Can a great military victory put the victor, not just the vanquished, in mortal danger? As her troops move in and Israel attacks from the air in all directions, in purely military terms, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have already won another stunning victory, this time over the most formidable of Iran’s allies, Hezbollah.
The killing in an air strike of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah – who died in Beirut on 27 September alongside a senior general from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – was the final decapitation of the group. It followed the assassinations of five other members of Hezbollah’s senior command since June; another, Nabil Qaouk, was killed a day later.
No leader is irreplaceable, but Nasrallah was one of the founders of Hezbollah four decades ago, and had led the group since the killing of his predecessor by the Israelis in 1992. He was a wily, relentless, brutal one-off. His death is at least as big a blow for Iran as the 2020 killing – in a US drone strike in Baghdad – of Qasem Soleimani, who was leader of the Iranian Quds Force.
Israel has “settled its score” said Benjamin Netanyahu before making an extraordinary direct appeal to the Iranian people – the “noble Persians”, as he called them. It is a little early to declare the game over, however. If the regime in Tehran does not strike back, it will have been thoroughly humiliated in a region and at a time when “face” matters hugely. Even before Nasrallah’s death, the disruption of Hezbollah’s communications and command system with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, followed by pulverising Israeli air strikes killing hundreds of innocents, had thrown it into chaos.
Once more, the kaleidoscope has been shaken. Previous incursions into Lebanon have not gone well – but so far this is the biggest defeat Israel’s enemies have suffered for several decades. Some will ask whether the fall of Iran’s Islamic Republic, followed by the Assad regime in Syria, is now plausible – Netanyahu clearly thinks so.
Are we seeing the beginning of a regional revolution? There were crowds in Lebanon mourning Nasrallah – but also anti-Assad crowds in Syria, a country swollen by perhaps 100,000 new refugees, celebrating the Hezbollah leader’s death. In the south, Hamas is being bloodily ground down; many of its leaders, too, though not yet Yahya Sinwar, presumably at large in Gaza, have been assassinated.
One year on from the terror attacks of 7 October at the music festival and in surrounding kibbutz communities – the rapes, the sadistic murders, the hostage-taking – the IDF and Israeli government are triumphant. But their victories have been in individual battles, not the wider war for survival. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, called Nasrallah the murderer of thousands of Israelis and pointedly added: “To the people of Lebanon, I say: our war is not with you. It’s time for change.”
But there, immediately, is the big problem. Murder hundreds of innocent people in air strikes – more than 1,000 so far in Lebanon in recent days – because, frankly, those people don’t really matter to you: just alien meat, as with the slaughter of civilians in Gaza in pursuit of Hamas – and when you reassure them “our war is not with you”, they may not be in a receptive mood.
If a regional revolution is beginning, we can’t tell where it leads. All around the Middle East, right now, the next generation of future suicide bombers and bereaved teenagers dreaming only of killing Jews, grow in numbers and determination. For millions more around the world, from Brazil to South Africa, Israel is viewed as a pariah state.
For many Israelis, that may not matter much. The State of Israel was born in bloodshed, from the recent memory of pogrom and Holocaust, and has expanded outwards ever since, through war and the violent, bullying expropriation of Arab villages. To a Scot, their half-eradication and desolation brings to mind the stony emptiness of the Highland Clearances. Violence is part of its DNA: Israel has learned that might is right in the world and what matters in the end is only force.
But this is not, of course, the Israel its supporters have fondly imagined – a lively, devout, democratic, agrarian haven on a hostile planet. I think there are two huge illusions about this across the West; and they are both to do with our postmodern, fastidious distaste for taking religion seriously.
We were sold an Israel which seemed like a European-tradition enclave from authoritarian and chaotic Muslim neighbours; or a modest transplanted US state, perhaps, with the same Enlightenment attitudes to the rule of law, freedom of the press, democracy and culture – a competitor in Eurovision, a land of academics and writers, famed for its medical tech and universities. A country so familiar its ambassadors ask how we would feel if Hezbollah was dropping rockets on Liverpool or Hampshire?
But the Israeli story goes back to an ancient and unfamiliar world where, in every valley, by every river, atop each mountain, people worshipped a local god, or gods, just for them, and celebrated a divinely sanctioned right to their small moist patch of earth. In his recent book Dominion, the historian Tom Holland vividly demonstrates how the dangerous revolutionary St Paul, travelling through Galatia in modern Turkey, understood that his revelation of a single universal God smashed all previous, local worship.
But not here in Israel. The writer Nathan Lopes Cardozo wrote recently in the Jerusalem Post: “We are God’s stake in human history, and we could not make a greater mistake than to believe that we could ever be a nation like other nations. To believe that is to commit spiritual suicide.”
The spread of the universal faiths in the past two millennia has been rampant across continents. Today, the intimate connection between Jews, their God and their promised land is like a crack in space-time.
With our post-faith, busy, political imaginations, we don’t really get it. We certainly don’t like to talk about it. But the faith we don’t notice is what áallows Jewish settlers to intimidate Palestinian farmers on the West Bank into exile – “Always ours, this place; never yours” – and feel virtuous about it; and allowed the earlier expulsions, culminating in the 1948 Nakba, or expulsions of Palestinians from the land on which they lived.
Is there not a fundamental dishonesty in the conversation between Israel and her allies? We in the West can hardly say: “Sorry, Palestinians, but you see, God gave this village, where you happen to be living – or that hillside where your sheep graze – as an eternal possession to the descendants of Abraham; so off you hop.” We cannot describe a fundamental motivation for what’s happening. We look away.
That wasn’t always the case. During the British Mandate in Palestine, from 1917 to 1947, British troops eagerly assisted early Jewish settlers to seize land from the Palestinians by force and trained them in violence. Orde Wingate, later famous for the Burma campaign against the Japanese, was a passionate Christian Zionist delighted to help drive Arab Muslims out of Judea.
Of course, taking religious motivation seriously does not help “solve” the Middle East crisis – far from it – although it may help us avoid jurists’ optimism; but it is crucial in trying to understand the confrontation. If you think you have been chosen by God to have this territory, you are not going to share it willingly, ever; it would be “to commit spiritual suicide”. The political motivation of Zionism, the whole world knows about – but the religious frame of Judaism matters as much.
I said, however, that there was a double blindness in how we view this conflict. The second common illusion is that the Palestinian cause is an ideology-free alliance of secular victimhood, with no militant religious agenda of its own, and which offers no real threat to Jewish people or the State of Israel. It’s a gentle, guitar-thrumming convocation of kindly anti-war humanitarians under an olive tree.
What Israel does every day drives this belief. We see weeping bereaved parents and exhausted, decent doctors, covered in brick dust after the latest bombs have landed in Gaza or Beirut, and our anger against Netanyahu flames brightly.
But think of the anti-Israeli leaders too, those driving the other side of the conflict. Hamas and Hezbollah, with Iran behind them, are clear in wanting the eradication of Israel. Long before the 7 October massacre, they posed a physical threat to Jews across the Middle East. The 1988 Hamas founding charter quotes Imam Hassan al-Banna: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The writer Massaab al-Aloosy, in his assessment of how Hezbollah has been forced to change, nonetheless speaks of its “core ideology of creating an Islamic state in Lebanon, destroying Israel and liberating Jerusalem”.
This is commonplace, normal. If you want an image of how the Islamist militants in Lebanon imagine the future of the Levant, think not of farmers who only want to live and let live, or idealistic secular British supporters, but of the pitiless, determined, anti-democratic Iranian theocracy.
So where does this great Israeli military victory, after so many victories, so many defeats, so much bloodshed, so much hatred curdling down the generations, leave Tel Aviv? The endgame, as Tehran works frantically on its nuclear programme, is lurching into sight. Outriders for Netanyahu are talking already about hitting Jordan next.
It is possible, as I mentioned, that Israel’s enemies, Iran above all, simply give up and crawl away. Perhaps, at last, the suppressed liberal voices of the Iranian middle classes will make themselves heard. Perhaps the vile Assad regime will suddenly collapse in Syria.
But even then, in the turmoil that would follow, Israel will not be safe, nor find a peaceable settlement with her furious neighbours. This war has already corrupted, coarsened, terrified and inflamed a better Israel. Too many innocent people have been killed. Too many others have been forced into vengeful exile. Israel herself is not seen as a moral beacon; her leaders ignore Britain and increasingly the US too. There are very few allies left.
And that is the better outcome. After the events of recent weeks, Iran and any of its Hezbollah and Shia proxies still in control of formidable missiles, will want to attack again in a style and at a time of their choosing. Beliefs and feuds from almost the dawn of recorded time are rising up, and they are very hard for modern secular humans to understand. In military terms, what Israel has done has been remarkable and will be remembered in the annals of modern warfare. In political and human terms, it feels catastrophic.
[See also: Israel won’t find victory in Lebanon]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history