Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza is imminent. Currently more than 300,000 Israeli troops are amassed along the Gaza border, waiting to deliver on Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s promise that they will see Gaza from the inside.
A ground invasion will be a significant escalation of Israel’s indiscriminate response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 in southern Israel, in which 1,400 people, from a dozen countries, were killed and 200 people, including children and the elderly, were kidnapped.
Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza, imposing collective punishment on all its 2.2 million inhabitants, has so far killed more than 4,100 Palestinians. That bombardment has also been accompanied by clashes on Israel’s border with Lebanon, and attempted attacks by Iranian-backed forces from Syria, intensifying fears that events in Gaza will spiral into a wider conflict. Israel has sharply increased troop numbers on its northern border with Lebanon and is evacuating 20,000 residents from Kiryat Shmona, one of the biggest towns in the area.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning of a “long war” against Hamas may prove an understatement. Israel’s previous invasions of Gaza, in 2009 and 2014, in effect lasted less than three weeks. On both occasions the remit was to cripple Hamas’s military capacity and leave Gaza to its own devices. This time around, along with its desire to find and rescue its hostages, Israel wants to impose a “new security reality” on Gaza. That, as the west discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, will not be accomplished quickly. It will be bloody and fraught with difficulty, militarily and politically, as it drags on.
However, the real fear remains an even bloodier escalation of the conflict, drawing in other Iranian proxies, including Houthi rebels, who control Yemen’s capital and the surrounding area. On Thursday, the U.S. confirmed one of its destroyers in the Red Sea shot down cruise missiles and drones launched by Houthis, which may have been aimed at Israel.
Amid all this, a hastily arranged peace summit in Cairo today (Saturday), aimed at preventing contagion, looks like an exercise in futility. Quite why Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi thought he could organize an international summit is anyone’s guess. He was scarcely able to organize a couple of dozen lorries loaded with aid for Gaza across Egypt’s border.
Neither the U.S., Israel, or Iran will attend, and few senior Western leaders plan to travel to Egypt. The final nail in the coffin for the summit was the announcement late on Friday that inept long-marginalized Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would attend – doubtless to escape protesters at home demanding “the fall of the president”. There is more chance of the conflict in Gaza widening to the West Bank, than of Abbas offering anything akin to a solution.
The danger of a wider regional conflagration and what might happen next was widely discussed across the world’s media in the last week.
Writing in The Times of London today (Saturday), the historian Dominic Sandbrook draws a parallel with the atrocity in southern Israel and events in Gaza, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which sparked the outbreak of WWI, to show how events can spiral out of control.
He writes: “History never repeats itself, whatever Karl Marx might have said. Even so, it’s hard not to be struck by the echoes across the generations, the parallels between the Balkans in 1914 and the Middle East in 2023. A spectacular atrocity shocks the world and within hours the war-drums are beating. In a troubled capital, long riven by political divisions, a veteran leader weighs his options. To do nothing would look fatally weak. Worse, it might invite more attacks and risk his country’s future security.
“His only course, he thinks, is to show strength: to strike hard at the terrorist plotters, lancing the boil once and for all. But what about their sponsors, his country’s sworn enemies? There’s an obvious answer. He too has a mighty ally, with the most formidable military machine in the world. The risk is an ever-widening, ever-escalating war, which might destroy countless lives and sweep his country away. Yet wouldn’t doing nothing be the greater risk? What other choice does he have?
“This was the dilemma facing Austria-Hungary’s elderly emperor Franz Joseph in the summer of 1914. And this is the dilemma facing Israel’s elderly Prime Minister Binyamin (SIC) Netanyahu today. Could the long, tragic story of Israel and the Palestinians escalate into a wider regional war, as it did in 1948, 1967 and 1973? Could the Iranians really intervene to defend their local clients? Could the U.S. really be dragged in?”
The immediate catalyst for this worrying scenario playing out was examined by Michael Young, writing in Diwan, a blog from the Beirut based Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
Young suggests the impending Israeli ground invasion could follow a similar pattern to Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon.
He wrote: “With the Israelis asking the inhabitants of northern Gaza to move south, what may be taking shape is a strategy in which Israeli forces gradually push Hamas into a corner of Gaza, much as they did with the Palestine Liberation Organization in West Beirut in 1982, and begin a process of negotiations for the evacuation of its leadership.”
However, as Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, threatened this week during his visit to Lebanon, any ground invasion of Gaza will both escalate and widen the conflict. This would likely involve Hezbollah opening up a full blown second front in Israel’s north as well as an intensification of recent rocket attacks from Syria on the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, which according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) were carried out by Palestinian factions “working with the Lebanese Hezbollah”.
Despite warning “all the pieces are in place for a major explosion in the Middle East”, and despite Amir-Abdollahian’s rhetoric, Young believes Iran is aware that an escalation will seriously weaken its allies and its influence.
Mohanad Hage Ali, writing in the same publication, suggests Hezbollah is a prisoner of its regional alliances with Hamas and other Iran sponsored groups, and wants to avoid an all-out conflict in Lebanon over Gaza. In effect, he believes Hezbollah is no longer the author of its actions: “The party’s alliances, which were designed to act as another level of deterrence [against Israel], have instead exposed it to levels of military escalation that it has sought to avoid since 2006.”
Israel’s primary focus is of course to eradicate Hamas and rescue its hostages, but against the backdrop of America’s steadfast support right now – evidenced by Washington’s speedy deployment of a powerful naval force to the eastern Mediterranean, headed by the USS Gerald R Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier – Young adds that “it’s not inconceivable they [Israel] may choose to go all out and try to resolve their Hezbollah and Iran problems…However, the risks in this choice are many. Israel could suffer major destruction and loss of life, and most importantly it is highly probable that no side could win a clear-cut victory.”
Writing from Israel the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, urges Israel to react with caution. “Israel, like any other country, has a right to safeguard its existence and its citizens, and it would be folly to say that there is some easy way to combat Hamas without cost. But what will come from answering cruelty with accelerating cruelty, from an endless bombing campaign, from reoccupying part or all of Gaza? One thing is certain: it will intensify the suffering and resentments of ordinary Palestinians…The Palestinian Authority’s leadership – aging, corrupt and, thanks to the Israeli government’s perverse undermining, weak – will only lose more standing in the West Bank and Gaza.”
Con Coughlin, Defense and Foreign Affairs Editor at London newspaper The Daily Telegraph, and an experienced Middle East watcher, said Western governments must unite and support Israel to eradicate Hamas. He also called on Western governments to “urgently review their attitude toward countries like Iran and Qatar, whose backing for Hamas has enabled it to develop the terrorist capability necessary to carry out … the attacks. In particular, the U,S, and Europe should abandon efforts to improve ties with Tehran, which recently resulted in the Biden administration unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets in return for the release of five U.S. hostages.”
Whatever happens next, one hopes world leaders find a few minutes to read an article written by renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim for The Guardian newspaper in London. Barenboim was the co-founder, with Edward Said, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, composed of young Arab and Israeli musicians, and established the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin for young musicians from across the Middle East.
A few days after the Hamas attacks, Barenboim wrote: “In the current situation, I naturally ask myself about the significance of our joint work in the orchestra and the academy. It may seem little – but the mere fact that Arab and Israeli musicians share a podium at every concert and make music together is of immense value. Over the years, through this commonality of music-making, but also through our countless, sometimes heated discussions, we have learned to better understand the supposed other, to approach them and to find common ground. We start and end all discussions, no matter how controversial, with the fundamental understanding that we are all equal human beings who deserve peace, freedom and happiness. This may sound naive, but it is not: for it is this understanding that seems to be completely lost in the conflict on both sides today. Our experience shows that this message has reached many people in the region and around the world. We must, want and will continue to believe in our shared humanity. Music is one way to bring us closer together.”
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