Oct 8th 2024

October 7 marks 12 months of escalation into the ‘forever war’ now engulfing the Middle East

by Scott Lucas

Professor of International Politics, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

 

One year after Hamas’s mass killing of nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and abduction of 251 others, and almost a year into the Israeli retribution that has so far slain almost 42,000 in Gaza, there seems no prospect of resolution.

Far from it. The violence is expanding not only in Gaza but also in Lebanon, where Israel is carrying out targeted assassinations, airstrikes and a ground invasion. Now Iran – whose commanders have also been “liquidated” by Israel – has fired missiles on Israeli territory, raising concerns that an Israeli-Iranian war will be next.

If the anniversary of the October 7 massacre poses a question, is not as much: “How did we get here?” but “How long will this go on?”

The answer for now is that there is no answer.

Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the region has been marked by wars and the violent intervention of other countries in the region. The attack of October 7 itself can be directly tracked back to Israel’s 11-day clash with Hamas in 2021, after which Hamas leader Mohammed Deif reportedly began planning a cross-border ground assault both for revenge and for a reassertion of power.

October 7 was an unprecedented shock for Israel and the region. Allies in the west pledged support for Israeli security while pressing Israel to remove Hamas from power in Gaza through political and economic measures.

But Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, presented with an opportunity to serve his own ends, demurred.

Before the massacre, Netanyahu had faced a possible trial on bribery charges and split Israeli society with his attempt to subjugate the courts to executive power. By summer 2023 there were mass protests across the country, discord within the government and threats by reservists to refuse military service. But October 7 gave him the chance for the perfect distraction: a campaign to “destroy” Hamas.

From the outset, there were queries both inside and outside Israel about the endgame. Even if Hamas could be annihilated, who would govern a devastated Gaza? In the absence of that governance, would Israel occupy all or part of the Strip?

In the opening months of the Israeli response, Netanyahu did not need to answer the questions. All he had to do was to sustain the assault, even as the number of Palestinian casualties – almost half of whom were women and children — reached the tens of thousands, and around 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population were displaced.

But in the spring, Benny Gantz – one of the three members of the war cabinet and former head of the Israel Defense Forces – resigned. He said Netanyahu had put his personal and political interests ahead of the existential needs of the state of Israel.

This summer, defence minister Yoav Gallant, the other war cabinet member, privately said that Hamas could not be destroyed. Netanyahu’s office publicly denounced him for an “anti-Israel narrative” and threatened his dismissals.

And hundreds of thousands of Israelis were back on the streets. They demanded that Netanyahu put a priority on the return of hostages, around 100 of whom – dead or alive – are still held by Hamas.

But Netanyahu appeared at every turn to be undermining any prospect of a ceasefire that would return those hostages, including the assassination of Hamas’s lead negotiator and political head Ismail Haniyeh in an apartment in Iran’s capital Tehran.

Now, what appears to have banished any chance of peace in the region, certainly in the foreseeable future, is the expansion of the conflict to a second front in Lebanon – this time with a larger adversary, Iran, in Netanyahu’s sights.

Israel and Hezbollah had waged a low-intensity conflict since October 7. Over the year to mid-September 2024, Israeli cross-border fire killed more than 350 Hezbollah fighters and around 100 civilians. Hezbollah killed 22 Israeli troops and 26 civilians, including at least 12 young people on a football pitch in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Syria.

Netanyahu needed to escalate this conflict into a war. Doing so, he pushed the public to offer its support and reconciled with defence minister Gallant and the military, which favours an expansion of attacks.

On September 17, Israel detonated explosive-rigged pagers in Beirut and across the country. A day later, Hezbollah’s back-up network of walkie-talkies was detonated in the same way. At least 37 people were killed and thousands wounded.

Then, on September 27, Israel went for the kill. Having already assassinated several Hezbollah commanders, it targeted the leader Hassan Nasrallah and other senior officials. US-made bombs weighing 2,000 pounds (900 kg) levelled a block in southern Beirut. Nasrallah’s body and those of Hezbollah’s senior military officials were later pulled from the rubble.

On October 1, Israeli forces crossed the border into southern Lebanon.

Hours later, Iran fired 181 ballistic missiles, including for the first time hypersonic Fattah missiles, at Israeli territory.

Facing serious economic problems and international isolation and with a new government just in place, Iranian leaders had not retaliated for Haniyeh’s killing as it had promised. But following Nasrallah’s assassination, the Islamic Republic had no choice but to react if it wanted to dispel the appearance of weakness at home and in the region.

Yet at the same time – as before, in April 2024 – Iran telegraphed the attack, notifying Arab countries and giving them time to pass the message to US and thus to Israel. As a result, only two Israeli civilians suffered minor injuries. (In a tragic irony, the only fatality was a Palestinian in the West Bank, killed by falling debris.) Far from portending a direct Iran-Israel War, Tehran’s regime had calibrated its response to avoid one. Meanwhile, it had strengthened its adversary, Netanyahu.

The Israeli prime minister publicly said Tehran had made a “big mistake” and promised “it will pay for it”. But Iran had done him a favour. Now, rather than facing any pressure to step aside, he can tell Israelis he is needed more than ever in the face of an existential threat from the Islamic Republic as well as winning the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah and securing the release of the hostages.

War without end

Reports have emerged, so far unconfirmed, that Israel has assassinated Hassan Nasrallah’s potential successor, Hashem Safieddine, in Beirut. If so, he joins more than 2,000 others so far killed in the conflict in Lebanon, including 127 children and 261 women.

Meanwhile, last week in Gaza around 120 people perished in 48 hours, some in a school and an orphanage used as shelters, others in their homes. The death toll since October 7 in Gaza is now almost 42,000, including at least 11,000 children.

In the occupied West Bank, an Israeli airstrike killed a Hamas commander and seven fighters in the Tulkarem refugee camp. Ten civilians were also killed in the strike. And in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights in Syria, two Israeli soldiers have been killed by a drone launched by the Iran-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

Maybe Israel’s prime minister has a dream where every senior Hamas figure and every Hezbollah leader is killed. Where Iran has accepted the loss of its allies and, more concerned about domestic problems, has stepped back from confrontation. And where the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for him will not be enforced. Perhaps he imagines standing on a podium under a banner: “Mission Accomplished”.

But in the real world, slain leaders are replaced. Those who bury their dead do not forget or forgive, and those who have felt the punishment of arms do not forego weapons but embrace them. So it seems unlikely that’s how the story will end.

Sadly, it’s far more likely it will never end.

Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Nov 3rd 2024
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Oct 9th 2024
EXTRACT: "The continuing cycles of violence can easily spiral out of control, precipitating a wider war involving nuclear powers. Moreover, Netanyahu’s goal of 'total victory' against an ideological movement cannot be achieved by military means alone." ..... "So long as both sides seek to inflict maximum damage on the other to right past wrongs, the violence will not end. Netanyahu may think that total victory is in sight, now that Hezbollah is badly damaged and Gaza reduced to rubble, but that is an illusion. All he has done is create more enemies who will want to restore their honor by killing in a war without end."
Oct 9th 2024
EXTRACTS: "Nasrallah was on a mission to destroy Israel. It was a mantle he had taken up from countless other Arab leaders, from Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who met with Adolf Hitler in 1941 to discuss the destruction of the Jews, to Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League who described the Arab invasion of the then-nascent Israel in 1948 as a 'war of annihilation'. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser – an icon of pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s – pledged more than once to 'destroy Israel'. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who founded Fatah, nurtured their own dreams of liquidating the Jewish state." ...... "Alas, Israelis have built their own dangerous dream palace of 'total victory', erected on a foundation of nationalist fervor, religious messianism, and political intransigence. There is a scenario in which Israel’s military exploits change the region for the better. Unfortunately, far from being the standard-bearer for some enlightened political vision, Israel’s current government is committed to fighting a war on all fronts, with no view toward any political future that Israel’s neighbors could possibly accept."
Oct 8th 2024
EXTRACT: "But in the real world, slain leaders are replaced. Those who bury their dead do not forget or forgive, and those who have felt the punishment of arms do not forego weapons but embrace them. So it seems unlikely that’s how the story will end. Sadly, it’s far more likely it will never end."
Oct 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: ".....,Russia will probably spend about $190 billion, or 10% of GDP, on the war this year, and that figure presumably represents the peak, given the constraints imposed by Western financial sanctions. Whenever Russia can no longer finance a budget deficit, it will have to cut public expenditures, and its non-military outlays have already been pared to the bone."
Sep 12th 2024
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Aug 7th 2024
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Jul 27th 2024
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Jul 16th 2024
EXTRACTS: "In her dissenting opinion in Trump v. United States, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declared that with the majority’s ruling, 'the President is now a king above the law'. In this, she is wrong: the majority opinion has given the US president far more power than English kings had at the time of the American Revolution." ---- "In June 1686, 11 of the 12 hand-picked justices ruled in favor of the king. Echoing the king’s own solicitor, Sir Thomas Powys, the Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys contended that if the king did not have leeway above the law, 'the preservation of the government' might be in jeopardy." ---- "In 1689, the English people roundly rejected such reasoning and asserted that their kings would thereafter be subject to the law. They set a precedent by removing James II from office. The Supreme Court’s decision goes beyond threatening more than two centuries of American jurisprudence; it overturns four centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The Roberts majority did not give the president the power of an English king; it gave the president power that an English king could only covet."
Jul 4th 2024
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Jul 3rd 2024
EXTRACT: "....the debate showed all too clearly that he is suffering cognitive decline and cannot possibly serve as a competent president for another four years. If Biden is true to his word, and stopping Trump from regaining the presidency is his overriding goal, he needs to announce that at the Democratic Convention in August, he will release his delegates from their obligation to vote for him, and instead ask them to vote for the candidate with the best chance of defeating Trump."
Jul 3rd 2024
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EXTRACT: "An all-too-familiar specter is haunting Europe, one that reliably appears every five years. As citizens head to the polls to elect a new European Parliament, observers are once again asking whether far-right anti-European parties will gain ground and unite to destroy the European Union from within. To be sure, skeptics of this doomsday scenario have always argued that the far right will remain divided, because nationalist internationalism is a contradiction in terms. But it is more likely that specific policy disagreements – mainly over the Ukraine war – and drastically diverging political strategies will prevent Europe’s various far-right parties from forming a 'supergroup.' ”
Jun 9th 2024
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Apr 13th 2024
EXTRACT: "That said, even if Europe were to improve its deterrence capabilities, it would be unwise to assume that leaders necessarily make rational decisions. In her 1984 book The March of Folly, historian Barbara Tuchman observes that political leaders frequently act against their own interests. America’s disastrous wars in the Middle East, the Soviet Union’s ill-fated campaign in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war of blind hatred between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, with its potential to escalate into a larger regional conflict, are prime examples of such missteps. As Tuchman notes, the march of folly is never-ending. That is precisely why Europe must prepare itself for an era of heightened vigilance."
Apr 13th 2024
EXTRACTS: " Nathan Cofnas is a research fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His research is supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. He is also a college research associate at Emmanuel College. Working at the intersection of science and philosophy, he has published several papers in leading peer-reviewed journals. He also writes popular articles and posts on Substack. In January, Cofnas published a post called “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem.” No one at Cambridge seems to have been bothered by his argument that people on the political right have, on average, lower intelligence than those on the left." ---- "The academic world will be watching what happens. Were the University of Cambridge to dismiss Cofnas, it would sound a warning to students and academics everywhere: when it comes to controversial topics, even the world’s most renowned universities can no longer be relied upon to stand by their commitment to defend freedom of thought and discussion."