It seems cold or even cynical to suggest that some people might be benefiting from the barbarism unfolding in Israel and Gaza, but as Clausewitz reminds us, war is the continuation of politics by other means — and as is always the case where politicians are involved, we must try to keep asking: who benefits from this?
Some beneficiaries are clear. Religious fundamentalists, whether jihadists like Hamas or ultraorthodox, ultranationalist Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, now have ample, bloody evidence that the other side wants to commit genocide on it, and must therefore redouble its efforts to drive its would-be killers off land given to it by its god.
Benjamin Netanyahu, likewise, has been handed a political lifeline. Before Hamas’s attack, he was a deeply unpopular prime minister, dodging charges of corruption and facing a revolt from the judiciary and military. Today, he is a wartime leader, forging a government of national unity and cosplaying Churchillian strength and resolve.
The largest beneficiaries aren’t in either Israel or the tunnels under Gaza but in Washington and Tehran
It’s been a radical — and for Netanyahu almost miraculous — turnaround. No wonder the conspiracy theories are already mushrooming, darkly hinting that the failure of Israel’s famously sophisticated security state to detect and then react to Hamas’s attack was by design rather than accident.
The largest beneficiaries, however, aren’t in either Israel or the tunnels under Gaza but in Washington and Tehran.
It is no secret that Israel and Hamas are involved in a proxy war, but it’s been surprising just how explicit the US has been about it lately, and how transparent.
Earlier this week, senior Republican figure Lindsey Graham announced that escalation in violence between Hamas and Israel proved that it was time for — checks insane notes — the US to bomb Iranian oil infrastructure.
Admittedly, it sounded like a strangely anachronistic war-cry, harking back to the early 2000s when both Republicans and Democrats united around faked evidence of weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq. The GOP of 2023 is now fervently isolationist, calling for an end to US involvement in foreign wars, while the Democrats know that their left-leaning base doesn’t want to repeat the Iraq abomination.
Still, Graham’s sabre-rattling has clear benefits for his party, making Joe Biden look weak on Iran slightly more than a year away from an election in which Donald Trump will no doubt do his usual shtick, pledging no more international wars while simultaneously threatening to rain hellfire down on Tehran.
On the other side, Iran’s strategy was equally clear. The “normalising” of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel is an existential threat to the ayatollahs, as Iran faces being slowly isolated as one Arab neighbour after another is lured away into the arms of the Great Satan by the irresistible prospect of being able to buy American and Israeli weapons.
By funding and perhaps even helping plan Hamas’s murder spree, Iran was hoping to provoke exactly the kind of heavy-handed response we are seeing from Israel, a response broadcast into every Arab home in the region, and one that might (Iran hopes) make Saudi slow down its glasnost or even reverse it.
Below this great, brutal game played by cruel, rich men, however, there are ordinary people. And right now, millions of us are being encouraged to join their fight, to speak in moral, political and religious absolutes, and to declare that what this side or that side claims is absolutely, unerringly true.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a position. But if you can sift through the history of 2,000 years ago, when Rome ruled Judea, or of 1,300 years ago, when Islamic caliphates swept west to conquer the Holy Land, or of 800 years ago, when crusaders fought to take the region for Christianity, while Europeans launched into centuries of astonishingly bloody persecution of Jews, or of 100 years ago, when those same Europeans carved up the region between themselves, or of 80 years ago, when Hitler showed Jews what would happen if they didn’t have a heavily armed homeland, or of 76 years ago, when their determination to have that homeland unleashed the Nakba on the Palestinians, or of 35 years ago, when Hamas was founded on explicitly anti-Semitic and genocidal principles, or you can look at the last 10 years of relentless harassment and dispossession of Palestinians by Israel, and you can find one party to be guilty and the other innocent, then you’ve done more than I can.
I don’t know how this gets solved, because very few people do. All I can do is watch the world’s oldest wound start to bleed again, and to ask, so that we might know bad men when we see them: who benefits from the blood?
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