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For months now, analysts and academic observers have warned of how tensions could easily spin out of control in the Middle East and provoke a major war. This came several steps closer this week after a fortnight of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon culminated in the killing on September 28 of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. This was followed two days later by the launch of Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon (which it referred to as a “limited ground operation”).
The airstrike that hit Nasrallah was part of a concerted campaign dubbed “Operation Northern Arrow” by Israel, which is preparing to mark the first anniversary since the October 7 attacks that sparked this conflict. Israel’s strike aimed to decapitate Hezbollah and neutralise as much of its senior command structure as possible.
Writing for The Conversation the day after Nasrallah was killed, Ori Wertman, a research fellow at the University of South Wales (and a former national security adviser to Israeli president Isaac Herzog), looked at the regional ramifications of what would almost certainly be a wider war that could draw in Iran.
One of the key questions, Wertman writes, has been how Tehran might react to an Israeli campaign against Hezbollah. He believes Iran is unlikely to intervene with troops to help its proxy. This, he believes, could affect Iran’s influence in the region.
This must call into question the advantage of acting as one of the country’s most important proxies in the region. In this context, many in Beirut, Damascus, Sana’a and Gaza are surely asking themselves now what is the advantage of being Iran’s emissaries, if the latter leaves them alone to face Israel.
When it came, Iran’s response was limited. Before launching more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, it gave advance notice of its intention and there were minimal casualties. But despite this, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has sworn that Iran will “pay for” the attack, calling it a “big mistake”. So, what, asks Ran Porat of Monash University, could Israel’s retaliation look like?
Porat runs through the options open to the Israeli government, including the destruction of its communications and transportation networks, financial institutions and oil industry, all options that could bring Iran to its knees. Most devastating, Poran speculates, would be Iran’s fast-developing nuclear programme, which the US and Israel believe could yield a viable atomic bomb sooner rather than later. He concludes:
Israel has a narrow window to inflict a major blow against it – and Netanyahu is unlikely to let this moment pass.
Given that Israel so often remains silent when it kills one of its enemies, it was interesting that the Netanyahu was so jubilant about Nasrallah’s killing. “Nasrallah was not a terrorist,” he crowed when taking credit for the Hezbollah leader’s death. “He was the terrorist.” Similarly, Joe Biden called the assassination “a measure of justice for his many victims” while a US State Department spokesperson called Nasrallah’s killing “an unalloyed good”.
Very few voices were raised in protest at Nasrallah’s assassination. Luca Trenta of Swansea University and his co-authors Emil Archambault of Durham University and Sophie Duroy of the University of Essex believe this shows how normalised these extrajudicial killings have become, at least for the west.
As Nasrallah’s killing demonstrates, legitimising efforts by Israel and the US have been so successful in normalising assassination that, even when they acknowledge assassinations, they rarely engage in legal justifications anymore. Instead they simply talk of “justice”.
The Israeli incursion into Lebanon is the sixth of its kind in the past 50 years – and it represents a big risk for Israel, write Vanessa Newby of the University of Leiden and Chiara Ruffa of Sciences Po. Newby and Ruffa – experts in international security with years of experience in following Middle East conflicts – believe that it’s one thing to take on the guerrilla fighters of Hamas in Gaza and quite another to take on the Hezbollah’s well-trained and equipped troops, many of whom are combat veterans. Israel, they conclude, should “not assume that Hezbollah is out of the game or underestimate the group”.
Hezbollah’s real strength has always lain in its ability to melt into the population – and it will be ready to commence a war of attrition with hit-and-run tactics if the IDF makes the mistake of putting boots on the ground again.
Newby has also provided a timeline of Israel’s conflict in Lebanon since the late 1970s.
Somehow, over more than five decades of civil war, invasions, political turmoil and economic instability, Lebanon has always managed to cope, to rebuild and reset. But this new crisis comes with the country under unprecedented pressure. Its economy is shot, having never really recovered from the 2008-09 financial crisis. People’s standard of living has plummeted in recent years and nearly half the population now lives below the poverty line. And civic order is strained by the influx of more than 1.5 million refugees from Syria over just over a decade.
Imad El-Anis, an expert in international relations at Nottingham Trent University, who specialises in the Middle East, believes another conflict of any significant duration could push Lebanon over the edge into state collapse and perhaps start another civil war. This, he believes, would be a disaster – and not just for the people of Lebanon. As he concludes:
If the Hobbesian logic of the strong doing what they will and the weak suffering what they must is allowed to continue, only collapse and ruin will follow in Lebanon, the Middle East and further afield. It is imperative that sense and reason prevail and the war between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah de-escalates.
Election watch
When writing about US election campaigns, political buffs often talk about what they call an “October surprise”. By this they mean some unexpected news that breaks the month before a presidential election when it may be too late for a candidate to do anything about it. There’s been speculation that war in the Middle East could be just such an “October surprise” for Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
It’s a tricky calculation for Biden and Harris. About 70% of America’s Jewish population identify as Democrats and they will be vital for the party ticket on November 5. But, as we regularly hear, it’s going to be all about a small number of voters in a handful of swing states. And in some of these, notably Michigan, Muslim voters could tip the scales and scupper Harris’s chance of beating Donald Trump. Things are that close.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, is thought to favour a Trump victory. As president between 2017 and 2021, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and pulled the US out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, both things that would have been high on the Israeli prime minister’s wishlist, according to Natasha Lindstaedt and Faten Ghosn, US politics experts at the University of Essex.
In our view, the more aggressive Netanyahu’s government is (both in Lebanon and in Gaza), the greater the likelihood that Trump will be elected. This all works perfectly for Netanyahu as it could allow him to look beyond Lebanon and target his biggest obsession: Iran.
