The US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding remains just about intact despite several exchanges of fire. Oman’s recent decision to release $6bn in frozen Iranian assets has helped to ease tensions, but it is also a reminder that the Strait of Hormuz issue is only one of the problems ahead.
Another is the vexed issue of the proxy wars, with the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict being the most difficult. The on-off discussions between Israel and the Lebanese government might imply that this conflict is also subject to talks, but this is simply not so. Beirut does not control Hezbollah, which acts as a state within a state and does not see itself as bound by the US/Iran talks – a view shared by Israel.
For Israel, this is a core issue. Binyamin Netanyahu and those around him view Donald Trump’s behaviour as little short of a betrayal. They would greatly prefer the whole peace process to collapse as they attempt to convince the electorate that only the current Israeli prime minister can keep Israeli Jews safe.
Understanding this requires looking beyond today’s diplomacy to the security doctrine that has shaped Israeli policy since 1948. This doctrine is rooted in a desire to keep the state safe by whatever means are deemed necessary, whether the use of extreme force, irregular warfare, assassination or short- and long-term occupation.
These violent methods have often led to the mass deaths and injuries of Palestinian civilians, as well as their detention without trial, and have slowly but surely dragged Israel into an insecurity trap of its own making.
Take the current disastrous conflict in Gaza. Three months from now will be the third anniversary of Hamas’s 7 October assault on southern Israel, which killed 1,195 people. The shock of what happened shattered most Israelis’ presumption of control, but few were able to see the wider context.
From afar, some analysts noted that the Hamas attacks followed more than 15 years in which the Israeli Defence Forces had employed rigorous control over the two million Palestinians in Gaza, including through four conflicts that killed at least 5,000 Palestinians and wounded thousands more, many of them maimed for life.
While these conflicts might have helped preserve an Israeli perception of security, in one sense they made Israel’s response to the 7 October assault even more violent. Many within Israel concluded that if even this high level of control could fail, then much greater force would be needed. Gaza’s Palestinians were framed as “human animals” against whom any amount of force was legitimate.
Many millions of people across the world have since come to view Israel’s actions over the past three years – which have killed many tens of thousands in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Lebanon – as terrifyingly excessive.
In reality, it is little more than a continuation of an Israeli security posture dating back 80 years and in the wake of the killing of six million Jews in the Holocaust. As Israel is competing for the right to land that can be achieved only by denying that right to Palestinians, it is fundamentally insecure and therefore has to be “impregnable in its insecurity”.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the new state of Israel rapidly consolidated its hold on the land assigned by the UN partition and the additional land it gained in the war of independence. For Palestinians, this was the Nakba, the ‘catastrophe’, in which at least 700,000 people were forced to flee their homes.
By 1956, Israel was sufficiently secure in its support from the UK and France to take part in the Suez crisis. While that was disastrous for the UK and France, Israel came out of it stronger. A decade later, it fought the Six-Day War against surrounding Arab states to take control of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the whole of Jerusalem, while further displacing Palestinians. Many thousands living in refugee camps in the Jordan Valley were forced to flee once more, mostly east to Jordan.
Over the past 60 years, Israel has fought more wars, both large and small, and suppressed internal revolts in two intifadas – all in pursuit of a peace that never comes, yet still with the memory of the Holocaust.
The country maintains a vigorous and well-funded lobby in the US and works hard to maintain its standing in the UK, so that it can be argued that any opposition to modern-day Israel and the current Netanyahu government is antisemitic.
Yet on both sides of the Atlantic, a disaster is unfolding for Israel: public support is fraying. Some US polls now show more support for Palestinians than Israelis, and in the UK Keir Starmer’s support for Israel has been one factor in his downfall.
Back in Israel, many Israeli Jews vigorously reject much of Netanyahu’s politics, yet simply want the Palestinian problem to go away by just about any means. There are a few exceptions, including a small peace movement and some determined human rights groups. Very recently, former prime minister Ehud Barak has been bitterly critical of settler violence across the occupied West Bank.
These efforts have not so far led to a domestic mood change, but this could change as the international community increasingly regards Israel as a rogue state. In time – possibly in the coming months – there is likely to be a full-fledged campaign of economic damage, boycotting and social isolation that Israel will not be able to ignore.
That may end up being Netanyahu’s crowning, if bitter, achievement.
