THERE was more to the Middle East than the 2022 football World Cup in gas-rich Qatar — the first Arab state to host the mega event — which spent billions of dollars on the extravaganza and kept people the world over on edge.

With Ariel Sharon reincarnated in the person of Likud hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu back in power and the far-right party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir his ally, Israel had all the reasons in the world to look to the future with confidence

In February, Bahrain became the second Arab country to sign a defence agreement with Tel Aviv after the then Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz visited Manama. The first to do so was Morocco in November 2021.

In March, the first-ever Arab-Israeli summit meeting was held at Sde Boker kibbutz in the Negev desert, attended by foreign ministers of Egypt, Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. So excited was UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan that he termed the two-day summit “historic”, which was going to create “a new future.” As in 2021 so also last year in early August Israel unleashed death and destruction on Gaza, reducing buildings to rubble and killing 40 people, most of them civilians including children.

Meanwhile, after denying the crime for long, Israel finally admitted that Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian who had covered Middle Eastern affairs for more than two decades, was killed by Israeli fire during a military operation in the Jenin camp in May.

In August Turkiye decided to restore full diplomatic ties with the Jewish state, which had evoked Ankara’s ire because of its depredations in Gaza in 2018.

Turkiye also improved its relations with Saudi Arabia when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Ankara in June for the first time since the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Riyadh’s consulate in Istanbul.

In July there was a tripartite summit in Tehran when Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin met Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president. Ukraine was no doubt discussed but the real issue was Syria, where Ankara doesn’t see eye to eye with Moscow and Tehran on a number of issues.

Meanwhile a radical decision by the Raisi regime — abolishing the morality police — came in the wake of the unprecedented upheaval that rocked Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 23-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman.

Arrested for apparently not wearing hijab, she died in a hospital but many people thought the police had tortured her to death. Protests began over her funeral in Saqez, Kurdistan province, and by early December more than 300 people, including security officials, had died. Many women threw the hijab away and cut their hair, calling spiritual leader Ali Khamenei a “dictator”. The regime also seemed to be considering relaxing the law on hijab.

Throughout the year, Iran remained embroiled in unsuccessful talks with the US and others on the JCPOA nuclear deal which former American president Donald Trump had unilaterally withdrawn from.

In February, the US lifted sanctions on Iran’s civil nuclear programme. Tehran called the lifting of the sanctions insufficient with Khamenei saying his country was capable of making a nuclear weapon but that it had not yet decided to do so.

The Yemen war, meanwhile, took a dangerous turn in January when missiles fired by the Houthis hit Abu Dhabi when Israeli President Herzog was on a visit to the Gulf country.

However, the continuation of the civil war, which began in 2014, has created what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in the Arab world’s poorest country. With the economy in tatters and health services virtually non-existent, children have been the worst sufferers.

In Lebanon, while political instability and the economic crisis continued, the only positive development was a US-brokered agreement with Israel on offshore gas reserves. The accord accepts the two states’ right to exploit the gas reserves in the Mediterranean.

Published in Dawn Yearender, January 1, 2023