Fire and smoke rise above buildings in Gaza City during an Israeli air strike on October 8 (Photo: IBRAHIM HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
Fire and smoke rise above buildings in Gaza City during an Israeli air strike on October 8 (Photo: IBRAHIM HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)

SocietyOctober 9, 2023

The war in Israel has deep roots and may spread

Contributing writer
Fire and smoke rise above buildings in Gaza City during an Israeli air strike on October 8 (Photo: IBRAHIM HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
Fire and smoke rise above buildings in Gaza City during an Israeli air strike on October 8 (Photo: IBRAHIM HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)

The new conflict in Gaza is part of a much bigger power struggle with a long, complex history.

In a shocking development on Saturday night (NZ time), Hamas militants launched attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel by land, sea and air. The assault, in which civilians were killed and others taken hostage, prompted an immediate declaration of war from Israel and a pledge by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to inflict an “unprecedented price” in response to a “murderous terrorist assault”. The latest estimates are of more than 600 dead in Israel and more than 400 in Gaza.

The astounding strike into Israel with missiles, breaches of supposedly impregnable fences, microlite aircraft and boats on the coast has been condemned around the world. For the forces of Hamas it is seen as a historic success. It also represents a historic failure by Israeli authorities that pride themselves on sophisticated surveillance, deep penetration by intelligence, and advanced military technology.

As shocking as it is, the eruption of a fresh war between Israel and the forces of Hamas in Gaza is part of a much bigger power struggle in tiny slivers of land: Israel is smaller than Waikato and the Gaza Strip is about the size of greater Wellington. Israeli and Palestinian civilians will be the victims but the wider battle involves Iran, Saudi Arabia, and different visions of the future.

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It is easy and understandable to buy into the tropes of the extraordinary Hamas attacks against Israeli towns and missile strikes further afield as part of a supposed colonial struggle against the oppression of Palestinians by Israel since its foundation in 1947.

There is a truth in that idea of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli oppression, including a 16-year blockade of Gaza. There is also truth in the sense of existential threat that Israelis feel, whether from Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon – each of which is backed by Iran, a theocratic and oppressive state that badly needs an enemy to defend its domestic control and international influence.

In a matrix of complex, overlapping local and regional agendas, three factors are worth considering:

  • Iran backs Hamas and opposes US-led attempts to “normalise” relations between Israel and its Arab regional neighbours.
  • Hamas is in an internecine struggle to dominate Palestinian territories, having taken control of Gaza in 2007, and despises the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
  • Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu thrives in a crisis and may use the attacks to reinforce his right-wing government and counterprotests at home.

That the attack happened during the week of the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was also taken by surprise by Arab neighbours, was surely no accident. It cuts to the core of Israeli identity: a state built in the wake of the Holocaust carving out a God-given right to live in sacred territory surrounded by hostile neighbours.

Why now?

Thinking about “why now” opens a set of questions that, as usual with the Israel-Palestinian conflict, opens out into regional and global issues of leadership, conflict and human rights. 

Iran, whose Islamic leadership gains strength from oppression at home and chaos abroad, backs Hamas not out of the goodness of its heart to support Palestinian ambitions of statehood and progress in Palestine but to use as leverage – a mechanism through which it can exert influence through terror and extremism. Moves towards the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia will only have added a sense of urgency in Tehran.

The same is true to the north of Israel, in Lebanon, where Iran backs the Hezbollah militia and political faction. The ambition is not to create a stable and successful Lebanon but a sliver of febrile chaos which, as with Israel, engages the attention of much bigger states because of the potential for regional and international blowback through religious or racial strife.

Lebanon is a warning of what the current crisis could foment in Israel: a chaotic and corrupt amalgam of ethnic and religious complexity overlaid with foreign interference. Add to that the interests of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, other regional Arab states and Iran – plus the United States, China and Russia – and it all becomes rather complex.

It is also true that at times in its history Israel has destabilised Lebanon. It is not a pretty story and it is well documented in contemporary accounts and movies. It is inextricably tied to the foundation of Israel in 1947 and what Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe) – the expulsion or withdrawal, depending on whose history you prefer – of millions of Palestinians from what is now Israel in the face of terror and Israeli determination to carve out a state.

Millions of Palestinians still live in what have become permanent refugee camps or communities in Lebanon, Jordan and, more centrally to this conflict, the West Bank or Occupied Territories and the tiny coastal statelet of Gaza on the border with Egypt. We can expect the weekend attacks to create flare-ups, especially in the West Bank where Hamas may exploit dissatisfaction with the corrupt and moribund Palestinian Authority.

US president Bill Clinton stands between PLO leader Yasser Arafat (right) and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as they shake hands on September 13, 1993 at the White House after signing the Oslo Accords (Photo: J. DAVID AKE/AFP via Getty Images)

A long history

The Authority is the legacy of the Palestine Liberation Organisation of Yasser Arafat whose legacy is the Fatah leadership in the West Bank and their hated rivals, Hamas. It is  complicated and ambiguous: the Palestinians are divided and so are Israelis, but only one side has a real and recognised nation with a world-class military and nuclear weapons.

Not only is it 50 years since the Yom Kippur War, it is also the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords. The result of years of talks organised by Norway, Oslo led to a famous White House agreement with president Bill Clinton, when then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (ultimately assassinated by a hardline Israeli) and Arafat shook hands. It is hard to comprehend quite how far we are away from that moment of potential peace – including the recognition of the so-called two-state solution to create a Palestinian nation.

Recommend reading and resources

To stay on top of the story overall, it is hard to go past the major media organisations that have people on the ground – on both sides, in most cases of my recommendations, and with clear ethical and corrections policies and open sites: Reuters; BBC; Al Jazeera; CNN.

The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz offers comprehensive reporting and the more conservative Jerusalem Post takes a slightly different but still strongly reported perspective.

This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere on Vox is an interesting rapid analysis that focuses on decades of Palestinian frustration.

From an editorial in the Economist (paywalled): “The longer the fighting drags on, the greater the chance that violence spreads to the West Bank or Lebanon. The death of many civilians in Gaza, especially if seen as wanton, would harm Israel’s standing in the world as well as being profoundly wrong in its own terms.”

PLO: History of a Revolution is a comprehensive package on Al Jazeera.

‘The next days were hell’: how the Yom Kippur war realigned the Middle East is a valuable historical view from The Guardian.

Apeirogon, by Colum McCann, is a fictionalised account of a true relationship between a Palestinian and an Israeli united in grief at the loss of their daughters to terror attacks.

For more international coverage like this, sign up to the The Spinoff Members and receive The Bulletin World Weekly, Peter Bale’s round-up of the biggest stories in world news, in your inbox every Thursday.

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SocietyOctober 9, 2023

Hear me out: Traffic is fine

Guest writer
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School holidays are over and traffic is shit again. This isn’t a big deal. 

I used to hate traffic as much as the next guy. I’d sit there seething as we inched along, fuming at the thoughtless bastards who cut into my lane; resenting the ingrates who didn’t do the little wave or hazard light thanks; oozing furious sanctimony as I became later and later for work. Now, in a traffic jam, I am zen and unaffected. They don’t so much as fractionally raise my blood pressure any more. Sorry to be sick and twisted, but sometimes I even enjoy them. 

I’m not sure what exactly changed. I became a mother recently, which famously increases your patience and sense of perspective, but I also think that, over the years, it’s become harder to avoid the conclusion that traffic is actually fine.  

Being stuck in traffic is just sitting in a seat. Given an hour of leisure time, most people will do little else with it than sit in a seat. Granted, they’ll probably also scroll their phone, watch TV or yarn with a friend, but if you get good at rising above the frazzled vibe, you can reach this same level of relaxed enjoyment while you crawl down the Southern motorway. 

Have you ever had one of those harrowing existential realisations that you will never, in your entire life, listen to all the music or read even a fraction of the books the greatest artists have bequeathed humanity? When you’re sitting in traffic, you can make a decent dent in all this cultural treasure. David Bowie’s 77-80 run of albums are all perfect, traffic jam-lengthed listens. The Idiot, The Metamorphosis and Moby Dick are free audiobooks on Spotify; do an Audible trial and you can hear Toni Morrison reading Sula herself. Centuries of great art, from Chopin to Kafka to Gunplay, at the touch of a button. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy it. 

But I’m fucking late for work!!!!! I know, but listen: fuming impotently won’t get you to your job any faster. You can go one of two ways here: you can lean on your horn and zoom madly down a lane you know damn well is ending in 200 metres, pissing off everyone so you can shave a miserable two minutes off your commute, or you can call your boss to say you’ll be late, queue ‘A New Career in a New Town’, then crack the windows. Feel the wind in your hair as you listen to the greatest rockstar who ever lived, at the apex of his cool in late 70s Berlin.

That’s easier said than done when your baby’s wailing in the back seat and a real estate agent with a punchable face is riding up your arse. But even the most trying traffic situations are low-stakes Stoic challenges in the scheme of things. Think how much worse it could be. Your baby is so cute and you’ll be home soon. 

Traffic will mould you into a better person if you let it. People are usually at their worst when they’re inching down a motorway, but cast in the right light, you’ll see they’re still loveable. My trick here is remembering that some people, maybe most people, have unbearably hard lives. The depth of the real estate agent’s suffering would break your heart if you knew about it. It’s genuinely calming to imagine the worst thing your road nemesis might be facing, and I do this all the time. When some dickhead shrieks at me for a minor and accidental roading infraction, I imagine his wife of 15 years just asked him for a divorce, or he’s waiting to hear if his son has leukaemia. Suddenly I truly and fervently wish the dickhead well, and my anger just evaporates. 

Traffic jams are atmospheric. The low-angle sunlight glinting off all that steel. The dark, feral energy. Rain blurring tail lights into a wash of neon red. Hundreds of cars crawling in tidy unison while emotions boil inside.

Look at the personalities bursting forth around you. I sat behind a Subaru hatchback the other day with a personalised plate that said R3KLES, and a frame that added, “PUT IT ON MY TAB”. I’ve seen a “RuffCuntz Performance” decal span an entire back window. On a road in New Zealand right now, there is a champagne-coloured 90s Mazda sedan with the number plate SARTRE. Humans, beautiful humans, have shelled out hundreds of dollars for CRY, THETOE, P0VRTY, LESHGO, OLDCOK, BEACH and HI COPS. 

People are so, so funny and triumphant. A traffic jam is your front row seat to the movie of human life, and it’s full of joy, fury, sex, sorrow and pride. Sit back, queue the best songs you know, and watch these gems of humanity gleam.

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Society