The Israel-Hamas war two months on: what is it telling us about the new world order?

After two extensions of the humanitarian pause, there were high hopes that the truce could be extended further. The pause had undoubtedly benefited both sides with over 100 Israeli and foreign hostages being freed and 230 Palestinians. The pause had allowed much-needed aid to be delivered to Gaza but just seven days of ceasefire were not enough to have a significant or lasting impact in terms of feeding the Palestinian population, restoring electricity supplies or replenishing vital medicines and hospital equipment. Hamas seems to have broken the truce first by refusing to release all the women and children held hostage and restarting its rocket attacks but Israel also made clear that the pause would be short-lived as it was not willing to live with only the partial destruction of the Hamas military organisation. However, the circumstances are now different. The United States Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, has called on Israel to run a different kind of military campaign, establishing humanitarian safety zones before it recommences operations and sparing vital critical infrastructure such as power grids, roads, telecommunications and hospitals. Will Israel heed this warning and operate a more discriminate military campaign or consider that anything can be a legitimate military target if associated in some way or other with Hamas? 

Many within the Israeli security community – and not only on the far right of the political establishment – were worried that Hamas would use the truce to regroup and re-arm and that Israel will lose momentum in its campaign to eradicate Hamas. Tel Aviv is already seeing that the initiative has passed to Hamas, which has forced the Israelis to negotiate with it over the hostages and which is using the negotiations also to secure the release of three times as many Palestinian detainees. As the Israelis try to continue their military operations while showing more concern for the lives of Palestinian civilians, they are cramming the displaced population into a tiny corner of southern Gaza, which might protect people from bullets and air strikes but will undoubtedly expose them to disease and lack of sanitation. Anything short of absolute victory for Israel would create the fear that Hamas would attack Israel again, as it has pledged to do given its commitment to the destruction of Israel. Although the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised to restart the military operation as soon as the temporary truce is over, the longer it were to last the more Israel would come under pressure – including from its allies in the US and Europe – to stay its hand, declare victory by weakening Hamas, if not eliminating it, and withdraw its forces currently occupying northern Gaza. This would represent a pyrrhic victory for Israel and a great propaganda victory for Hamas as it remains very much in business.

Restarting the humanitarian pause at a later stage may be even more difficult than previously after a new round of fighting and if Hamas demands that Israel release Palestinian fighters rather than women and children. Hamas will undoubtedly demand a very high price for the release of the Israeli soldiers, both men and women, that it captured on 7 October. Back in 2011, the Israelis were forced to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in order to free just one Israeli staff sergeant, Gilad Shalit, who had been held in Gaza for five years by the Qassam Brigades. An additional factor is the fact that Israel seems to lack a war plan and an exit strategy. What exactly is the elimination of Hamas given that it is not an organised army with leadership in Gaza but a disparate group of sympathisers and supporters extending deep into the Palestinian population? One that also arranges social services as well as training its militias to attack Israel. Or, in reality, is Israel adopting a much more realistic strategy of degrading Hamas’ command structures and weapons and missile stocks, destroying its tunnel complex, as well as killing a significant number of its military commanders? This would at least make it much more difficult for Hamas to mount a major attack on Israel for some time in the future. The complicating factor here is that many of those who went on the rampage against Israel on 7 October were not members of Hamas but of other radical groups, such as Islamic Jihad or the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, or of criminal gangs or just individuals taking advantage of the breach in Israel’s defence wall. So, the issue for Israel is how much permanent security it wants to achieve and how much risk and threat it is willing to live with.

Another issue concerns the future of Gaza. If Israel does not want to maintain a long-term military occupation of Gaza with a resentful Palestinian population and constant harassment from Hamas and other groups, who will run the territory if Hamas is no longer in charge? There have been various suggestions to put the territory under UN administration, set up the Palestinian Authority or have an Arab peacekeeping force; but none of these formulas sound especially convincing. Much further down the diplomatic road is the question of how to bring Israel and the Palestinians back around the negotiating table to work towards the two-state solution. Paradoxically, the current war in Gaza has underscored that there is no alternative to the creation of a separate Palestinian state, but it has further convinced Israelis that they are hated by the Palestinians and have no possibility or interest in trying to reach a political settlement with them. Ultimately, this crisis may lead in the fullness of time to a renewed Israeli interest in negotiations. However, the dust will need to settle first; A new more centrist and moderate Israeli government will need to emerge; and new political leaders, military commanders, diplomats and intelligence officials will replace those discredited after the inquiry into the circumstances of the 7 October events, which Israel will certainly carry out. Moreover, a third country will need to offer its good services, as Norway did in negotiating the Oslo Accords back in the 1990s, to start an informal track-two dialogue to bring the two sides together and build trust quietly behind the scenes. 

Yet as Israel, and the rest of us, ponder the possible answers to these difficult questions, a larger question looms: will this war in Gaza be transformative? In other words, will it change the international order and the way it functions, leading to new alignments or international fault lines and potential conflicts? We can think in this connection of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the US or Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014. The first led to the ‘Global War on Terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq and the second led to the strengthening of both NATO and the European Union. Alternatively, and despite the intense media focus on Gaza since 7 October, once the conflict dies down, at least for now, will the Middle East return to ‘business as usual’ with the strategic landscape barely moving? As the English historian, A.J.P. Taylor, memorably said of the revolutions of 1848: “History reached a turning point and failed to turn.” 

Two months into the war, the back-to-business-as-usual hypothesis seems the most likely. Hamas will undoubtedly still be around in some shape or form even if its leadership will be outside Gaza – much of it already lives in Doha with the support of the government of Qatar. Israel will still face the stand-off between the Palestinians in the West Bank and the 200,000 settlers who are agitating for Israel to take more territory away from the local Palestinian villages and incorporate more of the West Bank into Israel. This week, incredibly, the Netanyahu government allocated a further $42mn to the development of new settlements in the West Bank. Iran will still be implacably opposed to Israel and will fund, arm and train all the anti-Israel militias from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and the mix of Islamist groups in Syria. The Iranian nuclear programme will continue to advance, confronting Israel with an existential threat and sooner or later the decision to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities or rely on another round of international diplomacy. Inside Israel itself, the current spirit of national unity generated by the revulsion at the Hamas attack on 7 October will no doubt make way for a return to the deep polarisation between left and right, doves and hawks that led to the massive demonstrations against the Netanyahu government during the spring and summer. The doves will draw the conclusion that there must be a return to dialogue with the Palestinians and a regional political process, whereas the right will double down on the ‘total security’ solution, believing that more walls and fences and an even tougher crackdown on all forms of Palestinian resistance or Iranian interference is the only way to guarantee Israel’s survival. The right will also try to remove the institutional restraints on its freedom of action – as in the government’s determination to overturn the powers of the Supreme Court – and the left will link the two-state solution to Israel’s ability to survive as a Jewish state and parliamentary democracy. This is because the one-state solution would imply the permanent domination of the minority (Jews) over an increasingly large majority (Arab Israelis and Palestinians). As the dust settles, we could well return diplomatically to the age-old syndrome of occasional US and European engagement in the Middle East Peace Process followed by periods of stagnation and hopelessness as everyone sees only roadblocks and paralysis and we have fewer ideas on how to overcome them. Meanwhile, after a pause, Israel will return to its policy of seeking to normalise its relationships with its neighbours, for instance through the US-brokered Abraham Accords, and to mend ties with its critics, but important trading partners and investors, such as Turkey, Russia and China. 

Yet even if the war in Gaza will not turn out to be transformative, despite the wall-to-wall media coverage it has received for nearly two months already, it has nonetheless underlined some important strategic lessons, which diplomats and national security officials need to reflect on. 

The first concerns assumptions. Most policymakers form theories or views about the world and the behaviour of their partners and adversaries that, if not quickly challenged or discredited, become hard-wired into their intellectual DNA – often with disastrous consequences when the assumptions turn out to be wrong but it is too late for leaders and military commanders to react or change course quickly enough to prevent the worst from happening. Hamas’ October attack has been noted as a catastrophic intelligence failure by Israel, which is all the more surprising given that Gaza is a tiny space that the Israeli intelligence agencies, Mossad and Shin Bet, were always watching closely – and with ample technological and human resources. A recent video broadcast by the BBC even shows Hamas fighters training in open view for a 7 October-type attack at a mock Israeli kibbutz located less than a kilometre from the northern border of Gaza with Israel. This training exercise took place in 2021 but it bears an uncanny resemblance to the real attack that Hamas carried out last October. So, if all the warning signs were there, why were they not acted upon? 

Here we come to assumptions, which is the art of downplaying or dismissing certain signals or evidence because other factors are deemed to be more important or decisive in the final analysis. In this instance, the view within Israel’s defence community that, despite its anti-Israel rhetoric and track record of violence, Hamas was too wedded to Israel’s economic and energy lifeline to Gaza to challenge the status quo. It would lob the occasional Katyushka rocket against Sderot or Ashkelon but would not launch a full-scale invasion that would bring the wrath of Israel down upon its head. Believing that the status quo and Israel’s high-tech electronic fence along its border with Gaza would hold, Tel Aviv redeployed a number of its border control forces to the West Bank where Palestinian militancy was stirring in Jenin and Hebron. The settlers were also demanding more protection from the Israeli defence forces. So, bad assumptions are often the enemy of good intelligence. Like banks, assumptions need to be subjected to more regular and rigorous stress tests. What are the key factors underpinning an assumption? How many need to change, and in which way, for an assumption to become suspect or lose its validity altogether? Are we sure that we are measuring these key factors accurately and objectively? It is good intelligence, properly assessed, that should drive assumptions and not the other way around. The Israeli experience is a timely reminder to all NATO member states and others trying to keep the peace in the face of military competitors to periodically gather together their intelligence agencies, national security officials and academic experts to identify the assumptions underlying foreign and security policies and rigorously question their validity. NATO would have been well advised to do this before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and the US to take a deeper look at the activities of jihadist terrorists before 2001. 

A second lesson concerns radicalisation. This used to be a word that appeared in almost every article on international security 20 years ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But we do not focus much on the terrorist threat these days in the West as great power rivalries and efforts to support partners to resist external aggression come to dominate the debate. The major terrorist threats seem to have moved to Africa or to subsist in the more traditional places like Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan as the jihadist networks prioritise attacking local targets rather than the US or the major European powers. Yet we know from recent history that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the biggest driver of radicalisation and recruitment into terrorist cells in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The longer the war in Gaza continues with TV pictures of civilian death and destruction, the more likely it is that some of the individuals participating in the large pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the cities of Europe and North America will be radicalised and turn to more violent forms of protest. There is no longer a Caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria to attract these aspirant foreign fighters, and they will not be welcome in Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad even if they could travel there. So, they are more likely to attack targets in their home countries. Consequently, the Western countries do not only have a humanitarian interest in bringing the war in Gaza to an end as soon as possible, but a self-security interest as well. 

A third outcome of the war is the urgent need to clarify the rules of armed conflict. Israel claims that it is the victim having been attacked first and in an unprovoked way. Palestinians, of course, looking back to the origins of the conflict in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, would beg to disagree. Israel suffered 1,200 dead on 7 October. The Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza claims that 13,000 civilians, mainly women and children, have been killed so far in Israel’s bombing campaign. So, the war has thrown up difficult questions regarding proportionality in armed conflict and how far one side can legitimately go in pursuing its concept of self-defence. How far does improving your own security justify worsening the security of others? In particular, does the security of states, territories and borders always override human security and the responsibility to protect civilians of other countries and not just your own?

There are also issues regarding warnings to civilians before attacks are carried out. Should Israel give more time for civilians to move to safer areas and even help to create these safe areas before strikes are carried out? We have also seen an intense debate regarding the protection of hospitals and whether the presence of Hamas tunnels and command centres near or under the Shifa and Indonesian hospitals turns them into legitimate military targets. Urban warfare and the intermingling of militias and the civilian population, which is used to create human shields, make these questions particularly acute as no militia can be destroyed without destroying much of the civilian society and infrastructure as well. Is it permissible to drop 2,000-pound bombs that can collapse entire apartment blocks in densely populated civilian areas? Israel has used a surprisingly large amount of high explosives in Gaza and for a longer period than many anticipated. More women and children have been killed in six weeks than in two years of fighting in Ukraine.

South Africa has said that Israeli leaders should be indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, but what about non-state actors like Hamas as well? On 7 October, it set out to massacre Israeli civilians and not primarily to attack military bases and personnel. Should not Hamas be held responsible for the actions of Palestinians who were not members of the group and under its command structure? Is it ever legitimate to take women and children and even three-month-old babies hostage? The Geneva Conventions and the international law of armed conflict already have a lot to say on these issues, but it is clear from both Israeli and Palestinian spokespeople that the interpretations of these core principles vary widely. So, Western democracies need to use Gaza to clarify the precise scope of international law and be rigorous in judging the claims of both sides. In the meantime, Western politicians should be cautious in giving a free pass on legality and legitimacy to one side or the other. 

The next burning issue is deterrence. It is linked in part to what was said earlier on assumptions. In dealing with authoritarian and risk-prone adversaries, Western democracies have long relied on deterrence for their security. This depends on persuading a potential belligerent that the price and costs of aggression outweigh the gains. Yet this calculus relies on the adversary thinking in the same way as the defender and having the same reluctance to accept unnecessary risks. Yet Hamas clearly was not deterred by Israel accepting the inevitability of a massive and devastating Israel counter-strike, which would severely deplete its ranks. It believed that, in the long run, it would emerge as the undisputed leader of the Palestinian cause – vis-à-vis Fatah and the Palestinian Authority or other radical groups – and that for every fighter killed, three or four new recruits would rush to join its ranks. In short, Palestinians and other Arabs would ultimately blame Israel and not Hamas itself for unleashing the chaos.

So, as NATO goes back to deterrence as its core collective defence strategy and as the US and its allies apply similar concepts to China, Iran and North Korea, it would be useful for policymakers to reflect on whether what they think is good deterrence actually works on their potential adversaries. Of course, Hamas or other non-state actors are not powerful, nuclear-armed states like Russia and China. So, their risk calculation and level of risk acceptance and sacrifice may well be different. Yet Russia has been ready to accept heavy and long-term economic costs for its invasion of Ukraine, and threats of massive Western sanctions and diplomatic isolation did not stop Putin from going ahead with his invasion in February 2023. Again, Western security officials should think long and hard about just how far they can rely on deterrence and what that deterrence needs to comprise, rather than assume that a few brigades along a border or the possession of a few nuclear weapons is all that is required. 

Finally, what does the Israel-Hamas war tell us about the new world order? It is an interesting mix of the old and the new. The US has emerged once more as the most important single actor, or to quote former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, “the indispensable nation”. The current Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has made four trips to the region, assuring the traumatised Israelis that Washington has their back while touring the key Arab states to build a diplomatic coalition to nudge Israel towards opening the border to Gaza for vital humanitarian supplies and accepting a pause in its military campaign. Although Qatar has received praise for its mediation in securing the release of a limited number of Israeli and foreign hostages, it is clear that the US, and President Biden personally, have done much of the heavy lifting to ensure a pause, then have it accepted and prevent the Israeli-Hamas deals from falling apart at the last moment. As the guarantor of Israel’s security and its weapons supplies in crisis and war, the US is unique in having leverage on both sides of the ledger. The EU by contrast has been hampered by internal divisions, a lack of trust and credibility on the Israeli side and an inability to convert what it contributes on the humanitarian side – for instance, it is by far the biggest funder of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) – into effective political leverage. So, much thus far follows the well-known paradigm.

Yet we are also witnessing some new things. China has chaired a meeting of the UN Security Council on Gaza and proposed to mediate. It was the first of the five permanent members to host the Arab Contact Group, which was set up to give the Arab states a united voice in Middle East diplomacy. Instead of just criticising from the sidelines, the Arab states have been actively involved in international diplomacy from the outset, and not just Qatar skilfully mediating between Israel and Hamas for the release of the hostages and prisoners. Saudi Arabia has hosted ASEAN, a joint meeting of the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Jordan and Egypt have also hosted international meetings involving the UN and the Europeans and Americans in an effort to build bridges between East and West. These efforts have facilitated the rapid delivery of large-scale humanitarian aid into Gaza even if, so far, they have not mapped out a long-term roadmap for the future of Gaza or a new Middle East peace process. Even South Africa as current Chair of the BRICS has weighed in on the crisis by organising a virtual BRICS summit. Russia – so often at the centre of conflicts and crises as it seeks to weaken the West, expand its influence and score its propaganda points – has been curiously low profile as if it is careful not to alienate either Israel nor its Arab partners. What we are therefore seeing is the reality of the new multipolar world in which success goes to the most skilled diplomats able to build the broadest coalitions across regions and different regional groupings. The Biden administration, which set out to divide the world too simplistically into democracies and authoritarians, seems to have realised its mistake and is willing to work pragmatically with anyone who can be helpful, even if the cooperation is limited to this specific case. The challenge for the EU’s quest to be a geopolitical actor is to learn to do the same. 

As diplomats and security officials think of how they can shape a Middle East that is safer after the war in Gaza than before, here at least are five lessons thus far that they need to reflect on while they push ahead with immediate crisis management. There may be more to emerge in the months ahead but these five will do for starters. 

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.