The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union ended dramatically not because of a military conflict or international crisis, but because of internal domestic politics: Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms inside the Soviet Union led not to rejuvenation but to the dismantling of the communist system itself, and that, as we know, changed the world.
The postmodern Middle East may experience a similar fate. The military conflict between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Arabs can have lulls and ceasefires, but ultimately cannot truly end until there is change inside Iran. This historical process has only quickened because of the current war in Lebanon, which pits Israel against Iran’s most militarily powerful proxy force, Hezbollah.
The assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September, followed by Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, further undermines Iran, whose decades-long project in Lebanon may be turning to ashes. The regional war just ahead of us will ultimately focus on Iran itself and its military-security complex. Iranian territory will be less and less off-limits.
Its clerical regime, in power since 1979, defines the region’s era to an extent much greater than even Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, himself a historical life-force who will echo for far longer than the unmemorable mediocrities that now govern Europe and the US. But it is Iran, a country of 88.5 million and an ancient cluster of Persian civilisation (rather than many Arab countries, which are merely vague geographical expressions), that holds the key to the current regional war. Energy-rich Iran provides the money, the military training, the brilliant tactics and the dynamic ideology of revolutionary nihilism (which combines a radical Islam with an anti-Semitic fascism) that has allowed Hamas and Hezbollah to become what they are today. The older Arab-Israeli conflict over historical Palestine was a conventional contest over states and territory. But the introduction of clerical Iran has given the struggle a tiers-mondiste quality, further infused with a millenarian religious call for the annihilation of an entire people.
It is Iran that struck Israel on 7 October 2023, an event so dramatic and so bestial that it will be remembered like 9/11: a date so infamous that it becomes a concept. Of course, Iran did not do the murdering, the raping and the hostage-taking in southern Israel. Hamas and its operatives and supporters did that. Iranian leaders may not even have known about the exact timing of the event, or may even have been uncomfortable with its scope. But their long, total support of Hamas means their strategic fingerprints are all over the attack. Had Iran a different regime, there would likely have been no 7 October – no matter the anger and suffering of the Palestinians.
The 7 October attack, a high watermark of Iran’s strategy to annihilate Israel, constituted a paradigm shift. Before it, the Gulf Arab regimes and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had complacently believed it was possible to normalise relations with Israel while holding the Palestinian problem in abeyance. The Gulf Arab regimes and MBS in particular were at once fed up with the Palestinians, terrified of Iran and increasingly disdainful of the wisdom and seemingly waning power of the US, especially vis-à-vis China. Thus, with America being less helpful, they needed Israel as almost a corporate acquisition to aid them in their struggle with Iran in this new age of cyber warfare. It was a great theory but Iran and Hamas, in discovering vulnerabilities in Israel’s domestic security, were able to execute a plan that made it impossible for the region ever again to dismiss and forget the Palestinians.
It is a tribute to the brilliant fascistic nihilism of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who is still at large in Gaza, that even if the Israelis succeed in killing him, he will have significantly altered the thinking of MBS and other Gulf Arab leaders. On 7 October 2023 Sinwar’s forces launched an attack reminiscent of the Holocaust, which Sinwar knew, having learned Hebrew in an Israeli prison and understanding the mind of his enemy, would elicit an Israeli military response of such devastating proportions that it would be impossible for MBS and his fellow sheikhs to believe they could ignore their own streets, which were quietly baying for retribution against the Israelis.
No matter how much Israel levels Gaza and dismantles the Hamas leadership, Sinwar has won his victory. The Israeli response has included the utter destruction of a large urban cityscape and slumscape – even as the object of the attack, Hamas, has continued to melt into the population, to rise and fight again despite its substantial degradation. A simultaneous regional war in Lebanon and the Red Sea has been ignited as a result of the scale of the Israeli military response.
Israel is fighting on all fronts now, without a postwar plan for governance of the occupied territories – again, exactly what Sinwar wanted. The Palestinian issue is back on the global diplomatic table after languishing off it for years. In other words, Israel has suffered a strategic defeat, as it did in the 1973 war with Arab states. Back then, despite eventually surrounding the Egyptian Third Army and pushing the Syrian army back towards Damascus, the very fact of the Arab surprise attack led to the Americans forcing territorial withdrawals on Israel and restoring diplomatic relations between Washington and both Cairo and Damascus. In both cases, in October 1973 and in October 2023, the culprit was Israeli arrogance: their disdainful belief that the Arabs were not capable of doing what they did. On 7 October, that arrogance, in part, resulted in too much reliance on technology, allowing young people to congregate at a music festival protected by electronic surveillance rather than by soldiers.
Israel is now fighting a multi-front war: in Gaza, in Lebanon, and increasingly in the West Bank, which has seen a steady rise in armed and deadly Islamic radicalism. The Israeli military and intelligence services may be resourceful, but Israel’s entrepreneurial economy simply cannot sustain an Armageddon for too long. Nor are territorial concessions by Israel necessarily the answer: Gaza was a de facto independent state for two decades, with no Israeli troops or settlers.
With Israelis and Palestinians doomed to conflict, the only way Israel can possibly gain a strategic victory is if there’s a domestic change inside Iran, leading to the collapse of the radical clerical regime and its replacement by a weaker, less aggressive, less ambitious and inward-facing Iranian state. This is not a fanciful prospect. The regime is hated by an overwhelming majority of the population, and is in a calcified, late-Soviet condition. Mass protests have become a steady feature of its politics, most recently in 2022 and 2023 over the mandatory wearing of the hijab. Nothing in geopolitics lasts forever. Many once made the mistake of thinking the shah’s system was eternal; one should not repeat the error. The collapse of the shah was a world-historical event; the collapse of Tehran’s clerical system might be too.
Even manifestly unpopular regimes do not end on their own. There has to be a trigger. Might a direct Israeli strike that embarrasses the Iranian government be a catalyst? Perhaps. But that may take years. Iran is exceedingly complex, with multiple political power centres impervious to outside actors. And keep in mind that Israel cannot launch a serious strike on Iran until it neutralises Hezbollah first. Hezbollah, far more powerful than Hamas, has the capability with its tens of thousands of missiles to retaliate against Israel in the name of its Iranian patrons. Israel’s recent strikes against Hezbollah, in addition to creating the conditions for the return of 60,000 Israeli civilians to northern Israel, carries the benefit of preparing the battle space for an eventual Israeli strike on Iran.
That’s where we are at this juncture: a year on, the 7 October attack has unleashed a chain of events that previous decades combined did not do. The pace of history is now furious.
[See also: Is Netanyahu plotting the destruction of Iran?]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history