Tragedy. There is no other word that can describe what happened on October 7, 2023 when Hamas’s terrorists killed 1,200 people in an audacious terror strike in Israel and abducted 250 hostages. There is no other word that can describe what Israel has done in Gaza since then, killing 40,000 and displacing two million Palestinians, in an offensive that cannot but be seen as genocidal in nature.
Tragedy: There is no word that can describe what Hezbollah, with its strikes from October 8, did to communities in Israel’s north who had to leave their homes. And there is no other word for the death of innocent people in Israel’s more recent strikes across Lebanon.
Tragedy: There is no word that can describe the enormous toll Israel-Iran covert and overt conflict has taken over the years across West Asia, be it due to the terror strikes Tehran’s proxies have mounted or the active disruption of maritime traffic and free flow of goods and services and people. There is no other word for the ruthless sanctions that America, prodded on by Israel, has imposed on Iran that make the lives of ordinary Iranians so much more difficult. And there will be no other word to describe the destruction that will be unleashed if Israel and Iran begin a direct war, risking the lives of their own people and throwing the entire region and world into even greater uncertainty.
But at the core of the tragedy of the past year in West Asia is the triple tragedy of history, of both democratic and authoritarian politics, and of the international system that has dehumanised entire societies, incentivised states to be at their worst, and left global civil society helpless in the face of unspeakable horrors.
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The tragedy of history
The competing historical narratives that all protagonists in the West Asian conflict, particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict, have told themselves and the world are well known.
For the Jewish people, it is the story of a historically dispossessed community, facing persecution across the ages and across the world, culminating in the Holocaust, returning home finally to create the only state that is safe for them. It is the story of being relentlessly under siege, surrounded from all sides by hostile neighbours, with anti-Semitism lurking in every corner of the world. It is the story of giving peace a chance, only to be undermined by either wars from states or terrorism from state proxies.
For Palestinians, it is the history of a historically rooted people, victimised by colonialism, subject to arbitrary border demarcations, displaced and evicted from their own homes, forced to make way for a settler population and a new state that was a product of either western guilt or western strategy or both. It is the story of being made to suffer for the sins of others, for among all communities in the modern era, the one that had the least to do in terms of persecuting Jewish people was made to pay the most. It is the story of living as second-class citizens or as refugees, divided and disenfranchised and stateless, subject to the mercies of a hostile power and vacillating neighbours. It is the story of the failure of moderate politics and the failure of violent resistance, and of generations after generations waiting to exercise their right to self determination.
If these competing historical frames serve as the guiding motif, finding common ground in the best of times requires human genius and empathy of an exemplary kind. But in the worst of times, when a terror strike hits Israel or when Israel bombs a Palestinian settlement, the historical frame only serves to strengthen the antagonistic narratives for both traumatised societies. And the battle is framed as existential. That is what happened on October 7 and has happened every day since then. And that is the tragedy bequeathed by history.
The tragedy of politics
The fundamental impulse that guides politicians is, unsurprisingly, the search for power and the desire to retain power. At the best of times, this can coexist with finding ways to reconcile contradictions. But in general, political power rests on sharpening contradictions and escalating conflicts, for that is the recipe to showcase one’s indispensability to one’s people. This is true both for democracies and authoritarian regimes. And it has been true for the protagonists in the West Asian theatre.
For Benjamin Netanyahu, dependent on coalition partners, embattled because his moves to control the judiciary yielded a fierce democratic backlash, and confronting severe legal liabilities if ousted from power, October 7 was both a crisis and an opportunity.
It was a crisis because no Israeli PM had presided over, and then survived, a national security setback of the scale that Hamas’s terror strikes represented. It was an opportunity because it changed the national conversation and allowed Netanyahu to play the strong nationalist card, embark on an unprecedented military offensive in Gaza, push more settlements into West Bank, use the multiple forms of aggression against Israel as a way to respond, often disproportionately, against adversaries in order to reshape the region, and play the American system like only Israel can, by extracting every pound of support and yet criticise it for not doing enough. Netanyahu chose revenge over hostages, and faced massive internal resistance and external pressure to discard this policy for peace, but he survived because he essentially had to please an audience of one — his Far-Right flank on which his government depends. And in recent weeks, by destroying the Hezbollah leadership and escalating the conflict with Iran, he has ensured that his domestic political stock is replenished. Political incentives in an ethno-democracy enabled Netanyahu to do what he is doing.
For Iran’s leadership, presiding over an increasingly unpopular system of government, ostracised from the western world, and with a young restive population that is seeking access to modernity and rights, political incentives were aligned to keep alive the conflict with the US and Israel and the battle with its Sunni rivals, and prevent an accord between these two blocs that Abraham Accords represented. For Hamas’s leadership, increasingly fearful that the wider Abraham Accords would leave the Palestinian question either unaddressed or change the regional dynamics to extinguish any support it got from Arab neighbours, political incentives were aligned to cause destruction of a magnitude that would force an Israeli retaliation. That retaliation would lead to Palestinian suffering. And that suffering would not just isolate Israel globally but make it impossible for any Muslim country to do any deal with Tel Aviv.
Irrespective of whether Iran and Hamas coordinated in any way, for both actors, October 7 — and the subsequent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, the Shia militia attacks in Iraq and Syria, the Hezbollah aggression — served exactly that objective. Israel responded. To be sure, the extent of Israel’s offensive may have gone beyond what even its adversaries calculated and brought the conflict much closer to Iran’s doorstep than Tehran may have liked. But every Palestinian death suits the Hamas leadership as a propaganda point and recruiting tool. Every instance of Israeli offensive and Tel Aviv’s clear backtracking of any commitment to a two-state solution has weakened the voices for a broader rapprochement in the region within Arab and Gulf countries. And every instance of intensification of the conflict, where the US and Israel are on one side, is leading to a closer pact between Iran, China, Russia and North Korea on the other.
For much of the past year, the beginning of the war, the extension of the conflict and the killings of their own people has suited those in power in Tel Aviv, Tehran and Gaza’s tunnels. And that is the tragedy of politics, both democratic and authoritarian.
The tragedy of interstate system
The fundamental premise that guides world affairs is that the international system is literally anarchic. There is no overarching authority that has the mandate of the ability to enforce its decisions on independent sovereign states, let alone non-state actors. The closest that comes to a supranational body in the name of global governance, United Nations, is entirely dependent on the ability and willingness of its member-states to craft a consensus and enforce it. The fact that Israel has mounted an all-out attack on UN just because it has had the moral temerity to call out Israel’s genocide and seek help for Palestinians is a stark illustration of this anarchy.
Precisely the same impulses of history and political survival that guide West Asian protagonists guide decision makers in the world’s most powerful capitals which can actually make a difference. So for Washington DC’s political class, even remotely stepping out of what is the established pro-Israel consensus, can lead to political marginalisation. The doors for a debate on the Palestinian issue have opened up in university campuses, but arming and diplomatically supporting Israel, burying any criticism of Tel Aviv’s record by terming it anti-Semitism, and valuing an Israeli life over a Palestinian life form the basic ingredients of the American state’s approach, notwithstanding any nuanced critique that White House may have about Israel’s actions. For Beijing and Moscow, seeing Washington DC get thoroughly discredited across the global south and get entangled in yet another conflict in the West Asian theatre is great news. It aids their story of American decline, ruins the prospects of a western-led compact in the region, gives them more space in the European and Indo-Pacific theatres, and leads to a cheap way, through Iran, to create the conditions of chaos that undermine the global system further.
And in that inability of the international community to act, and the active willingness of powerful states to let the conflict fester for reasons that often have nothing to do with the conflict itself, lies the tragedy of international politics.
The past year marks civilisation’s biggest failure of the 21st century so far. And that tragedy is a direct product of how societies interpret their past, how polities are run in the present, and how the world is governed or not governed.
