Palestine-Israel conflict: Implications on international order

Jin Liangxiang    source：Tehran Times

The current conflict between Palestine and Israel, as a result of Israel’s long occupation and triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack, has already proved to be consequential in many ways, big and small. As an issue catching the eye all over the world, the positions and reactions of major powers, and the interactions of regional and extra-regional actors, will all become part of the history, and the implications of the conflict on international order are particularly worthy of talking about.

Among all the implications, the primary one should be its impact on what has been called as liberal international order of the West. For rather a long time, the U.S., together with its Western allies, have been advocating the concepts of human rights policy based on Western ideologies and values, and have been on the course of interfering the domestic affairs of countries of the Middle East and other regions as well with the excuse of humanitarian concerns. This, though has met strong resistance from non-Western developing countries, did win some markets in the world. And the so-called humanitarian intervention had been employed as an instrument to achieve the so-called Pax-Americana and the dominance of the West over the world.

But the positions of Western countries in the latest conflict between Palestine and Israel have sufficiently exposed their hypocrisy on human rights issues. They could have pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza and reversed the worsening of the humanitarian disaster by launching real pressure on Israel’s Netanyahu government. But their expression of concerning the humanitarian crisis had proved to be nothing but lip service. The U.S., together with some European countries, vetoed even the UN resolutions calling for a humanitarian ceasefire though they finally let pass the resolution calling for Ramadan ceasefire on March 26.

As a result of the inactions of their own and intentional obstruction of others’ efforts for assistance, more than 2 million people have been displaced, more than 33,000 have lost their lives, and more than 70,000 have been wounded in six months. No other issue could be more legitimate for a humanitarian intervention than what had happened in Gaza. But the U.S. and its Western allies had stayed actionless. The double-standard nature of U.S. human rights policy is self-evident.

The U.S. has been enshrining its human rights policy in major international hotspots in the last decades, and will continue to instrumentalize this policy in the future. But the market of the policy will be significantly reduced. Even those conscious audience of Western countries will not buy their arguments. Together with this will see the declining of the Western liberal order, which takes humanitarian intervention as a practical basis.

Another implication of the conflict could be the growing division of the world as a result of the conflict. The world used to see a kind of unification and integration in a certain period of time. In the 1990s and 2000s, all the world were talking about globalization, which paved the ground for multilateral cooperation across the world. But unfortunately, the last decade has seen the declining of globalization as a general trend. The U.S. and its Western allies were talking about decoupling and derisking for geopolitical reasons and for the sake of maintaining their supremacy in technology and hegemony over international affairs. As a result, the world has become more divided.

The responses of the U.S. in the conflict between Palestine and Israel are making the world more fragmented as a result of the sharply different positions of different countries and the struggles between major international actors. Firstly, the conflict has resulted in new divisions between the West and the global South. While the governments of the UK and Germany and a group of European countries have been blindly following the United States' unreasonable policy, the global South including China, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia are viewing the Palestine issue either as a struggle for justice or as a legacy of colonialism.

Secondly, the West will be more divided. Though some Western countries have been siding with the U.S., some others have stayed on the right side of justice and history including Spain and Belgium.

Thirdly, the West will see division between the governments and civil societies. The governments of the U.S. and some other Western countries have been supporting Israel for the war in Gaza, but their civil societies are well aware of the truth on the grounds including the root cause of the conflict between Israel and Palestine and the nature of the war launched by Israel in Gaza. Within this context, the legitimacy and credibility of the governments of some Western countries will be further weakened.

These divisions are about the conflict itself, but will produce spillovers in global governance in other global areas including countering terrorism, managing global warming and a number of other issues. As the mutual trust is declining, cooperation could become more difficult.

The conflict will also see changes of global strategic landscape. Albeit declining, the U.S. has never abandoned its strategy to enter and dominate the AsianEuro continent. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is due to complicated historical reasons, but the U.S. had chosen to provide weapons to Ukraine instead of working for a ceasefire or negotiations. This is obviously for the purpose of weakening Russia for its own dominance of the AsianEuro continent.

The Palestine-Israel conflict, though geographically distant from the Russia-Ukraine front, did serve to disrupt the above-mentioned U.S. strategy. On the one hand, the Palestine-Israel conflict, for its huge humanitarian disaster, had greatly distracted the attention of the world including that of the West. As a result, the political pressure on Russia particularly had been significantly weakened.  Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, has traveled to the Middle East six times over the last six months, which suggested that the Palestine-Israel conflict had taken a substantial part of the energy of the U.S. Department of State and even the White House.

The Palestine-Israel conflict, on the other hand, has also reduced substantially the military pressure of the U.S. together with its Western allies on Russia. Israel, with a population of 9 million, cannot sustain its military operations in Gaza and other fronts of the Middle East without assistance from the U.S. and its Western allies. U.S. military assistance to Israel means that it will have to reduce the supply of ammunition to Ukraine, which suggests that Russia will have less military pressure from Ukraine.

The last couple of months have seen that Russia is feeling rather comfortable in its military conflict with Ukraine. Russia moved forward on the battlefield and is seeing more advancements in the coming future. As things on the ground are moving on, the U.S. and its Western allies will soon see the collapse of their strategy in Ukraine and Eastern Europe as well, which could finally suggest the collapse of the U.S. global strategy as AsianEuro continent remains the single most important part of global geopolitics.

All in all, the conflict between Palestine and Israel did produce changes in various vectors. The last decades have seen the declining role of the U.S. in delivering its agendas in the world as the U.S. was always taking the wrong side of history. The conflict between Palestine and Israel does not change itself, but the unreasonable policy and extremely biased position of the U.S. is making a game-change in the world and in the region, which will result in the end of the so-called Western liberal international order.