David Hearst – After Lebanon ceasefire, Netanyahu is running out of cards to play

That’s why neither Israel nor the Lebanese army could stop the convoy of villagers returning jubilantly and defiantly to their ruined homes within minutes of the ceasefire taking effect.

The moment Israel stopped fighting, they lost control.

The other arm of the “bruised and battered” narrative is the contention that Hezbollah is now more isolated politically than before because of the damage that the whole of Lebanon has sustained.

If anything, the opposite is the case. 

Such is the hatred and humiliation Israel has stirred in Lebanon, and indeed every country in the region, by its bombing campaign in the last two months and its campaign of extermination in Gaza, that some of the bitter divisions created by the civil war in Syria are starting to heal, though as events this week have shown in Syria, those scars have not gone away. 

But the last 13 months of war on Gaza showed that a “Sunni” Palestinian resistance movement can join forces with a “Shia” Lebanese movement in a fight against a common enemy. 

This alone has done much to refocus Sunni and Shia energies throughout the region. The policy of pacifying the region by practising divide and rule no longer works for Israel the way it once did.

For there is a major psychological change going on in the Sunni Arab world that has erased the logic of the Abraham Accords. Peace can no longer be achieved by recognising Israel, still less installing it as the regional technological, military and economic hegemon.

This change has made even the current Saudi leadership, the least sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and the most transactional in the history of the kingdom, recoil.

After several decades in the freezer, Arab nationalism and armed resistance to occupation has been fused under the banner of Islam.

Potent forces are being released by this fusion and they no longer work against the Axis of Resistance, that network of sub-state armed groups throughout Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen that Iran constructed as a form of deep defence after the trauma of being invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. 

Iran’s influence throughout the Arab world has perennially been constrained by the confessional and sectarian realities of power in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

And until today, it had difficulty breaking out of that barrier. 

Misreading the Middle East

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular, and the power-drunk behaviour of Israeli forces in Gaza, Occupied West Bank and Lebanon in general, has helped Iran break out of those constraints.

For many in the Arab world, Iran is seen less as an unwanted intruder in the Arab space, and more as the regional spearhead of resistance against colonial control. If it continues, this is a major change a decade after the schisms created by the Arab Spring.

In short, Hezbollah has proved once again to be a staunch enemy for Israel that cannot be eliminated. If previous experience is anything to go by, it will emerge even stronger.

But nothing impedes Israel and America’s ability to misread the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s “capitulation” in accepting a ceasefire, while Israel continues to pound piles of dust in Gaza, is seen as the precursor to a similar capitulation by Hamas.

Hamas, too, is being written off as “on its knees” after the death of its leader Yahia Sinwar, although it continues to operate even in the hell hole of north Gaza where all food supplies have been cut off for 50 days.

But this, again, is wish fulfillment disguised as analysis.

Even after the battering Gaza has received in the last 14 months, Hamas is in no mood to wave the white flag.

In one of several statements made since the ceasefire was announced, Hamas took heart from Netanyahu having to accept a deal which fell far short of his military aims in Lebanon.

Hamas said in a statement that “accepting the enemy’s agreement with Lebanon without fulfilling his conditions, is an important station in destroying Netanyahu’s illusions of changing the map of the Middle East by force, and his illusions of defeating the resistance forces or disarming them.”

The movement expressed its commitment to “cooperate with any ceasefire efforts in Gaza, within the determinants of stopping the aggression on Gaza, which we agreed to nationally; namely the ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the return of the displaced, and the completion of a real and complete prisoner exchange deal.”

This position has changed little since Hamas accepted a ceasefire proposal from which Netanyahu recoiled in May, before the invasion of Rafah and the reoccupation of the Philadelphi Corridor.

A direct war closer than ever

Bogged down in Gaza, repulsed in Lebanon, Netanyahu has already started to shift Trump’s attention to the need to attack Iran.

Again, an attack on Iran has been paved by the creation of a myth for which western correspondents have become willing mouthpieces. 

This is the ambitious notion that Iran lay “wide open” to a second and major Israeli and US attack on its nuclear enrichment production facilities because the last one destroyed the country’s air defences.

An over-the-horizon radar station was hit. Four Iranian soldiers died, but Iran’s S300 batteries were not knocked out and the Iranian air defence system was not disabled.

What happened was something very different, according to informed Iranian sources. 

The second wave of Israeli F-35 bombers, which were supposed to go in after the air defence system was taken out, were held 70 kilometres from the Iranian border after being “lit up” by Iranian radars, despite having stealth capabilities. 

Parchin, a site claimed by three US officials to be an active top-secret nuclear weapons research facility, was not hit by ballistic missiles, according to sources who lived close to it. 

In any case, all the gear in Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex had been moved to the mountains long ago. One other site was hit by drones, but they came from the Caspian Sea, not the west where the Israeli strike force was located.

But such stories that Iran is now “wide open” to attack are meat and drink to Netanyahu’s strenuous efforts to achieve bipartisan support in Washington for a decisive strike.

Whether that will happen is as much a product of the complicated games being played by Biden’s outgoing administration, Netanyahu, and the deep state, each of whom have different motivations for wishing to frame and predetermine Trump’s choices before he is inaugurated. 

Similarly, Iran could attack Israel with a much heavier strike than the one it achieved in October when it launched 200 missiles and drones in retaliation for Israel’s assassinations of Haniyeh in Tehran, Nasrallah and the IRGC general Abbas Nilforoushan.

It would do this for three reasons: because it said it would, to re-establish deterrence, and in response to the continuing bloodshed of Gaza.

Continual hints to the contrary by the reformist government, in particular that the ceasefire in Lebanon could influence Iran’s plans to retaliate for Israel’s latest strike, must be balanced by the thinking of the IRGC. 

At any rate, a direct war with Iran is closer than it has been for many years. 

Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, nor indeed Iran is good news for Netanyahu, who is facing a gathering storm of opposition at home. It’s opposition from a tired army, from the desperate families of the hostages that remain alive, and the looming threat of corruption charges coming to court.

It is also the growing hostility from an armed settler movement which is seeing its once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to capture the whole of the biblical land of Israel slip from its grasp. 

Netanyahu is a gambler who is so much in debt, his only salvation lies in laying more bets. But his deck of cards is running low. 

The reality that Israel has achieved little in its 13 month war and lost a lot, has a stubborn habit of poking through the many layers of myth and self delusion.