[Salon] Israel and a war it has lost - ArabDigest.org

Israel and a war it has lost Summary: a top Middle East security and defence analyst argues that Israel has lost the war in Gaza and that unless and until its allies in the West acknowledge that reality and seek new strategies the Middle East will continue on a path of growing instability and volatility. Today’s newsletter is a transcript edited for length and clarity of our 26 June podcast with Andreas Krieg. Andreas is an assistant professor at the Defence Studies Department of King's College London and a strategic risk consultant working for governmental and commercial clients in the Middle East. He is the author of Subversion: The Strategic Weaponization of Narratives published last year by Georgetown University Press. You can find the podcast here. How much more insecure is the region after 7 October last year? It depends on how you define security, whether you narrowly define security as just military security, physical security or if you look at all kinds of spectrums of security, like economic security, societal security, identity security. I would say Palestine in general since at least 1948 has been somewhat a source of insecurity across all these different domains. And that's not different in 2024 so I'd say the region is collectively far less secure, far less stable than it was before 7 October and that's not just in the physical domain. It's also to do with identity security, societal security and also regime security. If you look at the relationship between communities and political elites and regimes across the Arab world, I think there's been so much mobilisation. The silence of Arab regimes (about Gaza) has also created a lot of friction between the regimes and the people on the ground. And I think this is another element of security that most people are not looking at because we're always looking at physical violence, we're looking at military insecurity and kinetic action. But there's a lot of underlying currents that I think are probably more threatening to regional security than the physical military element. And I think we will see, potentially, a new trajectory emerging which could eventually lead to another Arab Spring 2.0 because, especially in Egypt and Jordan, we see all these sorts of tensions internally, socio-politically playing out which is an aspect of security that does lead to mobilisation. Many experts are now looking at what has been called Israel's northern front, weighing up the likelihood of a major confrontation. How likely is it that a full-scale war could break out between Hezbollah and Israel? At the moment most people are speculating because it's in the hands of a few individuals who make subjective decisions. And despite all the checks and balances that exist in Israel, there is a prime minister at the helm who is unhinged and has shown time and again that he is not acting rationally and that he's not abiding by international law or, in fact, directions he’s getting from very close allies such as the United States. So a lot of things are possible but if we were taking a rational approach to this I do think that Hezbollah is extremely rational. I think Hassan Nasrallah, despite the fact that we always try to portray both the Iranians and most of their network of non-state actors as irrational, ideological players - and they are extremely ideological - they are still also very rational in terms of wanting to continue fighting another day and, particularly in Lebanon, Hezbollah has always been interested in governance and so survival is extremely important. There is this idea that they're being suicidal which is what the Israelis are always pushing as a narrative. I think it’s not true and certainly what happened since 7 October suggests that Hezbollah isn't suicidal. Obviously it is using and exploiting the current dynamic of the Gaza war for its own gain but at fairly limited costs. Hezbollah is happy to keep escalation where it is right now. On the other side, you've got the Israelis for whom the status quo is not bearable and therefore not sustainable. They have 150,000 Israelis who can't return to their homes in northern Israel. That, I think, is a constituency that is extremely powerful and also fairly loud and is a constituency that Netanyahu and the far-right in Israel actually respects, unlike the constituency of hostage families who have been somewhat disregarded by the Israeli government for a long time. But people who live in northern Israel who've been displaced are saying, ‘we need to return, the government needs to be able to give us the ability to return to our homes’. That is a much more problematic issue that Netanyahu and the far-right can't ignore And if a major war were to break out what will it look like? A full-out escalation with Hezbollah mobilising all that massive arsenal of drones and missiles and launching that on Israel will be destructive. I think this would be a war where the home front in Israel would be more affected than probably in any other war since 1967. It will hit critical national infrastructure in Israel from water supply to electricity to internet. The fact is that there is no defensive system in Israel that will stop drones and missiles coming in. So an all-out war is certainly not in Israel's interest. And I think rational voices will tell the prime minister that this is really not an option. I think both sides should have an interest to return to a status quo whereby you have a level of deterrence where both sides don't want to cross certain red lines. Would you agree that Israel is losing the war in Gaza and if that is the case given what you’ve said about Hezbollah and the potential it has on Israel's northern border, how insecure is Israel now? I think Israel has already lost the war. There is no way to turn this around. Strategically speaking, a war is always supposed to deliver on political ends. Israel is now more isolated than it has been in decades. Israel has lost key allies and particular constituencies in the West which should be very worrisome for them. Israel is economically very badly hit by this war. It has made very little progress in getting the hostages back and actually defeating Hamas. Hamas has avoided direct confrontation and is sitting and waiting in the bunkers to fight another day. The entire network of tunnels underneath Gaza is still fairly intact. The brigades that were attacked and allegedly destroyed by Israel are still mostly operational and they've been able to recruit more people. From a grand strategic point of view of trying to undermine the idea and notion of armed resistance across Palestine, I think for Israel that's been very counterproductive. There are more people in Palestine now ready and willing to pick up arms and fight Israel, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. So you have created more grievances, more mobilisation against Israel. That is certainly counterproductive to security and it certainly pushes Israel further away from achieving its targets. There isn't really a military alternative to diplomatic engagement with Hamas and trying to find a ceasefire that is conducive to long-term stability and allows reconstruction in Gaza. Hamas, in one shape or form, will survive, whether as an idea or as a fighting force. So, in that respect, Israel has already lost the war and I don't think there is anything it can do to recover its losses in that respect. And, therefore, has the security that Netanyahu claimed he was going to achieve just vanished in the haze of war? It has. I mean it was always kind of a joke that he called himself Mr. Security because the opposite is true. He has led Israel into a false sentiment of stability and security where most people in the centre of Israel forgot that they were right in the middle of a conflict zone and now it has all come back. They're realising they have made no progress in the last couple of years or decades in terms of building stability and security in the region because the root cause of that has not been addressed. Obviously there's now a lot of mobilisation against Netanyahu but most Israelis are still convinced that the IDF is strong, the IDF can win. 'We are the strongest military in the region. We can defeat Hezbollah. We can defeat Hamas because the IDF is just the best.' And I think there is a bit of an illusion of the actual capabilities that Israel has. And in the eyes of Israel's antagonists, Hezbollah, Hamas, but also in the eyes of many Arabs the narrative that Israel is invincible and that therefore you have to make peace with Israel, which was always the deterrent for Israel's security, that deterrent has broken down in the minds of most Arabs. They don't believe in that anymore. They see that Israel is fairly vulnerable. Israel is strategically indecisive. It has lost its dominance of escalation, not just vis-â-vis Iran but also vis-â-vis non-state actors. And, to be honest, Israel hasn't won a major war since probably 1973 which is 50 years ago. So it's a country and a military that is living in an illusion and an echo chamber, telling itself how good it is and how stable and secure and how much capabilities it has. None of the capabilities Israel has today can make up for the strategic deficiencies and its inability to politically address the root causes of the conflict in Palestine. So in this incredibly unstable, volatile scenario what needs to happen to take the temperature down? For too long the regional order and stability was built around a single hegemon which is the United States and the primacy of US leadership in the world. And despite all the competition during the Cold War, it was always the US who was able to somewhat bring a degree of stability by having relations with authoritarian states. The empowerment of the Arab street and the Arab people through social media since the Arab Spring means that this authoritarian notion, this notion of authoritarian stability, is no longer feasible. It's non-state actors who are on the rise and so what you end up with is an unstable spontaneous order that lasts for a very short period of time and can be easily upended or thrown into imbalance by a singular event being able to completely throw regional order upside down as we've seen with 7 October. And that is a trend that's been ongoing since 2003 and the war in Iraq. 7 October has really speeded up that process. And in the future we will have to come to terms with the fact that the Middle East will be even less stable and less secure than it has been. That being said, you can still get to an equilibrium of stability but that is going to be an equilibrium of stability that is mediated, if you will, or negotiated between a host and a whole variety of different state and non-state actors. That sounds like a big lift, Andreas, from where we are right now. The problem we have is still some people in Western capitals take a very state-centric approach to the region and say it's all about stable, authoritarian regimes and states and they disregard the street communities, NGOs and also armed non-state actors. The fact that someone like the Huthis are able to impose a naval blockade on one of the busiest logistical trade routes in the world, the Bab el-Mandeb, is quite impressive and is something that means we need to engage with them. The fact that we're just bombing them without really making overtures to get them to the negotiation table shows that we're unable to really engage with the variety of different actors that we need to engage with. So, basically, what we need is good governance because bad governance is the root cause of insecurity in the region. That means we need to find more efficient ways of governance. That means including non-state actors and having multi-stakeholder initiatives to negotiate stability and security. We have to sit down with actors that we now consider to be terrorists, such as the Huthis or actors that we consider to be our enemy, anyone in the Axis of Resistance, for example, including Hezbollah. We need to open our minds to the network-centric order that is appearing and states are very ill-prepared for it. And beyond that, also, I think most European states and the United States are so preoccupied with their own stability and insecurity at home that the Middle East becomes some sort of afterthought. We need to prioritise (new approaches), especially in Europe because the Middle East is right on our doorstep. Whatever happens there will have implications across all domains of statecraft for Europe.