1914 again

 Having decided to discuss the Middle East once again, I reviewed the two posts I made last October, only weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel triggered the war.   The first analyzed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather pessimistically, arguing that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian leadership really wanted peace and a two-state solution in the long run, and suggesting that under the circumstances, they had a responsibility to try to keep the level of conflict as low as possible.  It occurs to me now that talk of a two-state solution has been designed to do that.  The Israelis have however continued to wage a remarkably destructive war that has left most of Gaza uninhabitable while hundreds of thousands of Gazans--if not more than a million--move their tents from one camp to another.  The Israeli government does not seem to want a cease fire, even though its military leadership recommends this.

Meanwhile, as a long New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins shows, a new low-level conflict between Hezbollah and Israel continues along the northern border.  Hezbollah immediately began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas, and Israel immediately began striking back.  Tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese have had to abandon their homes along the border.  Everyone seems to agree that Hezbollah would stop this particular campaign in response to a cease-fire in Gaza, but its long-term threat would remain.  And they now, I think, have the capability to threaten the existence of Israel.  I do not mean that they could destroy Israel, but they apparently have so many sophisticated rockets that they could make large parts of Israel look the way Gaza looks today if they fired them all off.  Israel would in turn destroy much of Lebanon, but the damage Hamas could inflict, it seems to me, would decisively undermine the ideological foundation of the Jewish state: that it provides unique safety for the Jewish people.  So many Israelis, it seems to me, would decide that the Zionist experiment had failed and would emigrate to the West that the survival of the nation would be called into question. 

The underlying problem, as I wrote then, is the failure of much of the region to accept Israel's existence.  Here some history tells a very sad story.  About 40 years ago, a young Israeli diplomat named Nimrod Barkan explained some of the diplomacy of the early Jewish state.  Facing the unremitting hostility from the Arab states that surrounded it, Tel Aviv had cultivated relationships with the largest non-Arab states in the region:  Ethiopia, Iran, and Turkey.  The last two of those nations were also allies of the West.  Beginning in the 1970s, of course, Israel made peace first with Egypt and then with Jordan, and more recently it established diplomatic relations with some Gulf states.  Iran, however, went totally over to anti-Zionism after its Islamic revolution in 1979, and has become the patron of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.   Turkey has also become more Islamic and is now a declared foe of Israel.   And Iran has provided both with the missiles that have put the Israeli population under permanent threat and could in fact destroy a good deal of the country.

In my opinion, Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the Congress left no doubt that he feels that Israel, with the help of the United States, should remove this threat through wars with Hamas (ongoing as we speak), Hezbollah (threatening to become total at any moment), and Iran itself.  Meanwhile he has made Gaza uninhabitable while Israeli settlers, often backed by the Israeli Army, continue to squeeze the Arab population of the West Bank into smaller and smaller territory.  And that brings me to the analogy I drew in the second post last October between the current situation and the European situation in 1914

My analogy, which disturbed some readers, cast Israel as the 21st-century counterpart of Austria-Hungary, a state of the second rank threatened by its neighbors and by internal conflict with ethnic minorities.  The Israeli situation is in some ways just as precarious, since the Arab and Israeli populations of the territory from the Jordan River to the sea are nearly equal, and Israel is split between left- and right-wing Israelis in the same way that Austria-Hungary was between Austrians and ethnic Hungarians.  Israel reacted to the Hamas attack the way Austria-Hungary decided to respond to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, by trying to crush the source of the attack.  It did so with the backing of the United States, just as Austria-Hungary did so with the backing of its ally Germany.  War broke out almost immediately in July-August 1914 because the Germans, for their own reasons, were more than willing to risk a European war.  The United States has tried unsuccessfully to get Israel to halt its war in Gaza because it fears a wider war involving both Hezbollah and Iran.  Israel is however continuing to provoke those nations with assassinations, and Netanyahu, to repeat, talked in Washington as if he would welcome general war.

Iran does not seem to want that war, all the less because it has a new president who reportedly wants better relations with the west.  Yet I am afraid that if the war does break out, the United States will come in on Israel's side.  A few years ago an excellent Frontline documentary showed that the United States and Iran were perilously close to a strike on Iran's nuclear capability during the Obama administration.  It seems that if full-scale war between Iran and Israel broke out, the United States would side with Israel and might well join in the fighting itself.

We should remember that the 1914 crisis was the last of a number of disputes between Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, and Serbia, backed by Russia.  Crises over the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908-9 and over Serbian expansion in the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 did not result in war because cooler heads prevailed in all the major capitals.  They are not prevailing in Israel now, however, and things could change at any moment within Hezbollah and Iran.  The major powers, including Russia, seem to be trying to preserve the peace, but the danger of general regional war is very real, and that in turn could easily escalate into world war.