Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the term “unprecedented” has frequently been used to describe the current cycle of escalation across the Middle East. Whether it is the devastation of Gaza by the Israeli military that followed the attack, or the widening of hostilities to encompass Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and their backers in Iran, the sheer scale of the conflict has shocked many observers. Yet, far from being unprecedented, the lingering legacy of previous conflicts in the region still directly affect current tensions between Israel and its regional adversaries. A closer look at these precedents might help Western and regional policymakers better understand the challenges they face now.
Previous cycles of conflict involving Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinians between 1978 and 2006 can provide particularly useful insights into the long-term impact such conflict dynamics can have on the region. In several cases, external actors and regional powers were blindsided by the speed with which wars erupted despite growing signs that a fragile regional order was on the brink of collapse.
When it comes to understanding the motivations of various actors involved in such escalation cycles, the key mistake made by external policymakers has been to believe for too long that enough players on the ground had so much to lose from full confrontation that they would avoid it indefinitely. Before the attack of Oct. 7, for instance, policymakers in the region and beyond assumed that a broad enough swathe of the Palestinian leadership had a positive stake in the regional status quo to ensure a stable Middle East. This overlooked the willingness of figures like Yahya Sinwar—then Hamas’ top authority in Gaza who has now assumed overall leadership of the group—to risk personal and collective annihilation to inflict pain on Israel and return the issue of Palestinian statehood and self-determination to the regional agenda.
Similarly, in the weeks after the attack, many diplomats and officials in the U.S. and Europe seemed convinced that an Israeli national unity government that included centrist opposition parties could restrain Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza. In doing so, however, they willfully ignored the fact that Netanyahu and the far-right extremists to which he is beholden—like Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir—have strong personal and political incentives to pursue further escalation, even if the war inflicts devastating humanitarian suffering on Palestinians and undermines Israel’s internal cohesion.
Over the past few decades there have been similar precedents when it comes to the willingness of Israeli and Palestinian political actors to pursue escalation out of a quest for ideological purity or personal political gain. Perhaps the clearest example of the devastation such dynamics can wreak is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to expel the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Beirut. While senior PLO officials as well as several Israeli generals at the time privately expressed concerns to journalists over the risky cycle of escalation that preceded the invasion, other figures on both sides convinced themselves that they could achieve personal glory from a war they expected to generate clear winners and losers.
Between the initial Israeli move to establish a so-called security zone in southern Lebanon in 1978 and the final spiral toward full Israeli invasion in 1982, extensive plotting by figures on both sides against their internal rivals fueled the escalation toward conflict. Then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s secret deals with Lebanese Christian militias hostile to Palestinians reflected wider ambitions to reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. But these irresponsible geopolitical gambles were intertwined with Sharon’s ambitions to secure dominance of Israeli domestic politics for his Likud Party. At the same time, rivalries between Palestinian leadership factions led the Abu Nidal network to organize the assassination of an Israeli diplomat in London to present itself as a more radical alternative to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction in the PLO. That provided Sharon with a pretext to initiate his plans for the invasion and partition of Lebanon.
In hoping for the best while glossing over the worst, the U.S. and Europe are repeating many of the mistakes they made in trying to head off previous conflicts in the Middle East.
Even as Sharon was goading then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin into ordering a full assault in Lebanon, Western diplomats continued to believe that a conflict that seemed so obviously against the self-interest of both sides could be avoided. This misreading of how actors on the ground defined their own factional interests made it easier for Sharon to conceal the wildly ambitious strategic goals that flowed out of his alliance with Lebanese Christian militias from officials in Washington. When it came to the PLO, in focusing on Arafat’s assurances that he hoped to avoid escalation, Western European and Arab regional powers trying to restrain the Palestinians underestimated how far desperation at the grassroots level had created opportunities for radical groups to gain support with attacks that played into Sharon’s hands.
The echoes between the inability of many Western diplomats to grasp how internal factional rivalries shaped the behavior of both sides in 1982 and 2023 is linked to the other key recurring dynamic in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has so often fatally slowed efforts to stop an escalation cycle from spiraling out of control. From the first battles between a nascent Israeli military and the armies of neighboring Arab states in 1948 onward, the final steps toward full regional war have always been preceded by lengthy periods of more limited skirmishing. Throughout these periods of seemingly contained violence, many observers often remained hopeful that some kind of formula could be found to restore stability to the region.
The slide toward Israel’s full invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was punctuated by such moments of overconfidence among the U.S., European states and other key powers over the extent to which they could control the conflict’s trajectory. It didn’t help that the Likud-led government was at the time finalizing Israel’s peace accord with Egypt, making Western governments reluctant to pressure Israel to avoid military operations after PLO attacks launched from Lebanese territory ended with the murder of two dozen Israelis. The result was the initial Israeli incursion in 1978 that destabilized Lebanon south of the Litani River and pushed over 100,000 refugees out of the area. When the U.S. and Western European governments subsequently turned a blind eye to deals between the Israeli military and local Lebanese Christian factions hostile to the PLO, it allowed conditions to take shape that by 1982 would enable Sharon to pursue his grand plan to remake the Middle East.
Similar complacency over regular flareups of violence between Israel and its current adversaries have affected U.S. and European diplomacy in the Middle East over the past decade. The shadow war during that time between Israeli and Iranian security services was increasingly treated by Washington and Brussels as a routine aspect of regional politics, while Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah and its Iranian partners in Lebanon and Syria, and the almost desultory retaliation that followed, was regularly brushed aside as a temporary problem. That the periodic conflicts between Hamas and the Israeli military in the 2010s were usually defused after a few days or weeks reinforced a sense that bouts of violence that unsettled Israeli society and exacted a horrifying toll on Palestinian civilians were not going to cause wider geopolitical disruption.
Even after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas fighters that traumatized Israeli society and the devastating Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, the approach of U.S. and European policymakers has still been shaped by futile hopes that any spillover effects of the conflict can be contained. Indeed, the fact that Israel and Hezbollah have so avoided an all-out war, despite daily exchanges of fire that have displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border, has led to even greater optimism in some diplomatic circles. And hopes that all sides might recognize that it is in their self-interest to seek de-escalation were further boosted when the exchange of fire between Israel and Iran in April was ultimately contained after extensive backchannel diplomacy involving the U.S. and key regional states.
Yet, in hoping for the best while glossing over the worst, the U.S. and Europe are repeating many of the mistakes they made when trying to head off previous conflicts. Just as overconfidence among Western diplomats in 1982 helped create opportunities for Abu Nidal and Ariel Sharon to upend an unstable status quo, assuming today that backchannels and signaling through limited attacks represents a path to stability, let alone peace, only provides space for a new generation of conflict entrepreneurs to pursue their own factional interests over the interests of tens of millions of civilians.
Rather than claiming that the current wave of conflict threatening the Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese populations is unprecedented, policymakers in and outside the Middle East need to look closely at lessons that can be learned from how previous escalation cycles overwhelmed the region. In an environment in which structural incentives in domestic politics might push leaders toward embracing war rather than working for peace, Washington and Brussels need to exert pressure quickly and firmly on any state or nonstate actor pursuing escalation. If Western and regional policymakers once again allow complacency to seep into their strategic approach to the Middle East, then they will find themselves pushed aside by those who just want to watch the region burn.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.