How will the curse of Middle Eastern violence be broken?

I once discussed the perils of public opinion in relation to Israel with a Jewish man who went on to become a peer of the realm. I can’t remember much original being said. The usual things. The tragedy of history. The oldest prejudice. The Middle Eastern curse of arbitrary lines, promises kept and promises broken in the great game of power.

“The mutable and rank-scented many,” as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus dismissed the sort of mobs we’ve seen worldwide baying for Jewish blood in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel. Great God what have we become? Frighteningly, what it seems we’ve always been.

Perhaps that’s what prompted him to conclude the conversation with the one thing I do remember. “When has public opinion ever helped us?” he asked. And answer came there none because the answer is so plainly ‘never’. 

But watching the madness on the streets of London, watching the political players struggle to hold their horses as Israel’s inevitable military response plays out on our TV screens, what he said came back to me again. 

Because, while it might be understandable for a suitor to give up courting a love that will never answer, “Only a fool ignores what other people think of him,” as cynical French philosopher La Rochefoucauld once quipped. 

In the case of Israel and its invasion of Gaza, that philosophy is acute because of a military truth that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War. Democracies lose the smaller ones. And they do so, not because of a lack of might or martial will, but because ‘public opinion’, rarely allows them to beat the ticking clock of tolerance democracy sets for what’s done in its name.

It isn’t my theory. It belongs, in fact, to Gil Merom, an academic at Sydney and Tel Aviv Universities and set out in his book How Democracies Lose Small Wars. In it, he looks at France in Algeria, America in Vietnam and, tellingly, Israel in Lebanon and draws fairly obvious conclusions. 

Just as with Hamas, none of the smaller players could hope to match the larger ones in symmetric warfare. However, their resort to insurgency resulted in such a mutual escalation of inconclusive bloodiness, since Vietnam increasingly televised, that the largely conscript or reservist armies of the conventional player and domestic and overseas middle class sensibilities could only brook so much. 

The ‘middle class’  bit is important because, as Merom puts it: “The two forces are ‘the state’ on the one hand, and part of the educated middle class, which is a proxy of ‘society’ on the other… their manifestations are in the state’s military dependence on society, the voice of ‘society’ in politics and the different value priorities of each.”

In other words, for the democracy, win quick or go home and, for the insurgent, take the casualties and stick it out as long as possible.

One could argue that, right now, domestic society is right behind the IDF. Under the circumstances, how could that not be so? One could equally argue that this is not a small war but an existential one, as wars in which Israel is involved often by definition are. And that this time it is different, so compelling is the casus belli. 

But everybody thinks that, don’t they? Who could argue with the right of American might in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack? Yet still Biden’s chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan ensued.

It is also a fact that ‘the middle class’ is a global entity, a chunky part of which holds shockingly prevalent views in regard to Jews. They too influence the politicians who, in turn, influence the geopolitics. If Keir Starmer is to be Britain’s next prime minister then his struggles with the vociferous of his own party are already on display. 

Throw in understandable worries that matters might escalate into a regional conflict or worse and that clock is ticking at double time. 

One feels for Israel. It’s very raison d’être is safe haven yet safe it has not been. Its agony at the sheer awfulness of what has happened to it seems yet again to show that its people must ever be the ones to exemplify man’s inhumanity to man.

In that regard my former colleague’s ageless dismissal of what public opinion might do is hard to contest. It might never help. But it could do much to hinder. It’s how democracies lose small wars. And in that respect cannot be ignored. 

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