The Houthis declare war on Israel

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 30 November 2023

          In the early days of November a considerable amount of journalistic ink was spilled countering a report that appeared on several social media sites. On October 31 a post on X, formerly Twitter, stated: "Breaking: Yemen declared they are now at war with Israel." According to Newsweek, it was viewed 7.1 million times. The news site USA Today reported that a similar post had appeared on Instagram, and went on to state categorically that the story was untrue. One after another, the news media scrambled to deny the report.

          In fact the internationally recognized government (IRG) of Yemen, led by Rashid al-Alami, has not attacked Israel by word or deed. But for the past nine years Yemen has been in the throes of a vicious civil war initiated by the Houthis, a Shia-allied group that emerged in the early 2000s in opposition to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Supported, financed and equipped by Iran, the Houthis have gained control of a considerable portion of Yemen, including the capital Sana’a.

          The Houthis, rallying behind a banner which reads in part: “Death to America; death to Israel, a curse on the Jews”, needed little prompting from their Iranian paymasters to support the Hamas massacre of October 7. It was no doubt at Iran’s behest that the Houthis went on to plan a series of assaults on Israel. Not all went according to plan. Three cruise missiles fired from Yemen on October 19 were intercepted by the US navy. A drone attack launched on October 28 apparently went off-course and resulted in explosions inside Egypt.

          On October 31 Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Saree, announced on TV that a "large number" of drones and ballistic missiles had been launched toward Israel. In reality they had little chance of hitting anything. More than 2,000 km (1,240 miles) away, Israel is at the very limit of even the longest-range Houthi missile. Moreover, to reach Israel, Houthi missiles must first evade US Navy ships patrolling the region, and then Israeli Navy missile corvettes stationed in the Red Sea.

          Israel has said it destroyed an unidentified “aerial target” over the Red Sea on the morning of October 31 using the “Arrow” aerial defense system for the first time since the outbreak of war with Hamas. “There was no threat or risk to civilians,” said the official report, but the incident triggered air raid sirens in the tourist resort of Eilat.

          In announcing the strike, Saree declared that Houthi military activity against Israel would be maintained "to help the Palestinians to victory." His statement was a virtual declaration of war, but the fact that the attacks would emanate from Yemeni territory certainly does not mean that the state of Yemen would be in any way involved.. The legitimate government of Yemen, supported by Saudi Arabia, is fighting the Houthis – and through them Iran – for control of the country. Nine years of conflict have seen the Houthis well entrenched in the area they have overrun, but still far from their goal of total control. In fact, according to Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arabian Gulf States Institute in Washington, in recent months anger has grown against Houthi rule within the area they control as the civil war grinds on without resolution.

          “The Houthis view the war between Israel and Hamas as an opportunity to mute some of this domestic criticism,” Johnsen wrote in an analysis earlier this month. “If they are attacking Israel, their local rivals will be less inclined to attack them.”

          This may be the motive behind the seizure on November 19 of a cargo ship connected at some remove to an Israeli businessman. Houthi rebels boarded the ship in a crucial Red Sea shipping route, and took its 25 crew members hostage.

         “All ships belonging to the Israeli enemy or that deal with it will become legitimate targets,” they announced.

          It suits Houthi propaganda to use the terms Houthi and Yemeni without distinction. For example, when a senior Houthi official told an international news agency about its drone attack on southern Israel, Abdelaziz bin Habtour, prime minister of the Houthi government, added: “These drones belong to the state of Yemen.”

          Later Mohammed Abdul-Salam, the Houthis’ chief negotiator, in a deliberately misleading statement that identified the Houthi militia with Yemen’s armed forces, declared: “The detention of the Israeli ship is a practical step that proves the seriousness of the Yemeni armed forces in waging the sea battle, regardless of its costs and costs. This is the beginning.”

          The ship, the Galaxy Leader, flies the flag of the Bahamas, and is operated by the Japanese NYK Line. Its crew is drawn from five different countries, none of which is Israel. The ultimate owners are Ray Car Carriers, founded by Abraham “Rami” Ungar, an Israeli billionaire. A ship linked to him experienced an explosion in 2021 in the Gulf of Oman which Israeli media blamed on Iran. Again on this occasion prime minister Netanyahu's office condemned the seizure as an “Iranian act of terror." Since 2021, Iran has harassed, attacked or seized nearly 20 internationally flagged merchant vessels.

          The Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are all part of an unofficial alliance that the Iranian regime likes to call “the Axis of Resistance.” It includes other groups in Iraq and Syria, which have also been busy targeting US forces in those countries. Over the past three weeks at least 40 separate drone and rocket attacks have been launched at US forces by Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, where a total of 3,400 American troops are based. Fortunately many of the rockets and one-way attack drones were intercepted by US air defenses, and only minor injuries have resulted so far. By manipulating events and avoiding any direct involvement, the Iranian regime has succeeded in souring the political atmosphere in the Middle East to the point, they hope, that any normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel - very much on the cards only a few short weeks ago - has become out of the question.

          As for the Houthi organization, it has responded as ever to the self-interest of its Iranian masters and has willingly assumed the role of combatant against Israel on their behalf.

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "The Houthis, not Yemen, declared war on Israel", 30 November 2023:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-775740

Published in Eurasia Review, 1 December 2023:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/01122023-the-houthis-declare-war-on-israel-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 6 December 2023:

https://mpc-journal.org/the-houthis-declare-war-on-israel/

Qatar: We talk to everyone

Published in the Jerusalem Post, 23 November 2023

 “We don’t do enemies,” a one-time foreign minister of Qatar once said. “We talk to everyone.” 

This is the policy pursued with determination over the past thirty years by the tiny Gulf state of Qatar in its long-term effort to become a major player on the world stage – and it has succeeded.   Qatar was absolutely central in negotiating the complex deal that has led to the release of a batch of the 240 hostages captured by Hamas.   

It already had two successes to its credit.  On October 20 Qatari officials negotiated the release of Judith and Natalie Raanan, mother and daughter, and then helped broker a deal for the release on October 23 of two elderly Israeli women held by Hamas —  Yocheved Lifshitz and Nurit Cooper.

            Two days later Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said that negotiations on the release of all the hostages captured by Hamas were progressing.

   Yet there has been strong opposition in Washington to the Biden administration’s close working collaboration with Qatar – especially in light of Qatar’s statement, issued after the horrific Hamas assault on Israel of October 7.  It declared that Israel is “solely responsible for the ongoing escalation due to its continuous violations of the rights of the Palestinian people…”  Critics of the US-Qatar relationship also point to the fact that Hamas has been largely financed by Qatar for years,  Since 2021, Qatar has reportedly funneled an estimated $360 million a year to Hamas. Between 2012 and 2021, Qatar is estimated to have given Hamas $1.8 billion in total.  What Hamas spent the money on must be left to the imagination, since no accounts have ever been published.  Certainly very little went to improving the lot of the citizens of the Strip. 

            Winston Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Qatar is close to meriting the same epithet . Dubbed “the wild card of the Middle East”, Qatar makes for an intriguing case study.  Not much is generally known about this stand-alone and gas-rich Gulf state except perhaps that it is the wealthiest country in the world on a per capita basis, that it has established what is now a global media empire called Al-Jazeera, that its national airline is a long-time sponsor of Britain’s Sky News TV channel, and that it won the hosting rights for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in somewhat dubious circumstances.

Qatar has long pursued a foreign policy that appears self-contradictory, if not bizarre.  While offering itself as a key US ally in the Middle East, it has also consistently backed hardline Islamists — from Hamas in the Gaza Strip, to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, to Sunni jihadist opposition fighters in Syria.

It was back in 1995 that Qatar’s emir at the time, Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani, set the nation on its friends-with-everyone journey. 

In 2002, when the US military began pulling forces out of Saudi Arabia, the emir offered his country as a home for the US Central Command’s forward headquarters.  Ever since, Qatar has hosted a large US military presence, one of the biggest in the region, at Al Udeid Air Base.

Yet as the Arab Spring dawned in 2011, with popular revolutions toppling dictators and autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, the emir had no hesitation in allowing hardline members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, as well as other jihadists, to establish a presence in his capital, Doha.  He gave them a fair degree of freedom of action, too, much to the irritation of Qatar’s neighbors who actually severed relations with the country for a period. 

In the years leading up to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Qatar played a pivotal role in hosting meetings between US officials and members of the Taliban.  While the talks ultimately failed, they demonstrated the reliance the US places on Qatar as a key intermediary.  Qatar certainly played an important role in the events leading to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.  Collaborating closely with the US, Qatar acted as mediator between the Taliban and what was left of the previous Afghan administration in assisting the evacuation of refugees.  Qatar's role in coordinating the safe exit of tens of thousands of people — including US citizens and contractors — was invaluable to the American government. Nearly 40% of all evacuees were taken out via Qatar.

As a direct result, on March 10, 2022, President Joe Biden formally confirmed his grant to Qatar of the status of “major non-NATO ally”.  MNNA,  a US legal designation conferred on nearly 20 countries including Australia, Israel, Japan and Brazil, is a powerful symbol of friendship and close collaboration.  It provides foreign partners of the US with a range of benefits and privileges, especially in the areas of defense, trade and security cooperation. By conferring the designation on Qatar, the Biden administration was signaling it wanted an even closer relationship with the Gulf state than it already enjoyed.

Biden’s gesture toward this paradoxical nation state certainly paid off.  Qatar's working relationships with traditional US adversaries such as Iran and Russia — or nonstate groups like Hamas and the Taliban — have made it an invaluable partner for the US and other Western countries.  All turn a Nelsonian blind eye to its questionable friends and alliances deep in the jihadist and terrorist worlds, since it is precisely these relationships that make Qatar such a valuable contact.

On October 13 US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to reporters at a press conference in Doha.   

“Qatar,” he said, “has been a very close partner to the United States on a broad range of issues that are crucial to both of our countries and to this region — from working together on evacuating Americans, Afghans and others from Afghanistan, to cooperating very closely in responding to humanitarian emergencies, like the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and in Syria."  He diplomatically made no mention of Qatar’s sensitive role, being undertaken as he spoke, in attempting to negotiate a deal involving both Israel and Hamas to release the hostages.

            Qatar’s bid to punch well above its weight has succeeded.  The tiny state – less than half the size of Israel – has followed its own star by maintaining good relations with a vast spectrum of global players while still being a strategic partner to the US.  Doing so, it has placed itself at the very heart of world affairs.

Published in the Jerusalem Post, and in the Jerusalem Post online titled: "Qatar punches above its weight by talking to everyone", 23 November 2023:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-774645

Published in Eurasia Review, 6 November 2023:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/25112023-qatar-we-talk-to-everyone-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 6 December 2023:
https://mpc-journal.org/qatar-we-talk-to-everyone/

Israel’s war: lessons from the past

Published in the Jerusalem Report, issue dated 27 November 2023 

           Speaking in Tel Aviv towards the end of his one-day visit to the Middle East on October 18, US President Joe Biden compared Israel’s situation after Hamas’s invasion and pogrom to the US’s crisis after the attacks of 9/11. His country had “sought and got justice,” he said, but also “made mistakes.”

          A catalogue of those mistakes was laid out in uncomfortable detail by Garrett M Graf in The Atlantic journal a few years ago. Taken together, they add up to a damning indictment of US foreign policy in the years following the al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Among the errors, failures and misjudgments listed by Graf, the US-led invasion of Iraq on unverified intelligence, undertaken while the invasion of Afghanistan was still in progress, is particularly noteworthy. Many commentators believe that America’s cardinal error was to begin those operations without either a clear objective for each nation post war, or an exit plan for the invading forces.

          In short Biden, while approving Israel’s intention of destroying Hamas root and branch, was pointing to the need for a viable vision of what was to follow its success – for both Gaza and the IDF.

          Historical parallels always require special factors to be taken into account, but they do allow lessons to be learnt. Take the document issued from Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) just before the end of World War II, when victory was assured but before it was achieved. It laid out one of the major war aims of the United Nations ­– the de-Nazification of Germany. The objective? To destroy the Nazi Party, its political organizations and government agencies; to purge and re-organize the police; and to dismiss from government offices and other position of influence all active Nazis, their sympathizers and leading military figures. Very shortly after the end of the war, the program was set in train.

          Why was it done? Because Nazism, with its wild-eyed philosophy of Aryan racial superiority, its virulent antisemitism, its brutal disregard for human rights, was seen as a virus that had infected the German state and its population, and had to be eliminated.

          The programme was fraught with enormous difficulties. It was only made possible because the Allies had won total victory.

          The same applies to Gaza. Hamas is an extremist political and military organization that shares much of the Nazi philosophy. It is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders in the 1930s and 1940s were actively involved in carrying through the Nazis’ ”Final Solution to the Jewish problem”. They supported and were actively involved in implementing the Holocaust.

          The Hamas charter expands on its theme of the God-approved duty of every Muslim to kill Jews for, as article 28 asserts: “The Zionist invasion of the world…[aims] at …annihilating Islam. Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people.”Like the perverted Nazi philosophy, this perversion of Islam needs to be countered. The essential pre-requisite for mounting a de-Hamasification program in the Gaza strip is a decisive victory by Israel. Also vitally necessary is a well-conceived, comprehensive and fully worked-out plan, ready to be put into action as soon as the moment is ripe. The object would be to dislodge the leaders and adherents of Hamas, with their malevolent anti-Jew, anti-Judaism and anti-Israel ideology, from their positions of power within Gaza. Only with Hamas out of the picture could any form of reactivated peace process become possible.

          Israeli leaders have already said that Israel has no interest in the post-war administration of Gaza. Palestinian or wider Arab input will be necessary to recruit the army of non-Hamas administrators and executives required for its reconstruction and governance. Nevertheless Israel could be party to devising a viable political strategy.

          Out-of-the-box thinking is called for. A possible answer could lie in a renewed peace process, aimed this time at establishing a new regional configuration. One possibility out of many is the idea of expanding the Abraham Accord normalization structure to encompass a Palestinian entity.

          Another is to consider establishing a new legal entity – a confederation embodying Jordan, Israel and a demilitarized Palestinian state including the Gaza Strip. A confederation is a system like the European Union, in which nation states, while retaining full sovereignty, agree to collaborate in certain spheres such as security, defence, economic development or infrastructure.

          Coming into legal existence simultaneously with the new Palestine, a confederation structure could bring Jordan, Israel and Palestine into a mini-EU dedicated to providing hi-tech security and economic growth for all its citizens. It might also conceive a pragmatic status for Jerusalem satisfactory to all parties. The Israel Defense Forces would act in collaboration with the forces of the other parties to guarantee the security of Israel and that of the confederation as a whole.

          Rid of the Hamas-inspired rejectionist agenda, a three-state confederation covering the whole of what was originally Mandate Palestine might open a hitherto unexplored path leading away from unending Israel-Palestinian discord.

Published by the Jerusalem Post online as: "Can Israel's war on Hamas be helped by lessons from the past?", 25 November, 2023:

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-773675 

Who's behind Britain's anti-Israel rallies?

 Published in the Jerusalem Post, 16 November 2023

          November 11 is known in Britain as Armistice Day. A two-minute silence is observed nationally to commemorate the end of the First World War in 1918 – at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. This year it fell on a Saturday. Ever since Saturday, October 28, when a reported 100,000 pro-Palestinian supporters marched through central London, waving anti-Israel banners, chanting anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans, and calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, mass rallies – although on a smaller scale – have taken place every Saturday in London and in cities across Britain.

           Leading up to Armistice Day this year, influential voices throughout the UK, including the prime minister himself, Rishi Sunak, urged the head of the Metropolitan Police to prevent the pro-Palestinian march from taking place, but the police chief confined himself to requesting the organizers to postpone it. They refused, and he maintained that the police do not have sufficient powers under the law to ban an event that does not pose the threat of extreme violence.

In a final gesture of exasperation the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, penned an article in The Times, deploring the failure of the Metropolitan Police chief to act, and asserting that the force has demonstrated bias in their handling of political rallies. She claimed they favored left-wing groups, citing the pro-Palestinian rallies which she called “hate marches”.

“Terrorists have been valorized,” wrote Braverman. “Israel has been demonized as Nazis, and Jews have been threatened with further massacres.”

A political storm burst around her. There was an instant demand from the Labour Party and its supporters, joined by some in her own Conservative party, for the prime minister to sack her. On November 13 Sunak announced a reshuffle of his Cabinet, and Braverman lost her job. 

On Armistice Day, the pro-Palestinian rally went ahead with some 300,000 people taking to the London streets. The marchers took more than four hours to proceed along a route starting in central London and ending at the US embassy on the south bank of the River Thames.

The antisemitic rhetoric had been toned down, if not entirely eliminated, but anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian slogans abounded, many advocating a ceasefire in the Gaza war. There are media reports that the police spotted a few pro-Hamas banner holders, and are trying to identify them. It is illegal to support the terrorist group. But the march proceeded peacefully, and few arrests were made.

A counter-protest, however, by far-right groups, did turn violent. Police battled with aggressive protesters and made more than 90 arrests.

The police and Britain’s counter-terrorism services are well aware that such protest demonstrations are a highly complex operation, requiring detailed organization ranging from assembling vast numbers of supporters and controlling the routes of marches, to the location of rallies, devising slogans to be chanted, and providing banners and placards telling the same story.

On November 7, an exclusive report in The Daily Telegraph revealed that a former Hamas chief, Muhammed Kathem Sawalha, said to have been active in Hamas as recently as 2019, is behind one of the six groups organizing the pro-Palestine protests. 

Sawalha, 62, came to Britain in the late 1990s and founded the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). He was granted British citizenship in the early 2000s. The Daily Telegraph further discovered that, in addition to the MAB, at least two more of the groups that organized the November 11 march have links to Hamas.

On October 27, an exclusive report in The Times revealed that hostile state activity in the UK has been directly linked to the Iranian regime, including the spread of disinformation online and lodging Iranian agents in the crowds attending marches. Following that report, the police announced that Iranian agents are hijacking Britain’s pro-Palestinian rallies.
None of this should have come as a surprise. On October 19, Robin Simcox, head of the independent Counter-Extremism Commission, gave a long and thoughtful address to the highly prestigious Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Simcox began by endorsing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s description of the Hamas onslaught of October 7 as a pogrom. “Hamas reveled in this bloodshed,” he said. “It was sadism.“

          He went on to say that, in the UK, support for Palestinian rights too often translates into rhetoric supportive of Hamas. “Too many in positions of prominence have praised them or their leadership; or sought to rationalize or excuse their acts of terror… The Hamas support network in the UK is entrenched.”

Simcox continued: “What is underappreciated is the scale of Iranian-backed activity in this country; and the extent to which Iran attempts to stoke extremism here.”
In March 2023, the UK government revealed that since 2022, there have been 15 credible threats by the Iranian regime to kill or kidnap British or UK-based individuals.

The Director General of MI5, Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, has said that “Iran projects a threat to the UK directly, through its aggressive intelligence services.”

Now that the UK government has proscribed Hamas as a terrorist organization, Simcox strongly advocates that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) should be similarly proscribed because of its role in plotting violence. Despite the urging of some government ministers, Britain’s Foreign Office has opposed a ban because it claims it would cause permanent damage to diplomatic relations with Iran.

“The IRGC has operated like a terrorist organization ever since its inception, over four decades ago,” said Simcox. “And yet it is legal, at present, for the IRGC to be, for example, hosted in UK institutions.” He believes that the IRGC is operating Iran’s destabilizing policies in the UK but also worldwide.

In February 2023, acting on police advice, the independent Iran International TV closed its operation in Britain because of threats to its staff from operatives acting for the Iranian regime.

“I cannot believe it has come to this,” said Mahmood Enayat, the station’s general manager. “A foreign state has caused such a significant threat to the British public on British soil that we have to move.”

The channel will continue its output from its Washington DC site. “We refuse to be silenced by these cowardly threats,” said Enayat. “ We will continue to broadcast. We are undeterred.”

         Valiant words, and an intrepid attitude – but the truth is that, on police advice, a media outlet operating legally on British soil has succumbed to Iranian threats. That is scarcely a satisfactory position. Some in the police have called for legal clarification and enhanced powers to deal with terrorism and incitement to violence on Britain’s streets. That would seem a step in the right direction. Unmasking, charging, and expelling foreign agents masterminding illegal antisemitic activity would be another.

Published in the Jerusalem Post 16 November 2023:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-773427

Published in Eurasia Review, 17 November 2023:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/17112023-whos-behind-britains-anti-israel-rallies-oped/  

Published in the MPC Journal, 20 November 2023:

https://mpc-journal.org/whos-behind-britains-anti-israel-rallies/

Lebanon - why no second front?

 Published in the Jerusalem Post, 7 November 2023

 A much-trumpeted speech on November 3 by Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was, in the event, rather less than overwhelming. 

For starters there was no sign of Nasrallah himself.  Thousands of Hezbollah fighters and supporters packed a square in the southern suburbs of Beirut to greet their leader, but their leader  wasn’t prepared to greet them.  Instead they faced a monster TV screen.  They viewed, and cheered, a videoed speech recorded in some secret location –  perhaps a bomb-proof bunker.  According to one media commentator Nasrallah himself has not been seen in public for a decade.  This address to supporters was his first since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, and expectations were high in some parts of the media that he was about to announce the opening of a second front against Israel.

However he made clear in his opening remarks that Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, the subsequent massacre of 1400 civilians and the abduction of over 240 hostages – an operation which, predictably, he praised –  was a purely Palestinian enterprise.  And, he implied later in his remarks, Palestinian he wanted the subsequent conflict to remain.  He made it clear that Iran and Hezbollah had had no part in its planning or execution, and neither found it expedient in present circumstances to support Hamas by opening full-scale hostilities against Israel.  Although he made no reference to Washington’s clear warning that such a move would bring dire consequences, there is little doubt that the message had been received and understood.

So hostilities would be confined to the recent artillery and rocket exchanges across the Lebanese-Israeli border and the Iranian drone strikes against US stations in Syria and Iraq.  A second front, open warfare with Israel, was demoted to a final resort, triggered by vague, unspecified circumstances.  The speech no doubt came as a disappointment to Hamas leaders who have been pushing, covertly and openly. for active Hezbollah support.

The Lebanese people are in the midst of a familiar emotional dilemma – on the one hand sympathy with Hezbollah’s support of the Palestinian cause; on the other, intense suspicion of Hezbollah and its baggage-train of Iranian requirements in the regime’s self-interest.  For example, public opinion questioned from the start why thousands of Lebanese youth were sent off to fight in Syria under Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), in support of the ambitions of the Iranian regime to dominate the region.  The Lebanese public, which has little love for Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, failed to see how its own interests were being served by fighting to sustain him in power.

Hezbollah has entrenched itself deeply into Lebanese society.  It has a dominating position in the financial, economic and political fields, and itself operates a range of social support services.  It has truly become a state within a state, sustained by its own armed militia which is independent of the official Lebanese armed forces (under the presidency of Michel Aoun, a Hezbollah supporter, they did cooperate).  Indeed Hezbollah has acquired so much military power and political influence that it is very nearly ruling Lebanon on its own, especially since the country has lacked a president and an effective government for more than al year.  Moreover it serves Hezbollah’s and Iran’s interest for the stalemate to continue, and every attempt to beak the political deadlock has been thwarted by Hezbollah and its allies.

Just a few months ago the respected Washington Institute published a devastatingly frank assessment by its counterterrorism and intelligence academic expert, Matthew Levitt, concerning the deep-rooted troubles that are paralyzing Lebanon.

“Let’s be clear,” he writes, “corruption is at the heart of Lebanon’s economic and political crises. This economic and political rot is deeply entrenched and is protected by powerful political bosses across the spectrum… yet no Lebanese party presents a greater security threat to Lebanon domestically, and to its neighbors in the region, than Hezbollah – in part because Hezbollah is the de facto militant enforcer of the corrupt political system from which it and other sectarian political parties benefit.”

Levitt explained in a recent media interview that while Hezbollah can prevent government decisions that are against its interests, “it’s not held accountable for what the government does or does not do, and it’s independently able to make decisions of war and peace, life and death, for the entirely of Lebanon – without consulting either the people or the government.”  In short, it has power without responsibility, operating its own mini-administration across the nation with a great degree of impunity. 

Hezbollah is therefore little concerned with the worst economic crisis to grip the country for decades. The value of the country's currency has dropped by over 90 percent since 2019, with essential goods and services increasingly difficult to access. In addition, hours-long power outages are routine in Beirut and other cities.  Lebanon’s declining economic, political, and security conditions are rarely referred to by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, nor does he mention the resultant demonstrations and labor strikes that are plaguing the country.  In fact demonstrations in reaction to deteriorating socio-economic conditions and perceived government mismanagement have been a regular occurrence in Lebanon since 2019.

Major economic and political reforms will be required to help reverse the crisis, unlock international financial assistance, and address protesters' demands. However, Lebanon is locked in a political stalemate which makes reform, or indeed remedial action of any significant sort, impossible. 

          Nasrallah, clearly with Iran’s concurrence, has wisely decided to hold back on any full-scale conflict with Israel, since he would need support from a people mired in economic, social and political unrest and struggling with a cost of living crisis.  The last thing they need is to be  dragged into a war on top of their other woes.  if Nasrallah tried to involve them, he might find himself facing a popular revolt.

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post online, 7 November 2023:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-772005

Published in Eurasia Review, 9 November 2023:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/09112023-lebanon-why-no-second-front-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 14 November 2023:

https://mpc-journal.org/lebanon-why-no-second-front/