Straight News: What do you think of this week's chaos in the Middle East and Blinken's seven-day trip to the Middle East?
Special Commentator Zhang Sinan: Just a week after 2024 began, the Middle East is blooming everywhere, as if a full-scale conflict is coming.
On Tuesday (January 2), Israeli drones conducted a "decapitation operation" in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon On Wednesday, the Islamic Republic of Iran suffered the worst terrorist attack in its 45-year history, two suicide bombings targeting the commemoration of the late senior general Soleimani, killing 84 people and injuring more than 200 in the southern Iranian city of Kerman, and on Thursday, US drones launched a "decapitation operation" in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, and the militia group "Popular Mobilization Organization" The commander of the 12th brigade was killed.
Add to this the fact that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has not yet ended since October 7, 2023, and the recent intensification of Yemen's Houthi attacks on the Red Sea Route, if we stand in front of the map, we will find that the places just mentioned – Palestine and Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran – have run from west to east, through the entire Middle East region, forming a "chaotic arc".
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began a week-long trip to the Middle East this week, visiting Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank from the 4th to the 11th. Interestingly, if these countries are linked together, they can also form an arc that blocks the "arc of chaos" from west to south, as if the aim is to keep Europe and Africa behind and push the chaos into the Caucasus and Central Asia, the former is the hinterland of Russia, and the latter is the crossroads of the Eurasian land bridge.
There is a view that Blinken's trip to the Middle East this week symbolizes a reshaping of some kind of order, and another "decapitation operation" by the US military creates new chaos, and the two are undoubtedly contradictory. I don't think there is a contradiction, because when the so-called order is dominated by a certain country or an exclusive interest group, chaos is a necessary nourishment.
In 1999, Bush Sr.'s defense secretary and later Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, said in a public speech that the Middle East has two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest extraction costs, so the "ultimate prize" lies in the Middle East. Cheney went on to say that energy is the foundation of the world economy, and that the Gulf War is just a demonstration of that reality. As one of the core planners of the Gulf War, Cheney's remarks give us a glimpse of some of the logic of the US grand strategy: for the United States, a defeated and chaotic Iraq that had to be rebuilt to meet the energy needs of certain countries is far better than a strong, stable Iraq that can affect world oil prices. This is true for Iraq, and it is true for the entire Middle East.
If the core of the chaos in the past 20 years is energy, the core of the chaos in the next 20 years will also include geostrategy, which is to prevent the new international political and economic order from extending from east to west, connecting with Europe through Central Asia and the Middle East, and breaking the monopoly of the world order that has lasted for more than 500 years since the Age of Discovery.
Straight News: Do you think there is a risk of further escalation in the Middle East in the new year?
Zhang Sinan, Special Commentator: This is a good question, and I personally think that the future of the situation in the Middle East in 2024 depends on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or more directly, on Israel. This is not to say that countries in the region such as Iran and Iraq are more stable, or that countries outside the region such as the United States and Russia have no intention of intervening, but it is somewhat unsettling what path Israel will choose at present.
First of all, allow me to quote data from the Washington Post of the United States on January 5, which shows that the death toll in the Gaza Strip has exceeded 20,000 and 2 million are in famine as a result of Israel's continued bombardment and offensive. And Israel's official narrative is that the military operation since October 7, 2023, is aimed at defeating Hamas and avenging the dead Jews.
Why do I say I am disturbed? Because outside of this official narrative, more extreme voices are emerging within the Israeli Government. According to the Times of Israel, on November 5, 2023, Israeli government minister-level official Amikhay Eliahu said in a television interview that nuclear weapons should be dropped on Gaza to "raze there and wipe out all Palestinians", and on November 12, according to Turkey's Anadolu news agency, another ministerial-level official, this time Israeli National Security Minister Itama bin Gvir, declared that anyone sympathetic to Hamas "should be eliminated"; On November 14, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich stressed in a statement that Israel would not be able to tolerate the existence of Palestine as an independent entity in the Gaza Strip, Reuters reported.
Then on Tuesday, January 2, 2024, according to the Israeli media Haaretz, Moshe Sada, a member of parliament from Israel's ruling party, said on a television program that he believed that the vast majority of Israelis supported "the extermination of all Palestinians in Gaza", and on Thursday, Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom, Hotowili, stressed on a local television program that Israel has no other solution but to "destroy every school, every mosque, every house in Gaza."
In fact, there are many more such statements, and the ones I have just shown are not even the most extreme. Such rhetoric and Israel's acts of war in Gaza constitute a lawsuit filed by the South African government with the United Nations International Court of Justice on December 29, 2023, accusing Israel of "committing genocide" in the Gaza Strip. It is not my intention here to specifically discuss whether Israel has committed "genocide" in the strict sense of the word, but at least I fully agree with the 84-page indictment that the Israeli government has never effectively suppressed "public and direct incitement to commit genocide" by domestic politicians and public officials since October 7, 2023.
The good news is that even so, these extreme perceptions may not reflect the true position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's core political figure, who I just mentioned is not part of Israel's current three-member wartime cabinet and theoretically does not have the power to ultimately decide how Israel ends the conflict. An anonymous Israeli military figure told The Washington Post: "Professionals know that it is impossible to exterminate all Palestinians, and without Gazans and the Palestinian Authority, there is no future." ”
But the bad news is that, at least to this day, Netanyahu remains vague about the eventual outcome, and that those who take extreme positions, while not in the wartime cabinet, are the guarantor of Netanyahu's stay in power. If at the beginning, Israel's aggressive war against Gaza was only an election season when it had to pander to voters, it is starting to turn out to be absurd and unsettling. The blatant atrocities of war against millions of civilians under the national system may not only disintegrate peace and stability in the Middle East, but also the rejection of concepts such as "total war" and "all-out war" in the civilized world since World War II, and make all mankind once again face some unbearable historical spectres.
Author丨Zhang Sinan is a special commentator of Shenzhen Satellite TV's "Live Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan".
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Editor丨Liu Liping, editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Satellite TV Direct News
Typesetting丨Su Ruixue, Shenzhen Satellite TV direct news editor