Israel-Hamas war: parallels with 1914?

From Washington to Tel Aviv, from Beirut to Cairo, policymakers are fixated on a prospect still more alarming than what is happening in Gaza, said Gideon Rachman in the FT: the fear that Israel, Iran, the US and even Saudi Arabia could be pulled into a "general war in the Middle East". 

For many, the situation has frightening parallels with Europe just before the First World War. Then, the logic of Great Power alliances meant that the murder of an Austrian archduke in June 1914 inexorably led to a full-scale European conflict, said Ben Judah in The Sunday Times. 

The worry now is that Hamas’s attack on 7 October – and Israel’s increasingly brutal response – will trigger a similar pattern of escalation, with the US and its two main Middle Eastern allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, being embroiled in a war against an Iran-led "axis of resistance". The fear stalking the region – which explains why its diplomatic phone lines are "frantically ringing”"– is that a "1914 moment could be at hand".

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'Combustible situation'

We’re not there yet, but such fears are justifiable, said Kim Sengupta in The Independent. Already, the conflict appears to be escalating. Israel has exchanged rocket fire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, since the Hamas attacks, and this week another Iran-backed militia – the Houthis in Yemen – fired drones and missiles at southern Israel. The US has "positioned a formidable military force" in the region, sending two aircraft carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean, and last week it carried out air strikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria that had attacked its bases in Iraq and Syria.

In such a combustible situation, the "risks of misperception and blunders pouring oil on the flames are high", said Ivor Roberts in The Daily Telegraph. If Tehran, through its proxies, were to step up its attacks on Israel, Israel could attack Iran itself – spurred by its conviction that Iran has reached a "nuclear weapons threshold". That could draw in US forces, and potentially Saudi Arabia too – especially if Iran carries out its long-standing threat to effectively choke much of the world’s oil supply by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

'More interested in fist-shaking than armed confrontation'

Given all this, it "would be a brave body who would bet against a widened conflict". Thankfully, there are good reasons why such a scenario remains unlikely, said Lina Khatib in The Guardian. Despite their incendiary rhetoric, neither Iran nor Hezbollah actually wants the conflict to escalate. Hezbollah’s position as the "most powerful political actor in Lebanon", and Iran’s ability to influence Middle Eastern politics through its proxies, would both be endangered by a regional war. Israel will also be desperate to avoid a second front opening up, while it is engaged in fighting Hamas.

Tehran is the key to how this conflict will unfold, and history suggests that the Islamic Republic is more interested in fist- shaking than armed confrontation, said Scott Lucas on The Conversation. But another uncomfortable lesson of history – including the First World War – is that sometimes even when "no one wants" a war, it nonetheless comes to pass.