All eyes on Hezbollah ... but that’s the wrong place to look

Hezbollah has spent most of the past year lobbing rudimentary and largely ineffectual rockets in the general direction of northern Israel, whence most of the civilian population has in any case already long departed.

In response to the most recent havoc wreaked by Israel in Lebanon — from deadly exploding pagers to a pounding by warplanes that has killed more than 500 people — and the carnage inflicted on Gaza that has taken the lives of more than 41,000 mostly innocent civilians, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Hezbollah has delivered no more than a mildly irritating flea bite. Benjamin Netanyahu must surely be sitting in his prime ministerial office suite chuckling quietly to himself and asking: “Is that it? Is that all they’ve got?”

But it isn’t. Hezbollah is, by all independent estimates, the best-armed non-state military force in the world. In fact, forget “non-state” — Hezbollah fighters are better equipped than the armed forces of most countries, including Lebanon itself. In 2006, faced with an Israeli force supplied and armed by the world’s supreme military power and enjoying undisputed control of the air, Hezbollah fought its enemy to a standstill.

And it has not exactly been standing still since then. The days of Hezbollah fighters being able to wield only rusting, clapped-out Russian-supplied AK-47s are long gone. For the past 18 years, there has been a flow of increasingly sophisticated weapons from Iran into Hezbollah’s arsenal, interrupted only occasionally by Israeli attacks on the supply lines through Syria. These now include cruise missiles with guidance systems to replace antiquated hit-or-miss rockets that were little more than glorified lamp posts with a bomb attached.

So, there is little doubt that, having weaponry of sufficient quality and in sufficient quantity, Hezbollah is capable of overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system and causing considerable damage to military and civilian infrastructure, not to mention casualties. The question, therefore, is why it has not done so.

There are several possible answers. One is that Israel has, as it intended, already eliminated Hezbollah’s command and control structure and destroyed its principal missile launch sites. However, since Hamas is still clearly alive and kicking after nearly a year of unremitting carnage in Gaza, the idea that the far better-organized and equipped Hezbollah has been incapacitated by a few days of airstrikes in Lebanon seems unlikely.

Another possible reason is trepidation over the consequences — military, political and personal. In the full-blown regional war that would erupt if Hezbollah were to strike at the heart of Israel with all the force at its disposal, there would be no winners, including Hezbollah itself. Politically, civilians in Lebanon, many of them natural Hezbollah supporters, are already blaming the group for drawing Israeli fire that is destroying their lives. If Israel were to reduce Lebanon to the rubble and debris it has created in Gaza, which it would, that blame would multiply exponentially.

Finally, there is the target on the back of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

You do not need to be an admirer of the state of Israel (which I most assuredly am not) to appreciate the audacity and effectiveness of an intelligence operation that can deliver little bombs to the trouser belts of several hundred Hezbollah operatives, to be detonated at the touch of a Mossad button. No one is supposed to know where Nasrallah is. But then, no one knew where Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was — until Israel blew him up with a bomb planted in the apartment where he was staying, in Tehran of all places.

So, you can be sure that Israel knows exactly where Nasrallah is, as well as what he ate for breakfast this morning. He is probably safe for the time being, because his increasingly vacuous, posturing bluster about the “price Israel will pay” every time Hezbollah suffers another humiliation simply makes Israel look stronger: but that is only for the time being.

A third and intriguing reason I have heard advanced by intelligence sources is that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have ordered Hezbollah to keep their most advanced weaponry under wraps and well concealed, to be deployed only in the event of a direct and destructive attack on Tehran’s nuclear development facilities. Now, if I know that, then obviously Israel does too — which places Netanyahu in an extraordinarily powerful position: he knows exactly how far he can go in attacking Hezbollah without igniting a regional conflagration.

Netanyahu has been running rings round American presidents from Bill Clinton up to the current Biden administration.

Ross Anderson

That Netanyahu is once again in the driving seat should come as no surprise. Like him or loathe him (and most sensible people are in the latter camp), he is easily the most effective politician of his generation. The US is supposed to enjoy unrivalled leverage over Israeli policy because of its enormous financial and military support, but Netanyahu has been running rings round American presidents from Bill Clinton up to the current Biden administration. Just witness the limp and toothless expressions of “concern” from Secretary of State Antony Blinken at each new Israeli atrocity in Gaza — the equivalent of the futile “thoughts and prayers” every time some crackpot with a rifle murders a classroom-full of American schoolchildren.

The conventional wisdom is that Netanyahu needs constant conflict to save his political career, but does he? That was certainly true for six months after last year’s Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, but his Likud party is now edging upward in the opinion polls: not by enough to save Netanyahu’s skin yet, but the next election to the Knesset is not due until October 2026. By then, he may be confident in his ability to form yet another government.

That Netanyahu wields such power is an indictment of a leadership vacuum at both global and regional levels. All eyes are currently on Hezbollah and Iran, but they are looking in the wrong place. When the choice between war and peace is in the hands of a single, venal, self-serving politician, the Middle East is in a sorry state indeed.

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.