Dr. Morris Mottale

On October 7th 2023, Hamas, an Islamic, Palestinian Militant Terrorist group, sworn to the destruction of the State of Israel succeeded in changing the perceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the extent that within a few months, Israel found itself ostensibly isolated from the international system with major states in the world, including China, Russia, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, and the public opinion of much of the world against Jerusalem’s policy and even its legitimacy. It was also a spectacular victory for the Iranian position in the Mideast. Ever since the rise of the Islamic Republic, the government in Tehran, whose ideology had been shaped by the radical vision of Ayatollah Khomeni in 1979. He was ever-committed to the demise of the United States, the United Kingdom, and last but not least, the state of Israel. In fact, the rise of radical Islam and the so-called clash of civilizations that Samuel P. Huntington talked about some decades earlier saw the beginning of this paradigm with the success of an octogenarian Ayatollah who generated the Islamic radical revival against the Western World and beyond. 

For decades, Iran supported the Palestinian cause as a strategic tool to unhinge the so-called moderate Arab states who had come to recognize the state of Israel. Within a few years, Iran had moved into Lebanon, Syria, parts of Iraqi territory, Yemen, and had spread Iranian Islamic influence from North Africa to Latin America. The Hamas attack on Israel was a tactical success that weakened the image of a powerful Israeli state. The final history of this conflict and its genesis has yet to be written, but that the Iranian Revolution and the Iranian Government had a hand in it goes without saying. It is no accident the attack was followed by Lebanese Shiites bombings of Israeli territory, Palestinian guerilla war on the contested territories of the West Bank, drone and rocket attacks from Yemen, from Iraq, and from Syria.

This conflict took place as other wars were characterizing the international system, principally the Russo-Ukrainian War that had started some time earlier. There were other wars which did not receive the same attention that they probably deserved in that year, this included a political conflict in Spanish Sahara, conflicts in Sudan between Arabs and Africans, a Libyan failed state, internal conflicts within Ethiopia, and conflicts in the Caucasus between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Erdogan’s Turkish Republic and its Neo-Ottoman ideology saw Ankara getting involved in North Africa, in Ethiopia and Somalia. A virulent opposition to the state of Israel by Erdogan and the promotion of a Palestinian state buttress the Islamic cause in Turkey. They complement an ethno-nationalist war in the Middle East that was symptomatic of religious cleavages that, with all due exceptions, saw the confrontation of religion, principally Islam, being integrated with nationalism. In fact, some decades earlier, Yugoslavia saw the same breakdown of its political system, as did Cyprus, and the Caucasus. Terrorism in Western Europe had an Islamic tinge, and of course the clearest examples could be seen from 9/11 in New York, the October 2015 attacks in Paris, and to most recently the attacks on Moscow’s Concert Hall by Islamic State Jihadists March 2024. All the same, it was the Gaza conflict which caught the imagination of millions of Arabs and Islamic sympathizers in North America and Western Europe. 

As the Gaza War received universal attention and press coverage, political parties and governments in the world used the war to legitimize external and internal political postures within the international system and to oppose the United States, the principal ally of Israel. It was a media debacle for Israel- the worst ever. 

The Gaza Conflict had domestic implications in North America and Western Europe because of the Islamic population as well as in Latin America, Africa and Asia.  For the Iranian Ayatollahs and Iran’s Guardians of Revolution, it was a spectacular ideological victory. In the Islamic World, the leadership, however much they might be opposed to Hamas and Iran, had to cater to the public opinion, which called for the destruction of the Israeli state. Historically in modern times, the Middle East had been crucially important because of the presence of oil, easily exploitable in the Persian Gulf, and eventually in North Africa. The control of oil by Arab states and Iran allowed the leaders of these societies to exert an incredible amount of influence- financial, political, and religious- on Europe and the world at large. It allowed leaders of countries that had been relatively weak and had thought much about their past as being glorious to reconstruct a history that saw them, as in the case of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, buying symbols of status and prestige in Europe ranging from football teams  to luxury brands and real estate. Oil money allowed Iran to survive American boycotts and pressures and gave the Iranian Islamic elites an incredible leverage, both domestic and foreign, in influencing the region. Such financial pre-eminence allowed the leaders of the Islamic world often to ignore European and American calls for human rights and democracy. The evolution of the demographic growth of the Islamic world saw the rise of parallel Islamic societies across Western Europe and the globe, and such developments gave even more power and influence to rich oil-producing Islamic states and also buttressed Turkey’s neo-Ottoman longings that saw Ankara influencing Africa, the Middle East and Europe, and a source of great pride for the Turkish population. 

These trends came to be reinforced even more by the perceptions of the Gaza War and the plight of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, which had gleefully and joyfully accepted the October 7th attack on Israel and the massacres that followed but which also strengthened the Israeli resolve to destroy Hamas and the Palestinian leadership. The spectacular attention on the war was influencing European and American electoral politics, thus underlining even more the inability of the Euro-American world to influence trends in Asia, Africa and Latin America that seemed to be ever more inimical to Euro-American values and economic well being. The Mediterranean world was again the theater of conflict between North and South, East and West. The war had come to reshape the balance of power between greater and lesser powers within the international system, committed to political salvation in a world seemingly characterized by conflicted relationships, such as social media and an accent on apocalyptic catastrophe.