Special to WorldTribune.com

By John J. Metzler, October 7, 2024

On October 7th, 2023, the world changed yet again.

The powerful but seemingly contained Hamas terrorist group carried out coordinated rocket and ground attacks from Gaza on Israel in a stunning surprise attack. As with the Al Qaida terrorist attacks on America September 11th, 2001, the Grim Reaper had arrived unannounced.

The singular horrors which befell Israel, this modern-day pogrom, with widespread and barbaric civilian murders, as well as the mass hostage taking were but the first step in what would evolve into a wider Middle East conflict. All the pieces were in place but most observers, including in Israel, were caught unaware, when the Islamic jihadi forces attacked.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres remarked powerfully on the anniversary, “Today marks one year since the horrific events of October 7th when Hamas launched a large-scale terror attack in Israel killing over 1,250 Israelis and foreign nationals, including children and women. More than 250 people were abducted and taken to Gaza.”

He called on “the global community to repeat in the loudest voice our utter condemnation of the abhorrent acts of Hamas, including the taking of hostages.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

But this attack did not recall Israel’s past conventional wars facing massed Arab states such as in 1956, 1967 or 1973; Those were the days when a spunky and tough Israel could do no wrong; When its armored columns crisscrossed the Sinai, its jets vanquished the Syrians in the skies and its ground forces entered the Holy city of Jerusalem.

This was a different form of conflict with non-state actors using lethal means but the doctrine of asymmetrical warfare.

Today we live with a new narrative; The era when Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel can do no right.  The new leftist policy mantra echoed even in many European capitals is that of an aggressive Israel using what the mainstream media calls disproportionate force, causing heavy civilian causalities and collateral damage while fighting Hamas.

For both sides the conflict has emerged as a long-running morality play.

While the war and the incessant fighting in Gaza continues, as expected the political reverberations have spread to the streets of London, Paris, and New York.  On some U.S. College campuses pro-Palestinian demonstrations have often radicalized into pro-Hamas groupies giving a sordid Western benediction to the jihadi murderers.

The Islamic Republic of Iran proudly stands as the paymaster of Hamas, Hizbullah and the Houthis who have taken the fight to a new level.  This in turn has created Armageddon type predictions for a wider Middle East war which would directly include Iran.

In a rare but significant sermon, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Iran’s Supreme Leader stressed that his country’s missile strikes on Israel were “correct, logical, and lawful.” He told a vast crowd gathered in Teheran that these were the “minimum punishment” for what he called Israel’s “astonishing crimes.” Yet the aging ayatollah sits on a domestic powder keg in his own teetering Islamic Republic.

Brilliant surgical Israeli attacks on Hizbullah have decapitated its leadership and decimated the   fighters but have predictably spilled over into neighboring Lebanon, a nominally independent once prosperous land shared by Christians and Muslims, since politically hijacked by Hizbullah.

But after Israel’s killing of Hizbullah’s elusive kingpin Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, the conflict entered a new phase.  Lebanon exploded.  Israeli ground forces went into southern Lebanon while Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps attacked Israel with 200 ballistic missiles.

Western states have pressed for de-escalation.  The UN Security Council called for an “immediate end” to hostilities, but to little avail.

The UN Security Council has become immersed in the Mideast crisis and deadlocked along predictably political lines. Yet the enduring Palestine political conflict has placed the United States on the diplomatic back foot as widening global sympathy for the “Palestinian cause” has gone beyond the usual suspects and now encompasses both the Global South, and even many close American allies such as France, Japan, Ireland and Spain who backed a non-binding General Assembly resolution demanding Israel end its “unlawful presence” in the “Occupied Palestinian territory.”

Currently there are major conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and the ongoing strife in Syria.

Now Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel have upped the ante and taken the crisis closer to the brink. Secretary General Guterres condemned the “massive missile attacks by Iran on Israel.  These attacks paradoxically do nothing to support the cause of the Palestinian people or reduce their suffering.”

Beyond its notable humanitarian roles, UN policies seem marginalized as too does the lame duck Biden Administration.

The world is beset by a swirl of crises and calamities, many of which we have yet to discover.

John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]

  New Armageddon World order: Israel bad; Ayatollah Khamenei as moral authority?

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