Article: Israeli-Palestinian crisis

The twists and turns of political animosities, sectarian rivalries and territorial
disputes in the Middle East over many decades now include further unravellings
of the regional order as new forces take hold. The enduring Israeli-Palestinian
conflict must be now be seen within this context.
Israeli ground operation in Gaza
Many Palestinians and Israelis foresaw another round of conflict on theIsrael-
Gaza front this summer. They depict a kind of inevitability to it all, that speaks of a
fatalism about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some Israelis even hold to the view
that they can sustain the status quo in both the West Bank and Gaza through a
combination of containment and periodic resort to force, while mouthing the
rhetoric of a two-state solution sometime in the future.

Yet the situation in the region as a whole should give them pause. The regional
order that has more or less prevailed for decades is fast unravelling and new
forces are emerging that cannot be contained in the way that the Palestinians
have been since the 1948 war in which most of them became refugees and the
state of Israel was established.

The configuration of Arab states that came into being at the end of the First
World War has experienced relative stability on the basis of a system designed by
Frenchman Georges Picot and his British counterpart, Mark Sykes, (the Sykes-
Picot Agreement) in May 1916. They paved the way for the British mandates in
Palestine and Iraq and the French mandate in Syria-Lebanon that endured until
1948. Thereafter, maintenance of the lines drawn on the map by the British and
French has required a level of enforcement and dictatorial rule at odds with the
ideals of self-determination and democracy. And the fate of the Palestinians
today derives from their relative weakness in the successive struggles for power
that have characterised the Middle East since 1916.

The enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in a sense, unfinished business from
that era and it might have remained so, in relative isolation, but for the fact that
in 2003 the Americans and British thought that by intervening in Iraq they could
remake the regional system for the better. Instead, they opened Pandoras box,
to quote former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and now the whole system is
in flux.

From 1948 to 1967, when Israel captured land from the surrounding Arab states,
including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Palestinian problem was depicted
as one of refugees, not self-determination. Resort to guerrilla warfare and terror
tactics by the Palestinians from the 1960s drew attention to their cause, but it
was not until the first Palestinian intifada of 1987 to 1993 that the idea of self-
determination for those living in the West Bank and Gaza, potentially leading to a
Palestinian state alongside Israel, really gained traction.

Meanwhile, the cause of Arab nationalism suffered such a blow in the defeats of
Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967 that the Palestinians could no longer look to the
Arab states to solve their problem. In the place of Arab nationalism, the
phenomenon of revisionist Islamist movements emerged as a new challenge to
the regional order. Post-revolutionary Iran identified with these movements,
sponsoring Hezbollah in Lebanon and supporting Hamas in the Gaza Strip. These
developments, the collapse of the Oslo peace process in the second Palestinian
intifada in 2000, and then 9/11 combined to produce a new narrative on the
Palestinians that depicted them as part of the general problem of terrorism
besetting the region and beyond.

The unravelling of Sykes-Picot has much to do with the rise of jihadi groups at the
forefront of the terrorist challenge in the region. They gained strength in the
fallout from the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Then came the Arab uprisings
that brought down governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya and fighting
between government forces and rebels, aided by jihadis, in Syria.

Since 2011 the rising toll of death and destruction in Syria, the flight of millions of
Syrian refugees to neighbouring countries and the divisive policies of the Shia-
dominated government in Baghdad have led commentators to depict a region
riven more by sectarian animosities than the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Another shift has taken place at the international level, with the Americans no
longer able to exercise decisive influence in the region overall. In their opposition
to the Assad regime in Syria, the Americans were at one with their long-standing
Arab ally Saudi Arabia, but they upset the Saudis by not doing more to bring him
down. This omission was not the only source of aggravation to the Saudis who
have come to question the commitment of the Americans to their erstwhile
friends in the region. They were aghast when the Americans did nothing to
prevent the fall of Mubarak in Egypt and watched in consternation as the Muslim
Brotherhood came to power there.

The Brotherhoods stance on regional issues represents a direct challenge to the
Saudi monarchy. And therein lies a contradiction to the depiction of a region
embroiled in sectarian conflict. Both the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood are
Sunni Muslims. Their rivalry is about political power, not simply sectarianism.

When President Morsi was ousted last summer, the Saudis were delighted.
President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi is as opposed as the Saudis to the Muslim
Brotherhood and, by extension, its offshoot, the Palestinian Hamas movement
that presides in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has been embattled ever since. Meanwhile,
Obamas decision to pursue a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue,
capitalising on the election of President Rohani as successor to the abrasive
Ahmadinejad, alienated the Saudis afresh while also alarming Israel.

As if these twists and turns were not already complicated enough, recent
developments in Syria and Iraq, specifically the advances made by Isis (the Islamic
State in Iraq and the Levant) and its declaration of a new Islamic caliphate across
captured territory in both states, represent a further unravelling of the regional
order.

It is in this context that the latest round of conflict on the Israeli-Palestinian front
cannot be dismissed as a sideshow. If the durability and legitimacy of the post-
First World War regional system is up for grabs, both the Israelis and the
Americans will be hard pressed to contain Palestinian resistance to Israel for
another decade in the name of a moribund depiction of regional stability. The
Palestinians represent but one of several communities in the region for whom a
remaking of the 20th-century regional order may not be unwelcome. However,
their main defenders in the region are more anti-Israel than they are pro-
Palestinian and if Israel and its friends want to stem the trend toward Islamist
extremism in the region they would do well to find a resolution of the Palestinian
problem through a two-state solution than leave it to fate.