Israel

Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and strategist responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, is dead, killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in a tunnel beneath his hometown of Rafah in Gaza.   Although the Biden administration (rightfully) congratulated Israel, both President Biden and Vice President Harris had previously demanded Israel not stage a major military operation in Rafah, where Sinwar and other Hamas leaders were killed. That advice matched the administration’s strategic wisdom throughout the conflict.   With Sinwar gone, the key questions now are: what is the endgame in Gaza? And how does Israel’s success in Gaza affect the current battle against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the future battle against the Islamic Republic of Iran?

During Rosh Hashanah dinner this past week, my mother — an occasional yet focused steamer — recommended I check out the Israeli show A Body That Works on Netflix. And so I did. The series focuses on the marital joy and strife that emerges during a surrogate pregnancy situation between an affluent Tel Aviv couple and a single mother from far more modest circumstances.  Clearly shot before last October 7, I couldn’t help thinking that A Body That Works reflects all that is great about Israel — a place I’ve visited and lived in for decades. There’s Tel Aviv’s balmy seafront location. The series’ hip and hunky cast.

Anything written on the Middle East at this moment in history is almost instantly out of date. As Lenin said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The Arab-Israeli war in 1967, the Iranian revolution in 1979, the invasion of Iraq in 2003...the region may once again be at one of those forks in the road that dictate the fate of nations for years to come. Journalists’ predictions age like milk out of the fridge. Nevertheless, here are some: Israel attacks Iran. This isn’t a hard one. The question is what form that attack will take. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has wanted to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before, only to be stopped by the US.

Iran on Tuesday launched 180 ballistic missiles against Israel, a democracy the size of New Jersey. It was the largest escalation to date in a year-long, seven-front war waged by the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism against Israel, the United States, and global maritime shipping. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris must come to terms with the fact that this attack resulted from their own foreign policy — subsidized by billions of dollars in US sanctions relief, legitimized by strategic accommodations to Tehran, encouraged by pressure on Israel and invited by the non-stop signaling of American fear of escalation.

A few hours before Iran launched missiles at Israel, America’s spy satellite saw Iran moving the weapons onto their launching pads. They told Israel (and leaked to the media) that an attack was “imminent.” They were right. Within hours, several hundred Iranian missiles were flying toward the Jewish State, just as they had in April. The earlier attack caused little damage — most of the missiles were intercepted — and early reports are that the recent attack met the same fate. Israel’s success shooting down the missiles is crucial, not only because it saved lives but because it does not require Israel to launch a full-scale counter-attack. Safety from the missiles did not protect all Israelis, though.

The killing of Hassan Nazrallah is the latest — and most impressive — stage in Israel’s campaign to wipe out Iran’s terrorist proxies on its doorstep. From the Egyptian border to Beirut, the campaign is the most dazzling demonstration of real-time intelligence, high technology and precise military action in the modern era. It will be recounted on screen and studied by military experts for decades to come. James Bond’s gadgets had nothing on the booby-trapped pagers. As the meme put it, “From the liver to the knee.”  The battle started a year ago, when Hamas terrorists in Gaza broke the ceasefire, raped and killed innocent Israelis and took hundreds of hostages for negotiating leverage. It was obvious from the outset that Israel would respond with full force.

Explosions ripped across Lebanon Tuesday afternoon as hundreds of old-fashioned pagers stuffed with an ounce or two of explosives blew up, killing twelve and injuring approximately 3,000 more. On Wednesday, the low-tech carnage resumed, with exploding walkie-talkies killing at least another twenty people and wounding an additional 450.  The targets were militants and allies of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim political and military organization which, together with a coalition of political allies, holds a majority in the country’s parliament. Hezbollah and the allied Iranian government, which heavily supports its activities, have blamed Israel, which has been in localized near-daily hostilities with Hezbollah since Hamas’s October 7 attack.

October 7 was the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Some refer to it as Israel’s 9/11, though proportionally it was like fifteen 9/11s. However, numbers rarely tell the full story and here they fall devastatingly short. I was awake when it started. I’ve always been a night owl but staying up until six in the morning is unusual for me. On that bright fall morning I heard sounds like a thunderstorm and went outside to see what was going on. I live on a hill overlooking Gush Dan, the informal megalopolis that’s home for almost half the population of this stamp-sized country. When something big happens I can often see it.

The months-long ceasefire and hostage release negotiations between Israel and Hamas have been the diplomatic equivalent of Groundhog Day. And the US officials tasked with bringing those talks across the finish-line have contributed mightily to the very bad, never-ending movie we (not to mention the hostages’ families and the more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza) have watched since President Biden rolled out his ceasefire plan in late May. In the months since, Washington has committed verbal blunder after verbal blunder by getting over its skis and proclaiming progress where no progress exists.

To the extent Joe Biden had anything to say about Saudi Arabia during the 2020 presidential campaign, it largely centered on shaming the oil-rich monarchy into changing its ways. Coming off the 2018 state-sponsored murder of Washington Post columnist and former royal court insider Jamal Khashoggi in a Turkish consulate, Biden aired numerous complaints about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. He pledged to make the kingdom a pariah state during a Democratic presidential debate, accused the Saudi air force of killing children in Yemen — it wasn’t as much an accusation as a fact — and committed himself to reassessing US arms sales to Riyadh. The Saudis didn’t like what they saw during the Biden administration’s opening months.

For the last three months, the Biden administration has had one top priority in the Middle East: end the war in Gaza. President Biden’s May 31 address, during which he outlined a three-stage process whereby a temporary six-week ceasefire and hostage exchange would eventually led to a permanent end to the fighting and Gaza’s reconstruction, remains official US policy. CIA director Bill Burns, a former senior negotiator himself courtesy of his decades-long experience in the State Department, has spent the last ten months flying to Cairo, Doha, Jerusalem and Rome to close the remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas. It’s hard and thankless work.

Everywhere you turn in conversations about Israel, Gaza, Jews and antisemitism right now, the long-promised specter of expansion and escalation is... well... escalating. More than nine months into Israel’s war with Hamas, the rhetoric of conflict and activism has escalated into violent confrontations on the battlefields of war, politics and protest.   Across Israel’s northern flank, for instance, its months-long flare-up with Hezbollah is quickly escalating into an all-out war as the Iranian-backed militia killed a pair of Israeli civilians last week via rockets launched from Lebanon.