Just gets worse: The Israel-Hamas conflict brings the Palestinian issue out on global stage

Sandeep Dikshit

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When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map of ‘The New Middle East’ without Palestine while addressing the UN General Assembly on September 22, little did he know that Hamas’ preparations were in the final stages to shatter the peace of the graveyard in his backyard of Gaza Strip on October 7.

The ‘animals’ of Gaza, as the Israelis now call them, had been penned for too long — 16 years after the Israeli army withdrew from the third most densely populated place in the world. If the settlements ate up their land, violence led to a staggering loss of lives as well. From 2008 to September this year, 6,407 Palestinians were killed and 1.5 lakh injured in the under-the-carpet violence from the Israeli military and the settlers, as per the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Less than 100 km away, the agreement on the inviolability of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s second most holy site after Mecca-Medina, was repeatedly violated. The apogee came two days before the Hamas attack. Led by a Knesset member, hundreds of settlers stormed the mosque. The security forces, who had already been blocking Muslims for the Fajr (dawn) prayers, peppered those protesting the indignity and humiliation with rubber-coated bullets and stun grenades.

The Palestinians of Gaza had repeatedly tried to attract world attention to their plight through violent breakouts. These attempts, mostly quarterbacked by Hamas, had elicited five Israeli bombing campaigns. The October 7 attack was not the first that was in parts brazen, cruel and novel. But it was the first that took the lives of nearly 1,500 Israelis in a society where every life has a huge cost attached to it. It was also the first that laid bare the complacency of the security network weaved by Mossad and Shin Bet with the backing of Heron drones, Merkava tanks, the Iron Dome and the Israel Defence Forces.

The toll is now roughly equal on both sides. But Israel has the most hardline government in history — where a Cabinet member won his spurs by legally defending Israelis accused of hate crime, and even murder of Palestinians. The images are simply too gory for an ultra-muscular state to not go the whole hog. It has expectedly invoked the memory of Pearl Harbour, which was the excuse for the US to jump into World War II.

The lot that has been equipping Ukraine has now started funnelling bombs and Iron Dome batteries to Israel for an earth-shattering annihilation of the citizens of Gaza, though not all of them are culpable for propping the Hamas. It won 45 per cent of the vote in the last elections in Gaza in 2006, but 55 per cent went to half a dozen other parties.

The US has good reason to turn a blind eye to the non-culpability of most Palestinians. The Ukraine campaign is stalemated and monetarily too draining. The Gaza campaign of carpet-bombing needs pennies in comparison. The US’ half-complete Abraham Accords have gone up in the smoke of the battle. The Hamas has brought the Palestinian issue from somnambulant to the front, back and centre of the global stage. The Arab Street will be too worked up to allow the Abraham Accords or the India-Middle East-Europe corridor to proceed till memories of the Gaza slaughter remain.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initial Israel-favouring tweet is to be seen from this angle. One of the prominent nodes of the corridor is an Adani-acquired port in Israel. The sabotaging of the corridor does set back Adani’s plans, but Washington has cause to be more upset. Joe Biden has personally invested political capital in the project, which is to be an alternative to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

Now that the Abraham Accords are off the table, the excuse to muddy up the region for the US has ripened. Many countries from the region have joined the BRICS and several want to become members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), both dominated by arch rivals China and Russia.

Worse, China has been midwifing alliances such as the historical one between Saudi Arabia and Iran. During Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ visit to Beijing this year, Xi Jinping had expressed the desire to do the same between Israel and Palestine. Such an eventuality will reduce the US to a bit player in the region. As is happening to France in western Africa, it could then be asked to pack up its military bags from the region.

But in rejecting appeals for negotiation and restraint from the entire Arab world besides China, Russia and India, the West will risk the attention of other armed groups in the region which are already under pressure from their sympathisers to respond to the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza. The line-up includes the Houthis, Hezbollah (inventory of one lakh ballistic missiles and rockets), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansarallah and Hashd al-Shaabi.

Iran is now being painted the villain. And, if the orchestrators of the Gaza bombing decide to set their sights on Iran, Russia and China will hardly remain bystanders. Iran, too, has been honing its options for such an eventuality. Oil prices will skyrocket if it blocks the Strait of Hormuz.

Hamas has certainly brought the world at a dangerous crossroads. But it is the war party from the West that may take the world down the wrong end of the fork. The solution cannot be but a Palestinian nation, East Jerusalem as its capital and UN membership.

The many stages of conflict

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1922-48: British Mandate

In 1916, a British expeditionary force and a revolt by the Palestinian Arabs began gathering momentum against Ottoman Turks. The British promised an independent nation of Palestine in exchange for Arabs contributing to bringing down the Ottoman empire. But the British double-crossed the Arabs with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which they promised the Jews a homeland within Palestine. After the end of World War I, the British were to govern areas of Palestine and Trans-Jordan till they were able to stand on their feet.

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1948 UN Plan: First Squeeze

The migration of Jews had started on a small scale but picked up speed with the beginning of the holocaust in Germany in the 1930s. The UN partition plan of 1948 was heavily tilted in favour of Jews. Though Arabs were two-thirds of the population and owned 94 per cent of land, the Jews were given 56 per cent of Mandatory Palestine. In addition, the Jews took over more land by setting fire to Arab villages and expelling 7.5 lakh Arabs (called the Naqba).

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1967: Fencing them in

The map changed even more with the six-day war in 1967 when Israel attacked the amassed Arab armies and occupied more Palestine land. The Palestinians had been driven out of nearly all surrounding areas and confined to East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and West Bank. Many Palestinians had gone into exile. The world, including India, supports the creation of a UN-recognised state of Palestine based on this map with the capital in East Jerusalem.

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2008: Settlements appear

The Israelis kept encroaching on the scenic or fertile areas of West Bank (so named because it is on the west bank of the Jordan river) and Gaza Strip. They created “settlements” or fenced colonies of armed Jews who also ran agricultural farms or arrived from abroad to spend lives in retirement. By 2008, Israel had applied a complete choke on Gaza. Residents could leave

or enter at pleasure of Israeli army. Netanyahu now wants to bring Jewish-majority parts of West Bank into Israel.

Isolated, but adamant

The trans-Atlantic alliance’s domination of the narrative on the Hamas-Israel conflict in mainstream media is near-complete. The reality though is that the world is painfully divided. When the US looked around for allies to ink a joint statement that gave Israel a free hand, even the ever-amenable G7 was reluctant. In the end, it could only muster France, Germany, Italy and the UK. The US-led mollycoddling of Israel has made it the most defiant to global opinion. Hundreds of UN, UNSC and UN Human Rights Council resolutions have fallen on deaf ears. The UN has passed 250 resolutions and the UNHRC, in its brief existence of just 17 years, has issued more resolutions condemning Israel than for other countries combined. The UNSC vote is always lopsided. The usual margin against Israeli settlements is 14-0, with the US abstaining. Yet, a clutch of countries continues to encourage Israel to buck global opinion since the UN was formed.

Waning support?

A photo that symbolised India’s backing for the Palestine cause was the palpable warmth between Indira Gandhi and PLO chief Yasser Arafat at the 1983 NAM Summit. But even in the 1930s, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had opposed the western plan to artificially create a nation of Jews in Arab land. Nehru made peace after Israel was born and India recognised its existence in 1950. India gave short shrift to Israel as compared to Palestine till the 1990s. But Kashmir insurgency and the Soviet Union’s disintegration forced the Narasimha Rao government to look at Israel for its security needs. He also established diplomatic ties with Israel. The real ballast to ties came from PM Modi, who normalised high-level visits between the two countries. This year, India made its biggest investment in Israel through the Adani Group. But Modi was also the first Indian PM to visit Palestine in 2018, though the frequency with which Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, comes to India has decreased.