I truly hope this Iran-Israel cease-fire holds and gets extended to Gaza — first and foremost to see an end to all the killing. But second, because I think this war will trigger in its aftermath much-needed debates in Iran, Israel and the Palestinian community.
These debates won’t happen the morning the guns fall silent, when leaders from every country involved will try to claim some sort of victory. But everything in my gut tells me these debates will happen the morning after the morning after — when all the internal politics will start to kick in.
Among Palestinians in Gaza, the question will be asked of their defeated Hamas leaders: “What in the world were you thinking on Oct. 7, 2023? You started a war with Israel, a vastly superior military foe, with no end game other than destruction, which only got the Jews to retaliate with no end game other than destruction. You sacrificed tens of thousands of homes and lives to win the sympathies of the next generation of global youth on TikTok, but now there is no Gaza.”
Among Israelis, the question that will be asked of Israel’s radical religious-nationalist government by the largely secular elements of that society — air force pilots, cyberwarriors, technologists, scientists, weapons designers and Mossad agents, the people who actually defeated Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — is this: “Where do you think you’re taking us? We were the ones who won this war and we will not let you leverage this victory to win the next election and carry out your plan to crush our Supreme Court, annex the West Bank, excuse the ultra-Orthodox from serving in the army and create a pariah Israel that our kids will no longer want to live in. No way.”
And among Iranians, the question that surely will be asked of its clerical leaders and corrupt Revolutionary Guards: “You spent billions of dollars trying to build a nuclear bomb to threaten Israel and remote-control Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. But you brought the war home to our country — our families had to flee Tehran and our generals were killed by Israeli drones in their own beds. All you did was destroy a few buildings and kill some civilians in Israel, and when Donald Trump attacked our three key nuclear facilities, your response was to put on a harmless sound and light show over a U.S. air base in Qatar. You were paper tigers, who only knew how to use technology to repress our own people. Meanwhile, our great Persian civilization is destitute, broken and miles behind the rest of the world.”
It may not happen overnight, but every bone in my body says these discussions are coming. Because we have never had a war like this in the region. That is, a war in which Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Israel are all led by religious nationalists who think God is on their side. A war in which Israel has made Gaza uninhabitable, after being humiliated by Hamas forces that killed more Jews in one day than in any day since the Holocaust. A war in which Israel was able to decapitate and largely destroy Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon and Syria — where the pro-Iranian militia had helped crush the shoots of democracy since the 1980s. A war that saw Iran’s key nuclear facilities bombed by a U.S. president — something the Iranian mullahs never thought would happen.
In short: Everyone went all the way, bursting through psychological and military barriers we never imagined would be breached. If they don’t stop now, or soon, they will all get where they are going: into a forever war — everyone, everywhere, all the time — that will leave nothing and no one unscathed.
For all of these reasons, I’m convinced that some very big internal debates are coming — if the wars really stop.
For autocratic movements like Hamas or countries like Iran, history teaches us that internally driven regime change happens only after the war is over — and without foreign interventions, said the pollster and political scientist Craig Charney. It has to happen organically by a change in the relationship between the leaders there and those they are leading.
“In Serbia in 2000, nationalist president Slobodan Milosevic fell after losing wars in Bosnia and Kosovo when he tried to steal the next election,” Mr. Charney said in an interview. “Iraq’s defeat in the first Gulf War led to a massive revolt against Saddam Hussein that he had to brutally put down. When Argentina’s military junta lost the Falklands War of 1982, it had to allow democracy’s return. And after the Armistice marking Germany’s loss in World War I came the November Revolution that toppled the kaiser. Strongmen don’t look so strong when they’re losers.”
The limited polling we have from Gaza, Mr. Charney added, suggests a backlash against Hamas for the catastrophe people there have experienced. There is no polling yet from Iran since the current conflict began, “but social media chatter was reportedly favorable when it began with strikes against unpopular regime figures — and then became more rally-round-the-flag as civilian casualties have mounted,” Mr. Charney said. Now let’s see what happens if the cease-fire holds.
All I know for sure is this: Israel is the kind of democracy that Iran’s secular educated elite — part of a rich Persian civilizational legacy — hope this war will pave the way for in Tehran. But an Iranian-style theocracy is precisely what Israel’s secular educated warriors, pilots, scientists and cyber experts want to make sure Israel’s victory doesn’t create in Jerusalem — if there are new elections soon and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition tries to ride this war to victory.
As Ari Shavit, an Israeli writer, pointed out to me: The sector of Israeli society that did the most to win the war against Iran “was precisely the same sector that for eight months went out to the streets every Saturday night to prevent Netanyahu’s extreme-right government from destroying Israel’s liberal democracy.”
In 1970, Mr. Shavit noted, the Israeli historian Shabtai Teveth wrote a famous book: “The Cursed Blessing: The Story of Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank.” It basically argued that the unintended consequence of the 1967 war was that it unlocked messianic forces in Israeli society. Once the West Bank, the heart of biblical Israel, was back in Israel’s hands, these forces would never consent to return it and would instead insist on settling. And here it is now — still in Israel’s hands 58 years later — with a soul-draining, democracy-eroding occupation.
What if, as with the unintended consequences of 1967, Mr. Shavit concluded, “we will look back in 20 years and see that this war made Israel more like Iran is today and made Iran more like the Israel that was before. Because the extremists in Israel were able to take the victory delivered by liberal, democratic, scientific and enlightened Israel and turn this nation into a dark place.”
The Palestinian community is also sorely in need of a rethink. The “curse” of the Palestinians is that because their enemy has been the Jews, their plight has always received an inordinate amount of international attention and support that other groups never enjoyed — like the Kurds, who got stuck fighting for a state against Saddam Hussein and Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan. It’s been a curse because all of that attention as victims often blunted the will of many Palestinians to assume more agency and conduct the kind of hard introspection that repeated military defeats should have stimulated.
When students on college campuses all over America are calling to “globalize the intifada,” why bother calling for the return of Salam Fayyad, the most effective nation-building Palestinian leader.
Will this time be different? Will the terrible defeat that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack delivered to Gaza tilt Palestinians to clearly and unambiguously get behind institutional reform of the Palestinian Authority, a demand for professional leadership and support for a demilitarized state along the 1967 lines? I hope so. Will it produce the thing Mr. Netanyahu most wants to avoid the emergence of: a competent, compromising, legitimate Palestinian Authority — i.e., a real partner for peace? Wouldn’t that be ironic.
In sum, this regional war for the players in the Middle East was the equivalent of World War II for Europe: It completely shakes up the status quo and opens the way for something new. Whether that new thing will be better or worse within and between the parties to this war is what will be most fascinating — or depressing — for me to watch.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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