Independent Minds Middle East: Your questions answered

This week Independent Minds hosted the “Middle East in Crisis: a region on the brink”, a special event in which correspondents Patrick Cockburn and Bel Trew endeavoured to answer the most pressing questions on the region. There was not enough time to answer all of them from the audience or social media, so Bel Trew has returned to some of the most pressing ones here.

Jenny Greenwood: To what extent was Benjamin Netanyahu approach to democracy an inspiration or example for a subsequent authorities government in say Hungary, Poland or the US?

For those covering Israel and the Palestinians, we couldn’t help noticing the similarities in a tweet on 19 January by President Donald Trump who said he would be making a “major” live-streamed announcement about issues on the US’s southern border and one penned by Netanyahu’s office just days before. Netanyahu had also promised he was going to make a “dramatic statement” live on air too.

In both instances, there was mass speculation about what would be revealed from an (albeit jaded) media. In both instances there was disappointment.

But it certainly did look like Trump was picking up tips from Netanyahu, a master of populist and clever oratory, about how to drum up support by channelling anger into votes. Trump has repeatedly used Israel to defend his case for building the wall on the Mexico border.

I don’t think it would be too dramatic to say that Netanyahu set a trend of populist rhetoric and illiberal democracy that has largely been picked up in eastern Europe. And it’s no coincidence that last year the Israeli leader was busy courting his fellow right-wing leaders including Hungary’s Victor Orban, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

The “illiberal bromances”, as left-wing Israeli paper Haaretz called it, sparked uproar among the opposition in Israel, largely because of allegations of antisemitism from each of the leaders Netanyahu hosted.

The cornerstones of that illiberal democracy were created when Netanyahu returned to power in the wake of Israel’s first Gaza war in 2008, peddling a right-wing hardline nationalism which engaged an enraged electorate: similar tactics were later used across eastern Europe, and arguably by Trump.

He has used a string of controlled wars with Gaza to ignite nationalist fervour without causing mass casualities – in a bid to distract the Israeli electorate from domestic woes or to secure votes.

Last year the passage of the controversial nation-state law, which holds a constitution-like status, was again another stepping stone in Netanyahu’s form of democracy. The law, which was slammed by critics as apartheid legislation, describes Israel as a Jewish state, it prioritises the right of Jewish settlements, it downgrades the Arabic language and it defines national self-determination as “the unique right of the Jewish people”.

But it isn’t just his actions but the mode of delivery that has arguably inspired others.

The director of a new Israeli documentary King Bibi told me at a recent screening that the team had spent many weeks deliberating the full title and in the end went with “the life and performances of Benjamin Netanyahu”.

The film tracks the meteoric rise of a shy, quiet economic consultant to a powerful orator and savvy politician who, as one opponent says in one of the film’s archival clips, is adept at manipulating his audience.

Kerry Greenwood: I read your article on the state of Gaza today and that it will be uninhabitable by next year. What in your opinion will it take for the outside world to take notice and action?

Having covered the last two Gaza wars and followed the enclave over the past few years, I have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of interest in, or the quiet acceptance of, the humanitarian disaster that is Gaza.

No matter what side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you sit on, no matter who you blame, the facts remain the same: there are 2.2 million people corralled into a 25-mile-long strip that is not fit to live in.

More than 97 per cent of Gaza’s drinking water is undrinkable, three-quarters of its beaches are so polluted they really ought to be shut down, and 70 per cent of the youth are unemployed, which among the highest rates in the world.

If you are aged just 10 in Gaza you have lived through three wars – the numbers and statistics go on.

The journey across the border between Gaza and Israel is a stark and bewildering one: on one side bombed-out skeletons of buildings line pock-marked dust roads; on the other, tree-lined highways snake towards sweeping metropolises.

I think the problem may lie in the fact that so few people can actually get into Gaza and see it, and few from Gaza can get out. Gaza is always seen within the frame of the wars, as an abstract.

At a recent United Nations event in Moscow, which was attended by both Israeli and Palestinian leaders and journalists, I realised I was one of just two people (also a journalist) in the room who had been inside Gaza in the past decade. No one from Gaza was able to make it.

The other problem is that Gaza is propped up by aid agencies, so it can just about limp on. The World Health Organisation told me the only reason there has not been an outbreak of diseases like typhoid is because 100 per cent of the children are vaccinated in Gaza, thanks to UN programmes there.

But I do believe this may change this year. The UN has sounded the alarm about Gaza saying it will be uninhabitable by next year. That is largely anchored in the fear that the coastal aquifer, Gaza’s only natural source of water, will collapse if people do not stop over pumping it.

The pollution is also seeping up the coast into Israel and having a direct impact on the safety of Israeli civilians: water treatment plants and beaches in Ashkelon have been shut down. Groups like EcoPeace argue that the environmental crisis in Gaza is an Israeli national security issue and I would push that even further to say it is a threat to regional security.

I hope attitudes will change in time to save Gaza’s aquifer because that damage is irreversible and people will just have to leave. How safe can Israel be if millions of people try to breach its borders?

Tom Greenwood: How much is a threat if any do you feel Iran is to the stability of the Middle East?

Iran is often portrayed as the bogeyman whose dangerous expansionist agenda is the greatest threat to peace in the region. This idea has been a unifying force for military alliances such as the Saudi Arabia-led coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, or Turkish-backed rebels groups fighting Assad and its main ally Iran in Syria.

Iranian forces are certainly involved in many conflicts in the region right now: either physically the ground (in Syria), where they are apparently trying to build permanent bases, or virtually – according to Israeli army officials they are funding Hamas in Gaza.

Just a few days ago saw another flare-up of cross-border conflict between the Israeli army and Iranian forces in Syria, after an Iranian missile hit a ski resort in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Again questions were raised about whether an Israel-Iran war would erupt. Israeli officials have told me that most of Hezbollah’s impressive weapons stockpile of some 150,000 rockets is due to Iran.

But I don’t think anyone knows to what extent Iran actually wants to go to war with its old enemy Israel (and follow through with the fiery propaganda threats to wipe it off the face of the planet ). How much does Tehran really want permanent military infrastructure in Syria from which to threaten the region? How much is it intent on using northern Yemen as a diving board for further attacks on Saudi?

That said, it doesn’t necessarily matter, as the perceived threat can be as destabilising as a real threat itself.

The main reason Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen was because of the fear that Iran would have influence through the Houthis right on its borders and possibly excite Saudi’s own embattled and oppressed Shia minority in the eastern provinces.

Personally I doubt Iran would actually want to flatten Riyadh from northern Yemen, but the threat of that is enough for the Saudis and their allies to engage in a ruinous and costly four-year war, which has sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

It has also seen Israel, which has no interest at all in intervening in the Syrian crisis, strike targets in Syria repeatedly. Isreal also does not want another war with Lebanon but last month had to launch a military operation on the border to destroy Hezbollah attack tunnels it feared would be used by the (Iran-armed) Lebanese militants to strike Israeli citizens.

It is also important to remember that Iran is not a homogenous entity: there is an internal conflict. The agenda of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guards is often at odds with the comparatively moderate president, Hassan Rouhani.

Audrey Bauccan: Conflict in the Middle East has been going on for thousands of years – was there any one event this century that lead to the escalation of conflict in the Middle East?

I think the short answer to this is that there is no one key event that has caused the many wars that have ripped apart the Middle East; instead, there has been a bewildering concatenation of events. Some would argue the fairly arbitrary and ill-thought out lines of the Sykes-Picot agreement after the First World War is to blame.

Others would say the conflict surrounding the creation of Israel, which resulted in at least three regional wars and three more domestic ones with Gaza, has divided and continues to divide the region.

The 1979 Iranian revolution also saw the creation of a Shia theocratic state that arguably wants to export its ideology across the region, igniting conflicts today in Yemen and Syria, and between Israelis and Palestinians.

But then the 2003 intervention in Iraq ultimately lead to the creation of Isis. The 2011 Arab Spring is still playing out eight years later. It’s hard to pick.

Anna: Why is the Middle East in crisis given most of this region is close to the US?

Is it though? The Palestinians have pretty much cut diplomatic contact with the Trump administration after he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem last May and then slashed funding to the UN’s Palestinian refugee programmes.

Assad and his allies, Iran and Russia, are certainly not on the side of the US. Saudi Arabia and the US have, at least partially, fallen out over the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Egypt has had intermittent outbursts with Washington over the withholding or freezing of military and economic aid.

Iraq does have strong ties with America, but I would argue the US influence there has massively waned in the past decade. In 2018 there were serious tensions between powerful Shia militias in the south of the country and the US, who had to order all non-essential personnel out of Basra in September amid security threats.

And even if the region was close to the US I’m not sure that could heal the ruptures which have ripped it apart.