We've never had a Middle East war like this. Many will regret ‘going all the way'

The Age

13 hours ago

For all of these reasons, I'm convinced that some very big internal debates are coming – if the wars really stop.
For autocratic movements like Hamas or countries like Iran, history teaches us that internally driven regime change happens only after the war is over – and without foreign interventions, said pollster and political scientist Craig Charney. It has to happen organically by a change in the relationship between the leaders there and those they are leading.
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'In Serbia in 2000, nationalist President Slobodan Milosevic fell after losing wars in Bosnia and Kosovo when he tried to steal the next election,' Charney said in an interview. 'Iraq's defeat in the first Gulf War led to a massive revolt against Saddam Hussein that he had to brutally put down. When Argentina's military junta lost the Falklands War of 1982, it had to allow democracy's return. And after the Armistice marking Germany's loss in World War I came the November Revolution that toppled the kaiser. Strongmen don't look so strong when they're losers.'
The limited polling we have from Gaza, Charney added, suggests a backlash against Hamas for the catastrophe people there have experienced. There is no polling yet from Iran since the current conflict began, 'but social media chatter was reportedly favourable when it began with strikes against unpopular regime figures – and then became more rally-round-the-flag as civilian casualties have mounted,' Charney said. Now let's see what happens if the ceasefire holds.
All I know for sure is this: Israel is the kind of democracy that Iran's secular educated elite – part of a rich Persian civilisational legacy – hope this war will pave the way for in Tehran. But an Iranian-style theocracy is precisely what Israel's secular educated warriors, pilots, scientists and cyber experts want to make sure Israel's victory doesn't create in Jerusalem – if there are new elections soon and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition tries to ride this war to victory.
As Ari Shavit, an Israeli writer, pointed out to me: The sector of Israeli society that did the most to win the war against Iran 'was precisely the same sector that for eight months went out to the streets every Saturday night to prevent Netanyahu's extreme-right government from destroying Israel's liberal democracy'.
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In 1970, Shavit noted, Israeli historian Shabtai Teveth wrote a famous book: The Cursed Blessing: The Story of Israel's Occupation of the West Bank. It basically argued that the unintended consequence of the 1967 war was that it unlocked messianic forces in Israeli society. Once the West Bank, the heart of biblical Israel, was back in Israel's hands, these forces would never consent to return it and would instead insist on settling. And here it is now — still in Israel's hands 58 years later — with a soul-draining, democracy-eroding occupation.
What if, as with the unintended consequences of 1967, Shavit concluded, 'we will look back in 20 years and see that this war made Israel more like Iran is today and made Iran more like the Israel that was before. Because the extremists in Israel were able to take the victory delivered by liberal, democratic, scientific and enlightened Israel and turn this nation into a dark place.'
The Palestinian community is also sorely in need of a rethink. The 'curse' of the Palestinians is that because their enemy has been the Jews, their plight has always received an inordinate amount of international attention and support that other groups never enjoyed – like the Kurds, who got stuck fighting for a state against Saddam and Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan. It's been a curse because all of that attention as victims often blunted the will of many Palestinians to assume more agency and conduct the kind of hard introspection that repeated military defeats should have stimulated.
When students on college campuses all over America are calling to 'globalise the intifada,' why bother calling for the return of Salam Fayyad, the most effective nation-building Palestinian leader.
Will this time be different? Will the terrible defeat that Hamas' October 7 attack delivered to Gaza tilt Palestinians to clearly and unambiguously get behind institutional reform of the Palestinian Authority, a demand for professional leadership and support for a demilitarised state along the 1967 lines? I hope so. Will it produce the thing Netanyahu most wants to avoid the emergence of: a competent, compromising, legitimate Palestinian Authority — i.e., a real partner for peace? Wouldn't that be ironic.
In sum, this regional war for the players in the Middle East was the equivalent of World War II for Europe: It completely shakes up the status quo and opens the way for something new. Whether that new thing will be better or worse within and between the parties to this war is what will be most fascinating – or depressing – for me to watch.