Photo From: AP Photo/Abed Khaled

Understanding Israel’s war | Opinion

By Robert G. Rabil

The Lebanese Shi’a Islamist party, Hezbollah, emerged at the intersection of three momentous developments. First, beginning in the 1960s, Shi’a religious scholars began mobilizing their marginalized community with the objective of empowering it on the communal and state levels.

Second, the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979 sent shockwaves across the Middle East, leading to the belief that Islamism as an ideology was the answer to all the failed “isms,” spanning the gamut from capitalism to communism. Central to this development was the adoption by Shi’a religious scholars of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary doctrine Wilayat al-Faqih (Rule by the Just Jurist), which asserted that only senior clerics are sanctioned to rule the Muslim community because they are equipped with the knowledge to interpret and apply God’s divine mandate on earth as set forth in the Koran. Khomeini’s binary division of the world as oppressors and oppressed resonated with members of the Shi’a community.

Finally, the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982, against the backdrop of the Shi’a community bearing the brunt of Israel’s retaliation for the PLO’s acts of terrorism originating from southern Lebanon, transformed all three of these developments into a crucible that churned out a radical Islamist movement, Hezbollah, or the Party of God, which has been guided by an eschatological ideology revolving around fighting Israel as the oppressor

Robert G. Rabil served as chief of emergency of the Red Cross in East Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war and as project manager of the U.S. State Department-funded Iraq Research and Documentation Project. Supported by Iran and Syria for ideological and strategic reasons, Hezbollah led a campaign to evict Israel and its proxy, the South Lebanon Army, from southern Lebanon.

Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 not only enhanced the power of Hezbollah but also removed the barrier to Iran’s regional projection of power. From 2000 until his assassination in 2020, General Qassem Suleimani, Commander of the Quds Force in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, played a key role in organizing and strengthening pro-Iranian proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Gaza and Lebanon. Hezbollah served as both a military and political paradigm for pro-Iranian proxies, especially after its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, triumphantly declared that the “Islamic Resistance” had dealt a blow to American Middle East strategy and defeated Israel in the 2006 summer confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel.

Despite the fact that half of Lebanon was destroyed and hundreds were killed in the 2006 war, Nasrallah declared a “divine victory” over Israel. After its inconclusive war against Hezbollah, and by extension Iran, Israel focused on eliminating senior militants in the ranks of Hezbollah and senior Iranian officials, including its nuclear and military defense scientists. This ushered in a clandestine war between Iran and Israel, which has played out in many countries.

It was against this background that Suleimani orchestrated a master plan entailing aid to Iranian proxies, evicting the United States from Iraq and Syria, and ringing Israel with an array of militias equipped with enormous quantities of rockets, missiles and drones.

Despite its successes in the clandestine war against Iran, Israel has not been able to totally stop the country’s maneuvering and derail Suleimani’s plan, even after his death. Significantly, Iran grew bolder in the aftermath of the eruption of the Ukraine war. The Western alliance against Russia pushed Moscow into the arms of Tehran, which was readily disposed to support Russia’s war efforts and transform its relationship with Russia into a strategic alliance. This dovetailed neatly with the attempt of Russia, China and many countries in the global south to end American global hegemony and create a multipolar international system.

Hamas’ barbaric attack against Israel goes beyond the Israel-Palestine conflict and is an integral part of the late Suleimani’s plan to evict the United States from the Middle East and plunge Israel into an attritional regional war in which Iraq’s pro-Iranian al-Hashd al-Sha’bi, Yemen’s pro-Iranian Houthis, Syria’s pro-Iranian militias, Palestine’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah’s thousands of rockets, missiles and drones would paralyze Israel into a traumatic inaction.

Significantly, this axis and its patron know that Israel and United States may win the day; nevertheless, they are certain that their victory would be a pyrrhic one. From their standpoint, they will again declare a divine victory because they can stomach casualties who will be considered martyrs, whereas Israel will neither be able to stomach high casualties nor change this new regional configuration.

The United States and Israel should prevent the spillover of the Gaza war into a regional one by working with their Arab and international allies, while at the same time reconsidering their foreign policies by recognizing that managing the Arab-Israeli conflict is not a prescription to regional stability and admitting that pushing Russia into the arms of Iran and China has had negative global repercussions inimical to American and Israeli national interests, especially in the Middle East.

*Robert G. Rabil is professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon (2003); Syria, United States and the War on Terror in the Middle East (2006); Religion, National Identity and Confessional Politics in Lebanon: The Challenge of Islamism (2011); Salafism in Lebanon: From Apoliticism to Transnational Jihadism (2014); The Syrian Refugee Crisis in Lebanon: The Double Tragedy of Refugees and Impacted Host Communities (2016); and most recently White Heart (2018). The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of FAU. He can be reached @robertgrabil.