Howard W. French
Foreign Policy / September 24, 2024
Beyond human rights concerns, the attacks raise questions about U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East.
When Israel attacked Hezbollah last week by unleashing a spate of synchronized explosions in Lebanon and Syria, the first response of many observers—wherever they sat on the geopolitical spectrum—was of awe.
Adversaries and friendly nations alike marvelled at the degree of sophistication needed to pull this off. Not only did agents working for Israel have to place tiny amounts of explosives inside of pagers and walkie-talkies; they also had to get these into the hands of a sworn enemy. The feat was a reminder of Israel’s long history of technical and operational sophistication that includes its victory against a coalition of Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War, the raid on Uganda’s Entebbe Airport to free hostages captured in the hijacking of a commercial airliner in 1976, and the use of booby-trapped cellphones to attack militant groups that dates back to the late 1990s.
As impressive as the latest attacks were on a technical level, they should raise numerous objections. For one, they devastated civilians. The pagers belonged to Hezbollah members, but the explosions—which killed at least 40 people and injured more than 3,000 others—put many noncombatants at risk. Think of what would have happened to passengers in a car or children at the dining table if the driver or a relative was carrying one of the devices. Video footage has shown that some exploded in markets and street corners.
Political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times that the explosions, which targeted Hezbollah operatives who were not actively engaged in warfare at the moment of the strike, were “very likely war crimes.” Even Leon Panetta, a former U.S. defense secretary and CIA director, said he doesn’t “think there’s any question” that the attacks were a form of terrorism.
My concerns with Israel’s recent tactics in Lebanon, including an escalating air war against Hezbollah positions in the south used to fire rockets into Israel, go further. No sooner had the air cleared from the detonating pagers than analysts began asking whether Israel had achieved any strategic gains from the attacks. This remains unclear. The same has been true during nearly a year of Israel’s offensive in Gaza against Hamas. There, a basic question remains unanswered: What does Israel do once its military operations end?
What links these two campaigns is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent view that Israel can achieve long-standing security through a policy of military superiority coupled with uninhibited offensive operations. The United States tacitly supports this position through its feeble criticism and almost unlimited supply of arms to Israel. As Gaza has begun to show—and as another war with Lebanon, if it comes, will likely reaffirm—this approach amounts to scorching the earth in neighbouring lands in the deluded hope that Israel can kill enough of the “bad guys,” irrespective of collateral damage, to achieve peace.
The first obvious flaw to this approach is that each military operation risks generating new enemies, perpetuating enmity between Israel and its neighbours. Total Israeli military control in Gaza, for example, does nothing to address the pressing need for political and territorial rights for Palestinians. Indeed, the territory’s hopelessness and domination ensure new forms of resistance against Israel in the future. By the same token, an Israeli advance into southern Lebanon would merely create a new frontier for hostility between the two countries, just as surely as the campaign’s death and destruction would drive more Lebanese people in the direction of violent reprisals against Israel.
My biggest concerns, however, go beyond even this and implicate the strategy of the United States as much as Israel. In recent decades, the two allies have regarded Iran as the ultimate source of violence and instability in the Middle East. But with the exception of international efforts to persuade Iran to forgo nuclear weapons development, the United States—never mind Israel—has shown almost no creativity in engaging Iran politically. (Unrealistic preconditions to engagement, such as requiring Tehran to first change its political system or recognize Israel’s right to exist, do not count.)
What makes the problems of the Middle East especially hard to manage is that both Israel and Iran are incarnations of old civilizational and religious identities. Many in the West know that Israel is the land of the Bible and that many Jewish people legitimate their support for Zionism partly on the basis of the existence of an ancient Israel, whose stories constitute the essence of the Old Testament. Less widely understood outside the realm of specialists is that Iran is also the inheritor of traditions of language, culture, identity, empire, and statehood that date far into antiquity.
In response to seemingly unending violence in Gaza, many people have raised their voices in exasperation to state that there is no substitute for recognizing that neither Jews nor Palestinians will ever disappear from the lands where conflict currently divides them. This means that lasting peace will require people—and eventually states—on both sides of this deep divide to recognize each other’s needs and interests.
This is equally true for Iran. A policy of demonizing a country of 90 million people is not going to make it go away. In fact, Western attempts at isolation only increase Iran’s determination to build up nonstate proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, as well as deepen ties with Russia and China.
A central preoccupation in the West, as in Israel, is Iran’s nuclear program and the prospect that Tehran could soon break out from its protracted research and refinement phase and develop usable nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the global record of disarming nuclear-capable states is extremely unpromising. Ukraine is one of the only examples of a nation decommissioning its nuclear weapons, inherited from the Soviet era, and this has sadly helped make it vulnerable to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Years of Western and Asian diplomacy around North Korea, for example, proved unable to convince Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program. Like it or not—and I don’t—that is because the North Korean regime feels fundamentally insecure about its future. Moreover, it is widely understood that Israel has for decades possessed a nuclear arsenal, though the country has not officially acknowledged this.
Concerns over Iran’s nuclear program should not be an obstacle to speaking with Tehran more and exploring ways of defusing enmities in the region. We are likely to find that the only way to ensure broad security in the Middle East, including for Israel, is by somehow bringing Iran into deeper contact with the West and eventually addressing its security concerns—along with those of Israel, other states such as Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinians. The sooner the West can begin doing so, the better.
Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent
