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With the world's eyes understandably focused on the carnage in the Gaza Strip, violent manifestations of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have been getting even less attention than they normally get, and less than they deserve. Amid concerns about possible spreading of the current war in Gaza, spreading already has begun in the West Bank, with the potential there of stimulating still more spread.Casualties have spiked in the West Bank since the Hamas attack on October 7. More than 100 Palestinians, including civilians, have been killed there.Most of the casualties have been incurred as part of accelerated operations in the West Bank by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in the form of raids, mass arrests, and crackdowns on protests. The stepped-up Israeli use of force has even included an airstrike on a mosque in a refugee camp in the city of Jenin — a rarity in the West Bank, where the Israelis usually rely on ground forces.Additional violence has come at the hands of Israeli settlers — some of the 670,000 Israelis whose residence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is widely recognized as a violation of international law. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded in just the first two weeks of the current crisis 100 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian residents. The U.N. office noted that this represented an average of almost eight such incidents per day, up from a daily average of three incidents since the beginning of this year.The connection between this settler violence and the events this month in southern Israel and the Gaza Strip has two aspects. One is that Israeli anger over the Hamas attack and the blurring of such emotion into a general hatred of Palestinian Arabs has made the current moment even more of an open season on Palestinians than it was before. The second is that the current focus of attention on Gaza among the press, foreign governments, and the world generally has represented an opportunity for settlers to conduct violent and illegal business in the West Bank while drawing little notice. Mairav Zonszein, an Israel-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, notes that a difference between now and before is that the settler violence is occurring "without almost any media attention being paid to it."These developments are a continuation, in intensified form, of longer trends in the physical suffering of West Bank Palestinians. Many of the nearly 1,600 deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis between 2015 (that is, since the last big Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014) and August of this year were in the West Bank. The violence accelerated in 2023, even before October 7. This year was already on pace to be the deadliest year for residents of the West Bank since the United Nations began keeping such records in 2005.The upsurge in Israeli violence in the West Bank clearly is related to the coming to power at the beginning of this year of an extreme right-wing Israeli government. Far from policing or discouraging the settler violence, the de facto Israeli response often has been to permit or condone it, with IDF soldiers standing aside or even participating in some of the violence. One of the most prominent of the extremists currently in power, minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir — himself a West Bank settler — promised to distribute as many as 10,000 free rifles to Israeli citizens, including West Bank settlers.All this is part of a longer-term process of one people, defined in ethnic and religious terms, subjugating another people similarly defined, and of the determination of successive Israeli governments to maintain Jewish Israeli supremacy over all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Part of the formula for doing this has been to cordon off some two million of the Arab residents into the Gaza Strip and to rely on blockades, periodic "mowing the grass " with military force, and an occasional misery-alleviating sop to keep those Arabs from interfering with Israeli ambitions. The Hamas attack, of course, shattered some of the assumptions underlying that strategy.The other part of the formula has been the piecemeal displacement of West Bank Palestinians from their land. Although much of the settler violence manifests simple hatred and bigotry, much of it is a more calculated effort to make life for Palestinian neighbors so miserable — or so uneconomic, given settler tactics such as vandalism of olive groves or denial of water and pastures needed by herded livestock — that those neighbors will give up and move. The accelerated anti-Palestinian settler activity this month has included much of this kind of intimidation. The Israeli human rights watchdog organization B'Tselem reported earlier this month that in the previous week, eight entire West Bank communities, numbering 472 people, had abandoned their homes out of fear for their lives and livelihoods.The current war, replete with Israeli orders for millions of Gaza residents to evacuate what the Israeli military has turned into a free-fire zone, has raised fears throughout the region of a new Nakba or catastrophe — another installment of the war in the 1940s that caused the mass displacement of longtime Palestinian residents from what became the state of Israel. The fears gained credibility from the leak of an Israeli government planning document that calls for forcibly transferring the population of the Gaza Strip to the Sinai. Perhaps the only thing preventing Israel from trying to implement such a plan is that the Egyptian government has multiple reasons to refuse to participate in any such scheme.That scheme was about Gaza, but West Bankers probably have the most to fear from any new mass displacements or ethnic cleansing. Gaza is the open-air prison, but the West Bank, with East Jerusalem, is the prize — the land that Israeli hardliners want for, and only for, their own people.The other dynamic that has made the West Bank increasingly become a powder keg since October 7 is the unsurprising increase in anger and resentment among the Palestinians who live there. Fear of a new Nakba is part of it. The casualties from increased settler violence and IDF use of military force are part of it. And so are the miseries in everyday life that have come from roadblocks and other obstructions to movement that the IDF has increased this month.Another big part of it is anger over the death and devastation that the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip has imposed on the Palestinian brethren who live there. This is not a matter of support for Hamas. It is a matter of feeling the pain of co-nationals and of general outrage over the infliction of mass suffering.The chance of a new intifada, or popular uprising, in the West Bank, was already significant before this month and is now even higher. In the current atmosphere, a new intifada would likely be at least as violent as the last one. It would by itself represent a significant spread of the war in Gaza. And by making the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict that much larger, it would increase the chance of further spread, such as by drawing in Lebanese Hezbollah.

Recent Russian efforts to interfere in US elections, track down and eliminate defectors and other 'disloyal elements', and plant disinformation using social media are nothing new. Rather, they are the continuation by modern means ...

In all the analysis and portrayals of conflict and strife in the Middle East, we shouldn't forget that the region hosts a rich history and a vibrant cultural and intellectual life. Media organisations must take responsibility for presenting the region in its totality.

Diplomatic initiatives led by Western actors have counter-productively entrenched the anti-democratic forces now fighting for control in Sudan. To drive real change, the West needs to empower Sudan's democratic movement and undermine the power of armed factions.

by Professor Michelle Pace, Roskilde University In April 2023, in a pre-recorded congratulatory message on Israel's 75th year of independence celebrations, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that: "Today, we celebrate 75 years of vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Seventy-five years of dynamism, ingenuity, and groundbreaking innovations. You have […]
The post Normative Power Approach, Planetary Politics, the European Union and the Middle East 'conflict' appeared first on The JCMS Blog.

by Professor Michelle Pace, Roskilde University In April 2023, in a pre-recorded congratulatory message on Israel's 75th year of independence celebrations, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that: "Today, we celebrate 75 years of vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Seventy-five years of dynamism, ingenuity, and groundbreaking innovations. You have […]
The post Normative Power Approach, Planetary Politics, the European Union and the Middle East 'conflict' appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Moscow stands to lose a great deal if the Israel-Hamas conflict escalates into a wider war. While Russia would prefer the West distracted, a direct Israel-Iran conflict would expose Russia's vulnerabilities in the Middle East.

While the conflict in Ukraine is mostly concentrated in the east along the country's border with Russia, the borders of NATO members to Ukraine's north and west are increasingly being tested. Mercenaries from Russia's Wagner ...

Views of the Israel-Palestine conflict are polarized worldwide between those who have experienced the past few centuries as an East-West conflict and those who have experienced it as a North-South conflict.For the first group, the storyline of the past few centuries begins with the American and French revolutions: The former established the first constitutional democracy. The latter overthrew an absolute monarchy in the name of the people, emancipated the Jews, and spread its doctrine of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité throughout Europe. The progress of freedom culminated in the victorious struggles of democracies against first Nazism and fascism and then communism in the twentieth century. President Biden's foreign-policy theme of a global struggle of democracy against autocracy is the product of that narrative. Atrocities of fascism and communism included both the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and an almost equal number of non-Jews were murdered, and Soviet repression, in which up to 20 million perished in the gulag, the purges, and man-made famines. From this East-West perspective the establishment of the state of Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust and the struggle of the Arab and Muslim worlds against it are extensions of the victory of the Allies and Hitler's genocidal program. For many of this narrative's believers, the October 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas reinforced this view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For the second group, the main story of the last five centuries has been the subjugation of Asia, Africa, and Latin America by European colonialism, and the consequent anti-colonial struggles. The trans-Atlantic slave trade took two to four million lives. The genocide of the native American peoples led to the deaths of 90 percent of the population. Between 1885 and 1908, the atrocities in the Belgian-ruled Congo Free State produced death tolls estimated at from three to ten million. British policies in India set off the 1943 Bengal famine that killed three million people in eight months. For those who see history through this North-South lens, the 1922 League of Nations mandate to establish "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine without the consent of that land's inhabitants; the 1948 violent expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe; the annexation and occupation by Israel of lands conquered in 1967; and Israel's evolution into an undeclared nuclear power armed and supported by the U.S. amount to the extension of colonialism into the 20th and 21st centuries. Israel's current war against Gaza and the uncritical support it receives from the U.S. confirm this view.In 1905 Negib Azoury, a Lebanese Christian former deputy governor of Ottoman Jerusalem, alerted the world to "two important phenomena, of a common nature, but opposed to each other, the awakening of the Arab nation and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient Kingdom of Israel on a large scale. The fate of the whole world," he wrote, "will depend on the result of the struggle between these two peoples representing two opposing principles." Azoury argued that regardless — or because — of their similarities, the only possible outcome would be for one side to defeat the other. Azoury was right about the common origin of the two movements — the resistance to different forms of oppression that have driven some to become Zionists and others to become Arab nationalists or Islamists differ less in their nature than in the positions into which their proponents are born.The degradation of the outlook of some on both sides into dehumanizing hatred is an inevitable result of the consequent century or more of violence. But must one ultimately defeat the other? Both narratives derive from genuine experience and pain. Is it beyond our power to acknowledge that no single narrative recounts the whole of history's polymorphous cruelty? The "fate of the whole world" may now depend on our ability to recognize that tragedy and prove Azoury wrong.

Bill, co-host Behnam, and long-time friend of the show Edmund Fitton-Brown preview and share insights from a project they've been working on concerning the Islamic Republic of Iran's axis of resistance. They discuss Tehran's extensive track record of not playing by the rules — and not paying a price for it — as well as the origins of conflict between Iran and the West from before the 1979 revolution to tapping their regional proxies on and after October 7, 2023 to target Israeli and American interests in the Middle East — and everything in between.
The post Ep. 154 — The Islamic Republic of Iran's Axis of Resistance first appeared on FDD's Long War Journal.

In 2020, the Vatican has opened its archives for the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), which has been accompanied by strong media coverage. While a lot of scholarly attention has been given to the actions of the Catholic Church during the Second World War and the Holocaust, the research group "The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958" is the first attempt to focus on the post-war period and tries to address new questions about the Vatican's role in the phase of reconstruction after 1945, the emerging conflicts between the capitalist West and the communist East, and the processes of decolonization in the global South. Simon Unger and Julian Sandhagen in conversation with Alex Favalli.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other Russian officials have called for a ceasefire in the most recent outburst of Israeli-Palestinian conflict triggered by Hamas's recent surprise attacks on Israel.
Moscow has also warned that the conflict could spread and has criticized U.S. Navy deployments in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip.
Yet while the Russian government has adopted a "balanced" position with regard to the Israel-Hamas conflict, a number of prominent Russian commentators have issued statements that have been highly critical of Israel and sympathetic toward the Palestinians (if not toward Hamas itself). While these statements do not necessarily reflect Kremlin views, it is doubtful that these commentators would make them if the Kremlin strongly objected to them. What seems to bother these commentators is the continued closeness of Israeli-American relations, as well as the possibility that the West will somehow benefit from this situation (Russia also has its "worst case analysts").
As of this writing, according to the Washington Post on Tuesday, the Kremlin has not offered condolences to Israel nor has President Vladimir Putin called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the two have had a reportedly close relationship.
While Moscow has good relations with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, it has a strong incentive to maintain good relations with Israel. Although Russian-Israeli relations have become strained as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war, as well as Moscow's reliance on Iran for armed drones for attacking Ukraine, Moscow has appreciated how Israel has resisted both American and Ukrainian pressure to supply Israeli weapons to Kyiv. If the Israeli government became convinced that Moscow supported the Hamas attack on Israel, then Israeli reticence about supporting Ukraine could suddenly end.
Of course, Israel is not going to be supplying weaponry to Ukraine so long as its conflict with Hamas is ongoing. Some, then, might see the Israeli-Hamas conflict as useful in preventing this or in America diverting weapons that it might have supplied Ukraine to Israel instead. Presumably, though, the hot phase of Israel's conflict with Hamas will require far fewer weapons, and much less time, than Ukraine's war with Russia, and so the diversionary potential of the Israel-Hamas conflict will not benefit Moscow for long, if at all.
Further, Moscow's warnings about conflict in the Middle East spreading are an indication that it fears its own interests would be harmed if this occurs. An all-out conflict between Israel and Hezbollah could result in Hezbollah's forces in Lebanon becoming so degraded that it will be forced to redeploy a substantial number of its fighters now in Syria back to Lebanon, thus destabilizing the Russian-backed Assad regime, which relies in part on Hezbollah's military prowess. Escalating conflict between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria could result in the Assad regime becoming vulnerable once again to its internal opponents.
Just as Russia being bogged down in Ukraine did not act to protect Armenia against Azerbaijan, the exigencies of Moscow's war against Kyiv might result in Moscow being unable to help Iranian or Hezbollah forces against Israel. The two situations are not directly comparable: Putin has been unhappy with what he perceives with the pro-Western government in Armenia while he has no such concerns about Iran or Hezbollah. But Putin simply might not be able to spare the resources needed to defend Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian forces in Syria against a determined Israeli assault supported by the U.S.
While many in the West seem to think that Russia somehow benefits whenever conflict erupts in the Middle East, this might be an occasion when it does not. Moscow may be calling for a ceasefire, then, because it sees this as the best way to protect its interests. The problem for Moscow, however, is that it is not in a strong position to either persuade or coerce Israel or Hamas to agree to one. Perhaps this is why Foreign Minister Lavrov indicated that President Putin would not be making calls to any other leaders about this.
The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas is one which could affect Russian interests negatively, but which Russia has only limited ability to affect.

The United States is barreling toward another war in the Middle East. The conflict between Israel and Hamas is rapidly escalating across the region and risks dragging the United States directly into the fray. The recent barrage of ballistic missiles and drones launched by Yemen's Houthi movement at Israel — coupled with a statement by the group that such attacks will continue — and the continued attacks on U.S. positions in the region show this conflict is expanding fast. The United States now finds itself on a new war footing with Iran and its regional partners, whom many in Congress have cast as part of a new "Axis of Evil" that includes Russia and China.The Biden administration is preparing for such a scenario, yet adequate measures are not being taken by Washington to prevent such a disaster from transpiring. Fear among the American public that the United States will be dragged into another Middle East war is rising fast: according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 84% of respondents were either "very" or "somewhat" concerned that the U.S. could be drawn into the conflict. President Biden and his team have repeatedly warned Israel against making the same "mistakes" the United States made following September 11, 2001, but it would appear Washington has yet to learn from our own errors of the past two decades. If the administration does not want to enter another war in the Middle East, it needs to prevent the conflict from pulling in additional actors from across the region. The way the war is being fought at present seems to make that outcome more likely, not less.Following Hamas's terror attack on Israel on October 7, the United States significantly increased its military presence in the Middle East in hopes of deterring a broader regional conflict. The United States deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups, with roughly 7,500 personnel on each, two guided-missile destroyers, and nine air squadrons to the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea region. Washington also deployed an additional 4,000 troops to the region, with another 2,000 on standby, adding to the roughly 30,000 troops already in the region.This buildup comes as the conflict is escalating considerably. Over 1,500 Israelis and more than 9,770 Palestinians have died as a result of the war. The situation inside Gaza is dire, with over one million displaced and thousands in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. In the West Bank, violence has also been escalating, with an estimated 152 Palestinians killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers since the war began, resulting in the United States calling on Israel to "protect Palestinians from Israeli extremist settler violence."Outside of the war itself, violence is increasing throughout the region. U.S. forces in the Middle East have already been targeted at least 23 times in Iraq and Syria by groups connected to Iran. In response, U.S. forces conducted airstrikes on two facilities linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in Syria, while vowing to retaliate further if the targeting of U.S. personnel continues. Israel and Hezbollah continue to engage in clashes, with almost 50 Hezbollah fighters killed since October 7. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, delivered his first public address since the start of the war on Friday Nov. 3, where he stressed the independent decision-making of Hamas in launching its attack on Israel while also pressing for an end to the conflict, but maintained that a region-wide war remains possible. Nasrallah also praised Yemen's Houthis for getting involved. Following the latest barrage of ballistic missiles and drones, the Houthis have now targeted Israel three times since the war began. Israel has also continued to strike Iran-backed militias in Syria following the outbreak of war in Gaza.The Biden administration needs to square up to the fact that a broader war in the Middle East would be ruinous for the United States and the region.Given the relative military weakness of America's regional partners — with the exception of Israel, who would nonetheless be overextended in such a scenario — the United States would have to do the lion's share of the fighting and would bear the majority of its costs. Such a war would result in dramatic new levels of U.S. commitments and entanglements in the region at a time when the Middle East no longer represents a core theater of U.S. interests.The risk of a major war in the Middle East comes as the United States is already deeply engaged in assisting Ukraine against Russia's invasion and trying to deter China in the Indo-Pacific, while carrying a national debt north of $33 trillion and running $1 trillion-plus budget deficits each year in peacetime. Opening a new front in the Middle East while trying to pursue Washington's stated interests in Europe and the Indo-Pacific risks plunging America toward an economic crisis.It goes without saying that for the Middle East itself, such a war would be catastrophic, destabilizing the region politically, economically, and militarily. The war would threaten to empower illiberal actors across the region at the expense of genuine stability. The profound human and material costs would plague the Middle East for generations to come.It should be clear from the past several decades that throwing money, weapons and military assets at the region often has profound negative consequences. In this case, Washington is risking further escalation and even direct U.S. involvement in a region-wide war. Biden needs to make clear that the central U.S. interest is to stay out of the revolving door of Middle East conflicts and avoid being dragged into a ruinous military campaign across the region.

All of the unfinished U.S. conflicts in the Middle East are coming together into one big crisis for Biden.

The intensifying systemic rivalry between great powers also involves contesting the most effective approaches to conflict resolution and mediation. The most recent Beijing-mediated détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran has ignited heated debates regarding its longevity and China's rising profile in the region. While the Middle East may still be a region largely inhospitable to outsider mediation, there are three good reasons why Beijing's latest foray into Middle East peace diplomacy may be effective. The article argues that China's hitherto successful mediation between Saudi and Iran lies in its power of not using power—the ability to leverage its growing geoeconomic influence while refraining from the use of coercive power in regional affairs. This approach aims at providing an alternative approach to external powers' engagement in Middle East peace affairs.
Author information





Yiqi Zhou



Dr. ZHOU Yiqi ist Associate Senior Fellow am Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) und Gastwissenschaftler am Programmbereich "Innerstaatliche Konflikte" der HSFK. Zu seinen Forschungsinteressen gehören Konfliktforschung, Sicherheit im Nahen Osten, internationale politische Theorie und Forschungsmethoden. // Dr ZHOU Yiqi is an associate Senior Fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) and visiting fellow at PRIF's research department "Intrastate Conflict". His research interests include conflict studies, Middle East security, international political theory, and research methodology.

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Der Beitrag The Power of Not Using Power: China and the Saudi-Iranian Rapprochement erschien zuerst auf PRIF BLOG.