Whose Middle East is it? The limits of Washington and the minefield of the great world powers

At dawn on October 7, 2024, US President Joe Biden was focused on watching live TV images of missiles raining down on Israel from Gaza. Hamas militiamen, in a brutal and ferocious action, attacked cities and villages in southern Israel. Mutilated and lifeless bodies littered the streets, kidnapped hostages forcefully brought into the Palestinian enclave, fear and terror everywhere.

It was the prelude to the most important terrorist attack in decades. And also the green light for the longest war in which Israel has been involved since the 1980s.

Six months later, one hundred and eighty days later, the Gaza Strip is a pile of rubble. The Israeli army recently announced that it had withdrawn troops from the southern coastal territory, but did not specify why.

The perception is that the conflict will not end any time soon, given that the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has announced that a series of new missions have been planned, including the one to control Rafah. Moreover, attempts to reach a ceasefire have so far produced only negative results.

With US elections scheduled for November 2024, many in the United States have begun to doubt Biden's role in managing the war.

The Republicans, on the one hand, ask the president for greater support for Israel; the Democrats, on the other hand, want him to stop sending weapons to Israel, and in fact many of his public speeches ahead of the vote are often interrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Since the beginning of the conflict, Biden has firmly supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The USA is at Israel's side,” he said immediately after the Hamas attack.

The Pentagon and the American security services had been ordered to “make sure Israel had what it needed” to defend itself from Hamas, even though the US-made jets sent to Israel had already been bombing Gaza for some time.

Most likely, shortly after October 7, Biden and senior American officials from the State Department believed that the war would last a few weeks, at most a couple of months, and that in any case it would end before Christmas. This was not the case.

This “invalid” perception of the conflict, as well as of the behavior of those like Israel who first suffered and then triggered the worst carnage ever, meant that things took a very different turn from what many thought plausible.

An even more serious matter if you consider that those who made the wrong calculations are also those who move the pawns in the great Middle Eastern game.

Thus, tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths later (of which a third are children), the war continues its tragic course. More than a conflict: a tragedy thought out, calculated and reiterated in its gravity. A collective punishment of the Palestinian people.

You have to imagine that Gaza is the equivalent of an area equal to just under a third of the Municipality of Rome; a strip of land almost as large as the Municipality of Enna or, if you prefer, as large as Las Vegas but with a population three times higher.

Israel has turned Gaza into a region that no longer exists. The approximately 2 million inhabitants are displaced, dying of hunger, caged without being able to escape.

It is the largest de facto prison camp sanctioned by the international community whose prisoners are trapped with everyone's consent.

Without anyone having had the strength and courage to say a word to stop this tragedy.

It is clear to everyone that Hamas sucks, but that all civilians in Gaza are controlled and assimilated to Hamas means endorsing collective punishment of the worst kind.

The point is solely attributable to the double standards of the international community; to territorial sovereignty; to humanitarian protection.

The cowardly and unjustified aggression of a terrorist group has triggered the most shameful and unseemly military and warmongering spectacle on the part of Israel.

With the intention of annihilating a terrorist group, we ended up punishing an entire population.

And no one, absolutely no one, managed to stop this massacre.

Israel's naturalness in implementing its legitimate right to defend itself – soon transformed into the collective revenge of a people and perpetrated for six consecutive months – made any real attempt at dialogue and reaching a ceasefire futile.

There are those who, even today, all this seems obvious when in fact it only reveals the real weight of the world powers and the limit of the control that they believe they exercise in the world. A dog chasing its tail; the well-served of those who, once domesticated, today domesticate the master.

Although Biden criticized Netanyahu, he never managed to stop him. The Israeli prime minister has transformed his political battle into a fight for personal salvation: annihilating Hamas as Gaza and Gaza as Hamas. Netanyahu's government in Israel itself has its own problems: many no longer want anything called Gaza to exist, but still many others blame Bibi for the very fact that the October 7 terrorist attack could occur and accuse him of having abandoned the hostages. Many are calling for new elections.

The USA was the first country in the world to recognize the independence and sovereignty of Israel in 1948.

At least until the early years of the twenty-first century, that special relationship was always about what Washington could get from Israel in the Middle Eastern region. In fact, it controlled the country as if it were its armed and operational arm, as well as a valid deterrent, in the area.

And even if it supplied weapons and ammunition to Israel, the US had such weight and influence that it could effectively pose a subtle and invisible veto against the Jewish state.

Perhaps the most significant event occurred in 1957 when US President Dwight Eisenhower stopped the occupation of Sinai by the Israeli armed forces.

The conflict of recent months, with its specific circumstances, demonstrates the real limits of American power and influence on Israel.

Today the Middle East is littered with the remains of what were once the great world powers, still mistakenly convinced that they could exercise their power and impose their decisions on a region that never truly belonged to anyone.