I am increasingly taken by the growing discussion of the development of a complex regional conflict n the Middle East of which Israel/Hamas is a harbinger. Fareed Zakaria has discussed this, edition.cnn/2014/07/31/world/meast/israel-gaza-region/index.html; an Iranian writer Sayyeh Hassan in the Toronto Star explores it this weekend, thestar/opinion/commentary/2014/07/19/irans_fingerprints_all_over_hamasisrael_conflict.html; and Lee Smith in the Weekly Standard has recently written this weeklystandard/author/lee-smith. “The Gaza conflict should come as a sharp reminder that what we’re watching unfold in the Middle East at present is less a region-wide Sunni-Shiite war but rather a regional cold war where sectarian conflict and the rise of sub-state actors is a byproduct of a larger struggle between real nation states, often fighting through proxies. On one side are traditional American allies or partners like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. This is the status quo camp that wants to preserve the U.S.-backed order of the Middle East, a task increasingly difficult with the Obama administration all but absent from the region. Iran and the resistance axis, including Assad, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias and even Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki are on the other side. Turkey and Qatar are somewhere in the middle, looking to make themselves relevant, like by backing the Muslim Brotherhood. In the Gaza conflict, Doha and Ankara are acting as Hamas’s lawyers, for instance presenting John Kerry with the pro-Hamas terms for a ceasefire agreement last week. However, their attempts at mediation notwithstanding, Qatar and Turkey are secondary players. Yes, Khaled Meshaal lives in Doha, but Hamas’s political officials aren’t directing the war on the ground. Rather, it’s in the hands of Hamas’s military commanders, like Mohamed Deif and Marwan Issa. As Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs research associate (Ret.) Brigadier General Shimon Shapira told me recently, Iran has gone over the heads of the politburo officials and reached out directly to the military commanders. If Meshaal can afford the luxury of tending to his garden in his lovely Doha home, it’s different for the organization’s military commanders that have to pay and feed men to maintain their own power on the ground. There’s war in Gaza because the interests of Hamas’s men in uniform are aligned with those of the clerical regime in Tehran. As Badran [Tony Badran, a research fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies] writes, the war “was a necessary gateway for Hamas to resume its place in the resistance axis.” The current conflict, Badran concludes, “has served to clarify Hamas’s mission and place on the regional map.” In short, it has returned to the Iranian fold. [What this means is that Israel/Hamas cannot be understood as a simple Israel/Palestinian conflict. One must know about Hamas and its purposes, and one must also glean Hamas strategies in its current weakened context. Here the idea is that a weakened and boxed-in Hamas has been auditioning for restored Iranian backing and support. Iran equipped Hamas and trained its fighters but there was a falling out over Syria; more recently, specifically in recent weeks, Iran may actually have been deeply involved in Gaza again and seeking to call (and calling) some of the shots.] [Similarly, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab nations, have been quietly backing, and sometimes not so quietly backing, Israel. If we want to comprehend the new dynamics, we need to think not of Israel and Arabs, or Jews and Arabs, but of a regional conflict with real nation states in conflict, and sub-state actors, like Hamas, acting as proxies, in a new Middle East….. Need more discussions of this kind.]
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 04:45:47 +0000
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