John Jenkins
The Guardian / September 28, 2024
Netanyahu has his own reasons for prolonging the conflict, but many Israelis still want to see Hamas and Hezbollah neutralised.
We cannot say we couldn’t see this latest escalation between Israel and Hezbollah coming. There has been a standoff conflict between Israel, Hezbollah, Iran and the Iraq Shia paramilitaries since at least 2015. The proximate cause was Iran’s efforts to extend its physical presence and that of its allies throughout Syria as well as Lebanon, as far as the Golan Heights.
The Israeli air force has consistently sought to cut off Iranian supplies of missiles and other munitions from Iraq through Syria to Hezbollah in particular. There have been successes. But none of them have stopped Hezbollah becoming stronger, as it acquired more sophisticated and accurate missiles and significant combat experience fighting in Syria on the side of the Assad regime.
What has now changed are the Israeli calculations. A vast majority of Jewish Israelis are pessimistic about the potential for a deal to end the conflict in Gaza. Faith they may have had that negotiations would bring an enduring peace has been shattered. It is almost certainly true that the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has political reasons for prolonging the conflict. But while a majority of Israelis would probably like a different prime minister, many don’t want to stop the war until they think that both Hamas and more particularly Hezbollah – which has tied its actions directly to Gaza – have been neutralised as serious threats.
And that is because behind both groups they see an Iran that is dedicated to their destruction. They think the fine words of the new Iranian prime minister, Masoud Pezeshkian, and his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in New York this week, are simply another example of Iranian doublespeak. They know that Israel on its own cannot stop the Iranian war of attrition against them. But if they can at least disable Hezbollah and remove Hamas as a military force in Gaza, then they will have reduced the threat to manageable proportions.
I remember vividly the frantic activity at the UN in New York over Christmas and the new year of 2008-2009 as western allies sought to produce a ceasefire to end Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The Israelis were deeply unhappy that a ceasefire resolution was passed in the security council and they had no time – as they saw it – to finish the job. But what they thought of as “finishing the job” in 2009 was a matter of limited punitive actions to deter. Despite the appalling human cost of this conflict, and the massive damage to Israel’s standing internationally and regionally, most Israelis think that this time it really is existential.
The missing piece in all this, of course, is, as David Petraeus used to ask of Iraq, “How does this end?” Degrading Hezbollah as a fighting force is one thing. It’s essentially what the Israel Defense Forces tried to do in different circumstances in 1982. Israel can win those battles. But in the end it cannot win the war unless it has a political exit.
There are two key parts to this. One is the removal or neutralisation of the real existential threat from Iran. That, in practice, means the long-term neutralising of Hezbollah. The second is Palestinian self-determination – which needs to happen for the more important things in the region (particularly economic diversification, development and integration, combating extremism and tacking the climate crisis) to be achievable.
Iran does not want a hot war. It thinks it is winning the war of attrition, so why take the risk? Hezbollah doesn’t really want one either – especially if Israel avoids the mistake of putting boots on the ground. Israel would probably prefer to avoid one too. It has been preparing for war with Hezbollah for years and has a range of options it can use short of an invasion. Yet all this won’t necessarily stop a general war happening.
Iran and Hezbollah, in particular, will need to calculate how much damage they can sustain without losing both critical capacity and face. Israel needs to be sure that it can return 80,000 Israeli citizens to the north without fear of them being harmed. And the problem with escalation ladders is that they are usually missing several rungs: all it would take this time is a ballistic missile hitting an ammonia plant, for example, in Haifa, or someone trying to assassinate a senior minister. It is not clear to me that the UK (or maybe anyone) can materially affect these calculations.
Nice words at the UN don’t cut it any more. And, as we have seen with the latest arms deal and the announcement of new naval deployments, the Biden administration is simply not going to abandon Israel while it is at war. But what we can do is urgently think about where we collectively want to be in five years’ time and work out in much greater detail than we have been used to how we get there.
This isn’t simply about the US and its western allies. This time the Gulf states – and most of all Saudi Arabia – are going to be key actors. The prize of normalisation with Israel has not disappeared. But the price has gone up. It will certainly include the effective containment of Iran and its allies – and an answer to real, not simply declarative, Palestinian statehood. And this time we need to make it stick. Otherwise the pain we are seeing now will not simply not go away. It will get a lot worse.
Sir John Jenkins is an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House; he was ambassador to Syria 2006-07; the Foreign Office’s director of Middle East and North Africa 2007-09; and ambassador to Iraq 2009-2011
