“Iran Rules Out Any Military Escalation Against It Beyond Airstrikes, Assassinations and Security Breaches.”
That was the headline of a news report in Alhudood, an Arabic-language satirical news site in the vein of The Onion, commenting on the latest war in the Middle East between Israel and Iran. A cartoon on the site featured missile tracer lights above Tel Aviv, and a well-worn Arabic expression that denotes living long enough to see things that once were thought to be inconceivable: “We lived … and we saw.” Or, now I’ve seen it all.
Indeed, the enduring theme of the past several years of incessant warfare in the region is the repeated destruction of taboos, the crossing of the red lines that we had all been conditioned to believe were unnegotiable, things that could never come to pass: a successful cross-border assault by Hamas on Israeli territory; the systematic destruction and displacement of a people in Gaza in broad view of the entire world, unfolding in real time on social media over the course of months and at little or no cost to Israel; the dismantling of Hezbollah and the assassination of its charismatic leader, who had been a multigenerational, iconic cornerstone in the region’s psyche, all with no discernible response from the supposedly powerful Iranian regime that keeps vowing to destroy Israel. Then there was the sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad, his house of cards disintegrating before a rapid rebel advance after the country had endured more than a decade of bloodshed. And now, Israel is bombing Iran, not with overnight stealthy operations targeting a nuclear facility as it has done in the past, but with the day and night strikes that come with missile tracers that people can see in Damascus, Beirut and Amman. And if that’s not enough to shake the taboos of the past, Iran is bombing Israel itself. Iranian missiles are reaching Tel Aviv and causing fatalities to civilians and destruction in urban areas.
The scenes in the region, and the mood it is striking in the minds and hearts of people throughout the Arab world, feel like a bad compilation of those annoying social media posts that invite people to “normalize” something that shouldn’t be normalized. In this case, what’s being normalized is a free-for-all law of the jungle, with armchair commentators and bots cheering for one warring party or the other as if we were all watching a football game where no lives or livelihoods are at stake.
And yet those of us not on the receiving end of missiles are mere spectators. We are the Jordanian man staring nonchalantly into the camera in a now-viral photograph, sporting an all-black outfit as missile rounds light up the sky behind him. We are the bon vivant guests at the Lebanese wedding where a viral video shows festivities continuing as rockets sail through the sky above. Perhaps they are thinking that, at least for once, the visible and lethal projectiles launched from Israel aren’t falling on Lebanon.
It is tempting to claim that people in the neighboring Arab countries are experiencing schadenfreude over both Israel and the Islamic Republic finally receiving a dose of each other’s medicine, rather than visiting their violence on the countries that separate them geographically, but the reality is that there is deep ambivalence in the region about the outcome of this previously unthinkable war. There are, of course, uncompromising voices on all sides of the divide — those who designate either Israel or Iran as the region’s prime evil, those who are angry that Israel is yet again launching a preemptive war with the usual unwavering support from feckless Western politicians and those who, like many global actors, see Israel as the only country in the region with the right to defend itself.
In an absurd world, sanity often relies on satire, as this brilliant headline from The Onion demonstrates: “Netanyahu Calls Iran Strikes Necessary To Prevent War He Just Started.”
A more culturally familiar analogue for describing this war might be the phrase one often hears in Islamic supplications and sermons, usually denoting an inability to actually do anything meaningful about an injustice: “May God strike the oppressors with other oppressors.”
And yes, although the Islamic Republic has built its brand around the “Palestinian cause,” and might have been “heroic” in the eyes of Sunni Arabs some two decades ago, this has not been the case for some time — certainly not in Lebanon, where Iran’s proxy Hezbollah and its allies are at odds with the rest of their compatriots, and definitely not in Syria, where Iran, Hezbollah and the Assad regime slaughtered Syrians for 13 brutal years. And so it is challenging for many in the neighborhood to feel sympathy toward the Iranian regime, because of its systematic destruction of neighboring Arab societies; its funding of criminal militias that forever stunted the politics of societies like Iraq, Lebanon and Syria; and its prosecution of total warfare against civilians there. After news emerged of the deaths of Mohammed Bagheri and Esmail Qaani, top generals in the Iranian military and its foreign legion, one photo that circulated lampooned them as standing on the front lines in Aleppo, where Tehran helped the Assad regime orchestrate one of the most brutal sieges of modern warfare in 2016. It’s difficult for many to muster sympathy for a regime that is perceived not as defending Muslim interests, but primarily Iranian Shiite ones (as defined by the Islamic Republic, since many Shiite Muslims around the world feel unseen and unheard by the Khamenei regime), as a result of these political developments.
Still, Iran is standing up to Israel, and that is an emotive volcano for many in the region — both those who have endured wars with Israel and those who have merely watched them from afar — never too far from Arab consciousness. This is the Israel that has destroyed Gaza, killed tens of thousands of Palestinian children and continues to casually refer to the Arabs surrounding it as “animals”; the Israel that spitefully dynamited historical Lebanese villages because it could, that refused to leave the country after agreeing to do so in a ceasefire deal and whose soldiers, as they finally retreated, still found time to go into Lebanese homes and cut up dresses and day suits just for fun — because they can; the Israel that is inviting settlers on tours of occupied Syrian land in its latest unprovoked land grab, after unilaterally violating a multidecade peace agreement with Syria — also just because it can. The Israel that continues its decades of apartheid, annexation and wartime victories.
Now, for once, these two regimes that have fought each other by proxy, not in either of their homes but in the countries between them, inside the homes of Syrians and Lebanese and Palestinians, are finally enduring each others’ assaults on their respective home fronts, no longer hiding behind nihilistic militias many hundreds of miles away, or behind air superiority over the rubble of Gaza and southern Lebanon. For many in the region who have suffered from the brutality of both regimes, the attitude can be summed up by the quip widely attributed to Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq war: “It’s a pity they can’t both lose.”
But this ambivalence belies a monumental development, the breaking of a taboo no less consequential than any that have been shattered by the insane march toward total war. Tehran can be bombed. And so can Tel Aviv.
This sounds like an obvious conclusion, a “no shit, Sherlock” moment. But the reality is that Tel Aviv has almost never been bombed by a state. It was bombed by Egypt during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and, in 1991, with Iraqi Scud missiles launched by Saddam Hussein in a suicidal spasm. That act is still remembered today in the region, even by opponents of Saddam, as one of “unmatched bravery” nobody has dared repeat.
That’s it. None of the states that have claimed the mantle of the eternal struggle and resistance against the Israeli enemy have dared to bomb Tel Aviv in the last 35 years, until now.
For its part, the Islamic Republic has also always assumed that proxies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, well-placed on Israel’s northern border, would be a deterrent and the source of a possible last strike against any Israeli aggression on its homeland. And yet, here we are. The proxy militia was all but gone months before Tehran itself was struck.
The two countries have largely avoided being directly attacked in their city centers during regional wars, immune to strikes and foreign interventions. This helped them maintain a sense of “hayba,” an Arabic word that connotes mystique and an aura of untouchability, which made them seem invulnerable to the designs of outsiders. During the Gaza war, Iran came under intense criticism, including by some of its allies, for not entering the war while its proxies — Hezbollah and the Houthis — faced existential threats.
For two decades, the conventional wisdom that guided policy thinking under the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden was that any provocation of Iran would spark an all-encompassing regional war that would also affect Washington’s allies. Tucker Carlson and others in the “America first” camp warned that Russia and China would enter the war. That was why the killing of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, during the first administration of Donald Trump had been out of the question for many years. The killing of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, again tested that assumption. One by one, all scenarios involving attacks against Iranian allies were tested — until the battle reached Iran itself.
Perhaps it is normal that countries that wage war will suffer some consequences for their troubles. But taboos have already been broken, and perhaps the most consequential outcome of this round of Israeli-Iranian fighting will be these lessons: You can strike downtown Tehran and not provoke a regional war, and you can strike the heart of Tel Aviv and survive. (In both cases, at least for now.) That will be a new, new normal.
One would expect this to be a rather big deal, but you wouldn’t get that impression watching a relaxed Benjamin Netanyahu, who was at risk of going two months without initiating a new war, calmly explain on TV that the Iranian attacks were expected and planned for, that Israeli defenses would hold, that it was all business as usual.
Sadly, as with so many needless wars, this one, too, may come with no real winner, no matter who is left standing in the end.
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