The brakes are off
When, on October 7, Hamas chose to make what could have been a daring military act of resistance into a spectacular display of civilian slaughter, it was clear that its plan was to blast open the gates of hell. It wanted its savagery to provoke the strongest possible reaction, calculating that through Israel’s need to impose a new level of deterrence (with its sense of omnipotence now shattered), its government would go to extremes that would alienate the country’s supporters across the world. Also, in Hamas’ brutal logic, the greater the suffering of Palestinian civilians, the greater its own political legitimacy. What the planners of October 7 could not have hoped for was how complicit Israel’s leadership would be in this. Hamas wanted a conflagration, in a bid to force allies and fence-sitters to support it; Netanyahu and other extremists in his Cabinet saw this as an opportunity to break the Palestinian will to resist once and for all. Both sides extort support through uncompromising extremism, through the implication that failure equals their destruction. This weighs heavily on their more reticent allies, who fear an even broader conflict but cannot undermine their capacity to fight.
This clash came at a moment of accelerating global uncertainty. Over the past year, we have seen how this instability feeds the conflict, and how the conflict makes the world more unstable. The US elections, Russia’s war on Ukraine, China’s expanding influence, Europe’s crisis of faith in its Union, all strengthen an anti-Western movement as an alternative to the postwar world order. There isn’t a global center to impose a settlement, to present a “good example.” Instead, the tensions from each conflict fuel the fire of division across the globe, widening rifts between countries, stoking fanaticism among rival groups of citizens. But complicated issues cannot be solved by winner-takes-all mindsets. With global institutions losing credibility, with democratic forces suffering a crisis of confidence, nothing seems capable of stopping the march to further destruction. The only – small – hope is that the evident dangers will wake citizens in each country to the need for at least a minimal level of consensus. In our case, this means managing geopolitical risks, establishing a sense of justice, strengthening Europe, working to assure survival.
