The war in the Middle East continues unabated. The initiative of the movements has passed to the Israeli side. Following the neutralization of the entire leadership of the Lebanese armed Shiite organization Hezbollah, with the latest victim being the Secretary General, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the big question is whether Iran and its allies will attempt to reverse the extremely unfavorable, communicatively and substantively, situation it has created while remaining on the ladder of escalation.
Alternatively, the Islamic Republic will prove itself to the situation and attempt to adapt to the past. That is, that the blows were so powerful that they have now changed the rules of the “game”. Cliff front and stream behind. Because that would probably lead to strong internal turmoil. Regime change in Iran has always been a demand for Washington and Jerusalem. Could it be that, if such a prospect emerges, the situation will drag on further (please read also the analysis titled “If Hezbollah collapses, Israel will attack Iran“).
looking in retrospect at the developments triggered by Hamas’s invasion of Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, one could – at this point in time – speculate that if its leadership could foresee what would follow, it would either not have decide the business, whether he would have conducted it in a different way. The invasion, which resulted in unprecedented bloodshed and the capture of Israeli civilians by the Gaza-based Islamic group, destroyed the deterrence credibility of the Israeli armed forces. At the same time, however, he left no room for not trying to restore her, and in fact against any price.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t…”
This speculation becomes reasonable also bearing in mind the admission of – blessed as the organization announced – Hassan Nasrallah after the 2006 war in Lebanon. In a televised interview, he stated that if he could have imagined what followed, he “definitely would not have given the green light”. Regardless of how things turned out, as it was not the most successful military involvement of the Israelis in their history. This admission probably contributed to the strategy that the Israelis are unfolding in the current crisis.
That report, then, could represent to Israel that Hezbollah, under its leadership, wanted some limits to the confrontation, beyond vitriolic rhetoric. There are not a few analysts who have argued that Israel knew where Nasrallah was, but deliberately did not proceed to neutralize him. In retrospect, we can guess that if this was done for some lesser reason, Tehran would simply replace him and over time the situation would return to the familiar conflict pattern.
The way the organization’s leadership has now been neutralized is a show of force and evidence of an attempt to “uproot” the organization, or at least take a long time to recover. What is certain is that for a foreseeable period of time, any action by the “sponsor”, Iran, in this direction, will be met with “hard” military force.
After all, Israel decided to ignore the hard communication costs it began to pay after the first period of operations in Gaza and decided to play it all for everything. This had not happened in previous rounds of confrontation with his opponents.
Returning to Nasrallah’s idiosyncratic “relationship” with the Israelis, it can now reasonably be argued that the ferocity of the attack on October 7, 2023, and the hasty entry into the ranks of Hezbollah a day later, left no room for the Jewish state as it faced the collapse of his deterrence against his opponents. If this action was left unanswered and indeed in a very convincing way, such that it is not amenable to “alternative interpretations”, it would risk exacerbating the aggression of his opponents.
Although the strike on the Iranian consulate building in Syria and the assassination of senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran prompted an unprecedented response from Iran by launching hundreds of unmanned suicide vehicles and ballistic missiles, Israel managed with the help of its allies, mainly the United States, to overcome the problem almost without a “scratch”.
Escalation ladder
Somewhere there, everything shows that the Iranians’ willingness or ability to follow Israel up the escalation ladder has run out. However, Hezbollah’s persistence in firing rockets into northern Israel, leading tens of thousands of citizens to be forced to leave their homes and the internal political issues in Israel, did not leave the slightest room for the country’s leadership to back down, as it was under pressure from the interior.
For these reasons, he did not accept various proposals for a truce and an attempt to start some political process, with the aim of gradually de-escalating and ending the armed conflict. The US’s flagrant avoidance of business information is making a global impression. This was done only a few minutes before their start, or even while they had already started.
The Jewish state proved that it was willing to take all the risks, estimating – rightly as it turns out so far – that even the pre-election period Washington, did not have the slightest leeway to abandon Israel. The Americans “swallowed” the bitter diplomatic pill, limiting themselves to clarifying in every direction that their own military intervention would only have a defensive nature.
Even this, however, strengthened Israel’s war strategy, to the extent that it contributed to preventing potential plans of its opponents to launch new attacks. An important factor for the final decision, of course, is the probability of success of the…
In retrospect, and despite the monumental failure of Israel’s intelligence services to capitalize on any information or indication that would have prevented October 7th, the same services had done a very good job, having penetrated deeply into the Hizbollah leadership pyramid. The “beheading” operation of the organization was based there, when it was decided to launch a total war against it.
The effects of what we see happening in Lebanon will be multiple and long-lasting. The terrifying insecurity and suspicion sown within Hezbollah by the successful operation of the simultaneous explosion of buzzers and radios, which automatically led to the conclusion of widespread erosion by the enemy, is followed by the desperate effort of physical survival, not the design of any resistance. He who saves himself will be saved…
Everything is changing, who will be hurt?
But what is going to happen from now on? It’s hard to imagine. What is certain is that the next day will not be the same. And indeed not only in the Middle East, but on the entire planet. But that at some point there will be a backlash against what is violently changing through Israeli policy and action should also be considered definitive. As much as it is true that it is not easy to uproot organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas from the societies, it is also true that the usefulness of such organizations is not limited only to Iran.
What we are seeing is happening at a time when the Western ability to determine global developments… is not convincing. This is a given that it is not clear whether it is carefully taken into account in the formulation of long-term Israeli strategy.
At the regional level, it is certainly true that the overall severity of the blow will contribute decisively to the temporal extension of the peace interval – in the sense of the absence of war – until the next round of conflict. However, this will not solve the problem, unless there are unexpected developments that are just as disruptive as what we have known until now.
But this “buying” of time by the Israelis was the central issue in all wars. Improvement of the economy and adaptation of the military “tool” to the new situations. But when everything around is changing, and indeed on a planetary level, it is reasonable to wonder if this decades-old “given” will also be called into question.
