'Israel Will Engineer A Broader War'

'Israel is counting on the United States to enter the fray on their behalf and perform destructive strikes against these targets that are beyond Israel's conventional capabilities.'

'They may well get their way if they start a war, because the United States is still committed to Israel's security, and it won't matter whether it is Trump or Harris in the White House.'

Just as the Biden administration implored Benjamin Netanyahu to cease fire and bring succor to the millions crushed by the brutal Israeli occupation of Gaza, Israel opened a new front in Lebanon.

After its drubbing-of-sorts (for the unvanquished Israeli Defence Forces) in 2006 at Hezbollah's hands, the Israeli military and intelligence establishments have viewed the Iran-sponsored Shia Hezbollah militia as its primary adversary in its immediate neighbourhood; Hamas was seen as a nuisance, but a force the Israelis thought they could control.

October 7, 2023 altered that perception, perhaps for always.

With Hamas' leadership in Gaza killed -- barring its top leader Yahya Sinwar and a few others -- the generals and spooks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv decided it was now time to target Hezbollah and teach the Iranian proxy and its masters in Tehran a lesson.

First came the detonation of pagers all over Lebanon -- perhaps the second most audacious intelligence operation this century (the CIA homing in on Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad, Pakistan, must surely rank first) -- pagers reportedly sold by a native of Wayanad in Bulgaria!

Then, using its deep penetration of Hebollah ranks, Israel then began to annihilate the militia's leadership.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's assassination last Friday, September 27, 2024, defies the understanding of those who studied the secretive Hezbollah secretary general for years. Rarely seen in public, Nasrallah was paranoid about his security. In his 32 years as Hezbollah's leader, he rarely surfaced, making his long public speeches to his flock from some safe house.

Why then in the midst of Israel's brutal bombing campaign did he venture out of his lair and who leaked the information that he was in the building to the Israelis? Was it an Iranian informant, in Mossad's pay, as one newspaper claimed?

And how did Israeli bombers swiftly cross over to Lebanon -- as soon as Netanyahu had okayed the kill from his New York hotel -- without being detected by Lebanese military radar and before Nasarallah could be moved out of the way of the 2,000 pound bombs that obliterated the building and the underground bunkers where the Hezbollah boss was meeting with his aides?

Iran's barrage of 138 missiles fired at Israel on Tuesday, October 1, 2024 as a response to Nasrallah's killing has clouded further the fog of war.

What happens next? Will Netanyahu, anxious to erase the stigma of sleeping on the job this time last year and eager to restore his standing with Israeli voters, push for a war with Iran, a conflict that will almost certainly drag America into the conflict?

To unravel the current conundrum in the Middle East, Rediff.com's Nikhil Lakshman turned to Dr Hussein Ibish, the Lebanese born senior resident scholar at the Washington, DC-based Arab Gulf States Institute and author of the recent book Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal.

"There is an arrogance and triumphalism that is driving Israel's thinking, and hubris frequently gives way to nemesis," warns Dr Ibish.

Why do you think Israel chose this moment to attack Hezbollah, first through the pagers war and then with the brutal bombing campaign that has eliminated most of Hezbollah's leadership?

The main reason for the timing of the escalation was clearly the US election campaign.

Netanyahu and many other Israelis are well aware that moment of maximum impunity and freedom of action for Israel without American pressure and pushback are the weeks immediately running up to a US election.

That's why Israel has struck when it has.

There is really no other explanation, in particular.

Why did Israel decide to kill Hassan Nasrallah at this juncture? Surely it may have had many opportunities to kill him since he took over Hezbollah 32 years ago.
Is it because it felt that Hezbollah would continue its bombardment of Israel and its villages in the north till a ceasefire was reached in Gaza?

As a matter of fact, Israel has tried to kill him many times in the past, especially during the 2006 war with Hezbollah.

They tried twice in a serious way, and barely missed him once. In this case, they got notification of where he was from some inside double agent, and apparently they have many of those and Hezbollah and Iran's government, and so they decided to act when they did.

This was somewhat independent of the overall escalation with Hezbollah.

They were already on the campaign to kill as many senior leaders and cadres as they could, but if they couldn't kill him, it wouldn't have mattered that their strategy.

But they were looking to kill everyone significant to Hezbollah, they got the opportunity to strike him, and they did.

But it's important to note that they had tried to do it in 2006 and failed. It's not the first time by any means.

How do you account for the breathtaking penetration of Hezbollah by Israeli intelligence, its awareness where its targets were and then hitting them with frightening accuracy?

It's mainly because of the sudden and rapid growth of Hezbollah during the war in Syria.

In the fall of 2005, senior Iranian officials were dispatched several times to Moscow to make the case that a military dimension was required to save their mutual ally, Bashar al-Assad, who was facing very probable defeat in the Syrian war.

The Russians agreed, and the two countries launched a joint military intervention, with Iran tasking Hezbollah to be the major ground force in that effort.

Until then, Hezbollah had primarily served as a Lebanese militia with limited roles regionally, serving mainly as trainers and advisors to other pro-Iranian militia groups throughout the Middle East.

But when they had to take on responsibility for leading the ground forces in Syria, they had to expand their foot soldiers in a major way.

This compelled them to recruit many people rapidly, reducing the degree of vetting and ideological purity of their members, and opened them up to potential Israeli penetration.

They became fat and flabby, in other words.

Israel had been carefully preparing for another battle with Hezbollah ever since the 2006 war, which was a stalemate.

During and after the Syrian war, with Hezbollah's rapid expansion, they saw the opportunity to penetrate through bribery, blackmail and the insertion of already established double agents.

This allowed them to penetrate deep into the ranks of Hezbollah and its leadership, and apparently also into key Iranian national security institutions as well.

Contrast this with the lack of intelligence and other preparation for the war with Hamas in Gaza, which Israel did not anticipate, and for which it was not adequately prepared.

To this day, and despite everything that has happened in Gaza, the maximum Hamas leader and author of the October 7 attacks, Yahya Sinwar, remains alive, apparently well and unharmed, because Israel has no idea where he is.

That is a dramatic contrast with the pinpoint accuracy based obviously on human intelligence, about the whereabouts of many different Hezbollah leaders at any given moment and also details about the presence of Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in Iran.

He was killed in an Iranian intelligence safe house when he was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of the new Iranian president, and the bomb was detonated at a moment when Israel was aware that he and his bodyguard were inside, and alone, without any Iranians present so as to reduce the provocation against Iran because it was unnecessary for the task of killing the Hamas leader.

But the ability to put a bomb in a safe house and at least two months later exploded at exactly the moment of maximum impact, killing him but not any Iranian officials, demonstrated that Israel has also penetrated deep the Iranian leadership.

That's also been shown by many other actions by Israel in Iran, including assassinations, the theft of documents, sabotage and other military and intelligence coups that would not have been possible without extraordinary human intelligence relying on deep penetration of Hezbollah, even the Iranian leadership.

Do you see the possibility of an Israeli ground invasion in the days to come?
Or do the IDF generals, wary after what they encountered in 2006, swerve away from that military option knowing that a. it would likely enable Hezbollah to inflict losses on the IDF and b. help Hezbollah recover lost ground among its domestic constituency?

Israel has invaded Lebanon, and appears to be seriously considering the establishment of a new occupied zone in southern Lebanon under the rubric of a 'security buffer zone'.

For some reason, Israel seems to have forgotten that Hezbollah was founded under these circumstances in 1982, and that it grew into a major national and regional force in Lebanon and beyond exactly because of the guerrilla battle against Israeli occupation troops between 1982-May 2000.

Creating a new occupation zone in Lebanon will give Hezbollah a lifeline to rebuild in exactly the way they are comfortable and on their own terms.

It will be an act of hubris and madness, but much in keeping with Israel's enraged and reckless conduct since the October 7 attacks.

And what of Iran? Will it enter the theater of war on Hezbollah's behalf?
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told journalists in New York last week that Tehran does not want war, so will Iran abstain from war since it knows Israel is in a stronger position at this point; because it does not know how much Israeli intelligence has penetrated the Iranian establishment; and more important, because any war with Israel would leave the Islamic regime weaker than it has been at any time in its history?

After Iran's second attack on Israel, which failed, but was with much more serious missiles and targeting much deeper into Israel, including attempting to destroy military bases and the headquarters of Mossad, Israel's intelligence services, meaning it was a far more sophisticated and serious attack than the last one.

Israel is definitely going to respond in a major way.

It seems to me more likely than not that Israel will decide that this is the moment to go for a major war of missiles and airstrikes against Iran designed to deliver blows to Iran's nuclear facilities that set the nuclear bomb project back at least 10 or 15 years.

It is also likely that Israel is counting on the United States to enter the fray on their behalf and perform destructive strikes against these targets that are beyond Israel's conventional capabilities.

They may well get their way if they start a war, because the United States is still committed to Israel's security, and it won't matter whether it is Trump or Harris in the White House.

So the Israelis are taking care to manage the current situation to create the momentum for a war that cannot be stopped, and even if the United States says that it will not support Israel if it forces the war, the Israelis know that it will.

The domestic political support for Israel and commitment to Israel's security and fundamental national interests is so strong in the United States that this is almost certainly a correct calculation by Netanyahu and the others.

Why have the leaders of the Arab world been silent on the Israeli excesses in Gaza, and now its conflict against Hezbollah?
Is it because Arab leaders perceive Israel conducting wars against Hamas, an organisation these leaders could not control, and Hezbollah, a proxy of its dreaded adversary, Iran?
Will Israel's wars change the current equations in the Arab world?

Arab governments have not been silent. They have objected vociferously. But they haven't done much, because there's not much they can do.

The countries that engaged in recent normalisation with Israel under the rubric of the Abraham Accords, especially the UAE and Bahrain, are not going to break what have been, from that perspective, beneficial diplomatic rapprochements with Israel over Gaza or to rescue Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood organisation they fear and dislike.

Even less will they want to do that over Hezbollah, an organisation they correctly regard as the catspaw of Iran in the Arab world.

What might get them to act diplomatically, withdraw ambassadors or suspend diplomatic relations, would be brutal Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank, and especially anything that involves occupied East Jerusalem and the holy places there, or the annexation of large chunks of the West Bank and, especially, any accompanying expulsion of Palestinians.

This is a conundrum that these countries may face sooner or later, as Israel appears determined to annex much of the occupied West Bank eventually.

But it will be essentially a cosmetic sign-changing exercise, because the greater Israeli State exists, and has existed since 1967.

These countries decided that, Arab or not, they would follow European and other countries in having relations with Israel, which they recognised, while retaining the right and practice of objecting to the occupation and opposing any annexation.

But they can only go so far in ignoring what Israel does in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

The saving grace for them so far is that the war has not spread in earnest those places.

But eventually it probably will, if not in this generation, then at some future date, when either an insurgency breaks out in the occupied West Bank and area a (a 'third intifada') or violence spreads threatened occupied East Jerusalem or the holy places there.

Certainly anything involving the Al-Aqsa mosque is a redline for all of these countries.

Israel knows that, and will do its best to avoid any unrest in the holy places in occupied East Jerusalem.

But that can happen anyway, especially if and when (I would say when, certainly) major violence breaks out in the West Bank.

As I say, it may not happen in this particular conflict, but as long as the occupation continues without any framework for Palestinian independence, that day will come as an absolute inevitability.

It's not likely or probable. It's inevitable.

The only thing that can make it not inevitable is the creation of some sort of framework or horizon for Palestinian freedom.

Otherwise, a third uprising is simply inevitable. That's because were talking about human beings, who, as a species, will never agree to live without rights, citizenship or any access to government and rules them whatsoever indefinitely.

Eventually, they will rebel, with arms if they have no other choice.

How will this end? Will Benjamin Netanyahu be satisfied with what the Israeli military has achieved, which to an extent has erased the intelligence and military debacles of October 7, 2024, and restore his own political standing in Israel?
Or can we expect Mr Netanyahu to embark on a dangerous war with Iran and drag the United States into the conflict?

As I'm writing, today, it appears very likely that Israel will conclude, or may have already concluded, that now is the time for a war with Iran.

They will never find it easier to explain, and they know they have less on their side when they act against Washington's wishes or not.

Until the election, they have a huge amount of impunity to act without American pushback, and after that, they can still rely on the American commitment to Israel's security for US support even if they are responsible for pushing prices beyond the breaking point.

Given the trauma of October 7, and the insistence of Hezbollah and other pro-Iranian militias to enter the fray in a limited way, wanting a confrontation with Israel that maintains their reputation as resistance forces but without forcing a war with Israel that would be destructive and devastating to their organisations, Israel took advantage of this by calling Hezbollah's bluff.

They have now badly damaged that organisation, and they are looking to extend this winning streak in Yemen and Iran itself.

The chances of a broad, multi-front regional war in the Middle East, which has never developed fully in the region's modern history, seem extremely high.

As I'm writing, my guess is that Israel will engineer a broader war in its own interests, believing that the time will never be better and that what must be done should be done now.

They may end up much more insecure than they were at the start of the campaign on October 10 or so, but at the moment there is an arrogance and triumphalism that is driving Israel's thinking, and hubris frequently gives way to nemesis.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com