does call for a ceasefire, it fails to recognize the well-known issues of power asymmetry during negotiations and Israel’s longstanding policy of imposing faits accomplis, which have been thoroughly demonstrated by the failures of the Oslo Accords. However, there is a more fundamental issue pertaining to today’s two-state solution: denying the Palestinian people their right to self-determination.
By reiterating its commitment to the two-state solution under Palestinian Authority (PA) rule, even if “revitalized”, the international community places the proverbial cart before the horse; it seeks to pursue bilateral negotiations leading to an eventual political settlement with the promise of Palestinian statehood, and through a Palestinian state achieve self-determination for (a portion of) its people.
This is, to differing degrees, a common thread across all solutions discussed today in policy circles, whether two-state, one-state, or something else. It is characterized by a degree of dismissal of Palestinian agency and their rights under international law.
The Framework of Self-Determination
Self-determination is enshrined as a principle in the United Nations Charter in Article 1(2) which states that one of the purposes of the UN is to “develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples”.
It was further refined as a legal norm with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both adopted in 1966 and entered into force in 1976. Both treaties stated that “[a]ll peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.”
In other words, self-determination is the right of a people to determine their own pursuits, namely their political status, or as the Princeton Encyclopedia of Self-Determination put it: “a community’s right to choose its political destiny”.
It has been considered an enshrined right in international law for a while. For instance, International law scholar Hurst Hannum concluded in 1993 that “self-determination has undoubtedly attained the status of a ‘right’ in international law”. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) described it as “one of the essential principles of contemporary international law” in 1995. And while debates continue to this day regarding the nature of the concept, what constitutes a ‘people’, and who is entitled to ‘external’ as opposed to ‘internal’ self-determination, the longstanding international consensus is that Palestinians are a people with a right to self-determination.
However, the outcome of a two-state solution, formulated by this same consensus and informed by prevailing political realities, must not be assumed by the international community to be the natural, automatic, or indeed lawful route to pursue.
As the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations put it,
The establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State, or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people.
The Solution Delusion
The practicalshortcomings of the two-state solution have been discussed extensively. Despite this, the international community still insists on pursuing it, with Resolution 2735 as its latest expression of such pursuit. However, new life may have been breathed into it by the ICJ’s recent advisory’s opinion, ‘Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem’. The advisory opinion concluded that Israel must evacuate its unlawful settlers from the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). Nevertheless, what policymakers have only partially recognized is that October 7 and Israel’s genocidal response represents a paradigm shift that is as much structural and systematic as it is current; there is a justified recognition of the PA as a failed entity in need of significant revamp, but missing is the more important recognition of the need for an assessment by the Palestinian people regarding whether or not this entity’s existence is desired, and how they wish to proceed. The PA, of course, is the representation and champion of the two-state solution in the Palestinian sphere.
The notion that Palestinians are not represented by the PA, and that Palestinian self-determination is actively denied, is supported by several facts. First of all, the ICJ concluded in its advisory opinion that Israel’s actions have led to “prolonged deprivation of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination”. Second, there has neither been a legislative nor a presidential election in the oPt in nearly twenty years. Third, the majority of the Palestinian population in the oPt was not old enough to vote, and many not even born, when the last elections took place in 2005 and 2006. Fourth, the elections did not represent the will of the totality of the Palestinian people as UNRWA-registered refugees in neighboring countries, other Palestinians in the diaspora, and Palestinian citizens of Israel did not vote. Related to this is the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), long seen as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, has since Oslo been increasingly marginalized by the Fatah-dominated PA. Fifth, the will of the people in the oPt expressed through the 2006 legislative elections was quickly undermined as governance of the oPt was split between Hamas and Fatah. Sixth, polling shows most Palestinians are against a two-state solution. Seventh, and most importantly, the sheer ferocity and destruction being inflicted by Israel on the people of Gaza, and the distress and trauma Palestinians outside of Gaza are suffering, offers more than enough of a strategic and humanitarian paradigm shift to invoke the need to reaffirm Palestinian collective will regarding their future by exercising their right to self-determination.
Unfortunately, all ‘day after’ analyses, including this one, look to the future at the same time that Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from constant attacks, bombardment, displacement, massive destruction of infrastructure, and starvation, and have been for over nine months. Palestinians in the West Bank are facing an existential crisis of their own, with settler and army violence mounting against them since October 7, and the largest land seizures since Oslo taking place in 2024.
This is emblematic of the attitudes of various policy circles around the world, looking at the plight of Palestinians through the lens of national interest or regional peace and stability—both important lenses—while neglecting law, rights, and justice. Policymakers and analysts often look to find a solution to an ever-worsening landscape of conflict and destruction but fail to raise the question of how such solutions would be received by a scattered, traumatized, and deeply wounded Palestinian polity when the fundamental economic, demographic, and topographic changes inflicted by Israel’s campaigns on Gaza and the West Bank would need decades to address. The already unacceptable status quo of dysfunctional bantustans is being pulled from under them and yet the Palestinian people are expected to positively and passively receive a solution in which they had no role in shaping. This is not only impractical policymaking, it is delusional and disrespects Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
Even the one-state solution—wherein Muslims, Christians, and Jews live within one state, which is more noticeably advocated for in Palestinian policy circles compared to the two-state solution—faces the avant-horse issue and subsequent challenges as a result. The most basic hurdle is deciding whether this pursued state should be binational or secular democratic. Edward Said called for pursuing a binational state back in the ‘90s, while others see a traditional democratic model with equal rights and responsibilities as the best option. Each has its advantages and drawbacks. These policymaking challenges become oversized and longstanding when the underlying structures of Palestinian decisionmaking hinder rather than uphold the expression of the collective Palestinian will.
By its very nature, pursuing the one-state solution would require a collective decision by the Palestinian polity because it would be a change of course from the official PA-PLO position of a two-state solution. It would also effectively dismantle or reorient existing PA institutions created under Oslo. To do so requires either unlikely unilateral action by the Fatah-controlled PA to radically change itself and its dominance over the PLO, or some sort of referendum, or similar political process.
Rights Before Politics
However, this political process must seek to answer more fundamental questions before tackling the question of one state or two. Otherwise, the structural issues that were skirted by Oslo regarding comprehensive Palestinian representation and decisionmaking mechanisms, refugee return, and modes of resistance to Israeli violations of existing agreements and international law linger. Pertinent, especially to Palestinian citizens of Israel, is the question of who exactly (oPt residents, UNRWA refugees, other diaspora, Palestinian citizens of Israel) is part of the Palestinian polity and therefore has a right to participate in shaping the political direction of the Palestinian people. Another is how the different segments of the people will be represented and exercise their rights in the polity. Further questions regarding institutions, representation, voting mechanisms, fora for debate and discussion, and the PLO’s role in all of this naturally arise.
Therefore, a vote cannot simply come in the context of some sort of one-off referendum or election held by the PA or an international actor after Gaza has been flattened; it must be a genuine and constant process of the exercise of collective political will to determine how the Palestinians as a people wish to proceed at any given historical moment amid a constantly changing array of variables, values, and priorities. It is the only way to ensure a sustainable and representative Palestinian political existence. It also upholds the notion that the exercise of self-determination is a legal right not contingent on the existence or political recognition of a state. This is one of the three challenges Palestinian political scientist Leila Farsakh pointed out in 2011 regarding the one-state solution: “re-situating the Palestinian struggle for self-determination within a ‘rights’ paradigm… [shifting] political goals from establishing an independent Palestinian state toward the achievement of equal political rights within a single polity.”
In this regard, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace took the first genuine step toward conceptualizing policy options for a rights-based approach in a 2021 paper. According to its authors, this approach would “prioritize protecting the rights and human security of Palestinians and Israelis over maintaining a peace process and attempting short-term fixes”. They argue that it would contribute to changing the political calculations of Palestinians and Israelis. “Essentially, a rights-based approach necessitates accountability for violations of people’s rights and of international law.” And though safeguarding the right to self-determination is not explicitly discussed, it is implied and expected.
A rights-based, self-determination–centered approach strengthens the one-state process by refocusing the Palestinian political movement in a way that is uncontestable except from the inside. In fact, it strengthens any approach taken to ‘solving the conflict’ as it builds a representative Palestinian-driven foundation for decisionmaking that has been absent for at least twenty years. It also sets up potential negotiations on more equal footing, as it implies that the elements constituting free exercise of self-determination must be made present. One may look to the ICJ’s advisory opinion for examples: territorial continuity, protection from dispersal and undermining the population’s integrity as a people, permanent sovereignty over natural resources, and the right of a people to freely determine its political status. The latter element, the focus of this analysis, cannot be achieved in isolation from the constituent manifestations of self-determination. Only when the Palestinians have these minimum conditions could they be said to have the right to exercise their self-determination and a foundation for decisionmaking.
The point is that the path taken is theirs to decide and we, in policy circles and in the international community, should work to facilitate the decisionmaking process without attempting to influence the outcome.
Such a seemingly basic notion appears quite radical upon deeper inquiry, as it requires states to support a process without expecting any strategic benefit in return or developing ulterior motives along the way—something the United States was not able to do in the oPt in 2006 (or Libya in 2011 for that matter). In other words, there is a need to act altruistically and not simply appear to do so under the conditions of the status quo.
All solutions put forward by analysts necessitate democracy in some shape or form. However, it is the ontological rationale of democracy in the context of such solutions that creates tensions; one cannot be expected to fully respect the will of the people while attempting to control it. By boxing Palestinians in the framework and structures of a particular outcome and having democracy as its fulfillment—rather than the vehicle through which the decision made to pursue the outcome is made—designers of such a situation manufacture a state of tension that can only be described as performative democracy. It is a democracy where the people are only allowed to exercise their collective will on certain issues that are neither structural nor fundamental, as those have already been decided for them. In other words, democracy sans self-determination.
Accordingly, an ontology that looks to legality before politics is the only way to create a situation where the tensions are tackled head on. This would mean facilitating a process through which Palestinians are able to decide on how they wish to approach the issues of occupation, statehood, oppression, and Palestinian rights. Rather than the international community deciding on their behalf based on prevailing political realities, the Palestinians will take into account such realities, including entrenched injustices and the extremism of the Israeli government, when expressing their collective will. It would serve to provide a missing, real clarity in the regional arena as well as in any future negotiations. Even if the positions between the Palestinians and the Israelis prove to be more distant than the internationally-imposed solution, they are at least the real positions that—as history has proven—would come to appear in any case as long as violence and oppression are still present and injustice left unaddressed. Moreover, in the context of the peace process, it gives the Israelis a Palestinian negotiating partner that is legitimate and can deliver.
This does not mean that we should abandon the Palestinians, on the contrary. It means that the international community should do its utmost to support Palestinians not just in achieving their rightful national aspirations, but to first support them in deciding what those aspirations are and how to go about pursuing them.
Policy to Empower
An emphasis on Palestinian self-determination entails a ceasefire by default. How are Palestinians in Gaza expected to contribute to making decisions regarding their political trajectory as a nation when their lives are threatened by famine and constant bombardment and Israeli attacks?
On this front, the vast majority of the international community are on the same page, but many feel that much more can still be done. Israel can be pressured into compliance through economic and diplomatic sanctions, an arms embargo, boycotts and divestment, rebuke and isolation in international fora, peacekeeping measures, legal avenues such as those pursued by South Africa and Nicuaragua, and any other measures at their disposal. Much of this has already been recommended by UN Special Rapporteur for the oPt Francesca Albanese in the advance unedited version of her report back in March. Unfortunately, few states will risk the ire of the U.S. and Zionist lobbies without significant public pressure. Policy circles could have a role to play in this regard by bringing these courses of action into the mainstream of the discourse.
Furthermore, there is a large focus on rebuilding Gaza when a ceasefire is in place. Phase three of the ceasefire plan put forward by Resolution 2735 includes “the start of a major multi-year reconstruction plan for Gaza”. Indeed, Gaza must be rebuilt. The question of who will fund the operations is one which others have discussed. However, an equally important question is who decides exactly how it will be rebuilt. The answer should undoubtedly be the Palestinians. It is their land, after all, but who represents the Palestinians? Thus, it becomes clear that a reaffirmation of Palestinian self-determination is not only an intellectual exercise, but a policy need. It is now also a legal one, as the ICJ has concluded in its advisory opinion, that “[i]t is for all States […] to ensure that any impediment resulting from the illegal presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the exercise of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end”.
An election process facilitated by the international community must take place, but for the functions of the more representative PLO as opposed to the PA, and not just voted for by Palestinians of the oPt, but by all Palestinians. Much complexity and many difficulties undoubtedly hamper such an endeavor, but such is the eventual reality of any solution pursued. The PLO is provisionally sufficient to facilitate Palestinian collective decisionmaking because of its already existing structures and its international standing as the representative of the Palestinian people. From there, the Palestinians may choose to alter the structures of the organization as they see fit.
An important point to note is that this approach neither unravels the limited progress made under the two-state solution nor should it serve as a pretense for Israel to swallow up the remainder of Palestinian land should the Palestinians elect a person or render a decision that Israel regards as a threat to its security. To take away the status of the Occupied Territories as recognized Palestinian land is to take away their choice to pursue a two-state solution, and has been clearly stated by the ICJ to be illegal. The progress made so far through Oslo toward a two-state settlement will not be in vain as it should be regarded as the minimum—but not the automatic—solution the Palestinians will pursue upon expression of their collective will. In this regard, Resolution 2735’s rejection of “any attempt at demographic or territorial change in the Gaza Strip, including any actions that reduce the territory of Gaza” is critical.
Here, it is worth noting two possible points of contention to an approach that prioritizes Palestinian self-determination before taking additional steps in the peace process. First is the concern that the Palestinians choose an entity that pursues armed resistance to occupation, like Hamas, which is regarded as a terrorist organization (a political categorization) by some Western states and their allies. To this, it should be noted that some of the violence directed at Israel by Hamas was for the purposes of gaining legitimacy by cultivating an image of the party that fights for the Palestinian people. A legitimate elections process would result in a reduction of this type of violence. It would also mean a reduction of authoritarian violence against Palestinians to maintain control. Moreover, it is crucial to note that whoever accedes to power will be bound by international law. Equally crucial to note is that any violations of international law should be dealt with through legal avenues, not unlawful force. If force is to be used in Palestine, it is much more pertinent and legitimate to invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter today, based on Article 94(2), to halt Israel’s actions in Gaza—especially as Israel has clearly ignored the ICJ’s three previous orders for provisional measures.
Second is the concern that allowing the free expression of Palestinian self-determination, could somehow, violate or go against Israeli self-determination. Legally speaking, if Palestinians are entitled to self-determination, then their right is equally valid as that of the Israelis. On a policy level, one must note that if the Palestinians decide on pursuing a secular democratic one-state solution, something some Israeli policymakers may regard as the destruction of Israel, it does not mean that the Israeli state will be destroyed once they vote on such a pursuit. The Palestinians will still have to reckon with the prevailing realities including the existence of the state of Israel, illegal settlements in the oPt, U.S. bias toward Israel, a decimated Gaza, a traumatized people, and a host of other challenges. But it is their choice to make.
Such a basic notion—that a nation’s own people should decide how to pursue its political manifestation—becomes complicated in the case of the Palestinians not only because they have had to compete with a Zionist nationalism exported from Europe on the same land, but also because their agency has been historically and consistently denied to the point that to act otherwise would be to alter the status quo.
A New Idealism is Needed
The status quo has already been shattered by the shock of the October 7 attacks and again by the inhumanity of genocide. It is possible that, without international action against Israel, the current unbearable reality leads to a significantly worse state of affairs in the long run. It is also possible that it leads to something in the context of an automatic two-state solution that is marginally better than before but still deeply flawed. However, it is in the hands of the international community to exert maximum effort to alter the trajectory of the status quo to one that is in the long run more positive than the pre-October 7 situation. This would be done by embracing an approach that first acknowledges Palestinian self-determination. The very fact of doing so would subtly but deeply alter the international system itself because it would mean embracing an approach that looks to law before politics and to decoupling the nation-state. It would also mean endowing a people previously but not currently concentrated in one geographical area with agency. It provides the international community with a blueprint for addressing historical injustices by engaging with those marginalized by the state-centered system.
Such an outcome may appear to some to be far-fetched, to say the least. But it is an unfortunate truth that the international system is driven to the greatest change during times of shock and tragedy. What would be a tragedy compounded is if the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians does not sufficiently push the international system to change itself to a point where it can effectively support the Palestinians in finding overdue peace and justice.
Yet, this rhetoric of the international system “changing itself” is flawed. A system does not change itself—individuals do, both from within and without the state structures that the system is based upon. To look at it from a macro, state-based point of view is to adopt the same narratives that perpetuate the plight of the Palestinians. The first step for individuals to change the system is to recognize themselves anew—that is, their perspectives, the language they use, their ambitions.
As such, a new idealism is needed—one brought forth by an approach not to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but to Palestinian rights as a first, necessary step. This approach is given momentum through the ideals which trust that the fundamental respect of and for human rights will lead to better outcomes.
It is an idealism that endows the oppressed people of a nation with a certain degree of sovereignty without the necessity of statehood. It does not expect oppressors to decide to stop, or colonizers to act altruistically, but entrusts the oppressed with the tools to their own emancipation. It is an idealism that anchors itself in human security and human development paradigms, one that is grounded in reality but not bound by it—taking things as they are but more critically setting them up to be better. Moreover, it is an idealism where the lack of change in response to new challenges is in itself a security threat.
This idealism is both a route to and a result of adopting an approach that is centered around upholding Palestinian self-determination before anything else. Beyond idealism, however, such an approach simply makes policy, legal, and moral sense.
