Dr. Mohammed Moussa argues that the genocide in Gaza, backed by Western powers and tacitly sustained by regional normalization with Israel, reveals the collapse of international justice, reshapes Middle Eastern geopolitics, and entrenches a destructive militarism that prioritizes oppression over Palestinian lives.
As American bombs rain and Chinese drones drop exploding grenades, the bleeding of Gaza continues without succour. This tiny strip of land houses hundreds of thousands of refugees from historic Palestine. Militarism in its most vicious and blatant form has turned it not only into a war zone but subjected its people to a genocide. Tens of thousands of children, women and men have been killed while the ‘international community’ watches on and repeats the same hollow statements about Israel’s right to defend itself while remaining silent about the Palestinians’ right to do so or even their right to live. There are courageous voices at the international level such as the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and the Colombian President Gustavo Petro of the Hague Group who have joined forces to condemn the inhumane violence being systematically applied to the people of Gaza and those complicit with it.
The genocide against Gaza has highlighted a thinly veiled truth about the international community. A single state can wage a large-scale war targeting civilians with the diplomatic cover and financial and military support of the most powerful and wealthiest states on the planet. Norms such as justice, human rights and peace have become casualties in this genocide. Closer to home in the Middle East, mostly dominated by autocratic regimes and failing states, the region is experiencing both discernible and subtle changes. International relations and its frames of analysis have failed miserably in anticipating the current grotesque political violence and alerting us to the interconnections between what is going in Gaza, the dynamics of domination in the Middle East and the wider global milieu.
Iran’s political, diplomatic and military reach has been substantially blunted following Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. With Assad having run away to Moscow, Syria no longer provides the training ground for Iranian-backed forces and militias recruited from among its neighbours. There are murmurings of some kind of normalisation between Damascus’s new regime and Israel despite overt acts of war and military occupation on Syrian territory. Hezbollah has been demoted from kingmaker to a wounded courtier in Lebanese politics. Yemen’s Houthis, the de facto government in Sanaa, are a staunch but ineffective proxy without Hezbollah’s former military prowess and arsenal. In Iraq, the situation is more complex with Shi’ite political actors torn between opposing priorities: national versus pan-Arab or Shi’ite Islamist aspirations, stability versus solidarity and USA versus Iran. And despite Iran’s robust response to Israel and the US’s attacks showing the limits of their ability to thwart the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, Israel’s actions provide further evidence of who is the regional hegemon that enjoys virtually unconditional external backing.
The Middle East, nonetheless, cannot be reduced to the bitter rivalry between Iran and Israel. Containing many different actors, from opportunistic militias to some of the most prosperous societies in the world and other states in-between, the region has been shaken up irrevocably. Gaza has transformed the Abraham Accords into an unspoken complicity between the other parties with Israel. From war-torn Sudan to sectarian Bahrain, so-called normalisation remains firmly in place. Rhetoric of ‘de-normalisation’ or breaking off the Abraham Accords is conspicuous by its deafening silence. While peace agreements have been signed, weapons purchase deals continue to be inked. Normalisation with Israel, however, appears to have been delayed, at least for the moment. States such as Turkey with historic relations with Israel have accused Netanyahu of carrying out a genocide in Gaza and started rolling back their economic and political ties with an increasingly perceived pariah state. A contradiction has prevented the region from achieving a semblance of peace and prosperity for the majority of its inhabitants. Monarchies in the Gulf continue to host American military bases and Iran has shown that it will not shy away from targeting these even in limited ways that are furtively coordinated with local states. Yet the UAE’s ambitious plans gather momentum through its backing of Hemedti and the genocidal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan and Khalifa Haftar’s medley of militias that are dominating eastern Libya. War and money-making are cemented in these alliances. The emirate is angling for domination in a Middle East populated by much larger but impoverished states and may prove to be Israel’s most reliable ally in the not-so-distant future.
Egypt and Qatar have been tireless in expending their diplomatic energies to end the war in Gaza. But these attempts have demonstrated the weaknesses in their capacity to gain American support and forge a unified Arab stance to conclude the conflict. Egypt is subject to more precarious forces due to its close proximity to Gaza and its inability or inaction to stop the daily massacres in the territory and enable the entry of much needed humanitarian aid to prevent mass starvation contrived by Israel’s blockade. However, an equally critical observation can be made about Egypt’s hitherto crucial role as intermediatory between Hamas on the one hand and USA, Israel and even Fatah on the other. It no longer holds true today. The joint efforts of Cairo and Doha in shuttle diplomacy have been rent asunder by Israel’s irredentist strategy that is chasing after a settler-colonial dystopia in Gaza and the West Bank. The perpetrating of a genocide against Palestinians has seriously undermined the diplomatic status quo that prevailed in the Middle East from before the Arab uprisings.
The genocide in Gaza is not an isolated tragedy in the Middle East. War against the Palestinian people is connected to the Western states’ sales of weapons to governments in the region, internecine conflicts within countries like Sudan and the rise of ‘small states’ punching above their weight. At the same time, the more populous Arab states are stuck in a downward political, economic and social spiral. We are witnessing at this historic moment the resurgence of a militarism led by Israel that combines virulent racism, obliteration of a total human ecology and cutting-edge technology of destruction.
Will this militarism hold sway or will the repugnance against war among citizens win the day in the Middle East? And if it is the latter, will it arrive not a moment too soon to save the lives of the remaining people in Gaza?
Author: Dr. Mohammed Moussa
Dr. Mohammed Moussa is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University. His expertise centers on political movements and the history of political thought.
*The views in this article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect Yeni Şafak's editorial policy.
