The Middle East’s deadly doom loop

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
BEIRUT — Dazed and exhausted, a Lebanese Shiite mother of four gestures to her baby bump — her fifth child is weeks away from arriving.
For the past month, Samara and her young children have been sleeping rough in an abandoned, dilapidated shop front, a few hundred meters from the Grand Serial — the imposing building housing the offices of the Lebanese prime minister.
The country’s parliament is just a few blocks away. But it might as well be on another planet.
Since fleeing from the embattled border village of Ayta ash Shab early last month, Samara and her family have been receiving only a meal a day from the country’s cash-strapped and dysfunctional public authorities. “I don’t have a house, no. It’s gone,” she lamented. Most of the homes and buildings in her village have been destroyed, just as they were back in 2006, during the last war between Israel and Lebanon’s militant Shiite movement Hezbollah.
It’s as though the Levant is stuck in a time-loop, doomed to forever repeat the cycles of war and revenge. The weapons have evolved, of course — with the development of battlefield AI and drones — but the back-and-forth of attack and reprisal, and the general contours of the conflict have mainly remained the same, with minor variations depending on the involvement of outside powers or the regional ambitions and political makeup of neighboring countries.
The bewilderment and despair of those pushed from pillar to post because of conflict has remained the same too.
The geopolitics of this latest clash aren’t something that preoccupies Samara: She, like the many refugees before her, has more immediate problems — securing more food and fresh clothes for her youngsters and keeping them warm as winter looms. She wonders when, or whether, it’ll ever be possible to return home, and where and how her family may make a new home if it isn’t.
The Levant’s waves of refugees have all faced the same challenges — the Shiites of the south fleeing Israel’s ground incursion in the 1980s or 2006, the Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the Nakba, or the Jews forced from the region’s Muslim-majority countries from 1948 to the early 1970s.
And through it all, uncompromising combatants have resorted to vengeful, violent tactics, fearing anything else would show weakness, invite further attack and leave them in an even worse position — even if that’s meant exploiting civilians as human shields like Hamas. A ruthless hardline Islamist organization that’s never shied away from spilling civilian blood, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Hamas wants massive Israeli retaliation — that’s the strategy.  
But for a brief period, it had looked like the time loop might break. Hope came with the Camp David Accords and talk of a two-state solution, but the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s by an Israeli ultranationalist doomed the peace process. And now, encouraged by Hamas’ Oct. 7 rampage, the spirit of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — of retaliation — has Israel firmly in its grip once more.
Sharon himself wasn’t the author of the “respond to any attack with massive retaliation” tactic — that was Israeli General Moshe Dayan and the country’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. He was, however, appointed to command a special forces group tasked with mounting reprisals in response to Palestinian fedayeen attacks. The unit’s first raid took place on the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza in August 1953 and, a few months later, it conducted what became known as the Qibya massacre — a reprisal for a fedayeen attack that left a Jewish woman and her two children dead. Around 70 Palestinian civilians were killed at Qibya — half of them women and children.
Later Sharon defended the attack, saying: “Now people could feel that the terrorist gangs would think twice before striking, now that they knew for sure they would be hit back.” He embraced the “always escalate” philosophy through most of his time in the military and, subsequently, as a politician.
Sharon was also the one who launched Operation Peace for Galilee, the 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon in response to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) attacks on Israel. The invasion was successful in that it eventually forced the PLO out of Lebanon, but it also prolonged the Lebanese civil war, came at enormous human cost and led to an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. 
And in the end, the PLO was just replaced by another foe in Lebanon: Hezbollah.
Today, there’s talk of “total victory” in Israel again, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintaining that only tough military means can ensure a safe security environment, even if that means laying waste to Gaza, razing southern Lebanon, shunning U.N. resolutions and ignoring international rules of war. (Of course, as non-state actors, Hamas and `Hezbollah can disregard U.N. resolutions with impunity). The same arguments were made in 1982 and in 2006, when one of Israel’s key war aims was to get the Lebanese to turn on Hezbollah and force it to disarm — but that isn’t how it turned out.
Meanwhile, in Gaza and the West Bank — where Israeli ultranationalists are using the current emergency as cover to grab more land and expand Jewish settlements — the conflict is likely going to inculcate a new generation of Hamas fighters. The new generation will also believe in the logic of violence and reprisal. And as the time loop continues, empathy for the suffering of foes will become ever harder and the sense of victimhood more ingrained.
Israelis and Palestinians have both been traumatized by history. The Holocaust and centuries of pogroms and dispossession is in Israelis’ cultural DNA. A Jewish homeland was meant to offer safety, and the lesson learned from “never again” is that you have to strike hard, as brutally as you can, to survive or face being expunged. For modern-day Palestinians, though, everything flows from the Nakba, the besieging of Gaza and the ever-expanding footprint of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
And as the time loop continues the trauma is only compounded and the cruelty increases. Israel can kill more people as it has the military might to do so, but there can be no doubt that without the Iron Dome and David’s Sling its opponents would happily match the bloodshed.
A time of peace seems as far off as ever.