Now, two weeks before America elects a new president, there seems to be no way out of war in the Middle East. The killing of Yahya Sinwar, the brutal leader of Hamas and mastermind of the October 7 attack, is not going to end Israel’s war against Hamas, and its devastation of the Palestinians in Gaza will continue. I’ve heard nothing from contacts in Beirut close to Hezbollah—whose troops are putting up a stiff fight as they did in Hezbollah’s 2006 war against Israel—that suggests anything other than a long war ahead. President Joe Biden applauded the death of Sinwar and again urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call for a ceasefire that might free the remaining hostages taken by Hamas, if any of them remain alive. That Sinwar was found and killed above ground and not in one of the tunnels under Gaza raised questions for me about the alleged brilliance of the Israeli intelligence community, which has at no time in the past year indicated that Sinwar was above ground, surrounded by a few aides or bodyguards and with a large chunk of cash. He may have come up from underground for a breath of fresh air, as some Israeli media reports have suggested, leaving the remaining Israeli hostages behind, but he also may have put on sunglasses and pulled down a New York Yankees baseball cap and joined the more unfortunate of his people in chow lines with a plate and spoon. There’s no evidence that Sinwar was planning a getaway to safety, but the circumstances of his death should lead to serious questions about the capabilities of Israeli military intelligence. If I were a reporter for an Israeli newspaper, I would wonder if there were some intelligence officers who had been telling the command that Sinwar may have been operating above ground more than the Israeli public was being told, just as other officers repeatedly warned of the October 7 Hamas attack in advance. There was something reassuring about being told that the Hamas leader was flitting around in the tunnels, surrounded by Israeli hostages, but the fact that he was found and executed in entirely different circumstances is a glaring intelligence failure. At this point it’s clear that Biden’s influence on Netanyahu’s wars has been limited to the delivery of bombs and other ordnance. On his congratulatory call to Netanyahu after the killing of Sinwar, according to a White House statement, Biden said the moment was similar “to the scenes witnessed throughout the United States after President Obama ordered the raid to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken was less effusive in a telephone conversation with Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, the Saudi foreign minister: would the Saudi kingdom, with its vast wealth, still participate in the reconstruction of Gaza when the war has ended and Hamas is gone? An official State Department statement asserted that Saudi cooperation would be “a path for the people of Gaza to rebuild their lives and realize their aspirations.” The Biden administration has floated a plan for Gaza to become a Saudi protectorate, but any such prospect is a long way off as long as the bloodshed there continues. I was told this week by a former Lebanese official who is close to Hezbollah’s leadership that the new leader of Hamas will be, as has been reported, Mohammed Sinwar, the 49-year-old younger brother of Yahya. Mohammed, like his older brother, was active at an early age in anti-Israel activities and, like Yahya, spent time in an Israeli jail. The former Lebanese official described him as “a hard fighter who was head of a military wing” of Hamas. The former official said that the new leader is “as intellectual as” his older brother: “he and his colleagues will seem like Che Guevara,” the Argentine Marxist who became a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The former official said that in the current war with Israel Hezbollah has an asset that it lacked in 2006: the ability to bring the war to Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, founded in the fourteenth century BCE and thus a UNESCO World Heritage site. Hezbollah, he said, has chosen not to target civilian sites in Haifa and throughout northern Israel. Nonetheless, he added, Israelis “are suffering more than in 2006.” He was referring to the more than sixty-five thousand Israelis living in the north who have evacuated their homes under orders from the government. Israel’s constantly expanding bombing target list—it attacked a large residential complex in Beirut a few days ago—is seen in Lebanon as evidence that the Israeli air force “has exhausted its list of military targets in Beirut.” Large areas throughout the city have been reduced to rubble, he said, and increasingly the Israeli bombs have been targeting “normal people” and not only those linked to Hezbollah. The official said the war “is a tragedy for Lebanon. It will be a long war.” An American expert in Middle East conflict resolution told me he was aware that some fear that Netanyahu is intent on clearing the north of Gaza of all Palestinian residents, not just Hamas fighters, and will accede to demands of Israel’s far right and permit Israeli settlers to seek homesteads in the vacated zone. “I don’t think that is the goal among Israeli decision makers, but that could happen eventually due to realities.” He said that “a joyous remake of the north financed by the Saudis is also unlikely. Israel has no local partner or collaborator in Gaza to whom they can hand power. No Palestinian Authority to whom it can hand power, so they will hold onto it for the time being.” As for the war in Lebanon, the American said he was skeptical of those who think Israel is having a hard time in that war. But, he said, “Israel has not launched a major invasion either so it is too early to tell.” Hezbollah “is not producing much media from that front, and so Israel is controlling the flow of information. So we don’t know what is happening, but it is possible that Israel is slowly achieving its goals. “Hezbollah has the ability to hit major cities, but it is not doing that—in part out of concern of the consequences Israel would unleash on Lebanese infrastructure and civilians. So it’s a strategic dilemma. You have the weapons but you cannot use them.” The American said that “Israel might be a pariah state but they think the whole world hates them anyway, and they are doing their best to make sure everybody hates Israel and Jews, so they might as well kick the can down the road for at least a generation—‘mowing the grass’ for a generation—at a regional level. It might work. No one is stopping them, and Iran does not want to commit suicide. “I do not think it is likely Hezbollah can achieve a 2006-style ‘victory’. That war was short and had limited goals with clear political and financial goals at the end of it. This time Hezbollah entered the war naively thinking it could stop the killing in Gaza. It failed because that decision was entirely an Israeli one. And now Hezbollah is in a war without any clear goals and its enemy has license to do whatever it wants . . . no American president to rein it in, and in fact maybe some Americans see an opportunity here to remake the Middle East. So this will likely be long and terrible and regional.” I don’t mean to make light of the terrible events that now dominate and threaten the Middle East and the world, but the other day when I asked a retired senior Israeli military official, who spent a long career often dealing with sensitive issues, about the war in Lebanon and the hatred of Netanyahu expressed by a prominent Israeli journalist I know, I got an answer that was surprising and funny. My retired Israeli official said of the journalist: “Like our intelligence community, he is a realist. They and he despise Bibi. They consider Bibi dangerous for Israel. But we live in a democratic system, and a coup d’etat is out of the question.” He then turned to an event widely reported in Israel that some consider to be a message from Iran: one of its drones was spotted near the private home where Netanyahu and his wife live in a suburb of Tel Aviv. My friend said he expected more from the Iranians, “but they disappointed me today. The Iranians are not stupid. They demonstrated that they can get to our prime minister, thus making us feel vulnerable. At the same time they know that 50 percent know that Bibi is bad for Israel. Killing him, from their point of view, would be an idiotic mistake.” The ironic fact is that, despite the contempt for Netanyahu some in the Israeli military may have, current polling in Israel has shown a steady rise in the prime minister’s popularity over the past year of war. A poll published this month reported overwhelming support for Netanyahu’s decision to take the war to Hezbollah. Other polls have applauded the killing of Sinwar. Polls show that Netanyahu’s Likud Party would win more seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, if another general election was held. War remains a boon for politicians around the world. |