Lebanon: Why did Israel choose to attack now?
The deadly raids by the Lebanese air force against Lebanon are not part of a military escalation as described by the mainstream media. These are the first raids in an open war that has been foreseeable for several months. Of course, this open war is not the “total war” or regional war that Israel’s Western protectors, led by the United States, fear. But the modus operandi reminds us of all the wars waged by Israel in the region over the past twenty years. Increasingly massive and intense air raids to annihilate the military capabilities of the adversary and force it to accept the conditions of the pax israeliana.
Favorable timing
Contrary to the whining of some Arab commentators who point to the “madness” of the Netanyahu government, the latter acts with a chilling rationality. Those who believed that Israel would let Hezbollah’s rocket and missile attacks go unpunished throughout the last 11 months, which have driven tens of thousands of Galilee settlers away, were woefully mistaken. Israel was turning a blind eye and reacting proportionally to Hezbollah’s inconsequential attacks because it was mainly occupied with its war on Gaza. Now that it has finished with the main work in Gaza, leaving behind a strip 90% destroyed after killing more than 40,000 people, wounding and displacing hundreds of thousands more, it has every latitude to turn to Lebanon.
As one of the rare clear-sighted Arab analysts who does not mistake his wishes for reality, retired Jordanian general Faiz Douiri, recalled, Hezbollah will have to regret having left the initiative and the timing to the Israeli adversary. A few weeks ago, the Israeli army concentrated 5 divisions (the equivalent of about twenty brigades) in the Gaza Strip. Today, there is only one division left in Gaza and the Israeli army can now count on 6 divisions on the northern front on the Lebanese border.
The Netanyahu government has not only taken advantage of a favorable moment in terms of the military situation. It can also count on the criminal passivity of the American administration, which will not be able to do anything before the presidential election deadline next November. Indeed, any gesture that could be interpreted as unacceptable pressure on Israel risks costing the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris dearly. What is peace in Lebanon worth on the altar of the race for the White House?
Geopolitical motive
The Netanyahu government also had another geopolitical motive for launching its war against Lebanon at this precise moment. In the wake of the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Hanieh in Tehran, while the media complacently relayed fears about an Iranian retaliation that would never come, American emissaries held talks in Tehran. The deal was clear. If Iran’s new reformist president would sit back and do nothing to play into the hands of Republican candidate Donald Trump, the next Democratic administration might look favorably on Iran’s request for negotiations on the Iranian nuclear issue.
This is enough to push the Netanyahu government to act quickly to torpedo any prospect of a resumption of negotiations that would amount to a reprieve granted to Iran. An open war in Lebanon is supposed in Netanyahu’s mind to solve several problems at once: in addition to the annihilation of the security threat represented by Hezbollah and the return of Israeli settlers to the northern region, Netanyahu aims at least to suspend the rapprochement between Washington and Tehran while awaiting the result of the American presidential election that he hopes to see the Republican candidate Donald Trump win.
Even though it has every interest in a regional war in which it would drag Iran into the hope that the United States would intervene directly in the conflict and thus end Iran’s nuclear potential, the Israeli government will not see its wish granted for the simple reason that Iran will not let itself be drawn so easily into this trap that would be fatal to it. Until now, Iran has managed its confrontation from a distance with its regional and international adversaries with implacable intelligence, avoiding direct involvement in the conflict and preferring to act through its vectors in the region.
Moreover, there is no evidence that the United States and Israel would have an interest in the complete neutralization of Iran, since the existence of an Iranian threat to its Arab neighbors constitutes a certain geopolitical rent. America will thus continue to pump money from the reactionary petromonarchies of the Gulf in exchange for its so-called military protection. For its part, Israel is counting heavily on the hard cash dividends of its normalization with its Abrahamic “cousins.”
The stakes of war
But beyond the strategic calculations of some and others, Lebanon risks in the coming days and weeks to relive the horrors of a devastating war even if the latter will probably not resemble the ordeal experienced by the population of Gaza. The land invasion of southern Lebanon that Israeli ultras are agitating and that some predict as a new quagmire for the Israeli army, arguing that Hezbollah has more substantial weaponry than Hamas, is not for the moment on the Israeli army’s agenda.
Indeed, the stakes of this war in Lebanon are not necessarily the same as those guiding the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip and even in the West Bank. In Gaza and the West Bank, it is a question of breaking any capacity and will to resist and of terrorizing the population to force it to exodus to make way for new colonies. In Lebanon, it is a question of neutralizing the local armed wing of a strategic adversary (Iran) that we are trying to deprive of the capacity for nuclear deterrence but which remains, moreover, in the light of American and Israeli strategic doctrine, a useful protagonist in the regional geopolitical architecture.
Israel’s absolute air superiority in the region, added to the unconditional American support and the complacency of the other permanent members of the Security Council, does not leave much room for military maneuver to Hezbollah, especially if Tehran decides, as the Iranian president’s speech at the UN General Assembly tends to illustrate, to play the appeasement card while waiting for the American presidential election.
The first days of the war do not seem to deviate from this scenario: contrary to the desire displayed since the day after October 7 to destroy Hamas in Gaza, Israel hastened to declare that its objective was to weaken Hezbollah’s ballistic capabilities in order to force it to withdraw behind the Litani River. For its part, Hezbollah was obliged to increase its ballistic response to the Israeli bombings but with a well-calculated restraint in the hope of keeping forces for the day when its survival would be at stake or in the case of a war directed against Iran.
Palestine must-see
The mainstream media will take advantage of this new war in Lebanon to pass over in silence the genocidal acts that the Israeli occupier continues to perpetrate in Gaza. The Palestinian people continue to face their destiny with the short-term prospect of seeing their national cause purely and simply liquidated on the altar of the great regional normalization for which hypocritical theologians in the service of police states have miserably summoned the great patriarch Abraham. Never has a liberation movement known greater solitude than that of the Palestinians. Certainly, out of solidarity and calculation, Hezbollah sided with Gaza from the beginning, but in a way and proportion that could not have a significant impact on the course of the war.
At a time when Israel believes the moment is right to launch a new war against Lebanon, it is important to remember that Gaza has not yet said its last word, even if the battle opposing it to the occupying army is going to change configuration and risks experiencing dangerous changes with the prospect of the military occupation of the north of the Gaza Strip or the arrival of an international force.
The sacrifices made in Gaza are painful trials that will continue to inspire the multifaceted resistance to the political and diplomatic maneuvers that will follow in the coming months the war of extermination that is still underway. The lessons that will be learned by those who will have the honor of taking up the torch of the struggle will inevitably be nourished by today’s disappointments. Abandoned by everyone and against their will, the Palestinians turned to Iran and expected more active and consistent support from the “axis of resistance.”
The use of inter-regional and inter-imperialist contradictions is part of the most basic political realism and sometimes proves unavoidable. However, by relying too much on allies driven by reasons of state or by strategic interests that do not always coincide with its own, the Palestinian liberation movement could only find itself in an impasse. Heartbreaking revisions concerning both strategy and tactics, politics as much as diplomacy, await the Palestinian national liberation movement, called upon to draw the necessary lessons from the Gaza war. And because the regional and international order it is confronted with also crushes under its weight all the peoples of the region, more than ever the Palestinian liberation movement should re-appropriate, alongside so many other things that relate to the technologies of resistance, the revolutionary slogan of the 70s of the last century: the road to Al-Quds passes through the Arab capitals!
