It’s St Crispin’s Day and troops are again gathering for battle. Gaza isn’t Agincourt and Binyamin Netanyahu is certainly no Shakespeare. “We will cripple it with a force it cannot even imagine,” he told Israeli troops on alert near the Lebanese border, anticipating a possible Hezbollah attack in the north just as soon as the Israelis launch a battle in the south against Hamas. There was no time left between helicopter pitstops for his speechwriters to weave in that Henry V line about being a band of brothers.
Israeli generals are reported to be impatient to wage what they believe will be a decisive ground war against the Hamas terrorist group; wait much longer, they reckon, and the soldiers will lose their edge. Yet Hezbollah units are keeping their heads down, perhaps guided by their Iranian paymasters who are still nervous about a war that will set the Middle East on fire. Hamas, having anticipated punitive airstrikes, are busy finding boltholes to survive bunker-buster bombs. The US is on alert for suicide bomb attacks against its personnel in Syria and Iraq. Everywhere there is the special, sticky, antebellum anxiety.
President Biden, in his now-frequent calls to the Israeli leader, urges not only restraint in combat but also the need for a plan to get out of Gaza once the Israelis have uprooted the Hamas leadership. The US war on terror has clear lessons. One is that stamping on a terrorist group invariably leads to a new generation of insurgents not long afterwards, a Hamas 2.0, just as the supposedly decapitated Taliban rode back into Kabul full of new ideas on how to ban the education of women.
Another lesson: if Israel is not going to permanently reoccupy Gaza, then it must engage diplomatically with countries that can help manage the strip in the future. There’s also a just-around-the-corner issue: will the Palestinian Authority survive on the West Bank? Nobody has an answer but knocking out Hamas does demand political groundwork as well as military mobilisation.
The advice coming to Israel from the Biden White House is to package the coming ground offensive in Gaza as a rescue operation for the hostages rather than a full-blooded attempt to extinguish Hamas. Hostage rescue wins international legitimacy and does not preclude closing down the Hamas tunnels, arms workshops and command hubs.
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This is sound counsel from the Americans. So too is broad western pressure on those, like the Nato ally Turkey, who give Hamas leaders space to plot and safely squirrel the money stolen from Gazans. Too many players on the sidelines of the Gaza drama — not just Turkey but Qatar and of course Iran — are waiting for Israel to fall on its face rather than for the emergence of a better, more secure life for the Palestinians.
The keynote of the region in its present turmoil is strategic ambiguity. Russia under President Putin has posed as a friend of Israel. The Kremlin leader is reported to enjoy a personal chemistry with Netanyahu and has tolerated the return of Jewish culture to Russia, while the Russian (and Ukrainian) diaspora lives at ease in Israel. At the same time, Hamas officials come and go from Moscow, holiday in Sochi, take Russian girlfriends, receive audiences with Putin. It’s an echo of Soviet days when Palestinian freedom fighters/terrorists were royally entertained.
Most puzzling of all has been an arrangement whereby Russia, which controls Syrian airspace, allows Israeli jets to hit Iranian weapons depots and barracks stationed near the Syrian-Israeli border. Last week Israeli planes shot up landing strips at Damascus and Aleppo airports, apparently to stop the landing of Iranian arms supplies for Tehran’s proxy armies, Hezbollah in particular.
All of this is greenlit by the Russians. But Iran is virtually a military ally of Russia, one of its prime suppliers for suicide drones against Ukraine. Iranian officers advise on drone swarming; Iranian engineers are helping to set up mass production lines for drones in Russian factories. Syria, for that matter, is an ally too, President Assad kept in power at the pleasure of the Kremlin. Intelligence reports meanwhile say that Javelin anti-tank missiles captured by the Russians during the Ukraine war have been passed on to Iran, which forwards them to Hezbollah.
Surely, I asked an Israeli source the other day, Russia will soon have to decide between Iran and Israel; the nature of war is that sides are chosen. No, he replied, Russia has already chosen Iran — partly because it’s essential to the survival of the Assad regime which provides a warm water port to the Russian navy and a foothold in the Middle East. But the relationship with Israel was about risk aversion. Israel has in the past used Russia to pass messages to Iran. There is communication with Moscow across multiple channels, through spooks, through foreign ministries (above all on Iran’s nuclear programme). “They have to understand our position on every important decision in the region,” my source said.
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Russia, seen as a sinister destabiliser in the West, could prove to be disruptive again in the Middle East. But Moscow might also be a restraining force on the Iranian regime if it does desperately sprint towards a nuclear bomb. Putin’s foreign policy mentor half a lifetime ago was Yevgeny Primakov, the KGB’s point man on the Middle East, a gifted Arabist whose primary strategic aim was to drive America out of the region. This is still Putin’s thrust. Recent history shows he might not be up to the challenge. The coming war will have many losers and he’s likely to be among them.
