Hassan Nasrallah is dead. The Hezbollah he led is in tatters. Israel and Iran stand on the brink of all-out, devastating war. For the optimists, it is the supreme opportunity.
The Iranian regime will fall “sooner than people think”, as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it inan address to the Iranian public (delivered in English).
“When that day comes, the terror network that the regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled,” he announced. “Our two ancient peoples, the Jewish people and the Persian people, will finally be at peace.”
“Israel has now its greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East,” Naftali Bennet, former Prime Minister and perennial Netanyahu rival, wrote after Iran fired rockets at Israel on Tuesday night. “The leadership of Iran, which used to be good at chess, made a terrible mistake this evening.
It’s not only the politicians who are pushing for a decisive, region-changing war. There’s a large constituency inside Israel who believe things must change fundamentally, and via airstrike and infantry assault if necessary.
It is driven by a cocktail of fatigue, years of conflict, cynicism about the moribund peace process, and fury and fear at the slaughter perpetrated on October 7 last year.
“Look at it this way,” said Major Moshiko Giat, a veteran IDF special forces officer who fought in the last war in Lebanon (in 2006). Israel is surrounded by people who “want to kill you. To butcher you. They proved it on the 7th of October. They’re proving it in various other examples”.
“So to come and tell me, ‘Listen, I gained 18, 20, 25 years of peace’. What’s the meaning of that? That in another 10 years, maybe 15 years, they’ll come back? Yes. So probably my son, or my daughter, or my granddaughter or my future family are going to be at risk? Yes.
“Why? Why? Why can’t we actually get to some thought that it’s going to be different?”
Destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, on the eve of the anniversary of the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. Photo / AFP
Major Giat’s preferred answer to changing the paradigm is to “teach them a lesson by telling them Israel is here forever” in such a way even the terror groups will acknowledge.
For many Israelis there is an obvious emotive appeal to finally beheading the snake (or decapitating the “octopus”, as Bennett put it). But beyond Israel’s borders, allies fear doing so may prompt a catastrophic, even nuclear, bloodbath.
So with the region on the brink, which fate awaits.
‘If you play this game, you have to pick between peace and war’
In some ways, the conflict between Iran and Israel makes no sense at all. They share no land border or territorial quarrels, they have common historic enemies in the form of the Sunni Arab monarchies, and the general public in Iran does not really share the anti-Israel animus of the regime.
After all, it was Cyrus the Great who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity. Before the 1979 revolution, the two countries were quite close allies.
But the Islamic Republic of Iran “has never really been a project about how Iran should be”, says Arash Azizi, author of What Iranians Want. “It has always been a project about how the world should be: a world without Israel and in which the United States is not a power broker.”
“It’s Bader-Meinhoff meets Nasserism. But Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the last of the revolutionary generation who really believes in this stuff,” explained Azizi.
Perhaps that is why yesterday, at a rare address to Iranians at Friday prayers, Khamenei said Israel “will not last long”.
Faced with overwhelmingly superior enemies in the United States and Israel, and a population with bitter memories of all-out war with Iraq in the 1980s, he has long advocated “strategic patience” — spending billions on building an “Axis of Resistance” that at an unspecified date in the future would finally eliminate Israel, but which for now would foment revolution and act as a forward line of defence for the Iranian homeland and regime.
It is a vision with obvious parallels to revolutionary Soviet ideology of the 20th century. And to borrow another phrase of that era, it is now falling apart under its internal contradictions.
Protesters during a rally in Istanbul, on the eve of the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack. Photo / AFP
“Since 2019, Iran’s policy was no war, no peace. It’s a bit like the Israeli idea of de-escalation through escalation — it’s too smart by half, and it turns out there is no such a thing as no war, no peace, and that if you play this game, you have to pick between peace and war,” said Azizi.
“And that’s exactly where Khamenei is. Now, he has to pick between peace and war. The problem is, peace means giving away his anti-Zionist street cred, and war means destruction of his regime.”
Azizi says his military contacts in Iran are genuinely worried. Hezbollah was the jewel in the crown of the axis, its massive rocket arsenal viewed as Iran’s principal non-nuclear deterrent against Israel — and most specifically against potential Israeli strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
It is now in tatters and Iran does not have much of an airforce to meet an Israeli strike on the homeland. The hawkish Bennet is right: Iran is more exposed than at any time in recent history. So obvious is the danger that some hardliners in Tehran have even denounced Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who planned and executed the October 7 massacre, as a “Zionist spy”.
“A former official of the Ahmadenijad government said it, and he didn’t face any blowback for it,” said Azizi. “Iran is crazy with conspiracy theories. But in reality the conspiracy theories reflect a truth, and the truth is the October 7 attack has proved the undoing of the axis in many ways.”
So far, the Iranians have tried to walk a very narrow line. Bizarre as it is, the hope in Tehran seems to have been that Tuesday night’s 200-missile barrage against Israel would be seen as restrained, within the rules, and even responsible.
As with the last Iranian attack on Israel in April, they signalled it well in advance and gave Israel and its allies time to evacuate key targets and intercept many of the rockets. Only one person, a Palestinian man in the West Bank, was killed.
It even wrote a letter to the United Nations Security Council saying it acted “in full compliance with the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law, has only targeted the regime’s military and security installations with its defensive missile strikes”.
“If you read some of the statements made by Iranians in the past 24 hours after the attack, it’s pretty clear what they are saying is ‘we would like to draw a line under this”, Sir Simon Cass, a former British ambassador to Tehran and nuclear negotiator, said this week.
“They found themselves in an impossible position. If they didn’t respond to the killing of Nasrallah they would look weak. That always worries the Iranians, that people will take them lightly. On the other hand if you do respond, what is the risk that you pull the roof in down on your own head?
“I think they would like to de-escalate. But my word, that is going to be very difficult to do.”
Nuclear tipping point
For Israeli hawks, that is all the more reason to act now. But this is where Israel, once again, differs sharply from many of its allies.
Until now it was thought (or hoped) by many Western watchers of Iran that the regime was content to remain just below the nuclear threshold.
It was a logical way of having some of the diplomatic leverage of nuclear deterrence without incurring the massive international punishments that building a bomb would incur.
That’s hardly an ideal situation, but it gave some space for diplomats like Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to keep talks going in a bid to avert possible proliferation.
For many Western governments, giving Iran a reason to abandon that cautious stance and build a weapon is the opposite of good statecraft.
But with its non-nuclear deterrent exposed as a paper tiger, Netanyahu calling for regime change, and the United States and Israel more or less publicly debating a strike on Iranian oil facilities, that calculation could change.
Strikes on refineries would be much more disruptive and dangerous for Iran’s economy and public — and hence for the survival of the regime — than the destruction of the nuclear labs.
Which means at this point, regime insiders would not have to share the Supreme Leader’s revolutionary anti-Zionism to see the case for a nuclear insurance policy.
In theory, it wouldn’t take them long. Iran is believed to have enough near-weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb in months, if not weeks, of choosing to do so. They already have the long-range missiles to tip with the warheads.
That does not mean there would be a nuclear war — although there might well be. The enduringly weird point of nuclear weapons is that they are not meant to be used, and with the exception of the end of World War II, they never have been.
Perhaps Iran and Israel, which has long had its own unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, would just end up locked in a Cold War-style missile stand-off. That would probably suit the regime in Tehran, clearly the weaker side in the present war.
But they would not remain the only members of the Middle Eastern nuclear club for long. Saudi Arabia has been explicit about its own intention to seek a bomb if Iran gets one, for example.
And it is not just the Saudis. Grossi of the IAEA told the Telegraph in July that several “other countries in the region” have said they, too, would seek a deterrent. “The moment you have two or three countries with nuclear weapons, the possibility of their use is very high,” he warned.
A grand bargain for peace
There is another view of how this ends. “History would tell that you’re never wrong if you take a pessimistic view,” said Alastair Burt, a former UK Minister for the Middle East who has spent years wrestling with the topic of a two-state solution.
“But I have written fairly regularly since October the 7th, on the basis that this is now so awful, and we are never going back to October the 6h, that only something positive can come out of it.
“By that, I mean that whether or not you agree that the Palestinian issue is the central issue in the region, it is certainly used as a cause for those who can hitch their wagon to it, to make their case for a Middle East which is anti-West, anti-American.
“Now that it’s very clear that if normalisation of Israeli ties with UAE and Saudi is to mean anything at all, it has to encompass a Palestinian dimension. I see in that an opportunity.”
Arab nations insist they are prepared to do their part. Only this week, Ayman Safadi, the Jordanian Foreign Minister, vented his frustration at the United Nations. “Ask any Israeli official what is their plan for peace, and you’ll get nothing,” he said. “We are members of the Muslim Arab Committee, mandated by 57 Arab and Muslim countries, and I can tell you unequivocally that all of us are willing, right now, to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation [of the West Bank] and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state.”
Trust is low on all sides, making a deal almost impossibly hard to secure, but Joe Biden’s White House is putting huge effort into making it work.
The grand bargain envisioned by the Americans and Saudis, among others, goes something like this: to cement the peace gained by a ceasefire and release of hostages, Israel would commit to an arrangement for a two-state solution leading to a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Saudi Arabia and the other neighbouring Arab states would in turn guarantee Israeli security and shoulder the cost of rebuilding the new Palestinian state, including in Gaza.
A cleverly structured deal in which the benefits of peace ratchet up and offer a clear, non-violent path to the goal of a Palestinian state would put the terror groups out of business. Hamas or Hezbollah would have the option of putting on suits and attempting to govern legitimately, or fading into irrelevance.
Israel would get security and the Palestinians would get a state and reconstruction. Israel, its Sunni Arab neighbours and the United States would form a single security bloc against Tehran.
The Gulf states would get their own benefits. America has reportedly offered sweeteners, including a bilateral security guarantee and civilian nuclear technology for the Saudis.
And for America, it would have the added benefit of rebottling the Iranian genie it unleashed with the 2003 invasion of Iraq that opened the door to the westward expansion of Iranian influence into Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
This neat solution is highly appealing to those who view international relations as a clever parlour game.
The problem with that idea is selling it to the people on the ground. The two-state solution is very popular among Western politicians and diplomats, acknowledges Burt, but not so much with people on the ground.
Major Giat rather gloomily complains outsiders do not understand the mentality of Israel’s enemies. He’s not alone in feeling there is no peace to be made with people who want to kill you.
Demarcation of borders and the future of Israeli settlements on the West Bank would be a very difficult sticking point, and not only for ideological reasons. Israel is a tiny country with a growing population and not enough room. Rents, not to mention other consumer costs, are through the roof. Anxiety about finding a place to live is a constant part of day-to-day life.
So the right-wing settler movement is mixed up with the kind of basic bread-and-butter politics that makes any move that looks like giving up land difficult.
The answer, some hope, lies in an old axiom of Middle Eastern politics: that it is only the hardmen who have the political credibility to make the generous concessions that can bring peace.
The greatest single step towards peace in the Middle East, the Israel-Egypt peace agreement of 1978, was made by Anwar Sadat, ruthless dictator and architect of the Yom Kippur war, and Menachem Begin, a former terrorist so extreme that mainstream Zionists for a long time wanted nothing to do with him.
By the same token it was Yitzhak Rabin, hero of the Six-Day War, and Yasser Arafat, a career terrorist, who signed the Oslo Accords. Ariel Sharon, the general who led the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, pulled Israeli settlements out of Gaza.
Could the man who killed Hassan Nasrallah, crushed Hezbollah, and reduced Gaza to fine powder have enough credibility to do the same?
American diplomats, it is said, have been trying to persuade Benjamin Netanyahu that he could. Be a statesman, they whisper in his ear. Lead the country where no one has before. The public could follow you.
Return to the grim status quo
So far, Netanyahu has resisted those voices. There are domestic political reasons to do so. He is reliant on a coalition including small far-right parties in the Knesset to stay in power, although a recent addition has neutered the threat of Itamar Ben Gvir’s ultra-nationalists bringing him down by quitting.
He has also built a political career on opposing the two-state solution. To turn around now and accept it would take chutzpah that even he might struggle to muster.
For some, it is simply a question of character. Netanyahu, said another former official who spoke on condition of anonymity, is just not Menachim Begin. Nor is there anyone of the stature of Sadat or Arafat on the other side.
And history tells us the most likely outcome is a continuation of a grim status quo. Israeli conscripts will fight on three fronts. Palestinians will continue to live with the humiliation of blockade or occupation. Major Giat’s grandchildren probably will have to fight again, despite his best efforts.
For Lebanon there is the prospect of an open-ended Israeli occupation in the south, a collapsed state, and the threat of another inter-confessional civil war as armed groups take advantage of the chaos.
For Iran, an even deeper social and economic crisis than the one already under way that will either cement the IRGC’s mafia-like grip on power, or trigger a collapse that would make “Iraq after 2003 look like a walk in the park”, said Azizi.
“Israel attacking a couple of places in Iran won’t create an alternative. The military people I have talked to are very worried,” he said. “Yes it could be the unravelling of the regime. Hell, for a lot of us it could be the unravelling of our country. And that’s what is so worrying.”
The ruins of countries where despots have recently been challenged offers grim warning.
“Do we want the regime gone? Yes. Do we want the regime gone at any price? No. Do I want Iran to be Syria? No. Do I want Iran to be Libya? No.”
