To understand why and how Israel’s devastating blow to Hezbollah is such a world-shaking threat to Iran, Russia, North Korea and even China, you have to put it in the context of the wider struggle that has replaced the Cold War as the framework of international relations today.
After the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, I argued that we were no longer in the Cold War, or the post-Cold War. We were in the post-post-Cold War: a struggle between an ad hoc “coalition of inclusion” — decent countries, not all of them democracies, that see their future as best delivered by a US-led alliance nudging the world to greater economic integration, openness and collaboration to meet global challenges, such as climate change — versus a “coalition of resistance,” led by Russia, Iran and North Korea that use their opposition to the US-led world of inclusion to justify militarising their societies and maintaining an iron grip on power.
China has been straddling the two camps because its economy depends on access to the coalition of inclusion while the government’s leadership shares a lot of the authoritarian instincts and interests of the coalition of resistance.
You have to see the wars in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in the context of this global struggle. Ukraine was trying to join the world of inclusion in Europe — seeking freedom from Russia’s orbit and to join the European Union — and Israel and Saudi Arabia were trying to expand the world of inclusion in the Middle East by normalising relations.
Russia attempted to stop Ukraine from joining the West (the EU and NATO) and Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah attempted to stop Israel from joining the East (ties with Saudi Arabia). Because if Ukraine joined the EU, the inclusive vision of a Europe “whole and free” would be almost complete and Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy in Russia almost completely isolated.
And if Israel were allowed to normalise relations with Saudi Arabia, not only would that vastly expand the coalition of inclusion in that region — a coalition already expanded by the Abraham Accords that created ties between Israel and other Arab nations — it would almost totally isolate Iran and its reckless proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Ansar Allah in Yemen and the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, all of which were driving their countries into failed states.
Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli strike on Friday, were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon and turned it into a base for Iranian imperialism.
I was speaking over the weekend to Orit Perlov, who tracks Arab social media for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. She described the flood of social media postings from across Lebanon and the Arab world celebrating Hezbollah’s demise and urging the Lebanese government to declare a unilateral cease-fire so the Lebanese army could seize control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah and bring quiet to the border. The Lebanese don’t want Beirut to be destroyed like Gaza and they are truly afraid of a return of civil war, Perlov explained to me. Nasrallah had already dragged the Lebanese into a war with Israel they never wanted, but Iran ordered.
The Biden-Harris administration has been building a network of alliances to give strategic weight to the ad hoc coalition of inclusion — from Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Australia in the Far East, through India and across to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and then up through the EU and NATO. The keystone of the whole project was President Joe Biden team’s proposed normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis are ready to do, provided Israel agrees to open negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank on a two-state solution.
And here comes the rub.
The story Netanyahu wants to tell the world is that Iran and its proxies are the main obstacle to the world of inclusion stretching from Europe, through the Middle East over to the Asia-Pacific region.
I beg to differ. The keystone to this whole alliance is a Saudi-Israel normalisation based on reconciliation between Israel and moderate Palestinians.
If Israel now moved ahead and opened a dialogue on two states for two peoples with a reformed Palestinian Authority, which has already accepted the Oslo peace treaty, it would be the diplomatic knockout blow that would accompany and solidify the military knockout blow Israel just delivered to Hezbollah and Hamas.
It would totally isolate the forces of “resistance” in the region and take away their phony shield — that they are the defenders of the Palestinian cause. Nothing would rattle Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Russia — and even China — more.
But to do that, Netanyahu would have to take a political risk even greater than the military risk he just took in killing the leadership of Hezbollah, aka “The Party of God.” Netanyahu would have to break with the Israeli “Party of God" — the coalition of far-right Jewish settler supremacists and messianists who want Israel to permanently control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, with no border lines in between. Those parties keep Netanyahu in power, so he would need to replace them with Israeli centrist parties, which I know would collaborate with him on such a move.
So there you have the big challenge of the day: The struggle between the world of inclusion and the world of resistance comes down to many things, but none more — today — than Netanyahu’s willingness to follow up his blow to the “Party of God” in Lebanon by dealing a similar political blow to the “Party of God” in Israel. — The New York Times
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