Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD: As the war in the Middle East approaches its first anniversary, a full-scale regional conflagration is very much on the cards.

The crisis, which had been years if not decades in the making, erupted on 7 October 2023 with Hamas’s multi-pronged offensive into southern Israel. In a series of attacks on Israeli military installations and population centers, more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers, security personnel, and civilians were killed, most by Hamas and other Palestinians, many by Israel pursuant to its Hannibal Directive. A further 250 Israeli soldiers and civilians were taken captive and held in the Gaza Strip.

That same day Israel commenced with what quickly developed into the most intensive bombing campaign since 1945 which, accompanied by a comprehensive siege, saw Israel plausibly accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice by year’s end.

The following day, 8 October, Hizballah opened a new front in southern Lebanon. Characterized as a “support front”, and as its name implies, its purpose was to compel Israel to accept a ceasefire and captive exchange. Rather than unleashing a full-scale war of its own against Israel, Hizballah sought to achieve its objective through a campaign of attrition intended to persistently raise the cost to Israel of continuing its campaign against the Gaza Strip.

Later that month a number of militias, primarily in Iraq, opened a second support front and commenced with intermittent attacks against Israel as well as US military installations in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.

The following month, November, AnsarAllah in northern Yemen, also known as the Houthis, opened a further support front. Initially directed against Israeli shipping, it escalated into a campaign to disrupt global commerce and supply chains, thereby increasing the pressure on not only the Israel but also the global economy.

While Iran is a leading member of the coalition known as the Axis of Resistance, it did not open a support front of its own. Rather, its role was one of supporting the support fronts in various ways. When it in April of this year did launch an unprecedented direct attack on Israel, this was a retaliatory response to a direct Israeli attack against Iran’s embassy complex in the Syrian capital Damascus. Similarly, its vow to retaliate against Israel for the 31 July assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyya should be seen in the context of the killing’s location, the Iranian capital Tehran.

Those commanding the various support fronts have consistently stated that they are acting to end Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and that once a ceasefire agreement is reached their attacks will cease. Although the Axis of Resistance is a coalition rather than formal alliance, it has in recent years promoted what it terms “the unity of arenas”. The support fronts demonstrate the activation of this principle.

Destructive as a full-scale armed conflict undoubtedly is, from Israel’s perspective a prolonged war of attrition imposes excessively high social, economic, and military preparedness costs. A coordinated war of attrition on multiple fronts represents an even greater challenge.

The obvious response, a ceasefire agreement, was never on the cards. Simply put, Israel has no intention of bringing its war against the Gaza Strip to a formal conclusion. As importantly, the United States has no intention of compelling Israel to accept an agreement, and has not been serious about achieving one. In part on account of President Joe Biden’s complete ideological alignment with Israel, in part because Washington considers an Israeli victory – and failing victory an absence of defeat – of fundamental geopolitical importance.

Israel’s response, supported by its Western sponsors and allies, has therefore been a campaign to address each front in isolation. It seeks to collectively de-link them from Gaza, and from each other. At all costs, “the unity of the arenas” must be defeated. Thus, Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea is an Anglo-American effort to force Yemen to renounce its support front even as the Gaza genocide intensifies, and Israel’s Western and Arab allies in April mobilized to counter Iran’s missile and drone barrage against Israel.

Israel’s greatest challenge has from the outset been Hizballah. It sits immediately astride Israel’s northern border, possesses one of the most effective and committed militaries in the Middle East, and – upending Israeli military doctrine that wars must be fought on enemy territory – has turned northern Israel into a war zone from which tens of thousands of residents have fled.

It is telling that until last week, particularly when compared to the Gaza Strip, relatively few Israeli and Lebanese civilians have been killed in this conflict zone. The reason is that Hizballah has been concentrating its fire on Israeli military installations, and has threatened Israel with reprisals against Israeli civilians if it targets Lebanese civilians.

Israel’s comparatively restrained conduct in Lebanon, at least until recently, has absolutely nothing to do with Israeli fables about the morality of its warfare, and quite simply reflects its fears of getting a taste of its own medicine from an adversary capable of administering it. In this respect it bears recollection that in 1996, at the conclusion of Israel’s particularly violent “Grapes of Wrath” offensive against Lebanon, during which Hizballah responded to multiple massacres with continuous shelling of northern Israel, Israel was compelled to accept understandings that explicitly prohibited further attacks against Lebanese or Israeli civilians. The agreement to cease targeting civilians was rightfully seen as an unprecedented strategic achievement for Hizballah, and a major defeat for Israel. When a much weaker Hamas subsequently and on several occasions offered Israel a similar agreement, these were rejected out of hand.

Back to 2023-2024, Israel’s extensive bombing and shelling of southern Lebanon, and the killing of hundreds of Hizballah fighters and commanders, has failed to have an impact on Hizballah’s determination to maintain its support front. Threats of a large-scale Israeli offensive delivered to Lebanon by the United States, France, and others have made even less of an impression. More concerning for Israel is that each time it has escalated its attacks against Lebanon, Hizballah rather than being cowed has responded with counter-escalations of its own. Israel’s 1 August assassination of Hizballah’s chief of staff, Fuad Shukr, in the Lebanese capital Beirut, threatened to unleash an Israeli-Lebanese war independent of developments of Gaza. In order to maintain this link, and continue with attritional rather than full-scale war, Hizballah did not take the bait.

The first of September, the beginning of the Israeli school year, and the date by which the Israeli government had pledged that residents of northern communities could return, came and went without a change. It is against this background that we need to understand the developments of the past week. Israel’s government, seen as increasingly impotent, and with a majority of the public supporting or demanding a major campaign against Hizballah, decided to act.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Israel unleashed a terror campaign throughout Lebanon and in Syria, indiscriminately transforming thousands of pagers and then walkie-talkies into hand-grenades. Rather than representing one or more rungs further up the escalation ladder, it placed high explosives to demolish the ladder altogether.

In an address Thursday, Hizballah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged the unprecedented blows inflicted upon his movement and the damage they have caused, but defiantly insisted that the support front would persist, irrespective of the cost, until Israel ended its war against the Gaza Strip. For good measure, on this occasion he mentioned the West Bank as well, and additionally vowed that Hizballah would exact revenge for Israel’s terror campaign. The following day, Friday, as if to demonstrate that the attacks had not affected either Hizballah’s capacity or will to continue the fight, the Lebanese movement launched some 200 rockets across the Israeli-Lebanese frontier. Hours later Israel flattened several apartment buildings in Beirut, killing senior military commander Ibrahim Aqil and other commanders of Hizballah’s elite Radwan Force.

To be sure these latest Israeli attacks represent a severe blow to Hizballah. Particularly so because they relied on infiltration and precise intelligence against an organization that built its reputation in significant part on its professionalism, counter-intelligence capabilities and ability to withstand significant infiltration. While assassination remains, in contrast to combat, Israel’s strong suit, it is highly unlikely it acted alone, and fair to assume it was assisted by the more advance intelligence capabilities of the US, UK, and European allies.

On the face of it, Israel refraining from launching a major war on Lebanon immediately after its recent attacks doesn’t make sense, like if it had waited a week to invade Egypt after destroying its air force in June 1967.

Israel’s hesitancy has several possible explanations. It may have additional measures in store to throw Hizballah into yet greater disarray. Alternatively, it intends to keep provoking Hizballah so that it can claim that Lebanon rather than Israel escalated the situation into one of full-scale war. What is less in doubt is that absent a Hizballah capitulation and demobilization of its support front, Israel is determined to inflict a decisive strategic defeat upon its Lebanese adversary.

Doing so in late 2024 has several advantages. As the past year has made clear, Netanyahu has Biden wrapped firmly around his finger, and the US president will do nothing to restrain Israel, indeed is constitutively incapable of doing so, even when Israeli policy directly contradicts stated US objectives. Which raises the very real possibility that Washington may be stating different objectives, but in practice has endorsed and is committed to the fulfilment of the agenda of Israel’s extreme-right wing government.

The period between now and January 2025 thus represents an unprecedented if not unique opportunity for Israel to provoke a direct US-Iranian confrontation by way of Lebanon. Trump may be louder than Biden in his loyalty to Netanyahu, and more closely aligned with its supremacist ideologues, but he is also too unpredictable to be fully trusted. That said, a war during the final weeks of the US presidential election campaign can also be seen to help Trump against Harris in what is expected to be a close-fought election.

As for Hizballah, its restraint also has several explanations. One is that a full-scale war is likely to draw in other members of the Axis of Resistance coalition, and in so doing undermine the attritional model of warfare to which they are committed and draw the focus away from Gaza. Another possibility is that Iran’s response to Israel consists of crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, and restraint is required until this is achieved.

As for Hizballah’s capabilities, and even assuming further and even more painful blows against it, assassination and sabotage campaigns rarely decide wars. Particularly when deployed against movements as extensive, experienced, entrenched, and multi-layered as Hizballah. Not only was it the case with the CIA’s Phoenix program in Vietnam, it has also been the case with Israel, in both the occupied territories and indeed in Lebanon itself. Body blows such as those inflicted by Israel this past week can provide significant tactical advantages, but are not decisive strategically. END