The Middle East’s future has never looked more uncertain

In launching an unprovoked military attack on Iran, Israel not only once again finds itself in very clear breach of international law but has lit a blue touch paper that could have untold consequences for the Arab World and beyond.

There have been two long certainties that have led to what many will see as the inevitable; firstly President Trump’s incredibly foolish decision to unconditionally withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, the ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ (JCPOA) in his first term in May 2016 and secondly Israeli Prime Minister’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s long term and openly stated ambition to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and bring the United States into a war that would bring regime change in Teheran. Timing has been of the essence, for these military strikes were deliberately launched to stymie joint US and Iranian negotiations on the revival of something half approaching the JCPOA, and also to allow Israel to deflect the World’s attention from a continuing and worsening genocide in Gaza and widespread, sanctioned, pogroms across the Occupied West Bank.

The October 7^th attacks by Hamas on Israel were a gift to Netanyahu who was facing corruption charges at home and deepening unpopularity. In the 20^th months that have followed, his army has turned Gaza into a charnel house and along with the far-Right Cabinet members who support him, he believes that he is closer to driving the Palestinians from Gaza altogether and is using food and water as a weapon to do so. Palestinian towns in the West Bank have either been turned into virtual prisons, while smaller villages are attacked by settlers with impunity. The US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Southern Baptist Minister, has said that he no longer believes in a ‘two State Solution’, and if there is to be a Palestinian State it must be carved out of the territory of another ‘Muslim country’. 

In this period, Netanyahu has attacked and seriously weakened Hezbollah in Lebanon, laying waste to great swathes of the territory whilst doing so. He took advantage of the fall of Assad in Syria, by tacking military sites and occupying more of the country.

With the charge sheet against Netanyahu, already sought by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, getting ever longer, the voices against him inside Israel have grown louder. Global opinion has hardened substantially against Israel and across the Maghreb, thousands are rallying in the Al Samoud peace convoy heading for the Egypt’s border with Gaza. The United States might well have vetoed – for the 5^th time – a UN Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire but the vote for the same at a full meeting of the UN General Assembly was overwhelming. Over the course of 20 horrific, unbearable months, the United States and Israel have succeeded in completely isolating themselves diplomatically. 

Can the rest of the Arab World continue to remain relatively quiescent in the face of all of this? What may arise from the joining France/Saudi Arabia Conference in New York in a few days, as reports filter in that President Macron’s earlier suggestion that recognition for Palestine, has been followed by other reports that even this is being quietly shelved? And what now of the war that Netanyahu has just started with or without the knowledge of the United States of America, with Iran? At the time of writing, Israel’s leaders are hunkering underground in secure bunkers, an option not available to all Israelis and certainly not those Palestinians who may now find themselves in the crosshairs of yet another war.

We are in uncharted territory, but just the sort of territory that has long been the worst possible outcome for any lasting peace in the Middle East. In the short term, Israel (which unlike Iran does have nuclear weapons) is in a stronger military position than Iran and should it come under any serious threat the United States is likely to act. But in the longer term there is another question that will increasingly arise; on this trajectory can Israel, floating as it now is on a sea of volatile magma that it has helped generate, survive in its current term?

*Mark Seddon is a former Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Ban ki moon & former Adviser to the Office of the President of the UN General Assembly