This latest chapter in the Middle East’s bloody history raises a basic question: what is the end game? As Israel contemplates its response to Iranian missile attacks that have exposed the limitations of its air defence systems, the region teeters on the edge of a wider conflict. With Israeli bombing raids on strategic targets in Iran risking a much wider and destructive conflagration, the stakes have rarely, if ever, been higher.
All this is happening against a background of a US presidential election campaign in which the incumbents are vulnerable to criticism that they should have done more, and much earlier, to defuse a crisis that is threatening to metastasise. President Joe Biden will be judged harshly for fumbling his efforts to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza that would have forestalled the risk of all-out, multi-front war. That war has now arrived.
This is arguably the most dangerous period in Middle East history since the Yom Kippur war of 1973 — or perhaps the most dangerous ever given the threatened destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Netanyahu and his extremist war cabinet have in their hands a decision that risks scarring the region for generations to come.
In this latest moment a series of questions suggest themselves. What are Israel’s options in response to Iran’s brazen missile attacks on targets deep inside the country? What do Netanyahu and his colleagues hope to achieve by pushing across the country’s northern border and continuing to bomb Lebanese targets? What are the limits to Iran’s willingness to risk massive counterstrikes against oil facilities and other strategic targets? What role does the United State see itself playing in a crisis that risks becoming region-wide?
From Israel’s perspective, history is not encouraging. In 1982, its forces advanced north to the suburbs of Beirut to expel Palestinian strongholds and remake Lebanon under the control of its Christian Maronite militia allies. That was the plan, anyway: while the invasion did achieve its first goal of forcing the Palestinian Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, it failed to bolster Maronite militia control.
Israel’s complicity in the following year’s massacre, at the hands of its militia allies, of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children sheltering in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila was widely condemned. Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the Lebanon war, was forced to resign. Prime minister Menachem Begin withdrew from public life, claiming he had been misled about the scope of Israel’s invasion.
But unquestionably the most negative outcome for Israel of the 1982 incursion was the impetus it gave to the formation of Hezbollah, or Party of God, a lethal Iranian proxy. Hezbollah has proved the most serious threat to Israel since 1948.
The answer to my earlier question about Israel’s intentions in Lebanon is both straightforward and complex. The Israelis want to push Hezbollah thirty kilometres back from the Lebanese border to beyond the Litani River and enable some Israeli 70,000 citizens to return to their homes. Hezbollah rocket attacks have forced those Israelis to take refuge away from the border.
The more complicated answer rests on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objectives beyond restoring the country’s deterrent capabilities. Put simply: does he want to provoke a war with Iran in which America would feel obliged to support its ally? Netanyahu has never made any secret of his desire for a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities to remove the possibility of an Iranian nuclear breakout.
This is where the risk lies. It is also where Washington’s anxieties are undoubtedly greatest. A preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear installations would guarantee a wider conflict that would be difficult to contain.
Biden has said he doesn’t support an attack on Iran’s nuclear program, but his record in influencing Netanyahu is dismal. In a presidential election year, this administration finds itself riding a bucking horse — an Israeli government dominated by some of the most extreme elements in the country — whose priorities are well out of alignment with those of the United States.
Netanyahu’s motivations are both personal and political: Israel’s continued prosecution of a war with Hezbollah and Hamas has not only enabled him to cling to power but may allow him to rehabilitate himself electorally after the disastrous security breach that enabled the 7 October pogrom.
From an American standpoint, the Middle East — and Lebanon in particular — carries sour memories. A Hezbollah truck bombing in 1983 in Beirut killed 241 US service personnel, among them 220 marines. That shocking moment prompted president Ronald Reagan to disavow any future commitment of ground forces in the Middle East.
But another Republican president, George W. Bush, breached Reagan’s doctrine in 2003 by invading Iraq, thereby destabilising the entire region and empowering Iran. This overreach vastly expanded Tehran’s influence via its Shia proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and in Yemen, and its Sunni fundamentalist allies in Gaza. Netanyahu had been at the forefront of those urging the Bush administration to “take out” Saddam Hussein in order to rebalance power in the Middle East and relieve pressure on Israel itself. It proved a bad bet.
Now, in the current crisis, the key uncertainty is whether Iran will avoid a further escalation in revenge for the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israeli bombing of Hezbollah targets across Lebanon. Although Iran has made it clear it doesn’t favour a slide to all-out war, its leaders won’t hold back if their country’s sovereignty and security is threatened. This is where the risk lies, not simply in a back and forth with Israel but in a conflict that extends down into the Gulf, where Iran has the capacity to cripple international oil commerce.
Iran’s leaders are constrained, of course, by the fact that a full-scale conflict would harm its own economic interests. This is something it can ill afford, and significantly limits its willingness to escalate the conflict more broadly.
Overlaying Israel’s calculations about its strategy in Lebanon is the fact that its various incursions, invasions and occupations — going right back to 1948 — have come at a cost. Occupying swathes of southern Lebanon will inevitably bring Israeli casualties, as has happened in the past. Israel felt a Lebanese scorpion’s sting on multiple occasions in the lengthy occupation that only ended, after twenty-two years, in 2000.
On Wednesday, Israel suffered multiple casualties in an engagement with Hezbollah across its northern frontier. These are the risks inherent in guerrilla warfare at close quarters in hostile terrain.
In the background of the latest developments is the question of why American diplomacy has been unable to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza — a ceasefire that would have eased Middle East tensions more generally and avoided the crisis threatening to overtake the region.
When the history of this period is written, Washington’s limp efforts to force its ally to agree to a ceasefire will reflect very poorly on the Biden administration. President Biden announced weeks ago that a framework agreement had been reached that would enable a ceasefire. That announcement proved stillborn. His secretary of state, Antony Blinken has appeared wraithlike in the Middle East on multiple occasions, to little conspicuous effect.
Contrast Blinken’s efforts in the Middle East with Henry Kissinger’s successful calming of the situation after the 1973 war or James Baker’s work towards Middle East peace after the first Gulf war in 1990–91. Or go back earlier, to 1956, when US president Dwight Eisenhower intervened to defuse the Suez crisis. Unlike now, America’s honest broker role was respected, if indeed it can claim any longer to be an honest broker given its indulgence of Netanyahu’s priorities.
Vastly complicating the situation is a US election in which both Democrats and Republicans are hostage to a febrile domestic political environment that gives interest groups leverage far beyond what is reasonable in a pluralistic democracy. In normal circumstances, Biden might have been more intent on pushing Netanyahu towards a ceasefire; the fact he failed to do so has contributed to an even bigger mess.
The combination of a weak president, an unpredictable alternative and an Israeli leader desperate to get out of a political corner means that an already volatile situation is rendered even less predictable.
If there is a rule of thumb in the history of conflict between Israel and its neighbours it is that there will be no end to conflict until a comprehensive Middle East peace is struck. The question today is whether conflict can be contained. As things stand it’s not clear that is likely, or even possible. •
