Tag Archive for: Israel

The fight for Syria

The collapse of Syria’s al-Assad dynasty, which had ruled for more than a half-century, was always going to represent a daunting challenge for the country and its neighbours. But the escalating conflict over Syria’s future between Turkey and Israel compounds the risks considerably.

In Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s view, Syria could not have emerged from its ‘dark era’ had he not lent support to the militias that brought down Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now, Erdogan sees himself as the patron of Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), and he is eager to shape the new ‘bright’ Syria in Turkey’s image—and promote Turkey’s interests along the way.

For Erdogan, one of those interests is to repatriate the three million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey. Another key priority is preventing Kurdish nationalism from spilling over in Turkey, even if that means taking military action against Kurdish forces in Syria. Moreover, Erdogan is reportedly negotiating a defence pact with Sharaa, which would allow Turkey to establish air bases in Syria and provide training to Syria’s military. As Iranian and most Russian military forces are pulling out, Turkey’s are moving in.

But Israel believes that it, too, deserves credit for Assad’s fall, which probably would not have happened if Israeli military action had not weakened Iran—including by degrading its air-defense capabilities—and devastated its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah. So, why should Turkey be permitted to use the regime change to become the Levant’s new hegemon and attack Israel’s and the United States’ traditional Kurdish allies in northern Syria?

Already, Israeli forces have seized territory in Syria’s south, supposedly to secure the area temporarily. Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has pledged to ‘reach out and strengthen our ties’ with the Kurds. And the Committee for the Evaluation of the Defense Establishment Budget and the Balance of Power has recommended that Israel prepare for a possible military confrontation with Turkey in the Kurdish regions of Syria’s north, where Turkey has long supported local armed groups.

In the wake of Assad’s ouster, Israel clearly sees Turkey’s rising regional clout as a threat. But whether Israel likes it or not, Turkey is better positioned to dominate in Syria. And if it succeeds, the implications will reverberate well beyond both countries’ borders.

Napoleon said that a state’s policy ‘lies in its geography’. For Erdogan, this means historical geography: his foreign policy has Turkey straddling the Caucasus, the Middle East and the Balkans, which were once largely under Ottoman rule. After the June 2011 parliamentary election, Erdogan boasted, ‘Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul. Beirut won as much as Izmir. Damascus won as much as Ankara.’

Now, Erdogan has a chance to realise his long-standing dream of using Turkey’s model of Islamic democracy as a vehicle for diplomatic outreach across the region and positioning the country as a key intermediary between East and West. But he is likely to take a calibrated approach in pursuing his neo-Ottoman ambitions, not least because they have historically drawn bitter opposition from other Sunni powers in the region, especially Egypt.

For Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, containing the Muslim Brotherhood—which led the government that Sisi ousted in 2013—is a matter of existential importance. It was differences over the Muslim Brotherhood that drove him to collaborate with Cyprus, Greece and Israel in 2019 to exclude Turkey from the East Mediterranean Gas Forum. So, Sisi was hardly pleased to witness Assad’s fall, fearing that it might open the door for the Muslim Brotherhood’s resurgence in Egypt.

Rather than jeopardise the nascent thaw in bilateral relations, Erdogan met with Sisi in December to underscore his commitment to supporting Syria’s reconstruction and reconciliation, while allowing Syrians to decide their own future. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was even more explicit, noting that the new Syria should be pluralistic, with all ethnic and religious groups—including Alawites, Christians, and Kurdish minorities—represented.

This is what Sharaa is apparently trying to build. Seeking to position himself as a moderate leader of a multiethnic country, he has severed all ties with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and declared that all rebel groups that fought against Assad would be dissolved and integrated into state institutions. This vision cannot work without the Kurds. Even if it could, Sharaa, who has been working hard to amplify his international legitimacy, would not want to target US allies who played a decisive role in the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Overcoming the legacy of centuries-long colonial rule, decades of brutal dictatorship, a civil war and the risk of state failure would be a daunting challenge for Syria’s new rulers even under ideal conditions. But the geopolitical ambitions of Syria’s neighbours risk making a difficult task impossible. Adding to the list of regional powers with such ambitions, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, representing two irreconcilable political visions, also aspire to influence the outcome.

In any case, Syria’s stability is in Turkey’s best interest. The Syrian state’s collapse would mean a new influx of refugees and the emergence of a Kurdish proto-state along the Turkish border, with the likely backing of Israel and the US. Turkey could not tolerate a Kurd-controlled statelet in northern Syria, but it could live with a semi-autonomous Kurdish region fully integrated into a unified Syrian state.

A stable Syria is also in Israel’s best interest. In lieu of a Western-style democracy—which is not in the offing anywhere in the Arab world—an Islamist regime whose leader has announced the disbanding of 18 armed militias and called for peace with Israel is about the best outcome Israel could hope for. Instead of encroaching on Syrian territory and cultivating potentially self-fulfilling prophecies about war with Turkey, it should be doing everything it can to support this outcome.

From the bookshelf: ‘War’

Russia’s war on Ukraine, the war in the Middle East and the yawning chasm between liberal Americans and MAGA supporters defined much of the presidency of Joe Biden and are likely to define the political landscape for the initial years of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

In his latest book, War, Bob Woodward provides a vivid inside account of the three intertwined conflicts, casting fresh light on recent global events and providing the reader with tools to compare the outgoing and incoming administrations.

Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein, both working at The Washington Post, rose to instant fame in 1972 for their coverage of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of US president Richard Nixon. Their book about Watergate, All The President’s Men, has been hailed as ‘the greatest reporting story of all time’.

Woodward has gone on to author or co-author a further 22 books about US politics, including several about Trump’s first presidency, and still has a desk at The Washington Post. More than half a century of reporting on the US political establishment has given him access to inside sources that other journalists can only dream of.

Woodward’s research is meticulous and his sources impeccable. As a result, War brims with direct quotes from US and world leaders and their aides that provide fresh perspective on recent political dealmaking.

Woodward takes us behind the headlines to the minute-by-minute decision-making that has shaped key political outcomes. The reality that he describes is often very different from that depicted by the media.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in April 2024 ordered a missile strike on Iran that killed the ranking commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, and Iran responded with a massive missile strike on Israel, Netanyahu was ready to retaliate in kind and the elements were in place for all-out war. Woodward provides a blow-by-blow account of the exchange between Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden that convinced the former to back down.

Ultimately, Netanyahu agreed to a ‘small precision retaliatory response’ while sending Iran a back-channel message that Israel was ‘going to respond but we consider our response to be the end’. Iran did not respond further and, thanks to Biden’s intervention, a major crisis was averted. The reader can only speculate how Trump would have handled the situation.

Woodward also contemplates what drives presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. He reminds us that Trump views everything through a personalised prism. At a 2018 press conference in Helsinki following a summit with Putin, Trump accepted the Russian leader’s denial of meddling in the US presidential elections at face value, despite having seen extensive evidence to the contrary, and had great difficulty subsequently withdrawing his remarks. ‘[Putin] said very good things about me’, Trump explained to his aides, ‘why should I repudiate him?’

In stark contrast, Putin is driven by a deep frustration with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a desire to restore Russia to greatness. In October 2021, Biden’s intelligence directors presented him and his closest advisers with conclusive intel that Putin intended to invade Ukraine. Woodward details the incredulous responses within the US administration and among its closest European allies trying to understand why the usually low-key Putin would make such a high-risk move.

When confronted about the planned invasion by secretary of state Antony Blinken, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov denied the intel point blank, blustering ‘Are you serious with this stuff?’ Interestingly, Blinken concludes that Lavrov, who is not part of Putin’s innermost circle, probably had not been kept fully in the loop.

Woodward details many other high-level exchanges. In late 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was unwilling to authorise other European countries to supply Ukraine with German-made top-of-the-line Leopard battle tanks without the United States matching the move by providing M1 Abrams tanks, which Biden was reluctant to do. Blinken and other senior staffers spent long hours convincing Biden to announce the decision without immediately providing the tanks, thus allowing Germany to go ahead.

In October 2022, Russia publicly accused Ukraine of preparing to use a dirty radioactive bomb, and indicated that it would consider this an act of nuclear terrorism to which it would respond. Woodward provides a fascinating account of the tense phone call from US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that convinced his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu to back down from the implied nuclear threat.

For Blinken, convincing Netanyahu and his war cabinet to allow the first shipment of humanitarian aid into Gaza was no less challenging.

On balance, Woodward considers the Biden presidency a success. At the centre of this success lie teamwork and continuity. Biden’s tight-knit team from the State and Defense Departments, National Security Council, Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA worked together throughout his term to pursue a sound and coherent foreign policy. Woodward provides a set of benchmarks against which to assess the incoming US administration.

A new chance for the Middle East

The word ‘opportunity’ rarely appears in the same sentence as the Middle East, and for good reason, but there is a case for suggesting we are approaching an exception. An opportunity—if not for lasting peace, then at least for an end to the ongoing conflicts and the prevention of new ones—is in fact knocking. The question is whether political leaders will open the door.

Israel has decimated the military capability of both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But continuing military action on its part is running up against the law of diminishing returns, as fewer high-value targets are left.

Moreover, continued military efforts threaten the country’s regional and global standing. The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant is the latest indication of the political isolation and economic sanctions that could become Israel’s fate unless it changes course.

The case for a ceasefire on both fronts is strong. The recent agreement between Israel and Hezbollah requires Hezbollah (which is so weakened that it dropped its insistence that a ceasefire in southern Lebanon be linked to one in Gaza) to move its heavy weaponry north of the Litani River, away from the border with Israel. Lebanese troops will patrol southern Lebanon, and the Israel Defense Forces will withdraw from the area and agree not to maintain a presence. Israel has obtained assurances that under certain conditions it would still be able to take military action against Hezbollah to frustrate the group’s attempts to reconstitute itself along the border or if it were preparing to attack.

This accord, if it holds, permits some 60,000 Israelis to return to their homes after more than a year of displacement. In addition, the ceasefire will allow Israel’s exhausted and overextended military to recover and focus on other challenges, including Iran, which is inching ever closer to developing a nuclear-weapons capability that would pose an existential threat to Israel. And the ceasefire should spare Lebanon and its people further devastation.

Yes, the ceasefire will also allow Hezbollah a degree of time and space to regroup, which is why some in Israel oppose it. That said, open-ended military operations will accomplish little, as Hezbollah can be weakened but not eliminated. Israel’s past failed occupation of southern Lebanon demonstrates as much. Israel’s goal, which this agreement puts within reach, should be to restore deterrence.

Gaza poses a more difficult challenge. It is not clear that Hamas would agree to a ceasefire, although it is much weakened militarily and might have difficulty resisting one if Israel agrees to terms that are widely deemed reasonable.

But will Israel agree? It should, because a ceasefire would allow the return of the more than one hundred remaining hostages in Gaza, half of whom Israeli intelligence services believe are still alive. Moreover, as with Lebanon, it is far from clear that Israel stands to gain from continuing military operations in Gaza. Hamas is certainly unable to launch another attack like the one it carried out on 7 October 2023. But Israel’s refusal to start a diplomatic process that would give Palestinians a chance to secure elements of their nationalist aspirations has made it possible for Hamas—with its insistence on endless struggle—to remain relevant.

The big question, then, is whether Israel would agree to a political process that holds out the possibility (however distant, conditional, and vague in terms of territorial reach) of creating a Palestinian state. In the near term, such a process would pave the way for the entry into Gaza of a regional stabilisation force and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Over time, a Palestinian state properly constituted would enable Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic as well as prosperous and secure.

Some in Israel much prefer a future that allows for Israeli settlement of parts of Gaza and annexation of large swaths of the West Bank. And if they do not get their way, they have vocally threatened to bring down Netanyahu’s government. That is a risk Netanyahu has been loath to take, given that, once out of office, he faces pending legal action and official investigations into Israel’s failure to anticipate and respond to Hamas’s 7 October attack.

Donald Trump, whose return to the Oval Office on 20 January 2025 is already looming over these dynamics, could prove to be the critical variable. While the Israeli right sees his return as an opportunity to achieve maximalist aims, even calling 2025 the year of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and an opportunity to begin reducing Gaza’s Palestinian population through ‘voluntary emigration’, Trump has expressed a desire to calm the region.

Trump is in a position to achieve this goal. Owing to events in Lebanon, Netanyahu may be sufficiently strong to stare down his right-wing coalition partners, form a new government without them, or even get a fresh mandate from the voters. And even if not, Trump, whom the Israeli right see as a friend, could lean on Netanyahu and his government in a way that President Joe Biden never could. It would be more difficult for Netanyahu to resist Trump’s pressure, and much easier for Trump to apply and sustain such pressure, given his support among American evangelicals and certain American Jewish communities.

Richard Nixon comes to mind. Nixon, it is said, was able to reach out to Mao’s China because he alone didn’t have to worry about Nixon.

Much the same now applies to Trump. He could build on the ceasefire in Lebanon and press for one in Gaza, launching what would be a promising diplomatic process. Pulling this off would constitute quite a coup for the 47th president. The opportunity is there for the taking.

Demonstrated destruction is deterrence

US and Israeli air strikes in the last month underlined the unrivalled ability of sophisticated air forces to reach and destroy sensitive targets.

The devastating attacks contrasted sharply with ineffectual Iranian and Houthi missile and drone attacks. Critically, the demonstrated power of the strikes strengthened deterrence.

Australia should pay attention as it develops strike capabilities for its strategy of deterrence by denial. The key capability implication for the ADF is the centrality of sophisticated air forces in degrading and penetrating air defences and delivering the firepower needed destroy hard targets. The critical policy insight is that a proven ability to destroy sensitive targets at will is a far more compelling deterrent than visions of future capability.

On 27 September Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, as he met with senior Hezbollah leaders in a bunker buried nearly 20 metres under four high-rise buildings in southern Beirut. Israeli aircraft reportedly dropped 80 precision-guided penetrating weapons with 900kg-class warheads. The weapons were dropped at precise angles and the warheads were fuzed to detonate at specific heights to collapse the high-rise buildings and penetrate Nasrallah’s bunker. While there are questions about the strike’s proportionality, its sophistication and effectiveness are unquestioned.

On 16 October, US aircraft including two B-2A bombers destroyed five buried and hardened weapons storage locations in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. The mission reportedly used airspace and airbases in Australia, so the bombers flew at least 10,000km to the targets. The B-2A’s participation suggests GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators of around 13 tonnes destroyed at least some of the hardened and buried targets, as only B-2As can employ those weapons. In the words of the US defense secretary the strikes demonstrated America’s capacity to ‘target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified … anytime, anywhere.’

Finally, in the early hours of 26 October more than 100 Israeli aircraft struck air defence, missile production and other military targets in Iran. The assault came in three waves in less than four hours and employed a variety of weapons, including air-launched ballistic missiles from Iraqi airspace. The first wave degraded Iranian air defences, including destroying Iran’s last remaining Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries, which were its most advanced. This gave succeeding waves greater flexibility and leaves Iran vulnerable to further attacks. The strikes hit a limited number of sensitive military targets across Iran, including in the capital Tehran, to demonstrate Israel’s restraint while underscoring its ability to strike at will.

By contrast, the more than 500 Iranian missiles and drones targeting Israel in separate attacks in April and October overwhelmingly failed to reach their targets or do more than minor damage to the two Israeli airbases that they did hit. The same is true for Houthi attacks on more than 90 ships in the Red Sea over the last year, with just two ships sunk. This is not to diminish the seriousness of the threat posed by the missiles and drones or the cost exchange problem of using expensive air defence missiles to stop cheap drones. But it does serve to highlight the contrast in effectiveness, and that cost exchange perhaps should also consider the value of targets protected.

Sophisticated Israeli and US air forces, operating as integrated packages including drones and using stand-off missiles, have devastated hardened and defended targets over long range and at will in the past few weeks. Meanwhile, Iranian and Houthi missiles and drones have done little more than harass to the point of prompting retaliatory strikes that underlined their vulnerability.

The ADF should heed the relative effectiveness of these attacks as it develops strike capabilities. Investment in new surface-launched stand-off missiles should not obscure the enduring centrality of air striking forces for two reasons illustrated by events in the Middle East in the last month. First, missiles and drones alone struggle to penetrate capable air defences—especially over long ranges. They need to be integrated with broader strike packages, including crewed aircraft (for now), to reach their targets. Second, stand-in weapons carried by large aircraft remain the only way to effectively deliver the concentrated weight of firepower needed to destroy buried and hardened targets.

Finally, the Israeli and US strikes are a stark reminder that the most effective deterrent is a proven ability to devastate, not simply disrupt, targets at will.

Gaza’s economy: GDP down 86 percent, most businesses destroyed

It is intrinsic to warfare that economic assets are destroyed, but conflicts usually don’t generate economic devastation on the scale inflicted in Gaza.

The value of economic activity in Gaza in the first quarter of 2024 was 86 percent below pre-war levels, with studies from both the World Bank and the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development describing its economic collapse.

‘Since October 7, the Palestinian economy experienced one of the largest economic shocks ever recorded in recent economic history’, the World Bank report concluded.

By way of comparison, International Monetary Fund (IMF) figures show that Ukraine’s economy fell 29 percent in 2022 following Russia’s assault. One academic study estimated Germany’s economy contracted 64 per cent and Japan’s economy 52 percent during World War II.

The influx of relatively high-spending American and allied soldiers meant the economies of both Afghanistan and Iraq achieved modest economic growth from 2003 onwards, according to the IMF economic database, despite the human suffering. Afghanistan’s economy contracted 20 percent in 2022, after the US withdrawal. The 2014 war in Gaza resulted in a 38 percent fall in its GDP.

The World Bank estimated that by the first quarter of 2024, 82 percent of private sector establishments in Gaza had been damaged or fully destroyed. The impact on social infrastructure is similar, with around 84 percent of health facilities and schools damaged or destroyed.

Between 80 and 96 percent of agricultural assets had been hit by early this year, including irrigation infrastructure, livestock, orchards, machinery, storage and research stations. The World Bank noted that this had left those reliant on agricultural food chains without dependable food or income. Before the conflict, agriculture and the associated food-chain contributed 15 percent of GDP across both Gaza and the West Bank.

Estimates of GDP reported by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development show that Gaza generated value-added equivalent to an average of US$670 million a quarter in the three years before the conflict. This dropped to US$129 million in the third quarter of 2023 and US$92 million in the first quarter of this year.

A sectoral breakdown for the fourth quarter of 2023 shows a 96 percent fall in construction, 93 percent fall in agriculture, 77 percent fall in services and 92 percent fall in the industrial sector.

Palestine has long had high levels of poverty. By 2022, 80 percent of Gaza’s people depended on some level of international assistance, while aid was the primary source of income for more than half of households. A third of people across both Gaza and the West Bank lacked secure food supplies.

Including both the West Bank and Gaza, Palestine’s annual GDP per capita before the war was equivalent to US$3800 a year, according to World Bank data, ranking between the Philippines and Vietnam. The territory nevertheless has high literacy levels of 97.5 percent, while life expectancy before the conflict was 75.5 years, ranked between Mexico and Hungary.

By the start of this year, three quarters of Gaza’s people had been internally displaced and lacked secure shelter, with shortages of water, fuel, electricity and access to sanitation.

Gaza now depends heavily on material aid flows through UN agencies. However, these are greatly restricted. The United Nations reports that, before the conflict in 2023, 500 trucks entered Gaza daily, while, in the first two weeks of September 2024, only 166 were permitted to make the crossing.

Although suffering nothing like the economic collapse in Gaza, the West Bank Palestinian territory is also confronting a sharp downturn, with GDP in the fourth quarter of 2023 down 19 percent on the previous quarter. Virtually all private sector businesses in the West Bank are reporting a decline in sales. And 42 percent saying the number of employees reporting to work has fallen, reflecting greater restrictions on movement.

Before the conflict, 22 percent of West Bank Palestinians worked in Israel or in Israeli settlements. However, 90 per cent of those workers have now lost their jobs and unemployment in the West Bank has risen from 12.9 per cent to 32 per cent as a result. The Palestinian Authority is heavily in arrears in payments to public sector employees.

The United Nations estimates that the destruction in Gaza has left 42 million tonnes of debris, which Bloomberg calculated would take a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore to clear.

The Israeli government is promoting the idea of a futuristic Gaza free trade zone modelled on Singapore once the war is over. Reconstruction would be supervised by Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, with a target completion date of 2035. The territory would be administered by Israel, Egypt and a Palestinian Rehabilitation Authority.

The Middle East’s deadly dream palaces

Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is an event of historic proportions in the Middle East. As can be seen from Iran’s response to Israel’s attacks on its Lebanese-based proxy, the shockwaves are spreading throughout the region and are likely to reverberate around the world.

Nasrallah was on a mission to destroy Israel. It was a mantle he had taken up from countless other Arab leaders, from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who met with Adolf Hitler in 1941 to discuss the destruction of the Jews, to Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League who described the Arab invasion of the then-nascent Israel in 1948 as a ‘war of annihilation’. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser—an icon of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s—pledged more than once to ‘destroy Israel’. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who founded Fatah, nurtured their own dreams of liquidating the Jewish state.

There was always a touch of hubris in such dreams. Hussein harkened back to the Iraqi caliph al-Mansur—meaning ‘the victorious’—who founded the kingdom of Iraq in the eighth century, even naming his superyacht after him. Nasser and Arafat competed to be the modern reincarnation of Saladin, the ‘redeeming ruler’ who defeated the Crusaders and liberated Jerusalem in the twelfth century.

All four leaders—Al-Husseini, Nasser, Hussein, Arafat—failed to achieve their grand pan-Arab dream. But Arab intellectuals—many seemingly blighted by a perverse attraction to failure—sustained their delusions. As the late Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami lamented in his 1999 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A generation’s odyssey, this cohort largely put hollow pan-Arab nationalism above modernity, secularism and socioeconomic renewal.

Israel was the measure of the Arabs’ failure, pointed out the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said. To many intellectuals, its survival was unbearable. Ajami described the case of Khalil Hawi, a Lebanese poet and academic who supported Anton Saadah’s fascistic Greater Syria movement and subsequently imbibed the elixir of Nasser’s pan-Arabism. But there would eventually be no Greater Syria, no Arabdom, and not even a Lebanon Hawi could be proud of. Embittered and humiliated, he killed himself on the day of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Arab intellectuals created a moral universe in which any attempt by rulers to change lacked legitimacy. I recall being astonished when Arafat, who negotiated the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, believed Said to be his main opposition, though of course I understood why: Said was one of the many Arab intellectuals who rejected the Oslo Accords as an attempt by Israel to assert economic and cultural supremacy. As the Egyptian scholar Mohamed Sid-Ahmed—author of the visionary 1976 book After the Guns Fall Silent: Peace or Armageddon in the Middle-East—cynically put it, the accords amounted to ‘an exchange of land for a Middle East market’.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution was supposed to be the Shia answer to the failure of Sunni-Arab nationalism. Whereas pan-Arabism was often associated with the propertied Sunni classes, Iran’s revolution was portrayed as an uprising of the Shia underclasses. But Shia messianism found its own way to fail, proving unable to liberate the Arab masses abroad, despite massive support for proxy militias, while producing an oppressive, unpopular regime that offered no antidote to inequality.

Shi‘ism soon fell into the same trap that had doomed Sunni pan-Arabism: in an attempt to divert attention from its failures, Iran’s leaders poured all available energy and resources into a war of annihilation against Israel. Nasrallah became the embodiment of a new Arab ‘dream palace’, in which the Shia underclasses would reign supreme in Lebanon and beyond, and the regional designs of ‘Little Satan’ and ‘Great Satan’—that is, Israel and its American patron—are permanently thwarted.

If Nasser was a new Saladin, and Hussein was ‘the victorious’, then Nasrallah was the lord of the resistance (muqawama). He was the pan-Arab hero who fought in Syria’s civil war for more than a decade to save Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical regime and haughtily declared war on Israel immediately after Hamas carried out its massacre last October. And his legend survived even the devastating blows of recent weeks, not least the Israeli military’s ‘device attack’, in which it targeted Hezbollah members by detonating explosives that it had concealed inside pagers and walkie-talkies.

The assumption was that Nasrallah still had surprises in the pipeline. But he turned out to be just another delusional Arab ruler who was destroyed by the violence that he had so eagerly courted in the service of a fantasy.

Until his last moments, Nasrallah did not understand the extent to which the Israeli military had penetrated Hezbollah’s capabilities. Perhaps he was intoxicated by all the resources and power that his Iranian patrons had lavished upon him for so many years; perhaps he had lost touch with reality entirely. In any case, Iran’s dream palace is now in tatters. In fact, this new showdown between Israel and Iran has exposed what should have been obvious long ago: the vision of an Iran-led Shia empire is hollow.

Alas, Israelis have built their own dangerous dream palace of ‘total victory’, erected on a foundation of nationalist fervour, religious messianism, and political intransigence. There is a scenario in which Israel’s military exploits change the region for the better. Unfortunately, far from being the standard-bearer for some enlightened political vision, Israel’s current government is committed to fighting a war on all fronts, with no view toward any political future that Israel’s neighbours could possibly accept.

Following Nasrallah’s killing and Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, one Lebanese professor warned that an ‘entire generation’ of Lebanese is ‘waking up to politics’ and that ‘Israel is planting the seeds of future wars’. And so the cycle of violence continues.

Preventing human shields is vital to protecting aid workers in conflict

Foreign Minister Penny Wong was right to champion a new declaration for the protection of humanitarian personnel at the United Nations in New York this week. But the initiative will only be effective if it tackles the threat posed by Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups who use aid workers and other civilians as human shields.

Wong has convened a ministerial group that will develop the declaration in partnership with the UN and non-governmental organisations, and to which all countries will be invited to pledge support. The diversity of the group, which includes Jordan, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Colombia and Brazil, offers the potential for the declaration to be global in scope, and not targeted at a specific country. Such an approach would echo Canada’s declaration against arbitrary detention, which was universal despite being triggered by Beijing’s hostage diplomacy.

Pulling together working groups and getting things done are the hallmarks of Australian statecraft, as we’ve seen before on issues including countering proliferation and tackling economic coercion.

But the nature of the problem must be correctly identified at the outset—and Wong’s framing remarks on Gaza at the initiative’s launch raise concern that the declaration could become narrowly focused on Israel’s operations. The declaration cannot overlook the illegal tactics deployed by terrorists and some authoritarian countries of embedding forces among populations and using civilians as human shields. These tactics are a key reason why, as Wong has pointed out, 2023 was the deadliest year on record for aid workers and why Gaza is the most dangerous place on earth to be an aid worker.

There is ample evidence of armed groups around the world using civilian infrastructure to store weapons and plan attacks, including using humanitarian premises as cover for operations, which is illegal under international law. Satellite analysis by ASPI’s Nathan Ruser supported the assessment that the deadly explosion at al-Ahli hospital in Gaza in October 2023 was caused by a misfiring terrorist rocket, not an Israeli airstrike.

Terrorists also pose as aid workers. The UN has acknowledged that some employees of its Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees might have been involved in the 7 October 2023 atrocities committed against Israel.

The playbook of Hamas and other terrorist organisations, which includes seizing humanitarian equipment, adds to the risk that aid workers could be targeted by mistake. After the killing by the Israeli military of Australian Zomi Frankcom and six colleagues from World Central Kitchen in Gaza in April, the report by former Chief of the Defence Force, Mark Binskin, noted that the presence of armed security guards in the convoy ‘gave the appearance of the presence of Hamas’ as it was consistent with the group’s approach of hijacking aid missions.

It would be devastatingly counterproductive if, by failing to address such tactics, this declaration gave terrorists a free pass on international law compliance. After all, the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah pose as legitimate political movements and care about their public image, which is the basis of their support. Therefore, we must call them out for war crimes, including the use of human shields, and increase pressure on them to change tactics.

Hamas’s 7 October attack should have illustrated to the world the dangers of tolerating the intolerable: a terrorist entity that controls territory and a population, with the declared intent to destroy its neighbour.

Sadly, a combination of groundless idealism and animosity to the US and Israel continues to prevent the international community taking collective action. Even the evident depravity of Islamic State’s caliphate did not stop Russia blocking a Security Council resolution to authorise the US-led coalition’s use of force against IS in Syria.

All parties to armed conflict, including non-state armed groups, have obligations under international law to facilitate and protect humanitarian activities. That’s why the proposed declaration needs to apply pressure on countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iran to stop hosting and supporting terrorists, which is essential to protecting civilians and humanitarian work.

International law already obliges parties to an armed conflict to assess a range of legal criteria, including taking precautions and using force in a proportionate and discriminate manner, when targeting enemies hiding amongst human shields. But international law also leaves room for debate about how to distinguish between civilians that have been coerced into functioning as human shields against their will from people who have opted voluntarily to conceal terrorists, in which latter case they might lose some or all rights to protection.

This esoteric legal wrangle has very real implications for military commanders, working under combat conditions, who know that a mistake one way could leave them facing allegations of war crimes, while a mistake in the other direction might give the enemy respite to mount an attack.

The initiative is an opportunity to be ambitious by proposing solutions to these thorny, life-and-death issues. The declaration should condemn the use of human shields and pledge that signatories agree to take collective action against those who force civilians into that role. The declaration should also convene globally respected legal and security experts to chart the outline of a new framework that better clarifies and protects states’ right of self-defence when dealing with enemies using human shields.

In time, the declaration could dovetail with processes led by the UN Secretary-General under Security Council Resolution 2730, developing new, legally binding agreements and protocols specifically focused on tackling the problem of human shields. The Australian Defence Force could then lead the way in incorporating these new frameworks into operational doctrine and assisting other militaries to do the same.

That would be a lasting testament to Wong’s leadership and Australian statecraft. After all, who could object to a declaration against human shields?

The global implications of Iran’s election

The second round of Iran’s presidential election unfolded with little fanfare last weekend. But, with reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian defeating his hardline anti-Western opponent, Saeed Jalili, the world should be paying attention. At a time of deep tensions and shifting alliances, these results will reverberate across the region and beyond.

The election’s backdrop was messy, to say the least. The death of Iran’s last president, the hardline Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash in May, together with the lack of any obvious successor, exacerbated deep internal fissures in a country already shaken by popular protests. Bowing to intense public pressure, Iran’s Guardian Council permitted the moderate Pezeshkian to run, despite attempts by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to undermine Pezeshkian’s candidacy. Iranians had mostly boycotted the first round. Whether out of anger, apathy, or resignation, fewer than 50 percent showed up for the run-off.

The regional landscape is similarly muddled. Iran’s foreign policy is shaped by conflicting impulses. On one hand, Iran’s leaders desire a semblance of regional stability, both to ease the political transition and to help the country cope with crippling Western sanctions. On the other hand, Iran remains committed to the so-called Axis of Resistance, a loose network of opportunistic actors—including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza—dedicated to eliminating Israel, expelling the United States from the Middle East and upending the US-led world order.

This tension was apparent in the careful dance that Iran, Hezbollah, and Israel were engaged in for months following the launch of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. But Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s announcement last month that he planned to scale down operations in Gaza and redeploy troops toward the Lebanese border has tilted the scales toward conflict, as evidenced by a surge in rocket attacks on Israel.

The Middle East has never been a paragon of stability. But it did, until recently, appear to be progressing towards a somewhat more stable status quo. Under the Abraham Accords (led by the White House in 2020), Israel normalised ties with some Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. This helped to convince the United States that it could afford to shift its focus away from the Middle East to other foreign-policy priorities, especially containment of China and then, since 2022, supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion. But Israel’s war on Hamas upended the incipient new status quo, fueling clashes across the region.

Last year, Iran also restored diplomatic relations with several Arab states, beginning with Saudi Arabia. This detente, however, was brokered by China, which has maintained strong ties with Iran ever since. Iran’s oil sales to China are now generating $150 million per day for the Islamic Republic.

Iran maintains similarly close ties with Russia, which shares its goal of countering Western global dominance. Beyond openly supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine, Iran is helping Russia evade Western sanctions, especially in hydrocarbon and financial transactions. After Raisi’s death, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared, in a condolence letter to Khamenei, that he would ‘forever remember’ Raisi as ‘the most wonderful person’.

Meanwhile, Iran has been taking advantage of the international community’s preoccupation with Ukraine, Gaza and electoral dramas in Europe and Washington to advance its nuclear program. Though it does not seem to be developing nuclear weapons for now, it has already acquired many of the capabilities it needs for doing so, and the risk of proliferation is acute. If the Axis of Resistance has enabled Iran to project power with some measure of impunity, nuclear weapons would allow it to pose a credible threat to the existing world order.

The presidential election may have helped to mitigate this risk—to a point. Pezeshkian has advocated a more balanced foreign policy and a revival of nuclear diplomacy. This stance has won him the support of former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who led negotiations for the now-defunct 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which placed significant limits on Iran’s nuclear program.

But not even Pezeshkian is likely to assume the political risk of pursuing any kind of rapprochement with the United States, especially given the increasingly salient prospect that Donald Trump, who abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, will soon return to the White House. The chances of Iran’s new president attempting to forge a new nuclear deal with the international community are practically nonexistent.

For now, Iran might decide to remain a permanent nuclear-threshold state, threatening to arm itself at any provocation. But it could soon decide to make good on that threat and build a nuclear-weapons arsenal. The risk of a wider war in the Middle East—triggered, for example, by Israel—is also rising. In attempting to navigate these risky dynamics, the West must engage in new and creative thinking, rather than sticking to the same old strategies. Time is on the mullahs’ side.

Pezeshkian’s win might not spell the end of the Axis of Resistance or its efforts to topple the Western-led world order, not least because the president’s ability to shape Iran’s foreign policy is limited. But it could provide an opening to erode the grouping’s cohesion. The problem is that taking advantage of that opening will require a coherent approach, which the West is poorly positioned to devise at the moment.

From the Bookshelf: ‘Israelis and Palestinians’

Eventually, beyond the Gaza agony, Israelis and Palestinians must talk. 

To move beyond war, they must embrace ‘the conversation of mankind’, a phrase that’s the pivot of a new book by one of Britain’s leading moral philosophers, Jonathan Glover, emeritus professor of ethics at King’s College, London. 

The book was on the verge of printing when Hamas attacked on 7 October. Now published, the ethicist’s work is given a daily, horrific relevance by Gaza. 

Glover writes of psychological fault lines that trap people, shape conflict and drive cycles of violence. 

The setup in the book’s title is ‘Israelis and Palestinians’: the argument is aimed at peoples, not their governments. 

‘Leaders playing their competitive games can be unmoved by horrendous human costs,’ Glover writes. ‘Some leaders may care less about ending the Israel-Palestine conflict than about winning a current round. This shallowness can seem eternal …. Crisis leaves little time for the deep tides of history. It is harsh to blame leaders for their one-dimensional world. But the rest of us can ask the ignored questions.’ 

Glover is scathing about the leaders of Hamas and Israel. 

The October terror attacks, he writes, ‘were extreme by any measure. And they had an extra horror. The ideology behind it was a Nazi one’. Glover points to the Nazi influence on the Hamas constitution, which ‘explicitly endorsed the fraudulent antisemitic document Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. At least since 1989, Glover says, Hamas knew it was relying on a document used by Hitler and Goebbels, ‘but did not delete their constitution’s endorsement of the Protocols’. 

Turning to Israel’s government, Glover observes that ‘indiscriminate retaliation cannot be justified’, although psychologically it is understandable. ‘There are many awful actions that can be understood. But that does not stop them from being indefensible,’ Glover writes. ‘Bombing is only part of the indiscriminate punishment. The Israeli government cut off Gaza’s water, food, fuel and power. Did they think that only Hamas supporters would die of thirst, starvation or cold? When the power to hospitals gives out, do only Hamas patients die?’ 

Damming the leaders, Glover turns to peoples—to conversations between Israelis and Palestinians on three core elements that structure his book:  

—The cycle of violence; 

—The psychology of backlash built on collective guilt and stereotypes; and 

—Rigid beliefs and identity. 

Glover draws on other long-running cycles: a century of war between France and Germany; Northern Ireland; Muslim memories of the Crusades across a thousand years. He seeks to show how ‘the conversation of mankind’ must replace the cycle of violence.  

A very different way of thinking about strategy is offered. A philosopher asks warring peoples to understand their psychological triggers. See how war produces more war. Find a common humanity. Vengeance and retribution just feed the cycle, Glover writes. 

When each side uses violent backlash to teach the other a lesson, nobody learns anything. The backlash is central to keeping the cycle of violence going. One factor is moving from thinking of others as people to thinking in abstractions. ‘They’ are terrorists or cruel occupiers; communists or fascists; unbelievers or religious fanatics. Seeing others in these ways makes people harder and more cruel. Everybody loses. 

Ambitious for new understanding between peoples, Glover is cautious about the chance for big political solutions or diplomatic agreements. He argues that two-state or one-state resolutions are not within reach because of psychological fault lines.  

Both Palestinians and Israelis when ‘thinking about a shared single state are likely to fear and reject minority status. At any given time, one people will be outnumbered.’  

Single-state proposals advocate constitutional guarantees of the rights of both peoples, Glover notes, but ‘entrenched’ guarantees can be overturned by the majority. 

A two-state solution seems to give each people a better chance of self-determination and safety from each other, Glover writes. In the abstract, he thinks, it’s possible to design a version that’s roughly fair to both sides, but ‘for each people, the gap between that and what they care about is so huge’. 

Israel would resist losing the settlements and part of what some see as Greater Israel, Glover argues, while Palestinians would lose much of what was once theirs: ‘Goodbye Haifa, goodbye Jaffa, goodbye Beer Sheva ….’ 

Glover’s dismissal of the two-state solution chimes with the view of the former Australian diplomat, Bob Bowker, who calls it a ‘zombie solution’ that has no prospect of success. In words that Glover would embrace, Bowker argues that ‘peace will not be found between Arabs and Jews, in victories or treaties. If it can be found at all, it will be found when Palestinians and Israelis can look into each other’s eyes’. 

Rather than strain for the unreachable two-state answer, try for ‘federal and semi-federal solutions’, Glover writes: ‘A newly-created Palestine state would join Israel in a federation.’ 

‘Federation need not be all-or-none,’ Glover says. ‘The best solution may contain a variety of different overlapping sovereignties.’   

A semi-federal deal could work on practical issues such as water and shared ecology. Douse hostile passions with ‘limited and local cooperation over specific shared problems’. 

The conversation between Palestinians and Israelis, Glover concludes, should turn away ‘from ever-receding “solutions”, and try by a thousand small steps slowly to shuffle away from war’.

Australia misses the boat in the Red Sea

The 2023 defence strategic review noted that Australia’s economy had become more interconnected with the Indo-Pacific and the world, and that brought a fundamental interest in protecting the rules-based order upon which international trade depends.

The DSR also said that ensuring the uninterrupted flow of maritime commerce underpinned the importance of resilience as a vital component of Australia’s deterrence-by-denial strategy. The DSR argued that the navy must be optimised to operate in Australia’s immediate region, and to secure sea lines of communication and maritime trade.

The DSR defines Australia’s primary area of military interest as encompassing the northeastern Indian Ocean through maritime Southeast Asia and into the Pacific, including Australia’s northern approaches.

The focus on the Indo-Pacific is entirely understandable given the growing challenge presented by China, but it raises the risk that Australia may fail to respond adequately to events further afield that could undermine its security. This has been demonstrated by the attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea launched by Iranian-backed Houthi forces since 7 October when Hamas, also backed by Iran, carried out its vile terrorist attacks on Israel.

These attacks pose a serious threat to trade. More than 12% of global maritime commerce passes through the Red Sea and its exit to the Indian Ocean, the Bab el Mandeb Strait.

A failure to respond would not only imperil global trade but also weaken a rules-based order already under attack from authoritarian states, with Iran a key belligerent.

The US responded decisively, establishing Operation Prosperity Guardian with a multi-national naval taskforce to protect shipping. The UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain have so far joined the operation. Australia signed a joint statement condemning the Houthi attacks and, as a maritime nation that has long understood the importance of unencumbered sea lanes, there was a reasonable expectation that it would send a warship to join the taskforce.

The media reported that the US, Australia’s most important strategic and security partner, asked Canberra to send a ship but that request was declined. It is understood that the US then asked  Australia to send additional personnel to the US-led Combined Maritime Forces headquarters in Bahrain. While some will praise or justify the response as a demonstration that Australia’s priority is the Indo-Pacific, this fundamentally misses the global nature of maritime security and the fact that the world can no longer be easily compartmentalised into Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. The global impacts of both the Israel–Hamas war and Russia’s war on Ukraine clearly show this.

Australia cannot seek immunity through inaction. And we can’t expect support for stability and security in the Indo-Pacific from our American and European partners if we leave the rest of the world to others.

The government’s contradictory stance suggests that the DSR constrains the Australian Defence Force’s ability to respond to challenges beyond what’s defined as Australia’s area of primary military interest. The DSR is correct to narrow Australia’s strategic focus, and it would be foolish to be dragged into an open-ended deployment in another Middle Eastern war when the main challenge, from China, is increasing in our region.

However, Operation Prosperity Guardian is not a long-term deployment ashore with ground forces, and the requirement for the ADF to help protect maritime trade is clear. While the ADF should prioritise the defence of sea lanes in the Indo-Pacific, the reality is that an adversary can block trade outside this region and the effect is still the same.

So, does the ADF, and the navy in particular, fail in its mission to protect trade simply because it’s threatened in an area outside an arbitrary definition of what constitutes Australia’s primary area of military interest?

The globalised world means it’s difficult to simply divide areas of responsibility and concern into narrow geographic zones when trade, physical and informational, defies geography. The gathering threat to the liberal international order and the free flow of commerce posed by an axis of authoritarian states can emerge at any time and anywhere—from the high seas, to space and cyberspace. Failing to meet that challenge cedes the advantage to the opponent, making future threats more likely. The government’s argument that this request falls outside Australia’s primary area of military interest reflects a failure to understand a globalised threat to a globalised world.

Even though the US and Australia are firm allies, and the relationship has grown under the Biden administration, the refusal by the government to send even a single warship will be noted in Washington. It’s impossible to know how the relationship between Canberra and Washington may evolve under a new administration with, potentially, a radically different foreign policy agenda after 2024. The passing by Congress of the US National Defense Authorization Act reinforcing progress on AUKUS provides grounds for optimism, but Australia’s failure to support the US in an important mission to safeguard freedom of navigation and maritime commerce won’t be quickly forgotten.

This is not to say that Australia doesn’t have agency or that it should automatically agree to any US request. Australia should always make decisions in its national interests and, despite misleading suggestions otherwise, AUKUS has strengthened not weakened our sovereignty. But this rejection is not about deploying to war or taking our eyes off the threats in the Indo-Pacific.

Joining a multi-national taskforce to protect shipping lanes and the principle of freedom of navigation would clearly be in Australia’s interest. We would call for such multi-national action if attacks occurred in our region. And if potential threats in the Indo-Pacific are so serious that Australia can’t afford to provide a single ship to the Red Sea taskforce, that might suggest that the messaging about the situation in the Indo-Pacific underplays the reality, including Beijing’s bullying and intimidation of countries like the Philippines.

While good strategy always involves making wise choices on employing limited resources to achieve policy goals, any inability to respond to multiple and diverse threats—from Houthi terrorists or the People’s Liberation Army Navy—implies that Australia needs to get serious about building up naval capability more rapidly.

The navy has assured the government it can deploy a warship to the Red Sea if asked to. But any deployment would require rotations of ships and crews, placing additional strain on the navy’s readiness for other tasks. The surface combatant review is now with the government, and no comment on it is expected until the first or second quarter of 2024. If the decision not to deploy a ship to the taskforce is based on concerns about Australia’s fleet size and readiness, then a larger and more powerful navy is clearly needed to respond to the growing risks within our area of primary strategic interest and, if necessary, beyond.

Ideally, this should involve a larger fleet of warships with greater firepower that can operate at greater range—but also higher fleet readiness and sustainability for protracted and diverse operations. That means expanding the workforce to crew and sustain a larger and more powerful navy.

The situation demands an increase in defence spending, sooner than planned, to meet increasingly clear challenges that may not wait.

These challenges are not limited to one part of the world. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are all undermining the international rules to which Australia owes its security and prosperity. Australia must play an active role in supporting these rules and deterring those who would remake them in their own malign interests.