Middle East Scorecard: Netanyahu 1-Iran 0

Tehran proxy-based deterrence fails to hold off Israel. Are nuclear arms its next option?

The Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire apparently achieves Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goals of driving the Shiite Muslim militia away from Israel’s northern border and severely weakening its military capabilities but also shows its chief backer and enabler, Iran, to be a floundering paper tiger.

The truce has distanced Hezbollah from its self-declared alliance with Hamas, the Palestinian movement that triggered the war when it invaded and rampaged through southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas, which has been battered by a year of intense Israeli bombing and an ongoing ground offensive, now has no ally to relieve the pressure.

In effect, Lebanon’s major role in the Gaza war is likely over, even if there are sporadic outbreaks of violence. Netanyahu has taken with a win, to use current American political parlance. At a minimum, if the ceasefire holds, Hezbollah’s exit from the field of battle provides a buffer zone within Lebanon, as the militia is forced north of the country’s Litani River.

The exclusion zone was laid out via a United Nations resolution to end the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, though its eviction had never been enforced.

And just in case Hezbollah tries to restore its military operations in the south—or even beefs up its arsenal of weapons elsewhere in Lebanon, Israel will strike again, Netanyahu warned. “If Hezbollah violates the agreement and tries to arm itself, we will attack. If it tries to rebuild terrorist infrastructure near the border, we will attack,” he said.

“If it launches a rocket, if it digs a tunnel, if it brings in a truck carrying rockets, we will attack.If Hezbollah violates the agreement and tries to arm itself, we will attack. If it tries to rebuild terrorist infrastructure near the border, we will attack. If it launches a rocket, if it digs a tunnel, if it brings in a truck carrying rockets, we will attack.”

The ceasefire accord breaks the active “military links between Hezbollah and Hamas,” said Jonathan Panikoff, Middle East security expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. Hezbollah had pledged to keep attacking Israel until there was a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip,” Panikoff wrote. “Tehran has seen its deterrence decline.”

The outcome in Lebanon also showed that Iran’s regional deterrence system, which depended on Hezbollah, Hamas in Gaza, client militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen, was no deterrent at all.

Iran admitted as such in late September. As Israel blasted southern Lebanon and Beirut with air strikes, killed field commanders and assassinated leading officials – notably supreme religious leader Hassan Nasrallah – Iran announced it would not send soldiers to help its Axis of Resistance allies.

“There is no need to send extra or volunteer forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani. The Lebanese and Palestinian fighters “have the capability and strength to defend themselves against the aggression,” he added.

An evidently chastened Iran even tried it make nice with Washington, long dubbed the Great Satan by the Islamic Republic. Tehran informed the Great Satan before it launched its rockets into Israel in retaliation for an Israeli strike on its territory.

“Iran is probably quietly supportive of the (ceasefire) deal, concerned that pushing Hezbollah and the Lebanese government to oppose it would risk continuing Israeli strikes,” suggested Panikoff, the Atlantic Council researcher.

Netanyahu also placed the war in Lebanon in his wider concerns about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “I am determined to do anything needed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he said.

There had been kind of official previews the dangers to Iran. Last month, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced that an aerial raid near a major atomic facility had destroyed air defense missiles that were guarding it.

The attack eliminated the last three Russian-provided surface-to-air S-300 air defense rockets in Iran’s possession.

US President Joe Biden, now a lame duck with Donald Trump’sre-election earlier this month, characterized the ceasefire as a step toward “a vision for the future of a Middle East where it is at peace.”

He aimed a mild rebuke at Netanyahu over Israel’s lack of a day-after peace plan to end years of conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians. “Israel has been bold on the battlefield,” Biden said. “Now Israel must be bold to create a coherent strategy that will secure Israel’s long-term safety and advance peace.”

The strategy must include “a future where Palestinians have a state of their own.” That may be beyond the outgoing president’s reach, however. Long before and during this war, Netanyahu rejected the so-called “two-state solution” to the Palestinian conflict.

Biden had spent weeks trying to arrange Israel-Palestinian ceasefire talks but failed. On that score, Netanyahu has indicated that Israel must stay in parts of a demilitarized Gaza Strip for an indefinite period. Beleaguered Hamas has demanded Israel leave the territory as part of any ceasefire accord.

So the Gaza war rumbles on, as does a parallel lower-intensity battle in the West Bank. On Wednesday, Israeli intelligence officials said it uncovered a cache of weapons it said Iran had smuggled into the West Bank while Israeli soldiers carried out raids, which have become habitual in towns and villages nominally under the authority of the Palestinian National Authority.

The PNA is based in the city of Ramallah and has been silent on the Lebanon ceasefire.

It’s likely the next chapter will fall to Trump. Israeli settlers, whose ever-growing West Bank communities have made an actual land-for-peace deal all but impossible, are hoping that Trump’s January 20 arrival to power will open the way to some sort of annexation of the territory.

“We have high hopes. We’re even buoyant to a certain extent,” said Yisrael Medad, a settler activist who supports Israeli absorption of the West Bank. He thinks Trump’s support among religious Evangelicals in the US might sway him; he views Israel as a Biblical/historical inheritance. “Even if the Byzantines, the Romans, the Mameluks and Ottomans ruled it, it was our land,” Medad said in a Reuters interview.

Trump has displayed no inclination toward reviving the two-state formula, which had its heyday as a proposal more than four decades ago. Trump’s only comment on the Gaza war has been to advise Netanyahu to end it quickly.

During his previous 2017-2021 term, Trump formulated the so-called Abraham Accords based on the idea that the best way to stabilize the Middle East was to persuade Arab countries to make peace with Israel and put aside the Palestinian issue for a while.

In 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, both Persian Gulf mini-states fearful of Iranian military power, signed the accord. Morocco later joined. By 2023, with Biden in the White House, Saudi Arabia appeared to be ready join, partly in exchange for US military weaponry and possible defense agreements in case war with Iran broke out. The Gaza war shelved Saudi Arabia’s potential entry into the accord.

Earlier this month, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, accused Israel of committing “collective genocide” in Gaza and said Israel must “respect the sovereignty” of Iran and “not to violate its lands.”

However, analysts were not persuaded that bin Salman’s words reflected a rejection of the Abraham Accords. Once the fever of the Gaza war ends, he would likely recognize Israel, they suggested.

His harsh words, rather, reflected both public anger in Saudi Arabia over the Gaza bloodletting and bin Salman’s predilection for playing multiple sides in international gamesmanship.

Bin Salman, for instance, declined Biden’s request to pump more crude oil and thus reduce US energy costs, yet his country also purchases 80% of its weapons from the US and has been negotiating a security deal with Washington to go into effect once the Gaza war ends.

The only hang-up is an old one: Bin Salman is insisting that such an accord accompany steps toward a revival of the dormant two-state solution.