The past should not hold the present hostage

Brutal days ahead

The current conflict has many brutal days — perhaps indeed weeks and months — to run. It started with a level of performative cruelty deliberately broadcast on social media that we had come to associate with IS, not Hamas. 

And Israel will now seek a terrible retribution. Hamas know this. They do not care. They will hope to instrumentalise the violence – as they did in 1994/6 – and finally to displace Fatah, by focusing on Al Aqsa to gain wider sympathy and support in the Islamic world, to widen internal political divisions in Israel and to prevent any further talk of Arab normalisation.

In doing so, they serve the interests not of Palestinians but of Iran.

Already in Israel, comparisons are being made to the failure of the national security establishment 50 years ago to interpret properly the clear signs, indeed the explicit warnings, that war was coming: this meant the whole conceptual framework – the konzeptzia in Hebrew — within which they formulated policy, that neither Egypt nor any other Arab state would dare attack, had been false.

Today, we face another reckoning with the assumptions that many people have made about Hamas, probably Hezbollah, certainly Iran and perhaps the entire region.

Historical context

And at the heart of this is Saudi Arabia.

Since 2015, the Kingdom has come to stand for what Shimon Peres once called "The New Middle East".  It has been an exciting and sometimes troubling time.

In light of this current savagery, is that perception real or an illusion of naïve Western policymakers?

To answer that question, it is important to understand the historical context, something for which policymakers rarely have time or political scientists the inclination.

And what we think of Saudi Arabia is central because, in many ways, our shifting understanding of the country reflects a tendency born of the Kingdom's apparently exceptional transformation to privilege the present against the past.

In the past, the Kingdom was a byword for obscurantist religious austerity. This arose from its very distinctive history. The Saudi state goes back 300 years, not long by the standards of Iran, Iraq or Egypt.

But what makes it unusual is that it was never subject to colonial or imperial rule. The Ottomans may have claimed nominal authority. But that was a fiction. Their concern was the Arabian litoral, not its interior.

The Al Saud had risen to prominence in the heartland of the Arabian peninsula in the mid-18th century. They lost control twice, first as a result of a direct challenge to Ottoman authority in the early 19th century and then again as a result of family feuding some 50 years later.

The Amir Abdul Aziz founded the third Saudi state when he retook Riyadh from his Rashid rivals in a daring raid in 1902. His ambition was to unify the entire Arabian peninsula under his rule, in addition to the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina, Jeddah and Al Taif, advancing through al Hasa to the Gulf – and destroying forever the power of his great rivals, the Rashid. 

He would doubtless have liked to incorporate what are now Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE too. But he accepted British spheres of influence, rejected an offer of the caliphate, and signed formal treaties facilitated by London, demarcating territorial borders with Jordan and Iraq.   

Abdul Aziz was willing to accept Western support when it was advantageous.  And for around a century, that support was an essential guarantee of the Kingdom's national security in an unstable region. When British military forces withdrew from East of Suez in 1971, the US became, by default, the principal offshore balancer in the Gulf, for better or worse.

Now, that moment may, in turn, be coming to an end.

And just as the era of British ascendancy was marked by the emergence of a new political dispensation in KSA, the present moment is marked by what has seemed to many a remarkable economic, social and political revolution.

A driver of change

Another remarkable individual drives the change — this time, Mohammed bin Salman.

What he is, in effect, doing is seeking to build a fourth Saudi state. The Saudi Arabia the world knew throughout the 20th century was a highly conservative but pragmatic territorial state within a regional state system, with a ruler whose legitimacy rested on the three pillars of family, tribes and 'ulama' (religious scholars).

When Amir Faisal became King, he distributed responsibility for key functions of the state to his brothers. The tribes distributed government bounty and social capital according to lineage and loyalty.

The 'ulama' legitimated absolute rule through a version of Hanbali jurisprudence, reserving the right to enforce austere social and political norms for themselves. 

The state Mohammed bin Salman is building is different. Power is no longer distributed; it is centralised. The tribes do not count; what matters is demography. Saudi Arabia is highly urbanised.

The median age of the population is 31, higher than many in the region but still younger than most countries around the world. It will change – the total fertility rate has declined from around 7 children per woman since the mid-1980s to around 2 today.

But now is the moment of youth. 

And the religious scholars, for so long the opponents of any change they did not control, are silent. They have been made an offer they cannot refuse: get with the project or be crushed.

Driving this urgency in the new Saudi ruling elite is a sense that a world beyond carbon is speeding towards them.  People have been predicting peak oil for decades. Now, it might be about to arrive.

The rapid rise of green technologies, electric vehicles, new forms of clean power generation and now AI suggest that while oil and gas will remain important components of the global energy mix for many years, it is essential now to plan for a future where they are not the sole or most important sources of the country's prosperity.

And that future, the story goes, cannot simply be secured through security alliances with the US or another Western power.  Korea and Japan emerged in the 1960s to claim their place in the sun.

Now it is the turn of India, China, whose direct challenge to US global hegemony is the most significant of all — and Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom's domestic revolution also requires a revolution in its external relationships to reflect these changes.

It is certainly the case that KSA has rapidly transformed its domestic social structures and norms.  Polling across the region tells us that young people in particular – the demographic majority – want security, jobs, services and a country where they can feel valued before they want global justice or a Palestinian state.

Palestinian cause still stirs emotions

But the conflict in Israel and Gaza also suggests this is not the whole picture. Where history has symbolic power, the past has a habit of getting in the way of the present.

The Palestinian issue has undoubtedly lost much of the salience it once had among ruling elites with other, more pressing policy priorities.

But it still has the capacity to stir emotions and to mobilise popular opinion, particularly at moments when the sort of graphic images that we have seen in the last 48 hours circulate widely on social media and when Islam rather than secular nationalism is invoked. 

For this reason, it remains a potent weapon in the hands of Iran and its friends, who would like to see Hamas displace Fatah and join forces with Hezbollah not just to intimidate, distract or damage Israel but also to stop other things happening – like further Arab normalisation with Israel, the strengthening of the US position in the region or indeed the transformation of Saudi Arabia into an economic powerhouse and a regional hegemon – which are against its own interests. 

And the conflict in Israel and Gaza now puts the KSA and its Gulf partners in a difficult position.

They want to make progress on their domestic economic and social agendas. Whatever the hype about Vision 2030, it is still only imperfectly realised, with significant social gains but major economic and fiscal challenges ahead.

Sustained progress requires regional stability, at least of the sort that enables the Kingdom to insulate domestic reform from external turbulence. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are signalling that they can disrupt this arrangement at will.

While Iran and KSA indeed signed an agreement earlier this year, essentially agreeing to dial down the tensions between them, Iran continues to target US forces in Iraq and Syria, intimidate the Kurds in Iraq and Syria and sustain its position in Yemen and Lebanon.

It continues to enrich uranium and develop missile and drone technologies. It makes bellicose statements about Bahrain, control of Gulf waterways, maritime borders in the northern Gulf and their associated offshore oil and gas fields. And now it has encouraged Hamas to start a war.

This looks less like a new Middle East and more like the old one.  

Two Middle Easts struggle for dominance

And perhaps that is the point.

Perhaps there are two Middle Easts struggling for dominance: an old one of entrenched conflict, Islamist ideologies, the struggle for regional dominance and a hatred of Israel and the US; and a newer one where modernisation, interconnection, trade and collective prosperity and security are the priority. 

For Western policymakers, it is the second that has captured their imaginations. It is not an illusion. It exists and reflects the aspirations of millions of people living in the region.

But the first still has a malign power all of its own. In the looking-glass world that Hamas and its supporters inhabit, la lutta continua. And it will always continue — because the whole point is the struggle.

It will not yield victory.  It will not produce a Palestinian state.

Indeed, as did the second Intifada, it will set back any hope of a negotiated solution. But it will enable Hamas to claim the mantle of vanguardist revolutionary heroism. It will satisfy the vengeful fantasies of Western critical theorists and post-colonial scholars sitting in their comfortable university offices.

It will come at the inevitable cost, not simply of hundreds of dead Israelis but thousands of dead Palestinians and maybe Lebanese too. 

But it will save Hamas – and Iran – the trouble of having to address the need for compromise.  And it gives Iran another ideological weapon to wield against the aspirations for freedom of its own long-suffering people.

It will also almost certainly mean Saudi normalisation with Israel is off the table — for the moment, at least. Riyadh will not wish to become directly involved: it has no love for Hamas.

But Arab mediation will, at some point, be essential. And this means Egypt and Jordan once again become consequential players. They may seek to leverage this centrality to seek more economic support from the GCC, thus putting off the urgent need to undertake structural reforms and imposing new costs on largely committed national budgets. 

In London and other Western capitals, it will make the prospect of new trade routes from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean or a general economic resurgence fuelled by the end of hostility and the dismantling of border and other trade barriers again seem like a dream.

Hamas' goal, like Iran's, is to destroy the hope of political solutions or material progress and to sell instead destructive millenarian illusions.

All this will make the pursuit of progressive economic and social change in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf more challenging.  But it will not stop it: the need is too great and the impetus too powerful. 

What it does show, however, is that, in the end, you can't get away from politics. 

And if one condition of stability and prosperity is a political settlement of the Palestinian issue, it is in the interests of all of us that this is driven not by obscurantist and violent Islamists in Tehran Gaza and Beirut but by states like Saudi Arabia.