Hit them hard: prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and chief of the IDF General Staff Herzi Halevi assess Israel’s attack on Houthi-controlled Hodeida port, Jerusalem, 20 July 2024. The Houthis are backed by Iran
Israeli prime minister’s office handout · Anadolu · Getty
Over the past several months, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has regained his domestic standing, once again demonstrating an astounding ability to get away with anything – the secret to his remarkable political longevity. Approval among the furthest right segment of Israelis had already been mounting since spring as he resisted US pressure (if one can call it that) to sign a ceasefire agreement with Hamas that would bring back the remaining hostages.
In May, ignoring Washington’s pleas, he sent his troops into Rafah and the border region with Egypt, thereby eliminating the main appeal a ceasefire would have held for Hamas. By then refusing to pull back from Rafah even temporarily, as recommended by Israel’s military chiefs and defence minister Yoav Galant (his foremost rival within Likud), Netanyahu sabotaged any serious chance of a deal with the Palestinians. Egypt, meanwhile, was furious to have lost the upper hand it hitherto had over the Rafah crossing.
This was Netanyahu clearly snubbing President Biden, to whom he had no intention of handing a tidy truce complete with freed hostages, among them Americans, whose return would have offered a welcome opportunity for a photograph at the White House. And, by ungratefully rebuffing Biden, he was helping Donald Trump’s campaign. Netanyahu’s calculations didn’t change when Kamala Harris was substituted as Democratic candidate: he had good reason to fear Harris might move closer to Barack Obama’s Middle East policy than that of her current boss.
Soon after Netanyahu took office in March 2009, he began working with Republican politicians to complicate things for Obama, who had entered the Oval Office two months earlier. Years later, he relied on the same playbook, as Biden (now president) and the Pentagon started turning instead to Galant – welcomed in Washington several times during the Gaza war – and being more critical of Netanyahu. Republicans invited him to give his fourth address to Congress (breaking Winston Churchill’s record). When he spoke on 24 July this year, the absence of Vice-President Harris (the constitutionally delegated Senate president) was perceived as a way of distancing herself.
Netanyahu’s most recent decisions were surely influenced by the candidate switch and an initial Harris surge in the polls. Taking his time had seemed reasonable, as a victory for Trump – who would likely cut him even more slack than Biden – looked increasingly likely. But with the rise of Harris, who might rein him in, he had no time to waste.
Waiting for the moment to strike
Beyond grabbing more Palestinian land – following the expansionist vision of the Zionist right wing he represents – Netanyahu’s priority is Iran (1). In 1979 the danger from Egypt was neutralised when it signed a peace treaty with Israel. That same year, Iran’s revolution led it to break with the West – the dawn of its status as Israel’s archenemy and only existential threat. From the start, the Islamic Republic assumed a hostile posture toward the ‘Great Satan’ and promised the destruction of its partner, Israel. Embroiled during the 1980s in a deadly war with Iraq and cut off from arms supplies by embargoes, Iran gradually built its own regional ideological-cum-military network that could serve as a proxy against the US and its allies in the Middle East. And as it sought to expand its influence beyond Shias (its own community and most important audience) to the broader Arab and Muslim worlds, the theocratic regime’s anti-Israel stance became a key selling point.
As part of this effort, it fostered a relationship with the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood. The group had broken off ties with Riyadh in 1990, refusing to support the US deployment of troops in Saudi Arabia ahead of the Gulf war against Iraq, which had invaded Kuwait. Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian division, naturally received the most attention from Tehran, which simultaneously strengthened its connection with a competing Brotherhood offshoot, the (Palestinian) Islamic Jihad.
What happens next will depend on the outcome of the 5 November presidential election. A joint American-Israeli offensive on Iran seems much more likely with a Trump victory than a Harris one
Israel has been obsessed with Iran since the early 2000s, when it became clear that the country had secretly restarted the nuclear programme begun under the shah. Tel Aviv is certain that the goal is to develop nuclear weapons, which would end the regional monopoly it has held on such arms since the 1960s. Combined with an annihilation complex, shaped as much by the Holocaust as by Israel’s relatively small size, the spectre of a nuclear Iran explains its leaders’ determination to hit the enemy – and especially its nuclear infrastructure – hard.
A few days before Obama was sworn in, the New York Times published an investigation by David Sanger, its chief Washington correspondent. He described how since early 2008 – George W Bush’s final year in office – the Israeli government had been urgently requesting that Washington send an emergency order of GBU-28s (two-tonne, six-metre-long guided ‘bunker busters’) and give it authorisation to fly over US-occupied Iraq to strike Natanz, Iran’s main nuclear facility (2). Fearing this could endanger American troops, the Bush administration refused. But it had already ordered 55 such bombs for Israel the year before, with fulfilment scheduled for 2009. While Obama authorised their delivery soon after his inauguration (3), this did little for his relationship with Netanyahu, which deteriorated as the US president publicly criticised the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Iran, however, was the biggest bone of contention between the two. In a way, Obama’s bunker-buster shipment had increased pressure for limitations on its nuclear programme. But Netanyahu agreed with Saudi Arabia, another of Tehran’s sworn enemies, that even were an agreement to be reached – loosening the economic chokehold on Iran – it would neither stop the country from secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons programme nor from expanding its regional influence. (Several factors helped this second ambition: the West’s fiasco in Iraq and the extraction of US troops, completed in 2011; the civil war that broke out in Syria that same year after a popular uprising; and the Yemeni civil war that began in 2014.) Much to their chagrin, an accord was signed in Vienna in 2015.
Who wanted to see Trump elected?
Netanyahu and the Saudi rulers were thus delighted to see Donald Trump elected in 2016. The president’s first international trip, in May 2017, was to Riyadh. By October, Trump had begun the process of fulfilling his campaign promise to quit the Iran nuclear deal, despite entreaties from the European signatories (Germany, France, the UK, etc), and the withdrawal became official on 8 May 2018. And Trump opened the final year of his term with the January 2020 assassination in Baghdad of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the foreign operations division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (4).
Just as Trump had been the anti-Obama, hellbent on unpicking one after another of his predecessor’s achievements, Biden portrayed himself as the anti-Trump in the 2020 presidential campaign. Regarding the Middle East, he promised to resuscitate the nuclear deal and reopen the US consulate in East Jerusalem as well as the PLO office in Washington, both closed by Trump.
He did neither. Rather than reviving the Middle East policy he had carried out as Obama’s vice-president, he has mostly continued Trump’s approach. Netanyahu’s reoccupation and destruction of Gaza actually make Biden the first president to have overseen a joint Israeli-US war (5). And the occasional tensions between the two leaders have certainly not been reflected in the staggering amount of military aid the US has provided (6).
‘No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None… And I think Bibi should remember that,’ Biden repeated on 4 October. The reproach came as he speculated on a Democratic senator’s suggestion that Netanyahu is blocking a ceasefire to benefit Trump (7). The prime minister, on the other hand, lavished Biden with praise at a White House meeting while in the US for his speech to Congress: ‘From a proud Israeli Zionist to a proud Irish American Zionist, I want to thank you for 50 years of public service and 50 years of support for the state of Israel’ (8). This farewell to a lifelong politician who had just relinquished his party’s nomination was no doubt sincere.
The ticket change and Netanyahu’s visit to Trump’s Florida lair, Mar-a-Lago, both in late July, opened the war’s next chapter. He needed to make the most of Biden’s final months as president so that, in the best-case scenario, Trump would win and allow Israel to widen its offensive, and at worst, Harris would inherit – and simply have to contend with – deep US involvement.
The Hamas attack has cruelly highlighted Israel’s loss of credible deterrence. The country’s first military defeat – analogous to the American one in Vietnam – came in 2000 when it withdrew unconditionally from Lebanon. Its 2006 conflict with Hizbullah, which had significantly improved its capabilities in the meantime, turned into another quagmire. And, except for periodic attacks on Syria, Israel has been able to do nothing to stop Iran’s expansion.
The ‘Dahiya doctrine’ advocates inflicting disproportionate losses on the enemy as well as damage to its built environment (9) – an invitation to commit war crimes because it explicitly calls for targeting civilians. It was first used in Lebanon, in Beirut’s dahiya janoubiya (‘southern suburbs’, see Dark days for Lebanon as the storm widens, in this issue), a Hizbullah stronghold. The doctrine was applied twice in Gaza, in 2008-09 and 2014. But Israel’s repeated deadly campaigns since 2007, most often in retaliation for rockets fired by Hamas or Islamic Jihad, weren’t enough to dissuade the two groups.
Deterrence did work in Lebanon: Hizbullah never again carried out a cross-border offensive like that of 12 July 2006, which sparked the ‘33-day war’. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly acknowledged a month later, on 27 August, that he would not have greenlit the operation had he known the Israeli response would be so deadly and destructive (see After Nasrallah: the road to regional war, in this issue) (10). Hizbullah’s resistance having proved remarkable, Tehran supplied the party with an impressive and diverse arsenal of missiles, so that it felt it had achieved a state of mutual deterrence with Israel: a relatively peaceful coexistence enforced by each adversary’s potential to seriously damage the other. This also made Hizbullah a key asset in the delicate equilibrium between Israel and Iran, which maintains a significant conventional armoury aside from its regional network.
Although Israeli sources confirm that more Hamas assailants than Israelis were killed on 7 October 2023, the attack’s recklessness and deadly success – which surpassed even its planners’ expectations – exasperated Israel, to breaking point. Netanyahu was accused of having put his country in harm’s way by allowing Hamas to consolidate power in Gaza and receive money from Qatar. The goal had been to perpetuate divisions among Palestinian groups, thereby defusing any pressure to resume the so-called peace process (11). On the morning of 7 October, Hamas exhorted ‘the brothers in the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and Syria’ to join its fight (12).
The fact that Tehran responded at all, even if only minimally and indirectly, showed just how much dissuasive credibility Israel had lost. The Islamic Republic activated its network, inciting its partners – Hizbullah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen ‒ to begin a low-level war of attrition against Israel. Only Bashar al-Assad kept carefully to the sidelines, his regime continuing to block any Syria-based operation against Israeli occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Of the three Iran auxiliaries, Hizbullah’s activities bothered the Israelis most: while confined to a small area on either side of the UN-described Blue Line (against which Israel’s 2000 withdrawal was to be measured), they forced Israel to concentrate troops on its northern border and displaced tens of thousands of Israeli civilians – although even more Lebanese were forced from their homes.
Israel kept its cool in the north as long as it was heavily involved in Gaza. There, its mission had gone beyond disproportionate retaliation, mushrooming into a full reoccupation with unprecedented destruction and massacres of genocidal proportions. ‘Deterrence’ has been taken to the extreme against Palestinians, which explains why people in the West Bank, who largely applauded the Hamas attack, have ignored the Islamist movement’s call to join its fight through all available means. Nonetheless, once Gaza had been almost completely reoccupied, the Israeli army began unleashing deadly raids on West Bank villages and towns on a scale comparable to its 2002 repression of the second intifada.
Israel prepares to enter Lebanon
As its focus turned to the West Bank, the Israeli army was also preparing its entry into Lebanon. Instead of repeating the bulldozer-like approach used in Gaza, it planned carefully. Israel pulled its punches for several months, killing hundreds of Hizbullah members in ‘surgical strikes’ that culminated in its September assault. In Lebanon more militants than civilians perished, whereas in Gaza the violence has been indiscriminate. This was a foretaste of a long-promised offensive.
After the pager attacks (17 and 18 September) and Nasrallah’s assassination (27 September), Israel quickly began sending ground troops into Lebanon. Biden’s hypocrisy was visible both in the additional $8.7bn in military aid he sent to Israel, seemingly timed to boost its efforts in Lebanon, and in his celebration of Nasrallah’s death (13).
Netanyahu was triumphant: Iran had been humiliated. Even Hizbullah members felt they had been used by their sponsor, which had neither come to the group’s rescue nor stuck out its own neck. Tehran tried again on 1 October to save face, sending a second volley of missiles into Israel – an escalation, as these were ballistic ones, harder to intercept than the drones and cruise missiles that had mostly been used in April. But the attack’s scope and impact were limited, evidencing Iran’s fear of being pulled into a broader conflict involving the US and potentially even the superpower’s local allies. That could invite a mass uprising against the Iranian regime, which is hated by much of its own people.
Netanyahu certainly dreams of dealing Iran a major blow that would set its nuclear programme back by several years and enshrine him as a supreme Zionist hero. He also faces pressure from allies on the extreme right as well as from the ‘centrist’ opposition, both of whom outbid him in advocating a major attack on Iran. But an attack on the country’s oil infrastructure could have invited Iranian retaliation in the Gulf, thus triggering a worldwide economic crisis and poisoning Israel’s relationships with the Arab oil monarchies.
Due to Iran’s size and distance from Israel, striking the nuclear sites would have required more than the indirect US involvement seen in Gaza and Lebanon. Biden took a step toward direct participation in October when he sent a battery of high-altitude antiballistic (THAAD) interception missiles, along with around 100 soldiers trained to use them, exposing American personnel to a possible Iranian reprisal. Once again, by arming and protecting its ally, the US administration flagrantly undermined its own supposed pressure on Netanyahu to exercise restraint.
But to effectively destroy Iran’s subterranean nuclear installations, one-tonne bombs – dozens of which were dropped to kill Nasrallah – wouldn’t be enough. Nor would the two-tonne, bunker-busting GBU-28s Obama gave Israel. Nothing less than the 12-to-15-tonne GBU 57s would do, each capable of penetrating 60 metres underground. Israel has neither these bombs nor the aircraft needed to use them (14), which is why Netanyahu opted instead for a more significant attack on Iran’s defence system than the one he ordered in April. Israel’s air strike on 26 October represented yet a further step towards direct US involvement in that the Biden administration did not hide the fact that it was fully informed of its scope and timing.
What happens next will depend on the outcome of the 5 November presidential election. A joint American-Israeli offensive on Iran seems much more likely under Trump than Harris. That is, unless Israel manages to drag Iran into a spiral that makes such an intervention inevitable.