By Fawaz Gerges, Leila Seurat, Jason Burke, Orly Noy and Sanam Vakil
Full Text: One year on from 7 October, our panel considers: what next for the Middle East? in The Gardian
There are so many players and so many imponderables. Truly it is a region on a knife edge
Israel’s year-long war in Gaza (and the accompanying violence perpetrated against Palestinians in the West Bank), and its ever-expanding military campaign against Lebanon, have led to humanitarian catastrophe and the heightened risk of an all-out regional war. But the wider consequences may ultimately be a great rupture in international relations, and the accelerated decline of the US-led international liberal capitalist order that has prevailed since the end of the second world war.
At that time, western states seemingly committed themselves to an international human rights architecture, embodied in the Nuremberg principles, which holds that leaders and the states they govern must be held accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the way that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its military have waged their campaign over the past year, armed and supported by the US, has permanently undermined the notion that all states will be held equally accountable under international law.
Indeed, the slaughter of more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza (conservative estimates place the number of children who have been killed at more than 11,000), the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, and the starvation that has ensued cannot be justified by Hamas’s terrorist attack on 7 October, however horrific it was.
The US’s full-throated defence of Israel’s brutal campaign, consisting of many genocidal acts, has exposed what many in the global south already believed: that international law applies to the global south but not to the US and its allies. That Arab lives and the lives of non-westerners are viewed as lesser in the eyes of those who set up the liberal international order.
If there is not an immediate change in course, the consequences of the growing north-south polarisation will probably have transformative effects on international politics for generations. It will also further accelerate the decline of the US’s global influence, and empower China and Russia, which have been challenging the rules-based international order. It may also lead, as the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has warned, to “an epidemic of impunity around the world”.
The stakes are very high. No order so morally bankrupt and evidently hypocritical can sustain itself for long. The best defence is to ensure that all abide by common principles. If the US does not demand an immediate ceasefire and halt Israel’s escalations, this period may be remembered as the rupture that ended the US-led order that promised peace and universal values, but delivered anything but.
