‘It is impossible for regional countries to go back to the normalization formula that existed before October 7th’

David Hearst, Middle East Eye Editor-in-Chief spoke to Harici. Hearst said that it is impossible for the countries in the region to go back to the normalization process with Israel, which was initiated during the Trump era, and it is now reverted to the Arab peace initiative which was one of the things that Saudi Arabia created in 2002.

David Hearst is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the London-based Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. Hearst answered our questions on the Gaza war, the two-state solution, the possibility of war with Hezbollah and the role of regional actors.

Let’s start talking about the last massacre of Israel. 112 civilians were killed while they were expecting humanitarian aid. Do you think Israel’s attack in Gaza will increase pressure on Tel Aviv by the international community?

I would like to say “yes” but my brain says “no”, because so many massacres have happened over the last 5 months. It’s made the word meaningless. The massacres have become normalized in Gaza. If you look at the way, for instance, organizations like the BBC will report massacres, they will use the passive tense. They say “hundreds of Palestinians are dead” as if the bombs were coming from the cloud. As if actually, there was no agency involved in it. There were. Still less are they likely to repeat the idea that these Palestinians were actually targeted as they were searching for food. And we know that they are targeted. We know that absolutely nothing happens in Gaza without someone thinking about it, and with extremely accurate weapons, the accuracy of which, of course, America is helping Israel with. Your heart says “this has to stop” because we’re now over 30,000, by some calculations we could even be 100,000 casualties. And this is not my idea. This is the data that the 30,000 being counted are only the ones being reported to the Palestinian Ministry of Health each day. What that body count doesn’t count are the number of bodies under the rubble that have still yet to be accounted for or indeed the number of Palestinians who die because there’s no treatment in hospital because the hospital system has been destroyed. It only counts the number of people who die on a particular day as a direct result of Israeli strikes. It doesn’t count the casualties that are created when simple people die of their wounds because they’re simply not being treated. So, the casualty count could be much higher than 30,000.

What we’re seeing is a  process, which none of us, I think, were prepared for 5 months ago. 5 months ago, we thought that time was not on Netanyahu’s side or the Israeli army’s side. It had a limited window in which to achieve its military objectives, which all of us thought, couldn’t be achieved anyway. The dismantle or as they said the collapsing of Hamas. But as this war has gone on, and one of the assumptions was that Israel would have until the 1st of January, if you remember, Israel would have until the end of January to do what it did and then Joe Biden would call time and say “Khalas” enough. “Now, you’ve got to let the humanitarian agencies in and now you’ve got to ceasefire”. This never happened and the more it never happens, the longer this goes on, the more it can happen. And so that what we’re having is a process where massacres, individual massacres are being normalized. Shifa hospital… Look what happened to all the hospitals. Look what happened to the UN shelters… This is becoming so normal that it is simply being brushed over as a state of war. Collateral damage in a state of war… And if you listen carefully to how Western politicians describe these massacres, they don’t use the word “massacre”. These are only the words that we use here. But a lot of people who support Israel don’t use the word “massacre” or they say “Hey, it’s a war! What do you expect? It’s collateral damage”. We know it’s not collateral damage because these bombs are aimed and this is done to make Gaza unlivable and it is done to terrify civilians into fleeing, even fleeing into the sea. We got to be clear about this. You have an Israeli mainstream where you have mainstream politicians -I’m not talking about Itamar Ben-Gvir or etc. I’m talking about mainstream Likhud politicians who say “every Gazan who gets a bullet in the head deserves it”. And this is showing the absolute brutality of the impunity that we are giving people who are literally trying to kill as many civilians as they can and to terrorize them.

There were scenarios that Israel would confront Hezbollah and when the war in Gaza comes to a halt? Do you see this as realistic? 

I haven’t really decided about that. There are arguments on both sides of whether or not they will confront. For a start, this is an Israeli government that is not thinking rationally. It would not be rational to attack Hezbollah for a whole number of reasons but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t do it. They could argue to themselves that “now is the time to defy Hezbollah and to push it 6, 7 kilometers back from the border and if we don’t do it now, we’ve missed an opportunity of a generation.” Hezbollah themselves say and have made it really clear that they will not get engaged in a war, if they are not directly attacked if Israel doesn’t invade. However if they are attacked, then it really does become a regional war, because it will really involve Iran, it will involve Iraq. It will involve the Shia groups there. There’ll be a complete state of war along the entire border, not just that border but also the Jordanian one as well. Would Israel attack Hezbollah? There are lots of people who are convinced that it’s just a question of time. I think the Lebanese themselves are cautioning against this and there are quite a few people who know their stuff about Lebanon who actually say “No, Israel won’t”. There have been some interesting exchanges of fire along the border. One of them was the demonstration by Hezbollah of long range anti-tank missiles that went under Iron Dome that Israel could not knock out. And they demonstrated that firepower to send a message that actually fighting Hezbollah, particularly in the mountainous hilly areas of southern Lebanon, would be a completely different thing to fighting Hamas. So there are a number of arguments in the air. What actually will happen? I don’t know. But again we’re not in the realm of the rational. There are some who say that Hezbollah has a level of deterrence that has been established between the two armies and there are other people who would say “No, the residents of Northern Israel will not return to their houses until Hezbollah has been dealt with.”

How do you take the Hezbollah targeting Kiryat Shimona with missiles and Iraqi Shiite group hitting the power plants at Israel’s Haifa Airport? Can we say that this is the sign of your foresight about many parties involved in a greater war following Hezbollah?

 Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrealla group of Shia militias took responsibility for hitting the power station at Haifa airport with drones. Last week, the group mounted a similar drone attack on a chemical plant in the port of Haifa. This is the same group that killed three US soldiers at an attack at a US base on the border between Jordan and Syria. And it is undeterred by the way of airstrikes that the US launched in response. As some of us predicted, the northern as well as the southern borders of Israel have now become hot. And the ability of Hezbollah allied militias in Iraq to sustain these attacks which fly under the Iron Dome missile defense system and hit the targets with a pin-point accuracy can not be in doubt. 

Do you think a solution without Hamas in Gaza is possible? What do you think about the renewed Palestinian Authority envisioned by the US for Gaza? Do you take this plan as possible for the future of Gaza? 

I don’t think Hamas can be defeated in the sense that Hamas is an idea and it is part of the people of Gaza. It isn’t a militia that can be detached from Gaza. So, it could be forced out of Gaza but I don’t think it can be defeated. I think for that, you have to look elsewhere and find out the enormous popularity of Hamas in areas which are generally not associated with them at all. For instance, in Jordan, they’ve become enormously popular, not only amongst the Palestinians in Jordan, but also the East Bankers as well. That is very interesting and I think Hamas expresses as, indeed, the resistance groups express a resistance to occupation that has been completely abandoned by the Palestinian Authority. The idea of the Palestinian Authority taking over Gaza is being scorched by Israel because Israelis particularly want the Palestinian Authority in there. But also it is on its knees in the West Bank itself. When you go around the West Bank, it doesn’t extend to Nablus, it doesn’t extend to Janine. And the next generation, the sons and daughters of Fatah are joining in armed resistance as well. So, generationally, it’s also not working. Ultimately the only thing that will work, if you’re thinking about peace, is a fundamental change in the whole post-Oslo thinking, which is you actually allow Palestinians to choose their own leadership, that the factions become united in a government of National Unity and that there are free elections. There haven’t been free elections there for 17 years.

What are you talking about? If you want to build a Palestinian state of whatever dimensions, you have to allow UNRWA for the education system. You have to stop destroying it. But you also have to allow the political process going on. And that involves a government of national unity. Now, everything that Israel has done, everything America has done, and Britain has done, has been to prevent a government of national unity from forming. So, we have to change all our habits because there’s a formula: you exclude Hamas or exclude all armed resistance until they give up their arms. That is not what happened in Northern Ireland. What happened in Northern Ireland was that decommissioning happened after there was a clear political vision given to the republican movement that they could, then, share power with the unionists. Decommissioning didn’t happen before then. So, we’re asking Hamas to decommission before there’s any vision of a political future. If you want to stop the fighting, then you have to start talking about how you engineer the conditions for a long-term consistency.

The two State solution that the US has been pushing in rhetoric, let’s say, so far has not been successful. Do you think it’s realistic to insist on a two-state solution?

If you’re serious about a two-state solution, you’ve also got to be serious about what sort of state you are going to create for Palestine, which actually has sovereignty, which has contiguity, and which has control over its own borders. And none of that is being envisioned by the map which we saw during Erdogan’s speech. That’s what the state of Palestine actually looks like. It looks like a bunch of stones. So, if you’re talking about a two-state solution, the people who propose it, what sort of state are you talking about because it is a deeply deceptive word. The two-state solution implies a level of reciprocation of balance, of symmetry between two equal states. And what you’ve got is one enormous state. And a whole bunch of locked up prisons around it, and without any ability to commit to even get out of their village, and go from one village to another. They’re completely locked up and it is a total apartheid system.

So, how can you turn an apartheid system into a genuine two states. If you’re talking a Palestinian state, and if you’re talking about the land on which a Palestinian state would be, you’ve got to ask yourself, is there a politician who’s been born in Israel, who is prepared to order the eviction of something up to a million settlers. If you’re being serious, what do you do with the settlers? Because is now not a small number… It is anywhere between 700 to up to a million people. Now, if you count the settlements in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem and the Golan heights, 750 thousand more. That’s a large number of people. And it’s not just their houses but it’s also their businesses because there are now 18 different industrial zones that link them. They don’t have to travel to 1948 Israel for their jobs. They’ve got their jobs right there. They’ve got all their businesses right there. They are totally protected and now they’ve been given heavy arms as well. So, who’s going to evict them? However, you know, the Turkish Foreign Ministry is very much their line that if you confront people about a two-state solution and you promote it, you’re actually challenging the world to think about the sort of questions that are going to stop it. And, you would provoke Israel into saying “we won’t accept a state under any condition” which is what Netanyahu has said, so Israel can’t pretend it’s for a two-state solution only. They’ve got no one on the other end of the negotiation table to negotiate with. The further down the line you push for an autonomous contiguous Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem, the more you’re going to confront the myth that Israel is going to tolerate that.

What about all other global powers should they involve to solve this crisis? Do you think they could have a role in this? 

I think what has to happen is that the whole debate about Israel has to change and I think the involvement of South Africa is incredibly important. Because they have huge moral force, because they changed the system from within and they changed the system from without. It has become a global campaign now. What has happened as the only positive thing that has happened in the last 5 months is that Palestine has become a global moral issue in the way that Ukraine is not. Ukraine is a regional war but it’s not a global issue. However, Gaza is a global issue now but it hasn’t actually changed the regional dynamics or not yet. And now, what has to happen is the regional dynamics have to start changing and have to start happening the world’s got the climate that allows Israel to do what it does, has change and it’s got to become much colder for people who use phenomenal brutality and who have shown the brutality that they’re using against ordinary civilians, and and the mask of liberal Zionism has slipped. You can no longer use the fig leaf that Israel is behaving morally because it’s so obvious that it’s not.

Middle East was having a normalization process before the war? Do you expect this process to continue after the war? What’s going to happen after the war in the region? 

Normalization came from a basically an Israeli idea under the Trump administration that you could jump over the heads of the Palestinian issue and normalize with the Arab states. It was taking the Arab peace initiative on its head and producing the end- first, and building an enormous highway over the heads of the Palestinians and then offering them the status of being a sort of “Gasterbeiter” (guest workers). The status of being workers in their own land without any political rights… I think the Gaza War has turned that on its head. I think, in particular, one of the nations that could have been about to sign the treaty with Israel and normalized with Saudi Arabia under pressure of Gaza, and also under the pressure of Arab opinion. That’s now changed. And it is now reverted to the Arab peace initiative which was one of the things that Saudi Arabia created in 2002. There, the logic was inversed. “First, you have a solution on Palestine, and then we will normalize relations”. So, the logic of normalization has been reversed. That is not to say that the Arab regimes will cut ties with Israel because they are elites. They have a very ambivalent attitude to the Palestinian question, because the Palestinian question was the Arab Spring at large. It was the first real Arab Spring. The Intifadas were really the first signs of a model that was then repeated with the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt and the whole wave of revolutions that threatened them. They’re still threatened. They’re still threatened by that feeling and so the idea that somehow they’re going to become great supporters of a “New Palestine”, I’m very doubtful about. However, I don’t think that they can go back to the normalization formula that existed before October 7th. I think that’s impossible now.

So, they’re frozen in a position in which they say normally “we need a Palestinian state”. So, that’s why it is important to test everyone’s mind and say “what sort of Palestine?” Any Palestine are you prepared to create and in what time frame… Because if you look at the history of Israeli settlement, most of the settlement in the West Bank happened not before Oslo but after it. So, it was Oslo that allowed a huge expansion of settlement in the West Bank which we’re now dealing with. Therefore, you say “we should go back to Oslo” but this is not the same map that’s now we’re talking about, that was introduced, for instance, in the last round of talks which ended in Taba. So, one advantage of talking about a Palestinian state of any form, is to make the world conscious of exactly what is blocking the creation of a Palestinian state of any size. And that in itself is a salutary process. I don’t believe that this will work. But it’s still worth confronting the world community with the obstacles that any Palestinian State would create. I don’t think that Israel is prepared to tolerate an autonomous state living anywhere next to it. I simply don’t believe that. They believe in total domination from “The River To The Sea”. They’re prepared to accept small enclaves around them they can control. But they’re not prepared to accept free elections. But we have to go through that process before we can actually come to the solution that would last, which would be to keep the settlers where they are, but to introduce the right of return and to go for an equality of citizenship based on keeping everyone where they were but that would be a very very different state of Israel, and a very very different state of Palestine…