I am an avid follower of talk shows and pod casts that host American political scientist and international relations scholar John Joseph Mearsheimer. Belonging to the realist school of thought, Mr Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He grips me with his poise, wisdom, objectivity and realism in analysing global issues in relation to American strategic interests.
Today I shed light on Mr Mearsheimer’s interview with Tom Switzer, Executive Director of CIS. Based in Sydney, CIS is the Centre for Independent Studies; a public policy research organisation primarily focused on tackling Australian local issues, but also regional and international affairs. According to Mr Switzer, CIS is also very much engaged in the foreign policy debate which brought up the topic of conversation with Mr Mearsheimer. According to Mr Switzer, the crisis between Israel and Gaza in the Middle East is probably “the most vexed issue in international relations in 2024”. He invited Professor Mearsheimer to analyse the Israel-Gaza issue in detail, in order to expose its intricacies, repercussions and the divergent views about its development. I am printing excerpts from Mr Mearsheimer’s views which sought to answer the question of: “Why Israel is in deep trouble?”
“As everybody knows,” Professor Mearsheimer said, “since October 7th the Middle East has been turned upside down. I think before October 7th almost everybody thought that the Middle East was a quite stable area, there were no big problems. Then October 7th happened, and it looks like nothing but trouble today… I’d like to talk about the causes of the trouble where we are today and where we’re going. And in pursuit of that I want to break my talk down this way: first focus on analysing the conflict in Gaza mainly between Israel and the Palestinians, or Israel and Hamas… The second conflict I want to look at is the Iran-Israel-US conflict that took place April 1st, April 14th and April 19th… I want to talk about the consequences of those two conflicts for Israel, for the United States and for Iran, and my basic argument is that Israel is the big loser, Israel is in really serious trouble today and there’s little hope of getting away from that moving forward. Second, that the Americans are also losers.
“It’s very important to understand that Israel today is what I would call greater Israel, controls everything between the river and the sea… And Hamas wants to control everything between the river and the sea… It is very important to understand that inside greater Israel there are roughly 7.3 million Palestinians and roughly 7.3 million Israeli Jews; there is rough equality between the two sides.” But the Palestinian population is growing faster than the Israeli population, hence Israel’s adoption of ethnic cleansing policies against Palestinians, Mr Mearsheimer alluded.
Vis-à-vis this intricate dilemma, Mr Mearsheimer laid four options on the table: “One, is you have a democratic greater Israel, that’s not going to happen because it would no longer be a Jewish State, because if you look at demographic patterns the Palestinians are making more babies than the Israeli Jews… Second possibility is a two-State solution, that is not happening certainly after what happened on October 7th… Third possibility is apartheid, and basically what you now have is an apartheid State… If you look at Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, all three of those organisations have produced lengthy reports that lay out why Israel is an apartheid State… Fourth option is ethnic cleansing which means getting rid of the Palestinians for the most part who live in Gaza and the West Bank and creating a greater Israel that is completely dominated by Israeli Jews.
“Let’s talk about what the situation looked like before October 7th… In 2005 when Ariel Sharon was Prime Minister of Israel, he decided to pull the Israeli settlers out of Gaza… because Gaza was a hornet’s nest…and having settlers in there was a nightmare… And what they did was pulled all the settlers out and it became an open-air prison for Palestinians.” Mr Mearsheimer explained that as of this point the Israeli authorities’ mainstay was to target the Palestinians in the West Bank. Hence, and through collusion with Hamas, the two-State solution was taken off the table giving the world the impression that the Palestinians are not collaborating in the negotiations.
“Now what we want to ask ourselves is what exactly are Israel’s goals here,” Mr Mearsheimer said… “If you read the mainstream media in the West, what people talk about is that Israel is interested in: number one, defeating and eliminating Hamas… And second, the goal is to get the [240] hostages back… What’s not discussed in the western media is the real goal… to ethnically cleanse Gaza… And the reason they want to ethnically cleanse Gaza is that’s the way you get out of apartheid… To create the State of Israel to begin with you had to do massive ethnic cleansing; in 1948 and in 1967 the Israelis cleansed huge portions of what is today greater Israel… What Israelis and especially Benjamin Netanyahu are doing in Gaza is they have not come up with a plan for what Gaza is going to look like after the shooting stops, and Israeli military commanders are constantly complaining these days that Netanyahu doesn’t give them any sense of what the final political settlement’s going to look like so they can deal with Hamas and deal with the Palestinians with some thought in mind about what the endgame is… The reason they’re not talking about how they’re going to administer a Palestinian dominated Gaza is because they want the Palestinians out, they want to ethnically cleanse Gaza… How do you get the Palestinians out? First of all, they definitely went after Hamas… But to make ethnic cleansing work you have to kill a significant number of Palestinians… And you have to make the place unliveable… So Israel is in real trouble in Gaza now… They have not achieved their objectives with regard to those two-State objectives and with regard to the ethnic cleansing.
“The Israelis could never conduct that operation in Gaza without American Support.” But according to Mr Mearsheimer this has spilled on Americans a great deal of failure and deception owing to their own reckless policies. “What’s happening in the United States and all across the world on university and college campuses is just evidence that Israel’s reputation has been badly tarnished,” Mr Mearsheimer said, suggesting that the US administration should reevaluate its support of the Israeli war machine.
“I think that from Israel’s point of view what’s happened to its reputation is disastrous,” Mr Mearsheimer said. He reminded of the efforts made before by the US to create a coalition with Russia and China to serve its strategic interests in the Middle East. But all this has gone with the wind owing to Israel’s behaviour in the region… “Today, the United States is driving the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans together,” Mr Mearsheimer concluded.
I will present in an upcoming editorial the rich Q&A that followed this rich discussion.
Watani International
7 June 2024