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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack that launched the latest war in Israel. And, if you have been following things at all, you know that the situation there is getting worse, not better. If there is going to be an election-changing event in October, it's more likely to emerge from that part of the world than from anywhere else.
As we have noted many times, we dislike writing about this subject because it's very touchy, and it's not our area of expertise. Indeed, this item was actually going to run yesterday, but it would have been the last piece we wrote, and it is not well to engage with this subject when one is not at peak mental sharpness.
In any event, let's do a brief rundown of where things stand, just to make sure everyone's on the same page. Israel is currently fighting a three-front war, something they haven't dealt with since Benjamin Netanyahu was a teenager. To the south, it's Gaza and Hamas. To the north, it's Lebanon and Hezbollah. To the east, it's the West Bank, where radical Islamists who are somewhat in cahoots with Hamas have risen up in violence.
If this was not enough on the plate of the Israeli government, Iran has waded into the conflict. The Iranians were already funding and egging on Hamas and Hezbollah, and a week ago, they launched 181 missiles at Israel. This is actually the second missile attack from Iran this year. At the moment, Israel is pondering its response, while Iran has warned that if oil wells or nuclear facilities are targeted, there will be hell to pay. If this sounds like a giant, very dangerous pi**ing contest, you have the right idea.
It is hardly disputed at this point that, at least at the outset, Netanyahu badly misjudged the nature of this war. In particular, he failed to grasp that the PR war would be as significant as the conventional war. To that end, the Palestinians became an object of much sympathy around the world. Recently, the number of deaths in Gaza passed 40,000. For comparison purposes, that's about half as many people as the U.S. lost in the entire Vietnam War. The nature of the war in Gaza is such that the line between "combatant" and "civilian" is fuzzy, but the best guess is that half of the dead are non-combatant. That includes a lot of women and children, of course.
Given all of this, Netanyahu was under enormous pressure, both from without and within. He has pretty thick armor when it comes to pressure from foreign governments, but domestic unrest is a different thing, particularly given that his governing coalition is tenuous, at best. However, on September 28, Israel managed to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. Yesterday, the Israeli government announced that it had also killed Nasrallah's successors. For the Israeli PM, this is a coup on par with Barack Obama launching the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Consequently, Netanyahu has bought himself some time, possibly a lot of time.
Now, let's turn our attention to the U.S. Through all of this, the Biden administration has been working ceaselessly toward some sort of resolution, with no success. This is hardly surprising, as there is virtually no alignment in goals between the various players involved. The U.S. just wants peace, and possibly a two-state solution, in hopes that peace will be long-lasting. The fact that a two-state solution has been a goal for generations tells you about the odds that it's going to happen this year... or ever.
Meanwhile, as we have pointed out many times, neither Israel nor Hamas is especially interested in peace right now. Netanyahu and the key members of his governing coalition want to inflict massive damage on the various hostile factions that are within, or near, the borders of Israel. The PM has the additional motivation that every day of war is another day that his various criminal trials are delayed. Hamas, for their part, is destabilizing a situation that the Gazans find intolerable, and is also attracting a lot of international support. Adding another layer is that Iran does not especially care about Palestine OR Hamas. Their goal is to achieve Iranian and, more broadly, Shiite supremacy in the Middle East. They want to do everything possible to derail cooperation between non-Shiite nations, most obviously the increasingly close relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
There is little doubt that U.S. politics has already undergone a substantive change when it comes to support for Israel. The protests that took place on campuses (and elsewhere) made clear that there are many young people today who are of voting age and are overtly hostile to Israel. Meanwhile, American Jews have, on the whole, become considerably more Israel-skeptical than they were on October 6, 2023. That doesn't mean that all American Jews have changed their views, nor does it mean that previously pro-Israel Jews are willing to completely abandon Israel. However, there is much disdain for Netanyahu, and much broader support for limits on arms sales, two-state-solution arm-twisting, and the like.
But while the domestic politics have shifted, the geopolitics apparently have not. We say again, we don't know this subject all that well. We also suspect that there is much to know that cannot be publicly revealed. In any event, while talking peace, the Biden administration has nonetheless done much to keep Israel's war machine running smoothly. ProPublica had two articles in the last week, one on how the U.S. has not withheld so much as a single bullet from Israel, and another about how Antony Blinken put his thumb on the scale to make sure Israel was not sanctioned for withholding aid to Gaza. Further, the attacks on Hezbollah, including the one that killed Nasrallah, were undertaken with significant U.S. support.
We don't know exactly why the Biden administration is as... supportive as it is. However, we tend to doubt there is some sort of corruption here, along the lines of the Trump family and the Saudis. You can e-mail in and correct us if it is announced, next year, that Joe Biden will be taking over management of $2 billion in assets on behalf of the Israeli government. We also tend to doubt that Biden is motivated by political concerns, since his career is drawing to an end, and since the domestic political situation would actually seem to argue for tapping the brakes.
To re-use a favorite quote from Sherlock Holmes, yet again, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Since we reject the alternative assumptions, we therefore have to assume that Biden and Blinken are guided by geopolitical concerns, in particular reining in Iran. It is certainly possible that their judgment is wrong, or that they are old men whose brains are stuck 20 years in the past. On the other hand, they have close to a century of foreign policy experience between them, and they have access to all kinds of information that we don't have. The general public won't have a full picture for years or decades, if ever.
Regardless of the reasons why, the bottom line is that the Biden administration is all-in on Israel, and will remain so through the election. And there are many ways that could plausibly blow up in Biden's face (and, by extension, Kamala Harris' face). Israel's response to Iran (and Israel is resisting input from the Americans) could light the fuse on an already tense situation. Israel is also planning to escalate its operations against Hezbollah, so that situation could go south. Alternatively, school is back in session, and the campus protests could begin anew.
For these reasons, and likely others we're not thinking of/aware of right now, the Middle East is most certainly the most likely source of an October Surprise in the next several weeks. (Z)