The Middle East conflict and Israel’s existential choice

A peacemaker who has worked for more than two decades in inter-faith dialogue, conflict resolution and political dialogue in the Middle East and beyond argues that there will never be peace between Israel and the Palestinians until all key constituencies, including religious actors, on both sides are included in the process

Soon after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, I met a senior lawmaker in the Likud party who explained to me in detail how Israel would use the atrocities to launch a military operation that had been in the planning for years. Hamas would be eliminated, the residents of Gaza forced into the Sinai, the Palestinians in the West Bank deported to Jordan, and Hezbollah and the occupants of southern Lebanon driven north of the Litani River. The US would then be brought into a war with Iran. This, he told me, would mark “the reshaping of the Middle East and the establishment of a Jewish state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”, echoing the promise of Likud’s 1977 election manifesto: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

Over the past 20 months I have listened to a similar narrative outlined by Druze commanders in northern Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s spokesperson in Hebron, and, more recently, members of the regional council in the occupied Palestinian territories of Samaria. Israel, they all argue, is on the front line of a battle to save Judeo-Christian civilisation from “radical Islam” and what it is doing should have the full support of the West.

The existential threat to western civilisation posed by “radical Islam” is frequently echoed by influential political figures and commentators. Likud has strong ties with western right-wing and nationalist parties, based on shared ideologies and positions on security, immigration, and opposition to political Islam. The analysis that radical Islam poses an existential threat to Israel and our western way of life is yet to be proven. Meanwhile, Israel’s war plan is proceeding more or less in ­accordance with the goals outlined to me in the Knesset by that Likud lawmaker. Despite rumours of renewed ceasefire talks, I fear that the bombing of Iran by the US will only strengthen the Israeli prime minister and leader of the Likud party Benjamin Netanyahu’s resolve to deport the people of Gaza and complete the annexation of the West Bank.

The timing of Israel’s pre-emptive strike on Iran – within a few hours of a crucial vote in the Knesset that could have seen the collapse of the current ruling coalition – was also telling. Netanyahu managed to avoid a crisis by reaching a last-minute deal with a number of ultra-Orthodox parties to delay the draft of Haredi young men into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The strike on Iran created a sense of national unity across the deepening political divides. It also led to the cancellation of the sixth round of talks between the US and Iran on limiting its nuclear programme. The consequences of deciding to pursue the military rather than the diplomatic option may yet prove extremely costly to the wider region – including Israel.

For more than 10 years, Forward Thinking, under the auspices of the Finnish government, has facilitated a regular dialogue between diplomats and senior political figures from a number of Middle East, North African and European countries, including Iran and Saudi Arabia. That regular engagement has given us valuable insights into both the regional personalities and the political ­thinking that leads me to question the motivation of anyone who claims Israel and the West are facing an existential threat from a radical Islam promoted by Iran. Meanwhile, the war on Iran instigated by Israel and joined by the US, currently being held in check by a fragile ceasefire, risks recreating an Iraq-like scenario where, as a result of western efforts at regime change, chaos is created from which terror groups like ISIL will emerge.

Islamophobia has become deeply entrenched in public debate in the West. When it was being argued that a pre-emptive strike on Iran was necessary there was little or no reference to the fact that in 2003 Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had issued a fatwa declaring that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are prohibited in Islam. The fatwa played a significant role during the negotiations that led to the agreement signed in 2015 by Iran and six world powers, including the UK and the US, that placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. (The agreement was later torn up by President Trump.)

In May I participated in the Tehran Dialogue Forum, during which there was extensive discussion of Iran’s nuclear programme. It was acknowledged that some within the country wanted Iran to have a nuclear weapon but both the President and the foreign minister emphasised the significance of the fatwa prohibiting the production of such weapons. It was made clear that the fatwa remains an integral pillar of Iran’s nuclear doctrine. Islamophobes will argue that such a ruling could be changed, implying that Islam is a religion without principle.

There is no moral or legal justification for the brutality and indiscriminate killing on 7 October, in which around 1,200 people died and 251 were taken hostage. Israel has a right and duty to defend itself. But this right is not a licence to act without restraint. The death toll in Gaza – 55,297 on 14 June according to the strip’s health ministry – rises every day. Lex talionis, the ancient biblical idea of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, lies behind the principle in international law that the response to aggression should be proportionate to the scale and gravity of the initial attack. The total disregard being shown by Israel towards the rule-based order that grew out of the horrors of the Second World War could have serious consequences for the whole of humanity.

Under international law Gaza is recognised as part of the occupied Palestinian territory. Even though Israel withdrew its military and settlers in 2005, it continued to control the movement of goods and people, airspace and territorial waters, which under international law still equates to occupation. Although the Geneva Conventions forbid the forcible transfer or deportation of civilians and require an occupying power to ensure that civilians are treated humanely at all times and provided with food, medical care and properly functioning medical and educational institutions, it is evident from the scenes of immense human suffering emanating from Gaza on a daily basis, Israel has chosen to ignore its legal obligations to the people of Gaza. A year ago The Guardian published a deeply disturbing article claiming that the Israeli military were using machine-learning systems, AI, to help identify targets in their bombing campaign in Gaza. At one stage the system was said to have identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas. The users claimed, “It saved a lot of time.”

We cannot ignore the fact that 2.2 million Gazans face starvation and the immanent risk of being killed, while we argue over the niceties of whether or not it is right to use the word “genocide” to describe the circumstances they are forced to endure. In my view, the call for “impartiality” in reporting the conflict leaves the media open to becoming a channel for misinformation, if not disinformation. Who can be impartial in the face of a glaring injustice? What is called for is simple objectivity in reporting and analysis.

Why then the silence? Why are European and Arab political leaders not calling out such blatant infringements of international law? Why is the rule-based order that grew out of the carnage of the Second World War being infringed with apparent impunity? Why are so many of our religious leaders silent on what are essentially moral issues? I fear the simple answer is “fear” itself. Leaders, both political and religious, appear to be paralysed by the fear of being accused of antisemitism if they utter public criticism of Israeli leaders and the Israeli military. Senior politicians have admitted to me that they fear that their careers could come to a rapid end if they said what they felt.

In his address to the UN General Assembly in September 2022, Israel’s then-prime minister Yair Lapid was right to define antisemitism as “the willingness to believe the worst about Jews, without questioning”. He was equally right to add, “Antisemitism is judging Israel by a different standard than any other country.” And that, it seems to me, is what we do when we fail to call out Israel for blatant transgressions of international law. Silence robs the Israeli government and people of the honesty they deserve. At the beginning of the Gaza war President Joe Biden set the tone when he said that the US was imposing “no red lines” on Israel. No country should be given unconditional support to act outside the international norms and obligations. To ignore the rights of the most vulnerable and fail to speak out when those rights are blatantly ignored puts everyone on this planet at risk.

I have been working for more than two decades in the field of conflict prevention, conflict resolution and political dialogue in the Middle East. The conflict in Gaza is only the latest episode in an 80-year-old cycle of violence. It is the ninth war since 1948 and the mostly costly in terms of human lives. In a meeting in Doha earlier this year I learnt from a reliable source that 60 per cent of the current Hamas fighters are orphans from the 2014 war. Military campaigns only stiffen resistance and scale up the level of violence. In this same period there have been at least six major peace initiatives, including the Oslo Accords (1993-1995), Camp David (2000), the Kerry initiative (2013-2014) and the Abraham accords (2020). All failed because they were essentially top-down initiatives which excluded key constituencies, particularly religious actors, on both sides.

Despite the rhetoric sometimes used to justify the use of violence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an ideo­logical struggle. It is essentially a grievance-driven conflict, which, as we discovered on the island of Ireland, can only be resolved through an inclusive peace process: all the key protagonists must be engaged to achieve a durable agreement. But when Hamas began to explore the political rather than the military option through participation in elections in 2006 and the publication of a revised political manifesto in 2017, in which, like the PLO before them, they expressed a willingness to accept a peace agreement negotiated along the lines of the 1967 borders, they were rebuffed, and to this day the revised manifesto is still an inconvenient truth, ignored by most European and US politicians and commentators. What we are witnessing in Israel and Gaza is the price of several failures to seize opportunities to establish an inclusive political process.

The Netanyahu-Trump doctrine of “peace through strength” stands in sharp contrast to the teaching of Pope Paul VI, who almost 60 years ago wrote: “Peace is the fruit of anxious daily care to see that each person lives in justice as God intends” (Populorum Progressio). The attempt to dominate another will never secure peace. I fear Israel will never enjoy the security and peace that it rightly desires until it ends its occupation of the Palestinian territories and its attempts to ­control its people.

Oliver McTernan is the co-founder and director of Forward Thinking, an independent charity working to find solutions to conflict in the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region. In 1998 he was awarded its Gold Medallion for “outstanding contribution to inter-faith understanding” by the International Council of Christians and Jews.