Israel's conflict management: What could possibly go wrong?

Conflict management took various forms. In response to the Second Intifada, for example, Ariel Sharon's government constructed the now infamous West Bank peace barrier, which is a 9-metre-high concrete wall in many places. From Sharon's perspective, this achieved its goal, reducing suicide bombings from 73 between 2000-03 to just 12 between 2003-06. Similarly, Sharon opted to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza in 2005. This was an exercise in conflict management over resolution.

Recognizing Israeli settlers in the Gaza strip would always be outnumbered by Palestinians and therefore vulnerable to attack, Sharon opted to remove them – actually moving many to the West Bank. As with the construction of the barrier, these were unilateral actions, Sharon's preferred way to deal with the conflict rather than via negotiation with the Palestinian Authority. While the US would try to revive the two-state solution via George W Bush's Road Map to Peace, at the same time Washington and its western allies appeared to endorse Israel's evolving conflict management strategy by not effectively pressing Sharon to engage.

This was a pattern that has been repeated. Israel's frequent wars with Hamas after it seized Gaza in 2007 were, prior to this year, viewed as 'haircuts' by the IDF: ways of punishing the Palestinian militants for launching raids or missiles into Israel, and destroying enough of their military capabilities to dent their willingness to attack again for a few years.

Meanwhile in the West Bank settlement building and appropriation of Palestinian land continued apace, with occasional pauses at the request of the United States but, certainly under Netanyahu's leadership, these were temporary at best. Internationally, Netanyahu's conflict management saw him seek approval for his effective abandonment of the peace process.

He made major inroads in this regard during the presidency of Donald Trump. Firstly, Washington moved its embassy to Jerusalem, apparently recognizing both the eastern half of the city and the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory, despite this violating international law. Trump then brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and four Arab states, who seemingly also accepted the conflict management status quo.

Of course, as we now know, this approach proved a complete mirage. Israel's occasional raids on Gaza had not sufficiently weakened or deterred Hamas, allowing them to launch their attacks in October 2023. Moreover, the continued siege on Gaza and settlement activity in the West Bank, far from pacifying the Palestinians, had stored up decades of frustration. 

The Nagorno-Karabakh precedent

Had Netanyahu been paying attention to events a month earlier in Azerbaijan, he may have been less complacent. Indeed, as Nathalie Tocci, director of the Italian Institute of International Affairs, prophetically wrote in the Guardian days before Hamas' 7th October attack, "Israelis would do well to learn the lessons of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict." Even more than the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan had been 'frozen' for decades but, again, the (ostensibly) more powerful belligerent and its chief international allies had opted for conflict management over resolution. But, first in 2020, and again in 2023, the unresolved war exploded once again.

The war initially broke out in 1988 as the Soviet Union began to collapse. The two former Soviet Republics, Armenia and Azerbaijan, fought primarily over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The territory fell within the newly declared Republic of Azerbaijan but had an ethnic Armenian minority.

With help from Russia, by 1994 Armenia had won an emphatic victory, capturing not only Nagorno-Karabakh, but seven further regions of Azerbaijan. Over 850,000 ethnic Azeris were displaced from their homes as a result. However, the self-declared Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh government declined subsequent efforts for negotiated solutions, holding out for their preferred option of full independence from Azerbaijan. Armenia, militarily occupying much of western Azerbaijan, followed suit, with Yerevan and its allies in Moscow preferring to manage the conflict rather than seek to solve it.

However, after Azerbaijan enjoyed an oil boom in the 2000s and invested heavily in defence, it launched a major military campaign in 2020. All the Azerbaijan regions occupied by Armenia except for Nagorno-Karabakh were either recaptured or ceded to Baku after Yerevan capitulated.

Then, in September of this year, the Azeri military attacked Nagorno-Karabakh, swiftly defeating the self-declared government's forces, prompting the conquest of the entire region. The Nagorno-Karabakh government dissolved itself and the vast majority of the 120,000 ethnic Armenians living there fled, almost all resettling in Armenia.

Tocci suggests that Israel should avoid repeating the mistakes of the Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenian governments: to negotiate while they are in a strong position rather than assuming their dominance will last forever. But the lesson can be extended to both conflicts for the wider international community too.

External actors, notably the EU, Russia and, to a lesser extent, the US, put too little emphasis on seeking a negotiated solution over Nagorno-Karabakh, allowing the conflict to fester under the surface for decades before eventually exploding, as has also now happened in Israel-Palestine.

The Syrian tinderbox

There are many other such 'frozen' conflicts, where belligerents, their external allies and the international community appear to have opted for conflict management over resolution. But all hold the potential to suddenly explode in the same way that Nagorno-Karabakh and Gaza did.

One such tinderbox sits on Israel's border to the north-east. Syria's internationalized civil war broke out in 2011, but the last major fighting ended in 2020. Since then, there has been a relative calm, with Syria divided into three zones of control. The largest area is controlled by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, supported by his allies Iran and Russia. The northeast is controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-dominated force backed by the US. Meanwhile the north is controlled by the remnants of the rebels who first opposed Assad in 2011 backed by Turkey: independent militia dominated by "former" al-Qaeda Jihadists Hayat Tahrir as-Sham (HTS) around Idlib, and the Ankara-funded 'Free Syria Army' further north.

Read more: A complete guide to Iranian-backed militias in Syria

However, no agreement has been reached between these conflicting parties. Various initiatives sought to permanently solve the crisis. The UN launched the Geneva and Vienna processes aimed at forming consensus governments that would eventually see Assad removed or, at least, his power reduced. After Russia entered the war in 2015, the military victories Moscow (and Tehran) helped facilitated put Assad in the driving seat and Damascus instead pursued a strategy of conflict management.

The Moscow-led Astana process, which established a Russian-Turkish-Iranian brokered system to reduce the violence, effectively allowed Assad to consolidate his hold over most of Syria while preserving the last rebels in Idlib. The US presence in the east after it defeated the self-styled Islamic State similarly afforded the SDF protection.

Since 2020 there has been only limited fighting, but also few attempts to move the resolution process forward. Assad and his allies, like the Armenians or Israel, is in the position of relative strength and he and his allies have shown no willingness to entertain compromise. Indeed, Assad has repeatedly insisted he will reconquer, "every inch," of Syria.

Yet, as Professor Fabrice Balanche has noted for the Washington Institute, Idlib in many ways resembles the Gaza strip. It too is dominated by a determined group of radicals, HTS, overseeing an impoverished population that the world seems to have largely forgotten.  But, like Hamas, it could yet seek to resume the conflict. A drone attack that killed 89 at a Syrian military graduation in October was unclaimed but many suspected HTS, indicating that the conflict still has the potential to reignite.

Similarly, the fate of eastern Syria remains in the balance, with Turkey repeatedly launching attacks on SDF positions, regarding its Kurdish leadership as terrorists given their links to the PKK. Ankara has already invaded northern Syria three times to keep militants off its border and could strike again. Yet despite this, the international community appears to see Syria as yesterday's problem. There is an assumption that the current status quo will remain indefinitely, despite evidence from elsewhere that this is highly unlikely.

Beware the thaw

And there are many further frozen conflicts that the world appears to have forgotten about. Elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa the civil wars in Libya and Yemen are far from resolved and could yet explode into new rounds of fighting.

Further afield unrecognized separatists, like Nagorno-Karabakh, carry the potential for renewed fighting. Transnistria in Moldova, South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia and North Cyprus in Cyprus all claim independence and boast powerful external actors in the form of Russia and Turkey, raising the prospect that external as well as internal stimuli could provoke 'hot' wars. Then of course, there are the far bigger, and more terrifying, unresolved conflicts between North and South Korea and between China and Taiwan.

While it is plausible that none of these cases explode into violence in the near future, they all remain unresolved. It appears that key belligerents and the wider international community have lost interest in seeking resolution, instead expecting the status quo to hold.

But the Gaza war, and before that the clashes over Nagorno-Karabakh, show that such conflict management is potentially a flawed strategy. Perceived injustices are rarely held at bay indefinitely and they cannot easily be managed away.