EDITORIAL: Leadership in the Middle East is failing us all

A year since thousands of Hamas militants flooded into Israel and killed almost 1,200 people, the Middle East has drifted towards a wider conflagration.

A lot will be written about October 7 2023 and its implications in the years to come as historians and commentators get to grips with the consequences of the Hamas attack that day. Today they are not fully known, but the horrors in the Middle East have already exposed a commentariat not particularly interested in complexity or fairness, and this weak discourse is allowing weak leadership to flounder on.

Uninterrogated calls for a ceasefire fail to grasp that neither Israel, nor Hamas, nor Hezbollah want to stop fighting right now — and so any ceasefire will be abused by all sides to prepare for more war. For different reasons, war is what they seek. A more complete solution is required.

Israeli and Western intelligence agencies have been shocked at the level of Hamas’s preparedness, the scale and the depth of the Gaza “metro” of tunnels, measuring more than 400km in length, the extent of self-sufficiency in arms manufacturing and long-term underground survival. All of this was built with money from tax and aid from Qatar (received with Israel’s grudging approval), but also the hijacking of aid and humanitarian and economic development projects and at a terrible cost to Palestinian quality of life.

Given the reality that the “Gaza metro” cannot ever be fully destroyed and that the war is an effective recruitment campaign for Hamas, it is worth asking what it would take for Hamas to stop its war against Israel.

Hamas seeks war because it wants an end to the “siege of Gaza”, a cessation of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and an end to raids on the al-Aqsa Mosque, which lies on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — a place revered by Jews and Muslims. In a distant land these seem like topics that could be discussed, but many people in Israel feel that Hamas is an anti-Semitic hate machine that exists to eliminate Israel and Jews, and some of the commentary after the attacks didn’t help the cause of those who say differently.

Israel seeks war because it believes its security lies in the elimination of Hamas and Hezbollah. It is true that Hamas hides its military hardware and combatants among civilians and in civilian infrastructure. That is wrong, but it is still Israel’s choice to drop the bombs, and it seems beyond doubt that Israel has relied too much on the legitimacy of its targets and cared far too little about the collateral in the execution of this war. In doing so Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ceded moral high ground and sowed the seeds of hate that another generation will reap.

Israel will also say that its war seeks the return of the remaining 101 hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. Any justification of their ongoing incarceration requires us to draw an equivalence between kidnapped women, children and other civilians and Hamas operatives arrested by Israel. They should be released.

As Israel retaliates against a year of Hezbollah missile attacks in northern Israel, both Hamas and Hezbollah are severely weakened organisations. And yet both wars are unwinnable. Israel, whose prime minister is not universally popular, will not eliminate either. That is because so much of what happens in the Middle East depends on the regime in Tehran, where it is unpopular among younger people as much as Hezbollah is not well loved by all Lebanese.

If the horrors inflicted upon Israel, and Gaza and Lebanon in turn, are as much a function of geopolitical power struggles — Iran’s war against its real enemy, the US and Western hegemony — as they are a vicious regional dispute, then addressing the broader cause would help.

As Israel and its allies consider a response to Iran’s latest missile attack on Tel Aviv, it seems — amid comparative Arab indifference — that the Iranian people have their hands on the greatest lever of them all. If their voices were heard, it might change the course of history. It is pity that it is unlikely to happen.

It is the burden of the people of the Middle East that their suffering is abused by the comfortably distant as an opportunity to espouse facile luxury opinions, and whose deaths are used to advance — under a veil of nebulous ideas of “justice” — the realities of rabid anti-Semitism, appalling Islamophobia and the use of rape, kidnap and the relentless bombing of civilians as a legitimate form of “resistance” and war.

There is nothing simple about this at all, and grappling with the complexity is the work of serious people in Washington, Tel Aviv, UAE, Riyadh and Tehran. That seriousness is worryingly absent, and new ideas and leadership are desperately needed.