The Tepid War

Nobody wants this war, not Israel, not Hezbollah, not Netanyahu, not Nasrallah. The only actors who do are Hamas, because a war in the north makes Israel far less likely to complete any objectives in Gaza, and Iran, who wants Hezbollah to fight their war for them. Everybody actually involved in this Northern dispute finds this potential for war a colossal disaster.

But this is the Middle East, a bad neighborhood where anything that makes you look weak gets you exploited. It may not even be your enemy who shivs you, it may be your longtime ally who uses this moment to charge you with weakness and remove you from power.

That is exactly the game Netanyahu plays. Dampen his reaction to Hezbollah's bombing and the self-destructive right wing of his cabinet may bolt. Do as his right-wing cabinet wants, and Israel may self-destruct: embroiling itself in a war that makes its entire north look like Gaza. A new red line of status quo shapes itself next to Netanyahu, and if he deviates even an iota from its path, he can cause a mistake that ends his political career... or at least it would end the career of anybody else.

This means that Netanyahu is stuck, as Hezbollah is, in a holding pattern where he needs to give the appearance of making war without actually making war. Even as Hezbollah built up its truly impressive weapons stockpile and created a tunnel network that may be even more intricate than Hamas's, Hezbollah has kept their border as peaceful as possible for eighteen years only to destroy that peace for the least possible gain. If Hezbollah wanted to inflict the most possible damage, they made a colossal strategic blunder by not keeping their border quiet until they were ready for a devastating attack. Their middling level of missile launches was enough to get the whole north of Israel evacuated. If Hezbollah wanted to inflict the maximum possible damage, they would have attacked very suddenly and not waited until after the North was evacuated, and if Hezbollah wanted to cross Israel's border to stage an attack like October 7th, who even is now there to be kidnapped?

I may be the only person in the world who thinks this, but I think there's a greater than 50% chance Israel didn't kill Hamas's Chairman (in exile) Ismail Haniyeh. Rather, I can't help speculating that he was killed by Iran as an excuse to make the war on Hamas into a regional war.

When Iran's president was killed, I said to myself 'this checks out.' Iran had just leveled a direct attack on Israel, and Israel needed to send the starkest possible message that this was unacceptable. Well, assassinating the second-most-powerful man in Iran is a pretty powerful message, but something about killing Haniyeh doesn't add up in the same way. Haniyeh was in charge of Hamas negotiations to effect a ceasefire and known as a moderate. Obviously, Haniyah's moderation is in the time honored tradition of Israel's enemies saying things in the western press that sound peaceful to liberals, then extolling the glory of holy war to the Arabic press - Arafat was a particular master of that tactic; but every Middle East expert seemed to think that, relatively speaking, Haniyeh was a moderating force in Hamas, perhaps THE moderating force, and hardly anybody in the Axis of Resistance wants to hear about moderation after October 7th, their greatest triumph.

There is no peace possible when the opposition kills their negotiating partner, and Hamas's new chairman is Yahya Sinwar, literally the man who engineered this war. So far, it would seem that the Middle East has no leader shrewder than this man - everything's gone according to his plan. Israel had little choice but to attack Gaza devastatingly, thus making Hamas look to the world like Palestine's only line of defense. Does Israel really want to face a leader that bellicose and formidable? Does Israel really think they can assassinate a guy who's been ten steps ahead of them at every turn?

There's always the chance that that is exactly what Netanyahu wants: a leader with whom peace is absolutely impossible, but I have to imagine there are similarly moderating forces among Israel's top military brass who would have warned starkly against killing Haniyeh for exactly the reason that replacing him makes negotiation impossible: no negotiation, no hostage deal. On the other hand, if Iran did it, then the assassination of a leader as eminent as Haniyeh could send a message to Hezbollah's Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, that he is not safe and could easily be replaced by those who do Iran's bidding.

So both Nasrallah and Netanyahu are in an impossible position. They must give the appearance of war without actually declaring war. They've declared just enough war to minimize the casualties: causing 150,000 people to evacuate from the border area - 60,000 from Israel's north, 90,000 from Lebanon's south. Both have the capability of bombing far further into each other's respective countries, but we are now a month out from Haniyeh's assassination, every day a response doesn't happen makes Iran look weaker. Perhaps Iran's waiting for the perfect plan to strike, but there's no such thing as a plan that's executed the way they watned. Hamas planned on using October 7th to hit Israel's nearest city, Sderot, which may have caused far greater casualties and kidnapping, but in an improvised move, they went to a music festival instead.

Just for context, Hamas seems to currently possess 6,000 rockets. I used to read figures claiming that Hamas had 15,000 rockets, which means the majority of them have already been fired. I have no doubt that Hamas's tunnel system allows them to slowly replenish their supply, but the damage Hamas can inflict on Israel is tiny compared to Hezbollah's potential for damage. Israel's Iron Dome, the anti-missile system largely funded by the US, can handle a lot of fire, but it cannot handle a consistent battery from the Hezbollah arsenal of 40,000-120,000 rockets. But even 120,000 rockets are minimal compared to the damage Israel can inflict on Lebanon. If either leader values his survival, let alone the survival of their people, it is in neither one's interest for a greater war to happen.

Israel and Hezbollah may have no choice but go to war, but both are doing everything to avoid it. What's going on in the north is obviously too violent to be called a cold war, but neither is it a hot war. For the moment, it's a decoy war, a room temperature war: tepid, middling, perfunctory, designed to keep business as usual as possible in both countries.

We'll see if the strategy works, but for the moment, whether they're coordinating this decoy together, they both have the same aim. These are the actions of actors who have no desire to do what they seem to be doing.