Taking stock of October 7: The view from the Arab world

Over the past twelve months, the Palestinian people have sustained horrifying human, humanitarian, and political casualties, the worst since the Arab defeat of 5 June 1967 and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At least 40,000 people have been killed, among them more women and children than have been killed in a single year in any armed conflict of the past two decades, according to a recent Oxfam report.

Last month, the United Nations reported that 60 percent of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed, including about a quarter of a million homes, in addition to 68 percent of the roads and half of the hospitals.

The remaining hospitals are operating only at partial capacity. It is estimated that the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip will take fifteen years and cost tens of billions of dollars.

Hamas’ recent announcement that it would renew suicide attacks likely indicates its recognition that its military capabilities will not be restored any time soon. The future of governance in Gaza looks bleak and may involve the return of Israeli rule, whether direct or camouflaged.

What is certain is that Hamas will not rule Gaza, at least not in the foreseeable future. That is a point of international, Arab, Palestinian, and Israeli consensus.

In addition, Yahya Sinwar, the political leader of Hamas, is wanted by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, along with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, who has led the genocidal war in Gaza.

The far right in Israel has grown increasingly popular over the past year, and the re-colonisation of the West Bank has received political and on-the-ground support not seen for years. Calls for the forced displacement and deportation of Palestinians to Jordan are growing louder.

Of course, armed resistance to occupation is a legitimate right under international law. Yet, the exercise of this right at a specific time requires a rational justification beyond simply the right itself—for example, a military operation or a battle.

If war is an extension of politics by other means, then Hamas owes it to the Palestinian people to lay out the political goals of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood it had envisioned, regardless of the alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated against Israeli civilians during the operation.

What kind of political response did Hamas expect from Israel, the Arab world, and the international community?

Spectres of the International Community

The tragedy in Gaza has revealed the extent of global sympathy with the Palestinian people and their just cause, especially in Western countries, some of whose governments have supported the Israeli war of extermination to varying degrees.

Several countries in Africa, Latin America, and Western Europe have staked out a firm position of solidarity, reflected in resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly and Security Council and the International Court of Justice.

But the response from Arab peoples and Muslim and Arab governments, including the Palestinian Authority, has fallen short of expectations. Stances taken by China and Russia have been purely symbolic—a matter of simply stating a position—but at no point have they seriously sought to take a leading international role on the issue.

One need only compare the behaviour of these two superpowers with that of a developing country like South Africa, which does not have the right of veto or even a seat on the Security Council. Meanwhile, the US administration has offered military backing for the ongoing genocide in Gaza and given the war political cover in international forums.

It has played the same criminal role in the failed negotiations to reach a ceasefire in Gaza in parallel with Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas once and for all. The flagrant bias of the current US administration in favour of Israeli aggression should not come as a surprise to observers.

For decades, the current US president has publicly expressed pride in being a Zionist. The inability of the international community to force an end to the war of annihilation is not a complete surprise.

It also failed to stop the genocidal war in Syria some ten years ago, although Israel was not a party to the war. That genocidal war was and still is supported by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, the last being, along with the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the most important leaders of the “axis of resistance” against Israel.

One morning about a decade ago as well, Russia annexed an entire region of Ukraine. Despite the vocal condemnations this occasioned, the international community surrendered to its armed extortion, whetting Russia’s appetite for imperial expansion and encouraging it to devour what remained of Ukraine eight years later.

Paralysed by the Russian veto, the UN Security Council was unable to stop it. Eighteen years ago, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1701 on Lebanon.

What has prevented its implementation thus far is not Israel, America, or even the legitimate Lebanese government, but Hezbollah, a non-state party designated by several major states as a terrorist group.

The muted international response to the ongoing civil war in Sudan or the war of extermination in Gaza is not a complete surprise. For nearly two decades, the United Nations has been reeling from successive blows amidst a fierce conflict.

The angels observing from on high imagine that the aim is to transform it into an institution worthy of its name. The realists in this world, however, hope that it will not go the way of the League of Nations, whose gradual collapse was a prelude to the Second World War.

These concerns are especially pressing as the political and ideological currents that had fostered a world war in Europe again loom on the horizon, every day gaining political traction with the public. They are forming governments and occupying seats in legislatures from eastern Europe to the United States, including in the most important European Union states; Germany, Austria, Italy, and France.  

The Spider’s Web

The day after the Al-Aqsa Flood, Hezbollah announced that it would show its solidarity with Gaza by shelling settlements in northern Israel, in a bid to pressure it to end its genocidal war. Nevertheless, Hezbollah’s diversion failed. Having nearly completed its mission to destroy Hamas capabilities, Israel has turned eleven months later to Hezbollah.

In a ten-day period, it struck the group’s communications network and killed its leading lights, including its storied leader Hassan Nasrallah and possibly his successor as well. It is worth remembering that in a speech justifying Hezbollah’s diversionary war, Nasrallah boasted that Israel was more fragile ‘than a spider’s web’.

The vengeance of the rabid spider has not been confined solely to Hezbollah militants and leadership. Avoiding harm to civilians is not a consideration to which Israel takes into any account.

The same is true of Hezbollah, which establishes the headquarters of its military and intelligence services in the heart of residential areas and holds meetings of its military leadership in wartime in the heart of Beirut, even with the participation of foreign military leaders from Iran.

The bitter outcome at the time of writing is some one million displaced Lebanese (ten percent of Lebanon’s population) and thousands of wounded people who cannot find enough hospitals to receive them, in an entire country on the verge of becoming another Gaza, according to a Lebanese minister.

While Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri announced their acceptance of the proposed ceasefire with Israel—with Berri confirming that his ally Nasrallah had also accepted the deal before his death—the Iranian foreign minister had the gall and colonial arrogance to announce from Beirut his disdain for the highest authorities in Lebanon.

A ceasefire, his government believes, is impossible before a ceasefire in Gaza. In other words, the decision in this sovereign matter is not up to the Lebanese, their government, parliament, and army, but to Iran.

Before his death, Nasrallah was the conduit for Iranian directives—there was no need for an announcement them Tehran. He was able to carry out these directives despite the majority of the Lebanese people, their government, parliament, and army thanks to the enormous weapons capabilities provided by Iran, which made Hezbollah the most powerful non-state military organisation in the world.

But Iran did not permit Hezbollah to use the precision-guided missiles it had supplied, even after Israel decapitated the party’s leadership and brazenly challenged Hezbollah and Iran to shift from diversion to all-out confrontation. That is, perceived Iranian interests take precedence over those of the Lebanese people or even the need to stop the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

It is a remarkable irony that the malignant expansion of Hezbollah militias outside Lebanon is what allowed Israeli intelligence to penetrate the organisation.

It was doomed by its participation in the war of extermination against the Syrian people, where it fought alongside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and mercenaries from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. In fact, although the war with Israel began nearly a year ago, not all Hezbollah militias have yet returned to Lebanon.

But its most prominent leaders, assured that they had saved the regime of Bashar al-Assad, did return home only to be picked off by Israel at the opportune moment. Meanwhile, Hezbollah militias have played another historic role in turning millions of Syrians into refugees, much like Palestinians.

The Banner of Palestinian Liberation

In their struggle for liberation, the Palestinian people have grappled with daunting challenges that have cost them dearly, though a substantial part of the price they paid was not inevitable.

It was extracted amidst the fierce conflict with Arab regimes that vied to control Palestinian national decision-making, with the aim of exploiting the struggle to bargain with Israel and its allies or to whitewash their murderous record of their own people. These conflicts were not conducted in the political and media sphere alone; they entailed armed confrontations with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

Refugee camps were at times the site of bloody liquidations, which on some occasions turning into large-scale massacres. Assassinations in European capitals were also seen in the context of these Arab-Palestinian confrontations.

The regimes of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hafez al-Assad in Syria, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya were the main drivers of this blood-soaked chapter of the Palestinian cause, but they were not the only ones.

It is no accident that political and intellectual elites in the Arab world considered these ‘leaders’ and their ilk as symbols of ‘national liberation’, ‘anti-imperialism’ and ‘steadfastness and resistance’ to Israel, although an empirical analysis would lead to the opposite conclusion.

See, for example, how all the regimes that rose to power after the withdrawal of colonial occupation forces in their countries frittered away the gains of independence, channelling their countries’ resources into ill-considered economic projects and securing their authoritarian rule. Some of these regimes even waged genocidal wars against ethnic and sectarian minorities and majorities.

In the twenty-first century, Arab peoples began to see clearly the bitter harvest reaped by these regimes, which had rotted after national independence. The Arab Spring’s waves, first in 2011 and later 2018, was the first attempt to correct the course set more than half a century ago.

One of the ironies before which history will stand agape is that those who have sought cover under the banner of Palestinian liberation in recent years are the same ones who crushed the secondary waves of the Arab Spring in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen.

Their suppression was realised under the leadership of Iran, which occupies Arab islands in the Arabian Gulf and harbours imperial ambitions in the Arab region.

Notably, Iran’s supreme leader has recently emphasised that the ongoing regional conflict is just an extension of the Shia-Sunni conflict that began between the Umayyad Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya and Hussein ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib. This belief was echoed by Hassan Nasrallah on various occasions.

Under this sectarian banner, the Yemeni pole in the axis of resistance—the Houthis, who control the capital and other cities by force—announced their plan for ‘radical change’, which aims to return Yemen to the traditions of the medieval Imamate system that ruled the country before its national liberation revolution in the 1960s.

For its part, the Iraqi pole in the axis—the Shia alliance—is waging a legal and legislative battle in the Iraqi parliament to legalise child marriage.

More surprising is that some of the symbols of the Arab Spring and Palestinian liberation, including politicians, intellectuals, and academics, pin their hopes on elements of this axis, whose role in the assassination, imprisonment, and exile of their peers in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Iran is well documented, in addition to the examples mentioned in this article and dozens of other articles published by this newspaper.

Nevertheless, the current crisis is not about individuals driven to adopt positions and biases that they may see as appropriate for one reason or another. Rather it is linked to a profound, all-encompassing impasse in the Arab world that began when the compass was lost, and the ship went off course in the early years of liberation from foreign occupation.

That the way to Palestine has been lost is merely a symptom, not the crux, of the crisis. My enduring hope is to see an Arab institution with the requisite sobriety, depth, and acceptance to initiate a far-reaching dialogue between intellectual, political, and cultural actors in the Arab world on these critical issues.

Bahey el-Din Hassan is the Director and founder of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS). He is the author of several publications on democracy and human rights in the Arab World.

Follow him on X: @BaheyHassan

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.