The Fury of History – New Statesman

The Fury of History – New Statesman

The Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union ended dramatically, not because of a military conflict or an international crisis, but because of domestic politics: Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms within the Soviet Union led not to a renewal but to the dismantling of the communist system itself. and that has , as we know, changed the world.

The postmodern Middle East could suffer a similar fate. The military conflict between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Arabs may lead to lulls and ceasefires, but ultimately cannot truly end until change occurs in Iran. This historic process has only been accelerated by the current war in Lebanon, in which Israel is pitted against Iran’s strongest military proxy force, Hezbollah.

The assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 27 and the subsequent Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon further weakens Iran, whose decades-long project in Lebanon may be reduced to rubble. The regional war that lies ahead will ultimately focus on Iran itself and its military-security complex. Iranian territory will become less and less taboo.

His clerical regime, in power since 1979, defines the region’s era to a far greater extent than even Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, himself a historic vital force who will resonate far longer than the forgettable mediocrities now dominating Europe and the United States USA govern. But it is Iran, a country of 88.5 million people and an ancient collection of Persian civilization (and not many Arab countries, which are just vague geographical expressions) that holds the key to the current regional war. Energy-rich Iran offers the money, military training, brilliant tactics and dynamic ideology of revolutionary nihilism (combining radical Islam with anti-Semitic fascism) that have made Hamas and Hezbollah what they are today. The older Arab-Israeli conflict over historic Palestine was a conventional dispute over states and territories. But the introduction of clerical Iran has added a new dimension to the struggle tiers-mondiste Quality, additionally permeated by a thousand-year-old religious call for the destruction of an entire people.

It is Iran that struck Israel on October 7, 2023, an event so dramatic and so brutal that it will be remembered like September 11th: a date so infamous that it has become one concept becomes. Of course, Iran was not responsible for the murders, rapes and hostage-taking in southern Israel. This is what Hamas and its activists and supporters did. The Iranian leadership may not have even known the exact timing of the event or even been uneasy about the magnitude of the event. But its longstanding, unwavering support of Hamas means its strategic fingerprints are all over the attack. If Iran had had a different regime, October 7 probably would not have happened – regardless of the anger and suffering of the Palestinians.

A portrait of murdered Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Tehran. Photo by Hossein Beris / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP

The October 7 attack, a culmination of Iran’s strategy to destroy Israel, represented a paradigm shift. Previously, the Gulf Arab regimes and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had complacently believed that it was possible to normalize relations with Israel and at the same time keeping the Palestinian problem in limbo. The Gulf Arab regimes, and MBS in particular, immediately became fed up with the Palestinians, fearful of Iran, and increasingly despised the wisdom and seemingly waning power of the United States, particularly vis-à-vis China. With America less helpful, they essentially needed Israel as a corporate acquisition to help them fight Iran in this new age of cyberwarfare. It was a great theory, but when Iran and Hamas discovered vulnerabilities in Israel’s internal security, they were able to implement a plan that made it impossible for the region to dismiss and forget the Palestinians ever again.

It is a tribute to the brilliant fascist nihilism of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, still at large in Gaza, that even if the Israelis manage to kill him, he will continue to influence the thinking of MBS and other Gulf Arabs. leaders have changed significantly. On October 7, 2023, Sinwar’s forces launched an attack reminiscent of the Holocaust. Sinwar knew that, having learned Hebrew in an Israeli prison and understood his enemy’s mind, he would provoke an Israeli military response of such devastating proportions that it would be impossible for MBS and his fellow sheikhs would believe they could ignore their own streets, who silently cried out for retaliation against the Israelis.

No matter how much Israel razes Gaza and topples the Hamas leadership, Sinwar has achieved his victory. The Israeli response included the complete destruction of a major urban cityscape and a slum landscape – even as the target of the attack, Hamas, despite its significant degradation, continued to merge with the population to rise up and fight again. Due to the scale of the Israeli military response, a simultaneous regional war was sparked in Lebanon and the Red Sea.

Israel is now fighting on all fronts, without a post-war plan for managing the occupied territories – again, exactly what Sinwar wanted. The Palestinian issue is back on the global diplomatic stage after years of neglect. In other words: Israel has suffered a strategic defeat, as it did in the 1973 war with the Arab states. Although the Egyptian Third Army was eventually surrounded and the Syrian army was pushed back to Damascus, the fact of the Arab surprise attack at that time led the Americans to force territorial withdrawals on Israel and to restore diplomatic relations between Washington and Cairo and Damascus. In both cases, in October 1973 and October 2023, Israeli arrogance was the culprit: their contemptuous belief that the Arabs were incapable of doing what they were doing. On October 7, this arrogance partly led to an over-reliance on technology, allowing young people to gather at a music festival protected not by soldiers but by electronic surveillance.

Israel is currently waging a war on multiple fronts: in Gaza, Lebanon and increasingly in the West Bank, where armed and deadly Islamic radicalism is steadily increasing. The Israeli military and intelligence services may be resourceful, but Israel’s entrepreneurial economy simply cannot withstand Armageddon for too long. Territorial concessions from Israel are not necessarily the answer either: Gaza was a de facto independent state without Israeli troops or settlers for two decades.

Since Israelis and Palestinians are doomed to conflict, the only way for Israel to achieve a strategic victory is if there is a domestic political change in Iran that leads to the collapse of the radical clerical regime and its replacement with a weaker, less aggressive one , less ambitious and less self-contained regime leads -opposite Iranian state. This is not a fanciful prospect. The regime is hated by an overwhelming majority of the population and is in a hardened, late-Soviet state. Mass protests have become an integral part of their politics, most recently in 2022 and 2023 against the requirement to wear hijab. Nothing in geopolitics lasts forever. Many once made the mistake of believing that the Shah’s system was eternal; You shouldn’t repeat the mistake. The collapse of the Shah was a world-historical event; The collapse of the ecclesiastical system in Tehran could also be the case.

Even obviously unpopular regimes do not end on their own. There has to be a trigger. Could a direct Israeli attack that embarrasses the Iranian government be a catalyst? Perhaps. But that could take years. Iran is extremely complex and has multiple centers of political power that are inaccessible to external actors. And remember, Israel cannot launch a serious attack on Iran until it first neutralizes Hezbollah. Far more powerful than Hamas, Hezbollah, with its tens of thousands of rockets, has the ability to retaliate against Israel on behalf of its Iranian patrons. Israel’s recent strikes against Hezbollah not only set the stage for the return of 60,000 Israeli civilians to northern Israel, but also have the advantage of preparing the battlespace for an eventual Israeli attack on Iran.

This is where we find ourselves now: one year later, the October 7 attack has triggered a chain of events that has not occurred in the past decades combined. The pace of the story is now rapid.

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