What Lies Ahead for the Middle East

It was one year ago that Hamas militants breached the security barrier separating the Gaza Strip from Israel, initiating a rampage killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 in the bloodiest day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. More dark milestones followed. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its bombardment of the Strip, “the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.” More women and children were killed in Gaza over the past year than any other conflict over the last two decades, according to a new analysis by Oxfam. Famine, of which there have only been two in the 21st century, is a persistent risk.

In its first months, the conflict restored to the world’s consciousness the Palestinians’ aspiration to a nation of their own, the nub of their conflict with Israel. In the U.S., public sympathy toward Palestinians already was growing with revulsion over Israel’s 57-year military occupation of Palestinian territories. Now it climbed with the Gaza death toll, particularly among young Americans; global support for Israel soured.

Yet by Oct. 7, 2024, the world’s attention was back on Israel’s conflict with Iran—the contest that had replaced Palestinians as the fulcrum of the Middle East. Having over 11 months dismantled the military capabilities of one Iranian proxy force, Hamas, Israel in September pivoted to another—Hezbollah, the battle-hardened, heavily armed Shi’ite militia that dominates Lebanon. A lightning Israeli campaign decapitated its charismatic leader, killed more than 2,000 people, according to Lebanese health authorities, and prompted a shaken Iranian regime to launch some 200 missiles toward Israel. Like a similar fusillade from Tehran in April, the main effect of the barrage was to stoke worries that Israel’s retaliation would ignite a regional war that drags in the United States, and opens whole new realms of uncertainty.

Whatever comes next, when the dust settles, the Palestinian issue will be waiting. And, in theory, primed for resolution. Resolving it would not only pave the way to Israel’s normalization with Saudi Arabia, it would also deprive their shared enemy, Iran, of its excuse for targeting Israel. The world certainly wants it. If Oct. 7 showed Israeli Jews why they need a country, the retaliation for it generated a global surge in demands for a Palestinian state–the self-determination promised both by the U.N. charter, and by the 1993 Oslo Accords that laid out steps to create one in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem. That plan did not survive the Second Intifada, defined for Israelis by suicide bombings, and for Palestinians by Israeli tanks. But Oct. 7, and what followed, likely shattered whatever remained of trust on both sides.

People may feel “a natural inclination to try to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst at the International Crisis Group, based in Tel Aviv. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there is one right now.”

What analysts, and recent history, suggest may lie ahead:

For Gaza, an indefinite Israeli military presence

Since Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007, the 2 million Palestinians of Gaza had seen five wars, fighting so routine that Israeli officials referred to them as “mowing the grass.” But the Oct. 7 attack both traumatized and enraged Israelis, and 12 months later much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble, with many inhabitants squeezed into an area smaller than London’s Heathrow Airport. Hamas’s military capabilities have been severely degraded, according to Brian Carter, the Middle East Portfolio Manager at the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, although he notes that it’s difficult to assess the state of the organization in the northern part of the Strip, where Israel recently resumed combat.

What happens next? The so-called “day after” plan, in which Gaza could feasibly be rebuilt and its inhabitants return to their homes, remains as elusive as the ceasefire that would return some 100 remaining hostages to Israel and set the stage for a “day after” to come about. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated in a recent interview with TIME his insistence that Israel retain a military presence in the Philadelphi corridor that separates Gaza and neighboring Egypt, which is opposed by Cairo. He has also ruled out the possibility of the Palestinian Authority taking control. Created by the 1993 Accords that were supposed to lead to a Palestinian state, the PA administers only certain parts of the West Bank, which remains under Israeli military occupation. Israel pulled its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though of course its forces are there now.

“Absent a change of policy in Jerusalem, we are sliding into an open-ended occupation of Gaza,” says Nimrod Novik, a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and the former foreign policy advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. “Since we are not going to unilaterally withdraw and leave a vacuum for Hamas to recuperate, then it means that we’re going to run Gaza’s affairs for an indefinite future.”

For the West Bank, dramatic deterioration

Nearly 700 people have been killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since Oct. 7, according to the U.N. While the majority of deaths were by Israeli forces, some were also attributed to violent Israeli settlers, whose efforts to displace Palestinians from their land—already spiking under Netanyahu’s extremist, pro-settler government—grew all the more brazen during the Gaza war.

“All eyes used to be on Gaza, and now they are on Lebanon. And therefore what's happening in the West Bank goes pretty much under the radar, but it is quite dramatic,” Novik says. Indeed, Palestians living in the West Bank told TIME that the recent raids were reminiscent of 2002, when at the height of Second Intifada Israel sent armed columns and began construction of a separation barrier.

“We’re going to see the West Bank sliding in a Gaza-like direction,” Novik argues, citing, among other factors, rising settler violence and the increasing appeal of armed resistance groups among Palestinian youth, many of whom have no memory of the Second Intifada and embrace the resistance ethos of Hamas. “It has already begun.”

In Lebanon, a message to Iran

Iran may be 1,100 miles from Israel, but with Hezbollah—conceived, armed, and partly directed by Tehran—the Islamic Republic has been essentially on its northern doorstep. The day after Oct. 7, it began launching salvos into northern Israel, forcing the evacuation of 60,000 civilians and setting the stage for a war that, in contrast for the conflict in Gaza, Israel had been planning for decades. In the space of two weeks in late September, it disabled Hezbollah’s communications network, killed most of its leaders, and bombed a significant portion of a missile arsenal that had been regarded as the gravest threat to Israeli security. When Israeli ground troops crossed the border, it was to secure a Lebanese frontier decorated with monuments to Iran's ruling mullahs.

Israel said the invasion, its fourth, is “limited, localized and targeted.” But the 1982 incursion became an occupation that lasted 18 years. “We know from experience, and we know from the specific history of Israel-Lebanon, that they don’t ever intend to stay. They don’t intend to occupy, but that’s what happens,” says Zonszein, the Crisis Group analyst. “The experience of the last 20 years for Israel has been that they can’t rely on anyone else to enforce security in south Lebanon.”

But the implications of Hezbollah’s sudden and dramatic depletion may prove as consequential as the Oct. 7 attack. Israel’s initial success brought “a tectonic shift in the Middle East,” Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute wrote on Sept. 30. “The current rout of Hezbollah leaves Iran profoundly vulnerable.”

That means a great deal in a region where each country is defined by its attitude toward Tehran. The Islamic Republic has been ascendant for the last two decades— starting with the American removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where Iran now operates openly, then Tehran's rescue of the Assad regime in Syria, and making clients of the Houthis in Yemen. Hamas was also a client, but Hezbollah was Iran’s crown jewel—its missile arsenal deterring Israel from attacking Iran directly. Without it, Salem points out that Tehran may now opt “to build a more powerful deterrent, which would be a nuclear weapon…”

In Israel, global isolation and domestic politics

Israel was profoundly shaken by Oct. 7. The massacre and kidnappings not only summoned the collective vulnerability accumulated across 2,000 years of Jewish history. It also shattered the sense of security that Israel exists to assure. Neither of those things is visible to the outside world, however, and when international sympathy shifted to the people in Gaza dying under Israeli bombs, many Israelis defaulted to a familiar refrain: “The whole world’s against us.”

What was visible was Benjamin Netanyahu. He had been prime minister longer than anyone in Israel's history, but his political days appeared to be numbered in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, with a majority of Israelis believing should be removed from power. Every decision his government has made since then, from rebuffing international calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state to rejecting ceasefire deals that would bring the hostages home, could be seen through the prism of self-preservation: His right-wing coalition included extremists who threatened to leave if he did either.

“The prime minister is driving decisions on national security based on partisan, personal considerations,” Novik says, referencing recent revelations that Netanyahu had prioritized maintaining Israel’s presence in Gaza over the safety of the hostages. (Netanyahu rejects this characterization, telling TIME in a recent interview: “I’m not concerned with my political preservation.”)

But his party’s improved standing in recent polls is a testament not just to his own political survival; it also reflects the relief Israelis feel at a string of dramatic successes in the security realm, where there’s broad consensus. The gravest early warnings to Hezbollah were read out, after all, by Netanyahu’s main political rival, Benny Gantz, while serving in the war cabinet in December. From the assassination of the leader of Hamas in an Iranian government guest house to the striking early momentum in Lebanon, Israelis sense that “deterrence”—the premise of the nation’s security doctrine, and counted among the casualties of Oct. 7—is being restored.

How long Israel remains on the offensive, especially against Iran directly, is the question that consumes the globe.

For the United States, a choice

Outside the Middle East, perhaps the single biggest variable that stands to influence where things go next is the U.S. presidential election. Should Kamala Harris succeed Joe Biden, the expectation is that she will likely continue her predecessor’s supportive posture towards Israel, albeit perhaps with more sensitivity to the growing public uproar over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, as well as Washington’s own role in perpetuating it. Should Donald Trump be elected, the former president is widely expected to resume his unambiguous backing of Israel, which he said should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza.

While the U.S. holds considerable leverage over Israel, most acutely in the form of billions in military aid, the Biden Administration hasn’t been seen to use it to secure an as-yet-elusive ceasefire. “The only force that can change that calculation, that can actually impose the real costs on Netanyahu that could change his behavior, is the United States,” says Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former chief foreign policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the most vocal proponents of conditioning U.S. aid to Israel. “Biden is refusing to do that.”

Congress, which controls the budget—and where Netanyahu is embraced with particular fervor by Republican lawmakers—also plays a huge role. But foreign policy is made by Presidents, and with the election just a month away, Biden is unlikely to make policy changes in the interim—a reality that could be a boon for Netanyahu. “From now until Nov. 5, he has more free reign than ever, because he knows that the Biden Administration is certainly not going to do anything before the election,” says Yousef Munayyer, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., and a longtime observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Between now and Nov. 5 is when he’ll feel the freest to do what he wants, which makes this a very, very dangerous time.”

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