What Hamas misunderstood about the Middle East

PERHAPS IN HIS final days he reflected on the irony. Last year Hassan Nasrallah had not been eager to start a war with Israel. Hizbullah’s leader felt dragged into it by Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, who had declined to consult his allies before his men attacked Israel on October 7th. But Nasrallah joined the war anyway: his own rhetoric left him little choice. Almost a year later, that decision would cost him his life.
His assassination on September 27th was among the most momentous events in a momentous year. The worst massacre in Israel’s history led to the deadliest war in Palestinian history, Iran’s first direct attacks on Israel, even the first time in any war that missiles had been intercepted in space. None of this would have happened without Mr Sinwar’s fateful decision last October. That is not to say the region would have been at peace—but this particular sequence of events would have been unthinkable had Hamas not killed more than 1,100 Israelis. Mr Sinwar wanted a cataclysmic war that would reshape the Middle East, and he got one.
But in many ways it has not gone to plan. Gaza is in ruins. Hamas is battered. Hizbullah has lost its leader, its military command and its reputation for competence, while Iran feels vulnerable. There has been almost no sustained and spontaneous protest in the Arab world. No regimes fell, wobbled or cut ties with Israel. Even the economic consequences have been limited. The price of Brent crude is $10 lower than it was the day before Hamas attacked Israel, regional war be damned.
Mr Sinwar went to war with two assumptions: that he would enjoy the support of a strong and united “axis of resistance”, a constellation of pro-Iranian militias; and that Israel’s conduct would inflame and mobilise the region. Those beliefs were shared by many Arab, Israeli and Western officials.
The Hamas leader would have had good reason to expect help from Iran and its proxies. For years Nasrallah had promoted what he called the “unification of the arenas”, the idea that Iran-backed militias had forged a tight alliance and would co-ordinate to fight together against Israel and America. Battle-hardened from years of combat in Syria, Hizbullah would be primus inter pares. Israeli strategists were convinced by such talk. They warned that a “ring of fire” was encircling their country.
Yet when it came time to test the idea, Nasrallah was hesitant. An overwhelming majority of Lebanese, including around 50% of his Shia constituents, opposed going to war to support Gaza. Nor were his Iranian patrons enthusiastic. Hizbullah’s arsenal was supposed to be preserved as their shield against a possible Israeli attack; they did not want to jeopardise that arsenal in order to protect Hamas.
Nasrallah settled for a half-measure, a campaign of short-range missile fire that depopulated a slice of northern Israel but failed to halt, or even slow, Israel’s war in Gaza. It was hardly the full-throated support that Mr Sinwar expected. When Hamas officials met their Iranian sponsors in the weeks after October 7th, they complained about the lack of help.
The Houthis in Yemen were more eager to join the fight, but they had their own limitation: distance. Hizbullah could threaten to saturate Israel’s air defences with short-range missiles and send its elite militants across the border. The Houthis could hit Israel directly only with a small stockpile of missiles and slow-moving drones with the range to fly 2,000km to their targets. Those can still be deadly, like the drone that hit a Tel Aviv apartment block in July, killing one person and wounding eight more. But they are hardly enough to sway the course of a war.
Iran and its proxies were victims of their own hype. For all their talk of unity, the “axis of resistance” is a network of disparate militias that operate out of failed or failing states. The past year has shown that they do not share the same interests, and that many have only a limited ability to wage a long-distance war. That leaves Iran in an uncomfortable position. The militias were meant to fight on its behalf—allowing Iran to stay out of direct conflict with Israel. Yet now the Islamic Republic feels compelled to fire ballistic missiles at Israel to avenge attacks on those militias, a step that will surely invite Israeli retaliation. Its shield has become a liability.
If Hizbullah was an immediate disappointment, it still seemed, in the early days of the war, as if another of Mr Sinwar’s predictions would come true. On October 17th medics in Gaza said that an Israeli air strike had killed almost 500 people at a hospital. Within hours, it became clear that those claims were false: the blast was probably caused by an errant rocket fired by a Palestinian militia, and the death toll was considerably lower.
By then, however, the news had already sparked big protests in Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the occupied West Bank. Even the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Israel’s closest ally in the region, felt compelled to issue a sharp rebuke. It felt as if the Middle East was about to boil over. Arab and Western diplomats spent the night fretting about regional stability and wondering if they would need to try to restrain Israel.
Yet the streets were clear the following morning—and they never really filled again. In the months to come there would be remarkably few protests anywhere in the Arab world. Before Ramadan began in March, members of Hamas said that Mr Sinwar was counting on a wave of religiously inspired riots to pressure Israel. He was disappointed: the holy month was largely uneventful.
That is not to say Arabs have lost interest in the Palestinian cause: Israel’s conduct in Gaza is still a source of widespread fury. But it has not inspired the unrest it did in years past. Arab states have become more ruthless about suppressing dissent and no longer view pro-Palestine protests as a useful safety-valve for public anger. Posting on social media is displacing activism on the streets. Moreover, some people abhor Israel’s actions but find it impossible to support Hamas, an Islamist group backed by Iran. Most of all, though, there is a deep sense of fatalism. After the traumatic decade that began with the Arab spring in 2011, people are too exhausted and resigned to protest about anything.
All this has made for an odd paradox: Arab states have been bystanders to an Arab-Israeli war. They denounced Israel’s war in Gaza but did not sever ties with the Jewish state, nor did they try to apply serious diplomatic or economic pressure on its Western backers. At the same time, they were desperate to avoid any confrontation with Iran, even when its proxies caused them real harm. So far this year Egypt has lost around $6bn in revenue from the Suez canal, more than half of what it expected to earn, because of Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Its response has been to shrug. Jordan was almost apologetic when it shot down Iranian drones that violated its airspace in April, lest anyone think it was siding with Israel.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the most influential Arab countries, have found themselves juggling a range of contradictory feelings. They worry that Israel’s actions in Gaza will stoke religious fundamentalism in the region—but they also see Hamas as a fundamentalist group that should be extirpated. They are happy to see Iran and its proxies brought low, but are nervous that a widening conflict would reach their shores. In public they call for a ceasefire; in private they fret about a deal that would strengthen their enemies.
For almost a year these forces combined to produce a sort of stasis. The war stayed largely confined to Gaza and a narrow strip of land along the border between Lebanon and Israel. Life was intolerable for 2m hungry, displaced Gazans, and miserable for hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis and Lebanese.
The rest of the region could seem deceptively normal. Until August it was possible to sit by the beach in Lebanon and pretend that Israel and Hizbullah were not bombing each other a few miles away. (Thousands of Lebanese expats returned and spent their summer holidays doing just that.) A war that was meant to reshape the Middle East instead ground into a localised stalemate, and it was possible to imagine that it would end with a return to the status quo ante.
The events of the past month seem to have put an end to that stalemate. In Lebanon the decapitation of Hizbullah, a militia-cum-political party, offers a chance to loosen its stranglehold on politics. A good place to start would be for parliament to select a president, filling a post that has been vacant for two years because Hizbullah and its allies insisted on choosing a crony. That vacancy has made it impossible for Lebanon to appoint a new government or fill key security posts.
Choosing a president could happen only with the assistance of Nabih Berri, the longtime speaker of parliament. Both an ally and a rival of Hizbullah—they compete for support among the same Shia constituency—Mr Berri insists that he will not convene lawmakers for a vote until the war ends. Perhaps this is because even a weakened Hizbullah may still be too strong a force for other Lebanese factions to challenge, especially if it regains a measure of popular support for fighting the Israeli ground invasion.
In neighbouring Syria, Bashar al-Assad sees an opportunity. Although he owes his survival to Hizbullah, which sent fighters to prop up his blood-soaked regime in 2012, he kept mum last month as Israel hammered the group. It took him two days after Nasrallah’s assassination to issue a lukewarm condolence. Instead he is reaching out to Gulf states and hinting that he might distance himself from Iran. Scepticism is warranted: Mr Assad, like his father, is adept at playing off all sides against each other. But he hopes the mere promise of backing away from a diminished Iran will ease his global isolation.
A decade ago, Gulf states might have been eager to try to steer the Levant in a new direction. But today’s monarchs are less interested in playing in this region’s politics, especially when it requires sending billions of dollars in aid. The Saudis have largely written off Saad Hariri, a former prime minister and once their main client in Lebanon, as a lost cause, too weak and unpopular to lead the country.
They will be even more reluctant to get involved in any fighting, whether as part of a peacekeeping force in Lebanon—an idea that some Western diplomats have mooted—or as part of a coalition against Iran. Some media outlets linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have already suggested that it might attack Gulf states in retaliation for possible Israeli or American strikes on Iran’s oil facilities. That may well be an empty threat, since it would almost certainly invite a fierce American-led strike in response. Even so, the Saudis and Emiratis will be rather hesitant about calling Iran’s bluff.
Policymakers in America and Israel are already crowing about the chance to craft a new Middle East. The region is hard to change, though—and it rarely changes for the better. Gulf states fear they will wind up being soft targets for a cornered Iran. And they see little upside in taking such risks. In a speech last month Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, said that the kingdom would not recognise Israel until the Palestinians had a state. It was the first time he made such a declaration. Prince Muhammad does not care much for the plight of the Palestinians; that he felt compelled to distance himself from Israel is a sign of the risk-averse mood across the Gulf.
Moreover, it is plain to see that Lebanon’s ossified sectarian politics may prove hard to reform and that Syria’s cynical dictator is showing no sign of changing his ways. Other countries in the region, such as Egypt and Jordan, are too weak to exert much influence. Even at such a dramatic moment, the Arab states may remain mere bystanders to history.