Since October 7, the date of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli territory, we have been witnessing the most complex war in the post-Cold War era. This is not just a regional confrontation between Israel and a terrorist organization – similar episodes have already taken place in the past. The scale of operations on both sides, as well as the positioning of third parties in this war, is unlike anything that has ever existed in the Middle East. The downside is that not all of the tectonic plates have moved at this point, but they have given signs of it. In such a complex war, it is difficult even to predict the next development of events.

Why is this war so difficult to decipher?

First, we do not know exactly the motivation of Hamas for the action of this scale and why the moment of October 7 was chosen. Of course, we know that Israel was going to normalize its relations with Saudi Arabia, and Iran does not want that. We know that Hamas is part of the Axis of Resistance, which consists of proxies who are satellites of Tehran. However, we do not know to what extent Iran was involved in the preparation of this operation and how the huge arsenal of Hamas was delivered. We will try to give some explanations from the available data, although they are, unfortunately, incomplete.

Before making this raid, it is advisable to review the types of conflicts that occurred after October 7. The first hypothesis we put forward is that, unlike the previous wars in which it participated, Israel can no longer win on its own: it needs a strong alliance with the US at the political and military levels. This is what both countries achieved from the first moments of the Israel-Hamas war, through visits by Biden and Blinken to Israel, followed by Blinken’s constant visits to the capitals of Arab states in the region, the presence of two American aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and the transfer of American technology to Israel. The political and military alliance between Israel and the US is and remains strategic. The question is whether this alliance can project its military objectives in such a way that a political objective is outlined – a question that remains open for now. Israel and the US need a partner in the region, and that can only be the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Palestinian Authority is what post-Hamas Gaza needs, and there is currently no other reliable partner. However, for this to happen, Israel must decide to at least temporarily stop settling settlers in the West Bank. The “two-state” solution turned out to be unsustainable, impossible, no matter how tempting it was. A single state with a high degree of autonomy for the Palestinians can be envisioned, at least as an interim solution, as Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Mark Lynch argue in The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine? (Cornell State University Press, 2023). Iran will not accept this decision, but there are ways in which trying to negotiate a post-conflict deal solely between Israelis and Palestinians, with the US as guarantor on one side and Iran on the other, could be seen from a neutral perspective. The goal of Hamas is not to create a Palestinian state, but an Islamic state throughout the Middle East. Israel must refrain from any interference in East Jerusalem, especially regarding the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is considered the holiest site in Islam. The annexation of the West Bank is part of the government program of the coalition in power in Tel Aviv. Abandoning this desire and including the West Bank issue in the problem of creating a state with several regimes of autonomy – even an asymmetric one – would be the first step to convince the Palestinian Authority to participate in the management of Gaza. Such an approach would also facilitate the resumption of talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which were abruptly suspended on October 7. In fact, the West Bank is Israel’s second front today. Tensions between Israeli and Palestinian settlers have risen since October 7 and are at their highest level since then.

The ongoing war between Israel and Hamas is just one of several hidden conflicts coming to the surface. The third front on which Israel is fighting is a front at a distance with other members of the Axis of Resistance: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Islamist militias in Syria, near Iran. Israel was forced to evacuate its citizens on the border with Lebanon, attack the airports of Aleppo and Damascus to stop the transport of weapons from Iran, and intercept Houthi missiles over the Red Sea. Of course, we can’t talk about a full-scale war in these three dimensions right now, but without a doubt, this is the third front in which Israel is involved, after the front in Gaza and the front in the West Bank.

After the October 7 event, a meeting in Beirut discussed preliminary coordination between Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Hezbollah leader Nasrallah denied any such coordination in a speech on November 3, but that is not the case at all.

In December 2016, Iranian General Soleimani organized a meeting between Hamas, Fatah and Hezbollah also in Beirut. Brandon Weichert in the book The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Dominance (Republic Book Publishers, 2022) provided the first account of this meeting, the first attempt to coordinate these factions against Israel under the tutelage of Iran. The 2016 plan called for the start of a third intifada, the final one, in which Israel would disappear as a state along with all US military bases in the Middle East. At the same time, General Suleimani said that the plan was previously agreed upon by Iran with China and the Russian Federation. After December 2016, Iran launched the so-called “Precision Project” in Lebanon: weapons were delivered and scientists were sent from Iran to strengthen Hezbollah’s weapons, using materials bought on the black market (Iran is subject to international sanctions). It is possible that Hamas also benefited from Project Precision. General Soleimani was killed in January 2020, and in the summer of the same year, a powerful explosion occurred in the port of Beirut, as a result of which the city was partially destroyed. The explosion was later determined to have been caused by HMX, an explosive used in long-range rockets – the very type of rocket currently used by Hezbollah and Hamas.

Probably, if General Soleimani had not left the scene and the explosion in Beirut had not occurred, the moment of October 7 would have happened earlier.

This moment was also postponed by the Trump administration’s initiation of the Abraham Accords, through which the US wanted to create a coalition between Israel and the Arab countries against Iran. The Biden administration took a different approach, trying to normalize relations with Iran, including by returning to the nuclear deal initiated by the Obama administration. The moment on October 7 interrupted the illusions that this was possible. After the Hamas terrorist attack, Iran launched attacks through affiliated Shiite militias against US bases in the region. In total, 24 attacks by drones and missiles, a considerable figure. So far, this strategy has been successful, as the US was forced to respond to an attack on an ammunition depot in Syria that left 21 people injured in an attack by pro-Iranian militias. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did not act alone, but in close cooperation with the Russian Federation, which deployed anti-missile systems in Lebanon, in the event of an increased Israeli response to Hezbollah’s provocations. Pro-Iranian Shiite militias are using Iranian-made missiles and drones when attacking US bases and Hezbollah when attacking Israel.

Was there a 2023 meeting in Beirut that prepared the moment for October 7, modeled after 2016 and with the participation or consent of the Russian Federation? We currently do not have an answer to this question.

The fourth front on which Israel is forced to engage in a decisive confrontation with its adversaries is online propaganda. A presentation of the attack on Al-Ahli Hospital, which is run by the Anglican Church in Gaza, showed that fake news (Israel is believed to be the source of the incident, although it was not involved) spread around the world at lightning speed and caused a violent reaction from supporters of the Palestinian cause. By the time Israel presented exculpatory evidence, it was too late: condemnation had already taken place. Other similar incidents followed, such as the bombing of the Jabalia camp in Gaza, which killed innocent civilians cynically used as human shields by Hamas leaders. Israel is participating in this information war. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses.

The fifth front on which Israel is now engaged is closely related to the fourth: the growing manifestation of anti-Semitism in the West, which distorts the way public opinion perceives the war between Israel and Hamas.

Anti-Israel mobilization in the name of anti-Semitism is carried out by a part of the left movement, which is always committed to the Palestinian cause, but also to Islamic radicalism, which is seen as a revolutionary form from which the class struggle against capitalism should be inspired. . At the moment, the Western left is extremely divided about its position in the Israel-Hamas war. There are actually two overlapping traditions of the European left: one is the anti-Semitism tradition dating back to the period of confrontation with the fascist regimes in power until 1945, the other is a tradition fertilized mainly by Islamic migration from the west. For this reason, the Spanish socialists are more on the side of the Palestinian movement, the French left is divided, the German left is strongly pro-Israel, the British Labor is more pro-Israel, but the internal tensions on this issue are obvious. Since the 1970s, far-left Western movements have worked closely with Palestinian terrorists, ties Rote Armee Fraction Carlos is well known. Later, the “Islamic-Leftism” theorized by Mohamed Sifaoui (Les fossoyeurs de la République, Islamo-gauchisme: l´enquête inêditeL´Observatoire, 2021), so that there is now a generally favorable atmosphere for Islamic radicalism – what Gilles Kepel calls “atmospheric jihadism” (Prophete en son pays, L´Observatoire, 2023). Jihadism is fashionable, implicitly anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism has developed strongly in recent decades: if in 1990 the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Karpantras brought more than 200,000 people to the streets, then in 2023 the death of several dozen Europeans during the terrorist attacks on October 7 or the capture of Europeans by Hamas had to be met with indifference. Of course, not all those demonstrating for the Palestinian cause today have anti-Semitic beliefs, but the fate of Muslims in Sudan, China, Yemen, Syria, etc. left indifferent in the past those who protest today – this destruction of the past was inspired by Bernard – what Henri Lévy called the “Gamasism of the imbeciles” (Le Point, October 26) – just as anti-Semitism was originally considered the “socialism of the imbeciles”. There is no protest in the West against Iran, the most repressive state in the Middle East today.

The paradox noted by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times (November 1) is that Iran, which controls four other Arab countries – Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq – accuses Israel of waging a “colonial war” in Gaza and calls Israel “occupational government”, bypassing the fact that Hamas completely dominates this territory.

The last front, the sixth, least visible and least active: political tension in Israel. Netanyahu included opposition leader Yair Lapid in the military cabinet and is trying to avoid any upheaval in his government. In wartime there is what Edward Luttwak calls the “paradoxical logic of strategy”: what was a disadvantage in peacetime (a government at odds with society) turns into an advantage in wartime (public opinion supports a government that works, dissent in peacetime time disappear). quickly). – Read the entire article and comment on contributors.ro