You know you’re following the right journalists, amid all the noise and international media hijack of the Gaza genocide, when their reading of the war turns out to be right again and again.
“Netanyahu will probably still escalate, maybe even hit inside Iran next time”, old friends in the Arab media told me after the tit-for-tat missile-drone exchange fizzled out rather quickly in April. He needed the war, long story short, and he needed direct US involvement, went the argument.
And he did just that, striking right in the heart of Tehran — killing Ismail Haniyeh in a Pasdaran guesthouse, to add insult to injury — and forcing Joe Biden to rush the USS Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt to the Gulf to “protect our friend and ally”.
But Iran didn’t retaliate, at least not yet, and the war didn’t expand.
I was reminded of this just yesterday, when Bloomberg ran the headline ‘Israel says push to return residents to north is now a war goal’. The Galilee region has been abandoned for almost a year now, ever since Hezbollah’s rocket-and-drone expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people triggered mass evacuation and housing of tens of thousands of residents in hotels.
That’s wrecked the economy, especially in the north; confirmed by reports of a cabinet budget brawl that sneaked its way to the press despite the usual blackout of all things related to the war. Lately, these displaced residents have joined weekly record protests demanding Bibi’s head, making a bigger war now more important than ever for him to hang on to power and evade the corruption trial, and possibly jail sentence, waiting for him as soon as he loses immunity.
The day after the Bloomberg report, he greenlighted the pager explosions that ripped through south Beirut and shocked the international media, but would not have taken too long for Hezbollah to factor in. The Lebanese militia, just like Hamas and PLO, has paid in blood and tears for Israel’s astonishing advances in espionage and subversion, after all, the deadly mix of Uncle Sam’s largest annual aid package to any country in the world and breakneck scientific research of the world’s most ruthless intelligence agency.
Shin Bet used Palestinian proxies to smuggle a rigged mobile phone to Yahya ‘The Engineer’ Ayyash, architect of suicide bus bombings in the early 1990s . Israeli agents poisoned Khaled Mashal, then Hamas head, in Amman in ’97, but he survived because Mossad chief Danny Yatom flew to Jordan with the antidote after King Hussein threatened to “f***ing hang them (the two agents) at day break!” during an angry call to Netanyahu. In 2010, Dubai police released detailed footage of 11 Mossad agents, posing as tourists, sent to kill Hamas weapons dealer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a luxury hotel, but only after they were safely back after a job well done.
Telephone bombs, roadside bombs, booby traps and guided missiles have taken out rebel leaders from Red Prince Ali Hassan Salameh of the Black September fame in Beirut in 1979 to Hezbollah number-2 Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008 to the latest string of assassinations in Lebanon and Gaza. Yet the resistance has always managed to adapt and improvise. Ayyash’s murder led to more, not less, bus bombings. Hamas went on to win an election and rule over Gaza in the new century, and Hezbollah has grown stronger all the time, to the point that a war with Lebanon now, unlike as recently as 2006, would require active US participation.
You can bet that Hezbollah understood only too well what Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi meant what he said, after Fuad Shukr’s assassination in July, that “we can reach every door and window in Beirut”. Yet even though the pager explosions would definitely have rattled Hezbollah’s high command, there seems more to it than meets the eye. For example, co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence Yossi Melman told The Guardian that while “we know that Mossad is able to penetrate and infiltrate Hezbollah time and again”, and the pager attack “enhances the chance of an escalation of the border crisis into a war”, it was still “more a sign of panic”. It was “not very targeted”, nor would it change the wider strategic picture, so “I don’t see any advance in it”.
The big question now, according to my Arab friends, is whether Washington was on board. There were reports that Biden sent his aircraft carriers only after Bibi was told, in very clear terms, that Washington better not be kept in the dark next time, complete with an “or else…” ending. How Hezbollah (read Iran) responds depends on how deeply the US was involved in the spectacular pager operation, whether joint US-Israeli action is baiting Iran or Netanyahu is stretching the limits of American support and patience.
Either way, the answer should come soon enough as Hezbollah continues to inflict small cuts and bleed the Israeli economy. “Action is approaching”, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz said after the government made repopulating the north a war goal. “Hezbollah will be hit hard, will lose capacity, and will have to back off”. But that’s not possible without US help.
As he redefines war goals and prepares to shuffle his war cabinet – he’s already “in discussions” to replace defence minister Yoav Gallant and army chief Herzi Halevi, who don’t agree with him – Netanyahu is playing with fire as his desperation for a bigger, wider war, so he can stay prime minister, makes him increasingly reckless.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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