Smoke billows after an Israeli air strike that targeted the southern Lebanese village of Abbasiyeh, on Sept. 24.KAWNAT HAJU/AFP/Getty Images
Bessma Momani is professor of political science at the University of Waterloo.
After nearly a year of heightened pain and suffering in the Middle East, the escalating attacks over the past week between Israel and Hezbollah are a harbinger of things to come. With a lame-duck American president in place, the one political power with the most leverage in the Middle East seems unwilling to expend the political capital, or even to use its vast array of carrots and sticks, to stop this descent into chaos.
The recent assassinations and bombings in Iran and Lebanon will invariably elicit only increased determination among Iranian-backed militias – self-described as the “Axis of Resistance” – to grow their military capabilities. Exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon have even turned the mainly war-weary Lebanese people into accepting the inevitability of a Hezbollah retribution. After all, this has been the deadliest few days since the last Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, and the unbearable images of those being killed or displaced have become intertwined with those of Palestinians in Gaza on social media.
While Israelis are protesting weekly in favour of a ceasefire deal that leads to the return of the hostages – and, at times, for the removal of their Prime Minister – Benjamin Netanyahu has a personal interest in continuing the war in Gaza, expanding this into the West Bank and, so it increasingly appears, into Lebanon. Not only because the far-right religious parties in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet have threatened to break the tenuous coalition if Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza, but also because these same extremists want to realize their goals of annexing the West Bank and forcibly displacing Palestinians into neighbouring Jordan.
The idea of taking the war into Lebanon to force Hezbollah to abandon its military positions in southern Lebanon enjoys wide support in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, and even among the opposition. Only months ago, Israel’s Education Minister warned that “Lebanon, as we know it, will not exist,” adding to further Lebanese anxiety that Israel’s right-wing government wants to expand its war there as an opportune time to finish its enemies. Mr. Netanyahu needs the wars to continue because he fears that losing his post would nullify the current immunity he enjoys from prosecution for the numerous pending corruption charges against him. Continuing war – be it in Gaza, the West Bank or even Lebanon – is a means to Mr. Netanyahu’s political survival.
Boxed in by its own binary construct of supporting Israel or giving leeway to the militant groups of Hamas or Hezbollah, the United States is slowly being goaded into fighting. Already, the Pentagon has announced more troop movements into the Middle East in response to last weekend’s retaliatory strikes on Israel. Israel cannot fight a ground war on two fronts, in Gaza and Lebanon, without both American materiel and, eventually, troops, especially if a full invasion occurs in Lebanon. How long will it take before the Americans use their combat troops to support Israel in its war against Hezbollah?
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While instinctively the United States does not want to contribute ground troops to another war in the Middle East, Mr. Netanyahu wants this to become as much an American war as it is an Israeli war. Yet, Hezbollah will not be defeated by pounding Lebanon from the sky, and thousands of Iran-backed regional fighters will inevitably flock to support Hezbollah in the event of an Israeli ground offensive. How long can the world watch as the region descends into what could become a decade-long proxy war between the U.S. and Iran?
Meanwhile, after a year of watching Palestinians being killed in Gaza, popular support for the Axis of Resistance is swelling in the region. The pressure on leaders in Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf countries is mounting as they look feckless in the eyes of their people for standing by as tens of thousands of Palestinians, and now many Lebanese, are being killed. How long before these pro-Western states see the United States as being responsible for the regional disorder being unleashed upon them?
The vast majority of Israelis do not have confidence in Mr. Netanyahu executing this war, yet Washington’s implicit and explicit support for him is leading the region down a dark path. We will undoubtedly see the U.S. this week at the UN General Assembly shield Israel in full disregard of the disorder being unleashed in the Middle East. One need not be Nostradamus to know this chaos could have all been averted if the U.S. had curtailed its military support for Israel to press it into a ceasefire deal.