Recent developments
On Oct. 7, 2023, the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas charged across the southern border into Israel, killing about 1,100 people and kidnapping 250. It likely sought to capitalize on a period of domestic instability in Israel, as civilians—and military officials—marched in protest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for controversial judicial reform. The ensuing war has joined the legions of conflicts that clutter the history of the Israeli and Palestinian territories. The war has sucked in more of the wider region than anticipated. Israel is restoring its deterrence after being caught off guard by Hamas’ invasion—it has revealed its decade-long infiltration of the Iran-backed paramilitary Hezbollah by detonating thousands of pagers used in the terrorist organization’s communication network; expanded the war into Lebanon while assassinating prominent Hamas and Hezbollah leadership; and exchanged missiles with Iran. Iran taking a more direct role in the war than before has sparked fears of a regional war, with the potential to even take a nuclear turn. One year on, Israel has reaffirmed its status as the titan of the Middle East in a war that Hamas started but is losing horribly—at the time of writing, Israel just announced that it has killed the leader of Hamas and architect of Oct. 7, Yahya Sinwar, effectively decapitating the terrorist organization. How did Hamas’ calculations go so wrong?
Modern historical background
The Middle East today is known as a fractious region, buckling under the weight of religious chasms and ethnic cleansing. But it wasn’t always this way. For many centuries, when the Ottoman Empire ruled the region and beyond, the Middle East was the world’s bastion of religious coexistence and pluralism. The empire, ruled by Muslims, built churches and synagogues and devolved political autonomy to millets, or religious communities that enjoyed a considerable degree of self-rule (Pelham, 2016, p. 30). There were 17 of these religious communities in the Empire, including Islam (Pelham, 2016, p. 28). Pluralism declined as nationalist movements like those of Greece and Serbia realized independence and destroyed Muslim symbols and banished their Muslim population (Pelham, 2016, p. 33). The dissolution and partition of the Ottoman Empire by the Western victors of World War I in the early 20th century accelerated the decline of religious pluralism. They ended the millet system and diminished the important role of religion, lifting secular law above religion (Pelham, 2016, p. 33).
In 1923, furthermore, the League of Nations instituted a policy of mass population exchange that relocated 1.6 million people within the former empire to form homogenous religious blocs. This led to a shift in precedence to border defense and militarization, ultimately resulting in suspicion and skirmishes between the former millets (Pelham, 2016, p. 19). The British went on to partition Jerusalem and then Palestine, while the French divided Syria and Lebanon into sects. The homogenization mentality, imposed first by foreigners, came to inspire internal movements. The Young Turks in modern Turkey, which inherited the Ottoman Empire, for example, banned many displays of public religious expression and banned languages other than Turkish to elevate secular nationalism (Pelham, 2016, p. 37)—culminating in the expulsion and genocide of between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 Armenians.
The collapse of pluralist coexistence in the Ottoman Empire laid the groundwork for the sectarianism that characterizes the Middle East today in two principal ways. First, disillusion with nationalist movements created a vacuum in the region that disaffected religious groups sought to fill. Working in opposite directions yet both affirming the power of religious revivalism, in 1979 the Iranian Revolution constructed a Shia theocracy in which the ruler of Iran must be a Shia cleric, just as Saddam Hussein rose to power in Iraq and stripped hundreds of thousands of Shias of Iraqi nationality (Pelham, 2016, p. 46). Disillusion following the American invasion of Iraq and the failed Arab Spring civilian uprisings, moreover, widened the vacuum and fueled the rise of Islamic jihad, a movement to “protect Sunni dominance” in the region (Pelham, 2016, p. 87). More recently, the Islamic State, born from al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2013 and gaining control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria, expelled non-Sunni religious populations, created purity restrictions for Sunnis (Pelham, 2016, pp. 96-97), and destroyed and looted archeological sites. Shia Hashd militias, looking to Iran for leadership, fought back in Iraq by cleansing Sunnis, digging deeper the entrenched trend of sectarian, intra-religious violence (Pelham, 2016, p. 118). To counter Iran and reassert Sunni dominance, Saudi Arabia took the helm “to light multiple fires across the region and hope to draw in and then burn Iran” (Pelham, 2016, p. 129). This strategy included sponsoring Sunni militias against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, both Iran proxies (Pelham, 2016, p. 129).
The second way that the collapse of pluralist coexistence in the Ottoman Empire laid the groundwork for modern Middle East sectarianism is by providing a lens through which to view Israel. Israel has been viewed as the black sheep of the Middle East—a democratic Jewish state amid hostile, often autocratic Arab neighbors. This is not an unfair characterization. Israel has historically been a unifying enemy for its divided neighbors, most notably in the Arab-Israeli wars. The very creation of Israel in 1948 stumbled out from a ten month war pitting Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Transjordan (modern Jordan) against Israel. The Six-Day War in 1967 again reunited Egypt, Syria, and Jordan against Israel, resulting in an overwhelming Israeli victory and territory acquisition, including seizing Gaza from Egypt. Through a wider historical and regional lens, though, Israel’s sustained dispossession of Palestinians was an initiation into true Middle East membership: eschewing pluralist coexistence in favor of homogenous partition. After the 1948 war, Arab nationalists rebranded their history and expelled about 700,000 Jews from their lands, in the style inherited from the death of the Ottoman Empire (Pelham, 2016, p. 42). Zionists have played to the same style: after 1948, they reorganized Israel’s ethnic balance by expelling 80% of the pre-1948 Palestinian population and erasing over 400 Palestinian villages and encouraged mob violence and the destruction of Muslim holy sites (Pelham, 2016, pp. 54, 65-66). Journalist and regional expert Nicolas Pelham has argued that, “so commonplace and large was the population displacement and sectarian cleansing elsewhere in the region” that Israel’s actions seemed “if not paltry, a regional norm” (Pelham, 2016, p. 74). Another similarity of the Israel-Palestine case with the sectarian conflicts seen in the wider region is the birth of violent opposition with religious identity. Jihad, in fact, has its intellectual roots in Palestine (Pelham, 2016, p. 87). Hamas was born after the First Intifada in 1987 and soon gained ties with Hezbollah, through which it gained patronage from Iran. The historical coalition of Arab and Iranian support around Palestine, wielded against Israel, then, is not a phenomenon or special character in the fractious region—it is, instead, only one snapshot of Middle East sectarianism.
Analysis
The Middle East has no unifying institution to which states can feel allegiance or brotherhood. Whereas the Europeans, after redrawing the Middle East, returned home to aspire for common prosperity beyond borders and can today look to the European Union for common principles and a peace covenant, the Arab League has failed to unite members. Even states of the Middle East that share the religion of Islam are divided by sect. When the creation of Israel first punctured the region, shared ethnicity and religion was briefly enough to inspire unity—but not for long. Hamas lost sight of this. It overestimated its own capacity to survive, as evidenced by the spate of high profile assassinations by Israel of its leaders, when it launched the newest phase of the perennial war. Hamas has also, however, made three broader miscalculations.
First, it had outdated expectations of an outpour of support from the Arab world. There has been no coordinated response against Israel, unlike in past Arab-Israeli wars, like the Six-Day War or the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when oil-exporting Arab countries imposed an embargo on the U.S.. While civilians have held demonstrations across the region in support of Palestine, they have frequently been met with government repression. Egypt and Jordan, leaders of past wars against Israel, have refused to accept Palestinian refugees; for decades, they were the only two Arab states to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. In 2020, however, the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain did so in the Abraham Accords. Arab governments increasingly accept—though tacitly—Israel’s presence and clout in the region. In 2023, the UAE signed a free trade agreement with Israel. During the war, moreover, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have quietly helped defend Israel from missiles. The Middle East is a region rife with “milletcides,” (Pelham, 2016, p. 23). Given this tumultuous history, it may be that Hamas miscalculated the gradual willingness of Arab governments—now generations removed from their ancestors who fought against the creation of the Israeli state—to view Israel as just another actor in the Middle East, rather than the major threat to the Arab existence that it was considered it almost 80 years ago.
Second, Hamas underestimated the Sunni Arab world’s rivalry with Shia Iran. History is not always buried in the past: the Saudi conspiracy to draw in and “burn” Iran was hatched only in 2015 by the father of the current de facto leader, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who participated in the campaign (Pelham, 2016, p. 129). Although Saudi Arabia took steps toward rapprochement with Iran in 2023 by restoring diplomatic relations, it has become clear that throwing its weight behind Hamas, part of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” is too risky for the kingdom and other Arab states to countenance. Saudi Arabia today has refused to reprise its leadership against Iran. One reason is because it seeks partnership with the West. In a bid to become a more prominent actor on the global stage and diversify its economy away from oil, it has invested in making itself more attractive to tourists and immigrants and project a more liberal image (although remaining rigid in many restrictions, such as censorship). Similarly, other Arab states have worried about the tourism, economic, and diplomatic costs of participating in the war; the Abraham Accords have held, and the UAE is even one of the few countries whose state-owned airlines still fly to Tel Aviv. The prospect of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, as it has insinuated, only heightens Arab states’ skepticism of aiding Iran’s campaign to amass influence in the region.
Third, Hamas overestimated Iran’s strength. In the past few months, Israel revealed that it has been actively infiltrating Hezbollah for decades. Lebanon is under attack, yet no Iranian leadership has stepped in to try to stabilize the situation—Iran’s bluff has been called. Its rhetoric and actions since Oct. 7 have been relatively restrained. Its retaliatory missiles have been shot down with quiet help from Israel’s Arab neighbors. Its attempt in April to deter Israeli strikes with a barrage of 300 missiles—making no dent in Israel’s defense—failed. In late July, Israel assassinated a Hezbollah leader in Lebanon and assassinated former Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, a brazen challenge to Iran’s leadership. Despite vowing revenge, Iran also highlighted its willingness for diplomatic talks. The Houthis, another Iranian proxy group, meanwhile, continue to barricade and attack ships in the Red Sea, but no longer make a splash in global headlines. Ships have adjusted their routes to circumvent the Houthi blockade, with help from a U.S.-led international force. Under the shadow of Israel’s bombardments, Iran looks increasingly exposed.
Hamas’ miscalculations offer a reminder, not a revelation, of the dynamic of the Middle East. Once a bastion of pluralism and coexistence, it has steadily redefined itself as a patchwork of sects, fighting to establish dominance and homogeneity. Decades of diplomacy have looked to the 1947 boundaries drawn by the United Nations and the 1948 Green Line settled by the 1949 armistice—perhaps the greatest irony and tragedy is that the prevailing perspective for bringing peace to the Middle East still centers around how to draw the next partition.
Edited by Jack Marin
References:
Pelham, N. (2016). Holy Lands: Reviving pluralism in the Middle East. Columbia Global Reports.
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