On 7 August, the new round of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict entered its tenth month. This long-running conflict is in danger of spreading from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf as a result of Israel’s ‘decapitation’* operation in Tehran. However, Iran’s move to send a message to Israel through Hungary, while reducing the risk of a major war breaking out in the Middle East, has once again revealed the strange colours of this game.
In fact, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has turned into a multilateral geopolitical game with changing camps and the Middle East conflict has entered a new phase, creating a new situation and pattern. Around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Arab countries have collectively left the field and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ led by Iran has joined forces to become Israel’s number one rival and a new geopolitical player.
Since the outbreak of this conflict, Palestine has suffered unprecedented losses, marking a new catastrophe for the Arab nation in modern history. However, the Arab-Israeli peace process has not been overthrown, and not only the peace agreements between Egypt, Jordan and the PLO with Israel, but also the Abraham Accords signed by the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco with Israel have withstood this bloody test. Simply put, none of these seven national actors has abandoned its policy of peace with Israel, not even by recalling its ambassadors or downgrading its relations.
In the face of the terrible suffering of the Palestinians, none of the Arab states withdrew from the peace process with Israel to save their national brethren from the brink of extinction, putting the nail in the coffin of pan-Arab nationalism. Between 1948 and 1982, five wars in the Middle East taught pragmatic Arab leaders the lesson that war cannot defeat Israel, especially with the mighty United States as a round-the-clock provider of foreign aid.
This round of conflicts is not only a continuation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict of the last hundred years, but also underlines the new geopolitical shifts in the Middle East and the emergence of two new and increasingly distinct camps: Israel on the one hand, and Iran as the ‘Red Five’ and the actors of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ on the other: The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq. They do not necessarily share a common ultimate goal, but they do share a common contemporary enemy, namely Israel.
After the 1978 Camp David Accords with Israel, Egypt, the most belligerent, withdrew from the protracted nationalist battlefield, making a clean break after 100,000 deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in war spending. The Islamic revolution in Iran in the same year turned Tehran and Israel into bitter enemies. The anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and anti-Zionism espoused by Khomeini, the ‘Father of the Nation’, led the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran to see the ‘liberation of Palestine’ as a religious duty that transcended geography, ethnicity and sectarianism.
This coincided with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which unleashed a large-scale anti-Soviet and anti-hegemonic Islamic jihad movement, dubbed ‘political Islam’ by Soviet scholars. The ideological convergence of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan gave birth to the Islamic renaissance that shook the Middle East and the world in the twentieth century, replacing Arab nationalism in its last days and laying the first building blocks of today’s ‘Axis of Resistance’.
With the assassination of Egyptian President Sadat in October 1981 for making peace with Israel, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which advocated global jihad, confronted the secular regime and its ideology gradually spread throughout the Arab and Islamic world, including Palestine. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon and defeated and expelled the PLO forces, the Iranian Islamic Revolution seized the opportunity to sow its seeds in the Arab world on the ruins of the Arab countries’ defeat and created, nurtured and armed the Lebanese Hezbollah, whose mission was to liberate the occupied territories.
In 1987, when the anti-Israeli Intifada broke out in the Gaza Strip, Hamas, born from the Egyptian Mu’tazilite Brotherhood, took up the banner of resistance to put an end to Israel and liberate the national homeland. In 2011, after the Arab Spring exacerbated the sectarian conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, both Sunni Hamas and Shiite Hezbollah underwent a process of transition. Sunni Hamas and Shiite Hezbollah were placed on the list of ‘terrorist organisations’ by the Saudis and Egyptians, and their crime was not only to obstruct the peace process but also to defect to Iran.
The Houthis, backed and even supported by Iran and Hezbollah because of their Shiite genes and clear commitment to the Islamic republican system, are seen by the Saudis as a ‘fifth column’ in the Arabian Peninsula and have organised a ten-nation siege that has strengthened their ties with Iran. The Shia-dominated ‘Popular Mobilisation Forces’ in Iraq are a new force created and dominated by Iran during the regional war on the terrorist Islamic State, jokingly called the ‘Iraqi Hezbollah’.
At this point, before the new round of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict broke out, Iran’s new ‘four against one’ geopolitical camp in the Middle East was formed. The main common denominator of this camp is opposition to the Israeli occupation. Irrespective of the nationalist or theocratic dimension, they gave themselves the rationality and even legitimacy to attack Israel and support each other, and for the first time they achieved strategic coordination in this conflict.
In fact, the reason why the Arab states remain indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians and cannot ‘let Israel off the hook’, and why Israel even boldly says that it can open five fronts without fear of further deterioration of the strategic environment, is due to the new change in the relationship between the enemy and Israel. While the Arab countries and Israel fear Iran’s growing power, the Palestinian issue has created a legitimate space for Iran to disrupt the chess game in the Middle East.
The lesser of two evils. The Arab countries prefer to sit back and watch Israel and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ fight and drink each other’s blood, but they are not willing to cut diplomatic ties and use other means to put out Israel’s fire. The reason may be very simple: They think that Israel can only dream of annexing and subjugating the currently occupied territories, but has no ability or intention to do so and dominate the Arab world. Iran, on the other hand, under the banner of Islam and resistance, seeks to influence and dominate the entire region and maximise its interests on the basis of Persian nationalism.
*A decapitation strike is a military strategy aimed at eliminating the leadership or command and control of an enemy government or group.
Prof. Ma, Dean of the Institute of Studies for the Mediterranean Rim (ISMR ), Zhejiang International Studies University (Hangzhou). He knows the world affairs well, especially the Islamic and Middle East politics. He has worked for many years as a senior Xinhua correspondent in Kuwait, Palestine and Iraq.
