Supported by
Thomas L. Friedman
What This Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran Conflict is Really About
Opinion Columnist
To understand why and how Israel’s devastating blow to Hezbollah is such a world-shaking threat to Iran, Russia, North Korea and even China, you have to put it in the context of the wider struggle that has replaced the Cold War as the framework of international relations today.
After the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, I argued that we were no longer in the Cold War, or the post-Cold War. We were in the post-post-Cold War: a struggle between an ad hoc “coalition of inclusion” — decent countries, not all of them democracies, who see their future as best delivered by a U.S.-led alliance nudging the world to greater economic integration, openness and collaboration to meet global challenges, like climate change — versus a “coalition of resistance,” led by Russia, Iran and North Korea: brutal, authoritarian regimes who use their opposition to the U.S.-led world of inclusion to justify militarizing their societies and maintaining an iron grip on power.
China has been straddling the two camps because its economy depends on access to the coalition of inclusion while the government’s leadership shares a lot of the authoritarian instincts and interests of the coalition of resistance.
You have to see the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon in the context of this global struggle. Ukraine was trying to join the world of inclusion in Europe — seeking freedom from Russia’s orbit and to join the European Union — and Israel and Saudi Arabia were trying to expand the world of inclusion in the Middle East by normalizing relations.
Russia attempted to stop Ukraine from joining the West (the European Union and NATO) and Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah attempted to stop Israel from joining the East (ties with Saudi Arabia). Because if Ukraine joined the European Union, the inclusive vision of a Europe “whole and free” would be almost complete and Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy in Russia almost completely isolated.
And if Israel were allowed to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, not only would that vastly expand the coalition of inclusion in that region — a coalition already expanded by the Abraham Accords that created ties between Israel and other Arab nations — it would almost totally isolate Iran and its reckless proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq, all of which were driving their countries into failed states.
Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli strike on Friday, were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon and turned it into a base for Iranian imperialism.
I was speaking over the weekend to Orit Perlov, who tracks Arab social media for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. She described the flood of social media postings from across Lebanon and the Arab world celebrating Hezbollah’s demise and urging the Lebanese government to declare a unilateral cease-fire so the Lebanese Army could seize control of Southern Lebanon from Hezbollah and bring quiet to the border. The Lebanese don’t want Beirut to be destroyed like Gaza and they are truly afraid of a return of civil war, Perlov explained to me. Nasrallah had already dragged the Lebanese into a war with Israel they never wanted, but Iran ordered.
This comes on top of the deep anger for the way Hezbollah joined with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to crush the democratic uprising there. It is literally like the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz is dead and now everyone is thanking Dorothy (i.e., Israel).
But there is a lot of diplomatic work to be done to translate the end of Nasrallah to a sustainably better future for the Lebanese, Israelis and Palestinians.
The Biden-Harris administration has been building a network of alliances to give strategic weight to the ad hoc coalition of inclusion — from Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Australia in the Far East, through India and across to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and then up through the European Union and NATO. The keystone of the whole project was the Biden team’s proposed normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis are ready to do, provided Israel agrees to open negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank on a two-state solution.
And here comes the rub.
Pay very close attention to the speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel before the U.N. General Assembly on Friday. He understands very well the struggle between the coalitions of “resistance” and “inclusion” that I am talking about. In fact, it was central to his U.N. speech.
How so? Bibi held up two maps during his address, One was titled “The Blessing” and the other “The Curse.” “The Curse” showed Syria, Iraq and Iran in black as a blocking coalition between the Middle East and Europe. The second map, “The Blessing,” showed the Middle East with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan in green and a red two-way arrow going across them, as a bridge connecting the world of inclusion in Asia with the world of inclusion in Europe.
But if you looked closely at Bibi’s “Curse” map, it showed Israel — but no borders with Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank (as if it had already been annexed — the goal of this Israeli government).
And that is the rub. The story Bibi wants to tell the world is that Iran and its proxies are the main obstacle to the world of inclusion stretching from Europe, through the Middle East over to the Asian-Pacific.
I beg to differ. The keystone to this whole alliance is a Saudi-Israel normalization based on reconciliation between Israel and moderate Palestinians.
If Israel now moved ahead and opened a dialogue on two states for two peoples with a reformed Palestinian Authority, which has already accepted the Oslo peace treaty, it would be the diplomatic knockout blow that would accompany and solidify the military knockout blow Israel just delivered to Hezbollah and Hamas.
It would totally isolate the forces of “resistance” in the region and take away their phony shield — that they are the defenders of the Palestinian cause. Nothing would rattle Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Russia — even China — more.
But to do that Netanyahu would have to take a political risk even greater than the military risk he just took in killing the leadership of Hezbollah, a.k.a. “The Party of God.”
Netanyahu would have to break with the Israeli “Party of God" — the coalition of far-right Jewish settler supremacists and messianists who want Israel to permanently control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, with no border lines in between — just like on Bibi’s U.N. map. Those parties keep Bibi in power, so he would need to replace them with Israeli centrist parties, which I know would collaborate with him on such a move.
So there you have the big challenge of the day: The struggle between the world of inclusion and the world of resistance comes down to many things, but none more — today — than Netanyahu’s willingness to follow up his blow to the “Party of God” in Lebanon by dealing a similar political blow to the “Party of God” in Israel.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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