The October 7 War - a Thorn in the Side of Hubris
How October 7 demonstrates the Palestinian cause's continued centrality in Middle Eastern affairs
From the beginning of my time studying the Middle East, let’s say officially around 2017, there had been well-publicized whispers of a looming regional showdown between the US and Iran, another big Middle East war that would draw in all the region’s players like its 1973 all over again.
But unlike 1973, this prophesized war would not be between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Instead, such a war would see the US’s regional alliance face off against Iran and the armed non-state actors it supports across the Middle East.
Over the last two decades, Iran has effectively spread its influence across the region, being able to pull the strings of power in four Arab capitals by the late 2010s.
Indeed, through those years, multiple incidents occurred that seemingly could have sparked a chain of events that would inevitably pull the US into a big war in the Middle East spanning from Yemen to Iraq.
This was first apparent in the lead-up to the Iran nuclear deal, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed the Obama administration to take out Iranian nuclear facilities, something Obama knew could escalate uncontrollably (this was discussed in the Frontline doc Netanyahu’s War).
In 2018, Iran-backed forces launched a salvo of rockets into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, prompting extensive strikes across Syria, again sparking fear of escalation.
Perhaps the most tense moment was in the early days of 2020, when then-President Donald Trump assassinated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani after tensions grew in the wake of Iraq’s October Revolution the year before.
Then in the last two years, following an uptick in Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank, nominally in response to a string of Palestinian attacks in 2022, commentators started ringing alarm bells.
Many hinted at a Third Palestinian Intifada, essentially restricted to the West Bank, regardless of whether such a term even made sense in the post-2007 and the pre-October 7 status quo.
The status quo on the Lebanese border also began to seemingly become more fluid in 2023, with high-level meetings between Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Beirut, talk of “uniting the fronts,” and rocket fire into the Galilee.
Though Hezbollah had essentially signed off on a maritime deal with Israel in 2022, tensions on the border remained, even if relatively contained.
Around this time, Saudi Arabia and Iran announced a Chinese-mediated understanding to calm tensions and expand regional cooperation.
Everything seemed to be moving in an undefined direction, as I wrote in a post at the time.
Though tensions between Israel and Iran only worsened, almost out of the blue, Iran and Saudi Arabia decided it may be time to start a new chapter, as geopolitical tensions between other regional players markedly cooled.
Nonetheless, talk of a looming war kept up unabated, at least in places like Lebanon, forgotten by the region’s power brokers.
Many observers pointed to the Lebanese border, the Golan Heights, or the West Bank as potential regions that could see tensions escalate into a serious crisis, not to mention other places like Deir ez-Zor, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf.
Additionally, fears of Iran’s nuclear capabilities also grew, as talks between the Biden administration and Tehran floundered.
And then, out of nowhere, isolated Gaza, thought quiet and contained, was where the spark that started the fire originated.
The October 7 War is raging into its sixth month, around 30,000 Palestinians are dead, and one can now potentially evaluate what we (the people who follow this stuff for a living) got wrong to a satisfactory degree in the short term.
Why did so many, disregarding Israel’s security establishment (its own can of worms) misread Hamas so spectacularly?
And why did so many fail to understand what this conflict would be or look like?
In hindsight, it all seems so clear, almost as if destined. However, this obscures all the small and large choices that led to this fateful moment.
Israel is now threatening to invade Rafah, a city on the Gazan side of the Egyptian border in which over half of the strip’s 2.3 million population are taking refuge, primarily in tent camps. A Rafah assault could be a decisive move in the history of this conflict if realized, potentially setting the region on a terrible course.
As has been demonstrated time and time again, including since October 7, the Palestinian cause is a central issue in the Arab conscience, perhaps a core feature of the modern Arab identity.
Gaza nor the abstract dream of a free Palestine — one that lives in the hearts of tens of millions from varying communities throughout the region — will ever become irrelevant until, at the very least, a Palestinian state is established.
The region simply cannot progress past its current sordid condition until this dream is realized and made a reality, regardless of what that reality may look like.
As I have said in the past, I am neither Palestinian nor Israeli; I am a nerdy white boy from New York who simply wants to learn more about this part of the world and analyze its affairs.
It is not up to me how this all ends.
My job is simply to report the news, make sense of it, and explain it to you, dear readers, as best I can. I am quite fallible, and I make plenty of mistakes, but, please, bear with me.
A short history of America’s Middle East
After the US overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in 2003, Iran became the biggest threat to US interests in the region.
In 2006, Israel tried and failed to dislodge Iran-backed Hezbollah from southern Lebanon following years of the group developing its forces in the aftermath of Israel’s chaotic withdrawal from the country in 2000. The war established a certain “rules of engagement” that maintained the status quo on the border until October 7, 2023.
The US and Israel were also increasingly concerned going into the late 2000s that Iran would produce a nuclear weapon, which would upend the region’s status quo and essentially ensure the Islamic Republic’s continued security.
In addition to Iran’s support for groups opposed to the US’s occupation of Iraq, Hezbollah strengthened its hand in Lebanon in 2008 after violently preventing the government from dismantling its telecommunication network, among other issues.
Then the 2011 Arab Spring, coming out of nowhere, upended the regional order, with the US, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all playing an active role in shaping the rebellions erupting across the region in their respective favor, igniting or escalating several drawn out civil wars.
In Syria, Iran supported the Syrian government against a Western, Turkish, and Gulf-backed uprising. Though possessing a long-established alliance due to their mutual opposition to Saddam’s Iraq (and US interests at times), Syria under the Assad family distrusted the Islamic Republic, only accepting Iranian intervention due to the gravity of the situation.
Before 2011, Syria, though isolated, was still very much within the Arab (and Sunni) fold, as demonstrated by Syrian-occupied Lebanon’s sen w sen status quo, in which the country’s levers of power were presided over by a troika comprised of the Shiite Amal Movement’s Nabih Berri, the Druze Progressive Socialist Party’s Walid Jumblatt, and the Sunni Future Movement’s Rafic Hariri and backed by Syria and Saudi Arabia (Suriya w Saudiya in Arabic, thus sen w sen).
After the war began, however, Iranian-backed fighters, almost all Shiites, from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan began to pour into Syria, either in late 2011 or 2012, preventing the government’s collapse.
Of course, foreign fighters also poured into Syria to support the revolution, mainly through Turkey. These fighters would eventually make up a sizable portion of the Islamic State’s (IS) military forces.
IS’s advance into northern Iraq in 2014 crumbled any illusions that the US’s mission in the country had been at all successful, with Iranian-backed militias spearheading the fight to push back the so-called caliphate.
Both Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria made concrete progress against their rivals, with Iran finally establishing a solid land corridor between Tehran and the Mediterranean, passing through Baghdad, Syria’s Deir ez-Zor, Damascus, and Beirut.
Things cooled down *kinda* between 2014 and 2016, with the Obama administration hammering out the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.
Often seen as a concession from Obama for the nuclear deal, Saudi Arabia, in late 2015, led a coalition of Arab states against the Houthis in Yemen, who were on the verge of capturing the southern port city of Aden and effectively taking the whole country.
Though Iran’s ties to the Houthis before 2014/2015 are still uncertain, Iranian weapons and support, most importantly drones and rockets, helped sustain the Houthis and develop their capabilities in the face of a harsh blockade.
The Trump administration, though at times restrained, took a hawkish stance toward Iran and sought to develop ties with the Gulf states.
Only a few months after Trump took office in 2017, Syrian government forces backed by Iran and Russia rapidly advanced through the desert, eventually linking up with Iraqi forces on the border, cementing Iran’s land corridor.
Though Trump seemingly almost withdrew from Syria, his waffling led to a third Turkish invasion into the country’s north against the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), essentially the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Syria alongside some anti-IS Arab and revolutionary factions. The PKK is a Kurdish group that has been fighting the Turkish military for decades.
The US also has a base at al-Tanf, blocking the Baghdad-Damascus highway, thus making Iran’s corridor through Deir ez-Zor an obvious chokepoint.
I produced a poorly-made map for a visual reference of the region’s spheres of influence and Iran’s land corridor:
Red-orange: The US + Arab allies excluding Qatar
Green: Turkey + Qatar, both US allies, but have better relations with Iran, share geopolitical goals/alliances, and are critical of other US allies in the region
Purple: Iran + its allies (I marked Armenia as an Iranian ally because of Turkey etc), the corridor passing through Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut
Black Dashes: international shipping routes
One can make a few observations from this map depicting geopolitical influence in the region:
First, one can see why Iran wants the US out of Syria. Iranian-backed forces targeted US soldiers in Jordan a few weeks ago, right on the frontier with Iran’s sphere of influence. A US withdrawal from Syria would likely see the collapse of the SDF, thus giving Iran more “breathing room.”
Second, on top of economic reasons, Qatar and Turkey both have clear geopolitical reasons to keep warmer relations with Iran, even if any cooperation is ultimately the product of convenience.
Third, the US is still the dominant superpower in the region. However, it is facing an adversary particularly well-suited to subvert US interests in the region and inflict concessions.
Fourth, on the bottom of the priority list, though still a priority, the US maintains a light presence in Lebanon and is set to build a massive embassy outside Beirut in the city’s far-out eastern suburbs, *cough* *cough* spy center *cough* *cough*. Given the US’s lighter presence and its focus on intelligence gathering, Iran and Hezbollah are generally more interested in keeping local US allies in check and their eyes on the Americans.
Finally, Iran can now project power into the Mediterranean (via Lebanon and Syria), the Red Sea (via Yemen), and the Persian Gulf (via Iran and Iraq), having allied forces near all of the region’s most critical trade routes.
Simply put, Iran enjoys a network of strategic infrastructure that is hundreds of miles deep. Though interesting parallels with the US, Russia, and Turkey exist, Iran has crafted a strategy that can continually harass the US without risking too serious of an escalation.
The US and Israel are not fighting Iran on its borders. Rather, they are forced to engage it along the frontiers of its sphere of influence or conduct espionage.
Almost an inverted reflection of the US’s usual modus operandi in the Middle East, the clerics have relied on a patchwork of non-state actors to forward their interests, both saving capital and extending Iran’s plausible deniability.
As opposed to the US’s regional strategy, which generally invests in states, Iran usually prefers to rely on sub-state or non-state actors in weak states, as they do not require the same level of investment.
Even in Syria, where Iran is supporting a centralized autocratic government, Tehran has managed to chip off segments of the state that it can use to advance its geopolitical interests.
One striking thing you might notice about the map above that I purposefully excluded: Gaza is seemingly irrelevant in this regional patchwork of WWI-esque alliances, only missing trenches on a handful of frontlines.
If one were looking at this map in 2018, 2020, or October 6, 2023, it would seem obvious that Iran’s main goals were to entrench itself in the countries in which it has hard power and harass US forces in sensitive areas, namely the Tanf garrison (just south of Iran’s land corridor on the Syrian side of the Iraqi and Jordanian borders), bases east of the Euphrates in Deir ez-Zor, Baghdad, and the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq.
Indeed, Deir ez-Zor is the primary chokepoint in Iran’s corridor, and given the frequency of attacks in that area in recent years, one would expect that Deir ez-Zor would be the cradle of the next Middle East war.
The notion that Gaza would produce the spark that sufficiently tipped the scale in this regional shit show seemed incredibly stupid.
Iran appeared to want to put pressure on Israel through the West Bank and Gaza, namely via its support for PIJ and Hamas, with which it had had shaky relations given the war in Syria until ties thawed in 2018.
However, it seems increasingly likely that Iran did not know about Hamas’s plans for October 7, thus complicating this relationship.
Though it is surely possible that Iran and its allied forces were all aware of October 7 and wanted to set the region on fire, due to the simple fact of Israel’s intelligence-gathering abilities, such a possibility seems somewhat unlikely.
If it were really true that only Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, Marwan Eissa, and a few others knew the specifics of October 7, it could also mean that the internal leaders may have thought they could force Iran’s hand and invert Tehran’s perception of their relationship.
For instance, when Iran claimed that October 7 was a response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani, Hamas immediately responded by saying that this was false and the attack was motivated by the Israeli state’s many injustices against Palestinians.
There’s a bad tendency in Tehran to treat some of its clients as if they are expendable, something Hamas leaders likely saw as a given.
Iran saw Hamas as a useful asset in deterring Israel and a card that could be called on if the situation required it. After all, it’s not Tehran that would get flattened by an Israeli response.
Instead, Hamas leveraged the position it was in, forcing Iran to put up or shut up, something Tehran generally does not enjoy doing.
Given the mess of geopolitical alignments, again very WWI-esque, perhaps Sinwar saw October 7 as the spark that could pull the rug out underneath everyone, the Israelis, the Americans, the Gulf states, and the Iranians.
Keep in mind that while the media has focused on Hamas’s reported goal to upend Saudi Arabia’s potential normalization with Israel, Hamas’s internal leadership may have also had grievances with Iran that could have motivated the decision to keep Tehran in the dark.
Though the Saudi-Iran rapprochement happened only seven months before the attack, the wind was blowing in the direction of a calmer regional political scene. Perhaps the Qataris informed Hamas’s leadership of what was to come, who knows?
Meanwhile, the heat Iran was slowly cranking up on the Lebanese and Syrian borders does not correspond with October 7, which came after months of concern regarding Hezbollah setting up tents in a disputed border town.
However, there were some rumors of a Hezbollah-Israel border deal coming soon, which would demarcate the border and thus fundamentally change Hezbollah’s raison d'être.
Given that Hezbollah made a maritime deal with Israel (which was not that great of a deal for Lebanon either) in 2022, it may have seemed clear that the Iranians would hang Hamas out to dry soon enough.
As I have indicated many times, these sorts of things do not happen for singular reasons, and there is a laundry list of factors that led to the perfect storm that was October 7.
To name a few briefly: Israeli hubris regarding Hamas and its ability to adapt; the Israeli intelligence apparatus’s failure to connect the dots; the over-reliance on technology to maintain Israel’s barrier with Gaza; the deployment of Israeli forces to other fronts, such as the north or the West Bank to defend settlers; Hamas’s successful sleight of hand that it was pacified after the May 2021 War; military training and equipment Hamas received from Iran and its allied militias in recent years; and an overall failure of imagination on the part of everyone involved, just to name a few possible reasons a relatively small militant group largely operating out of an embargoed coastal strip managed to rampage through southern Israel.
Long war or big war?
I, like many others, did not understand in 2018 that the next big regional war would not look like the scenarios described by pundits during that time.
Just as I was starting to get my bearings regarding the region’s political dynamics, the general narratives that I can remember dictated that when the big war came, it would be apocalyptic.
Israeli and US troops would be fighting Iran and its allies across a front stretching over 1,000 miles, crossing the Mediterranean, the Lebanese border, the Golan, the Jordanian border regions, the Euphrates, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and Yemen.
Saudi Arabia, directly threatened by an invasion through southern Iraq, would be forced to enter the war alongside the US.
The war would see oil infrastructure destroyed causing gas prices to skyrocket across the globe. Russia and China would have to get involved, escalating the situation even more, as the US and its allies got bogged down in the vast expanse of the Syrian desert and Iran’s mountainous terrain.
To put it simply, it would be a catastrophe.
I was likely too young to call bullshit.
However, now that this war has ground on for some time, the situation has grown somewhat clearer in terms of what was so wrong with this cataclysmic framing.
Yes, in a sense the US and its allies are confronting Iran-aligned forces across this 1,000-mile frontier, but it’s only at a higher intensity than the status quo ante.
Hostilities along the frontier, though notably expanded, have not really lived up to the apocalyptic fantasies some commentators often envision in these situations of tangled alliances, even if the possibility of serious escalation is still very real.
I noted to a friend recently that every time I think the situation has gotten as hot as it’s going to get, it manages to get hotter and somehow the whole dam thing still hasn’t boiled over.
How far does the escalation ladder really go?
Does Iran’s strategy of supporting non-state actors that it can deny its leadership over extend this ladder so that Iran has more tools and time at its disposal to gain concessions?
Tangentially, Israel has not decided yet what type of war this will be, somehow, after almost five months.
Israel has only really ever fought short big wars or long low-intensity wars.
Israel’s short big wars include the Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War (obviously), the 1973 War, the Lebanon wars in 1978, 1982, and 2006, and the Gaza wars pre-October 7.
The long low-intensity wars, which have been rarer and generally avoided, include the 1967-1970 War of Attrition with Egypt, the occupation of south Lebanon, the Intifadas (note the first one is generally seen as being relatively peaceful), and Israeli operations in the occupied West Bank since the 2000s.
As one can see, Israel’s military and political leadership generally prefers to keep it short.
Israel’s war in Gaza is simply unsustainable, even with the gargantuan level of support Israel has received from the US, and Israel’s leadership, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, is well aware of this.
The only other time in Israel’s history that it has fought a war that was both long and big was during its inception in 1948, which saw a months-long high-intensity conflict that Israeli forces were not guaranteed to win until foreign intervention (from the Eastern Bloc) turned the tide.
That war saw the mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from territories in which they were a majority. At the time, the Zionist militias believed the land was needed to ensure the demographics of a Jewish-majority nation-state that was also viable from an economic and military perspective.
Now, Israeli far-right ministers openly broadcast to a global audience their dreams of rebuilding Jewish settlements atop Gaza’s ruins.
However, unlike Israel’s first war, it is not fighting the armies of several countries, regardless of its relative military advantages at the time.
In 2024, Israel is fighting Hamas with almost more intensity and fear than it has in any big war since its first.
Israeli society, which has generally approved of the war even after thousands of Palestinian deaths, seems to feel a sense of anxiety it has not felt in over 75 years.
Netanyahu seems to be making progress in stalling as he desperately tries to find a path in which he can hold onto power via ruthlessly preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.
By pessimistically stoking fears among the Israeli public that any notion of a Palestinian state would reward Hamas for killing 1,200 Israelis, largely civilians, and lead to another October 7, Netanyahu is essentially telling the public, “this is a bad situation, and only a bad guy can fix it.”
Given that Israelis from both the north and south are hesitant to return home, it seems the public is not convinced they are safe, meaning domestically the war can continue (though the government has extended evacuation orders either way).
Netanyahu may even be willing to risk normalization with the Arab world (for another decade at least) and isolate Israel if it means he gets to stay in power.
Netanyahu is a deeply cynical politician, who has a long track record of proving adaptive. He knows how to maneuver around major obstacles and improvise, though his handling of this situation will likely define his political legacy, regardless of its outcome.
He knows full well that one of the few things that unite the different communities that make up the Arab world is the Palestinian cause.
Many scholars (such as Tariq Ismail) have posited that a foundational principle of the Arab Left in the post-independence era was opposition and hostility toward Israel, even if that Left is long gone.
However, it seems that, broadly speaking, sympathies with the Palestinians and their plight still run deep throughout the region regardless of political orientation.
Palestine is not just a dream for Palestinians, it is a canvas on which tens of millions of modern Arabs project their respective dreams for a better future, as poll after poll indicates that a vast majority of people in the region support the Palestinians.
Though Arab Nationalism has lost its appeal in a certain sense, Palestine remains a holdover of the Arab Nationalist project that has repeatedly adapted to the Middle East’s ever-changing landscape, an idea that is concretely in the region’s popular conscience.
I want to expand on this more in a future post and need to do way more research, so I won’t go too into detail here, but the basic narrative (that underlies a myriad of Arab political projects) is as follows:
The Arab world, once the center of Islamic power with its most prized capitals of Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, has, in recent centuries (some even going as far back as 1000 years), become a region carved up and dominated by foreign powers.
The Palestinian cause naturally ties itself to this narrative, as Israel is often viewed as a European imperial creation to divide the Arab world and cause strife among its peoples.
This narrative can also lend itself to Iran’s soft power goals, but success is yet to be substantially realized given Iran’s empty threats of escalation, something I think Hamas wanted to lay bare if Iran was not willing to play ball.
Ultimately, for people in the region and beyond, Palestine is a rallying cry of great symbolic significance. Every departure from the status quo over the decades has had ripple effects that venture farther than the Middle East, from the 1973 Arab oil boycott to the Houthi attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea 50 years later.
Means to an end
Arab governments and political movements (including some outside the region) will continue to use Palestine as a rhetorical bludgeon to score populist political points while legitimizing domestic repression via national security laws and emergency powers.
To be clear, a political resolution to this conflict will not fix the Middle East nor will it uproot the structural challenges found in many Arab states. Competition among regional powers would continue as usual, regardless of the situation in the Levant.
This is also not to say that a political solution is going to occur anytime soon. My only intention is to illustrate that the Palestinian cause will continue to be central to the region’s politics and future.
All I mean to say here is that it is not difficult to see why the region is so hostile to the US and its interests.
The US diplomatically, logistically, and militarily supports a violent apartheid state that, since the 1960s, has acted as a springboard for US influence in a region spanning the length of Morocco to Iraq.
I would never deny that Arab Nationalist rhetoric has often lent itself to authoritarian practices, something Tariq Ismail wrote was to be expected given the ideology’s romanticism and the weak post-colonial civil states throughout the Arab world. However, Arab Nationalism is not the only regional umbrella ideology that has moved toward fascistic and/or autocratic tendencies over time.
It is difficult to look at Israel’s not-so-subtle forms of systematic discrimination via a system of checkpoints, raids, searches, arbitrary detention, and tiered citizenship “west of the Jordan” and not see that it too is autocratic and fascistic, just toward Palestinians.
Critics of this framing, when not arguing in bad faith, sometimes argue that it unfairly demonizes Israel for practices many states engage in.
There is an element of truth to this, with examples of overlooked issues being Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara, the Syrian government’s killing of thousands of Palestinians during the civil war, and the laundry list of discriminatory practices in Lebanon toward Palestinians and other foreign nationals and so on.
However, as I will explain shortly, this narrative falls apart rather quickly under basic scrutiny.
They also sometimes point out that the natural conclusion here is to perhaps then agitate for a “one-state” solution, which, according to most polling, Palestinians generally oppose.
To this I say, as I said earlier, I am not interested in proposing what a resolution to this conflict should look like nor am I interested in pontificating about the contours of a future Palestinian state.
I am primarily interested in describing what is going on today, the status quo, and the problems that policymakers have been discussing since October 7.
I see no point in partaking in rhetorical charades, and calling a spade a spade is necessary to advance a useful understanding of reality and what may happen in the immediate future.
Though Foreign Affairs ran an article last year declaring Israel’s “one-state reality,” something unimaginable only a decade ago, I far prefer the term “no-state reality,” as it transcends this utopic discourse of “one-state” versus “two-state.”
The reality on the ground is that Israel controls everything “west of the Jordan,” and there simply is no Palestinian state.
Palestine is, in fact, in tatters, and Palestinians still face the threat of oblivion.
A political authority is only internally accountable to those who hold full citizenship to it. For those living under its authority without full citizenship or comprehensive civil rights, they are subject to a different reality.
Israel is not unique in its tendencies either, as many societies, settler or not, have created a permanent underclass that is essential to the labor pool but must be ruthlessly policed to maintain a cruel and unjust system of exploitation and deprivation.
Israel is also not unique in the sense that it is a society built atop the mass graves of the one that preceded it.
However, a few things complicate Israel’s position:
First, Israel’s security goals — in this sense the “transfer” of the native population elsewhere — would have actually been quite achievable up into the early parts of the 20th century, as this was done in several instances where populations deemed irreconcilable were “transferred” (what we now call ethnic cleansing) to either other regions or their “home” nation. However, considering Israel’s creation occurred in the aftermath of WWII in the mid-20th century and it is generally considered a “Western” country, it may seemingly be held to a higher standard than other countries, namely in the Global South. I think both Ralph Leonard and Aris Roussinos wrote about this.
Second, an extension of the first point, Israel’s close relationship with the US draws it both just and unjust attention, as the US does go out of its way to shield Israel from backlash, at times to near absurd levels. As I wrote about in my last post, on the most basic level, US foreign policy is shaped by institutional rigidity, domestic political pressures, leaders’ respective personal styles, and cold hard material interest from what has typically been a realist perspective since the early days of the Cold War.
Third, the Arab world is a key region in the international order as I have pointed out multiple times. Arabic is one of the six primary languages at the UN, as it includes upwards of 300 million speakers. The region is a lynchpin in the global system of trade, bordering several crucial highways of maritime commerce. Arab petrostates also possess a substantial share of the global oil & gas market, their status re-cemented after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Fourth, regarding why there is so much attention on Palestinians as opposed to other oppressed groups in the Middle East and elsewhere, the reasons are rooted in Arab, Muslim, and Leftist political identities, all drawing on respective traditions of social justice in their support for the Palestinian cause. Antisemites also gravitate toward this topic, but I have increasingly found that they are rarely subtle and eventually reveal their intentions, which are seldom ever even related to Palestine, more often than not just a ploy to forward their own political project laundered with populist bigotry.
The main political identities involved in this cause all have a range of internal and external contradictions creating a hodgepodge movement that includes aging communists drinking their sorrows away in Beirut, conservative Islamists in London, and idealistic college freshmen drunk on utopian visions of their SJP-endorsed one-state solution.
Palestinian movements themselves are quite varied, with a full spectrum of political parties, armed groups, and ideologies playing their part on the scene over the years.
Nonetheless, regardless of one’s place along the fractured spectrum of people who call themselves pro-Palestine — a mess of left-wing Israelis, Western activists, bigots, random US Republicans, Irish people for some reason, Muslims across the globe, Islamists, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and, you know, Palestinians — the issue reverberates over so many fault lines it is a real slog through the mud to write about given the necessity of precise and respectful word choice.
It is just one of those things to which so many groups see reflections of their own struggle, latching on to its motifs as symbols of solidarity.
Some act in good faith and others don’t, that is up to you, the reader, to decide.
All the big players in the region thought the Palestinians could be left behind, yet now we are here; the region is on fire.
As I have written numerous times in the last 149 days, there are a few things I am quite certain of: Hamas will survive this war, Israel’s political leadership is destined to contend with increased international pressure to accept the creation of a Palestinian state, the status quo has been thoroughly shattered, and the Palestinian cause will continue to remain an amorphous symbol of resistance throughout the Middle East.
I’m not really sure what the future will look like.
I’m not sure anyone does outside of some lucky guesses.
Keep your eyes peeled, dear reader, for the ripples of this war in the coming years.
Until next time,
Cheers!