After one year of genocide, why Israel’s belligerence may be its undoing

On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched an offensive into southern Israel to irrevocably shatter an unsustainable status quo. While the crisis that has now persisted for an entire year did indeed erupt on that day, it had been decades in the making.

Israel’s initial response was to unleash a genocidal campaign against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. Motivated by revenge and bloodlust, it was designed to not only kill and destroy on a massive scale but to make the Gaza Strip unfit for human habitation.

Genocide was the price Israel’s western sponsors were prepared to pay for Israel to make an example of the Gaza Strip and, in so doing, to re-establish its shattered power of deterrence.

To ensure Israel could rampage through the Gaza Strip with impunity and escape any accountability for its actions, Israel’s western sponsors and allies, led by the United States, willingly shredded the rulebook of international law and the norms and values that underpin it.

Each successive Israeli obliteration of yet another red line – the bombing and destruction of hospitals, schools, and refugee centres, the indiscriminate transformation of communications devices into hand grenades, and the killing and wounding of hundreds to rescue four captives – was justified as a legitimate act of self-defence.

In the process, the world has been transformed into a much more dangerous place for us all on the altar of Israeli impunity.

Failed strategy

For much of the past year, Israel has failed not only to achieve anything of military significance in the Gaza Strip, but it has also failed to enunciate a strategy. Slogans like “total victory” and a Churchill complex are no substitute for political vision.

Genocide was the price Israel’s western sponsors were prepared to pay for Israel to make an example of the Gaza Strip and re-establish its shattered power of deterrence

This now appears to be changing. Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, and with him virtually the entirety of the movement’s military command, has given it the confidence that it can dismantle the coalition known as the Axis of Resistance.

Its key initiative in this respect is the invasion of Lebanon currently underway, and in which all the red lines violated in Gaza are being crossed again, once more with nary a peep from capitals that habitually preach to rivals, adversaries, and other lesser beings about the sanctity of the rule of law, human rights, and similar principles.

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As has been clear from the outset, Israel’s ultimate aim is regime change in Iran, on the mistaken assumption that an Iranian government disengaged from the conflict with Israel will transform the Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, into powerless sheep.

Israel appears to be convinced that the road to Tehran runs through the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed as much on 30 September when he vowed that Iranians would soon achieve “freedom” from their leaders.

Israel’s agenda requires it to engineer a direct military confrontation between Washington and Tehran, and in US President Joe Biden, it may well have found the candidate that has thus far eluded it.

Yet Lebanon has repeatedly proved to be the graveyard of Israel and American hubris.

Whether in 1982, when Ariel Sharon’s Operation Big Pines laid the basis for Hezbollah’s emergence, or in 2006, when Condoleezza Rice’s “birth pangs of a new Middle East” turned out to be a miscarriage.

The coming weeks will determine whether Israel can once again resume unilaterally resolving the Palestine question on its own terms, and with it to seal the fate of the Palestinian people, or whether 7 October will go down in history as the moment the Zionist project in Palestine began to unravel.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.