The chaos Israel is sowing across the Middle East could come back to haunt it…Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbours that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Netanyahu is currently set
By David Hearst
A ritual is performed every time Israel starts another war, before the white phosphorus rains down, before the fear and panic of people fleeing their homes, before the footage of stunned survivors sifting through the rubble of collapsed apartment blocks.
It’s called the ceasefire ritual – a public display of hand-washing. It’s the charade of pretending that there are honest diplomats out there trying to search every avenue, stretch every sinew, to stop this bedlam from starting.
Much of it is choreographed. Other parts are improvised. But be sure about one thing: it is pantomime. It bears no relationship to reality.
Hours before Israel declared that its ground attack on Lebanon had begun, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot was vainly insisting in a media conference in Beirut that his proposed 21-day ceasefire was “still on the table”.
As he was doing so, the US, France’s co-sponsor, was briefing journalists that ceasefire talks had stopped. This position went through several iterations as the afternoon wore on, and the contradictions accumulated.
The US simultaneously wanted a diplomatic solution, while describing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination as an “unalloyed good”. It claimed to have restrained Israel to a limited operation on the border, while also expressing anxiety about the humanitarian aspect of the operation. And it pledged to continue to work on de-escalating tensions while acknowledging that Israel was a sovereign country that made its own decisions.
If this charade sounds horribly familiar, that’s because it is.
Cut through the verbiage and the bottom line – as the Pentagon has confirmed – is that the US supports a ground invasion of Lebanon, and ceasefire plans can go hang.
Desire for vengeance
The same happened in Gaza a year ago. Israel’s “right to defend itself” is shorthand for flattening every neighbourhood unfortunate enough to live next to it.
This macabre dance serves a purpose: virtually every media outlet in the western world on Tuesday described the unfolding operation in Lebanon as “targeted” or “limited” – precise commando raids that go in and come back out – just as they did during the initial phase of the Gaza war.
“We do not expect it will look like 2006,” a US official told The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats and generals could not stop themselves from blurting out the truth. Mike Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the US, said: “The American administration … did not limit us in time. They, too, understand that following Nasrallah’s assassination, there is a new situation in Lebanon and there is a chance for reshaping.”
A “reshaping” of Lebanon does not mean a targeted operation limited to the border. Nor was limitation in the thoughts of one Israeli army commander, who noted: “We have a great privilege to write history as we did in Gaza here in the north.”
Rage and hate speech have reached psychotic levels in Israel. The desire for vengeance directed against the people of Gaza has swiftly found a new target: the people of Lebanon.
Netanyahu and his American backers will change the Middle East by invading Lebanon, that is for sure. But not quite in the way they imagine
Nir Dvori of Channel 12 News gloated that “Nasrallah died in torment” amid reports that the Hezbollah leader had suffocated. The head of the Shlomi town council welcomed the ground invasion, saying: “It is necessary to cleanse the area.”
Political commentator Ben Caspit dreamed of the “day after” such a cleansing operation, suggesting that even the grandmothers of any fighter in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force who crossed back over the Litani River should “die at that moment”.
Funny he should mention the Litani River, whose name has often been invoked as the upper limit of southern Lebanon that Israel wants to clear of Hezbollah rockets – because that, too, is turning into a myth. The military ambitions of this operation go far deeper into Lebanon.
Barely 12 hours after the US State Department said it had limited Israel’s operation, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders to more than 20 towns and villages in southern Lebanon. “You must head immediately to the north of the al-Awali River,” near Sidon, army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X (formerly Twitter).
Redesigning the Middle East
This indicates that Israel has claimed as its area of military operations the whole of southern Lebanon, almost one-third of the country. In a stroke, Israel doubled its area of operations.
This is in line with the promise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made in the hours after Hamas’s attack a year ago.
“We are going to change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told officials visiting Jerusalem from the country’s south, where Hamas had struck on 7 October 2023.
Israel has opened a new front in Lebanon on a war it cannot end
Jared Kushner, former US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and real estate investor who has apparently spent hours studying Hezbollah and considers himself an expert on the subject, wrote similarly on X: “September 27th [the date of Nasrallah’s killing] is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough … Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong.
“There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance.”
Netanyahu and his American backers will change the Middle East by invading Lebanon, that is for sure. But not quite in the way they imagine.
After leading the liberation of southern Lebanon after 18 years of occupation, and having led the battle against Israel in 2006, in Hezbollah’s eyes successfully, Nasrallah kept the northern border quiet for nearly two decades.
Under Nasrallah’s rule, Hezbollah was totally absorbed in another fight altogether: the civil war in Syria. This had many consequences. It downplayed the primacy of the struggle to liberate Palestine. And Hezbollah, as it grew in size and political importance, became easier for Israel’s Mossad to infiltrate.
Some of the major operations over the past month, such as the supply of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, were years in the making. The exact locations of Hezbollah’s bunkers, and the movement of targets between them, were also the result of years of work and research.
Dramatic contrast
None of what transpired to deliver a body blow to Hezbollah was unprepared, which is why it contrasts so dramatically with the difficulties Israel has experienced in attempting to decapitate Hamas in Gaza.
But Israel was also helped by Hezbollah and Iran’s “strategic patience,” or their lack of response to its mounting attacks on their commanders and leaders. Hezbollah never took revenge for the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, the leader of its military wing. Nor did it reply in kind to the assassination of senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri earlier this year in its heartland of Dahiyeh in Beirut.
The meekness of the response from Hezbollah and Iran only gave Israel the confidence to redouble its blows on Lebanon and Syria.
Every time this happened, both Hezbollah and Iran went out of their way to say they did not want to start a war with Israel; and that their campaign was in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza and would stop the moment a ceasefire was reached.
And when they did strike, it was generally, although not exclusively, on Israeli military targets. Hezbollah’s rockets and propaganda videos were demonstrative, designed to show its power, not to use it.
In hindsight, this strategy has proved to be a strategic mistake, for which Hezbollah is paying today – because it gave Israel the confidence to do what it is now doing to Lebanon.
Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah have outnumbered Hezbollah’s replies by five to one.
This is not just the miscalculation of those who are routinely dubbed hardliners in Lebanon and Iran. Reformist Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said he was lied to by the Americans, who promised a ceasefire in Gaza if Iran could restrain itself from replying to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran.
It was the failure of Iran’s strategic restraint that led on Tuesday night to the bombardment of more than 180 missiles on targets across Israel. After the attack, Pezeshkian still maintained that Iran did not seek a war with Israel, but the policy of restraint has clearly been dumped. One can expect Hezbollah and all armed groups in Yemen and Iraq to be more active.
But an even bigger miscalculation is being made by Israel in its desire to strike while the iron is hot.
Untamed aggression
Israel is re-engineering the entire Middle East to hate it, while the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. It is reverse engineering a period of three decades, since the Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian conflict lost its supremacy and centrality in the Arab world.
Nothing is doing more than Israel’s untamed aggression to heal the deep divisions in the Arab world created by the counter-revolution to the Arab Spring.
When you drop 80 tonnes of explosives to kill Nasrallah and kill 300 others in doing so, you move him from being a symbol of resistance to a legend.
“The symbol is gone, the legend is born, and the resistance continues” was how Lebanese politician Suleiman Frangieh, a scion of one of the country’s leading Maronite families, put it.
Netanyahu, more than anyone else, is persuading them that an Israel that behaves like this, does not belong to this region
Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of Al Akhbar, a newspaper close to Hezbollah, compared Nasrallah to Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who is regarded as the third imam in Shia Islam.
He wrote: “Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah did not imagine himself in the image of Hussain when he fell as a martyr. He is not in Hussain’s position when the world has let him down. Rather, he is in the image of Hussain who got up and fought in defence of a right that the cost of collecting is very high … [Nasrallah] has become an eternal symbol for every rebel in the face of injustice, and … he was martyred in defence of Jerusalem and Palestine.”
Nasrallah had a charismatic appeal as an orator to his Shia constituency and the pro-Palestinian masses in the Arab world, in the same way that former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had for the Arab nationalist movement in his time.
In death, Nasrallah promises to do that much.
Profound consequences
Of course, this is not the view of the Arab elites who have spent so much of their careers cosying up to the US and Israel. But even they have to acknowledge the passions coursing through their people.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman used Israel as a path to being taken seriously by Washington. But even he is brutally candid about his limits as a leader.
“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the 39-year-old ruler reportedly told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. “For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.”
A Saudi official disputed this account of Mohammed bin Salman’s conversation with Blinken, but it bears the ring of truth.
Yes, the region is being redesigned by an Israel that has broken its leash.
Nothing can persuade its Arab neighbours that Israel cannot live with them in peace more than the course on which Israel is currently set – a course that targets and threatens Christians, Muslims, Shia, and Sunni alike.
Netanyahu, more than anyone else, is persuading them that an Israel that behaves like this, does not belong to this region.
This will have profound strategic consequences for the future. So is Nasrallah’s death truly an “unalloyed good” for the region?
Beware what you wish for, because it just may happen.
•David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
•Opinions, positions or thoughts expressed here are personal and strictly belong to the writer/author and not The Daily Crucible.
