Mick Hartley

Remember the Abraham Accords? – when it seemed that, at last, those Arab states alarmed by the rise of Iran and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, realised that their best hope lay in putting aside the old hatreds and aligning with Israel. October 7th put paid to that – at least for the moment, and perhaps for good. Despite a general feeling of weariness across the Arab world with the endless Palestinian victimhood taking all the headlines, Tehran has managed to keep it burning as a fundamentally Islamic issue – and they seem to be winning.

So now here we are, looking at a new war in Lebanon. Tom McTague at UnHerd:

Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.

By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.

With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.

Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered….

The stakes today are far higher for Israel than the war it has been waging in Gaza for the past 12 months. This war against Hezbollah is one that must reestablish the ability of Israel to be able to shelter its citizens within its own borders. It is, then, a battle for the very purpose Israel was founded.

In its ignorance and arrogance, the West believed it could contain the appalling disorder of the Middle East. But it has simply allowed Iran to grow in strength. Not only did 7 October shatter the failing assumptions of Benjamin Netenyahu’s grand strategy, it also revealed the Western world’s myopic passivity too. Today, the world is reaping the whirlwind.

Allowing Iran to grow in strength is largely down to the JCPOA, the central plank of Obama's Middle East policy turn, which has continued with Biden. Iran was treated as a responsible partner with whom deals could be done, while Israel was side-lined. You'd think those big brains in Washington would have realised that Tehran was a regime implacably opposed to everything the US is supposed to stand for – the "Death to America" chants were a clue – but they were all so determined to mark their difference from the Bush administration and all that embarrassing "axis of evil" stuff….