The Long View on the War in Gaza

The Arc of History Bends Toward Normalization

The 2025 Peace Summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. In attendance were the leaders of the United States, Turkey, France, Qatar, Egypt, the UK, and, er, FIFA. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Now that the war in Gaza is tentatively over, what are its long-term consequences? According to one view—let’s call it the doomer left perspective—Gaza has “destroyed what remains of the illusion that the West should determine the future for the rest of the world” (Pankaj Mishra et al) and even “broken something in the world,” with Israel’s image “forever stained” (John Ganz). Certainly, support for Israel has dramatically declined over the course of the war. But is that decline irreversible? More momentously, has the West’s moral credibility been permanently reduced to tatters? Is Gaza’s destruction a rupture in the course of time, for which there is forever a before and after? Based on a judicious look at geopolitics and history, I have my doubts.

For context, if we take the 2010s as our starting point, the war in Gaza (67,000 Palestinian deaths, including combatants) isn’t even the deadliest modern conflict in the Middle East, let alone the world. The Yemeni civil war killed perhaps 400,000. The Syrian civil war, roughly 600,000. Yet no one ever said that the siege of Aleppo “has broken something in the world.” As far as reputation goes, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria was suspended from the Arab League in 2011. But the country was readmitted in 2023, after Assad (seemingly) emerged victorious. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s brutal intervention in Yemen has been largely forgotten.¹ Likewise, it seems unlikely that Israel will forever be blamed for the third-deadliest Middle Eastern conflict in the last 15 years, even if we factor in double standards, antisemitism, unequal media attention, displaced American racial politics, heightened religious sensitivities, etc.² If the current ceasefire leads to broader peace, then the popular narrative will change accordingly.

In June 2025, journalist

Murtaza Hussain

asserted that because of the “genocide, as well as the millenarian hostility of the Israeli government towards its neighbors . . . I do not foresee an ultimate integration of Israel into the region.” But as co-chair of a September 2025 conference to recognize Palestine, Saudi Arabia officially reaffirmed the goal of Israel’s “full regional integration, as provided for in the Arab Peace initiative.” President Donald Trump’s October 2025 Peace Summit in Egypt included 14 Muslim countries and produced a memorandum extolling “friendly and mutually beneficial relationship[s] between Israel and its regional neighbors.” And even under the strain of Gaza, the Abraham Accords didn’t break. A number of Arab countries—Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—actually expanded their military coordination with Israel during the war. Moreover, according to a senior Trump official, if the American peace plan unfolds, the Accords may be extended to other countries like Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Qatar, Mauritania, Algeria, Syria, and Lebanon. One Saudi royal source even said that with a new Israeli government and a commitment to the two-state principle, “you’ll see the Saudi royal family — myself included — buying homes in Nahariya [an Israeli coastal city] and vacationing there twice a year.”

All of this is not to say that regional integration is inevitable. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, in part, to derail a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia. Future derailments are, tragically, always a possibility. But let’s not be naive. No Middle Eastern leader has clean hands. Many loathe the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot, and were happy to see Israel weaken Iran and its proxies, which also threaten them. They’d also be happy to take advantage of Israel’s still-thriving tech and venture capital sectors, best-in-region security expertise, and deep US ties. Arab and Muslim public opinion is strongly behind the Palestinians, for the understandable reason that the Palestinians are Arab and (predominantly) Muslim. Widespread Muslim antisemitism, and the provocations of Israel’s own extremists, certainly don’t help matters. Even authoritarian leaders can’t go entirely against the will of their people, so progress on regional integration will require movement on the Palestinian issue. But Israel’s weakening of Hamas—combined with the constructive involvement of Muslim countries and Trump’s willingness to strong-arm all parties—actually makes such progress more likely than before.

Has America’s support for Israel discredited the Western world order? So the doomer left claims, but they never put much credence in it anyway. For argument’s sake, let’s accept the notion that the war in Gaza was a genocide. (I don’t accept this notion, but bear with me.) In 1971, Pakistan engaged in what is widely recognized as a genocide in Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan and treated like an internal colony by the western half. Perhaps up to 3 million Bengalis were killed, while 10 million fled to India and another 30 million were internally displaced—far greater numbers than the war in Gaza, and even the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a whole.³ The American president at the time, Richard Nixon, refused to condemn Pakistan, a Cold War ally, and enabled the transfer of weapons to its military dictator. If you’re going to impugn the West for moral imperfections, you don’t need Israel to do so. That’s setting aside October 7, perhaps the clearest casus belli in modern history, and the culpability of Hamas in using civilians as human shields, prohibiting ordinary Gazans from sheltering in its tunnels, and refusing (until now) to end the “genocide” by giving up its hostages.

With India’s military assistance, Bangladesh won its independence in 1971. Though relations are historically strained, Pakistan and Bangladesh have maintained diplomatic ties since 1974. In recent years, they’ve even sought to deepen their relationship to counterbalance India’s influence. The two countries are geographically distant and both Sunni Muslim, so neat analogies to the Israeli–Palestinian situation would be fraught. Clearly, there are security concerns, competing religious claims, and destructive ideologies (like Islamism and irredentism) that weigh more heavily in the Holy Land.⁴ Still, the point remains that even after mass violence, coexistence between historic enemies is possible. The former Yugoslavia, where once-warring Serbs and Croats now have full diplomatic relations, is another case in point. In fact, it could be argued that mass violence is a general precondition for stability, and that very few states were founded and recognized absent a history of conflict.

Incidentally, Pakistan was formed out of the British Empire around the same time as Israel (the late 1940s), with an analogous national purpose (for Pakistan, to be a homeland for South Asian Muslims; for Israel, to be a homeland for Jews) and concurrent population displacements (though at a vastly different scale: around 7 million Muslims were displaced from India and a similar number of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan, while 700,000 Arabs were displaced from Israel and 800,000 Jews from Arab countries).⁵ Would Muslims have been better off in a unitary India, as Mahatma Gandhi argued? Would Jews have been wiser to stay in diaspora, or perhaps to form a state elsewhere? We can have endless, fascinating counterfactual debates. But whether you think they were mistakes or not, both countries have now been around for 75-plus years. Pakistan clearly isn’t going away, and neither is Israel. Nor, for that matter, are the Palestinians: even if their identity was formed as a late-stage reaction to Zionism. From these basic assumptions, tested through decades of war, a proper perspective naturally follows. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward normalization.

1. At the very least, it wasn’t mentioned at the 2025 Riyadh Comedy Festival, which featured top Western comics like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Kevin Hart, and Bill Burr.

2. Factoring those in, I expect the opprobrium against Israel to continue for some time yet. But I’m taking the long view here.

3. Estimates of the death toll vary wildly, but even the low end (500,000) exceeds that of the entire Israeli–Palestinian conflict (perhaps 120,000, including losses on both sides).

4. Though Islamism also played a role in the Bangladesh genocide, which particularly targeted minority Hindus.

5. Of course, there are also differences between the two cases. For example, Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel stretches back to the Bronze Age, whereas there was never an independent Muslim polity in what is now Pakistan before 1947. (Though Muslim empires once ruled the region as part of India, just as they once ruled the land of Israel.) Also, unlike Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis whose ancestors were displaced don’t claim a “right of return” to another country.