The brief exchange of fire between Iran and Israel was a truer statement of the balance of power that now exists between these two countries than the many spurious claims by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about having “smashed”, “destroyed” or “obliterated” the armed forces of the Islamic Republic.
In firing up to 30 missiles towards Israel in retaliation against its renewed bombing of Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, Iran broke the model that Israel had imposed on the two other ceasefires in Lebanon and Gaza: namely that you cease, and we keep on firing.
Furthermore, it showed that it would target northern Israel to protect a third country, Lebanon, which is also something of a first.
In announcing that it would halt fire, Iran’s military command said that if Israel resumed its attacks anywhere, including southern Lebanon, “much more severe and crushing measures than before will follow”.
It has taken time for the Islamic Republic to respond to Israel’s campaigns on Gaza, Lebanon and itself as one war - which is what it is - but at last, it is being forced to do so.
No one else is; least of all the Lebanese government.
If Iran and Hezbollah between them force even a partial pullback of Israeli troops in Lebanon, they will have been more effective at ensuring the return of its own citizens to their homes than Lebanon’s president.
As Amal Saad, a scholar on Hezbollah, wrote in these pages, the ceasefire agreement signed by Lebanese representatives with Israel and the US belongs to a category of political submission with little or no precedent.
“Lebanon, a state under attack, co-signs a document that conditions a ceasefire not on the withdrawal of the occupying power from its territory, but on the withdrawal of its own citizens from their land,” she wrote.
Iran's display of defiance puts a spoke in these wheels. It has also substantially weakened Netanyahu's relationship with Trump
The ceasefire was not conditional on an Israeli withdrawal, a prisoner release, or a return of the population, but on Hezbollah withdrawing from the south.
It’s little wonder, then, that Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz have been crowing that they had won on all fronts.
Netanyahu said that Israel had proved it could fight a war on three fronts simultaneously, and that its forces should advance to a line that occupied 70 percent of Gaza.
Katz committed himself to the mass ethnic cleansing of the enclave: large-scale “voluntary migration” that Israel would implement “at the proper time and in the proper manner”.
Katz has also said that the Israeli army is using the same tactics in Lebanon as it did in Gaza, where entire cities were reduced to rubble.
Both Netanyahu and Katz speak without any apparent fear of incriminating themselves in the genocide case that is still before the International Court of Justice.
Stubborn resistance
Iran’s display of defiance puts a spoke in these wheels. It has also substantially weakened Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump.
Israeli jets were on the runway on Monday, ready to resume full-scale war on Iran, according to multiple reports, when Trump called Netanyahu and told him to stop.
Trump was true to his word. Asked in an interview with The Financial Times whether he could restrain the Israeli prime minister, Trump replied: “He won’t have any choice. I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”
The war on Iran was the brainchild of these two men alone, based on false Mossad intelligence that the Islamic Republic was weaker than it proved to be. Iran’s stubborn resistance to being defeated, alongside its ability to continually rebuild its missile and drone forces, is now imposing substantial strains on this alliance.
Both leaders face elections. Both are under attack domestically for having offshored, and thus lost control of, the war they jointly started.
Israeli journalist Ben Caspit complained in Ma’ariv that national security in Israel had been “privatised” and handed over to Trump, to the extent that military decisions needed approval from Washington.
His colleague, Avi Ashkenazi, said that “Israel must not accept the American dictate to sit still and refrain from responding”, noting that this could risk Israel’s very existence.
On Monday night, Netanyahu had to content himself with a truculent statement that he would halt attacks on Iran “for now”.
Trump, too, suffered a major setback last week when the House of Representatives voted “to remove all US forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”. The resolution, which has no force of law, was supported by four Republicans who defected to vote with the Democrats.
Trump railed on Truth Social: “Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”
But it is clear that the antiwar mood is spreading in Republican ranks - and Trump knows this is a threat.
Diverging agendas
It is clearer, too, that the US and Israeli agendas on Iran now diverge. Trump evidently does not believe that either a resumption of the war or the continuation of the Hormuz blockade will bring about an end to the conflict.
His insistence that negotiations are continuing, and that a memorandum of understanding on reopening the Strait of Hormuz is within reach, reflects the belief that negotiations with Iran are the only way for the US armada to stand down.
Trump started the war with dreams of a quick victory. He now has to end it as fast as he can.
For Netanyahu, a US peace deal with Iran - with the Islamic Republic still in place - would mark the end of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand Israel’s borders and impose itself as the region’s new hegemon.
That window of opportunity started in Trump’s first term, when he appointed a settler advocate as an ambassador, and recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
There was no quid pro quo, no commitments Israel had to give about a Palestinian state. These were gifts on a silver platter.
The golden alliance resumed in Trump’s second term, culminating in the US attack on Iran - a strategic goal that Netanyahu had been championing for at least 40 years.
During this period, and knowing that he would never again have a US president as gullible as this one, Netanyahu pursued a policy of maximum territorial conquest.
But lebensraum is not the primary aim. Rather, it is to clear Gaza and southern Lebanon of their native populations. About one million Palestinians in Gaza have no homes to go back to, even as rubble, while another million people remain displaced in Lebanon.
The new Nakba, or catastrophe, that is still being planned by Netanyahu and Katz would be several times larger than the one that Israel committed in 1948. It would mean destroying not just homes, hospitals and schools, but everything that keeps society in Gaza and southern Lebanon functioning.
As analyst Gideon Levy writes: “Once Gaza’s population is reduced to a disparate mass without an organized society, without basic services, essential institutions and, of course, without leadership, the complete disintegration of the social fabric will make it easier for Israel to move to the next phase, which it has never relinquished, the phase of expulsion. Only then will the Gaza problem be finally resolved. Only in this manner.”
'Logic of elimination'
Patrick Wolfe, an Australian scholar of settler-colonialism, has described the settler’s attitude as “the logic of elimination”.
“How did colonialists justify their attitude to the indigenous population? As in other colonialist enterprises, they dehumanised them, portraying them as ‘savages’ or ‘primitive’,” historian Ilan Pappe writes.
But he goes on to note that settler-colonialism differs from classical colonialism in one important respect: whereas the British in India regarded themselves as bringing modernity to “savages”, settler-colonialists see themselves as modernising the land. Its people must be got rid of.
Netanyahu and Katz are pursuing this vision, in war and peace, against Palestinians wherever they live.
It is the refusal of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to disarm that keeps Israel from fulfilling its vision of mass ethnic cleansing
Since Hamas handed all its hostages back, Israel has broken the Gaza ceasefire around 3,000 times. More than 900 Palestinians have been killed and 2,900 wounded. Dozens more have been abducted by Israeli forces.
The Yellow Line to which the Israeli army was supposed to withdraw has been creeping inexorably forward. The 53 percent of Gaza occupied by Israel became 60 percent, and late last month, Netanyahu promised to make that 70 percent, as a “start” towards complete control.
“We are currently squeezing Hamas; we now control 60 percent of the territory of the Strip - you know this. We were at 50, we moved to 60. My directive is to move to,” he said, before pausing as someone in the crowd called out “100” .
“Let’s go step by step. First of all, 70. Let’s start with that,” Netanyahu said. “We’re pressing them from all sides, we’ll deal with the remnants.”
Meanwhile, Israel has been killing all the Hamas leaders who agreed to hand over the hostages in exchange for ending the war. Mohammed Odeh, Hamas’s most recent military commander, was killed last month in a targeted strike.
Vision of exile
There is no sign of the “master plan” that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, presented in Davos on 22 January. No foundations have been laid for the New Rafah, with its 100,000 housing units, 200 education centres, 75 medical facilities, and 180 cultural, religious and vocational institutions. This is land that is under full Israeli control.
No one from the Palestinian technocratic government has stepped foot in Gaza. There is no international peacekeeping force and no money in the kitty to do any of this. The Board of Peace’s coffers are empty.
Nickolay Mladenov, the board’s high representative for Gaza, puts all the blame on Hamas’s refusal to disarm. According to the plan, first comes the group’s disarmament, then the International Stabilisation Force turns up, and only then does Israel withdraw. But none of this is happening.
As every Palestinian knows, Netanyahu and Katz are not planning an Abu Dhabi on the shores of the Mediterranean. They are actively planning chaos, civil war, and militias fighting each other - for these are the surest ways of pushing Palestinians into the sea and into exile.
But it is the refusal of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to disarm that keeps Israel from fulfilling its vision of mass ethnic cleansing. They are the only impediments to a mass exodus of refugees who would flood Saudi Arabia, Jordan and ultimately Europe itself.
Hezbollah has clearly been able to reconstitute its military strength after losing its leadership several times over to Israel’s assassinations in 2024. According to one authoritative analysis, it is concentrating on the quality of its strikes against Israeli military targets, rather than the quantity.
It keeps forces in reserve. It affords its local units a substantial degree of autonomy while maintaining command and control. These are no mean military feats under daily Israeli drone surveillance and strikes.
The ceasefires that Israel has signed so far, and which have been endorsed by Israel’s neighbours, are simply covers for pursuing the same dream of an ethnically cleansed Gaza and southern Lebanon, under a different format.
Regional imperative
This is the reality that the region has yet to wake up to. The agenda is not about normalisation with a country that does this. It’s not about disarmament. It’s about rearmament.
The only way Israel’s agenda can be stopped is by having the hard power to do so. Turkey, Egypt and Jordan have the most to fear from Israel’s plans, chiefly because whether or not Netanyahu continues in power, the strategic goal will remain the same. No land that Netanyahu has conquered will be returned by a Naftali Bennett as prime minister.
Israel in its current mood, which Netanyahu has described as its second war of independence, does not respect anyone else’s sovereignty. It will establish air fields in the Iraqi desert without applying to Baghdad for planning permission.
In addition, these countries know that they are next on Israel’s target list. They have held back because they don’t want a war with Israel. Turkish armed forces say they are several years away from having anything that could deter Israeli jets.
It is not that they are doing nothing. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stopped Trump from using Kurdish forces to invade Iran. King Abdullah of Jordan stopped Trump from backing Israel’s annexation of the West Bank - for now.
But these are tactical, not strategic changes of direction. No leader has stopped Israel’s project to redraw its own borders.
It is now a regional imperative to do so. Every nation in the Middle East will feel the consequences of Israeli success.
It is well past time to arrange a regional framework and defence pact that would become a fact on the ground, which neither Israel nor the latest occupant of the White House could ignore.
An end to the war with Iran, if it happens, must be the start of a regional initiative to ensure it never happens again.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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