The End of the Beginning

THE WAR IN GAZA BEGAN very quickly. At around 6.30AM on October 7 last year, thousands of rockets were launched into Southern Israel by Hamas militants who then broke through the $1 billion perimeter fence constructed to stop them doing exactly that and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians in their homes and at a music festival. They took 250 hostages, again mostly civilians, and withdrew, leaving a wasteland of burned out houses, burned out cars and corpses strewn over the blackened ground.

The first Israeli air strikes into Gaza started hours later, then shelling too, and then a full ground offensive. This started from the north and ground relentlessly on, week after week, month after month. A year on and more than 41,500 people are dead, including combatants but mainly civilians, and more than 80 per cent of the 2.3 million pre-war population has been displaced, most many times. Swathes have been reduced to rubble. Disease is rife. Hunger stalks some. This massive man-made humani­tarian crisis has slipped from the public eye in recent days for a simple reason: there is a new war that threatens to be just as devastating.

On Tuesday (October 1) night, Iran fired more than a hundred ballistic missiles at Is­rael. Unlike the previous such effort in April, this was meant to hurt, with many projectiles headed for Tel Aviv itself. That it did not is more a testament to Israeli air defences than any ef­forts by Tehran to mitigate what might have been devastating effects. This means that the regional conflict long feared by all watching on is now underway, and it is difficult to see how this precipitate slide to violent chaos across the Middle East can be braked.

Before asking where this goes, we should ask how we got here. The war in Gaza is now going to look like the match, and that in Lebanon the fuse that led to the detonation we are likely now to see.

The war in Lebanon only started for real in recent weeks, in stark contrast to that in Gaza. There was no sudden explosion of violence out of nowhere but a slow widening of parameters of violence over time which clearly have ample opportunity over coming weeks or months to widen still further, possibly to en­compass much of the region.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks into Southern Israel, authorities in the north began evacuating com­munities from along the contested border with Lebanon. They feared a similar operation launched by Hezbollah. There was good reason for this: Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant Islamist or­ganisation that is a state within a state in the neighbouring coun­try, has been practising such raids for decades. Though there was no prior coordination between the two groups before October 7, Hamas had been tutored by Hezbollah, founded in 1983 and so the more senior by four years, and among those lessons were the tactics employed by the juniors in Gaza.

Then on October 8 last year, Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran leader of Hezbollah, made a fateful decision. This would bring about his death and the partial destruction of his organisation a year later. Nasrallah did not want a full war with Israel, nor did his sponsors in Tehran. But he did need to signal his solidarity with Hamas, Iran’s wider coalition of proxies that both belong to, and the Palestinian cause. So Nasrallah ordered rocket attacks on Israel, which retaliated, and the cogs of war began to turn.

These turned slowly however, with a steady but slow esca­lation through the autumn and spring. There were multiple incidents that would have prompted an all-out war in usual cir­cumstances and soon hundreds of Hezbollah fighters, including many mid-level commanders, were dead. So too were some Israeli soldiers and civilians on both sides. Even then the ugly but man­ageable clashes were kept within “red lines”, officials in Israel and sources close to Hezbollah in Lebanon repeatedly told me.

But this was changing. Hezbollah’s main function for Iran is as a protective shield and spear. It is a spear because it can strike Israel, a shield because it can act to deter Israel from, say, a strike against Iran’s nuclear programme, but also because it can soak up punishment intended for its paymasters in Tehran. Israel sees the two as one. This is justified—to an extent. Hezbollah have their own interests to watch over and see themselves as Lebanese nationalists too. But the links with Iran are close.

So the acceleration that led to war started with an Israeli at­tack on an Iranian consulate where generals from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the same force that had helped found Hezbollah, were killed by an Israeli strike in Damascus. Iran responded with a barrage of 300 missiles and drones, which marked its first direct attack ever on Israel but was ineffective. Things were heating up by summer. In July, Israel as­sassinated in Beirut Fuad Shukr, a founder member of Hezbollah and a close aide of Nasrallah. Almost simultaneously, Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, in Tehran during the inauguration of the new president there. Iran threatened re­taliation, but there was none. The acceleration now accelerated.

One factor was Gaza; another was what was happening in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Sderot, Haifa, and every other Israeli town or city or whatever. Wars are an extension of politics, as Clausewitz famously remarked, though domestic as well as international.

By late summer, the war in Gaza was winding down, at least from the Israeli perspective. Though Hamas remains a shadow authority in much of the territory, the organisation is much weak­ened. It has been removed from formal government, and perhaps a third or even a half of its previous fighting force has been destroyed. More have been recruited, certainly, but these are young and inex­perienced and so no replacement for the older trained fighters that have died under the Israeli onslaught. Much of its senior leadership is dead, although Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 at­tacks and now the overall head of Hamas, is still alive, in a tunnel that he had built with money that could have been used to con­struct clinics or schools. With him, probably, are some of the Israeli hostages. Above him, almost certainly are the tents or shattered buildings housing the population that he supposedly represents and, presumably, hoped would shield him from Israeli retribution.

Which brings us to the domestic Israeli factors. Israeli war aims included bringing back the hostages, eliminating Hamas and mak­ing sure Gaza could not be used to threaten Israel. The first objective has not been achieved. Half of those taken on October 7 were re­leased during a short-lived ceasefire in November. Half of those left behind are now dead. Some appear to have been killed by Hamas, possibly as Israeli soldiers approached. Others may have died in Israeli bombardment, or of illness, malnutrition, and mistreatment. As for the October 7 raid, there are credible accounts of sexual assault and other abuse. The second and third aims have been partially reached. And this is important for the Lebanon war.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Israel’s prime minister, has somehow survived the biggest security failure in the history of Israel, including the misconceptions and com­placency that crippled the country before the surprise Egyptian and Syrian attack that started the 1973 war. This is a testament to how skilful and cynical a politician Netanyahu is, but also the disfunction of the Israeli political system, as well as how the October attack solidified his base. ‘Bibi’, as he is known, is faced with possible imprisonment for a raft of corruption cases if he loses power and until the last few days, Netanyahu has been a very unpopular politi­cian running a very popular war. The recent successes in Lebanon may well boost his personal standing among more Israelis than the third who are his diehard support­ers—as no doubt they were at least in part intended to do.

The popularity of the war among many Israelis is not dif­ficult to explain. So far, Israeli losses in blood, if not treasure, have been relatively light: some 340 soldiers killed in combat since October 8, 2023. The trauma of the Hamas attack cannot be underestimated. In a country built on the principle that it would be a sanctuary for per­secuted people, it is unsurprising that so many Jewish Israelis feel an existential threat now. Few now countenance any compromise with Palestinians or “the Arabs” in general. Few see international criticism as anything other than evidence of historic hatred that underlines the need for Israel to defend itself with every weapon it can recruit. The language of the war against terrorism, for civilisa­tion, against barbarism and darkness, etc has been part of Israeli conversation, first on the right and then everywhere, for decades.

From this standpoint, calls for restraint are a moral outrage. In recent months, Israeli officials have pointed repeatedly to the failure to impose UN Resolution 1701, passed in the aftermath of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, as evidence of how the world has “double standards”. This has a certain logic: in the last 18 years Hezbollah has, with Iranian support, increased its armaments massively and now, thanks to a deployment in Syria during the civil war there, has a reserve of battle-hardened fight­ers. Of course, others point to the many resolutions that Israel has repeatedly ignored as proof of other double standards on the part of the US, Israel’s staunchest ally, and other Western powers.

Resolution 1701 calls for Israel to respect Lebanese sovereignty and for Hezbollah to partially disarm as well as pull back from the contested border (and obviously not rocket Israel). These are now, broadly, Israel’s stated war aims as it moves troops into Lebanon. The ground war that commenced this week is the culmination of the widening of the parameters of this conflict through the sum­mer. As diplomatic efforts led by the US and France ran into the sand, Israel ramped up its military pressure on Hezbollah and on Iran. There were further strikes in Syria against Iran’s supply lines for Hezbollah, and then the spectacular attack which turned 5,000 pag­ers and walkie-talkies into bombs, crippling some 1,500 Hezbollah fighters and its communications. This was followed by one of the most effective air campaigns seen anywhere for decades which, at the cost of many civilian lives, eliminated the senior military echelons of Hezbollah in a matter of days. The killing of Nasrallah on Friday (September 27) sent the conflict into a com­plete new phase. The Israeli ground incursions, by small numbers of special forces initially at least, take it that much further.

Israel is currently seek­ing to expand the space of all these conflicts, at least conceptually and rhetori­cally. Netanyahu spoke directly to Iranian leaders last week, telling them that Israel could and would strike anywhere it wanted in the Middle East. He also addressed the Iranian peo­ple—or the Persian people as he preferred to call them—prom­ising a golden era of productive and prosperous civilisational cohabitation in the Middle East when they were liberated from the rule of the radical clerics. His message, in part directed at the Americans, was clear: the war against Hezbollah has another tar­get. To remake the Middle East, Iran’s regime and its proxies must be destroyed. A major raid was conducted in Yemen on the port of Hodeida against the Houthis, a less effective and less disciplined member of Tehran’s Axis of Resistance. Overall, the message was: what happens in Lebanon will not stay in Lebanon, much as what happened in Gaza did not stay there either.

In every theatre, Israeli military spokesmen talk of fighting until the job is done, a well-worn phrase that means little without a clear definition of what the job is. There is no formal discussion of what happens in Gaza after the campaign there, though much behind the scenes among officials and picked academics, and no public debate over what will be the endgame in Lebanon. Israeli forces did not stay in Lebanon after the 2006 war, not least because they received a bloody nose and did not inflict the damage on Hezbollah that they anticipated. But the 1982 invasion, also ostensibly simply to push their enemies back to a safe distance from the frontier, led to an occupation of at least parts of Lebanon that lasted 18 years. No one wants this, but will Netanyahu know when to stop and issue the orders for Israeli troops to withdraw? Nothing is less sure.

Nor is it clear what Israeli retaliation for Tuesday’s missile strike will look like, though it will inevitably come. Netanyahu has long wanted this war, and feels he now has an opportunity to deal definitively with the threat he has always believed a nuclear-capable Iran would pose. At the very least, he will seek to punish, weaken and warn through violence.

Iranian leaders and Hezbollah also promise a forever war, although currently their rhetoric appears to have less substance than that of their adversaries. Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s new and relatively mod­erate president, has made it clear that Hezbollah should not be left to fight alone, but this is not what has happened. The Iranian regime may be far more pragmatic than many hawkish observers in the US or elsewhere believe, but hardliners appear to have convinced Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei of the need to make a statement through force. Pezeshkian and Khamenei know that Tehran holds a weak hand at the moment. Israel’s obvious superiority militarily and in intelligence restricts options for retaliation, let alone taking the initiative, and they may still hope that a direct war between Israel and Iran can be avoided as it would play into Netanyahu’s hands because the US, which has parked a formidable range of military assets around the region in recent months and keeps adding more, would be forced to come to Israel’s aid.

IRAN MAY HOPE to play a long game: perhaps believing that its attack on Israel this week will allow time somehow for Hezbollah to begin to distract and drain Israel, while avoiding risking the remaining elements of its Axis of Resistance in further confrontation. Oil and gas prices have not reacted dramatically so far to the crisis in the Middle East over the year but any sharp hike will work to Iran’s benefit. Iran’s rulers have kept the country out of any major war since the end of their conflict with Iraq in 1988. This is one of the few achievements they can claim that have made Iranians better-off, and one of the few that confer a shred of legitimacy on the regime. They may now have made a decision that will see them lose this too.

So a year on from October 7, we see a second war underway in the Middle East. Where does this regional conflagration now go? It is impossible to say, but perhaps the months in Gaza provide some guide. The war there has proved appallingly bloody and destructive. We have been through different phases: the “over by the new year” phase, the “what to do on the day after phase”, the massive killing and de­struction of the early months, the huge population displacements, the rows over aid, the ceasefire and hostage-release deal hopes (all dashed), and so on. The US’ lack of influence has been made brutally clear. The failure of any other power to be able to act in any productive way has also been obvious. Above all, the course has been very hard to predict. There is no reason why fighting on the new front opened in Lebanon would be any different. War is, after all, a mirror of the world we live in.

Ali KhameneiBenjamin NetanyahuHaifaHassan NasrallahHezbollahIran-Israel conflictIron DomeIsraelIsrael-Palestine conflictMasoud PezeshkianMiddle East conflict