The Hamas Apocalypse has crafted a New World Order

The start of the summer had been filled with hope. Burnley had just beaten Liverpool in the FA Cup final, thanks to a goal by England international Bert Freeman.

The weather was gorgeous, noted the poet Alice Meynell, with moon after moon “heavenly sweet” as the “silken harvest climbed the down”.

Abroad too, things looked peaceful, as one senior diplomat observed. “I have not seen such calm waters since I have been at the Foreign Office,” wrote Sir Arthur Nicolson, until recently ambassador to Russia, and now permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs. It was May 1914. 

Within a few weeks, the idyllic days and calm waters had vanished following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The decisions made in the weeks that followed changed the world forever: soon, all of Europe was at war, spilling over into Asia and Africa not long after.

Within four years, millions were dead, with many more wounded; Russia was gripped by revolution and a spiral towards Communist authoritarianism; the curtain had been brought down on the age of European empires, even if for some – like the British – flickered on briefly. No one saw it coming.

No one saw the attacks on Israel coming last weekend either. Just over two weeks ago, Jake Sullivan, the US national security advisor, had talked with optimism about the changes in the Middle East and about his hopes – shared by many in the region – of stability and continuing integration.

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” he said at the Atlantic Festival on 29 September.

Eight days later, Hamas began an attack that resulted in the deaths of more Jews than on any day since the Holocaust. The horrors of those scenes are almost impossible to describe, from the festival-goers mown down in cold blood to the taking of hostages, many of whom are women, children and elderly.

Their lives are now likely to be traded or lost as Israel’s response to this crisis escalates.

The retaliatory measures being taken to hunt down those responsible are themselves haunting to watch, with multi-storey buildings crumbling after being flattened by missile strikes and detonations.

The siege and bombardment of Gaza by Israel’s military forces has now been followed by the order for more than a million people living north of Wadi Gaza to evacuate to the south.

How the young, the elderly or infirm are supposed to do so, or where they are to go or stay, what they are to eat and drink and how they are to remain safe is not clear. 

All are to be forced into one half of what is already one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Borders with Egypt are closed, with the Egyptian government thus far refusing to open up corridors to allow civilians to leave.

Hamas has called for people to stay put and “to remain steadfast in your homes and stand firm”. Many fear what the coming hours, days and weeks will bring. We are watching a humanitarian catastrophe in the making.

For now, many believe that the disasters will be borne only by the populations of Israel and Gaza. But there are already signs of escalation. Some US intelligence officials had initially linked Iran with the attacks, with Sullivan claiming that “Iran is complicit in this attack in a broad sense because they have provided the lion’s share of the funding for the military wing of Hamas, they have provided training, they have provided capabilities, they have provided support, and they have had engagement and contact with Hamas over years and years”.

That assessment has shifted in the past two days, with multiple sources now seeming to indicate that Hamas’s attack took the Iranian military, security and political leadership by surprise.

If Tehran was not directly involved then, it is spoiling for a fight now. Israel’s actions against Palestinians represent “war crimes”, announced Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, following a visit to Lebanon yesterday.

Israel’s actions and ultimatum in Gaza, he said, would “undoubtedly trigger a collective response from the resistance axis”. This was obviously intended to mean that Iran’s primary client in the region, Hezbollah, would wade in.

Naim Qassem, deputy leader of Hizbollah, made clear that he and his organisation would have no truck with calls for restraint. “The behind-the-scenes calls with us by great powers, Arab countries, envoys of the United Nations, directly and indirectly telling us not to interfere will have no effect,” he told supporters at a rally in southern Beirut. It is a question of when rather than if, that Hezbollah will engage. So much for peace and quiet in the Middle East.

The fact that we are facing the most serious crisis in the region since the Yom Kippur War – whose 50th anniversary fell last weekend – is itself a surprise, for there had been many signs of progress and peace, as Sullivan had rightly suggested.

The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, had normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Just last month, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman had given a rare interview in which he had suggested that Saudi Arabian recognition of Israel was “getting closer every day” – pending the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

“For us, the Palestinian issue is very important,” he said. “We need to solve that part. We hope that it will reach a place that it will ease the life of the Palestinians and get Israel as a player in the Middle East.”

The prospects of a realignment of the Middle East, of a two-state solution or of accommodation with Israel now no longer seem so much distant as inconceivable. The attack on Israel will have serious ramifications, whose significance is hard to understate.

For one thing, the shock felt by Israelis at the failure of the intelligence services to identify the threat and of the poorly coordinated performance of the military to counter it rapidly will reshape an already fragile political landscape in the country. 

If reports are correct that Egyptian intelligence had warned its Israeli counterparts of an imminent attack three days earlier, then serious questions need to be asked not only about why this alert was not taken more seriously, but also about the direction of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and the potential distraction posed by proposed reforms which have sparked what some analysts have called “the most serious constitutional and political crisis since [Israel’s] establishment 75 years ago”.

The shockwaves will fan out considerably further. The response by some was predictable. The Saudi Foreign Ministry put out a statement that did not mention the violence that saw festival-goers and families brutally murdered last weekend, instead noting that it had given “repeated warnings of the dangers of the explosion of the situation as a result of the continued occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, and the repetition of systematic provocations against its sanctities”

It was hardly surprising, in other words, that some would seek to take matters into their own hands to draw attention to the problem and to galvanise support. 

It may not be a surprise that Saudi would choose to push its potentially ground-breaking prospective links with Israel to one side and to show solidarity to Palestinians when faced with a crisis.

The decisions made by others further afield are more striking. The initial response of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing also said nothing about the deaths of 1,200 people in Israel, simply noting its concern “over the current escalation of tensions”, and calling “on relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint and immediately end the hostilities to protect civilians and avoid further deterioration of the situation”. 

The most appropriate course of action, noted the ministry, lay in “implementing the two-state solution and establishing an independent state of Palestine”.

This equivocal response was criticised sharply by Yuval Waks, a senior diplomat based at the Israeli mission in China. Israel expected “stronger condemnation” of Hamas and its actions, he noted, going on to say that “when people are being murdered [and] slaughtered in the streets”, it was hardly “the time to call for a two-state solution”.

While Mao Ning, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, was more forthright in her condemnation the next day, China watchers have been quick to spot that Beijing’s reference to a two-state solution is a move from its usual position of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs; moreover, given China’s long-standing and important trade connections with Israel, not least in the defence and hi-tech sectors, the shying away from a show of public support in the face of the traumas of last weekend has been interpreted as an indication of the significance of the Arab world and the oil-producing Gulf States in particular in Chinese strategic and economic thinking. 

If Beijing is seeing the developments of the past week through the lens of a new world that is taking shape, then the same is the case for Moscow – that has its own interests in the diffusion of disruption both regionally and beyond.

While there is no evidence at all of any Russian involvement in the events of the past week nor of support for Hamas and its activities, Russia has over the past decade been heavily involved in Syria, and more recently building ties with Iran, not least to secure supplies of drones to use in Ukraine. 

Nor has Vladimir Putin missed the opportunity to point the finger at what the Russian president claims was the cause for the attacks of last weekend. These, he said, did not stem from Israel’s oppression of Palestinians or of Hamas’s iron grip on Gaza and its desire to create chaos; rather, “this is a vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East”.

That provides a narrative that will fall on fertile ground in many parts of the world at a time of political and economic fragmentation. For Putin, the crisis in the Middle East comes at an opportune time not only in terms of distracting from the war in Ukraine and of blaming the West for the sins of others, but also because of another side effect of the events of the past seven days.

Perhaps the most significant of these is the reinforcement of ideas held in many countries around the world, but especially in Europe and the US, that the world is in transition, that we are entering or already in an age of darkness, that threats lie around every corner – from the effects of new technologies to the worries about climate change, from concerns about mass migration to those about the polarisation of political life.

One rational way to deal with such pressures is to turn away from them: so one likely effect of the suffering of so many Israelis and Palestininas will be the push towards growing isolationism – something which will bring as many problems as it solves.

As Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, has put it so presciently, we are “living in the decade of living dangerously”. Rudd was writing in 2021 about the context of rivalry between the US and China.

But the model applies to a whole new set of rivalries that have since intensified: not only ones between geopolitical blocs, such as the West on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other; but also new alliances, whether illusory or otherwise such as the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, which will expand in January to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Argentina.

As the events of the summer of 1914 unfolded, great powers, empires even, gambled on their ability to make good decisions, rather than rash ones.

As the vengeance for the horrors of the previous weekend takes centre stage in the coming days and likely intensifies with tragic consequences, we need to be mindful of some of the very worst lessons of history and to make sure they are not repeated.

Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at the University of Oxford