Soon, Benjamin Netanyahu will no longer be Israel’s prime minister. After 12 years in power, what kind of country will he leave behind?

Netanyahu wasn’t always the irremediable hawk that his opponents (especially outside Israel) thought him to be. He often displayed a sharp pragmatism, reflecting a keen intelligence, extensive historical knowledge, impressive economic proficiency and a deep awareness of regional and global trends.

But remaining in power was paramount for Netanyahu, so he tended to focus more on appeasing his base than serving the national interest. That often—and increasingly—meant pitting groups against one another by appealing to people’s tribal instincts. He ruled by incitement, implementing policies that matched his ultra-nationalistic, anti-Arab rhetoric.

For example, Netanyahu backed the 2018 nation-state law, which effectively establishes Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens. And he embraced the goal of annexation of Palestinian lands—an issue over which Israeli right-wing coalitions have historically wavered—effectively taking extreme religious Zionism mainstream.

Netanyahu’s successive governments have worked tirelessly to create the conditions for annexation of the occupied West Bank. At times, he seemed to prioritise the fantasy of Judea and Samaria shared by much of his base above Israel itself, pouring billions of dollars into realising it.

And yet, there were times when Netanyahu wasn’t quite the energetic builder of Jewish settlements in the West Bank that his constituency wanted him to be. In 2009, he declared a 10-month freeze on new settlements that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called ‘unprecedented’ (though no restrictions were placed on the thousands of buildings already under construction to expand existing settlements).

In 2014, Netanyahu negotiated a peace framework with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in which he adopted some unexpectedly reasonable positions. That said, to keep his right-wing base happy, he refused to restrain construction by Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, even during the negotiations.

A similar logic lay behind Netanyahu’s exorbitant concessions to Israel’s Orthodox community, reversing his own previous efforts made as finance minister in the early 2000s to cut their parasitic dependence on state allowances. By contrast, he invested far less in improving the conditions in Israel’s poorer periphery; he trusted that his unrelenting attacks on the old liberal ‘elites’ would be enough to maintain the support of voters there.

Netanyahu’s history of coalition-building reflects a similar focus on self-preservation. In the past, he has formed governing coalitions with left-leaning and centrist parties. After the last four legislative elections, however, he didn’t hesitate to govern with Jewish-supremacist factions.

This is not some reflection of a genuine ideological shift. If it was, Netanyahu wouldn’t have been willing to strike a coalition deal with Ra’am, an Islamist party linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, last March. This is, after all, the same man who warned in 2015 that Israeli Arabs were heading to the polling stations in droves, in order to give his party a boost in a tight race.

Netanyahu will go down in Israeli history as the politician who legitimised the participation of Arab parties in government. Anything to stay in power. This particular thing, however, may well have been Netanyahu’s undoing: the coalition that his political opponents have formed wouldn’t have been large enough to unseat him without Ra’am.

That’s not the only reason the new coalition couldn’t exist without Netanyahu. Its eight ideologically diverse parties—including leftists, centrists, right-wing nationalists and Arab Islamists—are united by one thing: the desire to unseat him. Many are former Netanyahu allies, who were increasingly alienated by his narcissistic, overbearing and often shameful behaviour. For them, his indictment on three charges of corruption and breach of trust was the last straw.

Netanyahu’s penchant for bridge-burning can also be seen in Israel’s deteriorating image in the United States, especially among moderates and liberals, including most US Jews. By aligning himself closely with the Republican Party and President Donald Trump, he turned support for Israel into a hyper-partisan affair.

The recent escalation of violence with the Palestinians seems to have further estranged many Americans. More fundamentally, it was a wake-up call for Netanyahu, who believed he had all but defeated the cause of Palestinian nationalism. That belief was fortified by the recent signing of the Abraham Accords, establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states.

Netanyahu knew how to leverage regional changes to Israel’s benefit. He saw that the Middle East’s incumbent Sunni regimes feared popular uprisings akin to the 2011 Arab Spring, as well as the rise of a nuclear (Shia) Iran. This, together with the recognition that the US is losing interest in the region, created a golden opportunity for Israel to normalise relations with them—ostensibly weakening the Palestinians’ diplomatic support significantly.

And yet, as the recent violence shows, Israel’s Palestinian problem is as acute as ever, and Jerusalem remains a flashpoint that could well trigger a religious war in the Middle East. Netanyahu’s counterproductive fight against the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and his consequent failure to stem Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional designs only exacerbate the risk of a regional flare-up.

Beyond the Abraham Accords, Netanyahu oversaw two other major strategic developments. First, building on Israel’s new status as a gas-producing power in the Eastern Mediterranean, he established a tripartite strategic alliance with Greece and Cyprus, as a counterweight to Turkey’s destabilising aspirations. Second, he expanded Israel’s economic links with China, Japan and India.

Yet Netanyahu’s economic legacy also leaves much to be desired. Under his strict neoliberal policies, the welfare system was hit hard, and Israel consolidated its position as one of the OECD’s most unequal countries, with 21% of the population living below the poverty line.

Ultimately, Netanyahu’s legacy is one of tension, loathing and chaos. Israel is now more divided than it has ever been, and Israelis have largely lost hope that their country can be both Jewish and democratic. Can a government united only by its aversion to Netanyahu push back against this legacy?

Another round of fighting between Israel and Hamas has ended in a shaky ceasefire, with both sides claiming victory, as was the case with the two previous ceasefires since 2008. Israel justified its massive bombardment of Gaza on the grounds of self-defence, and Hamas defended its rocketing of Israel in support of the Palestinian cause for freedom and independence from Israeli occupation. Yet, the latest confrontation has spurred a new set of US diplomatic activities in pursuit of resolving the long-running Israeli–Palestinian conflict based on a ‘two-state solution’.

Most conflicts in history have ultimately ended in a ceasefire and some kind of political settlement. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has defied this order ever since the creation of the state of Israel at the cost of the Palestinian people 73 years ago. The three Arab–Israeli Wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, many episodes of Palestinian uprising, and several peace attempts, including that resulting in the 1993 Oslo Accords, have not cleared the way for a peaceful settlement of the conflict.

Israel has remained stubbornly determined to maintain its occupation of the Palestinian territories that it captured in the 1967 war. It has also resolutely enforced a blockade of the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air since 2007 when Hamas took over the strip following Israeli and American rejection of it as a ‘terrorist’ group and of its victory in the 2006 Palestinian election. Meanwhile, the Palestinians’ struggle to free themselves from occupation and daily humiliation, and their yearning for an independent state of their own based on the 1967 borders, has not evaporated.

The right-wing and long-serving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has relied heavily on the application of his country’s regional military superiority to suppress the Palestinians and confiscate more and more of their lands for Jewish settlers, many of whom have come from abroad. He has rejected the internationally backed two-state solution whereby a sovereign Palestinian state could exist alongside an independent and secure Israel, and shut down any suggestion for a one-state solution.

Netanyahu has been a master of talking about peace and war at the same time to entice supporters and marginalise critics. In this way, he has boosted his political fortunes and tightened Israel’s hold on the occupied territories, while vowing that there would be no independent Palestinian state under his watch. In the process, he has benefited from the split between the Palestinian Authority, which has been nominally administering the West Bank as a result of the Oslo Accords, and Hamas. Netanyahu has done everything possible to ensure the continuation of this split, although when it comes to opposing Israel’s occupation, the two wings of the Palestinian nationalist movement share a common position.

Former US president Barak Obama sought to cajole Netanyahu to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, but failed. His successor, Donald Trump, went further than any of his predecessors in siding with Netanyahu and Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, dimming the prospects for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.

The latest confrontation couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for Netanyahu’s leadership and that of Hamas, as well as the Palestinian cause. While under the cloud of a trial on charges of bribery and fraud and having failed to win a majority in four elections in the last two years, Netanyahu badly needed a clash to raise his political fortunes and to show that he was the only leader capable of defending Israel.

As devastating as the conflict has been for the more than 2 million inhabitants of Gaza—one of the most densely populated pieces of land on earth—it has also galvanised world public opinion in support of the Palestinian cause. This includes a shift away from Israel among some US Jewish communities. Despite Biden’s traditionally strong backing of Israel and a split within the Democratic party, he now has more room for a diplomatic offensive in pursuit of the two-state solution than his predecessors.

It appears that Netanyahu’s political calculation has backfired. The Biden administration is in a position to engage in a systematic approach to facilitate a viable and just resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This may require it to deal with not only the Palestinian Authority but also Hamas. It has already honoured Trump’s peace deal with America’s erstwhile terrorist enemy, the Taliban, and removed the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen from America’s terrorism list. Why not do the same with Hamas as part of the Palestinian nationalist movement? If Hamas is not a party to a resolution, it will always be in a position to wreck it.

Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement of Hamas are once again locked in a deadly confrontation. The clashes that started between Palestinian worshipers and Israeli forces at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem over the Israeli forced eviction of Palestinians from their homes early this week have now escalated to losses for both sides. It confronts US President Joe Biden’s liberalist agenda with another serious problem that begs an urgent resolution. How his administration tackles this protracted conflict will be central to Biden’s emphasis on human rights and a stable Middle East.

Israel’s military actions and Hamas’s rocket attacks have already resulted in the loss of many innocent lives, including 14 children in Gaza and 6 Israeli civilians. While Washington has affirmed America’s traditional support of Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’ and called for an end to violence by all sides, Israel’s disproportionate use of force has caused much concern around the world.

In a recent report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israeli authorities of establishing apartheid and carrying out persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Israeli government has rejected the HRW report as baseless and biased. Yet, HRW has documented its claims in great detail. Its descriptions of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and in the blockaded Gaza Strip is sufficiently compelling to pierce the global community’s conscience.

This is not the first time that Israel’s behaviour has been branded as apartheid. Former US president Jimmy Carter used the term as far back as 2006 in his book Palestine: Peace not apartheid.

In an article at the time, he described Israeli behaviour as ‘abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine’s citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.’

Carter said that ‘in many ways, [the Israeli occupation] is more oppressive than what black people lived under in South Africa during apartheid … [and] that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonise choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens.’ Carter’s description remains very apt.

Israeli authorities condemned Carter’s assertions, irrespective of the fact that the former president had made tireless efforts to bring together the Egyptian and Israeli leaders, Anwar al-Sadat and Menachem Begin, who negotiated the two Camp David Accords of 1979.

One of the accords was designed to establish peace between Egypt and Israel and the other was to lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, comprised of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, within five years of the signing of the accords. Israel implemented the first accord but reneged on the second. Carter’s abhorrence is registered in his 2007 book, The blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East.

The reactions of HRW and Carter have been strongly backed by someone from the inner sanctum of the Israeli establishment, retired general Ami Ayalon, in the book he published last year called Friendly fire: How Israel became its own worst enemy and its hope for the future.

Ayalon has impeccable credentials as a most loyal son of Israel. He has served his country through a military career from the age of 18, rising to become head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, commander-in-chief of the navy, and a member of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) until his retirement in 2009.

He turned to peace activism in 2003 after, as he puts it, killing many Palestinians and burying his compatriots for the love of Israel. He said he became a peace activist due to a realisation that Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian lands and its discriminatory treatment of the Palestinians could only backfire, causing Israel to become its own worst enemy.

Ayalon expresses desperation about the diminishing state of Israel’s democracy and its treatment of the Palestinians. He sees an Israel that has become so self-seeking that it has deliberately turned away from understanding the Palestinians’ longing for freedom and a state of their own.

He, in turn, longs for an Israeli government which, in contrast to that under long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would be ‘fully committed to the values of civil rights, minority rights, human rights, pluralism, transparency, a rules-based international order, and peace with our neighbors’. He concludes that only such a government can declare a just war and that fanatics, whether Muslim or Jewish, will not be allowed to destroy Israel’s hard-won democracy.

And only the leader of such a government can ‘declare that our war to preserve our security and independence is inseparable from our decision to end our apartheid regime in the Occupied Territories and Gaza and to allow the Palestinians to exercise national self-determination in Gaza and what we call Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]’.

It’s time for the Biden administration and, for that matter, any state or organisation that supports Israel and is interested in the Jewish state’s long-term wellbeing to take the warnings of Carter, HRW and Ayalon seriously. They should prompt Israel to view its own freedom and security as intertwined with those of the Palestinians, and it must opt for the internationally backed two-state solution. Otherwise, the conflict will persist not only to the continued detriment of the Palestinians but also that of Israel and the region.

Turkish and Iranian interests coincide in the fields of energy and trade, especially because of Turkey’s dependence on Iranian oil and gas and Iran’s imports of Turkish goods. The two countries also align in their shared antipathy towards the Saudi regime and in their opposition to Kurdish separatism, which threatens the territorial integrity of both Turkey and Iran.

Turkey’s purchase of Iranian oil and Iran’s imports of Turkish products have been curtailed since 2018 by the sanctions reimposed on Iran by President Donald Trump, especially after April 2019 when the US rescinded the waiver given to Turkey and seven other major importers of Iranian oil. In 2019 the share of crude oil and oil products in Turkish imports from Iran decreased by 63% and Iran’s traditional trade surplus decreased by 79%. Simultaneously, the ‘maximum pressure’ exerted by Washington on Tehran reduced Iran’s capacity to buy Turkish goods.

However, both countries took this decline in their strides in the hope that things would improve with the end of the Trump presidency. Brighter prospects of America’s return to the nuclear deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Trump withdrew the US from in 2018) and of the graduated removal of sanctions on Iran following the election of President Joe Biden are likely to see a rise in Turkish–Iranian economic interactions once again. Although they may not reach the level they had achieved before 2018, Iran is still likely to be a leading energy supplier of energy to Turkey, and Turkish goods will continue to corner a large share of the Iranian market because of geographic propinquity and low transport costs.

While the future of Turkey–Iran relations looks brighter in the economic sphere, the same can’t be said for the strategic arena. It’s true that both Tehran and Ankara are engaged in competing with Riyadh for influence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has considered Iran its mortal enemy since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. More recently, Turkey also started challenging Saudi Arabia’s quest for pre-eminence in the Arab world with its neo-Ottomanist policy that projects Turkey as the natural leader of the Sunni countries. This became very clear during the Saudi-led boycott of Qatar when Ankara supported Doha by airlifting supplies and troops to neutralise the threat it faced from Riyadh and its allies.

However, beneath the surface of these converging strategic interests lurk a number of problems that are now coming to the surface. First, when all is said and done, Turkey continues to be a member of NATO and therefore an ally of the United States, Iran’s primary nemesis. Although of late it has taken a defiant posture towards the US on several issues, including buying air defence systems from Russia and acting aggressively in Syria despite American reservations, Tehran can’t be sure that, if push comes to shove, Turkey will abandon its alliance with the US for the sake of Iran. In fact, Ankara’s decision to slash imports of Iranian oil under threat of American sanctions sends exactly the opposite message.

Again, in the past few years Turkey’s policies in Syria, where it opposes the regime of Bashar al-Assad, run contrary to Iran’s preferences as a principal supporter of the regime. In the past few months, Turkey has also made reconciliatory overtures to Israel and Saudi Arabia that should have Iran worried. But most important of all are Turkey’s policies towards the Caucasus and Central Asia, which are based on the premise of pan-Turkism that has a great deal of appeal for the Turkic populations of those regions. Russia and Iran have been rattled by this since they each consider the regions, which had been part of the Russian and/or Persian empire, as part of their spheres of influence.

The contradictions in Turkish and Iranian approaches to the Caucasus came to the fore with great force during the Azerbaijan–Armenia conflict of September–November 2020. Turkey supported Azerbaijan to the hilt, supplying it with arms that were a crucial factor in the Azeri victory in the war. Iran was not only ambivalent about the war but also looked with trepidation at the increase in Turkey’s popularity in the Turkic countries as a result of its support to Baku. The victory of Azerbaijan, which gave it more control over Armenian-held territory, has positioned it, and more importantly its ally Turkey, as an alternative, east–west conduit for trade in energy and other goods with Europe that would bypass the existing north–south routes dominated by Russia or Iran. Such an outcome will vastly decrease Moscow’s and Tehran’s importance to the Central Asian states and greatly add to Ankara’s importance.

Tehran is particularly worried that Turkey is exploiting its ethnic identity, which it shares with many states in Central Asia and the Caucasus, to expand its influence. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recital, while attending a military parade in Baku to celebrate Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia, of an Azeri nationalist poem that calls for reuniting two Iranian ethnic Azeri provinces with Azerbaijan annoyed the Iranian regime no end. This act was seen as not only fomenting trouble between Baku and Tehran but also stoking separatist sentiments among the Azeris in Iran, who form about a third of the Iranian population and are for the most part well integrated into the Iranian social fabric. In fact, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is an Azeri himself.

Elements of cooperation and potential conflict are thus closely intertwined in the Turkish–Iranian relationship. The leaders of both countries must carefully manage the intricate balance between the two to prevent any major escalation of tensions. Any tipping of the balance between these two major poles of power in the Middle East could add greatly to instability in an already volatile region.

A wind of political change seems to be suddenly blowing across the troubled Middle East. Egyptian authorities have unexpectedly freed an Al Jazeera journalist from jail and Saudi Arabia has conditionally released a human rights activist. Both have happened in the wake of Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president. Are these moves likely to be followed by more and wider changes affecting the regional geopolitical landscape?

The releases of Mahmoud Hussein, who had been incarcerated in Egypt since 2016, and Loujain al-Hathloul, who had languished in a Saudi prison since 2018, came as a surprise to many in the region and beyond.

Hussein was accused of seeking to overthrow the Egyptian government and having an allegiance to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, although no formal charges were ever laid against him. An Egyptian national, but working for the Qatari Al Jazeera news network, Hussein and his employer had denied any wrongdoing, asserting that he was simply fulfilling his normal duties as a journalist.

Hathloul, on the other hand, had been convicted in a closed trial on a number of ‘criminal’ charges and sentenced in December to five years and eight months in prison, despite widespread international protests on her behalf. However, her release is conditional, limiting her movement and leaving her vulnerable to being arrested again.

Whatever the details of either case, Hussein’s and Hathloul’s releases may mark the dawn of an era in which not just Egypt and Saudi Arabia but also other regional states, including Israel, might find it expedient to change tack to align themselves with the new occupant of the White House.

Biden has already announced a number of policy initiatives that signal a Middle East policy approach very different from that of his predecessor, the neonationalist populist Donald Trump. He has emphasised human rights as a major foreign policy issue, halted the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, withdrawn America’s support for the Saudi-led Arab operation in Yemen and called for an end to the Yemen war which has inflicted massive devastation on the country’s population. This week, he removed the Iran-backed Houthis, who have been fighting the Arab coalition and its Yemeni allies, from the US list of terrorist organisations and announced that he will deal only with the ageing Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz rather than his controversial young son and Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman.

Biden has also said that he favours a US return to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, provided Tehran restores all of its commitment to the deal. He has also intimated that his administration doesn’t recognise Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories as legitimate and has restored some of America’s funding to the Palestinians for humanitarian and security purposes.

Considered together, these announcements indicate that the Biden administration isn’t interested in dealing with the region through a lens of ‘business as usual’. Its policy shift carries the potential to exert pressure on regional actors to engage in reform and conflict resolution, and thus dismantle some of the hurdles that have rendered the Middle East so turbulent and branded America as a contradictory player in the region.

Of course, the Middle East is not an arena where states can easily be compelled to succumb to America’s policy preferences. They have in the past often succeeded in using their individual geopolitical, geoeconomic and geosecurity viabilities and vulnerabilities to cut through or get around pressure coming from different US administrations. In recent times, we have seen Arab, Iranian and Israeli authorities find ways to defy or survive America’s cajoling—whether through diplomatic or interventionist means.

However, Biden’s initiatives come at a time when all governments in the region are struggling, though in varying degrees and intensity, to cope with Covid-19 and its far-reaching economic and social consequences, as well as growing public demand for better governance and living conditions.

Even Israel—America’s closest Middle East ally—is not free of this dictum. It has experienced an unprecedented level of political instability, economic hardship and public protests, not to mention its lingering internationally damaged image over its continued occupation of Palestinian land and treatment of its inhabitants.

Comparably, as America’s adversary, Iran has faced deeper and wider challenges. It has suffered enormously from American sanctions and the coronavirus’s savagery, which have given rise to intense bursts of public discontent from time to time.

The releases of Hussein and Hathloul could not possibly have materialised free of Biden’s policy initiatives. They may mark the start of more responses from the region, which also follows the end of the Saudi-led blockade of fellow Arab state Qatar. Yet, any further favourable development will depend on whether Biden will be able to maintain firmly the momentum of his liberalist approach and press on with it to make a real difference in the Middle East.

Although Biden is confronted with mounting domestic and other foreign policy challenges, he has made a well-intentioned start with the Middle East at a time when the regional environment appears to be quite conducive to his policy changes.