Is this the change in the wind that the Israel-Gaza crisis demands?

The British have an idiom – “It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good” – which is our way of describing a not-unfamiliar universal circumstance, when a benefit can be discerned in even the very worst of circumstances.

October 7, 2023, and the aftermath that is still being lived through, is an unlikely candidate for the idiom. After 12 months of misery, violence and death on a medieval scale, it is hard for any positive analysis to surface. But, as I wrote in The National a year ago, I still believe there is one to which to cling – that this is the Arab moment, the regional moment, to ensure that what we are witnessing must be the last time that victims suffer the consequences of the failures of the past.

The year has fulfilled the fears that many were expressing within hours of the shocking and brutal Hamas attacks. A reprisal from Israel was certain, and history suggested it would be unconstrained. So it has been. Gaza has been levelled, and Hamas severely reduced, but not extinguished.

Israeli military targets have been hit, but the consequential damage to the innocent as well has been high, with the reported deaths of almost 42,000 and plenty of evidence to suggest that, once the rubble is cleared, there could be double that number. Hostages remain – the only ones to emerge were mostly recovered through negotiation, or their bodies were released, some after cruel recent murder.

This is the Arab moment to ensure that this is the last time we witness victims suffer the consequences of the failures of the past

As most predicted, there was no military victory to conclude the agony, no clear pathway to peace or the restoration of anything like normal life for all who have been displaced in Gaza and Israel. And now the feared escalation is upon us. Israel’s identification of Hezbollah facilities, rocket bases and strongholds in southern Lebanon may have been anticipated. So perhaps also the strikes on the Beirut suburbs, but the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and the pager attacks not at all.

That one day Iran would also become a focus – through a combination of its support for those physically engaged with Israel, and its response to direct Israeli attacks upon it and its military leaders – is now upon us. The next stage in the dangerous scenes we are seeing unfold is the response of each to the attacks upon each other. We are all prisoners of those over whom most of us have no say.

While blood is hot, the cooling balm of diplomacy has little chance to begin the healing process. No one has been listening to the pleas from the UN for a “sustained ceasefire” in Gaza, or to US President Joe Biden’s “three-stage plan” for deconfliction and moving forward.

Rarely have so many dire predictions come to pass. But there were others.

At least 26 killed after Israel bombs Gaza mosque sheltering displaced

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Within a week of October 7 last year, I wrote the following in this paper: “But the new Middle East depends on peace and stability. Without finally resolving the cause of conflict at its heart, we must know that sooner or later violence will engulf us. The recent regional diplomacy [of reaching out from Arab states to Iran, and of the Abraham Accords] was designed to prevent that cataclysmic possibility. Now is surely time for the final step.

“To escape the failures of the past, such efforts must be led by the region itself, supported by the international community – not the other way around. There can be no more patch-ups, until the next round of violent exchanges. This is the moment for Arab and the Gulf leadership, and it must be seized.”

The formation of the Global Alliance to Implement a Two-State Solution, announced by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan at the UN last month, might just be that change in the wind that the crisis demands.

Supported by an alliance of Arab and Islamic states, and by the EU and the UN, Prince Faisal made clear his belief that a permanent resolution to the current conflict, and preventing the repeated re-kindling of it, was only through the establishment of a Palestinian state. Coupled with the recent declaration by UAE Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, whose country has ties with Israel through the Abraham Accords – that the UAE will not support post-war efforts in Gaza without the establishment of a Palestinian state – they demonstrate unmistakably that the time for the marginalisation of the issue by too many is over.

One of the fears of the past year was that the cause for self-determination for the Palestinian people, propagated not by violence but by diplomacy and advocacy, would be a victim of the conflict, squeezed between terror and reprisal, unable to voice itself because of the acute polarisation the situation had produced.

The leadership of the new alliance also seems to indicate that the failures of the past, a dependency for advancement on those outside the region, should now be overcome by the region asserting its primary position. The consequences of failure have fallen most heavily upon their people.

After so much, this must not fail. The safety and security of their people, the primary responsibility of a state, has been jeopardised by decades of failure to resolve this issue, as Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi forcefully expressed. Attempts to resolve it physically, or by denying fundamentals such as Israel’s existence and Palestinian statehood have brought us to where we are. Everyone involved knows what has failed in the past, and the points at which people turned away from each other and gave up. And every grieving family counts the cost of that turning away.

If there is to be an alternative to the catastrophe we are witnessing, it must start with people talking above the clamour of war and must include all. We should look forward to the progress of the new alliance and the inclusion of all whose decisions can create the region its people deserve.