On Thursday, Israel confirmed it had “eliminated” Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who masterminded the 7th October attacks on southern Israel. The news of his death made headlines worldwide, leading all to ask whether this development could bring a ceasefire, or whether it might even be a turning point in one of the most violent years that Israelis and Palestinians have endured in more than a century of fighting. But for anyone watching the proliferation of violence in the Middle East since the early 2000s, this seems like wishful thinking.
A year has passed since the world awoke to the horrors of 7th October. More than a thousand Israelis were brutalised and massacred, whether soldiers posted to observe the border, partygoers at the Nova Festival or families sleeping in kibbutzim nearby. Hundreds more were kidnapped to Gaza, hidden in homes or deep underground in tunnels, with some executed. Today, 101 hostages remain in the Strip. Most are believed to be dead.
In response to that terrible day, Israel unleashed an offensive that continues, during which more than 40,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed. Horrific stories of entire families trapped under rubble have occupied news and social media feeds for the past 12 months. Food and medical aid deprivation has led to accusations that Israel is starving Gaza. In December 2023, South Africa filed a case with the International Court of Justice claiming that Israel is committing genocide. It will take years to reach a verdict.
The current war between Israel and Palestine has coalesced two opposing sides in the United States and Europe. The pro-Israel camp supports Israel’s war on Hamas and, if saddened by the death of innocent civilians, centres the blame on the Palestinian militant group for using its population as a human shield. The pro-Palestine camp, meanwhile, has taken to the streets in protest at Israeli attacks, with some going so far as to justify Hamas’s violence as an act of resistance against a settler-colonial state. For this camp, all of Palestine must be liberated “from the river to the sea”, with fierce debate around what exactly is meant by this slogan.
That there is division between these opposing camps is an understatement. But what both groups have in common, aside from the war, is that they treat Israel/Palestine as if it were an island, rarely exploring the conflict within its broader history or developments in the region.
The First World War swept away the Ottoman world of Palestine, upending the politics of the Middle East. Before the war, Palestinians and Jews lived together under one political system. They were neighbours, business partners and friends. Religious celebrations were often celebrated in unison within the Old City of Jerusalem and in its newer neighbourhoods. But in the years before the war, Palestinians had become increasingly estranged from the Jewish community, as Jews—locals and immigrants—united under an umbrella of a shared culture. This included the wider adoption of Hebrew as a daily language over Arabic, which had previously been spoken by Jews living in Palestine, some for centuries, as well as over other Jewish languages, such as Judeo-Spanish and Yiddish.
For Jews in Ottoman Palestine, Zionism was not about pursuing an independent state but rather about living there as “modern” Jews. Given Palestinian claims that Zionism was a threat, the Jewish community sought to show allegiance to the Ottoman Empire through military service and other expressions of loyalty. Neither Jews nor Arabs could foresee the fall of the empire, despite the growth of local tensions.
The question of Palestine, however, was far from a priority for Ottomans. As war inched closer, the empire that had once prided itself on ethnic and religious diversity was becoming a state of ethnic-religious nationalism. With the outbreak of war in 1914, and amid British and Russian onslaughts, the Ottomans set off on a campaign of massacres against their Armenian citizens. The ethnic cleansing of the Armenians, which extended to other Christians as well, would decades later be coined a genocide.
Other ethnic cleansing campaigns also occurred at this time. With the 1923 Turkish-Greek population exchange—in which over a million Greek Orthodox Ottoman citizens were swapped for hundreds of thousands of Greek Muslims—the First World War and its aftermath altered the relative tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, transforming it into a state ruled by a rigid Turkish nationalism. The idea that nations needed separate states to thrive had taken hold, leaving behind it a legacy of ethnic cleansing and strife.
Following the war, Jewish leaders introduced that same rigid nationalism in Palestine. In contrast to the Ottoman Jewish community, David Ben-Gurion, who would go on to become Israel’s first prime minister, sought full separation from the Palestinians. Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders embraced the British system outlined in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which gave Jews special rights in the land and did not match them for Palestinians. Though Ben-Gurion had studied law in Istanbul and was pro-Ottoman, in the later years of the empire and during the mandate period, he and his socialist labour cohort championed ‘Hebrew labour’, pressuring Jewish farm-owners in Palestine to give higher wages to Jews and to hire Jews exclusively.
Ben-Gurion’s socialism was for Jews only, an ideological dissonance that would extend to the Jewish state when it was established in 1948. And as his power took hold, he also excluded a range of Jews who did not believe in his socialist ideology, creating deep divides within Israeli society. Many of these Jews, including the Mizrahim ethnically cleansed from countries in the Middle East, remained on the fringes of Israeli society for decades.
While Jews received special rights during the British Mandate, the Palestinian majority was never able to convince the area's colonial rulers to implement a legislative council that was based on the system of ‘one person-one vote’. As unequal citizens, without an option to air complaints in the civic sphere, matters quickly turned violent, and the Palestinian struggle for independence became a fight aimed at the Jewish community and the British. However, the political vacuum left by the Ottoman Empire's collapse pitted notable Palestinian families like the Husseinis, Nashashibis, and Khalidis against each other in a contest for power. This created new societal fractures that would resonate for decades. With no proposed road to independence, Britain and France’s division of the Middle East into weakly associated nation-states—as was done, in secret, in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement—undoubtedly hit Palestinians the hardest. But they were far from alone in these injustices.
The British and French created states in the image they desired, disregarding the voices of the many groups living in the region. While local Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese identities existed in the early 20th century, they certainly did not encompass the idea of independent states, and their division by the European imperial powers left them in disarray. It is no wonder that the legacy of these states turned out to be one of civil war and unsustainable regimes. The construction of borders also split small religious minority communities, such as the Druze, who today are spread throughout Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
Leaving aside the fact that no community in Lebanon is homogenous, the French allotted Christians increased political power despite them not being the majority. Even if there was a system of equal representation in voting, groups like the Druze were blocked from positions of leadership. The sectarian state constructed by the French after the war has left Lebanon in an interminable political quagmire. The division of power among the top religious groups in the country might sound nice on paper, but it brought greater fractures and deadlock.
While Syria and Iraq were not “sectarian” in the same sense as Lebanon, the makeup of these countries, whose borders were drawn by European powers, also led to internally divided states. During the mandate, the French split Syria into mini-states. The Alawite, another minority community, and the Druze received their own territories, and Aleppo was divided from Damascus, in addition to other territorial divisions. The message was clear: the French sought to hinder any source of Syrian nationalism. This failed radically in 1925, with a revolt in the Druze region that led to a nationwide uprising. Nevertheless, these divisions ultimately gave the Alawites, a minority, disproportionate power with central positions in the Syrian military.
This was significant. Coups in the 1960s and in 1970 led to an Alawite hegemony under Hafiz al-Assad and, later, his son, Bashar. Through a Ba’athist Arab nationalist ideology, the Assad regime brought the different minority communities under its wings, together with Christians and Muslims, later juxtaposing itself with a more conservative Sunni Muslim society in the country.
For Iraq, British proxy-rule was implemented through the Hashemites, who aided the British in the First World War against the Ottomans. The Hashemite King Faisal was installed in Iraq in 1920 (and his brother Abdullah in Jordan). Faisal and all the other Iraqi leaders who followed were unable to define the Iraq they wanted, unable to find a balance between an Arab identity and a civic Iraqi one, or between the country's Sunni and Shia populations. And like many other post-Ottoman states, Iraq has never been able to define the role of its many minorities, including its former Jews, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis and others.
Israel, increasingly sectarian, mirrors these Middle Eastern countries. However, it is Turkey that Israel resembles the most. Like Turkey, Israel was established in the shadow of ethnic cleansing, with the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians a pillar of its state-making—Palestinians refer to this as the Nakba. Just as Turkey absorbed hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees and immigrants from the Balkans and Greece, Israel absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe and the Middle East. Both states became regional powerbrokers who refused to recognise the national rights of the ethnic minority that remained within its borders: for Turkey, the Kurds, for Israel, its Palestinian citizens.
Both Israelis and Turks were born and bred on a secular, nationalist militarism that was a radical break from the past, where religious identities superseded all ideologies. The states’ emphasis on secular culture created a new division, as if any more were needed. To be a ‘good citizen’ was to be secular, national and ‘modern’. The religious and other groups, such as those who did not see eye-to-eye with the economics of the state, were thought to hinder national progress. More recently, in Turkey and in Israel, this has led to the rise of authoritarianism. Strongman leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded in creating coalitions composed of parties that did not fit into the secular-nationalist ideology of their respective state’s founders. Marginalised for decades, they now hold hungrily to power.
For both Kurds and Palestinians—the two national groups not promised a state following the First World War—the only option has been complete submission to another group that disdains their national movements and excludes them from the country as a whole. Today, the prospect of reaching a political solution is even fainter. Most Turks and Israelis seem to prefer authoritarianism over creating governments that would offer fair representation to their country's minorities. It is true that democratic states are obliged to protect their populations from terrorism. Yet, they are also responsible for securing a democratic future for all citizens. In Israel’s case, this goes beyond its Palestinian citizens. It begs the question: how can Israel even call itself a democracy given its prolonged occupation, ruling over millions of Palestinians for almost six decades without extending any civil rights to them whatsoever?
Today, as we watch Middle Eastern states languish, we see violence that has increased dramatically since the beginning of this century. In Iraq, the US invasion was the accelerant to the fire. Even if political and ethnic violence was essential to Saddam Hussein’s rule, including the gassing of Iraq’s Kurds in the 1988 Halabja Massacre, the 2003 invasion broke the hold of his Ba’athist party and led to the state’s collapse, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. The US attempt to divide control based on religion or ethnicity facilitated Iraq’s disintegration.
Throughout the region’s history, it is not different religions and ethnicities living together that has sparked war. Conflicts have instead been a direct outcome of modern governments pitting one group against another in a struggle for power. Iraq was no exception. The Syrian Civil War that began in 2011 proved that the 1982 Hama massacre, in which the Syrian army killed tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims following the challenge posed to the state by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, was a prelude. More than 500,000 people were killed in the civil war. Millions of Syrian refugees remain stranded in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Europe.
The violence of the Assad regime was supported by Hezbollah, a militia that emerged following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Assad’s alignment with Iran introduced a new dynamic that has further tested a frayed region. Russia’s deep involvement in the Syrian war, both arming the regime and sending troops, showed that the old Cold War divisions persist. For Russia, Syria is its last stronghold in the region. It is no wonder, then, that we see the US so unwilling to budge an inch in its support for Israel, despite the increasing opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza among American voters.
The violence has northern Syria and southern Turkey in tumult. Amid the chaos of recent years, the Kurds in these regions began to stir. In 2015, Turkey attacked what it deemed to be strongholds of the PKK, a militant Kurdish group, in Turkey’s south-eastern Kurdish cities, such as Cizre. Turkey’s attack bore a haunting resemblance to the destruction of Homs in Syria by the Assad regime —or today’s destruction of whole neighbourhoods in Gaza. Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the HDP, a Kurdish movement in Turkey that challenged the Erdoğan government politically, was imprisoned in 2016 and remains behind bars. The jailing of political opponents shows how peaceful actors are met with state force.
It is telling that the same cities which Turkey targeted in 2015 are those that Armenians consider their homeland. Such historical echoes hint at the intractability of the region’s. They remain intractable because states and their leaders postpone the inevitable; they seem unwilling to correct injustices and find real, sustainable solutions to decades-old problems.
Hamas is indeed responsible for the crimes of 7th October. The group, which reared its head in 1987 during what is known today as the First Intifada, is similar to the Israeli far-right in that, not only has it not sought peace, it has done everything in its power to undermine any agreements that have emerged. In 1994, Hamas set out on a terror campaign to derail the Oslo Accords—the peace deal which won Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat a Nobel Prize—with indiscriminate bombings. In 2000, during the Second Intifada, Hamas attacks once again showed Israelis how widespread terror could be. As Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, its actions are abhorred by most Arab states, aside from Qatar. Even the Assad regime has been surprisingly quiet during the current war despite its strong ties to Iran and Hezbollah—and despite Israel's army regularly targeting individuals inside Syria.
It is hard not to see the 7th October as yet another moment in which Israel has shown an inability to make fateful decisions about its future. This certainly predates Netanyahu, but throughout his political career Israel’s leader has kept the tradition alive. Overall, during his second durée as prime minister since 2009, Netanyahu has done his utmost to minimise conflict while maximising economic growth. Capitalising on the disarray of the Syrian war, turmoil in Egypt, and the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, he created a cushion of economic stability in Israel. Meanwhile, Hamas was able to strengthen its hold on Gaza. This played into Netanyahu’s desire to weaken the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank—and leave for another day any compromises that would need to be made in a peace deal with the Palestinians.
But, like its neighbours in the region, Israel has discovered that nothing lasts forever. After Netanyahu survived a brief period out of office in 2021-22, he returned to leadership with an authoritarian appetite that had long been brewing. His government tried to take away the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down laws it deemed unconstitutional, via what opponents term a judicial coup. In the months before 7th October, Israel witnessed the systematic disintegration of its rule of law even as hundreds of thousands gathered for weekly street protests. The day Hamas struck, Israeli society was more divided than it had ever been.
If history is any indication, it seems unlikely that this war will bring about significant change—not for the Palestinians, not for the Israelis. The sheer number of dead on the Palestinian side is a result not of a strong Israel but a weak one. The country's inability to forge a path forward as the powerbroker in this scenario reflects a political paralysis, as does Israel's continued shielding of its population from the horrors of Gaza while only lamenting its own losses.
Like other Middle Eastern states created after the First World War, Israel was constructed on the shaky hegemony of one ethnic-religious group over another. In the process this created stubborn internal divisions. In some cases, the post-Ottoman states have totally collapsed, with power redistributed or still up for grabs. Others maintain a precarious balance. Israel’s fate is not yet clear, but the Jewish state seems to be stuck for now, unable to imagine how to advance into the next century. For this, Israel needs to look inwards to ask how to create a sustainable state for all of its citizens. It must also tame the growth of the far-right, which has resulted in fascist ministers sitting proudly in government. The longer Israel postpones peace with the Palestinians, the more the country will deteriorate.
For the Palestinians, the immediate future seems even bleaker. It, too, is time for Palestine to fix its internal divisions. But it is also time to reach the obvious conclusion that national resistance akin to 7th October has only brought tragedy. For now, it seems, the Middle East is stuck in patterns engraved into the post-First World War era. Without looking for new solutions, Israel and Palestine, and the region at large, will remain trapped in the wars of the past.
