Anne Alexander analyses the likely effect a broader war in the Middle East would have on Palestinian liberation and why a revolutionary alternative is needed across the region to fight imperialism.
“This has been a really slow-motion train wreck. Anybody could have told you back in October, back in November, that we’d get somewhere like where we are today.” Back in June, Harrison Mann, the US Army Major and intelligence analyst who resigned from the military in relation to Gaza, discussed the prospects for an escalation of military conflict in the Middle East in an interview with Forever-Wars website.[1] Six weeks later, with two more senior leaders from Hamas and Hezbollah dead in Israeli assassinations, the region teeters even closer to the precipice of wider war. As Mann notes, this would almost inevitably involve the US (and likely several of its allies including the UK) in active roles supporting Israeli forces. This means not only “defensive” operations such as shooting down incoming missiles aimed at Israeli cities, but attacks on targets inside Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
One thing which October 7 has made abundantly clear is that Israeli forces are unlikely to achieve the kind of crushing victory advocated in their standard military doctrine over the past few years. General Eral Ortal, head of the IDF’s Dado Center, which leads the development of Israeli military strategy, argued in 2020.[2]
“The main test of Israel’s military power is that of decisive victory. This includes the ability to not only defeat a terror army like Hezbollah but also to do it relatively quickly, at an acceptable cost to our forces and our home front, and in a way that is irrefutable.”
The theory Ortal and his colleagues outlined involved directing overwhelming firepower at their adversaries using “multidomain” integration of combat capabilities and “smart” decision-making based on information gathered from sensor networks. The problem was that it didn’t work. Not only were Israeli forces taken by surprise by the attack on October 7, but ten months on it is clear that Hamas has not been destroyed in Gaza, or anywhere else. According to the terms of the IDF’s own doctrine, there can be no “decisive victory.” Far from fighting a small, smart, short war, Israeli forces have begun a big, dumb, long one, despite the fact that their major antagonist so far been the weakest militarily of their enemies.
Fighting Hezbollah, which has hugely improved its stores of weapons and massively expanded its defensive tunnel network since winning its last conflict with Israeli forces in 2006,[3] poses even greater challenges. Israeli experts in the electricity sector recently laid out bleak scenarios for the impact of a full-scale Hezbollah assault on the grid including the likelihood of long periods of blackouts and the danger to water supplies (Israeli water systems rely heavily on desalination which in turn requires electricity).[4]
All of this is prompting shifting thinking about what war entails on the Israeli side. The Jerusalem Post summed up the new mood on 15 August. An editorial noted the collapse of three basic national security assumptions: that Israeli technological superiority would deter enemies, that a relatively small army could rely on “billion-dollar walls and state-of-the-art sensors” to secure the border and that Israeli forces could act on their own in combat, without the need for real-time support from their superpower patrons and allies. The shocking realisation “that Israel is not able to protect itself, by itself, against any threat or combination thereof,”[5] has necessitated a profound rethink of military strategy, the paper said. The reliance on allies such as the US does not extend simply to dispatching aircraft carriers or providing intelligence, but includes “the basics needed to wage a war: bombs, shells, and even bullets.”
The paper’s conclusions about the necessary steps to address these problems are also worth analysing: rather than “deterrence” the aim should be to “dismantle” enemy capabilities, the army needs more soldiers (and in particular it needs to recruit more men from the orthodox Jewish Haredi community who have traditionally avoided military service on religious grounds), and increasing “munitions independence” by investing in local production lines of rifles, tank ammunition, artillery shells and one-ton bombs.
At one level there is a telling degree of historical amnesia involved here. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was also framed as a mission to dismantle “terrorist” capabilities – in this case the PLO factions rather than Hamas – and was carried out using very similar means to the attack on Gaza today, including the mass murder of civilians through indiscriminate bombing. In the short term the invasion achieved some of its aims by forcing the PLO to withdraw from Lebanon, but within a generation its ultimate failure was clear. Hezbollah literally arose from the rubble of South Beirut to lead an effective guerrilla struggle to liberate Lebanese land from Israeli occupation, forcing Israeli troops to withdraw in 2000 and humiliating the Israeli army in a short conflict in 2006.[6]
The language of “deterrence” also betrays the usual attempt to exculpate aggression on the grounds of “self-defence”. In reality it has always been Israeli attack capabilities which have underpinned the Zionist state’s role in the wider region as a watchdog for the interests of Western imperialism. But the recognition of a need to prepare for a different kind of war to the ones which Israelis have become used to points to the impact of deeper shifts in the dynamics of imperialism at regional and global levels.
In some senses the progress of the conflict since October 7 is therefore not a good guide for what a future regional war would look like. The one-sidedness of the casualty ratios between Palestinians and Israelis, the relentless, industrialised nature of the killing of Palestinian civilians and the racist, genocidal demolition of Gaza speak of a war of colonial domination. A regional war would certainly extend the zone of carnage from Gaza to Beirut in ways which repeat the atrocities of the past ten months on a wider canvas. Those of us who watch the progress of an Israeli offensive from afar would not smell the stench from tens of thousands of bodies under collapsed buildings or feel the burn of white phosphorous on our skin. But hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians, citizens and refugees, would likely perish.
However, as the Post’s editorial team implicitly understands, and as US military analysts explicitly acknowledge, a regional war would also unfold differently. As Harrison Mann points out, a war in which the leaders of Hezbollah and Iran “stopped holding back”, would play out as a battle of supply lines, pitting military-industrial complex against military-industrial complex. There are those on the Israeli side who are clearly betting that framing their parochial ambitions to maintain a racist system of privilege over the Palestinians as necessary to defend “the West” against a global axis comprising Iran, Russia and China will deliver the bombs they need. US Secretary of State Blinken’s decision to commit yet more billions in long-term arms deals suggests strongly they are right that Israel remains essential to US imperial strategy.[7]
This does not make Israeli victory inevitable by any means. As Mann says,
“The answer to the math problem of who will run out of munitions first is something I don’t think anybody in the public knows. But I think the better question is: Who can endure their capital getting bombed more?”[8]
Former Israeli intelligence chief Tamir Hayman came to similar conclusions in the wake of October 7th. “We can handle more than one front. We can handle even three fronts,” he said. “The problem is not the IDF; the problem is the home front. The problem is the damage to Israeli society and the resilience of Israeli society. Two fronts is not a military problem. It’s a social, resilience, and home-front defence problem.”[9]
A recognition of how the world has changed since 1982 is vital in understanding how these deadly calculations are likely to play out. Forty years ago, the geopolitical terrain was shaped by the aftereffects of Israeli military victories over Egypt and Syria in 1967 and the political surrender of Egypt’s rulers through the peace process with Israel which began in 1978. Today, the salient features of the regional system of imperialist competition are the aftereffects of US defeat in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion and Iran’s slow and steady re-emergence as a regional power partly as result of US miscalculations in Iraq and thanks to its leaders’ backing for the Assad regime’s brutal counter-revolutionary war in Syria. Hezbollah’s military capabilities have been honed in this context and its arsenal has grown in scale not simply as a result of the continued threat to Lebanon posed by Israel, but also as a protagonist in the Syrian civil war.
Has Israel’s role in the region altered from that of being a lonely colonial outpost, certain of its “qualitative military edge” over all potential rivals, to jostling for domination with other regional states? US worries about protecting its own forces in a multi-front conflict, let alone defending its allies in the Gulf and their vital oil infrastructure from possible Iranian attack were clearly on display in the blunt comments of US commanders who warned their Israeli counterparts in June not to expect a repeat of their rapid intervention to help foil the Iranian drone strikes on Israeli targets in April, in a scenario of regional war.[10]
Where does the analysis of this deadly escalation leave the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements? The first point to remember is that it is Israel’s combined character as racist settler-colony and watchdog for Western imperialism which is leading the region towards this abyss. Moreover, as has been the case since before Israel’s foundation, the primary responsibility for the carnage lies with the leaders of the Western imperialist powers who have enabled this and every previous wave of ethnic cleansing, war and genocide. We cannot waver in our unconditional solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and the rights of people in every land menaced by colonial domination or imperialist aggression to defend themselves through armed struggle, whether they are in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen or Iran. Dismantling the systems of oppression embodied in Israel’s racist state will be necessary to achieve peace and justice for everyone in the Middle East – whatever faith they profess or language they speak.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that the enemy of our enemy is a friend of the struggle for genuine liberation, whether in Palestine or anywhere else. For example, the Iranian regime is authoritarian and deeply repressive, committing enormous crimes against its own people. The recent brutal suppression of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement saw large numbers of people executed and massive repression directed against young people and schoolgirls, who were shot in the streets for protesting misogynistic laws. No socialist should view the regime as a champion of liberation just because it resists US imperialism.
There’s also a broader question of whether the so-called axis of resistance will help open up the path to victory for the Palestinians. The Palestinian national movement allied itself with so-called progressive or anti-imperialist states in the region from the late 1960s into the 1970s. The rise of Fatah and the Palestinian national movement as an independent actor was partially about asserting Palestinian autonomy from subordination to the foreign policy decisions of Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. But there were massive limits on that independence. All Palestinian armed factions from the late 1960s until the early 1980s and beyond suffered from fragmentation and loss of autonomy as a consequence of being financially and militarily dependent on other states in the region.
A real axis of popular resistance would take a different path by building alliances horizontally with popular movements in neighbouring countries to Palestine. These popular movements would need to be independent of their own states, and while also standing against US imperialism and Israel. The most obvious cases where this could make a difference in the short term are Jordan and Egypt. Intertwining the struggle for Palestinian liberation with the struggle against the Jordanian monarchy and against the counter-revolutionary Sisi regime could create a much more radical dynamic, opening up possibilities for resistance in the West Bank and massively increasing pressure on the Israeli state across the border with Gaza.
It’s a myth to think that the breakdown of Zionism will occur spontaneously. There must be a dual process involving the rise of revolutionary alternatives to the racist, settler-colonial state apparatus. This alternative must be led by Palestinians inside Palestine, but it cannot achieve sufficient social and political weight to overcome the Israeli state on its own. It must arise in tandem with similar revolutionary alternatives in neighbouring states. Yet these alternatives cannot be willed into existence simply because we wish for them. Resistance to our own rulers’ drive to war on the streets and in our workplaces should be our first priority, and its success and scale can play a vital role in emboldening the struggle from below for revolutionary change within the Middle East.
Anne Alexander is a member of the editorial board of International Socialism Journal and author of “Revolution is the choice of the People: Crisis and Revolt in the Middle East. You can purchase a copy of her book here.
[1] https://www.forever-wars.com/harrison-mann-on-escalation-in-the-middle-east/
[2] https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/dado-center/vol-28-30-military-superiority-and-the-momentum-multi-year-plan/going-on-the-attack-the-theoretical-foundation-of-the-israel-defense-forces-momentum-plan-1/
[3] See Chris Harman on the Israeli defeat in 2006 https://isj.org.uk/hizbollah-and-the-war-israel-lost/
[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-war-with-hezbollah-looms-concerns-over-vulnerability-of-power-grid-generate-unease/
[5] https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-814777
[6] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/we-were-caught-unprepared.pdf
[7] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-approves-20-billion-in-weapons-sales-to-israel-including-50-fighter-jets/
[8] https://www.forever-wars.com/harrison-mann-on-escalation-in-the-middle-east/
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/20/israel-is-fighting-on-four-fronts-but-the-defeat-may-come-at-home
[10] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-807449
