Séamus Malekafzali , July 23, 2024

Netanyahu’s Inferno

The regional war is already here IDF tank fires rockets into Lebanon, 2006. | Wikimedia Commons

In the nine months since the war against Gaza began—nine months of terror, destruction, and displacement with no end in sight—American officials have publicly sought, in tandem with ensuring no Israeli leader is held responsible for their wanton disregard of international law, to prevent the dread specter of a broader “regional war.” That term is on the lips of every foreign policy apparatchik in the Pentagon and at the White House, who are rightly fearful of a quagmire more vexing than Iraq, more intractable than Afghanistan. Officials have thus been working around the clock to pressure Hamas to accept the purportedly generous, if not downright magnanimous, ceasefire deal currently on the table in hopes of bringing an end to the conflict before tensions spiral out of control.

But these diplomatic machinations ignore a simple, obvious fact clear to anyone in the Middle East itself: the “regional war” is already here. For months now, Yemen’s Houthis have, in solidarity with Hamas, attempted to blockade the Red Sea, launching attacks against dozens of commercial ships. An international coalition meant to open the waters has only cleared the way for the Houthis to expand the scope of their operations, building hypersonic missiles and targeting ships not just in the Red Sea but in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea as well. Last week, in a marked escalation, they launched a drone that struck an apartment building in Tel Aviv, near the American embassy; in response, Israel struck Hodeidah, a Yemeni port under the administration of the Houthi-led government.

Iraqi militias, once content simply to attack American military installations, have also turned their weapons westward, launching drones into Israeli territory, including one that struck an IDF naval base in April. And after October 7, Israel expanded its campaign of airstrikes against Iranian elements in Syria, leading to the assassination of a high-profile Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in April, and in turn, provoking a massive, unprecedented direct military attack from Iranian territory directed at multiple military bases inside Israel, revealing that the Islamic Republic has formulated a new equation of force with the Jewish state.

A conflagration is spreading across the region, and the events of the past year have shown that all bets are off for just how bad it could get. The most volatile front is in southern Lebanon, where fighting between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah has raged longer than any other save for Gaza itself. In October, the organization started launching drone and missile attacks at IDF positions along the border, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis to flee south, many to government-funded hotels far from the fighting. In response, Israel has launched targeted strikes of its own both near the border and deep inside the country, killing hundreds of Hezbollah fighters, as well as a number of journalists and medics, and displacing almost a hundred thousand Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah has vowed to keep up its attacks as long as the war in Gaza continues.

The issue of the displaced Israelis has become a significant thorn in the side of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said that he is working to make sure they will be able to return to their normal lives by September 1, when the new school year will start. But when Netanyahu was heard asking then-war cabinet minister Benny Gantz back in May if it mattered if that date was pushed back, displaced families and their supporters erupted in anger, with local officials demanding immediate and decisive military action to push Hezbollah back from the border—even if that required the “total annihilation” of the land up until the Litani River, eighteen miles deep into Lebanese territory. Still, Netanyahu has dithered on launching a full-on assault.

Meanwhile, those displaced from southern Lebanon have not enjoyed the luxury of hotel stays paid for out of government coffers. Lebanese government assistance to its displaced has been painfully inadequate, forcing those with some means to seek shelter farther north in Beirut, where they are preyed upon by landlords demanding exorbitant rents. Those wishing to remain in their homes, or those without the means to leave them for safer ground, have been forced to withstand the slow-moving destruction of their neighborhoods: thousands of buildings reported to have been bombed by Israel in recent months, the Earth then salted with white phosphorus, the use of which against civilian targets is illegal under international law. One report from the Financial Timesin June described Israel’s campaign along the five-kilometer stretch of Israel’s border with Lebanon as creating a “dead zone,” with much of the land rendered “uninhabitable.”

A question inevitably arises: Why has Israel, supposed operator of the Middle East’s most powerful army, not yet invaded Lebanon to stop the rockets? The Biden administration, in some respects, has been warning Israel off from expanding its war since October, drawing comparisons with the decision to invade Iraq. But Biden, Blinken, and co. have not been the only source of opposition, at least not how Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant tells it. In early October, he was overruled when he suggested Israel launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah, which he reportedly views as a graver threat to Israeli security than Hamas. With no clear details given as to why Gallant was overruled, more questions then arise. Why would other Israeli officials want to immediately head off attacking their long-standing foes when so much of world opinion was behind them in the first few weeks after October 7?

For one, Israeli officials are keenly aware of Hezbollah’s strength: since their last major military confrontation with Israel in 2006, the group has expanded its capabilities considerably. The group has grown its ranks to over one hundred thousand, if Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is to be believed. Its tranche of rockets is said to be larger than the supply of many sovereign nations, enabling Hezbollah to fire thousands of projectiles continuously, for days on end. Its forces have displayed the ability to incapacitate elements of the Iron Dome, Israel’s air defense system, and its drones are able to hover over Israeli cities without being shot down. It is the closest thing to a conventional military force that Israel has fought in decades, and it may actually stand a fighting chance in a ground war. To some degree, Israel knows how formidable Hezbollah has become. If it did not, an all-out assault on every sector of Lebanese territory would have taken only days to initiate. But knowing is not necessarily followed by understanding.

Most Israeli leaders have thus attempted to triangulate a strategy for undermining Hezbollah while avoiding a larger, no holds-barred, all-out conflict, as if Hezbollah, an organization that has promised Israel a war without limits, will play ball if the IDF decides to invade only part of southern Lebanon, instead of up to south Beirut as some Israeli publications have called for, or of the entire country, as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has urged. American officials have had to be the ones to inform their Israeli counterparts that the idea of even a “limited war” against Hezbollah is not plausible, and that initiating a new stage of the conflict could potentially bring in the full weight of Iran and the Axis of Resistance into the fray. Their admonitions are falling on deaf ears.

But as the war against Hamas drags on, an increasingly embattled Israel appears to be prepared to chart a different course. A growing chorus of Israeli politicians are now insisting that war may be the only way to return northern residents to their homes. “If we can, we will do this diplomatically,” Netanyahu said in June. “If not, we will do it another way. But we will bring [the residents] home.” Other members of the government have advocated war if not out of necessity, then as punishment for Hezbollah’s insolence and the Lebanese government’s lack of capability to stop them. “There is no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon,” Israel’s Education Minister Yoav Kisch said in early July. “Lebanon as we know it will not exist.”

As it contemplates full-out war with Lebanon, Israel is once again relying on its attenuated version of reality, intentionally rejecting the existing material conditions in front of them and then responding in bewilderment when reality does not bend accordingly. Decades of impunity have led to the creation of a ruling class in Jerusalem that believes that it can always be 1967, when Israel triumphed over its enemies in one fell swoop, as long as the guarantee of awesome American military support never wavers. Those within Israel who argue that the country could be facing an enemy it cannot defeat are sidelined. People like Eran Etzion, former deputy head of the Israeli National Security Council, who said in April that Israel is being led from “disaster to catastrophe” in its escalation with Hezbollah and Iran, are pushed to the margins, away from the television cameras. Those advocating for the ceasefire deal currently on the table or an all-for-all hostage deal are similarly dismissed as agents of Hamas or Iran.

Even if Netanyahu were somehow averse to perpetual conflict, the bloodthirsty officials the prime minister has surrounded himself with—and the people who are putting pressure on him from outside the Knesset—will no longer allow him any other path than the absolute destruction of the nation’s perceived enemies. Day and night, on Israeli television when they are given the chance, or else on social media, government ministers, members of the ruling party and the larger governing coalition, as well as prominent media personalities, call explicitly for mass devastation, for Beirut to be made into another Gaza.

IDF rank-and-file and company commanders alike, who have blown up entire neighborhoods in the Strip, are also calling for the war to shift north. A commander told the Israeli site Ynet, “Why are we waiting for the Radwan force to strike?” referencing Hezbollah’s special operations contingent. “This equation must change.” Others call for retribution against Lebanon for its insolence, with one soldier, a Ukrainian-Israeli, filming himself among the rubble of collapsed buildings, saying: “I have a message to all the rats in Gaza, Lebanon, [and] Iran. Don’t mess with the IDF. You’ll come out crushed.”

The failure to accept reality is not Israel’s alone. The United States, without whom Israel would be able to do nothing, is similarly hobbled by its aversion to facts. Despite the discussions with Israeli officials about the dangers of invading Lebanon, White House personnel have nevertheless indicated they will not only back Israel to the hilt if they do, but have even indicated to the Lebanese that they will not be able to control Israel. That Congress has pumped billions into Israel’s war machine since October 7 appears inconsequential in this regard. Amos Hochstein, the Israeli-American mediator acting on behalf of the Biden administration, has told Lebanese parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri that America “won’t be able to hold Israel back” if things escalate, according to Axios.

Instead, the Biden administration has placed all hope for de-escalation on the current ceasefire proposal between Hamas and Israel. Hamas and its allies agree with the bulk of the proposal but have asked for more clarity on the details and have expressed reservations about trusting Western officials. Israel, meanwhile, disagrees with the very nature of the proposal, demanding that, as part of any deal, they be allowed to continue the war until Hamas is defeated. For every step that negotiators take to reach a deal, Netanyahu and his government undercut it with more demands designed for Hamas to reject, to be characterized as intransigent and bloodthirsty for doing so, and to be dismissed as an enemy that simply cannot be reasoned with.

Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their allies say they desire a ceasefire. Even American diplomats say that only a real ceasefire can stop a wider regional war in its tracks. The White House nevertheless refuses to change its basic strategy, one that’s riddled with contradictions: with one hand, they push for a ceasefire, while they give Israel virtually all the weapons it desires with the other. (In July, the Biden administration announced that, following a pause, they will resume shipping five hundred-pound bombs to Israel but will continue to hold back on supplying two thousand-pound bombs over concerns about their use in densely populated Gaza, bombs which Biden has since claimed he hasn’t even been sending, even though the administration has sent over ten thousand of them.)

The outcome appears inevitable. There is no prominent voice in either Israeli or U.S. military leadership, executive branch, or mass media that is not aware of the eventuality: a war against an enemy that has been preparing for this fight for its entire existence. Israeli electric company CEO Shaul Goldstein has warned that “it will not be possible to live in Israel” after seventy-two hours without power and that Hezbollah has the ability to “cripple” the nation’s entire power grid. A coalition of the willing, this time of Iraqi militias, has already indicated its desire to go to Lebanon to fight Israel directly should an invasion begin, and the Iranian government has said that “all options,” including “the full involvement of all resistance fronts,” are on the table. An invasion of this scale could suck the United States into a kind of direct military involvement that Israel’s National Security Advisor threatened the Axis of Resistance with in mid-October, remarking: “If they think of joining the attack against Israel there will be American involvement and Israel will not be on its own.”

Despite the knowledge of the disaster before them, America and Israel refuse to deviate from the course. Any inclinations toward taking a different way are shot down, rendered unthinkable, or faked for the cameras—even as officials wring their hands, evincing a desire to de-escalate tensions, to bring an end to the bloodshed. But the off-ramps are all blocked. There may be some sort of miracle ahead, where somebody, somewhere comes to their senses, but if there is one thing that the past nine months of unspeakable horror have shown the world, it’s that the Western order is willing to destroy itself rather than give in, to admit it has done unspeakable wrong, to imagine that a different world might be possible. It must be its own author and finisher.