After Israel’s token response to the Islamic Republic’s intercepted missile-and-drone barrage, there is one overarching question in the Middle East: Has anything—beyond the horrendous loss of life—really changed since the Gaza war started on October 7th?
After Israel’s token response to the Islamic Republic’s intercepted missile-and-drone barrage, there is one overarching question in the Middle East: Has anything—beyond the horrendous loss of life—really changed since the Gaza war started on October 7th? Consider a few subsidiary questions: Has the Palestinian–Israeli imbroglio, which has now left Gaza in ruins, fundamentally altered Arab–Israeli ties, the American–Israeli alliance, or the Jewish state’s relations with Europe? Are we really in a new era because Iran and Israel are now dueling openly, striking each other’s territory directly? And last but not least, has Iran’s nuclear disposition—a slow, cautious march towards a nuclear weapon—likely changed because of the conflict?
The Palestinian issue has certainly been amped up, making it more difficult for most Arab political elites, who long ago tired of the Palestinian cause, to deal with the Jewish state publicly. The Abraham Accords, which many Israelis thought beckoned a new era, will likely survive in a deflated form. Arab rulers who had decided that Palestinian revanchism was no longer their battle premised their acceptance of the accords on a proposition: that they could do an end run around the Palestinians, who continuously hurl both Islamist and Arab nationalist rhetoric against Arabs no longer motivated by the one-hundred year-old struggle with Jews, especially at a time of Persian Islamist ascendancy.
The Palestinian cause, when amplified by a massive Israeli ground assault against Gaza, certainly has proved more resilient than these Arab elites expected. It proved more resilient than Washington expected, diminishing the expectations of Republicans, who saw the agreement as a triumph of Donald Trump’s disregard for foreign-policy orthodoxy, and confounding Democrats, who belatedly latched onto the accords as a vehicle to maintain U.S. influence without significant military commitments. It is an excellent guess that Joe Biden’s disinterest in directly confronting Iran partly generated his willingness to embrace the accords and flip-flop on the roguishness of the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.
Through the Gaza war, the Democrats have now rediscovered, at least publicly, their ardor for the “peace process” and the “two-state solution.” None has suggested how this process, however, could overcome all the crippling choices of the Palestinian Authority; the intense, revanchist-cum-Muslim anger that consumes so many Palestinians; the likelihood of a long insurgency in Gaza, which is unavoidable if Rafah, and all its tunnels into Egypt, stay in Hamas’ hands (the Israeli refusal to “clean and hold” elsewhere also helps); and the hard fact that Israelis, left or right, are no longer willing to accept “risks for peace.” In comparison, the often violent avarice of “Greater Israel” right-wing settlers on the West Bank—a favorite target of those who find Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu especially culpable for the failure of the peace process—is just a low-rise hurdle.
The current centripetal eminence of the Palestinian cause among Arabs will surely again fade once Gaza becomes more like Syria—a dreary landscape of exhaustion and dysfunction that is too expensive and tiresome for Gulf Arabs, Europeans, and Americans to repair. Arab-versus-Jew definitely is more magnetic in the Islamic world (and the West) than Syrian Arab Sunni-versus-Syrian Arab Shiite. Yet it doesn’t appear to have regime-shaking potential in Muslim societies, which, with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia, are no longer rising and aspirational (compared to the Arab World from the 1950s to 1970s, or in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s, when anti-Zionism had wide appeal). Palestinians will continue to immiserate Israelis, and vice versa. But the Palestinians and their most ardent supporters probably cannot again successfully depict themselves as the cutting edge of a regional or global movement. Left-wing university students in pro-Palestinian encampments just don’t have the gravitas and money that once put Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization into the limelight for decades.
Nonetheless, the war has reconfirmed the original Abraham logic: Palestinians still have too much attention for Arab rulers. If these ruling elites rescinded their approval of the accords (ditto for the Egyptians and the Jordanians, who had already made peace with Israel), then they would just look like kowtowing idiots—a bad look for authoritarians who only want to make small retreats before their disgruntled populations. Better to do what Egyptian and Jordanian leaders perfected long ago: just go cold towards the Jewish state when popular (or ruling-elite) distaste for Israel is too high, keeping contact where essential and profitable. Peace treaties with Israel only oblige Muslim rulers to nuance their anti-Zionism; through them, they can take way more from the U.S. than they give to Israel.
Nonetheless, October 7 may have killed any chance Saudi Arabia will join the accords. But the odds that the Saudis were going to recognize Israel were not large. The risks versus gains did not add up. The Israelis do not have that much that they can offer the Saudi crown prince that he cannot get elsewhere. Allowing the Star of David to fly in Riyadh is a significant risk for any Saudi leader—the country remains deeply, iconically Islamic and MBS has compiled a substantial number of enemies, within his own family, the religious establishment, and the broader Hanbali–Wahhabi community, by his so far successful effort to turn the country into a modernizing (secularizing) dictatorship under his sole direction. Even if the prince is inclined to accept the political risks of close association with the Jewish state, Israel is just too far away and too democratic to be reliable (Israelis will not die to protect Saudi oil) in any confrontation with Tehran. More American goodies for Israeli recognition would obviously help. Does the prince think a U.S. security guarantee, assuming the Senate would approve a treaty, make the kingdom safer from foreign and domestic threats? With the former, maybe; against the latter, maybe not. Explicit dependency on infidels probably still is not a good look in 21st-century Arabia. The Saudis have often been as scared of American actions in the Middle East as they have been of American inaction.
The crown prince’s massive, budget-busting “2030” infrastructure projects, whose fragile viability could easily be shredded by Iranian missiles, have already steered MBS towards more accommodation with Tehran. He started seriously pivoting towards a more traditional, transactional view of Washington after the clerical regime attacked Saudi oil plants in 2019 and President Trump did nothing—except to send a token deployment of Marines. China and Russia, which have real clout in Tehran, may already be as valuable to the prince as the United States, his primary arms supplier.
An American offer to give Riyadh a turn-key “nuclear-energy” industry might tempt MBS to join the accords. He needs nuclear energy to lessen ever-increasing domestic oil consumption; a nuclear infrastructure that eventually allows for the production of fissile material would increase Saudi self-confidence. But the thorny issue of the country’s defense—the lack of martial esprit in the ruling elite and basic competence in the kingdom’s over-fed armed forces—and the unreliability of Americans (neither a Trump nor Biden victory will make America again a Middle Eastern hegemon)—will work in favor of further Saudi accommodation with the Islamic Republic. October 7th has most likely not been a game changer in the peninsula—unless President Biden decides, in search of a foreign-policy triumph before a close election, to wink at Saudi nuclear ambitions.
In the United States, the Gaza war has roiled campuses and supercharged the American political left’s disillusionment with Israel. The situation is even worse in Europe, where left and right often asperse Israel as an apartheid state. But none of this is new: the Democratic Party’s commitment to Israel has for years been evanescing—a victim of liberalism’s inability to deal with Palestinian revanchism, the consequent death of the two-state solution, and Israel’s unavoidable dominion over a non-Western people. Ditto in Europe: the Gaza war has just given Europeans who have always blamed Israel for the Palestinian status quo a reason to damn Jerusalem further. Israel’s morally questionable standing among European elites is counterbalanced to an extent by Europeans’ growing anger and anxiety about Muslim immigration and integration. Also working against an anti-Israel slide is the fractious nature of European politics. Divisions within the European Union—Germany has remained pretty steadfastly pro-Israel and even formerly Israel-dissing (but Muslim-immigrant fearing and Turkey-loathing) Greece now evinces pro-Zionist sentiments—will probably curtail any serious EU punishment. Given European history, economic sanctions against the Jewish state are still probably too jarring—no matter what happens in Gaza.
The Biden administration’s decision to halt temporarily the delivery of munitions to Israel because of its opposition to a Rafah campaign also is not novel and should not be shocking: it is the natural outgrowth of modern liberalism’s acute discomfort with and guilt about Westerners’ using hard power against Third Worlders, especially in urban warfare where thousands of civilian casualties are unavoidable. What might be barely passable if Americans were doing it, becomes just too much when Israelis are the perpetrators—even though the Israelis are using tactics that the American armed forces would use in similar circumstances. If one were to imagine a U.S. parallel in the American Southwest of armed irredentism, it is difficult to imagine Washington being kinder or operationally more clever. It is a decent political guess that most Americans, who can tolerate a lot of violence in their foreign policy for a good cause, intuitively know Israel is not doing anything they would not do. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman’s and the White House’s preferred solution for Gaza—search and destroy missions by special forces—would most likely become Black Hawk Down on endless loop. And Hamas would retain control of the Egyptian–Gaza border.
Jerusalem has always been beholden to foreign-arms suppliers (before the 1967 Six-Day War Charles de Gaulle cut Israel entirely off; Americans have never been that bad). That dependency now is even more acute. Without American cooperation, many more of Iran’s missiles and drones in April would have gotten through. Even if Israel doubled its defense budget, which it should, this dependency will not lessen much since the costs of developing and deploying advanced weaponry are enormous. Israel cannot win its wars without air superiority and ever-improving anti-missile defenses; the United States has—and will continue to have—a chokehold in these domains.
October 7th and the Gaza war have already concentrated Israeli minds on these questions. This may well lead them to the unhappy conclusion that Israel’s defense is inextricably tied to a retrenching superpower. American Iran policy may have already become Israeli Iran policy. October 7th and its aftermath did not make this happen; it just obliged Israelis to see the transition more sharply.
There are likely only two areas where October 7th and the Gaza war may have changed the Middle Eastern status quo significantly. First is Iran’s view of Israeli volition—Jerusalem’s capacity to deter Iranian actions. Second is the supreme leader’s calculations about possessing a nuke.
Iranian fear of the Jewish state is hard to measure since the clerical regime does not like to speak openly about its trepidations vis-à-vis Israel (it is demeaning). Tehran has been testing Jerusalem, to see how much it would endure before striking back. Jerusalem’s decision to assassinate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, in Damascus on April 1—not the first senior IRGC officer that Israel offed in Syria but surely the most important—was an act that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, could not ignore.
Through the “axis of resistance” and the Islamic Republic’s drone-and-missile programs, the clerical regime has adopted a much more offensive strategy against its enemies. Attacking Israel directly—especially after the death of Zahedi, who had been a key player in building up the axis and may have been the principal guardsman overseeing Iran’s liaison with Hamas—was the next logical step in this duel. The bravado of Iran’s response—telegraphing its intent to attack Israel directly—surely came more from wounded Islamic pride than from a desire to minimize the strike’s lethality and the possibility of escalation. For Khamenei, three-hundred missiles and drones launched at the Jewish state was audacious. In his eyes, Iran upped the ante. In response, Israel did not.
On April 19, Jerusalem had a near-perfect opportunity to attack Iran’s nuclear program and missile-production plants. (There is no “perfect” scenario: Israel likely could not escape significant civilian casualties after a successful American or Israeli strike—Iran and the Lebanese Hizbollah just have too many missiles.) Israel’s war cabinet had President Biden in a corner—he would have been obliged to support the counterattack, however grudgingly. If Tehran then escalated, Biden would have likely been obliged to step in, possibly unleashing devastating attacks against Iran’s military, including the nuclear sites. Israeli politicians and military men have often fantasized about such a chain reaction. Yet, when the opportunity presented itself, Netanyahu blinked. Former general, prime-minister-want-to-be, and member of the war cabinet, Benny Gantz blinked. Only the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, apparently wanted to escalate. (Gallant appears to be also in favor of a big strike against the Lebanese Hizbollah.)
The clerical regime certainly learned about the proficiency of Israeli–American missile-and-drone interception; much more importantly, it saw clearly that neither Israel nor America wanted to seize the day against its nuclear ambitions, which have advanced so far that the Islamic Republic has become a threshold state. Jerusalem’s limited response showed that the Israeli Air Force could easily get a missile past Iran’s best defenses, and yet, fearing escalation and the Biden administration, the Israeli government chose to blow up a radar site. Fear of America and Israel, which has surely been a significant factor explaining why Tehran has moved so gradually towards building and testing an atomic device, may have collapsed on April 19. Iran appears to have won the contest of who deters whom better.
We do not know exactly why Khamenei has chosen to advance as slowly as he has in producing atomic arms. Given what we know about the Islamic Republic’s program, the theocracy could have tested a weapon by now. Many factors—not just fear of detection and the possibility of a successful American or Israeli bombing run—have undoubtedly come into play. (The braking effect of Khamenei’s supposed fatwa, or juridical opinion, against the possession of an immoral weapon issued in 2003, when American armed forces had just taken down Saddam Hussein, is surely the least likely.) But the Islamic Republic’s more offensive approach to the region, and its inability so far to deploy a sufficient defense of Iranian air space and regional deterrence against Israeli strikes against Iranian personnel, certainly show clearly why a nuke could greatly enhance the Islamic Republic’s position. Many senior Iranian officials have been hinting openly that a change in its threshold status is in order. The helicopter death of Iran’s president Ibrahim Raisi, and the possibility of a younger, more aggressive successor (younger regime-loyalists—Khamenei’s chosen children—are more oppressive at home and more aggressive abroad than Raisi was), increase the odds that the 85-year-old supreme leader will bequeath nuclear weapons to his successor.
October 7 and its aftermath offered an opportunity for Jerusalem and Washington to punish Tehran and its allies. That hasn’t happened. (Iran can easily endure Sunni Islamists dying in large numbers; a low-boiling insurgency in Gaza is a win for the regime.) The advantages that the Islamic Republic and its allies had before October 7 remain—even considering the prowess of Israeli and American anti-missile systems. To the extent that the Middle East has really changed, it certainly has not been—at least not for the West—progress.