Spiral of Vengeance
The Gathering Storm Clouds in the Middle East
Israeli strikes in Lebanon, Houthi attacks on the Red Sea and Iranian missiles fired on Iraq: The risk of escalation in the Middle East is growing.
By Christoph Reuter und Monika Bolliger
An Israeli soldier at the border to Lebanon. Foto: Jalaa Marey / AFPThe villa belonging to the Kurdish construction magnate Peshraw Dizayee was a splendid estate, as big as a palace and surrounded by a verdant park.
Since Monday night, though, all that remains of it is a concrete skeleton surrounded by rubble, some remaining bits of wall and buckled palm trees.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have claimed responsibility for the missile strikes on Dizayee’s estate in the northern Iraqi city Erbil, which killed the businessman, his infant daughter and several civilians.
Tehran claims the attack targeted an Israeli "spy headquarters" – and it likely came in response to Israel’s killing of one of their commanders several weeks previously.
The anger and indignation among Iraq’s Kurdish population is palpable, with the attack having triggered protests and calls for boycotts.
"Why is Iran attacking us?" wonders Marwa Saad, a 23-year-old university student.
"If Iran has a problem with Israel or America, they’re right there in front of their nose.
Why are they killing our children, our families?
Why are they killing us?"
If the Middle East were a blank piece of blotting paper and the wars and crises in the region were blots of ink, it would be easy to see that the dots are rapidly multiplying.
The Gaza Strip, the border area between Lebanon and Israel, Erbil in northern Iraq, the mountains of western Yemen and the Red Sea.
Some of the inkblots are growing.
They remain separated from each other, but when the first ones begin merging, the risk grows that they will all join together.
That the Middle East – from Israel to Iran, from Lebanon to Yemen – will sink into war.
The situation hasn’t grown that dire yet. Governments in the United States, the European Union and in countries on the Gulf are still doing all they can, with the help of appeals, pressure and threats, to prevent further escalation.
Iran’s leadership still wants to avoid becoming party to a war, either with its own military or through the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, over which Tehran exerts control.
Israel’s war cabinet continues to insist that it is interested in reaching a diplomatic agreement with Lebanon.
But the escalation in various locations, the rockets fired ostensibly for the purposes of deterrence – attacks which almost invariably trigger a response – and even the risk of a simple misunderstanding are all making the situation extremely difficult to control.
The trigger for the current unrest was the murderous attack by Hamas and other Islamist groups in the Gaza Strip on October 7, an assault that targeted Israeli military bases and kibbutzim and resulted in the murder of around 1,150 people and the abduction of more than 240. Israel has been waging war on Gaza for more than 100 days since then, with the declared aim that of destroying Hamas.
Israel has occupied the entire Gaza Strip, and 24,000 Palestinians have lost their lives in the fighting.
"Stop Playing with Fire"
But even if Gaza was the starting point, who would have predicted in early October that three months later, the American and British militaries would be firing missiles at Houthi militia positions in the mountains of Yemen above the Red Sea?
Or that Kurdish civilians like the construction tycoon Peshraw Dizayee would be killed in northern Iraq by Iranian missiles?
That attack, in turn, was likely launched to avenge the drone attack on an Iranian general in the Syrian capital of Damascus – widely considered to be an Israeli operation.
The roots of the conflict are deep.
Localized power struggles, regional loyalties and political opportunism in addition to ideological dogmas and public opinion are all fueling the fighting in the Middle East.
And it is becoming increasingly difficult to control.
The greatest danger, however, continues to be the contested border between northern Israel and Lebanon.
Given the increasing number of skirmishes there between Hezbollah and the Israeli army, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres issued a dramatic appeal on Monday: "Stop playing with fire across the Blue Line, de-escalate, and bring hostilities to an end."
In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel’s government tried to convince the U.S. that Hezbollah had actually been behind the attack and was also preparing to launch an onslaught.
Israel, according to the argument, needed to preempt that attack with a massive preventative strike, with American support.
But there was no evidence of Hezbollah’s participation in the Hamas attack nor that it had plans for an attack.
A senior U.S. official later told the Washington Post that it was a case of "bad intelligence."
The official told the Post that U.S. President Joe Biden had called Israeli officials several times a day to prevent Israel from launching an attack on Hezbollah.
Otherwise, the official said, there was a risk of "all hell breaking loose."
British analyst Nicholas Blanford described for DER SPIEGEL what a Hezbollah attack on Israel might look like: "Airports, power plants, ports, military bases, shopping centers, everything would be attacked with rockets.
The entire country would be in lockdown.
Waves of thousands of rockets would also overwhelm Israeli air defenses.
The most modern of those rockets and guided missiles carry 500 kilogram warheads for a distance of over 300 kilometers and can strike within 10 to 20 meters of their target.
The rocket attacks by Hamas would be a light summer shower compared to the deluge that Hezbollah could bring down on Israel."
The Israeli military is fully aware of that scenario as well, which is why the border has remained largely quiet during the 17 years since the last war in 2006.
Deterrence works.
The two sides continued to insist their mutual enmity and would occasionally fire a couple of shells into an empty hillside.
In the first weeks following October 7, the flareups between Israel and Hezbollah were limited.
Andrea Tenenti, the long-serving spokesman for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) – a force that is there to keep the peace but can really only look on – said in late October that everyone was still playing by the time-tested rules.
The evacuation of thousands of residents on both sides of the border also lowered the immediate risk of war.
With no more civilians in the area, there is no longer a risk of them being accidentally killed.
But the more than 60,000 people who evacuated northern Israel are still unable to return home, even after three months – nor are the tens of thousands of Lebanese who fled the region.
The funeral in Beirut for Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri. Foto: Marwan Tahtah / Getty ImagesIn recent weeks, Israel’s war cabinet has upped the pressure, both rhetorically and militarily: In rapid succession, Israel first killed Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas leader in Lebanon, right in the heart of the Hezbollah stronghold of southern Lebanon, and then eliminated a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force.
That killing was immediately followed by the execution of another commander who was on his way to the funeral of the first.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says the Israeli government "prefers a diplomatic path over a military one.
But we are close to the point of the hourglass turning over."
Dangerous. But Inevitable?
As experience shows, each strike produces a counterstrike.
After the murder of Arouri, Hezbollah attacked an Israeli radar station, inflicting serious damage.
After the next "targeted killing," they fired on a the Northern Command headquarters of the Israeli army in Safed.
In the tried-and-true pattern of vengeance, each reply produces a reply of its own, until the spiral potentially results in open warfare.
The fact that Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, the head of a designated terror organization, mentioned the idea of a negotiated solution in a televised speech – involving Israel’s retreat from border areas it still occupies – went largely unnoticed.
In Washington, the fear of a war between Israel and Hezbollah is significant.
But as the New York Times recently wrote, assumptions about who might start such a conflict have recently shifted.
The U.S. has told Israel, according to the paper, that Washington would provide support if Hezbollah were to invade across the border, but not if Israel were to make the first move.
And according to the Washington Post, government officials believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants war with Hezbollah because he knows that once the fighting in Gaza is over, his political career will likely come to an end as well.
Which would also mean an end to the immunity he currently enjoys and that legal proceedings against him for fraud, corruption and breach of trust could resume.
Still, despite the ongoing threats of a military operation against Hezbollah issued by Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant and Chief of the General Staff Herzl Halevi, such plans seem unrealistic.
"Israel wants to drive Hezbollah back to the Litani River, 20 to 30 kilometers to the north," says Lebanon expert Blanford.
"But Hezbollah has rocket positions even further to the north, in the mountains along the Baqaa Valley."
They would, he continues, be able to attack from there just as easily, which would translate to the predictable failure of plans for a limited incursion.
In the Israeli media, war against Hezbollah – often framed as a vast, final conflict – is generally depicted as dangerous, but inevitable.
The trauma of October 7 has rapidly resuscitated Israel’s pledge to never again stand defenseless in the face of aggression.
It almost seems as though Israel’s military doctrine of defeating all its opponents has transformed into an absolute dogma.
The situation is Gaza is essentially an echo of Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978.
Ever since the peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, the concept of lasting victory through military subjugation has no longer really worked.
The Palestinians today refuse to accept subjugation and want independence.
In the same way that the wars in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, aimed at driving off the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), instead paved the way for the development of Hezbollah and its growth to the powerful force it is today.
In an interview with the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz, Ami Ayalon, the former head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency Shin Beth, described his own view of Israel's struggle to establish itself, framing it as a 140-year war for survival.
When asked if he thinks Israel will win, Ayalon said: "We won in March 2002.
At the Arab League summit in Beirut, the Arab countries surrendered and waved the white flag. [...]
After 35 years of struggle, at that summit they agreed to recognize Israel."
Israel, he says, got everything it wanted: "Yes to recognition, yes to negotiations, and yes to peace with Israel.
The tragedy is that we refuse to recognize our own victory and continue to fight.
We have turned war into an end in itself."
Land for peace was the formula that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat sealed with a handshake in the Rose Garden of the White House in 1993.
But then, settlement building in the West Bank continued and the opportunity for peace was ground to dust between maximalists on both sides.
And in 1995, Rabin was assassinated following a smear campaign by radical rabbis and politicians.
Ayalon says in the interview that he only realized "the magnitude of the rift and the fracture" of Israeli society after the assassination, and frames the country's frequent wars as a way "to avoid the debate that is tearing Israeli society apart, centered around the question of what we came here to be, as a people in this land."
In an interview with the Guardian, he said it upsets him that nobody is willing to talk about what happens after the war in Gaza.
"I know what happens to wars without a political goal," he said.
"This is exactly what happened to us in Lebanon, this is exactly what happened to us in the West Bank.”
Israelis believe, he said, "that security will be achieved if we conquer, if we occupy. […] Occupation will not bring us security, it brought us violence and death."
The Crown Jewel of Iranian Deterrence
The fact that Hezbollah is eager to avoid a major war with Israel has to do with the labyrinthine relationships in the region.
The militia’s rocket arsenal is Iran’s most important trump card against an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities.
Despite extensive military and financial independence, Hezbollah is slavishly loyal to the Iranian leadership and its ideology of God-given power.
For Tehran, says the analyst Blanford, Hezbollah is "the crown jewel of its deterrence strategy."
Domestically, the Iranian regime is stuck in a quagmire of economic crisis, inflation of over 40 percent and a lack of clarity regarding the successor of ailing, 84-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Not to mention the fact that the regime is despised by broad swaths of the population.
Iranian Supreme Leader Kahmenei (middle) at a weapons convention in November. Foto: Iranian Supreme Leader'S Office / ZUMA Wire / IMAGOMilitarily, by contrast, the country is stronger than it has ever been and has emerged as a vital weapons supplier to Russia. Furthermore, according to the New York Times, the country has rapidly accelerated its uranium enrichment efforts since October.
The paper has reported that Tehran now possesses sufficient material for three nuclear bombs and is on the verge of enriching it to weapons grade.
Iran also continues to maintain its network of loyal militias in numerous Arab countries.
With the attack on Erbil, Iran clearly demonstrated that it is willing to use military strikes as a demonstration of its power.
Killing civilians in Iraq won’t trigger revenge attacks, whereas a strike on Israel directly could immediately spark a war.
Ties between Hezbollah and Iran have thus far helped to keep the situation on the Lebanese-Israeli border halfway under control.
But should a war break out, those ties would likely produce the opposite effect.
Tehran would never abandon Hezbollah, even if it came under fire.
And a chain reaction would likely ensue, with the Iranian-controlled militias in Iraq, Syria and Yemen launching massive strikes of their own.
The U.S. navy launching strikes on Houthi positions. Foto: U.s. Central Command / UPI Photo / IMAGOThe Underestimated Houthis
Though the latter, the Houthis, have already ramped up their own military activities on the Red Sea since November.
The power and determination of this group, nestled in the mountains of western Yemen some 2,000 kilometers from Israel, were initially underestimated by many.
The Houthis are leveraging their geographical position in an attempt to blackmail the world into putting a stop to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Since November, the group has launched repeated attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea, through which roughly 10 percent of global trade is shipped.
The civil war in Yemen has now been going on for more than a decade, a conflict which has seen the Houthis take control of the capital of Sanaa and inflict defeat on Saudi Arabia.
"But hardly anything has brought them as much attention as interrupting the supply chains of Tesla and Ikea," says Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen analyst from the British think tank Chatham House.
The Houthis are actually motivated by solidarity with the Palestinians, he warns.
"I think in the West, it isn’t fully clear what kind of a shockwave rolls through the entire Arab world every day the images and details of the horrors from Gaza can be seen – and nobody is doing anything to stop it."
Their attacks and their willingness to even risk a confrontation with the U.S., he says, has turned them into the heroes of the region.
"Hardly any Arab countries, not even the Yemeni enemies of the Houthis, have criticized the group in public.
If they did, they would be seen as Israeli and American puppets."
He says the Houthis will of course convert their newfound prestige into political capital in their negotiations with Saudi Arabia over a treaty and international recognition.
Still, it remains unclear where this new conflict will ultimately lead.
A week ago, the U.S. and British militaries began launching strikes on Houthi bases, but the militia has nevertheless continued firing at ships and have stated that they are not afraid of a confrontation with the U.S.
And then, Iran and Pakistan have been launching airstrikes at each other for the last several days.
This conflict at the edge of the Middle East is not directly related to the war in Gaza, but it does look as though inhibitions regarding military strikes against other countries is lower than it has been – and that the spiral of revenge attacks is spinning faster than ever before.
"Watchful but unseeing," is how the Australian historian Christopher Clark described the European powers that stumbled into World War I.
"Haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world."
"The Sleepwalkers" was the title Clark chose for his book, which examined the interplay of mistrust, miscalculation and arrogance that led to war 110 years ago.
His book largely put to rest previous views that the war could largely be blamed on a single nation, instead arguing that it was the result of the interaction between a variety of different factors.
This time, the geographical region has changed.
But in their ignorant refusal to leave the narrow path of predictable reactions and revenge attacks, the actors of today are disastrously emulating the sleepwalkers of yesteryear.
With reporting by Sangar Khaleel
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