The World since 7 October

On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people’. If Khamenei were to refuse, he added, ‘that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens.’ That Petraeus was recommending Iran, a country of ninety million people, be reduced to Gaza-like conditions hardly occasioned comment: murderous threats from US officials against foreign leaders and their people no longer provoke shock, much less condemnation; they’re simply part of the ‘conversation’ about how the US should manage its empire.

On 22 June, the US air force dropped GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on uranium-enrichment sites at Fordow and Natanz, and fired Tomahawk missiles at the nuclear research centre near Isfahan. Initially, it seemed as if Trump was following Petraeus’s counsel, but then he rushed to proclaim victory, declaring that the strikes had demolished Iran’s nuclear capacity (according to a preliminary classified US report, the programme has been set back by only a few months); he then prevailed on Israel and Iran to accept a ceasefire. Israel’s strikes had caused extensive damage to residential neighbourhoods and property; as many as a thousand Iranians were killed. But Khamenei was not assassinated, despite Israel’s threats, and the US did not bomb Iran to smithereens, even if Trump compared his actions to Truman’s use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima (‘that stopped a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting’) when he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on 6 July. The starvation and killing in Gaza grew still worse, but so long as Israel and Iran were at war, Palestinian suffering was off the front page.

In the hallucinatory manner that is the signature of Trump’s foreign policy, all three parties could claim victory: Netanyahu, because the Israeli air force had eliminated the top leadership of the Revolutionary Guard, in lightning strikes as devastating as the destruction of the Egyptian air force on the first morning of the Six Day War of 1967; Khamenei, because the regime survived and fired ballistic missiles deep inside Israel, striking five military bases, causing considerable damage in Haifa and Tel Aviv, and the deaths of 28 civilians, including a Palestinian family who lived in one of the many Arab villages without a bomb shelter; and Trump, who could present himself as both warrior and peacemaker, winning over neocon never-Trumpers like William Kristol while reassuring his base that he wasn’t pursuing yet another costly Middle East ground war. At his meeting with Trump, Netanyahu revealed that he had nominated the president for a Nobel Peace Prize. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, spoke with a striking lack of bitterness (and transparent calculation) about the man who had just bombed his country: ‘Trump is capable enough to guide the region towards a bright and peaceful future,’ he said, so long as he can prevent Israel from dragging it into a ‘pit’ of endless fighting.

Since the ceasefire, the regime in Tehran has launched a purge against suspected traitors, several of whom have been hanged, and expelled hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. Israel has established control of Iran’s skies and may send its fighter planes and drones there again, as it routinely does over Lebanon and Syria. All this could have been avoided. Ten years ago, the UN Security Council, the EU and Iran reached an agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), intended to ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme would be directed to peaceful ends. Three years later, however, the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement, although it seemed to be working and there was no evidence that Iran had violated it – a move vigorously championed by Israel and its supporters. As a direct consequence, Iran began to increase the levels of uranium enrichment at Fordow and its other facilities.

Nonetheless, when Israel launched its surprise attack on 13 June, Iran was still in talks with the US, and Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified to Congress in March that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon. (Ridiculed by her boss, she changed her story after the US entered the war.) It’s tempting to read Trump’s decision to bomb Iran in psychological terms, something he has encouraged. ‘I may do it,’ he said on 18 June when asked by reporters. ‘I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.’ Perhaps he wanted to avoid any impression of weakness, even if that meant infuriating MAGA critics of foreign wars like Carlson and Steve Bannon; perhaps he didn’t want to be left on the sidelines and denied his share of the credit as Israel pummelled Iran.

But Trump’s personal motivations are less important than the fact that the United States has given its imprimatur to Israel’s regional hegemony. The US has been Israel’s patron since the 1967 war, providing vast financial and military support, as well as a reliable vote on the UN Security Council against any resolution condemning Israeli war crimes. In 2003, the US launched an unprovoked war against Iraq promoted by Israeli hawks, including Netanyahu. Yet until now it has shied away from sending military personnel to join an Israeli offensive. Netanyahu’s success in luring the US into the war was one of the great triumphs of his career, but he had to settle for a brief onslaught. When Trump made plain that he wanted Israel to stop bombing, Netanyahu had little choice but to acquiesce. (Under a Democratic president, the US might not have joined the war, but the fighting could well have dragged on, amid impotent cries of ‘concern’ about casualties.) Still a precedent has been set, and a new regional order has emerged, based on the uncontested domination of a small state that continues to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence with impunity, led by a man who is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The war with Iran is far more than an attempt to prevent nuclear weapons from getting in the hands of mullahs (if it even is that); it is the culmination of Israel’s effort to restore its image of invincibility, which 7 October shattered, to settle scores with its enemies and to make itself the master of the region. At the moment, it is exulting in its power, as it has not done since the end of the 1967 war, when the Jewish state tripled the territory under its control and was flooded by a wave of messianism. Its principal victims are the people of Gaza and the West Bank, but Israel also appears to be pursuing a long-range plan to weaken, if not to render defenceless, the other states in the region, so that none is in a position to challenge it. The instability and precariousness of such an order are evident to American and European politicians, but they prefer to remain discreet about them for fear of being accused of sympathy for Hamas or antisemitism. Most of the Democrats who criticised Trump for launching a war without congressional approval were noticeably reticent when it came to Israel’s unilateral assault.

The new order was not built in twelve days. The attack on Iran was the most recent instalment in a war for supremacy that began on 7 October 2023, when Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza crossed into southern Israel and killed more than a thousand people, roughly two-thirds of them civilians. Some of Israel’s most influential war planners wanted to strike Hizbullah right then, on the basis that the Lebanese militant organisation provided Iran with a shield against Israeli attack. When Israel assassinated Hizbullah’s senior officials, including its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, last September, Iran lost its ‘lung’ in the Arab Middle East, as a Shia cleric once described Lebanon. Two months later, Iran lost another key Arab ally when the Assad dictatorship fell to a Sunni Islamist insurgency, led by a former jihadist, Ahmed al-Sharaa, whom Trump has since praised as ‘attractive’ and ‘tough’. The decision to attack Iran was reportedly made at a meeting advertised as a conversation about the fate of the remaining hostages in Gaza, twenty of whom are believed to be alive, a reminder of Netanyahu’s priorities.

For Netanyahu, Iran was an irresistible target: a supposed nuclear threat and a symbol of evil in the eyes of the Israeli Jewish public for its support of Palestinian militant organisations. Attacking it would allow him to distract attention from the horrors of Gaza and the fate of the hostages, to continue resisting pressure for a ceasefire and to avoid having to face trial on corruption charges (Trump is now calling for those charges to be dropped). The Iranian regime is not only militarily weak, it is also widely loathed by Iranians for its oppression and corruption. Among the regime’s officials and civil servants, the ardour of revolutionary Shiism long ago gave way to cynicism, with the Revolutionary Guard smuggling liquor and the Basij looking the other way when women took off their hijabs. The regime is also infested with spies: Israel’s campaign couldn’t have proceeded so smoothly, or with such velocity, without the help of a network of spooks and informants.

The struggle between Iran and Israel has always been a bit of a puzzle. They are not neighbours and have no territorial dispute. Both are ethnic minority states in an Arab-dominated region, with religious cultures steeped in ancient memories of persecution; both invoke a sense of solitude and existential vulnerability, a self-image that confounds (and often outrages) their far more vulnerable neighbours. When Iran was ruled by the shah, the countries were allies. But in his last years in power, he became increasingly frustrated by Israel’s expansionism and arrogance, warning of the Zionist lobby’s influence over Washington in an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. After the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini embraced the Palestinian cause with a fervour unmatched elsewhere in the Arab world, hoping to transcend his country’s Persian and Shia identities, and to win support from the people of the region for Iran’s anti-imperialism. During the war with Iraq, he insisted that the ‘path to Jerusalem runs through Karbala’, as if the battle with Saddam Hussein were the first stage of the liberation of Palestine. The Israelis responded by arguing that the path to Pax Israeliana ran through regime change in Tehran. Netanyahu has long been a vociferous advocate of military confrontation with the Islamic Republic, and in a video address released in the first days of Israel’s assault, he made an explicit appeal to the Iranian public: ‘As we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.’ In the early hours of the war, some Iranians were pleased that a number of the regime’s top officials had been killed in targeted attacks, but few embraced Israel’s version of ‘liberation’, particularly as the strikes became increasingly chaotic and indiscriminate. On the penultimate day of the war, Israel carried out a series of strikes against Evin prison, a symbol of tyranny and oppression under both the shah and the Islamic Republic. Seventy-nine people died, both prisoners and visiting family members. Many Iranians were furious that their self-styled ‘liberator’ had killed the very people who had suffered most under the regime.

One of the immediate effects of the joint Israeli-US attack has been to reinforce a narrative that many Iranians had ridiculed: that the regime, whatever its flaws, is a bulwark against foreigners who would turn their country into another Libya, Syria, Iraq or, worse, Gaza, either by promoting regime change or by fomenting ethnic strife. One dissident, Sadegh Zibakalam, expressed a common view when he said that ‘even if we are part of the opposition, we cannot remain indifferent to an invasion of our homeland.’ The regime has shrewdly appealed to these nationalist feelings, which tap into collective memories of foreign conspiracies, above all the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh, orchestrated by the CIA and the British. When Khamenei made his first public appearance since the war began, at a ceremony for the Shia festival of Ashura, he requested that in place of the usual religious hymn a song about Iran should be performed. Thanks to the invasion, there is now considerable popular support for Iran’s decision to withdraw from co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. For all Trump’s triumphalism, the ‘twelve-day war’, far from having ended Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon, may accelerate it.

Israel, however, may prefer this situation to a diplomatic agreement that would allow Iran to enrich uranium for civil purposes, bringing an end to sanctions and leading to Iran’s reintegration into the international order. After all, Israel now has control of the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria – almost boundless room for manoeuvre – and has always favoured unilateral military assertion over diplomacy. ‘The most likely outcome of the war,’ according to Robert Malley, one of Obama’s negotiators in the JCPOA, ‘will be a situation of no war, no peace, more unilateral strikes.’ Iran will hunker down, focus on regime maintenance and hope for a better deal, while Israel will strike at Iran whenever it sees the merest hint of a threat. ‘It’s the regionalisation of the “mow the lawn” strategy practised in Gaza and Lebanon,’ Malley said. In the case of Syria, he added, where Israel has carried out repeated strikes, built nine bases and expelled hundreds of people from their homes for military use, ‘it has gone beyond “mowing the lawn” – it’s “mow the hell of whatever dirt may still be there.” Even without any evidence of a Syrian intent to attack, even in the presence of clear conciliatory signals from the al-Sharaa government, Israel has continued to go after supposed weapons caches and to occupy parts of southern Syria. They did this because they could, because Syria was in no position to lift a finger in response.’

Israel’s regional ‘mow the lawn’ strategy could exact a steep diplomatic price. Before 7 October, it appeared to be headed towards normalising relations with the Gulf states. But the devastation of Gaza has aroused anger among young Arabs, and Arab governments that once saw Israel as a useful counterweight to Iran’s ambitions now feel that its aggression and adventurism know no limits. As Mohammed Baharoon, head of a research centre in Dubai, put it, ‘now the madman with a gun is Israel, it’s not Iran.’ Israel’s violent raids into Syria, and its insistence on keeping the Golan Heights, have given al-Sharaa little incentive to co-operate. Nor is Lebanon in any rush to sign a deal that would be opposed by Hizbullah, which still has a significant domestic constituency. Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, who wants to establish the kingdom as the leader of the Arab world, isn’t likely to risk alienating young Saudis who are horrified by the massacres in Gaza by normalising relations with Israel, particularly when – as Malley points out – ‘he can get from Israel much of what he needs in terms of intelligence and security co-operation without paying the price that normalisation would entail.’ The more likely scenario is that he will continue to focus on repairing relations with Iran. Hard power can only get you so far if you have no soft power. But Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment don’t seem concerned about these diplomatic costs – or about the collapse of the country’s moral reputation as a result of the wanton destruction of Gaza. They simply shrug off the criticisms; after all, they say, the world is against us. In fact, Israel still has the governments of the US and most of the West behind it.

The​ twelve-day war has only deepened the agonising sense of desertion felt by Palestinians. For a time, Europe’s position on Israel’s war in Gaza appeared to be shifting. When, in March, Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire, European officials who had previously held their tongues began to speak out – even in Germany, which tends to be allergic to any criticism of the Jewish state. Various diplomatic initiatives were planned, including a UN conference on a Palestinian state chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. Then came Israel’s attack on Iran. ‘In the blink of an eye,’ Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian analyst based in Copenhagen, told me, ‘all of it was cancelled. My email was flooded with announcements of events that had been called off. People seemed almost ecstatic they didn’t have to talk about Gaza.’ Shehada is from a large Gazan family which, since the war, has become a much smaller family. The only official who expressed regret to him that the subject of Gaza was being shelved yet again was Norwegian. Not until the US joined the war did Shehada’s contacts express any criticism of it. ‘If the US had attacked Iran first, we would have condemned it,’ one told him. ‘But because it’s Israel, it’s much harder.’

The destruction of Gaza grinds on – ‘war’ seems an inadequate term, if not an obscene obfuscation, of such a lopsided struggle. The majority of its inhabitants have been forced into a sliver of land in the south, amounting to about 15 per cent of the territory. Potable water is scarce, baby formula impossible to find; raw sewage floods the streets; drones circling overhead produce a relentless, unbearable din. During the war with Iran, the IDF killed hundreds of people in Gaza waiting in line for food from the misleadingly named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is based in the US, backed (and possibly funded) by Israel and staffed by security contractors. The GHF distribution sites are located near military zones and require long, difficult journeys to reach, made still more arduous by hunger. According to Shehada, ‘it is now etched in people’s minds that trying to get food is a death sentence.’ Massacres that would have caused a scandal a decade ago are now an almost daily occurrence. On 30 June, the IDF killed 41 people at al-Baqa Café, a popular seaside establishment in the north. It has killed more than seventy healthcare workers in the last two months, among them the surgeon Marwan al-Sultan, director of the Indonesian Hospital, which was the last functioning medical centre in northern Gaza (it was shut down in May). According to the Gazan Health Ministry, more than 57,000 people have been killed in the war so far, roughly 17,000 of them children. The Israelis refer to the health ministry as ‘Hamas-controlled’, in an attempt to discredit it, but – as public health experts elsewhere have pointed out – its figures are likely to be a significant underestimate, since they don’t include those missing under rubble, or indirect deaths from disease, malnutrition or lack of medical care. It hasn’t escaped Palestinians’ notice that Israel’s strikes against Gaza have been far less precise than its strikes against Iran and Lebanon: a measure of the contempt in which they are held.

The French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu visited Gaza with Médecins sans Frontières during the ceasefire, and has published a powerful account of his trip.1 ‘Even though I have been in a number of war zones in the past, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, via Syria, Iraq and Somalia,’ he writes, ‘I have never, but never, experienced anything like this.’ Already desperate and hungry, the people of Gaza have to pay astronomical prices thanks to the growth of organised crime, encouraged by the Israeli authorities, who have been providing Kalashnikovs to the clan of Yasser Abu Shabab, a resident of Rafah who was involved in smuggling networks and is said to have links with Islamic State. ‘We activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas,’ Netanyahu said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ (In fact, Abu Shabab’s thuggery appears to have fostered a revival in support for Hamas, which had, until recently, fallen into disfavour among Gazans.) As much as forced displacement, killing, starvation and humiliation, the promotion of criminality – of a lawless ‘grey zone’ of the kind evoked by Primo Levi, in which members of a persecuted group are enlisted to police, brutalise and, at times, kill their own – has become a defining feature of Israel’s rule inside Gaza.

In The Arabs and the Holocaust, published in 2010 and recently reissued, Gilbert Achcar, a Marxist scholar of Lebanese origin, wrote of the 1948 Nakba: ‘It cannot fairly be said that the “uprooting” of the Palestinians … has been exceptionally extensive or cruel.’ Measured against the standards of the French army in Algeria, ‘the Israeli army pales.’ As Achcar admits in his new book, The Gaza Catastrophe, it wouldn’t be possible to write these lines about Israel now.2 The catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba, and ‘deserves the strongest Arabic name for catastrophe: Karitha’. The Karitha’s consequences are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.

After the 1967 war, Isaac Deutscher recalled a German phrase, ‘Man kann sich totsiegen’ – ‘you can triumph yourself to death.’ The same is true of Israel’s wars today, and for largely the same reasons. ‘Unless Israel decides to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands or even millions of Palestinians into Egypt or Jordan,’ Yezid Sayigh, a Palestinian analyst based in Beirut, told me, ‘it can’t overcome the principal obstacle to total colonisation, which is the fact that the Palestinians are still there, in Gaza and the West Bank. Which is to say: Israel has set itself on a trajectory for which it has no solutions other than a final solution, and final solutions aren’t easy to implement. I don’t think Israel will be able to go quite there in the way Hitler managed, but we’re closer to that situation than we ever were, and in the West Bank the settlers are emerging as the gauleiters of a new and far more brutal order.’ As Sayigh sees it, ‘in a world where the right and far right are on the rise everywhere’, Israel has found it easier to evade criticism since it discovered a growing number of admirers in the West, Latin America and India of its model of ethnonationalism, racial discrimination and reliance on brute force. Nor, he adds, has it faced much opposition from the liberal ‘centre’, which has presided over the growth of ‘a highly restrictive legal framework for dissent and public protest, not only with respect to Palestine, but also with respect to the militarisation of police, the increasing powers of the executive over the judiciary’.

It’s easy to satirise the racist absurdities and linguistic contortions of the Trump administration when it welcomes white South African farmers as ‘refugees’ from an anti-white ‘genocide’ (even as it continues to fund a genocidal war); or when Stephen Miller, noting the presence of ‘all the foreign flags’ at a demonstration in LA against deportations, calls the city ‘occupied territory’. But neither the Trump administration nor the far right has a monopoly on the abuse of the word ‘antisemitism’. As Mark Mazower writes in a forthcoming study, On Antisemitism: A Word in History, after 7 October ‘no one wanted to be called an antisemite, and yet if you believed the pundits, antisemites were everywhere, and it sounded like Manhattan was Berlin on the eve of Kristallnacht.’3 No word, in the last few years, has made such an outsized contribution to the attack on academic and intellectual freedom, or to acts of repression, arrests and deportation. ‘What was striking about the moment,’ Ross Barkan writes of pro-Palestinian protests after 7 October in Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics, ‘was how much had changed since [the Black Lives Matter protests of] 2020. In a little over three years, the most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts and multinational finance had evolved from fully genuflecting in front of zealous young activists to trying to silence and crush them. The difference, obviously, was the cause these activists had taken up.’4

In the early 20th century, and well into the mid-century, the struggle against antisemitism was a left-liberal cause, allied with other movements combating ethnonationalism and racial discrimination, including civil rights. Today it is well on its way, particularly in the United States but also in parts of Western Europe, to being annexed by an authoritarian right that wants to dismantle democracy in favour of ethnonationalism. It’s no wonder Israel’s greatest admirers are Trump, Fidesz in Hungary and France’s Rassemblement National. Anti-antisemitism now serves the purpose antisemitism (and anticommunism) once did. Trump and his allies continue to cultivate close ties with actual antisemites – Nick Fuentes, Kanye West, Andrew Tate et al – while Jewish leaders such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League see no cause for concern when Elon Musk gives the Hitler salute, and cheer on the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi and other student activists. Traditionally pro-Israel Jewish organisations have become crucial appendages of a movement that seeks to denationalise, and then deport, foreign-born dissidents, often on false allegations of antisemitism.

The question of Palestine now figures almost as prominently in American politics as the Jewish question did when European democracies faced the threat of fascism. Like the Jewish question, it has become entangled with other concerns: antiracism, intellectual freedom, citizenship, the right to assembly, cosmopolitanism, social justice, opposition to right-wing authoritarianism and neoliberalism. The most vivid illustration of Palestine’s growing impact on US politics is Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York mayor. Mamdani, a 33-year-old Muslim progressive, ran a brilliant campaign, emphasising how unaffordable the city has become for working people. By cross-endorsing with Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive, he won 56 per cent of the vote in the final round, decisively defeating Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, who, despite having been disgraced following allegations of sexual harassment, was backed by much of New York’s establishment.

The New York Democratic machine and the New York Times, which has been running hit pieces on Mamdani unconvincingly disguised as reportage, dislike him because of his democratic socialist convictions, but the chief focus of their attacks has been his opposition to Israel’s occupation and his criticisms of the war on Gaza. Since the last weeks of the campaign, Mamdani has found himself denounced as an antisemite, a jihadist, a supporter of the 9/11 attacks, because he spoke of ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ in Palestine, and because he refused to say that he supported Israel’s ‘right to exist as a Jewish state’. (He said that he supports its right to exist as ‘a state with equal rights’ – a position that, from a conservative Zionist perspective, is tantamount to calling for Jews to be thrown into the sea.) ‘Zohran “little Muhammad” Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York,’ Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, wrote on X. ‘He needs to be DEPORTED.’ Trump, who also poured scorn on Mamdani on social media, said he would investigate the matter. The Kahanist group Betar, which has supplied the Trump administration with a list of students to be deported, urged Jews to evacuate the city immediately. As Mamdani came under attack, ‘liberal’ centrists in his own party were nowhere to be found, and some echoed Republican invective. Yet he held his ground, supported by a team that included both Jewish and Muslim leftists. He was the number two choice of Jewish Democrats, an encouraging sign that, for a good portion of Jewish New Yorkers, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism isn’t a problem.

In fact, it may even be an asset, since, as Peter Beinart wrote recently, support for Israel has become ‘a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites’. According to Gallup, only one in three Democrats has a favourable view of Israel. While the party’s leaders – notably Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, both of whom hesitated at first to defend Mamdani against accusations of antisemitism and still haven’t endorsed his mayoral bid – oppose putting any conditions on US military aid to Israel, nearly half of Democratic voters think it should be reduced. A similar dynamic can be observed in the UK, where a robust Palestine solidarity campaign is putting renewed pressure on the Labour government. Here, too, there has been increasingly fierce repression of dissent and protest. Palestine Action has been classified as a terrorist organisation and the duo Bob Vylan are facing a criminal investigation for leading a chant of ‘Death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury – meanwhile, the government continues to supply Israel with spare parts for the F35 planes it uses to bomb Gaza.

As for​ the people of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – not to mention the Palestinian citizens of Israel – it remains unclear, nearly two years on, whether their immense sacrifices in the war will bring them any closer to statehood or freedom. Achcar says that the 7 October attack was ‘the most catastrophic miscalculation in the history of anticolonial struggle’. A strong case can be made that it has set back the Palestinian struggle for the foreseeable future. Al-Aqsa Flood united Israeli Jews behind the war instead of sowing divisions among them; it played to Israel’s advantage, its enormous military strength, and gave it a pretext not only to flatten Gaza and to expand its operations inside the West Bank, but to neutralise the Axis of Resistance: Hizbullah, the Houthis, Iran. According to the retired Israeli major-general Yitzhak Brik, Hamas’s military wing in Gaza has returned to its pre-war strength, having recruited more fighters than Israel has killed since 7 October. Merely by surviving, it has ‘won’. Nonetheless, no matter how hard Hamas has tried to spin the war, one can scarcely portray a genocide as a victory for one’s people, even if it forces the world to pay attention to their plight.

The massacre of 7 October did, however, lay bare the illusion that Israel could continue to subjugate the Palestinians without provoking a response – the illusion that lay at the heart of the never-ending ‘peace process’. In their probing book on the failure of that process, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, Malley and Hussein Agha – former advisers to the US and the Palestinians, respectively – describe the Gaza war as ‘the past’s formidable revenge’.5 The ‘return of the past’, they write, has been a ‘harsh rebuke to the hopes many held for the future’, and they include themselves in this. But ‘the issue is not so much why things unfolded as they did. It is why so many persisted for so long in thinking it could be otherwise.’ Sidestepping the scars of 1948 in favour of the apparently more ‘manageable’ problem of the 1967 borders, ‘diplomats expended their efforts to get Palestinian and Israeli leaders to speak the desired, talismanic words, and then welcomed or excommunicated them based on whether they uttered them or not.’ The virtues of the peace process and the inevitability of a two-state settlement based on the 1967 lines were heralded in much the same way as the virtues and inevitability of ‘liberal democracy’ after 1989: in this ‘end of history’ dogma, there was no alternative. Meanwhile, those who refused to utter the talismanic words – Palestinian Islamists, but also right-wing settlers and religious Jews – prepared for a different future, one that looked more like ‘yesterday’.

For Israeli Jews, Hamas’s attack was not merely shocking, it was unfathomable – a regression to the intercommunal violence of the British Mandate. But, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the ‘current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible … is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history that gives rise to it is untenable.’ Instead of questioning their view of history, most Israeli Jews took refuge in an older, fatalistic view, and interpreted the attack as a pogrom, a repetition of the persecution many of their ancestors had suffered in Europe. The next step, dehumanising the Palestinians of Gaza, came easily, since it was an outgrowth of the anti-Arab racism inculcated in them from an early age. ‘If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you,’ the Israeli stand-up comedian Gil Kopatz posted. ‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’ According to a survey commissioned by Penn State, more than 80 per cent of Israeli Jews now support the expulsion of Gazans. Compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists. When Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, posted a tweet celebrating a recent prisoner exchange, he was denounced for seeming to equate the predicament of jailed Palestinians and Jewish hostages: ‘Your presence pollutes the Knesset,’ a colleague told him.

The​ authoritarian, increasingly fascist drift of Israeli politics, which long predates 7 October, is horrifying but not surprising. What is surprising, or at least striking, is that the war has provoked so little reflection among Western policymakers, who continue to cling to the notion that a two-state settlement will resolve the conflict – and that an Israeli leader could be persuaded to support the creation of a Palestinian state. ‘The Gaza war offered a chance for clarity, honesty and introspection,’ Malley and Agha write, ‘because it was when everything got out of hand.’ Instead, ‘the world after 7 October was built on lies,’ and America’s were the ‘most startling because least necessary’. Chief among them was the lie that the US was doing its utmost to protect the people of Gaza from the very weapons it was sending to Israel.

In many corners of the Middle East relief came more readily than despair at the thought of bidding Biden – or, as they saw it, Biden/Obama – farewell … What Arab leaders … resented was America’s moral vanity, feckless expressions of empathy, and convictions devoid of courage. If you are not going to lift a finger for the Palestinians, have the decency not to pretend to care. At least with Trump, they felt, they knew what they were getting.

Some of what they’ve got they like: Trump has lifted sanctions on Syria, negotiated directly with Hamas, even toyed with the idea of undoing some of the sanctions against Iran. When he described Israel and Iran as two countries ‘that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing’, he expressed a blunt truth, and it was appreciated by some in the region. ‘The fact that Trump does not feel indebted to the traditional foreign policy establishment means that his instincts have not been clouded by the cobwebs that have affected the thinking of successive Democratic and Republican administrations,’ Malley told me. But ‘he has not replaced antiquated beliefs with innovative thinking but with personal, capricious instincts.’

Malley and Agha argue that, for negotiations between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs to work, they will have to include ‘powerful groups who felt that what was discussed was at odds with their core beliefs’ – the rejectionists of both camps, from Palestinian Islamists to Jewish settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. They believe that something could come out of a more open-ended conversation, with no clear horizon, or ‘solution’. These groups, they write, might even find a way of co-existing in the same land without renouncing their larger aspirations, as Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have done since the Good Friday Agreement.

What would it take for such talks to occur? The Israelis, who are more isolated but also more powerful than ever, aren’t keen to have them. As the human rights lawyer Michael Sfard wrote recently in Haaretz, Israeli Jews have been ‘high on drugs full of swaggering slogans and floating in military ecstasy’ since the war with Iran; ending the suffering in Gaza or creating a Palestinian state are the furthest things from their minds. They insist that they can never trust Palestinians after 7 October, while Palestinians have even less reason to trust them after the genocide they have visited on Gaza, to say nothing of the ongoing and increasingly violent campaign to colonise the West Bank, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been driven from their homes – the largest displacement there since 1967. Even if Israelis and Palestinians agreed to sit down together, who would broker the talks? The asymmetry between the two sides is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour, and the US has invariably acted as its advocate in negotiations. Malley and Agha know this, of course. The conclusion of their mostly grim and unflinching book feels, at times, like wishful thinking: what – and who – would compel any of these people to talk to one another, especially after the genocide in Gaza? Even if they did, what would this accomplish? The proposal is, to say the least, untimely. But the ground may be shifting, and, along with it, the balance of forces. The regime of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and now genocide has eroded Israel’s moral capital, and opposition has not only grown, but has begun to make itself felt in a new generation of progressive activists and politicians. Even so, it’s extremely difficult to imagine the dismantling of Israel’s apartheid system, or to imagine a serious challenge to its domination emerging anytime soon. In a world of rising authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, where the rule of law has all but crumbled, the brutal, pitiless state run by Netanyahu looks more like a pioneer than an outlier.

11 July