The Red Sea, the Middle East, and the US Roles
The Middle East was the cradle of civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was governed by great Empires from the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman. Today, the Middle East has a range of failed and deeply impoverished states next door to thriving, wealthy, highly educated ones; some are riven by civil war and bloody strife; others are stable and making necessary transitions. See the variations in per capita incomes at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=ZQ It has nations governed by dictatorships, democracies and monarchies, as neighboring states side by side. https://world101.cfr.org/rotw/middle-east/politics#overview and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_the_Middle_East_and_North_Africa#:~:text=Absolute%20monarchy%20is%20common%20in,the%20rest%20of%20the%20world. They share the deserts on either side of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf (but not their oil revenues) and are for the most part plagued by a scarcity of water resources. https://www.infoplease.com/atlas/middle-east
The Middle East accounts for about 1/3rd of the world’s oil production. Saudi Arabia alone produces 15% of global oil production. The US has played and still plays a key role in most of the region’s conflicts, as does a new actor Iran. Wars (internal and external) have devastated many Middle Eastern nations, and the US has played a major role in supporting and suppressing regional warfare.
The Red Sea is about 1400 miles long leading from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. On one side is Africa, on the other the Middle East. At the head of the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, controlled by Egypt, acts as transit for nearly 15% of world’s commerce, mostly between Europe and Asia. At the bottom entrance to the Red Sea are the nations of Yemen, Somalia and Djibouti. Along the Middle Eastern side of the Red Sea are Yemen and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. Along the African side of the Red Sea are Eritrea, Sudan, and Egypt.
Yemen is a very poor nation at the strategic Indian Ocean entrance to the Red Sea. In Yemen, the current civil war between the rebel Houthis (Shias supported by Iran) and the official Yemeni governments (different Sunni leaders supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, respectively) has gone on for over a decade. The Houthis have captured the capitol, and about 1/3rd of the country; the ousted Sunni government controls the key Southern port city of Aden. The Sunni terrorist groups, ISIS and Al Qaeda have a presence in the nation’s turmoil as well. The current civil war began after the ouster of the long serving dictator, Saleh, during the Arab Spring, and his replacement by President Hadi. It is a continuation of multiple civil wars between and among the leaders of North Yemen and South Yemen, dating back to the nation’s independence from Britain in 1962. Sometimes, there has been one state, Yemen, and at other times two states, North and South Yemen. Negotiations were underway to stop the civil war, but have now been derailed by the fighting in Israel and Gaza.
On the other side of the Red Sea from Yemen is Somalia, a failed state and impoverished society governed by tribal warlords, interspersed with religious fundamentalist, terror groups. During the late 19th Century, Somalia was divided between Italian, British and French colonies. The French section of Somalia is now the independent nation of Djibouti, which sits at the entrance to the Red Sea. The rest of Somalia was ruled by a dictator, Siad Barre, who was overthrown by the Somali army in 1991 after multiple unsuccessful battles with neighboring Ethiopia. The northern portion, Somaliland, has since declared its independence (not recognized by most other nations) from Somalia. Puntland is the neighboring and now autonomous Northern region of Somalia. Piracy, which bedeviled shipping along the long Somali coastline, has been largely eliminated by collective action. https://theconversation.com/somali-piracy-once-an-unsolvable-security-threat-has-almost-completely-stopped-heres-why-213872 The religious terrorist group, Al Shabab, continues to operate south of the capital, Mogadishu, despite the active presence of African Union troops to defend the Somalis from Al Shabab. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/al-shabaab
Djibouti is a small, Somali state occupying a strategic position at the entrance to the Red Sea across from Yemen. It was colonized by the French and slow to achieve independence. It was wracked by civil war in the 90’s; however, the competing parties made peace and power sharing which has endured to the present. The US Armed Forces have a major base there as do several other nations, including China.
After the defeat of the Mussolini-led Italian colonizers in World War II, the kingdom of Ethiopia annexed the territory of Eritrea. Ethiopia is landlocked while Eritrea has a long coastline along the Red Sea. Eritreans fought a 30-year war of independence to free themselves from Ethiopian rule. The Eritreans have been governed by the same party and same President ever since, the successors of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. Political freedoms are sharply limited. They were supported at various times by the USSR and China during their independence struggle against Ethiopia, which partway through the war turned to communism and then Ethiopia was supported by the USSR against Eritrea until the collapse of the USSR. The population of Eritrea is half Christian and half Muslim with cultural influences from its neighbors Ethiopia, an ancient Christian kingdom in the heart of East Africa and the source of most of the Nile’s water, and Sudan, the next nation to the north along the Red Sea coast.
Sudan is in the midst of a civil war between its army and its militias. Its long-time dictator, Omar al Bashir, was ousted by a people’s movement with assistance from the army in 2019. The army and the militias then ousted the new civilian leadership, and they are now fighting each other for control of the nation. Previously, Sudan fought and lost a civil war with oil rich South Sudan, which has now achieved its own independence. The northern parts of Sudan were Muslim and Arab, and Southern parts were African, Christian and animist. In the western region of the nation, Sudanese militias (the Janjaweed) fought the African farmers of the Darfur region. Influencing these conflicts have been religious and ethnic divisions (Arab Muslims v. African Christians in South Sudan). Another contributing part has been the economic issues (control over and revenues from oil producing regions in South Sudan). Settled farmer versus nomadic herder conflicts over land use have also pervaded the battles in the Darfur region. The UAE (United Arab Emirates) is supporting the Arab militias in their battle with the Sudanese Army, which is supported by Saudi Arabia. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/12/sudan-conflict-saudi-arabia-uae-gulf-burhan-hemeti-rsf/
Egypt is at the top of the Red Sea; it controls the Suez Canal, whose revenues are key to Egypt’s finances. It has played a leading role in Mediterranean civilization for over 5,000 years from the time of the earliest pharaohs to the present. The Nile Valley was a one of the earliest birthplaces of writing, religion, art, and architecture, and remains one of the most fertile places in. the world. Egypt freed itself from the late 19th and early 20th Century British imperial colonizers in a struggle that took over fifty years and culminated in the military coup led by Gamal Nasser in the early 50’s. Nasser and his supporters envisaged a Pan-Arab Middle East, and tried to align with Syria and Iraq to this end. Nasser and his military colleagues and successors, Sadat and Mubarak, ruled the nation until the Arab Spring united the opposition to topple Mubarak in 2011. In the ensuing democratic elections won by Mohammed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood triumphed over the secular parties, then was deposed by the military and secular leaders when he sought to implement an Islamist regime and agenda for the nation. The top military has resumed leadership of Egypt. Egypt was the first Arab nation to make peace with Israel, has a functioning socialist society and economy, and has one of the strongest militaries in the region. It allied with the Soviet Union to build the Aswan Dam across the Nile after the UK and US refused financing. It allied with the US to build a lasting peace with Israel.
On either side of the Red Sea, the leading nations are Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They are both allies of the US and both primarily Sunni, but otherwise could not be more different. Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy, religious, and hereditary monarchy; Egypt is a republic, governed by its military. Saudi Arabia is a conservative religious theocracy that is terribly oppressive to women and has killed its citizens like Jamal Khashoggi for criticizing its policies; whereas Egypt is more secular, more religiously tolerant, has greater freedom for its citizens, and has a much more socialist economy. Saudi Arabia is many times richer in per capita GDP due to its oil resources, while Egypt has a large GDP paired with a large and quite poor population. The Saudis control an invaluable asset -- oil production -- and control oil prices for the world through its leadership of OPEC. Egypt too controls an invaluable asset, the Suez Canal through which much of global commerce passes. They vie for leadership of the Arab world, but are not competing with each other. The lifeblood of the Saudi Arabia is oil; it is threatened by the global moves to alternative energy and the need to phase out the use of fossil fuels. It needs an economic strategy to transition its economy, and is in the process of doing so, as are many of the other Gulf oil monarchies, like Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. It is also threatened by the rise of Iranian backed theocracy and the growth of Shia based militias seeking Iranian dominance throughout the Arab world. Egypt’s lifeblood is the Nile, the source of its water, agricultural resources, and its hydro-electric energy in a desert landscape. It is far more threatened by downstream developments in Sudan and Ethiopia, where developing chaos of the civil war in Sudan and development of new dams in Ethiopia could impair the Nile’s flow. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66776733# Both nations want peace accords leading to a two-state solution for the Israelis and the Palestinians and want the US to pressure Netanyahu’s far right government to that end. Both want US help in blocking the Iranian trouble-making throughout the Middle East.
Iran is Persian, not Arab, and for the most part its citizens are Shia Muslim, not Sunni. It has a long history of empire building and dominance, think back to Xerxes, Cyrus, and Darius and the Persian Wars with the Greeks. It was a center of art, commerce, literature, and learning from ancient times throughout the Middle Ages. They fought the Romans, the Byzantine Empire, the Arab Empire, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Russian Empire for regional dominance. During World War II, Iran was a key regional ally of Britain and Russia and the conduit for US and UK arms and aid to Russia. It has now become a very conservative religious theocracy with ample oil reserves, a large population, and a powerful, aggressive military active in many parts of the Middle East. The nation’s young are increasingly disaffected from the fundamentalist, geriatric theocrats and the morals police who run the nation, abuse women and seek to control their lives. In the 1950’s for a short time, it was a vibrant democracy that was nationalizing its oil industry from the UK, but that government (led by Mossadegh) was overthrown by the CIA and British operatives. The Shah had been installed by the UK to replace his father during World War II to oppose Germany, and he was supported during the Cold War by the US as a bulwark against its expansionist neighbor, the USSR. He was an autocrat, a reformer and westernizer; he used the nation’s growing oil wealth to modernize the nation and to live a lavish lifestyle which scandalized his conservative religious opponents; he increasingly became a dictator and torturer of his own people who had organized to oppose his modernizing reforms. He was overthrown in 1979 by a broad coalition of leftists, secular leaders, and religious conservative opponents. The religious conservatives took power, killed their opponents, and have held power for the past 40 years.
Much of the nation’s large and prominent Jewish population left Iran which had been their home for millennia and emigrated to Israel, and the US at that time. The Persian King Cyrus and his successors had freed Jews from the Babylonian Captivity and assisted in the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem; many Jews moved to Persia during this time frame. They experienced much less persecution and discrimination under Persian Muslim rule than in Europe under the Christians. Iranian Jews had flourished during the reign of the Shah; that stopped with the overthrow of the Shah and the rise of Khomeini.
Iran holds elections, but the ruling theocrats disqualify those candidates who do not share their religious-political perspectives. During the years of theocratic rule, Iran has fought direct wars with Iraq who attacked it, and it has otherwise supported and used Shia proxies in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon to disrupt and seek to mold and reconstruct the Middle East in its image. It has for many years been developing nuclear power and is close to having an atomic bomb. Its arch enemies are the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. It is a bit of a mystery why the Iranian regime has chosen the US and Israel as its enemies; there is no direct competition; there are no land or resource disputes, and there were historically good relations with each. The more logical regional competition is with the nations of Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Russia (over the religious aspirations of Muslims living in the Caucasus). Conceivably, Iran simply wants the US out of the Middle East so it can dominate the region. Recently it has allied with Russia and China and is helping arm Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It supports Shia parties and militias throughout the region and aspires to regional leadership.
Lebanon is a small, once prosperous nation divided by Shia, Sunni and Christian power rivalries and civil wars that have destabilized it and ruined its prosperity. It is home to many Palestinian refugees. It had a successful finance and services economy and many personal freedoms that have been shattered, rebuilt, and shattered again by civil wars between the Shia, Sunni, and Maronite Christian communities, by Syrian and Israeli occupations, and by Palestinian refugee uprisings. Hezbollah is a Shia militia, dominant in South Lebanon, in Lebanese politics, armed by Iran, and dedicated to the conflict with Israel.
Syria, at the moment, is a mess. It had been one of the centers of Arab culture and commerce, a key part of the Hellenic and Roman Empires and the Arab and the Ottoman Empires. It has been governed by the Baath party led by the Assad regimes since 1970; it has become a terrible dictatorship, with a secret service torturing, and killing its citizens; it is supported by Iran and Russia. When Syrians revolted peacefully in 2011, widespread massacres of the opposition were committed by Assad’s army and secret services. Much of the nation is Sunni Arab, but the minority Alawites (a splinter religious sect related to Shia Islam) control the military, govern, and rule the nation. The Assads are the leaders of the Alawite dominance. The Syrian revolt turned from non-violent to violent in response to the Assad regime’s massacres of the peaceful protesters. Utterly despicable terrorist actors like ISIS then took over much of the of the country and a good part of Iraq as well. Russia, Turkey, the US, the Kurds, and Iranian militias separately worked to defeat and expel ISIS from Syria and Iraq. The Syrian government regained the upper hand in much of Syria, but Kurdish militias, troops and armed forces from Turkey, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the US remain in parts of Syria to combat ISIS and other terror groups, and each other in the case of the Turks and Kurds,```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` or Iran and the US .
Iraq is somewhat less of a mess. As Mesopotamia in the center of the Fertile Crescent nourished by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, it was one of the earliest founts of ancient civilization, learning, mathematics, writing, law, agriculture, and urban life. Babylon endured as a great city under the Greeks and then the Romans. Babylonia had a short-lived empire; it was frequently invaded by its northern neighbor, Persia and by the Assyrians. Baghdad became a great center of Arab culture and empire. It was sacked, looted, and burned by the Mongols, but continued that role in a diminished state under the Turkish Ottoman Empire. After the First World War, Iraq became a British Protectorate, and oil was discovered and began to be exploited. The British promoted the minority Sunni Arabs to positions of prominence in the army and government. After the Second World War, it gained its independence as the nation of Iraq. A series of military coups throughout the 50’s and 60’s finally ended with the ascent of the Baath Party and a single party state under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. They tortured and killed their political opponents and allied with the USSR. They invaded their larger neighbor Iran (Persia) after the Iranian Revolution to gain control of its oil fields, but to no avail, other than many killed on both sides. They were supported by most Arab states (but not Syria) in this endeavor. They then invaded their smaller neighbor, Kuwait, to gain control of its oil fields and pay their debts from the earlier war. The US with a large multi-national coalition under President George Bush I liberated Kuwait from the Iraqis but then stopped short of overthrowing Hussein.
After the 9/11 attacks on New York City from Al Qaeda based in Afghanistan, President Bush II fixated on invading Iraq, fixed the intelligence to claim that Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and was a threat to our national security. He was unquestionably a bad guy, he wasn’t a threat to American security. To highlight their differences, Hussein was a secular, socialist Arab dictator while Al Qaeda under the leadership of Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri were Sunni religious terrorists who aspired to overthrow all the Arab states and recreate the old medieval Arab Empire – leading to the rebirth and renewal of an Arab Golden Age. After the American invasion overthrew Hussein and ultimately killed him, a terrible civil war among the Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds ensued with the US clueless on how to manage the bloody chaos it had created and the ensuing sectarian killings, other than to kill ever more Iraqis (about 300,000 civilians lost their lives) in the name of “peace”. The Shia, Sunnis and Kurds held democratic elections which the Shia aligned parties won, and eventually agreed to some degree of power sharing, but in 2014 when ISIS invaded from its strongholds in Syria, the Iraqi army fled. Eventually the Kurds, US, Iranians, and the Shia militias recaptured Mosul and defeated ISIS in 2017 and restored Iraqi governance and security in western Iraq. Protests continue about the government’s ineptitude and corruption in solving real day to day problems like water, power, development, and unemployment; the elected parties seem unable to cooperate in rebuilding Iraq, but there has been some progress. Part of the challenge is the division of oil revenues from the fields located in the majority Kurd and Shia regions while the majority Sunni regions lack the rich oil fields, but want their share of the oil revenues. Part has been the desertification of the Fertile Crescent as climate changes and the impacts of war on irrigation and farming. Part has been the interference of neighboring Iran and the affiliated Shia militias striving to maximize Iran’s influence and expel the US, and partly the repeated incursions from Turkey into the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq. Part is recovery from the damages to the nation after four decades of war. and mismanagement of the oil industry. The US and Iran both maintain a military presence in Iraq such that the Iraqi government must walk a fine line between the potential antagonists.
This whole scenario for me at least was so reminiscent of the American Presidents’ lies that got us into and kept us enmeshed in the quagmire of war in Vietnam. Bush and company did the same thing in Iraq, and Congress bought it because of the nation’s trauma after the 9/11 attacks. Yet we did it again in Iraq, where are the nation’s memory cells? This was not Pearl Harbor, and Hussein was not Bin Laden.
Iraq has great potential now the wars have ended; it has an abundance of oil, river waters, a large population, and a strategic position in the Persian Gulf. It has a democracy, but its biggest challenges are effective democratic governance and improving sectarian collaboration and cooperation to develop its resources effectively for all its citizens. As just two examples, its once highly regarded education system is now badly degraded and poorly funded after 40 years of war, likewise in a degraded condition are its vital irrigation systems for its farmers and its oil infrastructure.
Jordan is a much smaller nation with fewer national resources like oil, but much higher literacy and life expectancy, signs of good governance; however there are few job opportunities in Jordan, so many Jordanians must work abroad in the Persian Gulf oil states. During early biblical times, the tribes in Jordan were warring neighbors of the Israelites. Jordan allied with the British against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, became independent, but under British protectorate thereafter, and achieved full independence after WW II. Jordan is governed by a king (a hereditary monarchy) and his appointees, and by a popularly elected but weak House and Senate. It has been allied to the UK and the US since independence. It is home to the native Bedouins (generally loyal to the King), and to many refugees from the wars in Palestine, Syria, Kuwait, and Iraq (sometimes not so loyal to the monarchy). Unlike the other nations with Palestinian refugees, Jordanians offer them citizenship with the right to vote. Refugees make up nearly half the population of Jordan. Jordan has made peace with Israel after many failed wars. It has had armed conflicts with the PLO and exiled their leaders, but has had no long, devastating civil wars. In 2000 Jordan ceded the West Bank to Palestinians who are now governed by the Palestinian Authority (the successor to the PLO, Palestinian Liberation Organization).
Palestine in ancient times sometimes had independence and regional dominance such as during the reigns of the Israelite Kings David and Solomon; at most other times the region was conquered by and subservient to its much stronger neighbors from Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria. It sat at the strategic crossroads between Egypt and Syria, between the Mediterranean and the East. It was the Holy Land for three of the world’s great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with a common root in the Jewish religion.
The Israelites were a Semitic tribe, distinguished from the neighboring Palestinian tribes by their monotheism, Jahweh, by their strong Mosaic Code of ethical conduct, and by their stubborn resistance to conquerors from the North and South who sought to control and extirpate their religious practices. Think back to the biblical tales of Babylonian Captivity, Queen Esther, Daniel and the lion’s den, and the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt. Jerusalem and the Holy Temple were destroyed many times, by neighboring military conquerors, including by the Greeks and most completely by the Romans who massacred many Jews in the first century.
Christianity was a persecuted, monotheistic offshoot of Judaism originating in Palestine that eventually spread throughout the Roman and Byzantine Empires and became a favored state religion under the Roman Emperor Constantine who built great Christian churches on the holy places throughout Palestine. Christianity was a proselytizing religion, as compared to Judaism where you had to be born into the faith and culture (the tribe); therefore, it had much greater growth potential, and it grew exponentially both under persecution and then under state protection.
With their homeland destroyed by the Romans, Jews spread throughout the Middle East and Europe, as far as India, Southern Africa, Spain, and from there early into the Americas. The bonds of shared religion and culture endured and flourished in the Jewish diaspora. During the European Middle Ages, Christians began to persecute Jews, including banishing and burning the Jews during the Spanish inquisition, and killing Jews in pogroms in Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. Virulent antisemitism continued to the modern times, culminating in the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust.
Mohamed founded the religion of Islam in Arabia in the 7th Century; it derived from Judaism and Christianity, and it spread rapidly across the Middle East, North Africa and into Spain as the Arabs conquered much of the Mediterranean basin. Islam was tolerant of other religions, languages, and cultures. Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine slowly became Muslim as Christians converted to Islam in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab-conquered parts of Europe. The third most sacred site to Muslims was built in Jerusalem. This was a golden age of advances in art, architecture, science, mathematics, medicine, literature, and commerce throughout the Arabic Empires at a time when Europe was just emerging from its Dark Ages.
Muslim Arabs conquered Palestine from the Christian Byzantine Empire. They conquered Spain and were finally stopped and beaten in France by the forces of Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in 732. In the year 1100, European Christian Crusaders convened by the Catholic Church conquered Palestine and restored Christian control over the Holy Land. Muslims, Crusaders and Mongols fought for control over the next several centuries until the Arabs fully triumphed over the last Palestinian redoubts of the Christian Crusaders by the end of the 13th Century.
The Mongols from the Chinese steppes invaded the Middle East and Europe. They destroyed whoever opposed them, but otherwise they preserved existing cities, cultures, and commerce, as their tax paying vassals. They were religiously and culturally tolerant. They adopted Islam and helped to spread Islam back across the Asian continent, including into China and India. They introduced land trade routes and commerce from China to the Middle East and back along the Silk Road. They created the first and largest global empire.
As the Arabic and Byzantine Empires collapsed, and the Mongols were defeated in the Middle East and Europe, the Ottoman Turks founded the next great Middle Eastern empire. They conquered Constantinople (1453), the rest of the Middle East (1516), North Africa, and portions of Europe such as the Balkans, the Caucasus and Southern Ukraine (Crimea). When Jews were expelled from Spain, as just one example, many resettled in the Middle East, as the Turkish Ottoman Empire promoted greater religious tolerance. Palestine during this period was subject to rule from Ottoman rulers based in Damascus or at times Egypt. The Turks invaded the Balkans and Central Europe, but were stopped and defeated by the Austrians and Poles at the Siege of Vienna in 1529.
During the 19th Century, significant new Jewish agricultural settlements emerged in Palestine as people fled their homes for the Holy Land due to the Russian pogroms. They came with very little; they worked the land; they bought land; they developed it, and they built a new life with new neighbors who did not persecute and kill them in pogroms. A prominent Jewish activist, Theodor Herzl, wrote an influential pamphlet promoting an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine as a refuge from the pogroms and antisemitism then pervasive in so many European countries. Jewish immigration returning to the Holy Land increased during the 19th and 20th Centuries, and over time it began to encounter resistance from local Palestinian Arabs. Arabs throughout the Middle East were also becoming increasingly opposed to the rule of the declining Ottoman Turkish Empire, and Britain and France were establishing their colonial empires all around the world, including in the Middle East.
On the eve of the First World War, Jews were about 12%; Christians were 10%, and Muslims were over 75% of Palestine’s population. During the war, British officials made contradictory deals and promises for the future of the Middle East -- independence for the Arabs from Turkish rule, a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, and a British Protectorate for Palestine with a French Protectorate for Syria. After the war, the League of Nations recognized both the British and French Protectorates and the need for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. During the interwar period, the Palestinian Arabs were split between hardliners and accommodationists, as were the Jews. The Palestinian Arab hardliners wanted no more Jewish immigration, and the Zionist hardliners wanted all of Palestine for a Jewish state. As Hitler rose to power, German and Central European Jewish immigration increased dramatically to Palestine, to the US, and elsewhere. Extensive Arab riots from 1935-39 against the newly arriving Jewish immigrants and against the rule of the British in Palestine occurred at the same time as Kristallnacht opened to public view the first act of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews; Hitler was invading Austria and then Czechoslovakia. By 1939, Jews had grown to over a third of Palestine’s population.
The UK’s Peel Report recommended a two-state solution in Palestine to separate the Jews and Arabs and stop the violence. This was unacceptable to the hardline Zionists and Arabs, so the violence between them continued. During the Second World War, both the Israeli Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs supported and joined the Allied Armed Forces to defeat Hitler. After the defeat of Hitler and the discoveries of the horrors of the Holocaust, the Zionist demands for unlimited immigration and an independent Jewish state in Palestine increased while the Arab demands for a halt to Jewish immigration and an independent Arab governed Palestine increased as well. Violence exploded, including the blowing up of the King David Hotel and the British officers and officials residing therein by the Irgun.
The British were unable to mediate the Arab-Jewish differences and referred the future of Palestine to the newly formed UN for resolution. The UN decided, with a two thirds vote (supported by both the US and the USSR), on a two state solution and recommended the boundaries for the new State of Israel. Jerusalem would become an international city for all to worship in peace given its status as a Holy City for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Arab League countries all voted against it. Fighting and then war ensued between the Jews settled in Palestine and the Arab countries of the Middle East. The Jewish forces prevailed, and the state of Israel was recognized and gained admission to the UN. Administration of the West Bank was given to Jordan and the Gaza Strip to Egypt by the UN.
After the war for the establishment of the Jewish state, most Palestinian Arabs left Israel for Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Many Sephardic Jews left their homes in Arab nations no longer hospitable and safe to Jews and moved to Israel. About 150,000 Palestinian Arabs stayed in Israel. The UN set up refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Jordan, where Palestinian families lived in tents, then small homes. Except in Jordan, Palestinians were not permitted to become citizens of the countries where they were refugees. They were stateless, destitute, and dependent on the UN and the generosity of wealthy Arab oil nations. They formed the PLO (secular) and Hamas (Islamist) which delivered essential services, governance, and engaged in terrorism against Israel and its allies, in a consistently unsuccessful effort to regain their lost lands. When they did so, Israel invaded and destroyed the refugee camps in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza to the point that the host nations wanted little to do with the terrorist attacks by PLO and Fatah and now Hamas and the inevitable Israeli reprisals. The leaders of Palestinian Arabs have had multiple opportunities to negotiate for a two-state solution but were never able to make the necessary compromises with Israel, nor vice versa. Hamas, which is now the most implacable of the Palestinian entities, is committed to the maximalist position of the utter destruction of the state of Israel and a unitary Palestinian state governed by Arabs.
Israel fought and won four major wars for its very survival with its Arab neighbors – 1948, 1956, 1963, and 1973. It has become a major military force in the Middle East with the only nuclear weapons in the region, and it has built a very strong economy from scratch.
Israel has now negotiated peace and recognition with Egypt and Jordan and to some degree with the PLO. In 1979 as part of the Camp David Accords, Israel and Egypt negotiated peace; thereafter Egypt’s Sadat was assassinated by Islamists. In 1993 and 1994, the Oslo Peace Accords were negotiated between Israel and the PLO recognizing Israel’s right to exist and forming and recognizing the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Jordan then negotiated peace with Israel and ceded the West Bank to the PA. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was thereafter assassinated by a right wing extremist from Tel Aviv. In 2000, PLO’s Arafat negotiated with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak but declined to sign the Camp David accords mediated by the US, and Syria likewise negotiated then declined to sign its peace treaty with Israel over the issue of control of the Golan Heights. Beginning in 2020, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan negotiated normalization of relations – the Abraham Accords. This is a recognition that Iran poses an existential threat to the Persian Gulf’s oil-rich Arab nations; Israel does not. Israel is a target of the Iran backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Hamas in Gaza. The Saudis, UAE and other Persian Gulf monarchies are at odds with Iran both because of historic Shia/Sunni rivalries and Iran’s support for the Shia militias seeking power in neighboring Iraq and Yemen. The leaders of Saudi Arabia and Israel were on track to negotiate normalization of relations brokered by the US when Hamas attacked from Gaza and massacred over 1,000 Israelis on October 7, 2023.
Israel now seeks to destroy Hamas and kill its military and political leaders; over 26,000 Gazans have died to date. Iran’s proxies are attacking Israel (and US forces) from Yemen to Syria, from Iraq to Lebanon.
The reality is that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, and if it did, another comparable organization would grow to replace it in employing terrorism on behalf of Palestinian statehood. Israel is not going to be destroyed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s other proxies. The only realistic long-term solution is a negotiated two-state solution. However, neither the Prime Minister Netanyahu-led Israeli government nor the Ismail Haniyeh-led Hamas are willing to negotiate a two-state solution. Hamas leaders are dedicated to the elimination of Israel and its replacement by a unitary Palestinian Arab state. Netanyahu, and many of his Cabinet officials and political allies are committed to expansion of the Israeli state to incorporate large swaths of the West Bank (the settler movement); this is completely unacceptable to the Palestinians.
To successfully negotiate a durable two state solution, new political leadership will be needed on both sides. In Israel, Israeli citizens could vote out Netanyahu and his allies to allow this to happen; he helped fund Hamas and then he failed to heed the warnings of their imminent October 7 attack; many Israelis are fed up with him and willing and anxious to make a change in their government, but they are traumatized by the October 7 events and in no mood to negotiate with Hamas for a two state solution. There is no such comparable opportunity for democracy to work for a two state peace agreement in Gaza; there is no democracy in Gaza; Hamas is in firm control, still popular with Gazans and not willing to change. Those who financially support Hamas, including the oil-rich Arab states and the UN could cut and should curtail and condition Hamas funding to pressure them to negotiate a two-state solution; humanitarian assistance for the Gazans must no longer be diverted to the subterranean Hamas war machine while Gazans are left starving and destitute. These are realizations that each side must reach, and they need to reach it in roughly the same time frame; otherwise, negotiations simply won’t work.
Neighboring Middle Eastern nations, the US, the EU, Asian, and African nations need to put steady and unrelenting pressure on both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to negotiate a durable, secure, peaceful two state solution. The current crisis and all the terrible killings and blood-letting could represent an important opportunity to successfully push for peace in the Middle East; it can only be realized if their allies speak unpleasant truths to both sides; it cannot be realized with unconditioned and unquestioning support from the allies of each side.
Revised: 2/9/24