[Salon] A ceasefire not a victory

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

A ceasefire not a victory

Summary: the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel has silenced the guns for now but claims of victory made by each side are wide of the mark.

Predictably both sides have said it is they who has come out the winner in the ceasefire which went into effect at 4:00 AM local time on Tuesday. Hezbollah called the deal a “victory from God (in a) righteous cause” and vowed to “keep their hands on the trigger (and) remain fully equipped to deal with the aspirations and assaults of the Israeli enemy.”

Hezbollah’s backer Iran also claimed a victory with Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi declaring that despite massive military assistance from America “after suffering heavy losses in southern Lebanon, (Netanyahu) was forced to beg for a ceasefire. Once again, Hezbollah has shattered the myth of Israel's invincibility."

Benjamin Netanyahu did not appear to be a leader begging for anything. Rather in a television address he listed what he called “great inroads into the seven fronts of the ‘War of Redemption.’”

Those fronts are Iran where “we destroyed major parts of Iran’s air defence system and missile-manufacturing capabilities, and we demolished a significant component of their nuclear program,” Gaza where in addition to killing its top leadership “we dismantled the Hamas battalions and killed close to 20,000 terrorists,” the Occupied West Bank where he claimed the IDF was “taking out terrorists, destroying terrorist infrastructure and operating in all of the terror strongholds,” Yemen where “we attacked the Houthis’ port of Hodeida forcibly, which the international coalition had not done,” Iraq with his claim that the IDF had “thwarted many drone attacks,” and finally his seventh front of Lebanon.

And here the prime minister was particularly exultant:

We have taken out the organisation’s top leadership, we have destroyed most of their rockets and missiles, we have killed thousands of terrorists and we demolished their underground terror infrastructure abutting our border, infrastructure they had been building for years.

We have attacked strategic targets throughout Lebanon and we have brought down dozens of terror hi-rises in Beirut’s Dahieh. The ground in Beirut is shaking.

No mention of course of the thousands of civilians killed, the thousands more wounded and the massive destruction of whole communities in the south of Lebanon.

People in Beirut returning to what remains of their homes after two months of Israeli bombardment

Somewhere between the claims of Hezbollah and the Iranians on one side and Netanyahu on the other lies the truth. Unquestionably Hezbollah has suffered huge losses and Iran has seen the key cog in its ‘Axis of Resistance’ grievously and deeply damaged. Hamas is a pale shadow of what it was before 7 October and Yemen’s Huthis will be weighing up the costs of continuing attacks in the Red Sea given the extent of the destruction visited on their axis comrades.

However Israel has paid a heavy price for Netanyahu’s great blunder in assuming before 7 October that he had effectively contained Hamas. The security for Israel that he had declared to have achieved has proved to be little more than a magician’s trick; the claim that by keeping Hamas in play there would be no two-state solution has been shown to be nothing more than a card shark’s sleight of hand.

In the run-up to the ceasefire Israel carried out some of its heaviest bombardments in Lebanon but it is worth noting that Hezbollah though much crippled unleashed one of its largest rocket attacks the day before the truce was announced. After more than a year of Netanyahu’s 'War of Redemption' the simple truth is that Israel is experiencing a level of insecurity that it hasn’t felt in decades. And who one wonders is the redemption for?

The promise to enable the roughly sixty thousand Israelis evacuated from their homes in the north has yet to be fulfilled with many displaced residents openly contemptuous of the deal. One told Reuters

What do I say? That it's very bad, real bad… they (the government) did nothing and our soldiers were wasted away for nothing. Bibi should pack himself out of the government quickly, even though I supported him. He needs to go home urgently.

Meanwhile President Biden’s envoy Amos Hochstein who is credited with negotiating the ceasefire was in his own flight of fancy. He suggested that a normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia could be just around the corner and could happen before the end of the Biden presidency. "I know I sound crazy, but then again people thought I sounded crazy when I said I thought I could get a deal in Lebanon," he said. "I read many articles [about] how I was in fantasy-land.”

Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has stated very clearly that there will be no normalisation unless and until the question of Palestinian statehood is dealt with. And while in private he has expressed no sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians MbS has accepted that the Saudi people do care and he must acknowledge that. Furthermore he will have no interest in delivering such a large legacy gift to Joe Biden in the waning days of his presidency. Their personal animosity aside, the crown prince will want to save such a present, were he to give it, to the architect of the Abraham Accords and incoming president Donald Trump. To the victor goes the spoils.

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