This latest episode of a long-standing conflict makes it even more challenging for countries to cooperate and collaborate to deal with existential crises confronting the world. Multilateralism in geopolitics and economic mitigation has just got another spanner in its works. Over the coming weeks, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to deal with the aftermath of the Hamas attacks. But the repercussions will be felt much beyond West Asia. Finance ministers, World Bank and IMF representatives meeting from today some 4,000 km west of Gaza in Marrakesh, Morocco, will now have to deal with another crisis that has the potential to make their task of finding ways to help developing countries tackle challenges like climate change without incurring further debt even more difficult.
While Israel will continue to take the measures it has to in order to safeguard the security of its people, the world needs to recognise that time to ignore long festering problems is not an option. Multilateral bodies such as the UN need to move beyond the binary approach of condemnation or support. Instead, all governments need to be heard as equal, and multilateralism must reappear to begin to repair the damage. Failure to enable collective action to address complex problems and challenges will provide more oxygen to the Big Power conflict currently unravelling like a moth-eaten sweater, with the war in Israel being the latest thread.
