Tag Archive for: Hezbollah

A new chance for the Middle East

The word ‘opportunity’ rarely appears in the same sentence as the Middle East, and for good reason, but there is a case for suggesting we are approaching an exception. An opportunity—if not for lasting peace, then at least for an end to the ongoing conflicts and the prevention of new ones—is in fact knocking. The question is whether political leaders will open the door.

Israel has decimated the military capability of both Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But continuing military action on its part is running up against the law of diminishing returns, as fewer high-value targets are left.

Moreover, continued military efforts threaten the country’s regional and global standing. The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant is the latest indication of the political isolation and economic sanctions that could become Israel’s fate unless it changes course.

The case for a ceasefire on both fronts is strong. The recent agreement between Israel and Hezbollah requires Hezbollah (which is so weakened that it dropped its insistence that a ceasefire in southern Lebanon be linked to one in Gaza) to move its heavy weaponry north of the Litani River, away from the border with Israel. Lebanese troops will patrol southern Lebanon, and the Israel Defense Forces will withdraw from the area and agree not to maintain a presence. Israel has obtained assurances that under certain conditions it would still be able to take military action against Hezbollah to frustrate the group’s attempts to reconstitute itself along the border or if it were preparing to attack.

This accord, if it holds, permits some 60,000 Israelis to return to their homes after more than a year of displacement. In addition, the ceasefire will allow Israel’s exhausted and overextended military to recover and focus on other challenges, including Iran, which is inching ever closer to developing a nuclear-weapons capability that would pose an existential threat to Israel. And the ceasefire should spare Lebanon and its people further devastation.

Yes, the ceasefire will also allow Hezbollah a degree of time and space to regroup, which is why some in Israel oppose it. That said, open-ended military operations will accomplish little, as Hezbollah can be weakened but not eliminated. Israel’s past failed occupation of southern Lebanon demonstrates as much. Israel’s goal, which this agreement puts within reach, should be to restore deterrence.

Gaza poses a more difficult challenge. It is not clear that Hamas would agree to a ceasefire, although it is much weakened militarily and might have difficulty resisting one if Israel agrees to terms that are widely deemed reasonable.

But will Israel agree? It should, because a ceasefire would allow the return of the more than one hundred remaining hostages in Gaza, half of whom Israeli intelligence services believe are still alive. Moreover, as with Lebanon, it is far from clear that Israel stands to gain from continuing military operations in Gaza. Hamas is certainly unable to launch another attack like the one it carried out on 7 October 2023. But Israel’s refusal to start a diplomatic process that would give Palestinians a chance to secure elements of their nationalist aspirations has made it possible for Hamas—with its insistence on endless struggle—to remain relevant.

The big question, then, is whether Israel would agree to a political process that holds out the possibility (however distant, conditional, and vague in terms of territorial reach) of creating a Palestinian state. In the near term, such a process would pave the way for the entry into Gaza of a regional stabilisation force and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Over time, a Palestinian state properly constituted would enable Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic as well as prosperous and secure.

Some in Israel much prefer a future that allows for Israeli settlement of parts of Gaza and annexation of large swaths of the West Bank. And if they do not get their way, they have vocally threatened to bring down Netanyahu’s government. That is a risk Netanyahu has been loath to take, given that, once out of office, he faces pending legal action and official investigations into Israel’s failure to anticipate and respond to Hamas’s 7 October attack.

Donald Trump, whose return to the Oval Office on 20 January 2025 is already looming over these dynamics, could prove to be the critical variable. While the Israeli right sees his return as an opportunity to achieve maximalist aims, even calling 2025 the year of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and an opportunity to begin reducing Gaza’s Palestinian population through ‘voluntary emigration’, Trump has expressed a desire to calm the region.

Trump is in a position to achieve this goal. Owing to events in Lebanon, Netanyahu may be sufficiently strong to stare down his right-wing coalition partners, form a new government without them, or even get a fresh mandate from the voters. And even if not, Trump, whom the Israeli right see as a friend, could lean on Netanyahu and his government in a way that President Joe Biden never could. It would be more difficult for Netanyahu to resist Trump’s pressure, and much easier for Trump to apply and sustain such pressure, given his support among American evangelicals and certain American Jewish communities.

Richard Nixon comes to mind. Nixon, it is said, was able to reach out to Mao’s China because he alone didn’t have to worry about Nixon.

Much the same now applies to Trump. He could build on the ceasefire in Lebanon and press for one in Gaza, launching what would be a promising diplomatic process. Pulling this off would constitute quite a coup for the 47th president. The opportunity is there for the taking.

Earthquakes in the Middle East

The Middle East resembles nothing so much as an earthquake zone with multiple fault lines. This week, fighting increased sharply along one of those lines, Israel’s border with Lebanon and more specifically, between Israel and Hezbollah. This in turn triggered activity along another fault line, as Iran, Hezbollah’s backer, retaliated by firing ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond severely. Less clear is what will come next, either along these particular fault lines or elsewhere in the region.

What made escalation all but inevitable were rocket strikes by Hezbollah against Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. Israel evacuated some 60,000 citizens from the northern border to shield them from the risk of attacks similar to Hamas’s, but the mounting exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel made it impossible for them to return safely.

What enabled the emergence of this new front, however, is that the situation in Gaza had reached something of a new equilibrium. Over the past year, Israel has sharply degraded the military threat posed by Hamas. Between 10,000 and 20,000 of its fighters have been killed, with many of its leaders either assassinated or forced into indefinite hiding in Gaza’s labyrinth of tunnels. Israel determined that it could safely shift its focus to its northern border and Hezbollah.

What Israel has accomplished thus far against Hezbollah is impressive. First by detonating explosives implanted in pagers and walkie-talkies, then by targeted aerial bombardment, Israel decimated Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader for over three decades, and killed a significant number of Hezbollah fighters.

After Israel’s costly intelligence failures in the lead-up to 7 October, the attacks against Hezbollah have revived the Israeli security establishment’s prestige by demonstrating its continued ability to gain precise intelligence about enemy groups and exploit that intelligence in a decisive fashion. The belief that Israel and Hezbollah had reached a stalemate, with Israel sufficiently deterred from forceful action by Hezbollah’s ability to unleash a missile barrage against it, has been debunked.

Israel followed its covert operations and air attacks with a ground incursion into Lebanon of unknown extent and duration. Also unclear is the purpose. Eliminating Hezbollah is impossible, and occupation of large swaths of Lebanon would be ill-advised given Israel’s poor history with such undertakings.

Current Israeli policy seems designed more to discourage Hezbollah from further attacks, but this, too, may not be possible. Although Israel has seriously weakened the organisation, it still maintains a sizeable fighting force, making it a dangerous foe, especially in any war fought mostly on its home turf. At the same time, as Hezbollah installs new leaders, it must decide whether and how to respond to Israel. The more it retaliates, the more it will invite strong Israeli military action. In short, it is far from clear where all this is leading.

One can sympathise with what Israel has done in Lebanon while criticising what it has done, and failed to do, in Gaza. Hamas, like Hezbollah, is an Iran-backed terrorist organisation that seeks Israel’s destruction. But that is where the similarities end. Hamas is a national liberation movement that has support from elements of the native Palestinian population. Hezbollah, by contrast, is purely an instrument of Iranian foreign policy, with little attachment to the aspirations of the Lebanese or Palestinian peoples.

Moreover, no country would countenance living with a threat that required tens of thousands of its citizens to vacate their homes. And the Lebanese government forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty by failing to fulfill the obligation of ensuring that its territory is not used by terrorists to attack another country.

For its part, Iran has reacted to these attacks on what was perceived to be its strongest proxy by taking what could be the fateful step of attacking Israel directly. I am frankly surprised that Iran did this, although its leaders may have felt compelled to do so lest they appeared weak. Or they may have thought they could thread the needle by acting against Israel without provoking a meaningful military response. But Iran has now provided Israel with a justification to retaliate, for example by attacking nuclear sites and military targets, or even energy-related facilities central to its economy. Israel proved it could do so in April, in the aftermath of an unsuccessful Iranian drone and missile attack.

Striking Iran directly is something many Israelis would welcome, as they have grown weary of dealing with its many proxies. After years of indirect conflict, there is significant domestic support for ‘going to the source’, with the hope that doing so would persuade Iran to curtail its support for its proxies. Some even appear to believe such attacks could trigger events that would bring about the downfall of the Iranian regime. Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, ‘When Iran is finally free—and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think—everything will be different’.

Regime change cannot be ruled out, though it is far from likely, much less assured. It is also far from clear what sort of government might replace the current one. The current regime is more likely than not to weather whatever comes its way, find ways to attack Israeli and Western targets around the world and, most consequentially, accelerate its efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

We may well be nearing a turning point in the Middle East. What we don’t know is where that turn could take us.

The conflict goes on, but no party desires an all-out Middle East war

Another round of Israel-Hezbollah tit-for-tat attacks is over for now, but the danger of an all-out war continues to haunt the Middle East. Both sides have said that despite their reluctance to escalate, they are prepared for it.

It is nearly 11 months since Hamas’s declaration of war on Israel on 7 October 2023. With no end in sight to that war, the Middle East has been teetering on the edge of a regional conflict whose scope and intensity could be more devastating than any since the 1967 and 1973 Israeli-Arab wars.

In a new war, Israel is set to be confronted not by Arab state armies, but by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its regional network of affiliates, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Syrian regime and the Yemeni Houthis in particular. With the United States acting as Israel’s security guarantor, and its global adversaries in China and Russia as well as North Korea supporting Iran, there is little chance of confining the impact of the war to the regional antagonists alone.

All parties in the current conflict are aware of the magnitude of such a scenario, and this has so far deterred them from allowing the conflict to expand into a regional confrontation. Yet, the situation is unsustainable in the medium to long run.

Israel cannot continue to ensure its security and durability based on the indefinite repressive occupation of the Palestinian territories, even with the power of the United States behind it. Israel has already experienced windows of vulnerability in the face of Hamas’s resistance, Hezbollah’s attacks and Iran’s retaliatory actions. Israel’s pre-emptive and assertive military actions have done little or nothing to maximise its security and well-being over the long-term. The country’s people have increasingly been living in fear and uncertainty; its national cohesion, economy, social services and technological edge have suffered significantly.

Without America’s all-round help, Israel is no longer in a position to defend itself against Iran and its allies on its own. As the only nuclear-armed state in the region, Israel possesses the ultimate weapons of deterrence and destruction. But Iran is now a threshold nuclear power.

The United States’ unwavering commitment has been critical in empowering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist ministers to maintain their catastrophic Gaza operations, tighten Israel’s hold on the Palestinian lands and engage in frequent applications of disproportionate force in the name of improving Israel’s security at the cost of widespread global condemnation and isolation.

Israel’s current circumstances do not inspire much confidence about its future. This will remain so, unless there is a change of leadership and policy direction. Instead of focusing on occupation, territorial expansion and warfare, there should be an understanding that Israel’s security and well-being are intertwined with those of the Palestinians within a two-state solution.

Similarly, Iran is not in a strong position to ignite a regional conflict. Under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s severe political, economic and social challenges do not leave it in a state to engage in such a conflict. Iran’s own foreign policy complications, resulting partly from mismanagement and partly from US and Israeli actions, including crippling American sanctions, minimise its choices. Meanwhile, hostility with Israel and the US, involving former president Donald Trump’s revocation of the July 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, has driven Tehran to accelerate its very costly support of regional affiliates and its nuclear program.

Despite all its difficulties, Tehran cannot be expected to remain passive in the face of Israeli actions such as the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on 31 July. Iran has reserved the right to retaliate, but in a manner and timing of its own choosing. It has linked its action to a Gaza ceasefire and Israel exhausting itself in the Strip and on the border with Hezbollah. In the event of a ceasefire not materialising, the Gaza killing fields persisting and the Israel-Hezbollah border confrontation expanding, Tehran will retaliate, most likely in a limited and targeted way, although somewhat bigger than its retaliation in April. Its act would simply be for deterrence and national pride purposes.

Given the precarious state of Israel, and Iran and Washington’s reluctance to see an all-out Middle East war, especially while the US is in the run-up to a presidential election, there is a strong case against, rather than for, a regional war. Yet, the Middle East has always proved to be a very unpredictable region where conflicts, limited or expanded, can­ —and do—break out at any time.

A three-state solution for Israel and Palestine?

The goal of two states for two nations, living side by side within secure borders, has been the foundation of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process since the 1993 Oslo Accords. But for all intents and purposes, it is dead and buried. And perhaps the most important reason is that the goal of two states no longer corresponds to the facts on the ground.

To be sure, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) still supports the two-state solution. It is not interested in any interim settlement that, as experience has shown, Israel’s right-wing coalitions could extend indefinitely, using the never-ending peace process as a political fig leaf for continued occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.

But for the second key Palestinian player, Hamas, the goal of statehood is secondary to ensuring the predominance of Islam throughout the region. Its absolute unwillingness to sanction the existence of a Jewish state in the sacred land of Palestine rules out any convincing commitment to the two-state solution.

On this point, Hamas’s position aligns perfectly with that of Israel’s current far-right, religious-nationalist government, which cannot make the concessions that a two-state solution demands without betraying the core of its own fundamentalist ideology. Israel’s government can afford an interim settlement, but not a conclusive peace agreement. Likewise, Hamas has toyed with the idea of a long hudna (truce) that may eventually lead to peace with—but not recognition of—the ‘Zionist entity’.

Despite the overlapping positions of Israel and Hamas, it is the PLO—and, in particular, the Palestinian Authority (PA) government, led by President Mahmoud Abbas—with which Israel cooperates on security. That cooperation is Abbas’s last line of defence against a Hamas takeover. In fact, the wave of attacks that Hamas has carried out on Israeli targets in the West Bank in recent months has been aimed at further weakening the PLO’s rule there, by exposing its strategy of collaboration with the occupier.

While the PA depends largely on Israeli force to retain power in the West Bank, its position vis-à-vis Hamas is also strengthened by its international legitimacy, which ensures its control over donor funds from the rest of the world. Abbas, taking advantage of this position, has imposed severe financial sanctions on Gaza, which have exacerbated the already severe humanitarian consequences of Israel’s blockade.

Abbas seems to be calculating that an all-out war with Israel in the Gaza Strip would end Hamas’s rule there, forcing it to form a unified government with the PA. But Hamas would undoubtedly regard such a government as an opportunity to take over the entire national movement.

Even that outcome is highly unlikely, however. In reality, there’s little that could compel Hamas to surrender its independent military capabilities—which may well be formidable enough to defy the Israel Defense Forces—let alone its right to deploy them. Hamas’s leaders may hope to emulate the Lebanese model, whereby Hezbollah maintains a military force that could ultimately be enough to secure political authority.

They would also do everything in their power to avoid surrendering control over Gaza, which, under Hamas’s rule, functions as an independent Sunni Islamic state, with government institutions, public services and its own network of regional allies. Those allies—Hezbollah, Iran, Qatar and Turkey—all represent an alternative model of Islamic ‘democracy’ and oppose the regional status quo (and the pro-Western PA, which helps to uphold it).

That’s why, even as they vociferously defend the Palestinian cause, these powers either oppose or are lukewarm towards the two-state solution. An Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement along the lines drawn by the liberal West would accord Israel regional legitimacy and make it a key ally of the region’s entrenched conservative Arab regimes.

Although none of these powers are particularly friendly to Israel, their support for Hamas is to some extent in the interest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—and Netanyahu knows it. For example, Israel allowed Qatar to keep the Gaza state functioning by paying Hamas civil servants’ salaries, thereby undercutting Abbas’s strategy of withholding them to force Hamas towards more conciliatory positions.

More broadly, while Netanyahu’s government has done all it could to weaken and humiliate the PA, it has respectfully negotiated with Hamas, through third parties, on prisoner exchanges and ceasefires. The reason is obvious: a Hamas-led Islamic-fundamentalist state offers Israel the ultimate pretext to shun peace negotiations.

Given these complex and conflicting dynamics, there are now three ‘states’ involved in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Hamas in Gaza, the PA in the West Bank, and Israel. The walls and fences Israel has erected to separate itself from Gaza and much of the West Bank have helped to entrench this reality.

According to Israel, a national movement comprising ideologically irreconcilable groups would never be able to achieve liberation; the Palestinians would need to carry out their own ‘Altalena’. In 1948, the army of the new Israeli state, acting on the order of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, sank the Altalena, a ship loaded with weapons destined for the Irgun, a radical Jewish paramilitary group. The Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, did not retaliate, ending the violent confrontation between the two sides.

But PLO founder Yasser Arafat dreaded the spectre of a divisive agreement with Israel that could usher in a conclusive Palestinian civil war, as does Abbas today. Of course, like Ben-Gurion, Abbas understands that an integrated military command implementing a single shared strategy is vital to creating a unified Palestinian state. But Israel, which has so effectively carried out a divide-and-rule strategy, has offered no clear path to a lasting peace.

Against this background, a Palestinian civil war would be tantamount to national suicide—and a dream come true for Israel’s right-wing government. Given this, the two-state solution cannot be revived. There are three sides to this story.

God’s Middle East playground

In his classic study of Polish history, Norman Davies describes Poland in the late 18th century as ‘God’s playground’. That description could be applied to Lebanon today. Like Poland back then, Lebanon suffers from a combination of domestic institutions that are too weak and neighbours that are too strong.

In recent months, Lebanon, more than any other country except Syria, has found itself caught in the crossfire between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran has gained increased influence in Iraq and Syria, owing to the effective military defeat of the Islamic State (IS)—from which it has benefited even more than Russia. At the same time, Iran’s great rival, Saudi Arabia, is experiencing a domestic power struggle unlike anything seen in decades, even as it tries to lead the Sunni Muslim world in its confrontation with Shia Islam.

In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia’s young, ambitious crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (known as MbS), has been politically, socially, diplomatically and militarily hyperactive, perhaps in response to perceived interference from Iran. For MbS, the deep structural reforms that he has been pursuing are a matter of life or death for his long-immobile country.

In Lebanon over the past two decades, the Iranian-backed political party and militia Hezbollah has carved out a state within a state. And last year, it entered into a power-sharing relationship with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and President Michel Aoun. Against that backdrop, Saudi Arabia earlier this month seems to have used Iran’s growing ambition as a pretext to summon Hariri to Riyadh as if he were a misbehaved pupil. While there, Hariri accused Hezbollah of taking over his country, and then announced his resignation—a decision he has since reversed.

For many analysts, Hezbollah has become too powerful not just in Lebanon, but also in Yemen, where it is said to be helping Iranian-supported Houthi rebels in a proxy war against the Saudis. An escalation of the war in Yemen, then, may have been the starting point for Lebanon’s latest crisis.

With the war against IS winding down, a new round of violence in Lebanon—between pro-Saudi and pro-Iranian forces, or even between Hezbollah and Israel—cannot be ruled out. While Iran has been emboldened by recent victories, MbS’s reform program has made it impossible for him to show any sign of weakness. ‘Reforms, made in time’, the Italian independence leader Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, once observed, ‘instead of increasing the strength of the revolutionary spirit, reduce it to impotence’. And yet, to appreciate MbS’s position, those following events in Saudi Arabia should recall Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous warning: ‘The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.’

What, then, should be the top priority in the Middle East after the defeat of IS? Some observers are calling for social and economic reforms to dry up the sources of extremism. But while one can hardly disagree, a reform agenda will take a long time to bear fruit.

For others, a much more immediate priority is to contain Iran, which, in digesting its recent successes, is developing a larger appetite. In September, Iran conducted tests of a new ballistic missile. And, according to the Israelis, Iran is building a military base in Syria, not far from the Golan Heights, which Israel has controlled since 1967. For those in this second camp, it is time to reimpose sanctions against the Iranian regime.

A third school of thought places stability—the need to prevent absolute chaos in the region—above all else. With the Middle East already consumed by a maelstrom of sectarian conflict, the last thing the region needs is another war centered around Lebanon.

French President Emmanuel Macron tried to defuse tensions on a short trip to Riyadh earlier this month. But appeals to reason are unlikely to work at a time when emotions are running high. Can the Iranians be convinced that if they push too far, they might lose the advantages they have gained? Much will depend on whether there is an ‘Iranian Bismarck’ on the horizon who can convince his country to accept a policy of limits.

And can the Saudis be convinced that they, too, are pushing too far? Given that the Saudis’ embargo against Qatar and war in Yemen have been ineffective, if not counterproductive, they are unlikely to do much better in Lebanon. Raising one’s voice to hide weakness is a dangerous strategy that can have catastrophic results.

As for France, direct involvement in attempting to reduce tensions in the Middle East seems indispensable in the era of Donald Trump. Now that he has put his administration squarely on the side of Saudi Arabia, the United States has no chance of being seen as a disinterested mediator.

To be sure, France cannot substitute for America. But geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and France does have unique historical and cultural cards to play in Lebanon. Moreover, its position towards Saudi Arabia and Iran is more balanced than that of the US. If the Saudis and the Iranians both recognise that it is in their interest to reduce tensions, they might just listen to a European interlocutor. Sadly, both sides seem determined to keep their blinders firmly in place, Lebanon be damned.