https://newrepublic.com/article/176512/palestinian-people-enraged-israel-hamas

Israel’s crimes in Gaza are clear. But Hamas has inflicted tremendous harm on blameless Palestinians in a political war of attrition against its Fatah rivals.

Palestinians should never forgive Hamas for the calamity unfolding in Gaza. Palestinian and international anger about the appalling suffering being visited upon the innocent 2.1 million residents of Gaza is understandably focused on Israel. Israel is indeed responsible for its own misconduct, such as cutting off all necessities of life for everyone in Gaza and disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks that have killed thousands of Palestinians in just a few weeks, most of them civilians. Yet it is essential to register the depth of Hamas’s guilt, because they intentionally provoked this disaster to benefit their own political fortunes, not the Palestinian national movement, let alone the well-being of the Palestinian people.

Honestly recognizing and acknowledging the atrocious nature of Hamas’s betrayal of the Palestinian people and national movement on and since October 7 in no way excuses Israel from its own myriad depredations and abuses. Well over 90 percent of the Gaza population are refugees and their descendants from southern Israel who were displaced in 1947-48 and are barred from ever returning to their homes. Since 1967, Israel has maintained an extraordinarily repressive and predatory occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. In the West Bank, the Israeli focus has been evolving from intensive colonial settlement to preparation for large-scale annexation, quite possibly accompanied by mass expulsions. And in Gaza, since 2007, Israel has maintained what many have rightly called an open-air prison—with occupation forces keeping a tight grip on the coastal waters, the airspace, the electromagnetic spectrum and all places of ingress and egress except one small crossing controlled by Egypt—governed on the inside by a fanatical gang of particularly nasty inmates.

Israel’s human rights record in the occupied territories is nothing short of appalling. And there can be no peace or coexistence as long as the occupation persists. Ending the conflict requires the transition to some formula, whether two states, one state or some sort of confederation, in which Palestinians gain self-determination and are no longer the disenfranchised subjects of a hostile foreign power. Such understandings are the very basis of the Palestinian national movement, as well as the policies of the Palestine Liberation Organization and of most Arab and international support and solidarity for the Palestinian cause.

But these well-understood grievances against Israel neither justify nor explain what Hamas did on October 7. By attacking southern Israel and essentially killing or kidnapping everyone they encountered, including Arab Bedouins and Asian laborers, Hamas effectively perpetrated two huge massacres: the first of Israelis on the day itself, and the second of the Palestinians being played out on a much grander scale by Israel. Hamas’s cynicism is so profound that it’s no exaggeration to call it an intentional human sacrifice of thousands of Palestinians in a desperate bid to increase the organization’s decades-long quest for dominance of the national movement.

Hamas knew what it was provoking, and that was the whole point of October 7. Since it was founded in 1987 by the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza during the first intifada, the primary aim of Hamas has been to take over the Palestinian national movement and, eventually, inherit the Palestine Liberation Organization with its invaluable global diplomatic presence, including UN observer state status and over 100 embassies around the world. Hoping to split the Palestinian movement between Islamists and nationalists, Israel has consistently facilitated and bolstered Hamas.

In its early years, Hamas had to play second fiddle to the secular nationalists in Fatah who dominate the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. Hamas’s big breakthrough was the paroxysm of violence during the second intifada after the diplomatic crisis caused by the failure of the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000. In the first few months of violence during the fall of 2000, the overwhelming number of civilian injuries and fatalities were occurring among Palestinians, with very few Israelis hurt. Hamas saw the opportunity and began a notorious campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli targets, which rapidly intensified the scale and scope of the violence and traumatized Israelis to this day. Israel, as always, remained true to its doctrine of disproportionality, and when the dust settled, far more Palestinian civilians lay dead. However, Hamas had finally emerged as a potential contender for national leadership. The lesson was obvious: Violence worked for them.

Palestinian elections following the second intifada and the death of Yasser Arafat played out in a now-familiar Arab electoral result between Islamists and nationalists: Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas easily won the presidency in 2005, while Hamas-backed candidates emerged as the largest bloc in the legislature in 2006. That’s strikingly similar to most elections following Arab spring uprisings, when nationalists generally prevailed in all-or-nothing presidential elections whereas Islamists managed to piece together powerful legislative coalitions.

This uneasy coexistence didn’t last long, as Hamas violently expelled Fatah from Gaza in 2007 and secured control of territory for the first time. Fatah responded in kind in the West Bank, leading to the ongoing Palestinian split. Israel adopted a policy of maintaining this split as ideally crippling to the Palestinian national movement, working to ensure that a neutered and discredited Fatah remained in power in the small Palestinian self-administered enclaves in the West Bank while Hamas continued to rule in Gaza. Nonetheless, Israel accepted the need to episodically (and literally) cut Hamas down to size –while also always killing numerous Palestinian civilians in Gaza—through periodic bombing campaigns mockingly described as “mowing the grass.”

Israel believed that both Palestinian factions were essentially content with ruling their own little fiefdoms, but over the past couple of years Hamas has clearly been developing other ideas. It was making no headway in advancing control of the national movement despite Israeli policies that made Fatah and the PLO look weak and pathetic. Hamas inmates and other Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have recently been treated much more harshly. The momentum of the national struggle seemed to have shifted decisively to the West Bank, led by unaffiliated armed youth gangs such as the “Lion’s Den,” an ad hoc militia group that has no allegiance to any established party and that formed in the warrens of Nablus’s Old City. Hamas leaders were being quietly shown the door by Turkey. And Qatar, which had been funding the Gaza economy under Hamas (with the approval of Israel, the United States, Egypt, and Fatah), started grumbling about the need for a more sustainable Gaza economy.

Worst of all, the broader Muslim Brotherhood movement in the rest of the Arab world—except for another enclave in western Libya—had effectively collapsed as a viable political force and network, leaving Hamas feeling isolated and increasingly dependent on the pro-Iranian Shiite Islamist network, with which it is politically sympathetic but religiously incompatible (Hamas are Sunni Islamists). In recent months, Hamas clearly decided to take drastic action against Israel that would force a change in a status quo that was no longer useful to them because they were slowly losing influence, momentum, and international backing, and they foresaw no end of that trend. Reports strongly indicate that they were egged on by Iran and Hezbollah in a series of meetings in Beirut, with the powerful Lebanese militia making vague promises (that, mercifully, have so far been ignored) to intervene if and when Hamas launched a major attack against Israel.

The worst part of Hamas’s cynicism is that it intended to provoke the kind of devastating Israeli overreaction that is unfolding on the ground today. There is no way that Hamas leaders were unaware that, as a matter of policy and doctrine, Israel would insist on inflicting wildly disproportionate losses on the Palestinians. Moreover, Hamas is trying to lure Israel into a prolonged re-occupation of the urban centers in Gaza in the hopes that it can launch an insurgency that begins to pick off Israeli troops in small numbers over time, even if initially the organization is smashed to pieces (along with much of Gaza and its population).

Hamas intends to use this insurgency to, at long last, succeed in taking over the national movement by pointing out that it and it alone is battling Israeli troops for control of Palestinian land. They would contrast this with the PA’s security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank while PLO leaders sit alone at the negotiating table listening to crickets and waiting for talks that Israel has long dismissed (largely by citing Hamas as an excuse).

That’s how and why Hamas placed over 2 million Palestinians in mortal danger, and achieved, in exchange, absolutely nothing except the mass murder of innocent Israelis that shocked the world and inflicted significant damage, however unfair, on the reputation of the Palestinian people and national movement generally. Not only did they make absolutely no provision for the civilian population of Gaza or provide any warning or indication of what they were going to do; they actively sought to provoke an Israeli attack that would inevitably involve tremendous suffering and countless deaths among the Palestinian civilians. Obviously, they intended to use Palestinian, Arab, and international outrage over this suffering to promote themselves and to justify, retroactively and prospectively, whatever violence they might deploy.

Just as Israel is squandering the international goodwill it sustained following the Hamas-led massacres of October 7, through that very killing spree Hamas similarly squandered a great deal of global sympathy for the Palestinians and their cause. It’s disastrous for the Palestinians that the most prominent Islamist group among them appears to behave little better than ISIS when given the chance. This plays into every possible anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and racist trope thrown at the Palestinians over the past hundred years of conflict, first with the Zionist movement and then with Israel.

Now that the Israeli attack on Gaza is in full effect, Hamas is getting not only what it wants, but is counting on. This doesn’t absolve Israel of responsibility for its actions. But it does mean that Hamas has deliberately inflicted tremendous harm on blameless Palestinians to try to advance its fortunes in a political war of attrition against its Fatah rivals.

After the devastating 2006 conflict with Israel, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was forced to go on Lebanese TV and claim that, had he known what the consequences of authorizing an attack on Israeli soldiers at the border would prove, he never would have authorized the operation. Everyone knew he was lying. By 2006, no one in Lebanon had any illusions about Israel’s attachment to disproportionality and determination to lash out at enemies with few scruples and considerable wrath. But at least Nasrallah had implicitly acknowledged how unpopular he had become outside of his own political base because of the devastation he had provoked. And the memory of that enormous national backlash in Lebanon is surely among the key factors holding Hezbollah back today.

Will Hamas leaders one day apologize to Palestinians in a similar fashion? It’s most unlikely, even if, when the dust settles and the smoke clears, it begins to dawn on Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere that Hamas engineered a huge calamity not through miscalculation or incompetence but because of cynical and grotesquely self-serving political and strategic malpractice. Palestinians and their supporters need to face the reality that Hamas has intentionally engineered a massive national calamity. They should never forgive them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/11/israel-gaza-after-hamas/675856/

Israel has launched what appears to be the first phase of a massive ground incursion into Gaza, vowing that Hamas must be eliminated or somehow rendered irrelevant, even at the expense of smashing Gaza to pieces.

But what then? Israeli officials have reportedly told the Biden administration that they haven’t engaged in any serious postconflict planning. That’s probably because none of their options is good and, despite a plethora of fantastical proposals, nobody is going to step in to bear the burden of Israel’s impossible dilemma or, put more simply, clean up its mess.

Israelis may feel that it doesn’t have any responsibility for realities in Gaza, given that Hamas has controlled the territory since 2007. But the rest of the world understands that the occupation has continued, albeit from beyond the borders of the Strip. Israel has all the while kept tight control over Gaza’s coastal waters, its airspace, its airwaves, and all of the crossings into the Strip except for a small one maintained by Egypt. Israel has made almost all of the major decisions regarding Gaza since 1967—including the reckless and self-destructive decision to bolster Hamas in order to split the Palestinian national movement between Islamists based in Gaza and secular nationalists in the West Bank.

Now Israel, apparently regretting this policy after the horrendous Hamas-led killing spree on October 7, has embarked on an offensive that will almost inevitably leave much of Gaza a smoldering pit of devastation. Yet, apparently, it still hopes to then withdraw, passing local authority to … somebody else. But this scenario is a fantasy. No third party is plausibly willing or able to police and rebuild Gaza on behalf of, and in coordination with, Israel.

One common proposal suggests that an expeditionary or police force, drawn from stable Arab countries, should secure Gaza as Israel withdraws. Given its geography and history, Egypt would have to be a central player in any such effort. But the Egyptians have made a foreign-policy priority of not getting sucked back into Gaza since 1979. They are not about to change their mind.

Another frequently suggested candidate is the Palestinian Authority. But the regime that Mahmoud Abbas leads in Ramallah has nothing to gain from reentering Gaza in the aftermath of Israeli devastation. Even in the decade before this war, Abbas rejected numerous Egyptian proposals to have the PA take over government ministries in Gaza, or supply security on the Palestinian side of crossings into the Strip. Hamas was apparently willing to accept these initiatives but also insisted that it would not disarm. Abbas reasonably feared winding up responsible for the impoverished population of Gaza, but without sufficient resources, and in the shadow of a heavily armed militia that could turn to violence whenever it liked.

If the PA was afraid of returning to Gaza back then, it will hardly be enthusiastic about stepping in behind Israeli forces after a devastating ground war. Gaza’s needs would be immense, and riding into power on the backs of Israeli tanks would mark the PA with a political kiss of death among Palestinians. Maybe, if a third party were to secure Gaza for a time after Israel withdraws, the PA might be willing to come in to replace it. But then we are back at square one: Who’s going to be that third party?

Some Israelis are quietly talking about the return of Mohammed Dahlan, the former Fatah leader in Gaza who has been living in exile in the United Arab Emirates since Hamas’s violent takeover in 2007. Dahlan still has supporters in Gaza, but he’s broadly unpopular among Palestinians and remains on terrible terms with Abbas and his inner circle. Without the backing of Ramallah, Dahlan can’t effectively return the PA to power in Gaza.

What about United Nations peacekeepers? Imagine a UN peacekeeping mission in charge of an utterly ravaged society that was already nonfunctional and on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. Now imagine it battling the insurgency that Hamas is plainly planning to unleash on the Israelis, and which is one reason the Israel Defense Forces wants to get out as quickly as possible once they have finished wreaking havoc. The UN and its member countries will almost certainly not be willing to accept responsibility for policing the rubble and caring for more than 2 million impoverished and largely displaced Palestinians in a tiny and overcrowded area that has been reduced to ruins.

Hamas’s main aim since its founding in 1987 has been to take over the Palestinian national movement, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, with its precious international diplomatic presence, UN observer-state status, and more than 80 embassies around the world. In service of this aim, Hamas hopes to lure Israel into Gaza, where it can mount a long insurgency against the Israeli occupiers. Hamas will then claim to be taking the fight to Israel, while the secular nationalists in the West Bank sit around waiting for negotiations that will never take place.

Such is Hamas’s path to leadership among Palestinians. If the Israelis skedaddle, Hamas won’t simply abandon the planned insurgency. It will carry out the plan against whatever power appears to be representing Israel’s interests, whether Arab, UN, or even Palestinian.

No third party is going to step into Gaza to fight the insurgency planned for Israeli troops, rebuild the infrastructure and society shattered by war, and solve the long-standing problem of governance that Hamas’s armed presence has ensured will endure. Israel is on its own, and so it must find an alternative both to leaving Gaza quickly, thereby allowing Hamas to reemerge, at least as a political entity, and to staying and battling the inevitable insurgency.

Whatever Israel decides to do now that its ground attack in Gaza is under way, it needs to understand that no deus ex machina will swoop in and save it from the accumulated consequences of its actions since 1967. When the smoke clears, yet again, Israel and the Palestinians—and not anyone else—will be left to cope with their self-inflicted disasters.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/10/30/us-biden-israel-gaza-netanyahu/

US policy towards Israel’s war is operating on several different registers.

Israel’s vengeance is terrible indeed. Only the US has any real influence over Israel’s policies. But is Washington trying to restrain Israel – appearances notwithstanding – and if so, will that work?

Readers may dismiss the idea that the Biden administration is doing anything serious to hold Israel back from bombarding Gaza, given its ostentatious bearhug since the October 7 Hamas attacks.

US policy towards Israel’s latest war is, as always, operating on different registers simultaneously. First, there is the President’s personal affection for Israel, which is reflective of his identity as a Democratic elder statesman.

Mr Biden came of political age during the Cold War, when support for Israel among liberals was key, in contrast to Israel-scepticism on the traditionalist right.

For decades, Israel was widely viewed in the US as a plucky young “democracy” in a sea of hostile Arab and Muslim societies with which westerners supposedly couldn’t identify. Until the late 1970s, Israel was ruled by the socialist-lite Labour party, which excelled at cultivating identification with liberal westerners.

Mr Biden’s instinct to identify with Israel whenever it comes under attack is thus both personal and political. Despite false diagnoses from Republicans, and even some conservative Democrats, the Democratic party has not been taken over by left-wing radicals. The mainstream’s willingness to pay lip service to identity politics and catchphrases doesn’t leave the party actually resembling the “woke” caricature of the ultra-left.

So, most Democrats rallied around Mr Biden in his embrace of Israel. Even the Palestinian voices in Congress, such as Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, refused to say much about October 7. There isn’t much Democratic opposition to the Biden administration’s policies towards Israel, except a few groups and people now vowing not to vote for him even if he faces former president Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election.

In addition to being personally consistent for him, and politically useful to a Democratic leader, Mr Biden is also leaving little space for the born-again pro-Israel Republicans, dominated by apocalyptic evangelical Christian fundamentalists, to attack him as insufficiently supportive of Israel. Loud voices on the far left and Maga right are howling, but none of the reactions yet seem likely to impede his election chances.

The most important question is, do these policies make sense for US national interests? As usual, the answer can only be, yes and no.

What galls so many Democrats, liberals, Arab and Muslim Americans and sympathisers with Palestinians and their morally unimpeachable and imperative cause, is that Mr Biden’s strategic positioning is simply not designed to stop the Israeli assault immediately and thereby save countless innocent lives.

He obviously concluded that there is little he can do to secure that in the short term, especially considering the domestic political constraints. Indeed, Mr Biden might not even have wanted to, given the rage that was prevalent among pro-Israel figures, such as himself, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks.

Nonetheless, Mr Biden has a clear overriding objective and coldly rational policy goal: preventing the conflict from spreading beyond Gaza to involve the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and, above all, Lebanon and Hezbollah.

From the outset, the administration calculated that Hamas was counting on Hezbollah leaders to fulfil their word, reportedly given to them from last summer, that if they entered into a war with Israel, the Lebanese militia would intervene to support them. But Washington is also convinced that Hezbollah doesn’t want to get involved in a major way, that Iran is not pressuring it to do so, and that Israel also wants to avoid this.

Given the dire Lebanese political and economic situation, in which perforce Hezbollah must operate, the group has very little incentive to enter into a devastating conflict with Israel now. For Iran, Hezbollah primarily serves as a deterrent against Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear and other installations Tehran would be loath to waste such an invaluable external weapon on anything as strategically, culturally and religiously marginal as Gaza.

But, as Washington is well aware, at least two obvious scenarios could drag Hezbollah into the fray, nonetheless. One would be the spread of the fighting into East Jerusalem and involving Al Aqsa Mosque complex, which would tug powerfully on Muslim heartstrings from Nigeria to Indonesia and back. That could re-orient Iranian and/or Hezbollah cost-benefit perceptions and make getting involved in the “defence of Islam and Al Quds” far more appealing.

Another possibility is that third parties in Lebanon, including Hamas, attack Israel and “get lucky” with a strike that prompts what Hezbollah regards as an unacceptable Israeli response. Once both sides start misinterpreting each other’s actions and intentions and begin attempting to “restore deterrence” against each other, a vicious cycle that no one can control could ensue.

The Biden administration’s bearhug of Israel is designed to place Washington in a position from which it can credibly urge the Israelis in private, from a background of trust, to hold back. It already succeeded in doing so, apparently, first on the grounds that hostages might still be rescued and secondly, reportedly, to bolster missile defences for US troops stationed in Iraq, Syria and various waters around the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Israel may well have fully launched its pledged ground incursion into Gaza. But the Biden administration is obviously hoping to limit what Israel does in Gaza, particularly to Palestinian civilians, precisely in order to reduce the pressure on pro-Iranian militia groups, even Tehran itself, and above all Hezbollah, from joining the fray and creating a regional conflagration that might quickly draw in Washington.

It’s obvious that the Biden administration is focused on trying to prevent that from happening, but unclear if it can. It’s not obvious that Israel will listen to even the US in what the Netanyahu government is inexplicably describing as “the second war of independence”. And there are limits to what the US government can politically defend at home, both among Democrats and in fending off Republicans, in pressuring the Israelis – at least without much more significant atrocities reported in world media than have already visited upon the devastated Palestinian population in Gaza.

Nonetheless, and undoubtedly counter-intuitively to many in the Middle East, perhaps the only person with the means and the ability – and perhaps the willingness – to try to restrain Israel is none other than Mr Biden.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/10/24/instability-in-the-middle-east-brought-on-by-the-israel-gaza-war-is-a-test-for-america/

It could damage US strategic interests and the balance of power in the region.

The American response to the Israel-Gaza war is being shaped by serious anxieties that it could devolve into an all-out assault on the American-dominated order in the Middle East and even international stability writ large. Everything is in place for a potential outcome that represents the victory of revisionist powers over Washington and its partners in the Middle East. Progressive Middle East countries could also be facing a near-term future in which they confront a gravely destabilised regional and, by extension, global order, if the worst-case scenarios are met.

Egypt is most directly threatened by the Gaza-Israel war. Ever since the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Cairo has been determined, as a matter of core national security and foreign policy, not to get sucked back into a leadership role in Gaza, under any circumstances.

Egypt knew that Israel was hoping to displace the Palestinians of Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula, and Egypt said absolutely not. So, Egypt has also made it clear that as a core national security and domestic policy it would not allow the problems facing the Palestinians in Gaza to be exported to Egypt. In short, there is no way that Egypt is going to open its borders to allow a flood of Palestinian refugees from Gaza into Egyptian territory and bail the Israelis, and Hamas, out. In fact, no Arab country is willing to help Israel, and Hamas, out of this incredible crisis that both have created for themselves, especially Israel, in Gaza.

Jordan will definitely not allow Palestinians who become displaced from the West Bank, under whatever circumstances, by Israel, under the cover of conflict, to enter into Jordanian territory yet again. Jordan has taken the largest group of Palestinian refugees twice: in 1948 and in 1967. This cannot be repeated, from a Jordanian point of view, because as a consequence of those earlier displacements, and Israel’s adamant refusal to allow any of the Palestinian refugees to ever go home without being gunned down in the process, Jordan has developed a plurality or even a majority of Palestinian citizens.

But annexation-minded and racist Israeli leaders have long insisted that “Jordan is Palestine,” meaning that they ultimately intend to displace the Palestinians in the West Bank and, possibly, Gaza as well, into Jordan, or possibly into Egypt, in order to alleviate Israel from this intolerable burden of non-Jewish indigenous persons living on their own land and in their own homes.

But none of that will do anything significant to alter the fundamental strategic, demographic and political landscape between the two peoples in the area in which they fight for land and power: British Mandatory Palestine.

Instead, such calculations reflect the most visceral and potent aspects of the conflict, the narratives that allowed Hamas to massacre hundreds of Israelis and Israel to so brutally attack the innocent Palestinian population of Gaza.

Hamas sought to provoke an emotional overreaction from Israel, and there is every indication that not only have they succeeded, but they will also succeed beyond their wildest imaginations. Israel appears to be preparing to invade the interior of Gaza with 300,000 conscripts, mostly untrained and unprepared for the requisite house-to-house urban combat, which so greatly favours guerrilla groups over regular militaries. Moreover, Israel is talking about a long-term conflict, with some military leaders using the framework of no less than 10 years, which must be music to the ears of everyone involved in the Hamas leadership and their Iranian sponsors.

Washington is confronting a situation that could spiral out of control and severely damage, if not destroy, the enduring but battered Pax Americana in the Middle East and, above all, the strategically imperative Gulf region. Already there is significant unrest in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. If that spreads to holy places, above all the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, then it will be much more difficult for Hezbollah and other Iranian clients to sit by and do nothing, and their hesitant calculations may well change.

Both Hezbollah and Iran want Hezbollah to stay out of the fray, and instead remain a crucial deterrent against Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, but if smaller groups in Lebanon keep attacking Israel and raising the stakes, a vicious cycle could spiral out of control, forcing either Israel or Hezbollah to act against each other when both would prefer to avoid a widening conflict.

There are also the Houthis in Yemen, capable of hitting the Israeli port city of Eilat, plus a range of pro-Iranian Shiite militia groups in Iraq who are already operating inside Syria and near the border with Israel, ready to strike. Other groups may be gathering around the occupied Golan Heights and elsewhere, prepared to fire at Israel as well.

If Israel finds itself bogged down in a debilitating multi-front conflict, there is every reason to suspect that it will not be satisfied leaving Iran, which it will correctly insist is effectively the ringmaster, unscathed. If that happens, you can expect direct Israeli strikes on Iran, especially its nuclear facilities. That could unleash a Middle Eastern Pandora’s box.

Washington has deployed two major aircraft carrier groups, a vast amount of additional naval and air force power beyond huge numbers already stationed in the Gulf. That’s because the Americans know they are being tested with the possibility of an all-out war that will destroy their strategic interests and balance of power in the region once and for all.

The good news is that Tehran appears strongly inclined to restrain its regional proxies from going too far and, especially, preventing Hezbollah from being dragged into this conflict. Iran is not going to want to waste its ultimate deterrent against Israel on Gaza, which it regards as strategically, culturally and even religiously of marginal interest. The even better news is that the Biden administration is not going to stand by and let a regional disaster unfold.

https://newrepublic.com/article/176251/israel-hamas-war-spread-hezbollah

If it does, the region—and maybe the world—is on fire. But so far, most signs are that Iran does not want a wider war.

Will the Hamas-Israel conflict turn into a regional conflagration? Is the Gaza war going to spiral out of control? It seems increasingly plausible.

As Israel appears poised to launch a multiphase ground offensive to try to eliminate Hamas as an effective organization, one of the biggest concerns for almost all parties is whether the fighting will spread. There are already numerous instances of other players in the regional network of militia groups and armed gangs supported by Iran in Arab countries taking tentative steps towards engagement in the fighting. Israel has demonstrated its alarm over the prospect by issuing threats and warnings to Iran’s most potent client, Hezbollah in Lebanon. There have been media reports that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant urged a preemptive attack against Hezbollah but was overruled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid strong pressure from the Biden administration not to widen the war.

The deployment of major U.S. naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean is clearly aimed at deterring that powerful organization and its Iranian patrons and giving Israel backing that would also stay its hand. Indeed, Hezbollah and Iran have ample and obvious reasons to want to hold back from all out involvement.

But almost all of the pro-Iranian groups in the region have been poking and pecking at the conflict, including by attempting to attack U.S. forces in the region. Iran has numerous clients and proxies in the Arab world that are capable of joining the fray, and not just against Israel but also the United States. Pro-Iranian “Popular Mobilization Forces” militia groups in Iraq like Kataib Hezbollah have long bedeviled U.S. forces in the region. Last week U.S. troops at the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq were attacked by drones and missiles, as was another base near the Baghdad international airport. There have been several other drone attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq last week. Similar pro-Iranian organizations in Syria launched drone attacks against American forces there, causing injuries to American troops. Another drone apparently aimed at U.S. forces was shot down near the Turkish border. In addition, the USS Carney naval destroyer intercepted several missiles and drones fired from land in Yemen, apparently by the pro-Iranian Houthi rebels.

But by far the biggest concern is that the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia will get drawn into the conflict with Israel. Unlike pro-Iranian militia groups in Iraq and even Yemen, and certainly unlike Hamas, Hezbollah is an extremely potent hybrid military organization combining exceptionally effective guerrilla and commando capabilities along with conventional military prowess. Hezbollah has demonstrated the ability to take and hold territory and, in its last major conflict with Israel in 2006, it shocked the Israeli military with its capabilities, including effective use of land-to-sea missiles against Israeli naval forces. Since then, the organization’s capabilities have greatly expanded. It has developed a vast arsenal of missiles and rockets with hyper-precision guidance capable of striking anywhere in Israel. Its ground forces are also now more battle-hardened and experienced than ever due to the Syrian war, in which Hezbollah troops were essential to the coalition with Russia and Iran that intervened in the fall of 2015 to keep Bashar Assad in power.

There has been noteworthy unrest on the Israel-Lebanese border that has, naturally, increased concerns of a wider conflict. In recent days there have been numerous limited skirmishes and exchanges of fire on or near the Israel-Lebanon border, and Hezbollah claims to already be “in the heart of the battle.” 

One Israeli officer and at least six Israeli soldiers, 13 Hezbollah fighters and Lebanon-based Palestinian militants have been killed. Yet, for now, this limited fighting is, essentially, within the understood and tacitly established terms of understanding between Israel and Hezbollah, although patience on both sides is being sorely tested. Their tense relationship is characterized by such occasional flareups, and as long as they are within certain geographical limits, and not too large in scope, they are essentially tolerated by both sides and do not lead to all-out war.

Yet mounting Israeli concern has been clearly expressed in its increasing warnings and threats to Hezbollah that it is capable of fighting a two-front war and is ready to decimate not only that organization but all of Lebanon if it is attacked. The United States has dispatched the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean, soon to be joined by additional U.S. Air Force fighter power, all in a clear warning to Hezbollah and Iran that Washington is also prepared to get involved if need be. It’s the first time in decades, and arguably ever, that American forces have been poised to actively defend Israel. Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder was blunt in saying that the deployment of these forces was designed to deter “groups” from acting recklessly to provoke a wider conflict.

Such deployments will undoubtedly incentivize all the major players, most notably Iran and Hezbollah, not to try to expand the conflict into a wider regional conflagration. But that may not be necessary. Hezbollah still has ample reasons of its own not to want a war with Israel under current circumstances. The Lebanese socioeconomic and political condition in which the group operates is dire. Lebanon’s political system is deadlocked with no president and a state that barely functions. Its economy has collapsed completely, plunging a once relatively prosperous society into penury, with over 80 percent of Lebanese now living in poverty. The country simply cannot afford another experience of being pulverized by the Israeli military. And the IDF is, not surprisingly, threatening reprisals and mayhem.

After the 2006 conflict with Israel, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was compelled to go on Lebanese television several times to apologize for having initiated such devastation. In one such broadcast, he even said that had he anticipated the consequences, he never would have authorized the attack on Israeli soldiers at the border that led to the conflict. Everybody knew he was lying, since no one in Lebanon by 2006 had failed to fully understand Israel’s doctrine of disproportionality and determination to counterattack brutally when provoked. But his claim demonstrates that Hezbollah can be accountable not just to its own Shiite constituency but to the broader Lebanese society and that it must be careful to preserve its ability to function within the Lebanese context.

Hezbollah does not operate in a vacuum. It is completely embedded in its Lebanese environment, and it is in no way immune from the Lebanese economic and political crises that have wracked the country in recent years. Neither Lebanon nor, by extension, Hezbollah, can afford another major war with Israel, particularly under the current parlous circumstances. That doesn’t mean that Hezbollah would refuse a command from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, which operates the network of Arab militia groups of which Hezbollah is the oldest and most effective member, to go into action. Despite its own considerable incentives not to get involved in the current conflict, an Iranian demand would be extremely hard, and perhaps impossible, to refuse.

But there are ample reasons to think that Iran also will not want Hezbollah to enter into a major conflict with Israel over the Gaza war. Hezbollah is Iran’s greatest asset, to be deployed only when absolutely necessary. The main function of Hezbollah for Iran is to serve as a massive and potent deterrent against Israeli military strikes on Iran itself, and particularly against its nuclear facilities. Tehran is therefore highly unlikely to want to expend such a potent deterrent on Gaza, which is, in truth, of marginal strategic interest to Iran. Deterrents are only effective when poised and in waiting. If they are deployed in action, they no longer serve the deterrent function. Instead, they become combatants that are expended as a deterrent force. Since Iran regards Hezbollah as a crucial defense against Israeli attacks against its key assets at home, it is going to think twice before expending that for any other purpose.

It’s possible that Hezbollah might get drawn into the conflict anyway. There are smaller groups, including Hamas operatives, in Lebanon who are already attacking Israel with drones and missiles. If Israel misinterprets one of these attacks and decides to retaliate in a manner that Hezbollah regards as mandating a strong response, such an exchange could set off a tit-for-tat spiral that neither side can control.

Alternatively, if fighting spreads to the occupied West Bank and, above all, occupied East Jerusalem, calculations could quickly change. Violence in and around the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem would inflame Arab and Muslim passions around the world in a way that nothing in Gaza could. A conflagration around the third holiest site in Islam could prompt either Hezbollah or Iran, or both, to decide that there is more to gain than to lose by unleashing Hezbollah’s fearsome missile and rocket capabilities in the name of defending the faith and, in effect, God.

Thus far, the skirmishing on the Lebanese-Israeli border and attacks against U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq are limited enough to be manageable. Nothing that has happened yet makes spread of this conflict a broader regional explosion inevitable. But unrest like this does make it more likely, because it raises tensions and puts all parties on the defensive. The good news is that one of the few things that Israel, Iran, and Hezbollah all agree on is that the war should not spread, especially to include the potent Lebanese militia. The bad news is that when tensions and passions rise, parties that rationally do not want a conflict with each other are sometimes drawn into a reactive dynamic that produces one anyway.

World War I is probably the most striking example of how actors that don’t want a conflict can end up in a huge one anyway. The even worse news is that this time the U.S. could well get directly involved as well. As things stand, it’s still more likely than not that the conflict will be contained to Gaza and Israel. Everything is in place for that to change quickly, but so far, it’s a mutual agreement—except for some senior Israeli officials, and, possibly, a few bigwigs in Iran as well—that the Hamas-Israel conflict shouldn’t spread.