Jonathan Spyer

Jerusalem Post, 7/7

Iran-supported Islamist militias are currently engaged in war against Israel on two fronts.   The main focus of combat remains of course the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip.  A ‘support front’, as is the preferred term, has been maintained by Lebanese Hizballah since October 8 in the Israel-Lebanon border area. 

Iran seeks as a strategic objective to surround Israel with a crescent of active fronts maintained by Iran supported Islamist client militias.  As part of this, the regime is seeking to find a way to add an eastern component to this crescent – through Jordan to the West Bank. 

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its client militias have freedom of action of course in Iraq, where they are deeply embedded in government and state.  But further west, two elements stand as barriers in the way of the Iranian desire to begin an armed campaign against Israel in the West Bank and from there into central Israel.  These two elements are: the US-supported Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the Israeli security presence in the West Bank. 

Teheran is actively engaged in developing a variety of ‘solutions’ to this problem. 

The Iranians are not without significant achievement in this area.  Most importantly, Teheran has succeeded in establishing and maintaining an arms route in which military materiel, brought from Iran into Lebanon, is then transported across the Syrian-Lebanese border, via Jordan, into the West Bank.  The maintenance of this route is of strategic importance to Iran.  It is intended, over time, to flood the West Bank with weaponry, and in so doing to eventually make this area a third front in the ongoing long war against Israel.  The following provides details on one of the channels of Iranian arms to the West Bank.  There may well be others. 

The weapons pipeline from Lebanon and Syria to the West Bank began in 2005.  Syrian Brigadier-General Mohammed Suleiman, assassinated by Israel in 2008, was responsible for facilitating the arrival of weapons to Damascus and the Syrian coast,  and then managing their conveyance to Lebanon and Jordan.  Lebanese Hizballah was also involved in this process. In this period, two brothers, Sami and Alaa al-Bashashbeh from Ramtha in Jordan were responsible for the handling of weapons from their entry into Jordan until their transfer onto the West Bank.  The Bashashbehs cooperated with smuggling networks on the Syrian side, and with Lebanese Hizballah.  Their interest, and that of the other smuggling families was in money, not ideological commitment.  The transfer at that time was in small arms – rifles, pistols and ammunition.   

This network broke down with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, and the loss by the Syrian regime and its allies of large parts of the border, to Sunni Arab insurgent groups. 

With the re-conquest by the Assad regime and its allies of the southern border area in 2018, the process began again, on a larger scale, once again managed by Hizballah, under Iranian supervision, in cooperation with elements of the Syrian regime and local smuggling families. These activities take place within the framework of Hizballah’s external security office, headed by senior movement official Wafiq Safa.

As of now, the arms smuggling process begins from Lebanon. Weapons are transported across the border to a Hizballah external security headquarters in Qusayr, Syria.  The weapons are taken from there to the Homs area, where they are stored in a farm belonging to an individual named Hussein Rahma. The farm has been converted by Hizballah into a site for the storage of arms. From there, the weapons are taken to a site at the Sayeda Zeinab area south of Damascus. There, a senior Hizballah official named Zain al Abidin is responsible for storing them and managing their transfer to southern Syria and Suwayda.  Under his supervision, the arms are taken to remote areas in the Suwayda province on the Syrian-Jordanian border. They are then transported into Jordan and then in into the West Bank. 

While light weapons are still being transported along this route, in the post 2018 period and the years prior to the current war the focus  shifted.  The weaponry now trafficked included and includes C4, TNT, mines, anti-tank mines, RPG launchers and missiles of various types including anti-armor and anti-personnel missiles. 

On the Jordanian side, two families centrally involved in the transfer of weapons within Jordan and into the West Bank are the al-Saeed and al-Ramthan families.  Muhammad al-Ramthan, the main member of this family involved in weapons transfer is the brother of Mari al-Ramthan, who was killed in an airstrike by the Jordanian authorities in May, 2023, because of his involvement in smuggling across the border. 

At the time, regional media reports called Mari al-Ramthan the ‘Escobar’ of southern Syria, because of the smuggling of Captagon along the routes he maintained.    Few outlets at the time noted that the same lines were being used to transport weaponry. 

The 4^th Armored Division, commanded by Maher al-Assad, is involved in this process. Hizballah relies also on the cooperation of local elements and armed groups to facilitate the smuggling.  In this context, Jihad and Mashafi al-Saeed of Shaab village play a central role.  A medical facility maintained in Shaab village by Jihad al-Saeed has been used by Hizballah for the storing of arms on the Syrian side of the border.  Regarding the final stage of the network, namely those individuals on the Jordanian side responsible for bringing the weapons into the West Bank, a number of names can be identified. 

Four names of individuals involved in the process of smuggling in this area are Abu Amar al-Khalidi, Abu Khaled al-Sarhan, Saqr al-Fadous and Muhammad al-Duaij.  All these individuals are known arms smugglers. 

Thus far then the route from Lebanon via Syria and Jordan to the West Bank.  So what happens when the weaponry arrives to this area?  A recent report by veteran Israeli Mid-East analyst Ehud Ya’ari on this subject suggests that Iran has abandoned efforts to create a unified, hierarchical military command structure in the West Bank.  Such a structure would be too vulnerable to penetration by Israel’s security services because of their tight hold there.  Instead, the weaponry and materiel is made available to any ad hoc armed group that forms itself on a local basis in the West Bank, and which is willing to carry out attacks on Israel. 

Such formations as the now defunct ‘Lions Den’ of Nablus and the Jenin Battalion of that city offer examples of such loosely assembled ‘Ktaeb’ or battalions.  Ya’ari refers to this approach as the ‘Kitaba’ strategy of Iran.  In his report, produced for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), he gives a figure of 1000 members in such loosely organized formations at the present time.  Ya’ari also notes that IRGC Qods Force Units 840 and 3900 have established a joint ‘operations room’ for managing this process with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). 

And the final destination of the weaponry?  On Monday, 22 year old Sergeant Yehuda Geto of Pardes Hanna and the IDF’s Commando Brigade was killed in an IED explosion in the Nur a Shams refugee camp close to Tulkarm on the West Bank.  A week earlier, Captain Alon Sacagiu of the Kfir Brigade died in an IED explosion in Jenin.  16 other IDF soldiers were wounded.  That’s how its meant to end, from Iran’s point of view.  The Iranian arms route from Lebanon,  through Syria and Jordan to the West Bank represents the main flagrant subversion of Jordanian sovereignty so far achieved by the Tehran regime.  It is also a clear, present and growing danger for Israel. 

The Spectator, 2/2

The US has failed to stop Iran and its proxies

Nine years ago, with Vice President Joe Biden at his side, US President Barack Obama announced the Iran nuclear deal. Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime would eliminate its stockpile of medium enriched uranium, reduce by two thirds the number of its gas centrifuges, and enrich only to 3.67% for the next fifteen years. In return America would lift economic sanctions. It was ‘historic’, Obama said. The Iranians had been close to developing their first nuke. Obama’s agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, stopped them. ‘This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change – change that makes our country, and the world, safer and more secure’, said the then President from the White House lectern.

 Obama was wrong. If recent months are anything to go by, America’s diplomatic attempts to fix the Middle East have been an unmitigated disaster. The region isn’t safer, nor more secure. Why? Centrally, Obama’s nuclear deal was too narrow, leaving Iran room to develop the proxy military and terror groups that are now bringing misery to the Middle East.

Obama’s Democratic successor, Joe Biden, has done nothing to fix the mess. The main dividing line in the Middle East today is whether you’re on Iran’s side or not.

For a brief period, under Donald Trump, America’s Iran policy changed direction. Trump’s administration hammered the Iranian economy with sanctions that cut its oil exports by four-fifths, and devalued its currency by two-thirds. Four years ago this month, a US drone strike took out Qasem Soleimani – the second-most powerful figure in Iran, a man central to the regime’s proxy network. Trump said his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign would force Khamenei and the mullahs into submission, stop Iran making a nuclear bomb, and end the regime-sponsored terrorism. 

 But Biden’s White House has returned the status quo ante.  Prior to the deadly Hamas attack on 7 October, his administration was trying to revive Obama’s nuclear deal. US officials met with Iranian counterparts in Oman and in New York, all while Tehran’s proxies were carrying out rocket and drone attacks on US positions in north east Syria.  

Now, the illusion that the Iranian regime could be tamed and domesticated through inducements is collapsing in ruins. 

Over 160 attacks on US positions in Iraq and Syria have taken place since October 7.  This week, Iran’s campaign claimed its first fatalities.  Three US service personnel were killed in a drone attack at the Tower 22 outpost on the Syrian-Jordanian border.  30 more were injured, some with traumatic brain injuries. 

The US response to this wave of attacks has until now been muted. A drone strike killed Jawad al-Jawari, a senior official of the Nujaba movement, a key IRGC-linked militia in Iraq, on 4 January. It did nothing to stop Iran’s campaign.

It remains to be seen if the fatalities on the border will now lead to a more determined response.  Don’t be too sure.  Some reports have suggested that the attacks are leading the Administration to consider a rapid withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and Syria.  Such a retreat, if carried out, would be a historic mistake, projecting weakness at precisely the time when the opposite is needed. 

Further south, in the Red Sea, the Iran allied Houthis are still targeting commercial ships, despite US and UK strikes.  A British linked oil tanker, the Marlin Luanda, was struck by the Yemeni rebels on Saturday, in the latest such incident.  The Houthis are the thinnest of masks over the face of the IRGC. The Qader long range ballistic missile intercepted by Israel’s Arrow 2 defence system outside the earth’s atmosphere on 31 October was not built in a backyard in Saada by a north Yemeni tribal militia. The Wa’id drones attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea are direct copies of the Iranian Shahed 136 system.

 The Houthis’ attacks are guided by the Iranian intelligence gathering ship, the Behshad, which guides the Yemeni Islamist rebels’ strikes on ships that seek to switch off identifiers. The frigate Alborz, too, has now deployed in the Red Sea, in support of the Houthis’ operations.  Biden was asked recently if the strikes were ‘working’. His reply was telling: ‘Well, when you say “working” are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes,’ he replied.  Continuing at the current level and tempo is unlikely to produce results different to those already achieved (ie, none). 

Then there’s Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Lebanese Shia Islamists clearly want to avoid the punishment being meted out to Gaza, while still not leaving their southern ally to face Israel alone. This dictates the pitch of the fighting. But one should not overdo this ‘limited’ nature of the contest: some 170 Hezbollah fighters have died, including the senior commanders Wissam Tawil and Ali Hussein Burji. An IRGC commander, Razi Mousavi, and a top Hamas official, Saleh al Arouri, have also been killed.

Around 86,000 Israelis and over 100,000 Lebanese have left their homes in the zone of conflict. IDF sources tell me that they are satisfied with the performance of the military in this arena (9 soldiers have died). But the matter of the northern border can’t stay as it is; it has to be resolved which could mean an all-out war. ‘We are fighting an axis, not a single enemy,’ Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said recently. ‘Iran is building up military power around Israel in order to use it… They see what is happening in Gaza. They know we can copy paste to Beirut.’

In the last two weeks, in addition to killing the three US service personnel, Iran bombed three countries: Pakistan, Syria and Iraq.

Teheran is still trying, meanwhile, to insure itself against interference with its nuclear program. Late last year an IAEA report indicated that Iran possesses 22 times the amount of enriched uranium permitted, and enough uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity to build three atomic bombs.

Lastly, the Iranian regime is waging silent war, alongside its kinetic operations. In September last year, it emerged that Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon official who worked with Biden’s chief Iran negotiator, Robert Malley, was part of a shady group of pro-Iranian academics and researchers called the Iran Experts Initiative. Tabatabai checked with Iran’s foreign ministry before attending policy events and conferences. ‘[I] will keep you updated on the progress’, she wrote in one email to them.  Other members of the IEI wrote newspaper articles for Iranian officials.

Tehran’s goal is clear.  It is not solely regional hegemony. Iran wishes to replace the post-Cold War US-led security architecture in the region with a nexus dominated by itself, alongside other anti-western forces, specifically Russia and China.

 The Middle East is as a result of this effort at its highest point of tension in years.

 Washington has tried to confine the conflict to Gaza since 7 October, and to contain rather than confront Iran’s proxies who have taken advantage of the fractured nature of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Clearly, it hasn’t worked. While the focus has been on Israel, Iran’s wider ambitions and activities have been ignored.

 The US might now have no choice but to respond with more force to not only the Houthis, but Iran more directly. Until now, the Administration has appeared determined to telegraph to Iran that no such options are under consideration. Rather, it seeks to let the Iranians know that the US desires only to return to the pre October 7 situation.  “Nobody’s looking for a conflict with Iran,” reassured White House Spokesman John Kirby, after the US struck Iranian munitions dumps in Syria in late October 2023. “No intention nor desire to engage in further hostilities”  said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, after the same operation.

 The Iranians appear to interpret such statements as invitations to continue and intensify attacks. 

Iran is paying close attention to the US’s support for Israel to see if it wavers. Biden is entering an election year and has already upset his progressive Democrat base. Any sign of the US’s resolve waning will also empower Gaza’s Islamist authority, which, while having sustained massive damage since the war began has not yet been destroyed.

The US’s enemies are no doubt satisfied watching the post-Cold War US designed security architecture of the Middle East region come under sustained attack.  Russia is an emergent strategic ally of Iran: Moscow sells the Iranians advanced weapons systems such as the S-300 air defence system. It relies on its partner in Teheran for the drone and missile supplies needed in its grinding war of aggression in Ukraine. The two are strategic partners in Syria, too. Moscow is undoubtedly hoping that the attention now demanded by the challenge in the Middle East will permit it to push further forward in Ukraine at an opportune moment.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the past stressed the personal rapport he had built up with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the better to ensure Israeli freedom of action in Syria, where Russian forces are also deployed.  As of now, the Israel-Russia deconfliction channel in Syria remains intact, according to Israeli security sources.  But the more general direction of Russian strategy in the region – toward greater alliance with enemies of the west – is clear. 

 China, too, which quietly enabled Iran to get through the brief period of US ‘maximum pressure’ under Trump by maintaining oil purchases, is waiting and watching in the wings. Beijing tends to avoid noise in its Middle East activities, but in addition to its role as the main receiver of Iranian crude oil exports, it has been conducting joint annual naval exercises with the Iranians and Russians since 2019. Chinese and North Korean weaponry has turned up in surprisingly large quantities in the hands of Hamas fighters in Gaza in recent weeks. China failed to clearly condemn the massacres of the 7^th of October.  Its call for a ‘larger-scale, more authoritative and more effective international peace conference’ on Gaza appears designed to place Beijing within the broadly pro-Palestinian camp, while avoiding a major rift with Israel.  China’s practical moves on the ground matter more, however, than these first unsteady steps in regional diplomacy.  Perhaps most importantly, should the West falter again in the Middle East and in Ukraine, this will provide a no doubt well noted lesson for the Chinese regarding their own ambitions toward Taiwan.

 Israeli and western failure to understand the nature and the potency of the marriage of political Islam from below and the Iranian regime from above, allowed the danger to build in plain sight.  A major challenge is now being mounted, on three fronts, to the Middle-East order as it has existed since the 1990s. The killings of the three US servicemen at Tower 22, and the recent Iranian missile attacks on Kurdish northern Iraq and on Pakistan further confirm it – this is a regime out of control, operating far from the norms of the international system.  Efforts to normalize the Iranian regime and its regional role through temptation  and inducement failed. Containment and passive defence haven’t worked, either. The fallout could yet still be a large-scale conflict that will engulf the entire region – and potentially beyond.

The Australian, 14-15/10

I was at Heathrow Airport, waiting for a plane back to Israel when messages, initially casual and nonchalant, began to appear on my Whatsapp feed.  It was Simchat Torah, the last day of the Jewish High Holy Days, and I was sitting among a large contingent of sleepy Israeli families waiting to return home. A Hamas incursion from Gaza, the messages said.   Few details yet available.  In the following minutes, the story and the details began to come into focus and we began to realize, with a moment of astonishment and then with weary familiarity, that this was not just another border incident.  As the dimensions of what was happening emerged in subsequent minutes, the familiarity also gave way to something else.  Hostages dragged across the border to Gaza.  Killings of civilians.  Something about a music festival close to the border. Terrible things happening. The army and police absent.  A peculiar charged hush came among those waiting in the crowded departure lounge.  They’ll close the airport, people began to say. 

We made it in, though, on one of the last flights by non-Israeli carriers.  Jerusalem, where I live,  is now a city transformed into war mode.  On that first evening of October 7, a colleague and I set out for the city center.  Everything closed.  The immediate association was with the pandemic. Then I remembered the years of the Second Intifada, and the empty streets after terror attacks, many of them by the same Hamas organization that Israel is fighting now. Eventually we found a single small bar that had stayed defiantly open.  A place frequented mostly by young people, foreigners and journalists. But there was no defiant optimism available there, either.  A friend of one of the servers had been at the music festival at Kibbutz Re’im, a few kilometers from the border.   No one had been able to contact her.  Everything had changed.  Suddenly, a different country. 

Online later on, I saw that a cousin of mine had posted that her husband’s brother had also been at the music festival.  He was missing and they asked anyone who had seen him to please be in contact.  They included his picture. 

The border area

We made our way to the Gaza border area the next day.  All along the borderline there were the signs of recent destruction.  And as in Jerusalem, the odd and eerie quiet.  As though the population as a whole, aware that something horrific was passing through, had decided to stay as far out of its sight as possible.  Along the road, here and there were smashed up cars, many with bullet holes in the windscreens.  These were the remains of vehicles which had belonged to Israelis and which had been fired on by groups of Hamas terrorists during the first, chaotic hours of the assault.  We looked inside one of the vehicles strewn by the road.  There were bloodstains on the driver’s seat, and a neat entry hole in the windscreen just above the steering wheel.  A corpse was lying close by, half covered by a piece of tarpaulin.  This was the body of the terrorist.  The army had taken the body of the driver away an hour ago, a religious Jewish man at the site told us.  The authorities appeared to be following a policy of collecting the Israeli dead first, leaving the corpses of the Hamas attackers strewn about beneath the sun. 

“The guy in the car’s father was here an hour ago,” the religious man told us.  “He wasn’t clear what had happened and he recognized his son’s car. He went crazy.” 

In the groves of Kibbutz Zikim, which had borne the brunt of one of the first assaults, there was the same curious silence. And absence.  Shouldn’t the army be here in larger numbers? We remembered 2014, and the days before Operation Protective Edge, when these fields and groves had bristled with military presence, awaiting orders.  Not now. Travelling down a dirt road along a line of the kibbutz houses close to the seafront we came across the vaporized corpses of two Hamas men. These men had clearly been taken out by very high explosives.  A smashed vehicle, its engine still running, was located close by.  Fearful of the possibility of too eager navy patrolmen and friendly fire, we made ourselves scarce. 

On the way out, we ran into a platoon of tanks.  A reserve unit, rapidly mobilized.  Merkava 4s, the top of the range currently of Israeli armored power.  Waiting at the border. There was the sound of tank cannon fire close by. ‘This is our Yom Kippur,’ one of the young soldiers told us.  Privately, it occurred to me that as of then, that was only half true.  In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel was surprised, was hit hard, and ultimately prevailed.  As of now, only two of those three elements appeared to apply.  The third remained to be decided.  The chaos, the broken cars and the corpses strewn around the roads didn’t seem especially encouraging. 

Barzilai Medical Center

At Barzilai hospital, the closest Israeli medical center to the Gaza Strip, the picture was different.  We expected something like a replay of the chaos at the border. A missile had hit the hospital a few hours earlier. But everything was quiet, smooth, quick and efficient. 

“I was woken by a siren on Saturday morning, and I thought it was a dream,’  Dr Tal Bergman, Barzilai’s deputy director told us.  “How could there be a siren, without us knowing? So I started calling people, but no-one knew anything.” 

Bergman, a psychiatrist by background, had made her way from her home in Rishon Letzion, near Tel Aviv, to Barzilai.  Sirens and missiles had forced her to stop her car and lie by the side of the road several times on the way down. 

When she arrived, “There were all kinds of rumors.  Bit by bit, we started realizing that something very bad was happening, but the situation was very chaotic, so we started doing what we know how to do best.”

380 wounded people came through Barzilai in the following 24 hours.  “A lot of very complex wounds – gunshots, some severe brain injuries, complex multi-organ injuries.” 

Outside the entrance to the Emergency Department, some volunteers had set up a food stall and were giving out hot food and drinks to the exhausted medical staff.  It was a lull period. They were expecting things to liven up a bit later.  The people running the stall were secular Israelis, men and women, from the local area.  ‘This food comes from the Chabad House,’ one of the women told us.  Chabad/Lubavitch, a Hassidic sect, is well known for its rapid responses of this type.  I remembered them on the Lebanese border in 2006.  That had been another time when people had asked where the state was, and concluded that it was nowhere to be found.   And had then acted on their own initiative. 

On the way back to Jerusalem, we stopped to buy coffee.  A woman behind me was in conversation on her cell-phone, speaking in quiet, whispered Hebrew.  ‘I heard they killed all the girls at the surveillance base,’ she said.  She meant the electronic surveillance base, staffed mainly by women non-combat soldiers that had been over-run early in the Hamas attack.  And she was right.  Most of these soldiers were murdered by Hamas. 

A Condolence Call in Jerusalem

The following evening, I paid a condolence call at the house of Elliot Young, in Jerusalem.  Elliot’s brother, Netanel, who served in battalion 12 of the Golani Brigade, had been killed on October 7 in the first hours of the attack.   Netanel, who was 20 when he was killed, was a recent immigrant to Israel from London.  A community group had sent out a message that his family had arrived from abroad, and were asking people to attend the ‘shiva’ – this is the seven day mourning period observed by Jews after a death.  The family, it was said, was worried that no one would come. 

At the apartment, as I arrived, there were about 200 people in attendance, and the Young family had moved the proceedings out into the courtyard to accommodate everyone.  People queued up to talk to Nicky and Chantal Young, the parents of Netanel.  When my turn came, I asked Nicky a few questions about his son.  ‘He had been in the army just over a year, since September,’ he told me.  ‘He came back for a month’s leave with us in England, during the summer.  And then back here.” And then a few words in French to a young man behind me, who like Netanel was a veteran of the Golani infantry brigade, one of the IDF’s premier units.  ‘Netanel didn’t do well in school, and he wasn’t always someone who stuck at things.  And people, friends, often let him down.  But he always wanted to help protect Israel. That was always very strong in him, and so that’s what he decided to do.” 

I wished him that he and his family should know no more sorrow.  He replied that all of us should know only peace.  Returning from the Youngs,  I received the news that the body of my cousin’s husband’s brother, Dan Damri, had been found.  He had attended the Supernova festival at Kibbutz Re’im, a ‘journey of unity and love,’ on October 7^th.  He was 22. 

A Preliminary Assessment

The Hamas offensive against the Israeli communities surrounding Gaza is a pivotal moment in a war that has been going on for some years. It’s a mistake to see this as another chapter in the long and interminable ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This error derives from the long habit of viewing the Israelis and Palestinians as part of a closed circle, detached from trends and power structures of the broader Middle East.  But what erupted out of the Gaza Strip on October 7, spreading massacre and horror has nothing to do with the ‘occupation’, the ‘two state solution’ and all the tired terminology of that dispute.  It represents the combination of two powerful and related forces. 

The first of these, coming from below, is the sustained potency of political Islam, or ‘Islamism,’ as it is sometimes termed, of both Sunni and Shia varieties.  Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, to give it its full name, is the local representative of  a series of political/military movements stretching along the contiguous space from Egypt up to Iraq, which for better or worse appear to be able to mobilize the support of a significant mass of their respective populations in the service of political violence.  Unfortunately, at ground level, these movements have no real competitors among the populations of the countries in question.  Where they are not in power, it’s because either a stronger non-Arab or non-Muslim force prevents this (Israel, the Kurdish enclaves in Syria and Iraq), or because a stronger non-Islamist Arab authoritarian force represses them by force (Egypt, Jordan).

The second element, coming from above, without which Hamas would be little more than a local nuisance, is state support.  The Islamic Republic of Iran is the element which provides Hamas’s missile array, instructs its cadres in the home grown building of rockets, and which almost certainly provided the space and the concealment needed for Hamas to train and prepare for  October 7.  For what purpose?  Iran is committed to a long war strategy against Israel, which is intended to end with the Jewish state’s demise and collapse.  This objective is pursued through the establishment or sponsorship of proxy political and military organizations along Israel’s borders, and the equipping of these groups with extensive military capacities, enabling Iran to carry on an ongoing military campaign against Israel, once-removed.  The question of the precise Iranian role on the day of October 7 remains open to question.  But the Iran-provided capacities to Hamas, and the role of the movement in Teheran’s broader regional strategy are not. 

As for what comes next,  it is clear that we are at the start of a long war, the dimensions of which could yet expand to take in other members of the alliance of which Hamas is a part.  Events on the Lebanese border are the main focus in this regard. Watch Syria too.  Still, the confused picture of the first days is now assuming a clearer shape.  Israel, both state and society,  is facing  one of its greatest challenges since its establishment.    

25/9/23

The Yom Kippur War of 1973  cast a shadow over my generation in Israel.  It was a distant and partial shadow, nevertheless, with its darkest parts only visible at certain points.  Mine, after all, was not the generation that fought the war.  Rather, it was the generation whose parents went through that particular fire. Those who returned from it, as is known in such matters, were not the same as when they set out.  And many of them didn’t return at all, leaving babies and toddlers who would grow up to be our contemporaries in Jerusalem and elsewhere twenty and thirty years’ hence. 

The war made its presence felt in various ways.  There is a particular raw vulnerability that leaves itself in children bereaved of parents.  One would pick this up in glances, in withdrawal, shyness, awkwardness. In shadows suddenly and abruptly cast. We are all older now, middle aged and mostly content.  But when we were younger these things were very visible. 

The war was around us, and was still fresh and breathing, in the early 1990s.  in the still vivid photographs of a cousin of mine, who was in Ariel Sharon’s division that crossed the Suez Canal in one of the decisive acts of the war.  And in other ways, too.  I remember one morning when I was a student, stopping at a shop in Jerusalem to visit a friend of mine whose father was killed on the Golan Heights in 1973.  This person has gone on to create a successful career and family life.  But we were just kids then, in our 20s, and she was fragile, troubled and vivid, and broken, a little. We talked a bit that morning, in the shop, in the way that young men and women do.  I was on the way to the national archives, to look into some tedious part of my research of the day.  It involved reading the minutes of Cabinet meetings, from the early ‘70s.  I remember sitting there later that afternoon and reading  Yisrael Galili arguing with Golda and Victor Shem Tov about some obscure, trifling aspect of government policy on the West Bank.  I glanced at the date at the top of the document.  September 25, 1973.  Just ten days to go before the storm hit. And there they were, squabbling querulously like the old apparatchiks that they were. And my friend’s father, in some student bar in west Jerusalem at the time, no doubt.  The storm coming, his death just ahead, and his daughter not yet born. 

I was not born in Israel, of course, and my parents didn’t live here in 1973.  Rather I came here in my very early twenties.  Oddly, the Yom Kippur War was one of the reasons that I arrived here.  As a boy, in school,  in England,  I remember discovering a book about the war in a classroom where old books had been piled up.  What gripped me were the pictures. And above all their vividness and urgency, the deep blue of the sky, and the harsh gold yellow of the desert sands.  The faces of the men.  And the feeling on some level or another that these men were connected to me. I was I suppose 11 or 12 then, so it was seven or eight years after the war. 

In the army, I served in the 188 Brigade, which is one of the two regular armored brigades that the IDF maintains on the Golan Heights.  The other is the 7^th Brigade and both of them are part of the 36^th Armored Division.  The culture of these brigades is steeped in the 1973 war and the enormous sacrifices that both brigades made in order to stop the Syrian advance.  Famously, the 7^th Brigade remained intact throughout the war on the northern Golan.  The 188^th, further south, was destroyed. The brigade commander, Itzik Ben-Shoham was killed along  with 101 other soldiers and officers.  The 188 was destroyed, but it held on long enough for the reservists of the 679^th Brigade to arrive and begin to organize.  This was what prevented the Syrian breakthrough in the southern Golan.  The Golan Heights is the memory scape for all this and today it is peaceful.  Zvika Force, Colonel Yair Nafshi and Battalion 74 and the rest of that stuff is there in the monuments that you find here and there. And in the more verdant landscape further north, the Valley of Tears, Kahalani, Yanosh Ben-Gal.  It seemed already quite  long ago when we were up there in the early ‘90s.  It wasn’t, tho, and it still isn’t. 

I am writing all this as though I am its native son.  But I am not.  I am  an immigrant from Europe, and I don’t really accept the prevailing Israeli narrative of the 1973 war.  It has been committed to memory here as a terrible disaster, full only of trauma and pain and bereavement, and it marked the point at which the desire for peace no matter what the cost was born in the psyche here, with all the dangers attendant on such a desire.  I think the war was something different.  I think it was the conclusive Israeli victory in a battle between two rival developmental projects that had been involved in a frantic race against one another for the 70 or so preceding years.  Those two projects were Zionism and Arab nationalism.  That is to say, the desire of the Jews to re-create sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, and the desire of Arabs to establish a powerful, united state across Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia.  From the point of view of simple geo-politics, as well as for other reasons, these two projects could not co-exist.  One had to be vanquished by the other.   Yom Kippur 1973 was the point at which the climactic battle between these two wills took place, with the Jewish side emerging as the clear victor.  The proof of the victory is that the conventional armies of the Arab states never came back again.  On a more complex level, Arab nationalism entered a phase of terminal decline at this point, to be replaced by a number of other projects – most importantly, local state patriotisms, and movements of Islamic revival. 

It is more customary to date the 1967 War as the ‘Waterloo’ of Arab nationalism.  But this term implies a definite conclusion.  That conclusion came in 1973.  The Six Day War, if one insists on the analogy, sent the enemy to brooding exile in Elba.  1973, however, sent him to St. Helena, never to return. 

I differ, I suppose, with the accepted version of the Yom Kippur War in Israel in another way.  I regard it as the greatest and final victory of Mapai Israel.  The state and the institutions established by Mapai were in an advanced state of decay by 1973.  The great and historic leaders – Ben-Gurion, Ben-Tzvi, Eshkol and so on  – were all gone.  A much less impressive second generation were in power by this time.  Prime Minister Golda Meir, tho iron-willed and sincere, was narrow, unimaginative and un-strategic in her thinking.  Her defense minister Moshe Dayan was an able general and a creative thinker but a  complex, corrupt  and ethically ambiguous man. They were the representatives of a decayed project, about to exit the stage. 

Yet October 1973 showed that the institutions that had been built up during the long years of Mapai rule were still fit for purpose.  The rival developmental project established by the Arab nationalist officers’ regimes in Egypt and Syria could not, at the crunch moment, prevail over the vastly smaller but vastly better organized and motivated Jewish society.  This in spite of the lackluster leadership at its helm by this time.

So ‘they did what they did, and they went on their way.’  And here we are, a half century on.  And what is one to make of all this? What might be learned from that almighty clash which, at least in my reading, begins with young militants practicing pistol shooting in basements in a number of late Ottoman cities somewhere around the turn of the century, and which ends in the mighty armored clashes on the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights in October 1973? 

Israel today, of course, is vastly stronger, more developed, more populous and richer than it was at that time. Of the two regimes which launched the war, one is now at peace with the Jewish state, the other is in ruins after a decade of internal uprising and revolution. But since one of the main lessons of Yom Kippur 1973 is the need for constant, vigilant and clear-eyed observation, I find that from the vantage point of our days, and in comparison with that time, there are two processes under way which cause me some disquiet.  Perhaps they are related both to one another and to the war itself. They are growing, respectively, on the landscape of Israel’s historic victory, and on that of the historic defeat of Arab nationalism which were sealed in 1973. 

The first is the fracturing of Israeliness.  The ‘unified’ Israeli Jewish identity of Mapai’s state was achieved and maintained at least partially by coercion.  It undoubtedly involved the deliberate belittling or dismissal and subsequent loss of large and rich parts of the experience of historic Diaspora Jewish communities, in particular from the Middle East but not only from there.  However,  at its core, modern Zionism, in its original inception and in both the Labor and Revisionist forms which competed during its formative phase, represented a stable and viable integration of rival strands and elements of Jewish life – secular and religious, eastern and western, pragmatic and messianic.  Indeed, its ability to maintain precisely this balance and integration might be seen as the formative success of modern Jewish nationalism, on which all its subsequent achievements depend. 

This success is now under challenge.  One may see in the current political turmoil in Israel the clear faultlines emerging to separate along the lines mentioned above – secular from religious, pragmatic from messianic and, yes, western from eastern.  The problem is that if these become separate, then their natural tendency will be to struggle with one another until, potentially, a victory and defeat which will in fact be defeat for both victor and vanquished.   Historically, I think Revisionist Zionism had the more coherent and inclusive version of modern Jewish political identity, and its parties’ long periods in government since the 1970s can largely be traced to this.  But we aren’t in Begin and Shamir’s second Israeli republic anymore, either.  We are in uncharted territory.  And if some newer version of Israeli identity able to once more integrate the disparate elements listed above, in some new way does not emerge, that territory contains dangers ahead. 

The second element relates to the other side.  In the summer of 2019, I spent some time living in Kurdish northern Iraq, in the city of Erbil.  I shared a house with a foreign journalist and with two young Iranian Kurds.  Once, I was discussing the region and its developments with one of these, a young man.  ‘Some nations will kill you with iron,’ he told me.  ‘But Iran, you know, will kill you with cotton.’  I later learned that this is a well known Persian phrase.  The phrase stuck with me and it describes, I think perfectly,  the main external challenge to Israel currently under way.  I have been busy with trying to observe and understand this threat and its dimensions for the last 17 years. 

There is, on Israel’s borders to the north, east and south, and within it, an effort under way to assemble a military and political force connected by myriad threads to the regime in Teheran, the purpose of which is to bring about the slow decline, disassembling and eventual collapse of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.  This effort has been ongoing for four decades, but it has advanced very considerably over the last ten years, because of the collapse and fragmentation of the Arab states system in the Levant and Iraq. 

This project is slowly and patiently weaving a web of myriad strands with which it intends eventually to trap and suffocate the revived Jewish state.  Just like a spider’s web, this is intended to render the target helpless, unable to move, stripped of its strength, before the final injection of poison finishes the job. Not the iron of Naser and Sadat and Hafez Assad’s divisions.  And not the old and empty slogans of the Palestinian nationalism that tried to follow them, and that is now divided, broken and mired in corruption and decay.  Rather, myriad strands of  cotton; politics mixed with military organization; slow, infinitely patient erosion, and then at the appropriate moment, sudden violence.  This project comes under the banner of Islamic revival, which remains without rival in the  politics of the Arab Levant at the popular level.  It is serious, it is proceeding and its goals and the depth and breadth of both its ambitions and its methods of organization require more serious attention. 

That, at least, is the best I can offer, by way of some words of remembering and of warning to my fellow citizens, fifty years after the great storm hit.  It is meant as a small offering of gratitude and with love and sorrow to the men who died in the Sinai and the Golan Heights in October, 1973.  It is the kind of offering that I think they would appreciate, as they were not a generation inclined toward sentimentality.  And may we all be sealed in the book of life. 

Jerusalem Post, 23/9

A truce brokered earlier this week by the Lebanese General Security Service to end the ongoing fighting in the Palestinian Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp appears to have broken down, with renewed clashes taking place at various locations in the camp.  A mass exodus of residents from the camp is under way, according to a number of regional media reports.  Fighting in the camp began in late July, but increased in intensity from September 7^th. 

The truce was the result of talks between the interim director of General Security, Elias Baissari and the ‘Joint Palestinian Action Committee’, representing all recognized Palestinian factions in Lebanon. It followed an earlier short lived ceasefire, announced on Saturday, September 9, which was the result of talks between representatives of Fatah and Hamas.  

Following the breakdown of the second ceasefire, senior Hamas official Mohammed Mousa Abu Marzouk arrived in Beirut, for renewed talks with senior Fatah officials in an effort to revive the ceasefire.  A joint statement was issued following Abu Marzouk’s meeting with Fatah officials including the veteran PLO diplomat Azzam al-Ahmad.  The statement expressed the two movements’ ‘full commitment to consolidating the ceasefire.’ 

The flaw in both ‘ceasefires’ so far brokered to end the violence in Ain al-Hilweh appears to derive from the fact that neither agreement was concluded between the actual parties to the current violence.  Rather, in both cases, Fatah, which is one of the engaged parties, concluded a ceasefire with a third party against which it is not actually fighting in the refugee camp. 

The agreement with General Security reflected the fact that the organs of the Lebanese state, in line with the 1969 Cairo Accord,  leaves the policing of Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps to the recognised, armed Palestinian organizations led by Fatah.  So the ‘ceasefire’ was by way of a commitment by the Palestinian organizations to restore order in the camp.   This commitment, obviously, has not been successfully implemented. 

The second ceasefire was brokered between Fatah and Hamas. The latter organization is not engaged in the fighting in the camp, but its attempt at a mediatory role is noteworthy.  Hamas has increased its authority and strength in Lebanon over the last couple of years, as a result of its revived ties with the real power in the country – namely Hizballah and behind it Iran and the Assad regime in Syria.  Lebanese journalist Souhayb Jawhar suggested that Hamas was seeking to leverage its growing strength and influence in  Lebanon in order to build political influence.  ‘”In this way,’ Jawhar told the New Arab website,  ‘Hamas may benefit from this struggle while other sides get weakened.”  

Still, while this may well be Hamas’s intention, as of now its efforts at mediation have similarly failed to produce results. 

So if neither the formal Lebanese authorities, nor Hamas with its links to the real power in Lebanon, namely Iran/Hizballah are party to the dispute in Ain al Hilweh, who is Fatah actually fighting in the camp, in clashes which have left at least 18 people dead since their outbreak?    

A number of reports have named an organization or framework calling itself the ‘Muslim Youth’ as constituting Fatah’s antagonist in Ain al-Hilweh.  Closer inspection reveals that this is not a coherent organization, but, perhaps predictably is a collection of a number of Salafi and other Sunni jihadi outfits, combined with local gunmen intent on challenging Fatah’s control of the camp with local and parochial aims in mind.  Among the former groups are Jund al-Sham, Asbat al-Ansar and Ansar Allah. 

Regarding these three groups, while the temptation might be to dismiss them as just another Sunni jihadi word salad of familiar terms, a moment’s further consideration is warranted.  The first two groups are indeed Salafi jihadi groups with deep roots in Ain al-Hilweh.  Jund al Sham may or may not have links to the group with the same name in Syria.  Asbat al Ansar first emerged in Ain al Hilweh in the early 1990s, and has long maintained its stronghold there. 

Ansar Allah, by contrast, is a group founded by former Fatah members but which, as its name suggests, is close to Hizballah.  Jamal Suleiman, a former Fatah activist, founded the organization in the 1990s.  All of these organizations have a long history of opposition to Fatah, with various episodes of violence between them and the larger movement in the past in Ain al Hilweh.  It is also important not to exaggerate the ideological element at play here.  These groups compete with Fatah for local control of resources and for power, as much as for any notional differences in preferred forms of governance. 

The current fighting differs from previous episodes in that over the last decade, Ain al Hilweh has become swollen with the arrival of thousands of refugees from Syria, who have made their homes there without official registration.  Ain al Hilweh houses 55,000 registered Palestinian refugees.  But the actual population is far larger.  Many of these Syrian Sunni refugees will have come with the loyalties forged in the course of the civil war in their country.  As such, they are less likely to be constrained by traditional Palestinian affiliations. 

The events at Ain al Hilweh showcase a number of trends.   

Firstly, they lay bare the advancing decrepitude of al-Fatah. The official Palestinian leadership is currently unable to quickly crush the poorly organized challenge to its authority in the camp.  Its weakness here is made more apparent because unlike in the West Bank, it is unable to call on the assistance of a stronger neighboring factor. That is because while in the West Bank, Israel cooperates with the Palestinian Authority, in Lebanon the official authorities stay out of the camp, while the real power, Hizballah/Iran, does not back Fatah. 

Secondly, the events in the camp reflect the unfortunate inability of Sunni Arab politics, and arguably of Sunni Arab social organization more generally to outgrow the level of organization  represented by armed clans and gangs, with issues decided through bloody contests between them. 

Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, the growing influence and power of Hamas is reflected in its efforts to play a mediating role.  The attempt at mediation may have failed, but the fact that Hamas was able to credibly attempt it indicates the extent to which this movement is currently in the ascent. 

Its ascent is connected entirely to the successful effort at rapprochement with Iran which has been under way since the rise of Yahya Sinwar and the growing centrality of Saleh al Arouri.  That is, the advance of Hamas is happening because it is a part of a broader strategy by Iran to take control of the Palestinian arena, and make it part of a united, cross border, Islamist, Teheran led campaign against Israel. This, in turn, reflects maybe the most telling point of all: that the strongest and most potent element from among the Palestinians currently owes its strength to the fact that it works for an alliance led by a non-Sunni, non-Arab power.  Whoever ‘wins’ in Ain al Hilweh, this defining weakness of what was once the flagship cause of the Sunni Arabs will remain.