Navigating the wars in Ukraine and Gaza has brought the political theory of realism to the fore, becoming a sudden mainstay of popular and journalistic analysis. More than anyone, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, the doyen of American realism, has been catapulted into the position of a global intellectual, consulted widely for both his told-you-so’s and his predictions. But on Gaza he demurs: the circumstances there, he argues, are so far from the conventional inter-state war we see in Ukraine that realism has little traction for analysing Israel’s offensive.
Other adherents of his thought have not followed him. Writing recently for UnHerd, Thomas Fazi claimed that the arguments of realism actually fit the war in Gaza very well. He argues that just as any realist appraisal of the Russian invasion of Ukraine must acknowledge the role of Nato expansion, so too an explanation of this war needs to be as rooted in the regime imposed by Israel on the Gaza strip as in the horrors of the Hamas atrocities last year.
Yet a realist appraisal of any war has to go further than an inductive analysis of its immediate causes to also consider the political character of its protagonists. One of the basic distinguishing features of realism is its focus on state power and the ruthless means by which states secure themselves, leading to the recurrence of violent conflict. And in this war, there is only one state to speak of — the Israeli one. Prior to October 7, the dependence of the Hamas authorities on the Israeli state was so extreme that the strip could be characterised as a de facto devolved province of Israel itself, with Hamas expanding to fill the vacuum left by the Israeli military and settler withdrawal in 2005. And as is now well-established and increasingly recognised, Israel has propped up Hamas ever since as a deliberate strategy for dividing the Palestinians of Gaza from those in the West Bank under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
A realist analysis should recognise this Israeli domination over Gaza, but the weight of its analysis should fall on the permissive cause of Israeli policy: the fact of Palestinian national defeat. For if realism is to carry any meaning whatsoever, it must surely include a lucid registration of historic defeats and victories, both political and military. There is one unavoidable fact in the history of this conflict that matters more than Israel’s crude strategies of divide-and-rule, and that is the fact that the Palestinians’ leaders effectively surrendered to Israel many years ago, at the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993.
Oslo was, in Edward Said’s ruthlessly incisive appraisal at the time, nothing short of a “Palestinian Versailles”. In accepting the two-state solution, Said argued, the Palestinian leadership renounced the entirety of Palestine’s national claims, accepting the substitution of municipal for national aspirations, with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) reduced to the role of policing Palestinians on behalf of Israel. The defeat of the secular Arab nationalism of the PLO would create the void that groups such as Hamas now occupy. But the rise of Islamist factions in Palestinian politics also traces a wider arc in Arab politics that began with Israel’s victory over all the leading Arab states of the era in the 1967 Six Day War. Since then, Islamic conservatism has come to substitute for Arab nationalism as the dominant force in Middle Eastern politics, whether backed by Iran on the one side (Hezbollah and Hamas) or Saudi Arabia on the other (the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and Isis).
For Hamas as for other Islamists, the ultimate referent object of politics is the overarching transnational community of believers, the ummah. For them, secular nation-states are provisional makeshifts at best, if not simply idolatrous substitutes for righteous rule. This is significant because as long as there is no agency that can legitimately claim to represent the Palestinian nation, their aspiration to independence remains a defunct and meaningless proposition. Over the years, regional experts have made much of the idea of a so-called “hudna”, a religious notion of ceasefire that some academics take as evidence for Hamas’s willingness to subordinate their religious ideals in favour of accepting secular rule and accommodation with Israel (at least in the short term). But given the fact that Hamas only exists in the ruins of Palestinian national independence, it makes little odds for the future of the Palestinian people, whatever term of Islamic jurisprudence one chooses to drape over Hamas’ thuggish theocracy or the iron fist of Israeli oppression.
Since the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in 1993, there has been no meaningful political agency in the conflict or the region except that of the Israeli state. Any political claim in this conflict that does not begin from this reality will inevitably find itself remoulded around the hard fact not only of Israeli military might but also the fact that the Jewish state is the only real political force in the Palestinian territories. And this is why analysts who otherwise draw from realism end up echoing so many of the liberal humanitarian claims around Gaza — whether describing the Israeli assault as a genocide, or boosting the claims of the International Court of Justice in its recent interim ruling.
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