Israel, Lebanon and the mirage of a new Middle East

by Ghassan Salamé

Published: Financial Times, 19 October 2024

Lebanese academic and diplomat Ghassan Salamé on how conflict engulfed his country — and why it is folly to try to reshape the region by force

Throughout history, leaders have sought to reshape the Middle East. From the heights of my village on Mount Lebanon, I can contemplate the passage of successive empires: the beautiful remnants of a Roman temple, a Byzantine church or a (much less charming) French military bunker, there to remind me of the region’s magnetic pull and the fleeting nature of power.

The area stretching from the Taurus Mountains to Arabia Deserta and from Shatt al-Arab to the Mediterranean is strategically located, symbolically intense, socially diverse and, therefore, politically unstable. Imposing some kind of order on its vulnerable states and uncertain, volatile identities has been a temptation for conquerors and politicians alike. Cyrus of Persia and Alexander of Macedonia tried; so, more recently, did George W Bush.

As the 20th-century colonial empires receded and the era of independence bloomed, a largely arbitrary political map took shape, distributing among the new (non-nation) states mountains and plains, plateaus and deserts stretched around the Jordan, Orontes and Euphrates rivers. These modern creatures proved to be fragile, permanently threatened by ethnic strife and political mismanagement.

State-building is a desperately difficult endeavour in plural societies, never accomplished, always reversible and often viewed as a mere cover used by one group or another (Alawi, Tikriti, Maronite) to impose its will. It is rendered even more difficult when emerging regional hegemons keep attempting to transform these fragile units into obedient satellites.

The Middle East has of late experienced many such episodes. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt used a fervent wave of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s to try to impose its primacy, only to be brutally contained in its ambition by Israel’s superior arms, conservative Arab regimes’ machinations and active western hostility. Khomeinist Iran, promoting Shia emancipation and political Islam, engaged in a similar project from the very first days of the revolution, leading among other effects to a horrible eight-year war with Iraq, and the sponsoring of non-state armed groups such as Lebanon’s Hizbollah, Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi and Palestine’s Hamas. Tehran tried to organise that network into an “Axis of Resistance”, which looked very much on the ascendant until recently. Not to be outdone, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has tried its hand at reasserting Ankara’s influence, through subtle means as well as less subtle ones, over an area that had lived under Ottoman rule for some four centuries.

The latest to be tempted is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. He talks about his ambition and demonstrates, one tactical victory after another, that he means what he says. Following the brutal Hamas eruption of October 7 2023, he transformed Gaza into a huge field of ruins, displacing, bombing, starving and dehumanising its population at will. Then he moved north to put an end to the low-intensity warfare Hizbollah had engaged in against Israel in support of Gaza, and he did it alla grande.

He bombed the port of Hodeidah in Yemen to punish the Houthis, who had considered it their duty to help Gaza by disrupting international navigation and firing missiles at Israel. He kept hitting arms depots and, of course, Iranian and pro-Iranian militants in dismembered, disabled Syria. At the time of writing, he is preparing to bomb Iran, a response to the missile attacks of October 1 that not only entails overflying a few neighbouring countries but also drawing the US into providing support.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has never let anybody forget that his most cherished aim remains the annexation of the occupied West Bank (and therefore the extinguishing of any possible Palestinian state), where assassinations of militants, destruction of whole villages and expropriations of land are, if anything, redoubled. His finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is busy altering the legal system of “Judea and Samaria” in anticipation of what many fear will be full-fledged annexation and possibly the transfer of some 3mn Palestinians east of the River Jordan; recently he has been ruminating publicly about a Jewish state that could extend from Iraq to Egypt.

Militarily, Israel’s behaviour in Gaza has looked instinctive, chaotic, a retribution rather than a war (Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, has accused all the Strip’s inhabitants of being accomplices of Hamas and therefore legitimate targets). During the year that followed October 7, Israel kept bombing hospitals and schools, mosques and churches, villages and camps, without stating, without probably knowing, what to make of the “day after”.

In Lebanon, its war has been, by contrast, a meticulously planned one: the most recent confrontation with Hizbollah in 2006 was inconclusive, and Israeli cognoscenti have believed since then that a new confrontation with Hassan Nasrallah’s fighters was inevitable. Hence the implementation of a war plan that has been refined down to its smallest details and regularly updated during the past 18 years. The result is a campaign that combines almost sci-fi intelligence with relentless bombing from a dominating air force and state-of-the-art drones, all areas where Israel has a clear superiority, not to say supremacy. By the end of last month, in the wake of Nasrallah’s assassination, Netanyahu was half declaring victory, hailing Israel’s success in “changing the balance of power in the region for years”.

Israel’s cascade of tactical successes on both fronts is indisputable — still more so following the news this week that its troops had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza. Military experts are feverishly anticipating the next Israeli innovations. Many pro-Israeli observers are in a state of awe, if not euphoria, and all this has inevitably encouraged Netanyahu to start thinking of a new Middle East, re-engineered by Israeli arms and reflecting the new hegemon’s will. Israeli cartographers are regularly asked to equip their prime minister with maps to show from the UN lectern in which a flourishing and prosperous Middle East is on the verge of replacing a tenebrous, barbaric one.

There indeed is no doubt that Israel has altered the balance of power, substantially crippling Hamas and Hizbollah, and putting itself in a position where its government thinks it can dictate the new regional configuration — helped as it is by its victorious army, by Arab passivity, American generosity (in weapons, dollars and diplomatic support) and a broken international system. How to remain rational, let alone modest, under such a constellation of stars?

The question is not that of this substantial change’s reality but of its durability. If anything, past attempts to reshape the Middle East have generally ended in failure: Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin entered a deep depression when examining the results of his attempt in 1982, and Bush might be ruminating still over the US-led initiative, proclaimed in 2003, to export democracy across the region through regime change.

Starting the re-engineering of the region with an incursion in Lebanon has, in particular, been a curse for Israeli politicians: Begin and his defence minister Ariel Sharon had to resign after their 1982 large-scale invasion of their northern neighbour, which had been justified in terms very similar to Netanyahu’s now. Shimon Peres was defeated in the elections that followed his “grapes of wrath” campaign of 1996 and Ehud Olmert’s misadventure there in 2006 combined with corruption cases to bring about his downfall. The repeated promise of a “new Middle East” after each of these invasions has naturally not seen daylight.

Could the present Israeli prime minister do better? There are a few good reasons for scepticism. First, aspiring hegemons need to be ready to redraw borders and promote regime change. Some application of force is indispensable and that’s why only countries with substantial military resources (Saddam Hussein was under the illusion that he possessed them) engage in such endeavours.

However successfully they are pursued, these goals usually exact a heavy price in human lives and material resources. Netanyahu has gone so far as to predict regime change in Iran “a lot sooner than people think”. But grabbing more land while imposing obedient leaders on a few neighbouring countries is probably a tall order; Israel can hardly do both at the same time, as each objective (and sometimes both) will be vigorously opposed by other players.

The second reason for scepticism is that Arab regimes’ passivity during the past year is very much linked to the identity of Israel’s main targets, two pro-Iranian champions of political Islam. By destroying them, Israel is also hitting what most Arab regimes consider their most serious adversaries. If and when Israel’s activism goes beyond this fortuitous convergence of interests, Arab passivity could suddenly disappear. Attempts to transfer Palestinians into neighbouring countries would in particular be opposed as a major source of political instability. Israeli attempts to impose a form of political hegemony in the Levant would not be acceptable to Egypt or Saudi Arabia and other would-be regional hegemons.

A third reason is that the excessive use of force will keep Israel’s adversaries in a state of anger: Israel can accumulate tactical wins but it cannot translate them into a stable hegemony. With the fundamental issues remaining unresolved, Hamas (or a successor group) and Hizbollah can reinvent themselves any time in the coming years, their most recent humiliation playing as an incentive rather than a deterrent (there are reasons to believe that, while being pounded like hell, both groups have been able to attract new recruits).

Fragile states in the region, when not accomplices of anti-Israeli movements, can hardly prevent the re-emergence of groups with deep cultural roots and what they consider a legitimate cause. It seems likely that the Palestinian cause will continue to play the role of the Bible’s burning bush, extinguished only to be reignited immediately after.

Fourth, an Israeli hegemony would be built on sheer, naked, arrogant power. All Israel’s neighbours are presently on the defensive: Syria is effectively occupied; Iraq has not recaptured its national unity since its “liberation”, nor been organised by strong, transparent institutions; Jordan fears the annexation of the West Bank and its own transformation into an alternative Palestinian state (something that had been part of the programme of Netanyahu’s Likud party for decades and has recently risen up the agenda in Tel Aviv and possibly in Mar-a-Lago as well).

As for my country, Lebanon, it is financially bankrupt, politically paralysed (with no president, a government with limited powers and a dormant parliament) and threatened by the recurrence of civil war. Israel’s hegemony, if it is established, would be an easy victory but in an unstable, frustrated, angry environment that could hardly be pacified. Even if the war stopped today, Lebanon would still need years to recover. Israel might find informants in such an environment but would search desperately for allies and proxies.

This is more so because the kind of regional hegemony Israel is attempting to build is totally non-Gramscian: it does not seek to integrate the defeated but, on the contrary, keeps excluding him. Its expansionist messianism is unpalatable even to the least bellicose of the region’s populations simply because they could have no part in it. They consider themselves utterly removed from the Holocaust inflicted by Europeans on the Jews and are therefore unwilling to pay, yet again, for Europe’s misdeeds. Integration of the weak into the powerful’s domain, as analysed by Antonio Gramsci or, long before him, by the great Ibn Khaldūn (who wrote of a process by which the weak accept a lesser standing as long as they are part of the ruler’s network, probably a precondition for sustainable hegemony), is impossible in these circumstances.

In this respect, the domestic evolution of the country is a mirror. Since its victory in the 1967 war, Israel has changed. This can be seen in the Druze community, traditionally a disproportionate source of recruits to the Israeli military, where there is growing unease about a redefinition of Israel that solidifies their standing as second-class citizens. It was evident too in the protests throughout the spring and summer of 2023, when liberal Israelis demonstrated in hundreds of thousands against the Netanyahu government’s “reforms” of the judiciary, meant to constrain its autonomy.

In other words, a reconfiguration of Israel as a religious entity (as illustrated by the settlers’ increasing influence on politics or the large increase of religious militants in the officer corps) makes it even more exclusivist: liberal Jews and — certainly — Arab citizens of the state are not welcome. This transformation of the Israeli polity (not its mere “slide to the right”, as often reported) has been going in parallel with the attempt at regional hegemony, a combination that can hardly reassure large segments of the Israeli population or the country’s neighbours in the region.

Those the gods afflict with hubris free themselves from reason. UN secretary-general António Guterres was declared persona non grata only because he reminded Israel that international humanitarian law also applies to it. Emmanuel Macron was promised hell because he suggested that arms deliveries to Israel should be halted. The International Criminal Court was demonised when it spoke of war crimes being committed; we do not know whether it will issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. Even countries that have normalised their relations with Israel are disoriented by its elastic definition of its security and contempt for others’ concern for theirs.

Similarly, the idea of Israel as a bulwark of civilisation against barbarism is a pretension that finds an echo in the west (certainly in the US Congress) but can hardly describe the region’s ancient civilisations nor adequately reflect the Israeli army’s behaviour in Gaza. Closer to reality is Israel’s attempt to be an advanced military fort for the west, and many in the west are happy with that role. But an advanced military fort cannot be a regional hegemon, much less a beacon of civilisation.

In this tortured, agitated, broken region, there still is a way to avoid the worst. It is by bringing back to the forefront the heart of the matter, the issue that has been around for a century and a half of conflict, the issue that many Israelis want to forget: the Palestinians’ basic political rights. Israel’s regional adventures often look like a flight from that ever-present, painful fact. Unless the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own alongside Israel is recognised and materially implemented, they will not cease to be a source of (fully legitimate) disruption, making their life and that of their neighbours impossible.

The aspiring hegemon has concluded that if force does not pacify the Palestinians and those who, sincerely or cynically, support their cause, the remedy is in the application of even more force. If history is of any use, it teaches us that the use of force to settle complex political issues is always sterile and often counter-productive. In any case, the ruins left by Israel’s present pounding of Lebanon have none of the charm left by Romans and Byzantines in my village: they are instead the mark of an unconstrained, unbearable hubris.

The writer is a professor of international relations emeritus at Sciences-Po (Paris) and a former senior adviser to the United Nations secretary-general