Gaza and Beyond-7: The Importance of the Mediterranean and the Middle East for Israel
In 1948, Israel, which was installed in the region as an afterthought due to anti-Semitic protests, especially in Germany, is experiencing problems of cohesion both within itself and with the communities around it. Israel poses a security dilemma for itself and its neighbors in the region.
Israel, 73.6 percent Jewish and 21.1 percent Arab, was established on May 14, 1948. Israel is located on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the northern shore of the Red Sea.
It borders Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the southwest, and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to the west and east respectively.
Between 1096 and 1921, the region was a focal point of war between Christians and Muslims.
From the end of the Crusades until the British conquest in 1917, Egypt was part of the province of Syria under the Mamluk Sultanate, and after 1517 it remained part of the Ottoman Empire under Yavuz Sultan Selim.
In the late 19th century, the persecution of Jews in Europe gave rise to the Zionist movement, and international support grew for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the region of the ancient kingdoms called Palestine.
After the British conquest of Syria, the Balfour Declaration following World War I and the establishment of the Palestine Mandate, Aliyah (the return of diaspora Jews to the Land of Israel) increased. As a result, Arab-Jewish tensions have increased due to the confrontation between Arab and Jewish nationalism in the region and have reached the present day.
In 1948, with the declaration of Israeli Independence, many Jews from Europe and Muslim countries immigrated to Israel. At the same time, many Arabs also emigrated from Israel.
Although the Arab-Israeli conflict seems to have started when Arab countries declared war against the state of Israel, which was established in 1948 following the United Nations' decision to partition Palestine, its roots lie in the post-World War I Middle East policies of Britain, which committed to establishing a "Jewish national home" in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
The first phase of the Palestinian conflict lasted until 1948 and culminated in the establishment of the state of Israel, with Jews struggling to establish a Jewish national home and Arabs struggling to prevent it. The phase after 1948 was characterized by wars between Israel and Arab states and fruitless peace attempts.
The Arab-Israeli conflict led to three major wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973, the occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands, the refugee status of Palestinians who lost their homeland, created polarization in the region, increased armament, strengthened radicalism, and paved the way for the great powers to divide the region into spheres of influence.
Although Britain, the USSR and France had a say in the Middle East until World War II, the US, the USSR, Germany and Britain continued to dominate the region in the post-World War II period, but the biggest share went to the USA.
The US still maintains this influence in the region and has all the controls in its hands. Especially after 1990, with the disintegration of the USSR, the US has been acting alone in the region and has been struggling to take complete control of the region.
For this purpose, steps have begun to be taken for the Greater Israel project. Israeli politicians are trying to portray this situation as a religious obligation and to expand their position and gains in the region in every situation. For this purpose, all kinds of discourse, including nuclear threats, have become commonplace in the media.
Mesopotamia and the fertile Nile lands, which have never lost their importance throughout the centuries, continue to be included in the influence and strategic plans of many countries today.
Looking at the security dynamics in the Middle East, we can say that the most intense struggle is between Israel and Iran with the support of their Western allies, especially the United States.
Therefore, one of the most important elements of regional security relations in recent years has been Iran's proxy war with Hezbollah. Another is the problems between Israel and Palestine, including land occupations. Iran's and Israel's struggle to establish a big state in the Middle East and to gain religious and political gains are also ongoing tensions.
Iran seeks to expand its struggle and Hezbollah in the region in order to balance its adversaries, who have military superiority in terms of quality and numbers, and to increase its influence and expand its strategic depth from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.
Israel, on the other hand, seeks to concentrate Jews in this region by forcibly and oppressively relocating the Palestinian people in its territories and moving Jews living in other parts of the world to these territories.
With the emergence of the US-China rivalry in many geographies and in many different areas of the world, the areas of struggle in the world are shifting towards a more complex and uncertain area. This ongoing struggle between the two countries and their allies is not limited to the Asia-Pacific but also manifests itself in different ways in different continents of the world.
The Middle East is one of the places where this mutual rivalry continues intensely but covertly. The Middle East, which has historically been the main area of competition between the great powers, maintains its important position in this rivalry.
First of all, the economic influence of the Chinese state in the region is reducing the influence of the US in the Middle East day by day.
In its loans to the countries of the region, China aims to contribute to the reconstruction of the existing infrastructures in the countries with which it makes agreements and thus closely follow the economic development of the countries in question.
China is trying to apply this model of joint development to countries in the African continent and is cooperating with many countries in Africa, including Iran and Israel in the Middle East.
China is trying to create an economic base for itself by cooperating with these countries through trade.
On the one hand, China is signing a $400 billion deal with Iran, on the other hand, it is signing agreements with Saudi Arabia to build a UAV factory and then making port agreements with Israel.
In the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the EU's eyes turned back to the Middle East for energy imports after the EU and Russia restricted natural gas and oil imports.
In 1948, Israel, which was installed in the region as an afterthought due to anti-Semitic protests, especially in Germany, has been experiencing problems of cohesion both within itself and with the communities around it. Israel's national consciousness is characterized by wars, numerous conflicts, terrorist acts, hateful rhetoric, the Holocaust and the hostility of Arab states. This is also how Israeli officials think about their own country and the Middle East region: Israel is geographically isolated. It lacks allies. It is geographically vulnerable to external threats. It therefore needs more military power.
During the Cold War, Arab countries strongly opposed the existence of Israel. With the exception of Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, the countries of the region refrained from recognizing Israel and refused any form of communication with the Israeli government. The countries of the region have even engaged in armed conflict with Israel on several occasions. These states have also tried to isolate Israel in the international arena and imposed economic and diplomatic boycotts against the country. In addition to Israel's superior military power, the uninterrupted political, military and economic support provided by the United States has helped Israel to survive until today.
Due to its isolation in the region and its small population, Israel seeks unconditional support from the United States under any circumstances. In this context, Israel sees obtaining military equipment, technical cooperation, economic aid and international political support from the US as the basis of its foreign policy. Israeli leaders believe that if they are not in an alliance with a big and powerful state, they will not be able to hold on in the region for long and will disappear. For these reasons, they have placed the concept of comprehensive and disproportionate/extreme retaliation, as well as nuclear weapons, at the heart of their military strategy defense.
The end of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli peace process allowed Israel to act more freely in its foreign policy. From the early 1990s until 2011, Israeli governments prioritized the peace process. The desire to develop peaceful relations with neighboring Arab states represented a significant departure from Israel's traditional strategy. This was because Israel sought to secure itself by developing alliance relations with non-Arab states. In particular, the Kuwaiti crisis caused the Saddam regime and Iraq, Israel's greatest enemy, to lose its former power. On the other hand, Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan and started direct negotiations with Syria. Revitalizing the peace process with the Palestinians, Israel also tried to improve its relations with the Gulf countries and North African states.
The Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, were signed on 15 September 2020 at an official ceremony held by former US President Donald Trump at the White House. These normalization steps expanded to Morocco and Sudan in the same year. Israel's desire to become an economically powerful country and the hopes of the other participating countries to have closer relations with the United States were the most important factors in these diplomatic breakthroughs.
While hundreds of thousands of people in Israel continue to protest against the Netanyahu government's move to increase its control over the high judiciary, recent surveys have also revealed that many Israeli citizens are considering leaving the country. In order for Israel and its politicians to be able to take measures against these events, which have recently started to divide Israel, a starting point was needed to keep its people together.
Israel's energy management and policies, which are almost completely dependent on foreign sources, have started to reshape and change with the natural gas deposits found in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Leviathan, Aphrodite and Tamar regions. It is trying to reshape its energy policy, which is dependent on foreign sources, and wants to make changes in its energy policies in order to get rid of this dependence on foreign sources. The restriction of Russia's natural gas and oil exports to EU countries due to the Russia-Ukraine war seems to have provided Israel with this opportunity. With the natural gas reserves it has found in the Mediterranean, Israel also wants to make use of this opportunity.
Israel has occupied Palestinian territories for years. In these occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has established settlements and settled Israelis in these areas. With this behavior, Israel has shown that it wants to be permanent in Palestinian territories and wants to expand further. Although the UN has taken decisions against Israel, which occupies the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Israel has not taken these decisions into consideration. There is no sign that Israel will withdraw from the occupied territories in the near future, and the bombing of Gaza can be considered to be for this purpose.
Today, it would be absolutely wrong to think that Israel will stop after taking Gaza. As it did in the past, it will always demand more and more land, including Turkey, by claiming that there are lands promised to it and religious rhetoric for Greater Israel. It will not return the occupied Golan Heights to Syria and will not accept a two-state solution in Palestine. As a people expelled from Europe, it will try to gain a place for itself in the Middle East and to create energy, water, land and population in the region by creating more problems in the region and solving them in accordance with its own interests, with the US and the UK behind it.
It is understood that Israel does not take these notifications seriously, despite the fact that the Israeli government has been informed by both the Egyptian state and the US that serious intelligence that the events of October 7 should be expected. It behaves just like the US, which attacked Iraq on the pretext of chemical weapons.
It can be said that Gaza was fictionalized in the Middle East as an analogue of the September 11 events of the US and that this attack was used deliberately to take over the Gaza region as a result of these events.
Only around 6.5 million Palestinians have been forced to leave their homeland from the region so far. The displacement of millions of people by fomenting sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Syria is also gradually being completed.
Israel's goal is to expel all the remaining non-Jewish Palestinians in the region from their homeland and to completely change the demographic structure in favor of Israel.
The Jewish communities in Europe are now being replaced by Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Arab and African populations, mostly Muslim, who have recently arrived in European countries due to wars in the Middle East. The demographic structure has started to change on the European continent as well.
As a result, the Israeli leadership acts in accordance with a foreign policy objective that is appropriate to its extreme security needs. It wants to be a major country in the region and to have access to the energy, water and trade routes for economic development that this major country will need. It seeks to have a say in the Mediterranean, especially in the energy basins. In order to become the Greater State of Israel, it aims to solve the problems of land, water, energy, economy and population and tries to implement the policies it has determined for this purpose.
At the same time, the Defense Ministers of Israel, Greece and Cyprus announced their agreement to increase military cooperation.
All three countries have established close ties over offshore gas rights in the Eastern Mediterranean amid tensions between Turkey and Greece. They also signed a trilateral agreement that will form the basis of a planned 1900-kilometer pipeline to transport Israeli and Cypriot gas to Europe. This should be seen as one of the biggest proofs of the idea that after Gaza, Israel's next target will be the Mediterranean and Cyprus.
Israel's relations with the Greek-GCASC axis are mostly based on the natural gas deposits discovered in 2009. The Aphrodite reserve, which corresponds to the SCGA's so-called exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields, which lie within the borders of the Israeli EEZ, have been the main triggers for the rapid development of bilateral and trilateral relations.
On December 19, 2019, with the approval of the "Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act", the US support for the developing Israel-Greece-GCASC axis in the Eastern Mediterranean has now turned into a concrete form. In this context, the US promised to lift the arms embargo against the SCGA, to establish an Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center to regulate the relations between Israel-Greece and the SCGA, to provide foreign military aid to Greece, and to provide international military training to Greece and the SCGA. Thus, through this law, the US administration again declared its support for the maturing military relations between Israel, Greece and the SCGA. Afterwards, the US started to establish military bases in Greece, especially in Alexandroupolis, within the framework of the war in Ukraine.
The Gaza war is an outward manifestation of a struggle that took place in such a place and at such a time, where all the energy policies of the world are determined. As such, there is an image that everything in the region, including Turkey, can suddenly turn into a chaos of unpredictable dimensions. Everything is now hanging by a thread.
References:
https://orsam.org.tr/d_hbanaliz/6ertanefegil.pdf
https://tasam.org/tr-TR/Icerik/70140/ortadoguda_cok_kutuplu_realizm_abd_ve_cinin_nufuz_savasi_
