In early June 1982, three Palestinian gunmen tried to kill Israeli ambassador to London Shlomo Argov as he was leaving the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. He survived with permanent physical damage, and taking credit for his attempted assassination was the Fateh Revolutionary Council, commanded by Sabri Al Bana, better known as Abu Nidal, whom British journalist Patrick Seale once described as a “gun for hire.”
The Israeli cabinet went into immediate session and decided to invade Beirut and strike at Yasser Arafat’s rival Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Israeli chief of staff Rafael Eitan reminded the cabinet that it wasn’t Abu Ammar (Arafat) who tried to kill the ambassador, but rather, Abu Nidal. Prime Minister Menachem Begin snapped: “Abu Nidal … Abu Shmidal, I don’t care. We are going (after) the PLO.”
Paying the price for the Madjal Shams incident
The story still resonates in the troubled Middle East today, although Arafat is long dead and so are Abu Nidal, Eitan, and Begin. Regardless if Hezbollah was responsible for last month’s rocket attack on a football field in Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights, which killed 12 civilians, it will be made to shoulder the blame and pay the price, just like the PLO did in 1982.
And despite Hezbollah insistence that it had nothing to do with the Majdal Shams incident, Israel went ahead with a targeted strike in the heart of the southern suburb of Beirut on 31 July 2024, killing top Hezbollah military commander Fouad Shukr.
Meanwhile in Tehran former Palestinian premier and president of the Hamas Political Bureau Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated.
Had the Israeli reprisal been restricted to Fouad Shukr, then perhaps the escalation would have ended there, without the threat of a full-fledge war with Lebanon. But by Haniyeh’s killing, (although Israel hasn’t acknowledged it) means all chances of a negotiated settlement in Gaza are in cold storage now.
The question is: where will it respond and how?
Iranian options
Iran’s options are limited; either through the Houthis of Yemen, Kataib Hezbollah and Al Hashd Al Shaabi in Iraq, or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria is not an option, given that the Syrians refused to open its territory for military strikes against Israel after outbreak of the Gaza War last October. In fact, Syria was the only country in the Axis of Resistance that didn’t get involved in the Gaza, forcing Iran to rely on the Houthis instead to stage attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Hezbollah is already under scrutiny for dragging Lebanon into a military confrontation, making any Iranian response from its territory both difficult and too risky. The country is already in shambles, suffering from a financial meltdown, chronic economic crisis, and prolonged presidential vacuum.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been itching for a broader regional war, telling Americans during his most recent visit to Washington that Israel is under attack, from Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Some see the back-to-back elimination of Ismail Haniyeh and Fouad Shukr as a message directed at Hezbollah’s longtime leader Hasan Nasrallah. Haniyeh was his counterpart in Hamas and Shukr was his second-in-command at Hezbollah, implying that he could be next on Israel’s hit list.
Full-fledged confrontation
Days before the twin attacks on 31 July, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth ran a story about who would succeed Nasrallah, if and when he parts the scene, peddling Hisham Safi Al Din as a substitute. He is a member of Hezbollah’s Political Committee, head of its Executive Committee, and happens to be a maternal cousin of Nasrallah and in-law of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Quds Force who was assassinated in Iraq back in January 2020. A more nuanced approach, however, says that if Israel could actually locate Nasrallah, then it wouldn’t have hesitated to kill him and thus cannot go down that path.
Netanyahu seeks a confrontation, having pledged to take down the leaders of Hamas, one-after-another, and has already succeeded in killing two of them, Haniyeh today and Saleh Al Arouri, who was assassinated in Beirut last January. If the war ends with no tangible gain for Israel, there is a high chance that he will be impeached and tried. It would be the end of his political career.
The Israeli premier has been waiting for the Knesset to go into its three-month summer recess, which ends in October, and for the US to enter its shutdown mode ahead of the presidential election in November. Between now and then he is freed from any legislative pressure at home, or internationally from the Biden Administration, which he will use to carry on with his military campaign, undaunted.
The chaos unfolding in Washington is music to Netanyahu’s ears, after Biden’s withdrawal from the election and the Democratic nomination of Kamala Harris for president. Both she and Donald Trump are presently too busy to mind what Netanyahu is doing, giving him a free hand to handle the Middle East in whatever manner he sees best, even if it means a full-fledged confrontation with Iran, whether directly or by proxy.
— Sami Moubayed is a historian and former Carnegie scholar. He is also author of the best-seller Under the Black Flag: At the frontier of the New Jihad.
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