It’s Bibi again. Having unapologetically allied with a racist, Jewish-supremacist party, Benjamin Netanyahu has secured a fourth consecutive term as Israel’s prime minister. The Union of Right Wing Parties says Netanyahu promised it both the education and the justice ministries, and who are we to doubt it? Along with Netanyahu’s other right-wing allies, the URWP is already backing a new law that would protect the prime minister from being indicted on pending corruption charges.

Israel’s parliamentary election has consolidated the country’s position within a growing bloc of illiberal democracies around the world. Once again, Netanyahu has won by mobilising the people against the very state institutions that he’s supposed to uphold and defend. In this election cycle, he shamelessly lambasted the judicial system and the police for doing their jobs. He attacked the media for uncovering improper behaviour by his family and cronies. He pilloried public intellectuals for refusing to acknowledge his greatness. And he depicted the old Zionist ‘left’ as traitors.

As for the Arab parties, they lost around 25% of their seats, owing partly to voter abstention. With Netanyahu having pushed through a ‘nation-state law’ declaring the pursuit of ‘national self-determination’ in Israel ‘unique to the Jewish people’, Israel’s Arab citizens apparently are through lending credibility to a sham democracy. Throughout the campaign, they were treated as political lepers by practically every segment of the Israeli body politic.

The Israeli left, in particular, has been exposed as a bankrupt political project. In fact, Netanyahu’s Israel has swung so far right that the term ‘leftist’ itself is now a smear. Both his party’s main challenger, the centrist Blue and White alliance, and the Labor Party have run away from the label. And both not only lacked the courage to stand up to Netanyahu’s maligning of Israeli Arabs as enemies of the state, but also refused even to consider forming a parliamentary alliance with Arab parties. On the Arab question, liberal Zionists have acceded to Netanyahu’s project of making Israel into a one-race, one-party state.

All told, the election amounts to a monumental indictment of Israel’s democracy. In a campaign dominated by personal smears and disinformation, not one substantive issue was debated seriously. It was as if the consequences of Netanyahu’s cruel neoliberal policies—a weakened welfare state and squeezed middle classes—didn’t matter at all. Nor was there any discussion of the unproductive Orthodox community’s dependence on state subsidies, which have grown substantially under Netanyahu.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: the Palestinian question. Fearing the loss of conservative votes, the left and centre parties didn’t make a single convincing statement—let alone offer a policy program—to address the greatest existential and moral challenge facing the country. Yes, candidates on the left paid lip service to the problem, and Benny Gantz, the colourless leader of Blue and White, muttered something about the need for a ‘diplomatic move’ with respect to the occupied territories, but that was it.

Meanwhile, Gantz and those on the left said almost nothing when Netanyahu boasted that he could get US President Donald Trump to greenlight a partial Israeli annexation of the West Bank. And they were equally nonresponsive when Netanyahu took credit for the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

In fact, US–Israeli relations were another key issue that went almost unmentioned in the election campaign. Never mind that Netanyahu’s alliance with Trump and American evangelicals has cost Israel the support of a growing portion of the US Democratic Party establishment, or that his blank cheque to the Israeli Orthodox community has alienated America’s predominantly liberal Jewish community. After Beto O’Rourke, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, warned that Netanyahu is a ‘racist’ who is damaging America’s special alliance with Israel, Israelis responded by extending that racist’s grip on power.

Throughout the campaign, Netanyahu touted his foreign-policy record. In addition to cosying up to illiberal Eastern European governments and Brazil’s new right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, he claims to have bolstered Israel’s economic clout in Asia, made diplomatic breakthroughs in Africa, and forged covert partnerships with neighbouring Arab countries, not least Saudi Arabia.

And here, too, Netanyahu’s opponents dropped the ball. They could have pointed out that his goal in brokering new partnerships is to head off international opposition to his planned annexation of Palestinian territory. Instead of using Israel’s diplomatic relationships to work towards an acceptable solution to its primary existential challenge, he has exploited them for his own chauvinist agenda.

Sadly, the election leaves no doubt about what awaits Israel in the coming years. A cabal of Netanyahu cronies and family members, racist messianic settlers, and Orthodox parties with opportunistic designs on the state budget will drag Israel towards a new single-state reality that will resemble apartheid South Africa.

If there is any consolation, it is that the Israeli left and centre—from Meretz and Labor to the Arab parties and Blue and White—still collectively represent almost half of the electorate. A bold leader who is willing to fight for Israel’s soul could prevail, but only by unapologetically allying with Israeli Arabs. That is not just the best electoral strategy. It is also the right thing to do.

A recent event in the United Arab Emirates sparked both merriment and scorn globally when every award at the Gender Balance Index 2018 was handed to a man. UAE Vice President Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who presented the awards, may have surprised some observers with this tone-deaf action; he is better known for his more successful gender initiatives, including increasing female representation in diplomatic roles, law and the judiciary.

Kinder commentators said that even the Gender Balance Index fiasco was a step in the right direction, noting that one of the awards was for instituting maternity leave for female UAE soldiers. But is this genuine progress that we should be applauding, or lip service to silence irritating (and largely Western) sniping? And what does it matter to Australia?

The UAE has arguably the most advanced military in the Middle East bar Israel, and Australia can immodestly claim significant credit for that through a combination of long-term government support and a slew of ex-ADF personnel who have worked to professionalise the UAE Armed Forces from the inside. Australia has provided equipment, training and other forms of support to the armed forces of nearly every country in the Middle East at some point, and women, peace and security (WPS) is coming up more and more frequently as an engagement topic.

While our contributions may be small in the scheme of things, Australian support (and equipment) does come with the cachet of high-end professionalism and potentially a sympathetic ear from a member of the Five Eyes community. Australia also gets to burnish its credentials as a champion of WPS. But barriers of language, culture and distance make follow-up difficult, along with a certain level of fatalism that accompanies just about any effort in a region littered with the failures of Western intervention.

One of the greatest challenges is trying to confirm what has actually occurred after the headline statements. Data beyond what governments want released is limited to say the least, especially in English. An internet search will turn up scores of favourable puff pieces, mainly from Arab media or Western sources uncritically repeating them. In 2018, both Saudi Arabia and Qatar announced that they were opening the doors for female volunteers to join their armed forces (although in Saudi Arabia’s case this would still require a male guardian’s permission). There’s little word yet on any further developments, from what types of roles will be open to women, to how many have chosen (or been allowed) to join up. Oman’s public commitments to gender balance in the armed forces seem limited to the Royal Cavalry’s all-female marching band, which doesn’t help dispel the feeling that these announcements are mere window-dressing.

Things in the more progressive Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) appear better, but again the critiques are limited. The JAF apparently intends to triple its percentage of women over the next five years. That sounds impressive, but the increase is from 1% to 3%, and the options for women will still be limited (and frankly puzzling to a Western audience; a woman in the JAF can become fully trained in midwifery). Unlike many of its far richer neighbours, Jordan has some pressing incentives to meet international norms. It is heavily dependent on external aid and is a sizeable contributor of peacekeepers to the UN.

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether our contributions are helping or hindering. By congratulating the JAF on its female engagement team are we respecting genuine progress in a culturally sensitive situation, or glossing over the doubling in child bride rates among the refugees they are supposed to be protecting? Even the UAE, which opened the Gulf region’s first military college for women in 1991, still requires adult women to seek permission from their guardians before joining. Do we applaud or sigh?

The answer, of course, is that it’s more complex than a simple binary choice. Women in the armed forces of nearly any country face a daunting situation, made harder by complex cultural and societal expectations. Successes should certainly be lauded, but Australia needs to think carefully about what it does next. Rather than simply repeating the latest platitude, Australia should be asking for hard data and honest discussions. There needs to be transparency and accountability, and a cleverer and more nuanced approach to capacity-building efforts that adds to a long-term strategy.

Australia is by no means the only country seeking to support women and gender issues in the Middle East, and should work closely with like-minded countries like the US, UK and Canada to coordinate and align our activities. Most importantly, we should all be sending the same message about ensuring that the countries of the Middle East make some real progress after the press release has been issued. Perhaps then we’ll see a few more awards being handed to women.

US President Donald Trump’s policy of putting economic pressure on Iran to force regime change by inciting a domestic revolt seems to be failing. There is little doubt that renewed sanctions have hurt Iran economically, as witnessed above all by the precipitate fall of the Iranian currency in their wake. However, economic pressure has not led to a revolt against the regime and the currency has stabilised after the initial shock. Indeed, the American action may have consolidated support behind the regime, which can now deflect criticism of its economic performance on to the imposition of American sanctions.

In this context, Iran’s relations with Turkey provide a very interesting case study. Both Tehran and Ankara have regional ambitions that have sometimes led to friction between them, as was the case over Syria until recently. However, economic complementarities and congruence of strategic interests have helped to keep their relationship on a relatively even keel.

When the Trump administration announced that it was going to reimpose sanctions on Iran, Turkey made it clear that it wouldn’t follow American diktats but would comply only with sanctions imposed by the UN. Economic interdependence provides part of the explanation for the Turkish stand. Bilateral trade between Iran and Turkey isn’t limited to oil and gas. The volume of trade between the two neighbours stood at US$11.7 billion at the end of 2017, up from US$9.7 billion in 2016, and both countries have committed to eventually raising the level to US$30 billion.

However, it’s not just oil and trade that determine Turkish–Iranian relations; there’s also a convergence of political objectives. Turkish and Iranian strategic interests coincide on Kurdish secessionism, which threatens the territorial integrity of both countries. That’s why Iran didn’t oppose Turkish incursions into Syria to prevent the creation of a Kurdish enclave abutting its borders, even when the two countries supported opposite sides during the civil war. Now that Turkey is reconciled to Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad remaining in power in Syria, the major political disagreement between Ankara and Tehran has lost its importance.

Iran’s support to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the time of the failed coup in July 2016 greatly helped in patching up differences. The Iranian foreign minister stayed up all night as the coup was unfolding to monitor the Turkish situation and telephoned his Turkish counterpart five times to express Iran’s support for the government, thus strengthening personal bonds between the leaders of the two countries.

There’s also an increasing conjunction of interests between the two countries vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia. Tehran has been engaged for years in a fierce competition with Riyadh over primacy in the Gulf and over their respective roles in the wider Middle East. Syria had been the primary battleground for their rivalry since 2011. Now that the Syrian civil war is almost over, Yemen has become the major arena of conflict between them. Saudi Arabia and its ally the United Arab Emirates are engaged in open warfare with the Houthis who are in control of the Yemeni capital and are supported by Iran. The Saudi–UAE aerial bombardments have ravaged an already desperately poor country, killing thousands of civilians. An estimated eight million people are on the verge of starvation.

Ankara has increasingly come to see Riyadh as its primary antagonist in the competition for influence in the Sunni countries of the Middle East. It finds Tehran a useful ally in tying down Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, thus making it easier for Turkey to emerge as the preeminent Sunni power in the rest of the region.

Saudi Arabia’s imposition of an economic blockade on Qatar further strained relations between the two countries. Turkey has a military base in Qatar, which it reinforced following the imposition of the blockade, and the emir sent a contingent of Qatari troops to provide security to the Turkish president at the time of the coup in 2016. Turkey reciprocated in 2017 by flying in essential commodities to Qatar in tandem with Iran in order to render the Saudi blockade redundant. The convergence of interests on Qatar between Tehran and Ankara arises from the primary reason for the Saudi blockade: Qatar’s cordial relations with neighbouring Iran, with which it shares the world’s largest gas field.

Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has greatly infuriated the Turkish government, especially the president, who has taken it as a personal insult. Erdoğan has asked for the extradition of Khashoggi’s murderers to Turkey to stand trial and has clearly implicated Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the crime, without naming him directly. Turkish–Saudi relations are currently at the lowest point in their history. This has worked to Iran’s advantage and has further cemented relations between Tehran and Ankara.

Turkey and Iran are thus moving towards a joint front against Saudi Arabia and its allies, whose numbers are dwindling as the Gulf Cooperation Council unravels. The United States would be wise to take this configuration of forces into account while formulating its future policy on the Middle East.

Ronen Bergman has written an extraordinary book which is at once morally confronting and gripping in its narrative.

Without the formal assistance of Israel’s intelligence community, including Mossad, Bergman has produced a comprehensive account of Israel’s deployment of targeted killings from the establishment of the state in the 1940s to the present day. While official endorsement of Bergman’s project was withheld, a great many Israelis from the fields of politics and government, security services and the military, academia and the legal fraternity have clearly made their views known to the author. And the author is accomplished: he is a contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a senior correspondent for Israel’s largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

Among Bergman’s books is The secret war with Iran, which has served him well by contributing useful detail in Rise and kill first. There’s no doubt that a global policy of assassinations is controversial. Any program of extrajudicial killings is an invitation to peril. When the state becomes prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner with minimal scrutiny and a near absence of legal sanctions, appalling consequences can arise. Mistakes can and will be made. Innocent people will suffer.

But then again, every security challenge for the state of Israel can prove existential. Bergman sums up the situation this way:

Because of Israel’s tiny dimensions, the attempts by the Arab states to destroy it even before it was established, their continued threats to do so, and the perpetual menace of Arab terrorism, the country evolved a highly effective military and, arguably, the best intelligence community in the world. They, in turn, have developed the most robust, streamlined assassination machine in history.

Bergman argues that two Israeli legal systems have developed in parallel: a recognisable criminal justice system for the citizenry, and one for the security and defence entities.

The latter system has allowed, with a nod and a wink from the government, highly problematic acts of assassination, with no parliamentary or public scrutiny, resulting in the loss of many innocent lives.

On the other hand, the assassination weapon, based on intelligence that is ‘nothing less than exquisite’—to quote the former head of the NSA and the CIA, General Michael Hayden—is what made Israel’s war on terror the most effective ever waged by a Western country. On numerous occasions, it was targeted killing that saved Israel from very grave crises.

Israel has established protocols for employing targeted assassinations as a weapon of state. Prime ministerial approval is required in most cases, but some Israeli prime ministers are more adventurous than others; while some are hard-headed, but nonetheless cautious, much depends on the personality of the Israeli leader. Many, such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, spent earlier careers in uniform. Prime ministers such as Ariel Sharon actually exhibited far more aggression in certain cases than either the security services or military.

And sometimes the security services get it wrong, as with the killing in Norway which was supposedly linked to Black September’s wanton murder of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. On another occasion, PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s brother, Dr Fathi Arafat, was targeted by mistake while en route to Cairo over the Mediterranean. A tragedy was only narrowly avoided, for the younger Arafat was very different from his brother.

He was a physician and the founder of the Palestinian Red Crescent. On the plane with him were thirty wounded Palestinian children, some of them victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Fathi Arafat was escorting them to Cairo for medical treatment.

Bergman’s book is compelling. The author draws his readers in by developing an absorbing, cascading account of a policy of Israeli assassinations from the calling to account of Nazi war criminals in post-war Europe through to the elimination of Iranian scientists working on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program. Bergman has assembled his substantial trove of intelligence material and his book unfolds from early targeting of German scientists working on an Egyptian missile effort through to successful intervention in Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons initiative.

There are convincing successes, carried out by various arms of the Israeli security services and the military. And, as previously mentioned, there are humiliating mistakes such as the identification of the Mossad unit—some of whom were using false Australian passports— which assassinated a senior Hamas arms trafficker in his hotel room in Dubai in 2010. Even Mossad can become complacent to the point of being sloppy.

The background to Rise and kill first is the constantly shifting strategic pattern in the Middle East, through recurring wars to the emergence of major new players, such as Iran, characterised by the unwavering hostility towards Israel of Tehran and its client militias, best evidenced by Hezbollah. The foreground is the appalling atrocities inflicted on Israel and its citizens by terrorists, some of which are too sickening to record.

‘Rise and kill first’ is originally a Talmudic verse from Babylonian times and there is a Biblical injunction in terms of the imperatives for Israeli security. The quest for security remains an overwhelming priority for the Israeli state. The question which Israeli leaders must constantly address is whether the policy of targeted assassinations fits readily or well into an overarching strategy. Or has this instrument merely become a tactical weapon for eliminating threats, however real, that diverts effort away from working on a broader foreign policy and national security canvas?

As Bergman points out, after 9/11 the United States embraced targeted assassinations as policy, so this book identifies consequences well beyond the state of Israel. It is one of many reasons that Rise and kill first is essential and revealing reading.

The signs are ominous—especially in Israel and its neighbours, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Violence, both actual and rhetorical, has been escalating on all three fronts. Gaza could become the immediate flash point as the Palestinians’ ‘March of Return’, which began on 30 March, intensifies and Israeli retaliation becomes increasingly lethal.

On 28 September, 20,000 Palestinians marched to the Gaza–Israel border and seven of them were killed by Israeli bullets. Such confrontations are now becoming an almost daily occurrence. The march began as a civil-society movement born of the mounting economic and political frustrations over the Israeli blockade of the territory that has made life in Gaza ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’.

Initially, it also had anti-Hamas overtones because of the organisation’s misgovernance of Gaza and its inability to reach an agreement with the Palestinian Authority that is in nominal control of parts of the West Bank. However, over time it has become a movement organised and orchestrated by Hamas itself.  That has made the situation highly combustible, with senior Israeli officials threatening a full-scale invasion of Gaza as happened in 2014. It may lead to a Palestinian eruption in the West Bank as well.

Gaza isn’t the only front on which Israel could be engaged in a war. Another major military confrontation is looming between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disclosed in his address to the UN General Assembly on 27 September that Israeli intelligence had unearthed evidence that Hezbollah is building a missile site near the Hariri International Airport in Beirut and a storage facility underneath a soccer stadium nearby.

According to Israeli sources, those projects are part of a joint effort with Iran to upgrade Hezbollah’s missile capacity so that it becomes an increasing threat to targets deep within Israel. In his speech at the UN, Netanyahu threatened Hezbollah explicitly: ‘I have a message for Hezbollah today: Israel knows what you’re doing. Israel knows where you’re doing it. And Israel will not let you get away with it.’ It sounded almost like a clarion call to combat, for any Israeli attack on these sites is bound to bring about severe retaliation by Hezbollah that could lead to an all-out war like the one witnessed in 2006.

The Israeli threat implicates not only Hezbollah but also Iran and Syria since the missiles are of Iranian origin and are being shipped through Syria. In fact, over the past year Israel has been engaged in repeatedly attacking Iranian troop concentrations in Syria and likely sites for missile trans-shipment to Lebanon with a high degree of impunity. That has introduced increasing recklessness into Israeli actions and led to a major diplomatic spat with Moscow after a Russian plane was accidentally downed by Syrian air defences attempting to intercept Israeli military aircraft attacking targets in Syria.

While a direct military confrontation between Israel and Russia isn’t yet on the cards, Moscow has strongly warned Israel that its irresponsible military adventurism could inadvertently lead to such a clash. It also warned that such actions could put the Israeli–Russian military coordination in Syria in danger. Russia cautioned Israel that its attacks on Syria, even if limited to Iranian targets, are weakening the Syrian regime and harming its attempt to end the war in the country, which is an important Russian objective as well.

In an immediate response to the downing of the Russian plane, Russia began supplying Syria with S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to beef up the latter’s air defences against Israeli air attacks. Israel considers that ‘a worrisome upgrade’ but one unlikely to prevent the Israeli Air Force from operating in Syrian airspace.

Nonetheless, continuing air attacks by Israel on Syrian territory in the context of Russian warnings has the potential to further damage Russian–Israeli relations. One of the consequences of the escalation in tensions could be Russia’s withdrawal of the guarantee it has given Israel that it will persuade Iran to keep its forces at least 100 kilometres away (except in and around Damascus) from the Israeli border to prevent inadvertent clashes. The deployment of Iranian troops and allied Shia militias, including Hezbollah, close to the Syria–Israel border could be the prelude to ground clashes that would add to the combustible situation in the Middle East.

President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal has assured Netanyahu that Israel and the United States are on the same page on Iran. He is therefore once again vigorously pursuing his favourite goal of totally eliminating Iran’s nuclear capacity in order to maintain Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. That agenda—in combination with the likelihood of an Israeli–Iranian confrontation in Syria, even if unintentional—is highly dangerous and may land the region in a major conflagration that drags in Washington as well.

The Middle East is sitting on a powder keg. No one knows when it will blow up. What is certain is that it’s likely to do so sooner rather than later.