His­to­ry, egos, ambi­tion and hubris have entan­gled the Mid­dle East into a polit­i­cal and secu­ri­ty Gor­dian knot. Mythol­o­gy has it that the ends of  impos­si­bly com­plex tan­gle were hid­den, and it could only be undone by the future con­queror of all Asia.

The most pop­u­lar ver­sion of how Alexan­der the Great undid the knot, was a sin­gle blow of his sword. The less-cit­ed account is that he found the ends either by cut­ting into the tan­gle, or draw­ing out the pole to which it was tied.
Gor­dian knot being the prover­bial term for a prob­lem that can only be resolved by bold action,  the mod­ern con­tes­tants for pri­ma­cy in the Mid­dle East have con­sis­tent­ly opt­ed to try the sword solu­tion first, despite the appalling “col­lat­er­al dam­age”, mean­ing inno­cent victims.
Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the knot is still firm­ly tied, the would-be con­querors are on the defen­sive on fronts they nev­er thought would arise, and their swords are grow­ing blunter by the day.
Israel remains the pre­em­i­nent  local mil­i­tary force, but bat­tle­field suc­cess is look­ing increas­ing­ly Pyrrhic; a suc­cess that brings such sig­nif­i­cant harm to the vic­tor that it dif­fers lit­tle from defeat.
Their newest ene­my is Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al, specif­i­cal­ly the organisation’s 296  page report, com­piled over six months, that accus­es Israel of com­mit­ting geno­cide in Gaza.
Among Israel’s pro for­ma defences is that Hamas used civil­ians as human shields. That’s weak­ened by evi­dence that the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has been doing the same thing with Pales­tin­ian prisoners.
Also, if you want to claim, as Israel does,  the man­tle of “the world’s most moral army”, you can’t break a moral code and kill tens of thou­sands of civil­ians and expect to get a mere slap on the wrist, nev­er mind a pat on the head.                                                                  

                 THE KNOT’S PRICE TAG

When the inter­na­tion­al media final­ly gets into Gaza and reports on what has been done, Israel will find itself more iso­lat­ed than embraced for its actions, the rea­sons and provo­ca­tion be damned.
Will those gov­ern­ment min­is­ters who allowed, encour­aged, aid­ed and abet­ted  ret­ri­bu­tion to become unremit­ting vengeance pay for it?
Or will the cost be mea­sured in the psy­ches of sol­diers who were ordered to do it?
How deep will the scars be on the soul of a nation found­ed as a hope­ful heal­ing of the hor­rors wreaked upon Jews by Naziism?
And how dif­fer­ent are the atti­tudes and actions of reli­gious set­tler zealots who attack Pales­tini­ans in the West Bank, from the “brown shirts”, among whose roles was “vio­lent intim­i­da­tion of polit­i­cal oppo­nents and of Jews.” ?
And if that seems undu­ly harsh,  con­sid­er that Ami Ayalon, the for­mer Shin Bet domes­tic intel­li­gence agency direc­tor, char­ac­terised the Israeli government’s pol­i­cy direc­tives for the mil­i­tary as “immoral and unjust,”
On the oth­er side of the “heads-we-win-tails-you-lose” coin, the longer Hamas tries to hold out, the less sup­port it’s like­ly to enjoy from Gazans when – or if ever — the dust final­ly set­tles and the rub­ble is cleared,  even if the move­ment acknowl­edges the futil­i­ty of try­ing to achieve Pales­tin­ian dreams through unwinnable war.
Ass for  the U.S., a state­ment by an unnamed State Depart­ment spokesper­son that: “Our posi­tion on this has not changed, and we con­tin­ue to believe that alle­ga­tions of geno­cide are unfound­ed” isn’t of Gor­dian pro­por­tion, but it has great pos­si­bil­i­ties as a noose.

                             A LESSER BUT STILL COMPLEX KNOT

“One man’s ter­ror­ist is anoth­er man’s free­dom fight­er,” may be a cliché, but it also epit­o­mis­es the conun­drum the U.S. and its allies now face in Syria.
The blitz-like offen­sive against the odi­ous regime of Syr­i­an Pres­i­dent Bashar al-Assad is being spear­head­ed by Hay­at Tahrir al-Sham, which was linked to the Islam­ic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda.
Despite the group’s efforts to build a more mod­er­ate image after offi­cial­ly break­ing with those move­ments some years ago, it’s still con­sid­ered a ter­ror­ist group by the Unit­ed States.
But Hay­at Tahrir and its jihadist-prone allies are the best chance for now of over­throw­ing Assad and poten­tial­ly cut­ting the arms pipeline between Iran and Hezbollah.
The resur­gence of extrem­ists  the U.S. thought had been bat­tered out of con­tention in Syr­ia, is clear evi­dence the “bad guys” know how to retreat, lick their wounds and then get back in the game.
The only rea­son­able, and in the long term viable, way for  the “good guys” (who don’t real­ly exist as such) to cut the Mid­dle East knot. is to bear in mind that in spite of his grandiose des­ig­na­tion, mil­i­tary genius and pow­er, the sin­gle blow method Alexan­der the Great alleged­ly used to cut the Gor­dian knot didn’t  bring him  the ulti­mate vic­to­ry the feat promised.
And then they need to emu­late a dic­tum of arguably the great­est bridge-builders and peace­mak­ers of our time; the late Arch­bish­op Desmond Tutu :  “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.”
That’s an ele­gant way to point out that brains will tri­umph over brawn.

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