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The temptation to see the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 as a profoundly transformational event in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East is irresistible, and it’s easy to see why.
The temptation to see the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 as a profoundly transformational event in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East is irresistible, and it’s easy to see why.
The attack—including the killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers, the reported rape and torture of women and girls, and the taking of some 250 hostages, many of whom have been abused or died in captivity—demonstrated the group’s brutal sadism. Israel’s response—a siege of Gaza depriving an already impoverished population of basic necessities followed by weeks of airstrikes and months of ground combat—has killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them women and children; Israel estimates that it has killed some 10,000 Hamas fighters.
As if these events weren’t potentially transformational enough, escalation by Hezbollah along the Israeli-Lebanese border; attacks by Houthis against international shipping in the Red Sea; and pro-Iranian militia strikes against U.S. forces in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan has raised the specter of something the modern Middle East has never experienced—a truly regional war. Apart from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Israel-Hamas war is already the longest ever fought.
The transformative character of what Oct. 7 set in motion seemed to many brutally clear. “There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on Oct. 6,” U.S. President Joe Biden said on Oct. 25. “Israel was one country on Oct. 6 and another on Oct. 7,” Michael Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said in late October. Jordan’s King Abdullah warned darkly that the “whole region is on the brink of falling into the abyss.”
These predictions may or may not prove to be true. Six months into this crisis, we do not even know where we are on the conflict’s trajectory or where it’s headed. CIA Director Bill Burns, a friend and colleague of one of the authors, who’s not prone to exaggeration, deemed this the most dangerous and tangled conflict he’d witnessed in decades.
Yet the Middle East has often proved to be unpredictably predictable. It is true that crisis can scramble the playing field, often with horrific consequences—but sometimes with positive outcomes. Almost every breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli arena was preceded by intense violence. The 1973 war led to Egyptian-Israeli peace; Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait produced the Madrid peace conference; and the First Intifada resulted in the Oslo Accords.
But we may not be as fortunate this time around. Two deeply traumatized communities will emerge from this crisis, and at the moment both are lacking the kinds of leaders essential to transformational change. It’s worth asking whether the region’s legendary resistance to change and the absence of leaders willing to take real risks, including those in Washington, will yield a new status quo that’s much like the one so many hoped to leave behind.
Much remains to be sorted. But several looming factors suggest that the new, post-crisis Middle East may look strikingly like the old one.
Every State Department decision memo begins: “The United States has three broad options.” The joke, of course, is that these are “nuke them,” “surrender,” or whatever the drafter’s favored alternative was, aka “my option.” The poor addressee is inevitably herded toward that one. The first two have the virtues of finality; the third is just an uninspiring nudge to muddle through. ‘Twas ever thus, at least regarding Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Attempts to break the mold by Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama ended in scandal or swift reversal.
The options menu doesn’t look very different now, as Iran has seized on the Gaza crisis to use its axis of resistance—a jumble of groups including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen—to stir up trouble for Israel and the United States. The notable feature of the current confrontation, however, is the relative restraint exercised by these parties, except for the Houthis. The main players have too much to lose by an all-out fight and have signaled publicly and privately that they wish to avoid one. Instead, they have contented themselves with a sustained level of violence just below the threshold of escalation. But the threshold is in the eye of the beholder—hence the persistent risk of inadvertent escalation.
Since the crisis began, diplomatic efforts by the United States and France have laid the basis for a more durable, formal arrangement on the Blue Line between Israel and Lebanon. The deal would trade a withdrawal of Hezbollah’s Radwan storm troops from the line for territorial adjustments that favor Lebanese claims. Lebanese Army units would deploy to the south in lieu of Hezbollah forces. These talks have stalled but will likely resume.
In Iraq, the main Iran-aligned militia proposed a truce, and a mini-groundswell for the expulsion of U.S. forces has receded. Persian Gulf waters have been relatively calm. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have indicated that a U.S. war with Iran would be unwelcome. In Syria, Israeli air power continues to thwart Iranian maneuvering; Iran has withdrawn senior Revolutionary Guard personnel because it cannot protect them. In the Bab el-Mandeb strait, U.S. and U.K. strikes and the interdiction of Iranian resupply efforts are slowly chipping away at the Houthis’ coastal infrastructure, if not their stockpiles, and will eventually drive an end to the mayhem in the Red Sea, if an Israel-Hamas cease-fire doesn’t do so first.
Bottom line: An escalatory spiral that fundamentally alters pre-Oct. 7 geopolitical dynamics does not seem to be in the cards—though a new hand can always be dealt.
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Even in Gaza, where Israel continues its grinding military campaign, a political change is hardly guaranteed. Perhaps the most candid assessment of the fate of Hamas comes from an Israeli intelligence document, widely circulated among the political echelon. The bottom line: “Hamas will survive this [Israel Defense Forces] campaign as a terror group and a guerrilla group.”
There’s no doubt that Hamas has been profoundly weakened as a military organization, and its capacity to pull off another Oct. 7 is greatly impaired. And while polls suggest that its popularity has surged in the West Bank, its standing in Gaza was compromised well before Oct. 7 as a result of its bad governance—but saw a minor surge afterward. Hamas benefits from being the only organized alternative to a bankrupt and sclerotic Palestinian Authority. Should its top leadership inside Gaza be eliminated, its viability will suffer.
None of this should suggest that Hamas’s capacity to influence Palestinian politics inside and outside Gaza has been fundamentally eroded and that it won’t be a factor in the proverbial day after. The most recent authoritative poll revealed that a majority of Palestinians in Gaza believe Hamas will win the war and resume its rule.
Why is Hamas still relevant when its policies have brought such suffering to Palestinians? First, Palestinians are more likely to blame Israel for their misfortunes rather than their own leadership. Polls show clearly that a majority of Palestinians believed the Hamas attack was justified by the Israeli occupation. Second, Hamas’s resilience is linked to the dysfunction of the PA and a sense that any post-conflict government must be based on a national consensus that would include all factions, including Hamas.
The awkward reality is that under current circumstances, there’s little chance of the PA—revitalized or otherwise—returning to govern Gaza without Hamas consent.
Then there’s the Israeli factor. It’s hard to imagine a better recruiting agency for Hamas’s extremism than the current Israeli government. Hamas is the organizational embodiment of an idea—the end of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state. The majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not subscribe to this goal. But the fecklessness of the PA, combined with Israel’s annexationist policies, offers Hamas a pathway to dominion over the Palestinian national movement.
Throughout, one inconvenient truth remains: Without a Palestinian national movement committed to functional governance and in control of the West Bank and Gaza with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, sovereignty and statehood are pretty much inconceivable.
It’s understandable that many would assume that the days of an Israeli leader who presided over the worst attack in the nation’s history and the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust would be numbered. That assessment may well prove correct. But even if and when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves office, his successor may have less leeway to make key decisions. That a majority of Israelis are tired of Netanyahu does not mean they are drifting leftward, oppose his approach toward Hamas, or support Palestinian statehood. More than 90 percent of Israeli Jews believe that the government is using the right amount of force against Hamas or should use more. Nor is there any viable mechanism for removing Netanyahu from power. His right-wing government isn’t about to end itself, and his main rival, Benny Gantz, remains seated at Netanyahu’s side in the war cabinet. For the foreseeable future, Netanyahu remains in charge.
Indeed, if the past is prologue in Israeli politics, the trend lines after a major crisis suggest a strong tendency to move to the right. Israel is already a right-wing or right-center country. After almost every military and security crisis, rightist parties have gained support.
In some case, crises can produce surprises. Few would have predicted that in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat would make a bid for peace or that Israel’s Menachem Begin would grasp it. But compared with the 1970s, today’s environment would not appear to favor bold decision-making on the Israeli side, Palestinian, or U.S. side. More than 100 hostages remain in Hamas hands; more than 200,000 Israelis have been temporarily relocated from the northern and southern border communities with little prospect of returning anytime soon. The threat of war with Hezbollah remains a constant concern—and for some Israelis, a necessity—and there’s little doubt that Israel will be operating in Gaza for months to come, as will Hamas insurgents. Even in the relatively quiet West Bank, attacks by Hamas and other groups, settler violence and vigilantism, and expanding Israeli settlements conspire to make any change of the situation unlikely.
Some point to the promise of a Saudi peace offer and with it reconciliation with the entire Arab world as a salve for the collective PTSD among Israelis induced by Oct. 7. But grand plans don’t necessarily produce grand results. The Biden administration’s scheme to transform the Middle East—a mix of low-income, high-population states and high-income, low-population states—by uniting the region’s richest country and its most technologically advanced one in a quest for intraregional trade, labor mobility, and infrastructure investment is certainly ambitious. But it’s also untethered from the realities of Middle Eastern governance and environmental conditions. That this vision is predicated on an enduring resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is in turn premised on unlikely developments in Israeli and Palestinian domestic politics, confers a surreal quality to claims about transformation.
Not that it would be a bad thing for Saudi Arabia and Israel to make peace and money together, but given foreseeable realities, normalization is most likely to reinforce Netanyahu’s political position and deal yet another blow to Palestinian aspirations. Whether it makes sense for the United States to offer a binding security guarantee to Saudi Arabia depends entirely on the reliability of a mercurial Saudi leader like Mohammed bin Salman to radically shift the direction of Saudi policy. He would be expected to abandon Saudi support for Russia within OPEC+, moderate production cuts with U.S. economic needs in mind, and distance the country from China, its largest energy market. Given the crown prince’s track record, his willingness to abide by these obligations even in the short term seems unlikely.
All in all, if you’re anticipating transformation, an old Spanish proverb comes to mind: “Best to wait sitting down.”
If the Gaza crisis and its aftermath do represent a horrific glitch in an otherwise immutable matrix, there is not a great deal the United States can do. As always, the belligerents have a lot more agency than outside powers. For the most part, the Biden administration understands this, but the results have been, at best, bittersweet. Some of Biden’s measures have worked to avoid making an extremely dangerous situation worse. They include the swift deployment of naval power and its subsequent redeployment; patience in the face of attacks followed by a measured response; not increasing the U.S. ground presence in the region in response to provocation; creative diplomacy to reduce the risk of escalation in the north; avoiding a drastic response to Houthi shipping attacks while trying to keep communication going; and maintaining constant, if largely ineffectual, pressure on Israel to shift its operational approach in Gaza, facilitate humanitarian assistance, and not try to push Palestinians to Egyptian territory. The fact that a relatively coherent response could be fashioned given the state of party politics in the United States is in itself remarkable. Yet the ghastly reality of tens of thousands of Palestinians dead and a shattered landscape cannot in any sense be described as a ringing foreign-policy success. It will haunt us.
Going beyond these moves, however, won’t be possible without Israeli and Palestinian commitments. And that seems scarcely likely at this juncture or indeed in the absence of a sea change in Israel’s state and society. If there was a sea change, it happened on Oct. 7. A reversal of the tide seems unlikely given the massacre of Israelis. It will be used by the Israeli right to validate its worldview of beleaguerment and its message that the world is roiled by hypocrisy and antisemitism. And there are no regional Arab powers, especially Saudi Arabia, willing and able to serve as the deus ex machina on this bleak stage.
Finally, there is the question of U.S. domestic politics. The Gaza crisis has divided Democrats and unified Republicans in the face of a consequential election. In the region, Israel and the Gulf states would welcome a Trump presidency. Thus far, the Biden administration has been preoccupied by the region’s turmoil, while the Trump campaign has not yet focused on the crisis. The campaign season, however, will undoubtedly make its presence felt as the United States and regional parties plot their next moves.
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