A beginners’ guide to the never-ending catastrophe  

Opinion: Perhaps the best way to try to demystify the Middle East crisis zone is to start close to home and work our way towards the current epicentre of catastrophe – Gaza.

On a recent Saturday, I took my daughter for her monthly sugary treat in the normally somnolent town centre of Dunedin – approximately 14,000km from the nearest edge of the Middle East.

As she struggled with the decadent dessert, we watched 100 or so keffiyeh-wearing protesters of all backgrounds march down the newly refurbished main street waving Palestinian flags (which are almost identical to the flags of pan-Arabism and the Ba’ath party, ironically first proposed by the infamous British official, Mark Sykes in 1917), chanting for a free Palestine and an end to Israeli occupation.

As before, the sight of these protests simultaneously filled me with hope and apprehension. Hope, because previously ambivalent people in Western countries are finally waking up to the horrors of humanitarian catastrophes in the Middle East.

Apprehension because I fear these protests, well-intended as they are, are not calling out all the necessary targets and could actually make matters worse.

This was the latest of numerous protest movements I have observed in-person over the past 15 years. I was next to Syrians demanding freedom, justice and dignity in 2011; knew and empathised with many educated youths and jobseekers in Oman in 2018 demanding genuine political participation and/or a fair share of the oil wealth their parents had sacrificed their political agency for.

I also stumbled on huge Israeli protests against the Netanyahu-led government and its increasingly autocratic efforts to undermine Israel’s judiciary in Jerusalem last year. And, although I have not been to Iran, I would like to also make mention of the brave women-led protests against the Iranian theocracy in 2022-23.

My hope about the current mass student and liberal mobilisation in Western countries is that there is finally a general awakening against unsustainable and corrupt patterns of politics in Southwest Asia, which perpetuate tyranny and human suffering and ultimately reverberates around the world in the form of forced migration, economic volatility, and polarising extremisms.

My apprehension stems from a feeling that the pro-Palestine protests around the world would have more positive impact if they demonstrated greater recognition of the bigger picture surrounding the conflict. The conflict in Gaza has been ongoing with varying levels of intensity since the first major escalation in December 2008.

What we have witnessed from last October until now is the explosive culmination of very complicated politics with many tangled threads that reach beyond the surprisingly insubstantial security fence between Israel and Gaza that I visited in July last year.

The solution to untangle and defuse and the conflict is not to grab one thread and tug hard but to find all the threads that perpetuate the crisis. This will be explored further in part two of this series.

My apprehension stems from a feeling that the current tone of anti-Israel protests demonstrates a critical lack of awareness of the bigger picture underpinning the conflict.

First, there is a peculiar inconsistency about when mobilisation occurs or not in support of victims of crimes against humanity.

To illustrate, in Dunedin, every day we see Syrian refugees (now busily rebuilding businesses and their lives) who of course fully support the protests in support of their Arab Palestinian brothers and sisters against Israel’s war crimes.

There were modest protests against President Bashar al-Assad and his allies in New Zealand, but they were organised by courageous Syrian individuals like Ali Akil of Syrian Solidarity New Zealand, who I met in 2013, and were mostly attended by Syrians and few Kiwis.

They must wonder where these protesters were when they (including Palestinian Syrians in Yarmouk, described as the “worst place on earth” in the siege of 2013-15) were being tortured, bombed, chemically poisoned, starved and ethnically cleansed from their homes and cities by the same ‘resistance axis’ that claims to support the Palestinian cause?

Another invisible catastrophe is the war and blockade on Yemen, prosecuted by a Saudi and UAE-led coalition in 2015-2023, which through air strikes, war and famine has caused the deaths of more than 377,000 Yemenis.

In late 2022 I picked up a Yemeni hitchhiker near the Yemen-Oman border who explained to me over a 500km drive across the desert highway, the desperate circumstances in Sana’a where he hoped to send money for food back to his family from Oman.

But there were no protests for Yemen in the West, and now Riyadh and Abu Dhabi look to position themselves as ‘moderate’ peace brokers in the Israel-Palestine conflict.  

Protest movements, in rightly opposing one form of tyranny and injustice, may unwittingly provide oxygen to others. The regime in Tehran is growing in stature in the Arab and wider world as Hamas’ chief sponsor, even as they crack down brutally on internal dissent at home.

Also, it is not an easy thing, but solely expressing solidarity with Palestinians and not acknowledging at all the victims of the dehumanising October 7 massacre and kidnapping of Israelis, vastly different in scale as it might be, still triggers deep-seated fears of global antisemitism among the 16 million core global Jewish population, 44 percent of whom reside in Israel.

This reinforces the stubborn bunker mentality of the Jewish state and boosts the influence of extremists in its politics such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and internal security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who jointly prop up Netanyahu’s coalition government.

I wonder how such people, who cynically and wrongly portray the campus protests as antisemitic, would cope if student protests raised the flags of Palestine and Israel in demanding a ceasefire and peace and dignity for all people in Israel-Palestine?

Protesters, by only speaking to one side of the crisis, are unintentionally playing their part in polarising the region and the world in very dangerous racially and religiously defined ways.

This is not to suggest these movements should cease, they will hopefully persist and expand, but rather that they search for a discourse that forcefully takes to task all those responsible for and who benefit from the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis, and which deescalates rather than inflames racial and religious divisions.

Part two of this series will examine the complex web of where the battle lines really lie across the region.