TPC Staff
The Palestine Chronicle / September 21, 2024
One can expect that if a response was imminent before the Israeli attack on Beirut, which also killed and wounded many civilians, it is now inevitable.
In his speech following a massive cyber-terror attack on Lebanon, which killed scores and wounded thousands of Lebanese, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah admitted that the Israeli attack was a “major blow”.
Then, on Thursday, Nasrallah promised that the Lebanese Resistance response would be ‘not seen but heard’.
All of this took place before another ‘major blow’ on Friday, when Israel killed, in a bombing of south Beirut, top leaders in the Radwan force, Hezbollah’s elite unit.
One can expect that if a response was imminent before the Israeli attack on Beirut, which also killed and wounded many civilians, it is now inevitable.
True, the number of Hezbollah’s rockets fired at Israel has increased by many folds, as did the Israeli strikes on south Lebanon. But this can’t be the anticipated Hezbollah response.
Psychological warfare
Hezbollah has suffered a blow to its reputation and for now, Israelis are celebrating – some actually handing out candies to passersby in the streets – the humiliation of the resistance.
In warfare, psychology plays a major role. Sometimes, defeat and victory are a state of mind as opposed to material outcomes.
This raises several questions, lead among them is whether Hezbollah will respond.
There seems to be a conflict between Hezbollah’s, and what is known as the Axis of Resistance, political calculations and military calculations.
Iran, Hezbollah’s greatest supporter, clearly does not want a regional war. Avoiding a regional war at any cost is indeed a politically sound choice. Why?
Wars of attrition
When Al-Qassam Brigades launched a raid in southern Israel on October 7, it was their way of declaring that Palestinian and Arab resistance have, after 75 years of war against Israeli colonialism and occupation, found Israel’s soft belly: Israel is incapable of winning a long-term war of attrition against resistance militias and non-state actors.
Indeed, that was a decisive blow. Note how the Palestinian and Arab discourse, in the last year, has fundamentally shifted away from the typical cries of ‘Where are the Arab armies?’.
Historically, Arab armies have been either ineffectual or, at times, a liability, as their military defeats have always been followed by the expansion of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab territories, or the inviting of yet new foreign occupations, for example, US occupation of Iraq.
This led to an obvious conclusion, based on historical fact, that Arabs cannot defeat Israel, especially when the latter has historically enjoyed the unconditional and blind support of Washington and other Western capitals.
And since this unconditional support is still in place, there is no reason to believe that traditional warfare, this time around, will significantly alter the current military equation in the region.
But non-state actors, when they coordinate and prepare for a long war of attrition, could in fact defeat Israel. If this was ever a theory, it is now being put into practice, and successfully so.
The trap
In Gaza, for example, the extent of the Israeli defeat has led some top Israeli officials, former officials, and reputable military analysts to conclude that if the war in the Strip continues, Israel could face an actual collapse.
In the case of Yemen, a massive American coalition could not alter an iota of the new paradigm, that of the solidarity with Gaza extended by the Ansarallah group. Not only did the Yemeni armed forces continue to choke Israel economically by targeting Israeli ports-bound ships in the Red Sea, but on September 15, it went as far as hitting an Israeli military site with a hypersonic missile.
The same understanding applies to Hezbollah in south Lebanon, whose military strikes targeting Israeli army bases in northern Israel, but also in occupied south Lebanon, have engaged nearly a third of the Israeli army, and mostly stalled the Israeli economy in that region entirely.
It took the extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu a few months to realize that it had walked into a trap. And for months, Netanyahu has been attempting to escape this trap by widening the war to include Iran.
The common understanding is that Israel wants to create a parallel trap for Iran by engaging it in a traditional war that would naturally involve the United States since Israel does not have the needed geographic depth to strike Iran routinely from Israeli territories.
According to this analysis, if the US humbled Iran militarily, Iran would be weakened on all fronts, and its regional non-state allies would be forced to retreat as well. For Netanyahu, this is a best-case scenario, considering all the other scenarios manifesting themselves in prolonged wars that are almost impossible to win in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen.
What also emboldens Netanyahu that this scenario is possible is the fact that American politicians, vying for re-election in November, do not dare defy Israel’s powerful constituencies – the lobby, mainstream media, and numerous other support groups – during one of the most defining elections in the history of the country.
This means that the US would have to engage in a war against Iran if Iran strikes back at Israeli interests. And Israel has indeed tried, and so far failed, to widen its war.
Finding the balance
This failure is a direct result of Iran’s own knowledge of the Israeli calculation. Indeed, traditional warfare would completely change the nature of the conflict underway in the Middle East and would deprive Israel’s enemies of their winning card: long wars of attrition on several fronts.
But this is where the Axis of Resistance’s dilemma lies. If political wisdom continues to prevail, the resistance front will suffer major setbacks that, in the long run, would allow Israel to claim some kind of victory in Lebanon.
Psychologically, Hezbollah’s supporters and those who support the Lebanese resistance in the region and beyond are experiencing a collective crisis at the moment. They want Hezbollah to respond.
Hezbollah must indeed respond if it wishes to restore deterrence with Israel. But, again, that response cannot cross all political considerations, thus giving Netanyahu the war he covets, and in doing so, denying the resistance its ability to wage a long war of attrition against Israel, which could, according to Israel’s own estimation, indeed, lead to its collapse.
Will Hezbollah be able to find the balance between its military needs, i.e. deterrence, and the political and strategic calculations, not just of the group itself, but of Iran as well?
