The Current - Political failure and expanding war in the Middle East

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Israel intensified airstrikes in Lebanon this weekend and announced “a new phase” in its offensive in Gaza. Matt Galloway talks to the CBC’s Margaret Evans in Beirut; and discusses a year of conflict and political failure with policy experts Janice Stein and Khaled Elgindy.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. One year on from the October 7th attacks, Israeli strikes have intensified in Lebanon. Yesterday, the Israeli military issued a map labeling nearly all of northern Gaza as an evacuation zone, saying this was in preparation for a new phase in that war. Meanwhile, Israel is on high alert, as ceremonies there mark the anniversary of the attack.

Ten people have been injured in the northern Israeli cities of Haifa and Tiberias by missiles fired from Lebanon. Margaret Evans is CBC's senior international correspondent, and we've reached her in Beirut. Margaret, hello. Hi, Matt. What's happening in that city today? Well, people are getting into a routine.

There have been constant airstrikes here, really ever since Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an airstrike by the Israelis over well over a week ago now people hear the booms in the night and the wake up and they say what happened what was hit who was hit where was it because some of those strikes have have veered out of the southern suburbs the Hezbollah stronghold we were also also down in Tyre yesterday, which is about 20 kilometers as the crow flies from the Israeli border. And as soon as you get past the city of Sidon, south of Beirut, you start to see the yellow flags of Hezbollah. And the villages along that

road have been given evacuation warnings from the Israelis. Every day, there's a new set of villages added there. And what's worrying people about that on top of everything else is that, you know, in 2006, it was the Latani River, which was important, which was a river in South Lebanon, wherein Hezbollah was supposed to have agreed as a part of the ceasefire then to have withdrawn to with all of its armaments. armaments. The Israelis this time are saying people need to go north of the Awali River, which is much further north, which has people worried about the possibility of much wider ground war potentially, given how far they're asking people to move. That squares with so much of what we've heard from people that we've spoken with as well, who say this is very different than 2006. It is. I mean, I was here for pretty much the whole 34 days in 2006. And it was different in that at the beginning, right away, they hit the airport. Well, the airport is still open right now.

But every night, just in front of the airport or not far from it, that's where Hezbollah's stronghold is. That's where those airstrikes are coming. You know, some of the diplomats here have said that they think psychologically for people, it's very important that the airports stay open. But, you know, the sense of people about to be trapped is very, very strong. In 2006, they took out a lot of infrastructure. They were hitting roads and bridges and cutting the country into pieces, if you like. But the death toll of this conflict is already much higher

than the whole of that 2006 war. And the other thing you notice here, you drive along the Corniche down by the ocean, you just see whole families, their laundry on fences, people sleeping outside, this sense of the country not being able to cope, distrust in the neighborhoods. There was a Belgian journalist who was operating in a Shia neighborhood, not his beloved Amal, their supporters, who was shot. Our own cameraman, editor Jean-Francois Bisson,

was filming downtown, a group of men. You know, they accosted him. He was fine in the end, but it was uncomfortable and people tell you they don't want to rent their houses out they want to help people who are homeless about a million people are now displaced in this country but they don't know who they're renting to so they're saying we want to help our fellow lebanese but you the israelis are hitting his targets again and again and that suspicion is growing. That's adding to the sense here of uncertainty. And, you know, I had a really interesting conversation with a Canadian Lebanese man who'd come over to help a sick member of his family who was trying to decide whether to go back or to leave.

He has that option. And he said, every question that you ask in this conflict has two answers. I have to stay and I have to leave. And he was feeling so guilty about trying to leave. You know this region so well, having covered it for decades and been in and out of Israel and the occupied territory since the 7th of October. But many, many years before that have been there on the ground. As this awful year continues, I'm just wondering, what are you reflecting on when it comes to the escalation of this conflict and what might be left when it comes to the possibility of peace between Israelis and Palestinians?

Yeah, you know, I've thought about that a lot because, you know, people of my generation, let's say that, some of my generation who has covered the conflict for a good 25 years now, it's very easy to kind of get caught in the, well, this is the way it will always be. There are always these terrible cycles. And this cycle, of course, is actually worse than anything I've ever seen. So, you know, I'm kind of trying to force myself not to assume an outcome, that it will simply end as it did before. And the weird thing is that ending as it did before would be much better,

even though it was terrible during that time. You know, the peace process or the peace effort between Israelis and Palestinians has been fraught for years now. It was, you know, it was almost reviled in parts of Israel before October 7th. It's, you know, now you see people that you've known and talked to over the years, finding it very difficult to talk to each other. But, you know, people will always try to find a foothold and the movement is not dead. And what you're finding now is that some of the people who've been through so much hardship are the ones who are saying, actually, this has to be the last war. I spoke with a man a couple of times. His name is Maos Inon.

He lost his parents on October 7th in one of the Moshavs along Israel's border with Gaza. He's become a very strong voice saying the only answer is two states or two entities. And by the same token, a woman named Reem Al-Kajara, she's the director of a group called Women of the Sun. She's based in Bethlehem and her organization lost about 40 people in Gaza. But she says, as does Mao's, you know, maybe the violence will actually finally shake people into believing that the violence isn't working. You need to kind of go back to the peace table. I mean, it's very small. I don't want to overemphasize it.

But I think kind of writing it off is what you kind of have to resist. You have to kind of see where they go. And they're planning a peace conference in November. So we shall see. In the meantime, you have very deeply traumatized populations. The population of Israel deeply traumatized by what happened a year ago today. And of course, the population in Gaza, which has gone through the effect of war that continues there. You can't get into Gaza, but you know those people well as well.

That's right. I mean, you have telephone conversations. It's not the same. Obviously, the Israelis do not let foreign journalists in or are not letting foreign journalists in during this incursion. They have in the past. And one of the things that comes to mind most for me is a conversation maybe around 2014. You could get in, obviously, nowhere near the scale of destruction now, but I remember having a conversation with a translator who worked for a colleague of mine for Radio Canada, and I knew him over the years. I remember him talking to me about being afraid, feeling afraid as a father,

and hearing an explosion, a building come down, a sonic blast, not being able to contain his fear. And what that meant to him as a father, showing his fear in front of his child. And I just, you know, you think of that exponentially. And you think of the kids who are seeing the fear and seeing their father's shame almost at going through that. And talking to people who've never actually been out of the Gaza Strip. I met a young man in 2021, I think, again, after another incursion, who during the interim had written to me when he got permission to go to Jerusalem, to go to the mosque, the Al-Aqsa mosque for the first time, and what a moment that has been for him. And he, of course, has been in writing to me through this conflict with his

family, moving around here and there. So you do, you do, of course, see the impact and how it's changing people. Margaret, I'm really glad to have you there talking us through this over the years, but certainly on a day like today as well. Take care of yourself and thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. Margaret Evans is the CBC's senior international correspondent. She is in Beirut. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is.

I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Janice Stein is the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Khaled El-Gindi is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of Blindspot, America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump. Good morning to you both. Good morning. Good morning, Khaled. Thank you both for being here. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Hamas must be completely destroyed before Israel ends the war

in Gaza. He's talked about this idea of total victory. A year into this war, what is the state of Hamas today, do you think? Well, there's no doubt that Hamas militarily has been severely degraded to the point that the president of the United States has come out openly since last May and said that there are no more military achievements that Israel can pursue in Gaza. Hamas has effectively been defeated, at least militarily. It remains politically, of course, a force in Palestinian politics. It will remain a force for the foreseeable future. Its popularity has grown, not in Gaza, but in other parts of Palestine, in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, in the diaspora. So the goal, of course, of total victory was never achievable. And it's, I think, has been a pretext for, one, keeping Benjamin Netanyahu in power,

and two, just having a kind of forever war that Israel simply can't win and that keeps expanding as we now see in Lebanon. Janice, how do you think, and I want to come back to the idea, that concept that Khaled has talked about, why the war is continuing, why it's been so difficult to achieve a ceasefire. How do you think Israel is different a year after the attacks on the 7th of October? I think you said in your discussion with Margaret, Matt, it is a traumatized and scarred country, completely different from what it was before. It's difficult to believe because you see the military might and the capacity that it is using now in Lebanon

and has used in Gaza. But the fear penetrates to individual homes where people are reenacting October the 7th over and over and over and are buying guns in case that kind of thing happens to them and their family. And the reason I say this is that kind of trauma and scarring really complicates the politics. There's no question about it. It has violence radicalizes. It's radicalized the Israeli population. It's radicalized the Israeli population it's radicalized the Palestinian population

and violence without as Khaled just said, without a political path out of it without a path for Palestinians to have a political future for themselves is ultimately purposeless and never results in victory.

Is that why, from your perspective, it's been so difficult to achieve a ceasefire? There are many people who, as this war unfolded, were thinking, oh, this can't last more than two months, it can't last more than three months, it can't last more than six months. Janice, is that why, in part, the hardening of the population makes it difficult politically to end the war? I think it's the combination of the two. It's the hardening of the population, which is very real, and it is the failure of the prime minister to agree to a political path which provides any viable solution for Palestinians. The military targets, this was never a symmetrical war or a war that should have gone on

for a year in any way. It has gone on simply because, as Clausewitz said, you know, war is politics by other means. And what's been missing here is a political strategy. Khaled, from your perspective, why has the ceasefire been so difficult to achieve? I mean, you're talking about the capacity of Hamas. Hamas fired a couple of rockets into Israel today on the 7th of October, injuring people near Tel Aviv. Why is it so difficult to figure out a way to stop this war a year in? Well, I mean, I think just as we've just heard, there isn't a political exit strategy. Israel's never had an exit strategy. And I think it's important. So while clearly, yes, the Israeli prime minister has his reasons for continuing this, I think an enormous share

of the blame also goes, must fall on the United States as Israel's chief ally and as the most important and most powerful political actor in this whole arrangement. And it was really the responsibility of the United States to provide Israel with that exit strategy. And so while there is a ceasefire plan that the administration, the Biden administration, has put forward, they've kind of treated it as a kind of, you know, optional, you know, Israel, if you feel like it, here's a plan. But in the meantime, they've been supporting the war effort quite vigorously and in an almost uninterrupted way supplying weapons, their diplomatic efforts, I think, have been undercut by the fact that they are still underwriting the war. And kind of as Israel, as Netanyahu

keeps shifting the goalposts, they follow right along. And so Biden has given the Israeli prime minister far too much latitude and really virtually no pressure at all. And I think that's why we are where we are. I mean, Hamas and Hezbollah and Israel, they're going to do what they do given their dynamics and their power asymmetries. It was really up to the international community and especially the United States to put a stop to this. as opposed to Israelis, I think that hasn't given them a real sense of urgency, since it's not Israelis who are doing the dying at this moment. Janice, what is Joe Biden's legacy here on this? I mean, partially, somebody who wanted to, as he leaves the presidency, you know, have some measurable steps toward a peace agreement, but also, I mean, you're seeing it influence the U.S. election right now. In Michigan, for example, huge numbers of Arab

American voters are saying that they're abandoning the Democratic Party. What do you think Joe Biden's legacy is here? Well, he clearly did invest energy. He had his team in a ceasefire, and they have failed to deliver that. But I think there is a larger context, and I would shade what Khalid just said a little differently. There's always been the temptation of those who watch terrible violence in this part of the world to just say, well, the international community has to do something about it. Big powers almost always fail in forcing smaller allies to do things. Hamas has resources and staying power. There are clearly all relationships between Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran here that matter. It is the parties in the region and Israel that shape these decisions.

You know, just to look at Biden's challenges, frankly, in getting Zelensky to do what he wants, and it's not anything like as complicated as this. I think that almost visceral impulse so many of us have, the international community, the Russia, you know, the United States has to do something, always fails. Peace or war is made by the parties in the conflict. We take away the agency from them, frankly. Where does that leave the conflict now? I mean, there is the real belief that there could be a direct Iran-Israel war now. How worried are you about that, Janice? I'm very worried about that.

I think there's a cycle that's started here, and you break taboos. here and you break taboos and on both sides this is again a category mistake that's made that you can use military force to send a signal Matt but you can control

it and so you have you know you send ballistic missiles but they don't kill anybody and so that's a controlled signal you're signaling. You go over the edge when you break taboos like this. And they're locked in a cycle, and I can see it and feel it, where there's going to be escalation.

And we are in uncharted territory here. You know, this is, in a sense, it starts, and leave aside the longer-term causes, just the moment, it starts when we use ballistic missiles against a nuclear power. Anybody who isn't worried, I think, is either very optimistic or naive. Khaled, do you share that worry?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think this is an extremely dangerous moment. We're just kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop when Israel is going to respond in some way to Iran. And it's likely to be a very, very large response. And then we'll have to wait to see how Iran responds to that. And the cycle will continue. And again, I'm sorry, but I disagree. The United States bears enormous responsibility. The international community bears responsibility. There were moments over the past year, for example, when Israel declared on October 9th of last year that they were cutting off all food, water, medicine cannot starve a population as a weapon of war. And yet that's precisely what Israel has done with the acquiescence of the international

community who are simply too afraid or too indifferent to express any outrage. So this is a hugely asymmetrical war, as we all know. Israel has the capacity to destroy the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and they've virtually achieved that. It's simply not reasonable to say there's nothing anyone could have done. There's nothing that the United States, as Israel's primary weapons supplier and political benefactor, could have done. They did all that they could. There was a lot of talk and there was a lot of motion in the diplomatic realm, but there wasn't ever any serious attempt to use the massive leverage that the United States has and that they've used in the past. The United States has brokered many, many, many ceasefires

between Israelis and Palestiniansfires between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israelis and Lebanese, going back to Ronald Reagan and since then. So the United States has played an effective role as a broker for ceasefires. It's just that they chose, this administration chose to play a diminished role, to sort of tie their own hands and cancel their own agency. We're just about out of time, but I will ask a year into this iteration of this conflict, Janice, is there any hope? People talk about a two-state solution.

Bob Ray, Ambassador for Canada to the United Nations, was on this program talking about how Canada still firmly believes in the idea of a two-state solution. Is that at all realistic? I think without a political solution for Palestinians, at the very best, this will just be a pause in an ongoing and worsening cycle of violence. of violence. What we have now, frankly, Matt, is we have extremists in power everywhere. Hamas is an extremist. The government in Israel is controlled by two right-wing extremist parties. When you have politics which empower the extremes who are frankly not interested in solutions, which empower the extremes who are frankly not interested in solutions,

that's when the middle has to find its voice again. Khaled, we just have a minute or so left. Do you see any possibility for that idea, long sought after, of a two-state solution now? I don't. I think it's been reduced to a kind of throwaway line of platitude. It's a talking point to mention two-state solution. It's not a political horizon in and of itself. I think it's totally disconnected from the reality on the ground, including the fact that you have an Israeli government that is determined to destroy any vestige of a Palestinian state in the future. And that is what the international community has to address, is that reality of Israel's extremist government.

It isn't Hamas. Hamas isn't the leader of the Palestinian people. But this war is sort of making them the de facto leader, given the absence of any political track at all. That is not an optimistic place to end, but it is where we will end. And I think reflective of the state that we're in right now. Thank you both for being here. Thank you, Matt.

Thank you. Janice Stein is founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Khaled El-Gindi is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. Khaled El-Ghindi is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.