The Middle East crisis has reached an extremely dangerous juncture. That’s a statement made many times since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on 7 October last year precipitated a descent into war. Yet it is precisely because nearly 12 months of international diplomacy, on-off ceasefire and hostage negotiations, protests, sanctions threats, lawsuits and political and moral pressure on the warring parties have failed to halt the slaughter in Gaza and elsewhere that this moment is especially fraught. With no end in sight, no obvious way out, no credible “peace process”, unchecked escalation grows more likely. Fear, anger, political opportunism and sheer desperation overwhelm calm, objective thinking about actions and consequences. The dogs of war run free.
Last week’s decision by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and his war cabinet to open a “new phase” in the conflict by targeting Hezbollah’s rank-and-file in Lebanon accelerated what looks like an inexorable slide into region-wide conflict. It is evident, with hindsight, that the booby-trapping of operatives’ pagers and walkie-talkies was planned long in advance. Hidden explosives could have been detonated at any time. So why now? Because, having failed in his stated aim of destroying Hamas in Gaza, over the bodies of more than 40,000 mostly civilian Palestinian dead, Israel’s leader chose to make Lebanon the new front in a war without end.
Israel is fully justified in wanting to secure its northern border areas from Hezbollah’s missiles. Many people have died and thousands of Israeli citizens have been displaced from their homes there since 7 October – and neutralising Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which seeks Israel’s annihilation, is a long-established aim. But it is also true that to keep his far-right coalition partners in line, cling to his job and fend off US pressure for what he regards as an unacceptable settlement, Netanyahu requires a prolongation and expansion of the conflict. The pager attacks advanced that cynical objective. Inside Israel, he stands accused of actively torpedoing a ceasefire-hostage deal. So now Lebanon risks becoming the new Gaza.
How Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, responds in practice to last week’s attacks, which killed dozens of people and injured thousands and which, he admitted, constituted a uniquely severe blow, will help determine how much closer the Middle East comes to catastrophe. Nasrallah has vowed to exact painful retribution. Hezbollah cross-border rocket fire has since resumed, amid large-scale Israeli air attacks, including on Beirut. Nasrallah warned that any Israeli ground incursion into southern Lebanon would be an “opportunity” for Hezbollah to wreak revenge. Netanyahu should take heed. Israel’s previous Lebanon interventions, notably in 1982 and 2006, did not end well. And Israel’s army is depleted after months of attrition in Gaza.
The severe shock administered to Hezbollah last week, followed by Friday’s killing of another senior commander, Ibrahim Aqil, has underscored the group’s limitations, strained its relations with Lebanon’s government and people, and may persuade Nasrallah and his Iranian backers to tread more carefully. Yet there is no sign that missile attacks into Israel will cease. Likewise, Netanyahu scored a tactical victory but may have acted prematurely. His supposed primary aim of safely returning residents to northern areas is no more attainable than before. Meanwhile, the appalling Gaza crisis continues. Agreeing a lasting ceasefire-hostage deal there remains the key to preventing a wider war.
It is dismaying that, despite months of indirect talks mediated by Egypt and Qatar, neither the Israeli nor Hamas leadership is willing to take the steps required to halt the Gaza carnage. It is dismaying that Britain, like the US and many European countries, has failed to exert sufficient pressure on Israel to halt its flouting of humanitarian law by restricting all offensive weapons sales, endorsing Netanyahu’s indictment for war crimes at the international criminal court and imposing meaningful sanctions. It is dismaying, though unsurprising, that Iran has similarly failed to rein in Hamas and Hezbollah in order to halt the slaughter of the Palestinian people whose cause it champions.
Yet amid this shared, shaming catalogue of failure, it is the ineffectiveness and one-sidedness of the US administration that is most dismaying of all. President Joe Biden belongs to an American political generation that instinctively and emotionally backed Israel, right or wrong. But the modern-day Jewish state, whose basic credentials as a law-abiding democracy are in serious question, has changed radically, while Biden has not. He naively gave Netanyahu virtual carte blanche after 7 October, only to watch the unfolding results in growing horror. The US is Israel’s biggest supplier of financial assistance and weapons. Biden could and should do much more to oblige Netanyahu to cut a deal. Instead he has tolerated and facilitated his bellicose, nihilistic depredations at an intolerable cost to Israeli, US and western interests – and to ordinary people’s lives.
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Gaza is Biden’s biggest failure, bigger even than Ukraine. Yet, rather than urgently repair the damage, officials in Washington are suggesting that a ceasefire is unlikely before his successor takes office in January. So what is US policy now? In a word, containment. Unable to stop the war, the White House appears merely intent on preventing it spreading further before the November presidential election, for fear it could harm Kamala Harris’s and the Democrats’ chances. It’s not really a policy at all. It’s a cop-out, a green light for hardliners and extremists on all sides to do their reckless, abominable worst. Which is why, more so now than ever, the Middle East totters on the brink.