Vital Interests are at Stake 

Hamas’s brutal attack is rightly perceived as a combination of Egypt’s and Syria’s surprise offensive in 1973 and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The memory of the Jewish Holocaust, never wholly absent, looms large these days in everyday conversation and public discourse in Israel. But the sense of unprecedented mortal danger is not confined to Israel and the Gaza Strip. In recent years, the Syrian president’s senior adviser described “resistance” as a “strategy that undermines the tenets of our enemies’ strategy.” Qassem Soleimani, the adviser said, understood “the core strategy that opposes the axis of resistance” and “worked to destroy the principles of that strategy.” Soleimani also personally “coordinated this strategy among Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen.” In other words, the prospect of a decisive Hamas military defeat could threaten the “axis of resistance” and its asymmetric strategy. Hence, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has warned that if the “axis of resistance” permitted the downfall of Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah could soon be forced to defend their own cities. 

For better or for worse, the long-term geopolitical ramifications of this war will be formative. Whether the “resistance” approach is discredited or confirmed, and whether Iran and its allies manage to deter and constrain Israel and the United States, will have huge implications on the strategic environment of other players. This includes regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have found themselves facing their own “resistance” threats in the form of Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both have referred to the latter as a “second Hezbollah.” Thus, the current war could end up precipitating, not impeding, a new stage of Israel-Saudi cooperation. 

Hours into the 1973 War, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stressed that the United States could not permit the defeat of its client—and of American weapons by Soviet weapons—which “would be a geopolitical disaster to the United States.”  It is precisely for this reason that the Biden administration has been providing Israel with massive military aid. But Kissinger also had already formed a clear idea of how the United States would harness the war in the service of diplomacy and a geopolitical reconfiguration of the Middle East. At the moment, this is perhaps the most helpful analogy to that war. Like in 1973, Israel could emerge from the current war with a more sober understanding of its strategic situation in the region and its own constraints and risk acceptance.  

That peace between Israel, Iran, and the “axis of resistance” is unrealizable does not preclude the possibility that the current war—and the palpable risk of grave “unacceptable” costs for all sides—could foster the conditions for an extended period of regional stability. In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a thirty-four-day war that neither saw coming and which both regretted, but which also helped pave the way to seventeen years of unprecedented deterrence stability. In 2016, President Barak Obama famously said that amid the fierce regional competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the United States had “to say to our friends, as well as to the Iranians” that they must “find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.”  

While the current crisis will not yield peace between Israel and its enemies, an all-out war in the region would entail costs that neither Israel nor the United States seem willing to risk. Given this reality, the two countries must now think hard and realistically about how this war, too, can indeed be leveraged in the service of promoting “some sort of cold peace.”

Daniel Sobelman is a research fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Middle East Initiative and an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Image: Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock.