Israel has struck a series of crippling blows against Hezbollah, culminating in the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that the killing was an essential step towards “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come”.
He believes that the wars in Gaza and Lebanon are heading towards decisive victories, permanently changing the political geography of the Middle East in favour of Israel. The signs so far are that Israel – and the US – have gone a fair way towards achieving their goals in the region.
Despite President Joe Biden’s administration calling for ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, it hypocritically continues to supply the weapons and diplomatic support that enable Israel to ignore these calls.
Suggestions that the White House has been humiliated by Israel’s failure to tell it in advance about the intended assassinations of Nasrallah are naïve. Such ignorance is clearly intended to allow the US to distance itself from the killing, which Biden effectively welcomed, saying that there was “a measure of justice” for the Hezbollah leader’s victims.
No good options
Iran and its “Axis of Resistance”, composed primarily of Shia Muslim movements and Shia-ruled states, have, for the moment, no good options. If they acquiesce in the death of Nasrallah without retaliation, this will be seen as a confession of weakness, but this weakness is already visible to the world. In any confrontation with Israel backed up by the US, Iran and its allies are bound to lose.
Yet failure over the past year to retaliate effectively for the killing of Iranian, Hezbollah and Hamas leaders has only encouraged Israel to step up its attacks. Airstrikes are now targeting the Houthis in Yemen.
The Iranian leadership is reportedly split on how to react to the death of Nasrallah, to which so far they have only responded with bellicose rhetoric. Most likely, the Iranian priority will be the security of the Iranian state.
Hezbollah’s hiding places
“All of the forces of the resistance stand by Hezbollah,” said the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “It will be Hezbollah, at the helm of the resistance forces, that will determine the fate of the region.” In other words, Iran may help Hezbollah but will not retaliate elsewhere.
But Hezbollah is scarcely in a position to retaliate against anybody, since it has been shattered by a series of Israeli attacks which began on 17 and 18 September when 1,500 of its fighters were maimed when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded. Since then, Israel has killed eight out of nine of Hezbollah’s most senior commanders, if Nasrallah is included. Israel says it killed another high ranking Hezbollah official, Nabil Kaouk, in south Beirut on Saturday.
Pagers and walkie-talkies manufactured or modified by Israel, could also contain listening and locator devices, so all of Hezbollah’s hiding places will be known to Israel and have become potential death traps.
Years in the making
Israel’s intelligence coup has obviously been years in the making, but the fact that it succeeded so lethally reveals much about Hezbollah weaknesses.
It is a mystery, for instance, why Nasrallah and other senior commanders were meeting, albeit deep underground, in a headquarters in south Beirut, the location of which was likely to have been compromised by Israeli-produced communications devices. It should have been normal military procedure to have these devices properly examined before being distributed.
Like many regular and guerrilla armies in history, Hezbollah was probably over-confident. Yet its high military reputation stemmed primarily from victories won long ago, notably its successful guerrilla harassment of Israeli forces during their occupation of parts of south Lebanon between 1982 and 2000 and its relative success in a short war in 2006.
Rockets and missiles
At the end of this latter conflict, I asked a UN officer in Beirut who was an expert on all things to do with Hezbollah, why its fighters were so militarily effective? He replied that “if you have been fighting the Israelis for years and you are still alive, then you are probably a very good soldier”.
But this was 18 years ago, and, although Hezbollah fought in Syria,at the height of the Syrian civil war, they calamitously failed to anticipate the efforts of Israeli intelligence.
Whatever Hezbollah might like to do by way of vengeance on Israel, it will have to devote most of its efforts to rebuilding its paramilitary organisation. Its reputation as a successful and efficient fighting force is in ruins.
Within Lebanon, Hezbollah’s political grip will come under challenge. It needs to recuperate, but it could also decide that it is better to use its remaining rockets and missiles before they are targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
More than ever before, Hezbollah needs Iran’s backing if it is to survive. If Iran sticks to its “strategy of patience”, and the signs are that it intends to do so, then Hezbollah will have little choice but to follow suit.
Decisive victories
Netanyahu may be right in believing that for the moment, he has established a more favourable balance of power for Israel in the Middle East, but this new balance is deeply unstable.
Israel’s success has depended much on open or covert US backing. But the wars in Gaza and Lebanon have brought losses as well as gains for the US. It may have struck a blow against its traditional enemy in Tehran, but its futile ceasefire efforts have become an international joke, viewed as either a humiliating failure, if sincere, or deeply duplicitous, if designed as a smokescreen to hide practical American support for Netanyahu’s bid for decisive victories in Gaza and Lebanon.
The US wants to arrange a normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, followed by a mutual defence pact between the US and Saudi Arabia. But this will be virtually impossible to arrange with the Israel Defence Forces still slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza and violently repressing or displacing Palestinians on the West Bank.
‘I don’t, but my people do’
“Seventy per cent of my population is younger than me,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, told US secretary of state Antony Blinken in January this year, according to The Atlantic magazine. “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.”
He said that he needed some sort of meaningful deal to be offered by Israel to the Palestinians, pointing out that half his advisers believed that normalisation with Israel was not worth the risk, while he himself might end up being killed like Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981 after signing a peace deal with Israel.
Both Israel and the US have repeatedly imagined in the past that they can win a decisive victory in the Middle East by military force alone, only to find themselves facing new enemies more dangerous than the old. They may be about to make the same mistake again.
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