Everyone’s on edge during a crucial week in a volatile region
Just as a broken clock is right on occasion, so can journalistic cliches be accurate: These are critical days of a pivotal week. Why pivotal? Because down one path lies an Israel-Hamas hostage deal that winds down the Gaza war. Down the other lies the real possibility of a regional war that draws in Iran and perhaps the West.
A possible inflection point comes Thursday, when Israeli negotiators are expected in Doha (or Cairo) amid maximal and public pressure by the United States, Egypt and Qatar to nail down the deal. The assumption is that an end to the Gaza war would mean Hezbollah also stopping its 10-month campaign of bombing Israel from Lebanon in solidarity with Hamas.
Also determinative is whether Hezbollah and Iran make good on threats to attack Israel any day now. That would be vengeance for Israel’s July 30 killing of Hezbollah military chief Fuad Shukr in Beirut, and for the following day’s assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran (assumed to be Israel’s doing). Israelis’ wait has been nerve-wracking and it is widely expected that many civilian casualties will trigger all-our war. The U.S. has been threatening Iran with “devastating consequences” should it miscalculate.
One possible miscalculation would be for Iran to attack IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, claiming it is a military target. Here is what the area looks like:
Which way it goes, nobody knows. But it might help to understand what each side wants.
The mediators are straightforward enough. Amid a volatile election, with the Ukraine war itself escalating, the Americans just want the Middle East disaster to end (instead moving toward an Israel-Saudi peace). Egypt wants an end to a conflict that could spill over into Sinai and has rattled its Suez Canal business (because Yemen’s Houthis are exuberantly attacking ships headed there in solidarity with the Palestinians). Qatar wants to be a business hub and is embarrassed by its association with Hamas.
But the mediators cannot want peace more than the parties, as the saying goes. And the parties are tougher customers than most.
Let’s, then, take a look. I apologize in advance for the denseness, but this is a complicated landscape where only the patient should ever dare to tread.
Iran
For a government whose leadership seems to enjoy cultivating an aura of inscrutability, the Islamic Republic’s goals are clear: To continue to project power across the region through financial and military support of terrorist proxies that damage Israel, undermine the West and rattle the moderate Sunnis, and to either possess nuclear weapons or to be a “threshold state” able to assemble a bomb quickly, which offers Tehran deterrence.
According to reports, Iranian officials now suggest their ultimate decision on whether to attack Israel could rest on the Gaza cease-fire talks. So potentially, massive linkage; quite possibly, utter nonsense.
It’s never clear to what extent Iran merely rides the tiger – for example, whether it actually ordered Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. But it is instructive to examine the Latin-derived legal standard known as cui bono – who benefits? On Oct. 6, the region appeared headed toward a Saudi-Israeli normalization forming the axis of a Sunni-Western-Israeli strategic alliance aimed to staying Iran’s influence. Since then Iran’s proxies Hamas and Hezbollah have derailed that plan. And the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have gotten away with disrupting global maritime trade (and the economy of Egypt) by attacking vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb waterway leading to the Suez Canal.
It is a great case study for the high-achieving chaos merchant. The challenge for Iran is now how to calibrate its promised attack on Israel without bringing damage upon itself – for the oft-unspoken truth is that the regime is reviled by its people, and many assess that a Western attack on its power centers could spark a revolution – or a palace coup, perhaps by elements of the Revolutionary Guards.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah seeks an optimal outcome in which it has provoked Israel as far as it can without actually goading it into a war in which it will be as determined to crush it at Hamas levels. Already it has achieved much: For 10 months nearly 100,000 Israelis have been displaced from communities near the Lebanese border. To have inflicted such a humiliation on a developed nation with a history of not putting up with very much places Hezbollah at the medals table of “resistance” movements and pleases its Iranian paymasters – while underscoring the deterrent power of its Iran-gifted rocket arsenal.
The complication for Hezbollah is that the Lebanese people, especially but not only the one-third who are Christians, do not have the same degree of conflict with Israel that the Palestinians do – and widely disapprove of the goading of Israel. Hezbollah is the strongest military force in Lebanon, but they want to maintain the pretense that they are not actually occupying the country, avoiding a deeper conflict with the population. Israel’s leaders have been warning the Lebanese that they will suffer mightily in a full-fledged war, trying to foment just such a conflict.
Hamas
Hamas is delighted to have shown that the Palestinians – who were feeling a little ignored in September – can still set the world ablaze. The group has caused Israel great damage, and even though Gaza has suffered far more, it retains considerable popularity among the Palestinians (which reflects the unpopularity of the Palestinian Authority, the hatred Israel has understandably earned, and how twisted is the psyche of many Palestinians).
At this point Hamas wants the war to end while it can still control Gaza, even if hobbled. It wants to engineer the release (as part of the hostages deal) of thousands of prisoners held in Israel, including Marwan Barghouti, who is from the rival Fatah and is seen as a future national leader. It wants to be accepted into the Palestinian national leadership and through that avenue take over the West Bank as well.
The cease-fire framework Israel supposedly offered (according to President Biden) and now seems inclined to renege on gives much of that. With the demise of Haniyeh, a fake politician who lived the good life in the Gulf, Hamas is down to basics: a terrorist group run by arch-terrorist Yihya Sinwar, sacrificing anything and anyone enroute to uncompromising goals.
Israel
Israeli society over the past several months has veered dramatically in favor of ending the war for the hostages. Most still would have wanted Hamas to be removed from power, but they can see it is taking more time than the hostages can be expected to survive in captivity (and dozens of the remaining 115 are thought to already be dead).
Israelis remain divided on what to do about the West Bank, but on much of the rest there is near consensus. If Hamas cannot be destroyed, Israelis want it deterred or prevented from ever attacking them again this way. Israelis also want Hezbollah to cease being a threat, and for Lebanon to assert its sovereignty over its own territory. They do not want to have to fight a war in which Lebanese will be killed, making more enemies still. They certainly want the Iranian regime to stop being a threat, and if at all possible to be overthrown. For all their economic and military power, they lack a pathway to most of those things.
I am careful to write “Israelis” want these things, because “Israel” suggests the government. And it is starting very much to look as if the government wants to prolong the war, because that’s what is buying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more time in power after the debacle of Oct. 7.
The end of the war means the end of his argument that war is no time for political recriminations. Indeed, through this cynical lens he could use not just more time, but a bigger debacle even than the one of Oct. 7 – one that can be blamed on antisemitism, on force majeure, or even on the Americans who refuse to give Israel free rein to smite their tormentors.
As we can see, Israel’s enemies are far closer to their goals than Israel is, and under the right alignment might be fairly satisfied with calling it a day and going for a cease-fire. That Hamas can even contemplate the concept of satisfaction when it also claims over 40,000 of its own people have been killed tells you something about the group. This is what fanaticism looks like.
As for Israel, it is hard to describe the reputational and other damage it has absorbed, and brought upon itself. After Oct. 7 there were alternative paths, and at several junctures since then there were exit ramps that the government blew right past, refusing to cut losses and indifferent to opportunities. This is what incompetence, cynicism and idiocy look like.
