The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is turbocharged with politics, history, religion, emotion and ideology. With Western media bearing down on the situation, everything is becoming increasingly polarized. The Gaza-situation has the characteristics of a Minsky Moment with the potential to spread into a wider conflict across the region or even into WWIII.
Israel are about to cross the Rubicon - diving into the abyss of Gaza. Their full ground invasion to rescue the 200-plus hostages and kill all that make up Hamas, will lead to saddening scenes and the anger invoked will only accelerate from here.
The aim of this piece is to focus solely on the situation that Israel is facing and highlight the risks and indeed the limits around this perilous situation. I will step through each character involved for a high level view to try make sense of it all.
First up; Syria.
I’ve read a savage amount of material that suggests Syria has the potential to pull a third man tackle on Israel and enter the fray. Ok, let’s take a step back here. First of all, Syria as a state, is already in civil war so their capacity for uniting and making a move is limited.
Besides from this, geographically the region separating Israel from Syria is the Golan Heights. The clue is in the name here; this region is an area of high ground which overlooks Syria, across the expansive approach to Israel’s east. Israel have controlled this region for years and are well dug in. Their extensive defensive positions should make any Syrian militant think twice before making an assault charge on Israel’s eastern border.
Besides from the military might of Israel casting a far reaching shadow over this region, there is another, equally fearsome deterrent. There are currently over 100 Irish soldiers patrolling the Area of Separation between the Golan Heights and Syria as part of Ireland’s foreign peacekeeping missions.
I’m sure there are a few Syrian lads sitting in a bunker right now debating which poses a more daunting confrontation; the entire military industrial complex of Israel secured on the high ground, or a hundred plus Irish lads sunburnt to bits, still seething over Ireland’s quarter-final loss in the Rugby World Cup. I’m not sure about you, but I know who I’d prefer not to bump into.
Lebanon and Hezbollah
The Hezbollah, or the Hezbollox as I prefer to call them, are a paramilitary group under the guise of a political party. Think the Lebanese version of Sinn Féin and the the IRA . As big and scary as these lads seem, the organisation’s structure, with its tentacles spread across the political sphere, is susceptible to intelligence infiltration by the West, including Israel. The Hezbollox are certainly a threat. But luckily, the fact that the lads live along the Mediterranean coast is their Achilles heel. There is now the most advanced and capable naval force in the history of mankind, in the form of two US aircraft-carrier strike groups, sitting off the coast watching, listening and monitoring every movement in-land.
Whatever the Hezbollox are planning, they only have to pause and listen to the faint chant of “USA USA USA!!” and look to the horizon to see one godly-powerful reason to think again.
Jordan
This country is effectively a satellite state of Israel. The majority of Jordan’s development hugs the Western side of their country along their Israeli border, with Jordan depending on Israel for a large amount of economic support. And while Jordan has a limited amount of dependency on Israel in terms of trade exports, standing at 2.85%. of their total, Jordan is over-exposed to the US at 26%. This concentration risk to the US, who are staunch allies of Israel, will quieten anything from this direction for fear of upsetting the status quo. Not to mention facing Western sanctions could cripple their economy.
Egypt
While the relationship between Israel and Egypt certainly has a coloured history, as of late the two countries have enjoyed somewhat hospitable relations. More importantly, focusing on the population density map of Egypt, the entire region to the east of the Suez Canal up the Israeli border is sparsely populated. This means the power centre of Egypt is considerably removed from the trouble. The Egyptian leadership will be more worried about trouble spilling over onto their side of the fence from Gaza than Israel is worried about something coming from the opposite direction.
Iran
If you ask me, the smell of who supplied-Hamas-with-the-support-to-carry-out-an-attack-on-such-a-scale stinks of Iran. In recent months, Israel and Saudi Arabia were chipping away at a normalisation process between themselves, which Iran hated like the devil hates holy water.
The fact that Saudi Arabia refuses to recognise the existence of the sovereign Israeli state shows just how significant a step this would be. Partnering the Middle East’s economically most powerful oil-state with the region’s most technologically advanced / Western-aligned state would create a united front against Iran that would be oh too much to stomach for the lads in Tehran. If such a bromance was to be formed, it would likely cause the smaller states such as Qatar and Oman to jump into the same bed with the Israelis and Saudis to align their security concerns.
With the Iranians being Shia Muslim, and the majority of the rest of the Middle East being Sunni Muslim, this religious divide is stacked against Iran. With all these developments occurring in recent months, I’m sure there were many lads in the internal government in Tehran having a few restless nights pondering how to disrupt it.
However this is where things get complicated, Hamas being Sunni Muslim, means they are on the other side of the religious fence to the Iranians themselves. Whatever support (weapons sales) the Iranians did with Hamas under wraps pre-attack, I’m sure was justified by the Iranians as “business is business”.
Now that Hamas carried out such an atrocity and in doing so took a few US citizens as hostages, shit has clearly hit the fan. The US has now deployed two aircraft-carrier strike groups to the region to keep a close eye on proceedings, so shit has clearly decimated the fan. With said fan now completely caked, I wouldn’t count on Iran’s continuing support for Hamas. It may be that Iran could have pushed through some quick sales to Hamas, setting them up for failure and are now moonwalking away from the situation.
However I wouldn’t be too quick to condemn the Iranians. The flipside of this coin is, if Iran had established contact and trust with Hamas pre-attack, this means they are aware of the main point of contacts within Hamas to re-contact and de-escalate the situation and potentially get the hostages safely home.
How ironic would it be that the deterioration of US-Iran relations began with the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and comes full circle to 2023 with Iran helping the US with their hostages taken by Hamas? Stranger things have happened in this world, so never say never baby.
Hamas
We should not view Hamas as a singular unified group. Irish people should know better, considering our experience with the many factions within and splintering of the IRA. This is where things get really messy. There was clearly a huge amount of coordination among the factions to prepare and execute such an attack. But as Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. When Israel ramps up their ground invasion (mouth-punching), making things a lot tougher for Hamas, expect to see splintering and chaos.
As Israel looks set to destroy all of Hamas and its many factions, as they progress through this eradication, they will be faced with an ever changing opponent. On any given day, in any location, there will be a different voice and mindset standing as their opponent. This means the tactics, skills, resources and levels of violence the Israeli soldiers will face each day will be different.
To further complicate proceedings, the theatre of warfare the Israelis face is the deadliest of them all; underground.
Gaza is a tiny place – it’s length is about the same length of a marathon run at just over 40km long and its width only about 10km wide. To overcome this disadvantage, Hamas have built a sprawling network of tunnels that are estimated to be over 500km long. Considering this is well beyond the length of the island of Ireland, with potential dead-ends and booby-traps at every corner, the process of clearing this out will not take weeks or months, but years.
Unfortunately for the technologically advanced Israelis, drones and other tech we have seen turn the tides in recent wars such as Ukraine count for little here. The advantage lies with the Hamas hermits living in their underground tunnel metropolis.
This is a politically and religiously charged situation with many strong views polarizing developments. Be careful who’s “side” you are on or who you condemn, because nobody is coming out of this situation looking good.. Especially the terrorists that rocked up to the Israeli music festival and murdered hundreds, those lads are a shower of bastards, so fuck them.
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