In the Middle East, putting out burning fires is a priority. Larger positive accomplishments are impossible as long as the bloodshed continues. However, avoiding the endless igniting and reigniting of more fires requires serious examination and recognition of the underlying combustible material, which is all too rare. It has long been observed and is still true that the regional policy of Israel—the country generating most of the flames—appears to be “all tactics and no strategy.” Something similar could be said about U.S. policy, notwithstanding the good intentions of its hitherto unsuccessful efforts to get a ceasefire.

The Middle East is a complicated place with many conflicts and rivalries, some of which intersect and overlap. The first thing to guard against in any discussion of underlying causes of the region’s instability is the all-too-common tendency to oversimplify and attribute all its troubles to a single cause.

But careful reflection about even just the current fires, let alone all the past ones, points to one factor that, more than any other, underlies the region’s violence and instability. That factor is the continued subjugation by Israel of Palestinians, the denial of national self-determination, and the occupation, blockades, and impairment of daily living that have gone with that denial.

The connection is most obvious regarding the horrors that have unfolded in the Gaza Strip during the past year, with suffering that includes tens of thousands of deaths. An earlier dismantling of some Israeli settlements left Israel in control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, and sea lanes, which it used to sustain a suffocating blockade that turned the Strip into the world’s largest open-air prison. A natural human imperative is to strike back at those responsible for imposing such conditions. Amid miserable circumstances, people feel they have little or nothing to lose by attempting to strike back.

The other fronts in what today has become multifront warfare in the Middle East stem from the oppression of the Palestinians. The Houthi regime in Yemen began its attacks on shipping in the Red Sea as a show of support for the beleaguered Palestinians of Gaza, leading the United States to intervene by bombing targets in Yemen. Without the dire situation in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis would have had no reason to attack Red Sea shipping, and they have made clear that their attacks will end when Israel’s carnage in Gaza ends.

The intense Israeli assault on Lebanon also grew directly out of the situation in the Gaza Strip and thus is another by-product of the subjugation of the Palestinians. Like the Houthis, Lebanese Hezbollah started firing rounds into Israel out of solidarity with the Gazans. This was probably the least that Hezbollah’s leaders figured they could do lest they seem indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians. Hezbollah, aware of the costs it incurred in the last previous full-scale war with Israel in 2006, did not want another war with Israel in 2024. Before Israel escalated this year to another major attack on Lebanon, Hezbollah, similarly to the Houthis, linked the cessation of firing along the Lebanon-Israel border to a needed ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

It is the political situation involving repression of the Palestinians that is the prime mover of the instability and violence—not the existence, nature, or objectives of any group or combination of groups that Israel considers its enemies. The groups in question have responded to the policies of Israel much more than to its mere existence. The origin, rapid growth, and popularity of Hezbollah in the early 1980s owed much to its role as the self-declared defender of Lebanese against an Israeli invasion of the country in 1982. 

That invasion, like the current one, also had a direct tie back to the subjugation of the Palestinians. The principal Israeli objective in 1982 was to deal a heavy blow to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which at the time was resident in Lebanon. If there were no occupation of Palestinian land in need of liberation, there would have been no role for a Palestine Liberation Organization.

Similarly, Hamas is not the prime mover of Palestinian violence against Israel, as demonstrated by the violent resistance conducted by an alphabet soup of Palestinian groups beginning in the late 1960s, long before Hamas was founded in 1987. Hamas owes much of its later growth and popularity to the widespread perception among Palestinians that the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority has been a feckless auxiliary to the Israel occupation rather than an effective opponent of it. 

Another way in which Hamas owed some of its strength to the Israeli policy of preventing Palestinian self-determination was through Qatari financial support that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu facilitated. For Netanyahu, propping up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority helped to keep Palestinian leadership divided and enabled Israeli leaders to keep asserting that they have “no partner” with whom to negotiate peace.

Then there is Iran, which is frequently and erroneously identified—by those promoting a monocausal explanation of the Middle East’s troubles—as the “real problem” in the region. Current tensions involving Tehran, in the wake of an Israeli aerial attack on Iran following Iranian retaliation for earlier Israeli attacks, again link back to the Palestinian problem. The most recent Iranian retaliation was for Israeli attacks that killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh while visiting Tehran and that killed Iran’s ally, Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah. The killing of Nasrallah was part of the current Israeli offensive in Lebanon, which, as noted above, grew out of the Israeli-inflicted carnage in the Gaza Strip, which in turn is an outgrowth of the occupation and Gaza’s status as an open-air prison.

Iran’s regional policies, and specifically its policies toward Israel, have been largely reactive. To the extent that Iranian antipathy toward Israel is based on more than a response to Israel’s attacks on Iranian interests—and the constant and intensely expressed Israeli animosity toward Iran—the Palestinian issue is again central. The Iranian regime speaks out on that issue partly out of genuine sympathy for the beleaguered Palestinians but mostly as a way of cultivating influence with Arab populations, among whom the Palestinian issue still has much resonance.

Although the Iranian regime has voiced some extreme rhetoric on the subject that appears to reject any two-state solution, it would have no reason to keep talking up the issue if a settlement were reached that gave Palestinians self-determination. It instead would have good reason to decide that whatever was good enough for the Palestinians was good enough for Tehran—especially given how the salience of the issue among most Arabs would quickly fade if the Palestinians finally got their own state.

If one takes away the Palestinian issue and takes away the Israeli attacks that compel an Iranian response, Iran has little reason to reject a stable relationship with Israel. There would still be obvious ideological differences, but since the first several years after the Iranian revolution, Tehran’s regional policies have been driven much more by pragmatic geopolitics than by ideology. Iran, like Israel and Turkey, is a non-Arab state operating in a predominantly Arab region. Geopolitical considerations have led Iran in the past to find some common cause with Israel not only when the shah was in power but also under the Islamic Republic when William Casey manipulated the hostage crisis to win the 1980 presidential election for Ronald Reagan. There was also the Iran-Contra affair, in which Israel played a significant part.

A Less Violent Middle East

Consider an alternate history in which Palestinians did get their own state, either soon after the Jews in Palestine got theirs in 1948 or after a relinquishing of Palestinian territory that Israel conquered in the war that it initiated in 1967. There still would be many rivalries and other sources of instability in the Middle East that are not rooted in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. There still would have been, for example, sectarian and tribal fissures in Yemen that would attract intervention from the likes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There probably still would have been the reckless expansionism of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There still would be rivalries involving the Muslim Brotherhood and authoritarian Arab regimes that have underlain political instability in Egypt and the Gulf. There also would be small extremist elements that would reject the existence of Israel, viewing it as a manifestation of Western colonialism.

Yet, in other respects, this alternate Middle East would be a much different and far less violent place than the actual Middle East of the past several decades. The violence that has been committed in pursuit of Palestinian self-determination would not occur if self-determination had already been achieved. The far greater Israeli violence in pursuit of keeping Palestinians subjugated would not occur if Israel were no longer subjugating the Palestinians.

The energies of Palestinian political elites would be focused on competing for power in their own state. Palestinians with real power would not be the object of disdain that the feckless Palestinian Authority has become, and there would not be the motivation to resort to violent alternatives to that fecklessness. 

Hamas, which grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, would not exist in the violent form we know today. Still, there would be a Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood that would compete for political power the way the branches of the Brotherhood in Tunisia and Jordan (and Egypt before Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s coup) compete for power in their countries. Even the Hamas we know has shown, when given a chance, its willingness and ability to compete successfully at the ballot box rather than with guns.

Palestinian leaders, whatever their ideological coloration, would have much to lose in this alternate Middle East universe if they were to turn toward violence against Israel, in stark contrast to the desperate, nothing-to-lose nature of much Palestinian existence today. U.S.-backed Israel still would be the most militarily powerful country in the region, capable of crushing any small Palestinian state that had gone rogue. The risk of losing their much-sought state would deter its citizens and leaders from any thought of going rogue.

Terrorism in this alternative Middle East would be significantly less than what the region has actually known, given how large a share of terrorism involving the Middle East has been driven by frustrated Palestinian nationalism. The situation in the alternate Middle East would be analogous to Irish nationalist terrorism after a peace agreement was reached in which the main nationalist movement Sinn Fein became part of a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland and its militant wing, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, laid down its arms. Terrorism subsequently perpetrated by fringe extremist groups that rejected the peace agreement has been a small fraction of the violence that was occurring when the PIRA was still active.

In the alternate Middle East, the multiple wars in Gaza, including the devastating one that is ongoing, would not have been fought. Nor would the multiple wars involving Israel and Lebanon have occurred since each one derived from Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Differences between Israel and Lebanon would be limited to negotiable matters such as where to draw the boundary line in a Mediterranean gas field. 

As for what relations between Israel and other Arab states would be like in the alternative Middle East, one does not need to speculate. The Arab League peace initiative was adopted by all Arab states twenty-two years ago, has been repeatedly reaffirmed, and is still on the table. The initiative offers full normalization between the Arab world and Israel provided that Israel withdraws from the occupied territories—with the possibility of land swaps—provides for a “just settlement” of the Palestinian refugee problem and allows the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab neighbors are not out to destroy Israel. They are out to end the subjugation of their Palestinian brethren.

The Need to Work on the Issue

Of course, political leaders have to deal with reality, not with an imaginary alternative universe. Part of the current reality is a decades-long Israeli project of building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, which has made the establishment of a Palestinian state more difficult than it would have been earlier. Some observers believe that it already has made a two-state solution impossible and that the realization of human and political rights for Palestinians can now be achieved only within a single state shared with Jewish Israelis. A successful one-state solution would confer all or nearly all of the benefits of the alternate Middle East described above.

Whether a two-state solution is still possible and whether a one-state solution could be devised that would satisfy the national aspirations of both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is uncertain. However, those are questions that need to be actively and openly discussed, including by the U.S. government, with enough energy to drive toward the implementation of a solution. This means doing much more than ritually saying “two-state solution” as diplomatic boilerplate while doing nothing with U.S.-Israeli relations to bring any kind of solution closer to fruition.

What is most certain is that the Middle East will continue to be a violent place, with periodic paroxysms like it is undergoing now, as long as the subjugation of the Palestinians continues.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

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