By framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in his speech to the US Congress last week, as part of a broader war against “an axis of terror in Iran,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu almost telegraphed, under the nose of the White House, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. “Give us the tools faster and we will finish the job faster,” he shouted in support of his request for expanded US military aid.
From escalation to escalation and from response to counter-response, Israel is dangerously tending to give in to a logic of total war not only in Gaza, but against all of its enemies in the Middle East. The risk is all the more immediate since the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was combined, a few hours apart, with that of a senior member of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Fouad Chokr, in an Israeli raid on a building in a densely populated district of Beirut.
The elimination of Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau, based in Qatar, confirms the idea, if it needed to be, that there is no question of Netanyahu’s far-right government negotiating anything with the Palestinians. The symbolism is powerful: he was assassinated at his residence in Tehran after he had just participated in the inauguration of the new “moderate” president Masoud Pezeshkian, elected in early July, in the presence of other representatives of the “axis of resistance” to Israel.
Haniyeh played a major role in Hamas’ military development, in collaboration with Iran, and took orders from Gaza’s hardline leader, Yahya Sinwar, who is considered the mastermind of the massacres committed in Israel on October 7, 2023. But he was also considered a pragmatist within the Palestinian armed movement, all things being relative. The fact is that he was at the center of efforts to end hostilities in the Gaza Strip. He was killed as negotiators from the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt were about to meet to try to restart talks for an elusive ceasefire.
For the Americans, this double targeted assassination therefore torpedoes their efforts to contain regional tensions and to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza — while providing the Israelis with their weapons to crush Hamas and the Gazans. Admitting his impotence or seeking to wash his hands of it, it is unclear, the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it known that the United States had not been informed of the operation in Tehran. Faced with Hezbollah, Israeli officials have been publicly toying with the idea of an open war with the Shiite armed organization for months. It is a long-standing conviction in the ranks of the IDF to think that they could put an end to it once and for all, if only they were given permission. The assassination of the influential Fouad Chokr, a man believed to have played a central role in the bombing that killed 241 US Marines in Beirut in 1983, serves as a last resort in this sense.
Everything in the clashes of varying intensity, but everywhere incendiary, which are tearing apart the Near and Middle East – in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq… – is an invitation to escalation, drives home the worst-case strategy. Everyone is playing with fire. Iran will inevitably avenge the strike attributed to Israel in the heart of Tehran and, for having been struck in Beirut, Hezbollah could now target Haifa or even Tel Aviv. If, for the moment, it is only a question for them of reestablishing “the balance of deterrence” without going as far as open war, the fact remains that, observers point out, the thirst is growing in the ranks of Hezbollah to see an extension of the domain of conflict. The same is true among the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, the Houthis in Yemen and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, where attacks on American bases are recurrent.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been dominated only by extremists of all stripes. The horizon is so blocked that any scenario for a negotiated end to the crisis seems ridiculously chimerical. A group of experts quoted by the columnist of World Jean-Pierre Filiu recently tried the exercise, proposing as an antidote to the “logic of total war” the formation of a coalition of Arab and Western states responsible for “the management of the post-war in Gaza” with the objective of achieving the creation of a Palestinian state. Without illusions, these experts assess the chances of success of their intellectual scaffolding at one in 10. However, it is difficult to contest their observation, notes Filiu, that only powers other than the protagonists will be able to produce the way out of the crisis.
Exactly. The “rosy scenarios” will remain so as long as there is no broad international will – including that of China – capable of overcoming the mere balance of power and the geostrategic interests of each party.