Hamas v Israel: Choices Of War Over Peace
Has Israel Embraced A Wider Middle Eastern Conflict?
It is a grim testament to the enduring nature of war that, nearly twenty weeks after Hamas launched their brutal and genocidal attack on civilian targets within Israel, the war between Israel and Hamas still drags on.
The Israeli military has launched air raids on Rafah in southern Gaza after warning of an imminent ground offensive in the border city where an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians have sought shelter since fleeing attacks across the enclave.
Yet the war is no longer limited to the Gaza Strip, nor are the combatants limited to Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force—if indeed the parties to this conflict were ever limited to just those two entities.
Hezbollah has been increasing its rocket attacks on northern Israel, recently launching as many as 13 such attacks in a single day.
The total number of operations launched by Hezbollah today against the Israeli occupation as a response to Israeli attacks on South Lebanon and in support of the Palestinian people and their resistance has increased to 13.
In its most recent operation today, Hezbollah targeted for the first time the "Matzuva" settlement using Katyusha missiles mainly as a response to the Majdal Zoun Israeli attack.
The Houthi militias in Yemen have declared that Israeli, British, and American-owned ships are “banned” from the Red Sea.
Yemen’s Houthis have announced they have “banned” vessels linked to Israel, the United States and United Kingdom from sailing in surrounding seas, as the rebels seek to reinforce their military campaign, which they say is in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Houthi’s Humanitarian Operations Coordination Center sent formal notices of the ban to shipping insurers and firms operating in the region on Thursday, the Reuters news agency quoted a statement as saying.
On the “other side” of the conflict ledger, the US has slowly increased its military involvement, first with its reprisals against the Houthis which have now been going on for over a month.
Those reprisals were soon joined by additional attacks on Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria as reprisal for the deaths of 3 US Servicemen in Jordan at the end of January.
One reality is unmistakable, and has always been unmistakable: the conflict which started between Israel and Hamas is growing, is getting wider, and is pulling in more players on all sides.
Rightly or wrongly, incrementally, and by degrees, the players in the eternal Middle Eastern psychodrama are increasingly choosing war over peace.
Thus we do well to examine whether Israel is also embracing war rather than peace as it contends with Hamas and its roster of Iranian-backed “allies” in the region. We must examine this, because neither Israel, nor the Houthis, nor Hezbollah, nor any of Iran’s other proxies in the region, can achieve meaningful peace when they repeatedly make the choice for war.
It is easy to oversimplify the conflict as centering on Israel and Hamas. However, we must not lose sight of the reality that even Hamas, despite being a Sunni organization, has long been backed by Iran, and that Iran has from the start played a role in how events have unfolded.
Barely a week after Hamas’ launched its horrific attack on Israel, Iran’s Foreign Minister “warned” (read “threatened”) Israel with a wider war if the IDF invaded Gaza to go after the Hamas terrorists.
Iran has warned Israel of regional escalation if the Israeli military enters Gaza for a ground invasion as the war with Hamas enters its second week.
“If the measures aimed at immediately stopping the Israeli attacks that are killing children in the Gaza Strip end in a deadlock, it is highly probable that many other fronts will be opened. This option is not ruled out and this is becoming increasingly more probable,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Al Jazeera on Sunday.
Thus while we should be concerned that the conflict is in fact widening, we do well to understand that escalation and expansion of the conflict was in most regards inevitable. The question was never an “if”, but rather a “when” and a “how”.
We should not forget that there were signs of Iranian influence as groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis entered the fray in support of Hamas.
Yet that is not to say that the escalation of violence has all gone Iran’s way, as evidenced by the early January attacks on Iran by a resurgent ISIS.
Indeed, one of the challenges in simply assuming that the widening of the conflict was exclusively down to Iranian interventions via their numerous militia and terror proxies was the reality that many of the broader consequences arguably worked against Iran’s interests, or those of Iran’s key allies Russia and China.
It surely came as no great surprise when Iran also chose the path of reprisals, launching strikes in Iraq and Syria, ostensibly against ISIS terrorist targets as well as presumed Israeli intelligence assets in the region.
We must keep all this in mind as the backdrop for current doings in the Middle East, to realize that the escalations are not all on one side or the other, or that the inevitable expansion of conflict in the Middle East is down to one side or the other.
It is against this backdrop that we must assess recent Israeli attacks on presumptive Hezbollah targets in Damascus.
Several Israeli missiles hit a residential building in the Kafr Sousa district in Syria's capital Damascus on Wednesday, Syrian state media reported.
The neighbourhood hosts residential buildings, schools and Iranian cultural centres, and lies near a large, heavily-guarded complex used by security agencies. The district was targeted in an Israeli attack in February 2023 that killed Iranian military experts.
While the reporting is still tenuous, what is being said is that the target was a senior Hezabollah leader.
The Kan public broadcaster reports that the target of today’s alleged Israeli airstrike in Damascus was likely a senior Hezbollah official responsible for transferring weaponry from Iran to the Lebanese terror group’s fighters in the region.
Regardless of the target, Israel has several times since October 7 conducted such attacks on Syria and Lebanon.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz confirmed on Monday evening that Israel was behind the assassination of an elite Hezbollah commander, Wissam Hassan Tawil, in Lebanon, reported Israeli media.
"Regarding the elimination in southern Lebanon, we took responsibility for it," Katz said, cited by Israel's Ynet news website. The minister said the killing was part of the ongoing conflicts on the Israel-Lebanon border.
This was the first time that an Israeli official confirmed that Israel had perpetrated the airstrike on Monday, killing Tawil, 48, commander of Hezbollah's Radwan Force, in his hometown of Khirbet Silem, some 10 km from the border.
This growing list of Israeli attacks must be kept very much in mind as we apprehend the apparent sabotage of a natural gas pipeline in Iran last week.
Explosions struck a natural gas pipeline in Iran early on Wednesday, with an official blaming the blasts on a “sabotage and terrorist action” in the country as tensions remain high in the Middle East amid Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Details were scarce, though the blasts hit a natural gas pipeline running from Iran’s western Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province up north to cities on the Caspian Sea. The roughly 1,270-kilometer (790-mile) pipeline begins in Asaluyeh, a hub for Iran’s offshore South Pars gas field.
Iran has since accused Israel of being behind the sabotage.
An Israeli sabotage attack on an Iranian natural gas pipeline caused the multiple explosions that struck it a week ago, Iran’s oil minister alleged Wednesday, further raising tensions between the regional archenemies amid Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The comments by Iran’s Oil Minister Javad Owji come as Israel has been blamed for a series of attacks targeting Tehran’s nuclear program.
The “explosion of the gas pipeline was an Israeli plot,” Owji said, according to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency. “The enemy intended to disturb gas service in the provinces and put people’s gas distribution at risk.”
While such an attack is definitely within the ambit of Israel’s intelligence and covert operations entities, as of this writing definitive evidence of Israeli involvement or Israeli admission of that involvement has not been forthcoming. Given the recent ISIS attacks in Iran, we are ill-advised to blithely accept Iran’s version of the sabotage; there are actors besides Israel who wish to do Iran harm.
Why would Israel undertake such operations against Iran? Specifically, why would Israel undertake such operations against Iran now, within the current climate of growing conflict arising out of the October 7th attack?
One thesis that is being advanced within corporate media is that Israel—and in particular Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—is being positioned by the United States as the public face of a new regional alliance against Iran.
Specifically, the US is offering him the chance to become the face of a new alliance against Iran, formed with the US and several Gulf nations.
Mr Netanyahu would become the US’s point person in the great geopolitical fight of the coming years – a globally important role that would see him go down in history not just as the man who let Oct 7 happen.
This role would, or so the thesis goes, come as a quid pro quo for a ceasefire in Gaza, and potentially Israeli acceptance of a “two state solution” to the larger conflicts between Israel and the Arabs in both Gaza and the West Bank.
This thesis also fits rather neatly within what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has recently termed “The Biden Doctrine”.
A Biden Doctrine — as I’m terming the convergence of strategic thinking and planning that my reporting has picked up — would have three tracks.
On one track would be a strong and resolute stand on Iran, including a robust military retaliation against Iran’s proxies and agents in the region in response to the killing of three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan by a drone apparently launched by a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.
Friedman’s basis for this “Biden Doctrine” is predicated on the need for the US to develop a muscular response to Iran’s efforts at hegemony-by-proxy in the Middle East.
The rethinking underway signals an awareness that we can no longer allow Iran to try to drive us out of the region, Israel into extinction and our Arab allies into intimidation by acting through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — while Tehran blithely sits back and pays no price.
Israel deploying its espionage assets to carry out a variety of covert operations against Iran would quite easily fit within such a presumed doctrinal shift within US strategic thinking towards the Middle East.
Yet even without the various hypotheses and grand geopolitical doctrines, what is unfolding is that Israel is steadily expanding its range of targets even as the Israeli-Hamas war is expanding beyond Gaza. With or without a new regional alliance to counter Iranian mischief in the Middle East, Israel is expanding its military efforts to eliminate Hamas, with Hezbollah now coming into renewed focus as a principal Israeli adversary and security threat.
Regardless of how this current cycle of conflict began, and regardless of which actors catalyzed which actions, the scope of conflict in the Middle East is widening, and it is not merely widening because of Iranian efforts or US reprisals.
Is Israel justified in embracing an expanded war? It takes no great understanding to recognize that Israel certainly thinks so—and the Netanyahu government in particular certainly thinks so. At the same time, there is no denying that Hezbollah has itself been escalating its attacks against northern Israel.
Yet to justify Israel—or to condemn Israel—for expanding its range of military operations with respect to its war with Hamas is in every regard a choice of war instead of peace. In the same vein, whether we justify or condemn Iran for its efforts to create greater conflict in the Middle East, we are still making a choice of war instead of peace.
My stance in this regard has not changed. What I desire for the Middle East, what I desire for all the world, is peace. For myself, I choose peace over war. For Israel, for the Arabs in Gaza, for Iran, for the Houthis in Yemen, I pray for peace.
If there is to be any hope for bringing this bloodshed to a quick and lasting resolution, we must have the honesty and integrity to acknowledge that if we choose a side—either side—we are choosing war and not peace. If we stand with Israel or if we stand with Hamas, or if we choose the Palestinian Arabs apart from Hamas, we are choosing war and not peace.
To choose peace means choosing an end to the violence. It does not mean choosing one side’s violence over the other.
Regardless of justification, Israel seems to be choosing war over peace. The United States has clearly chosen war over peace. Iran has from the outset chosen war over peace. And so we have more war and less peace.
One thing is always certain: those who choose war over peace will always find war, and never peace.
I also choose peace over war, but the whole Middle East mess has been going on since the end of WW2 (or several thousand years earlier, depending on how you look at it). No one has been able to come up with a solution. “What if they gave a war...and nobody came?” is a nice idea, but probably is never going to apply to this situation.
Shortly after Oct.7, I listened to an interview with Condoleeza Rice regarding the Hamas attack. She made the point that Israel has been making concessions, in exchange for promised peace, to various Palestinian groups for decades - but has not received the promised peace. Now Hamas has made this horrific attack, starting a war, and Israel is forced to fight for it’s very survival. There is now no way for Israel to make concessions without ‘rewarding’ terrorist aggression, thus endangering itself further.
So, what do you think, Peter? Do you see a pathway by which Israel can accept a ‘two state’ solution - politically, and without weakening itself militarily? (And yes, if you do you could win the Nobel Peace Prize - but I still ask because you are wise and insightful.)
Peace, the concept seems to be failing right now, and when the Chinese Communists start their 'operations' here, it will be really seen as failing.