One year after Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks, regional conflict is raging with no end in sight

Analysis | Middle East

Paul R. Pillar, Oct 07, 2024

The Biden administration is not only endorsing but also on the verge of actively assisting a new Israeli armed attack on Iran. National security adviser Jake Sullivan says that the United States is working directly with Israel regarding such an attack. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” declares President Joe Biden.

The projected attack serves no U.S. interests. The attack perpetuates a broader pattern of escalating violence in the Middle East that also serves no U.S. interests. The Iranian missile salvo to which the coming Israeli attack is ostensible retaliation was itself retaliation for previous Israeli attacks. Retaliation for retaliation is a prescription for an unending cycle of violence.

The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations. A sustained Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian-related targets within Syria elicited a response only when it escalated to an attack on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing senior Iranian officials. Even then, the Iranian response, in the form of an earlier salvo of missiles and drones in April, was designed and telegraphed in a way to make a show of defiance but — with most of the projectiles certain to be shot down — to cause minimal damage and almost no casualties.

When Israel assassinated visiting Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a government guest house in Tehran in July — the sort of attack that would elicit a quick and forceful response by the U.S. or Israel if it happened in one of their capitals — Iran did nothing until last week. It finally acted only after yet another Israeli attack— this time an assault on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer along with Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Far from being motivated by any grandiose ambitions of regional dominance or desire to destabilize the region, Iranian leaders believed that they were getting killed by a thousand cuts from Israel and that they had to respond to the repeated Israeli attacks lest they lose the confidence not only of their own people but of regional allies. The missile firings that constituted Iran’s retaliation, like the ones in April, again caused minimal damage or casualties.

By cooperating with Israel in a new attack, the United States is assisting a state that has been responsible for most of the escalation and the vast majority of death and destruction in the Middle East for at least the past year. Although Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October is commonly seen as the starting point of the subsequent mayhem in the Middle East, the question of who is responding to whom could go back farther than that. For example, the 1,200 deaths from that Hamas attack, horrible to be sure, were fewer than the number of Palestinians that Israel had killed in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip just from the day-to-day operations of the occupying Israeli army, supplemented by settler violence in the West Bank, during the previous eight years.

Since the Hamas attack, the devastating Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has gone far beyond anything that can be construed as defense, or even as a response to Hamas, and has brought suffering to innocent civilians that is orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas or any other Palestinian group has ever done. The still-rising official death toll exceeds 41,000, with the actual number of Palestinian deaths probably much higher and likely into six figures. Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble and rendered unlivable.

After Hezbollah fired rounds into Israel last October in a show of support for the Palestinians in Gaza, the story of conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier has mainly been one of repeated Israeli escalations. Israeli attacks in Lebanon have far exceeded Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in number but especially in physical effects, with almost no casualties within Israel apart from a few military personnel at the border. The rapidly rising toll of deaths in Lebanon from Israeli attacks has now passed 2,000, with about 10,000 injured and about 1.2 million people displaced from their homes. As in the Gaza Strip, civilians constitute much and perhaps most of that toll, including as a result of Israeli airstrikes that have demolished residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods.

As a growing Israeli ground assault in Lebanon accompanies the aerial bombardment, Israel has told people in almost the entire southern third of Lebanon to move north, even though Israel already has been conducting lethal aerial attacks throughout Lebanon, including as far north as Tripoli. This also is reminiscent of the pattern in Gaza, in which residents are told to move, only to be bombed again in their new location.

The offensive Israeli actions that figure into confrontation with Iran — including the aerial and clandestine assassination operations in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran — also have each constituted escalation. Those operations appear designed at least in part to goad Iran into entering a wider war, preferably one that also involves the United States.

Other motives behind the Israeli escalation are multiple and vary with the specific target. The deadly assaults on the Palestinians — in the Gaza Strip and increasingly also in the West Bank— are part of a long-term effort to use force to somehow make Israel’s Palestinian problem go away, through a combination of outright killing, inducing exile by making a homeland unlivable, and intimidation of any who remain.

Israel’s officially declared objective for its attacks in Lebanon is to permit a return home of the 70,000 temporarily displaced residents of northern Israel — whose numbers constitute less than six percent of the Lebanese who have been driven from their homes so far by the Israel offensive. That objective is genuine, but an escalating war along Israel’s northern border only places the objective farther out of reach. The Israeli operations also clearly are designed to cripple Hezbollah as much as possible, although they sustain and heighten the sort of anger that led to Hezbollah’s establishment and growth in the first place.

An Israel that is the strongest military power in the Middle East and is throwing its armed might around in seemingly every direction but the Mediterranean Sea is a nation drunk on the use of force and stumbling into still more use of it with little or no apparent attention to any long-term strategy for achieving an end state, other than living forever by the sword. Each tactical success, including the killing of a prominent adversary such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, only seems to deepen the inebriation.

Beyond this, one gets into a mixture of motivations that are specific to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ones shared with other Israeli policymakers. It is widely recognized, including by Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, that he has a personal stake in continuing and even escalating Israel’s wars. This is partly because of the usual rally-round-the-flag effect that attenuates the political problems of a wartime leader. It is also more specifically because Netanyahu is dependent on the support of the most extreme members of his right-wing ruling coalition to hold that coalition together, thereby keeping Netanyahu in power and delaying the day he has to confront fully the corruption charges against him.

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An armed attack on Iran would extend the Israeli policy— not unique to Netanyahu, although he has been its most prominent exponent — of stoking maximum hostility toward, and isolation of, Iran. That policy serves to weaken a rival for regional influence, to place blame for everything wrong with the region on someone other than Israel, to inhibit any engagement with Iran by Israel’s patron the United States, and to divert international attention away from Israel’s own actions.

The diversion seems to work. The international attention to what may come next in the confrontation with Iran, in addition to the escalating operations in Lebanon, has meant less attention than would otherwise have been given in newspapers and the airwaves to the continued carnage in the Gaza Strip that claims civilian lives, such as Israeli attacks within the last few days on a girls’ school and an orphanage that several hundred displaced persons were using as shelter.

The U.S. presidential election provides another motivation for the Israeli government to escalate regional warfare. Netanyahu certainly would like to see a second term for Donald Trump, who gave Israel just about anything it wanted during his previous time in office, with nothing in return except political support for Trump. This relationship is part of a broader political alliance between the Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To the extent an escalatory mess in the Middle East causes problems for the Biden administration and thereby hurts the election chances of Vice President Kamala Harris, that is a bonus from Netanyahu’s point of view.

Netanyahu is more likely to enjoy that bonus and the other fruits of ramping up conflict with Iran to the extent that the United States gets directly involved in that conflict. Such involvement not only makes the politically costly mess for the Biden administration all the messier, but also enables Netanyahu to claim credibly that he has the United States fully at his side in his government’s lethal activities.

None of these Israeli objectives are in the interest of the United States. Several of the objectives, such as hamstringing any U.S. diplomacy that involves Iran, are directly and manifestly opposed to U.S. interests.

Israel’s regional warfare — and more specifically a U.S.-backed attack on Iran — would harm U.S. interests in several additional ways.

Closer association with Israel’s lethal operations increases the chance of reprisals, including terrorist reprisals. It also worsens U.S. isolation in international politics.

Supporting or participating in an Israeli attack on Iran would further undermine U.S. claims to be in favor of peace and observance of a rules-based international order. It would mean attacking the country that in this confrontation has exercised restraint in the interest of avoiding war and is firmly in support of ceasefires on each of the fronts seeing combat. It would mean aiding further attacks by the country that in the same confrontation has inflicted far more death and destruction, and done more to promote escalation of the violence, than any other in the region.

An attack on Iran would roil the oil market and cause economic dislocations that would reach the United States, especially but not solely if such an attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.

An attack would set back any chance for fruitful diplomacy involving Iran on matters such as security in the Persian Gulf region.

An attack would increase the chance that the Iranian regime would choose to develop a nuclear weapon. Nothing would be better designed to strengthen the arguments of those in Tehran willing to take that step than armed attacks demonstrating that Iran does not now have a sufficient deterrent.

Israel has already entrapped the United States to a large degree in its lethal ways in the Middle East, and the entrapment threatens to become deeper with the anticipated new attack on Iran. The entrapment would not have been possible without mismanagement of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on the Washington end. President Biden’s approach of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of influencing his policies has failed. It also has been counterproductive. In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.

It is refreshing to see reports that at least within the Department of Defense there is some recognition that the policy has been counterproductive by emboldening Israel to escalate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the department whose personnel would be on the front line of any expanded warfare involving the United States is more willing than others to recognize the nature and sources of the violence plaguing the Middle East and the need to deter or restrain Israel rather than embolden it. One can only hope that this willingness will spread more widely in policymaking circles.

Paul R. Pillar

Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.