The loss of hope: Israel, Gaza, Lebanon 

Hope rarely collapses overnight. Most often it leaks away, bit by painful bit, like a slow haemorrhage. We are fast approaching that point in the Middle East.

Day 373 of the war which began in Gaza: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “instructs” the Secretary -General of the United Nations to move his peacekeeping troops from southern Lebanon after they were fired on by Israeli soldiers and threatened by their tanks. 

UN peacekeepers around the world are, contrary to the prevailing view, by and large, quietly effective. But Lebanon (like Rwanda, Kosovo and Somalia) has proved a spectacular failure. Hezbollah operates with impunity building a massive stockpile of rockets under the nose of the blue helmets. Israel comes and goes as it pleases.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), comprising 10,000 troops from 46 nations, has been there since 1978 by order of the Security Council. The mandate is renewed unanimously every year. This expresses “strong support for the territorial integrity” of Lebanon, as well as a lasting peace in the Middle East. The intent, from the seat of international diplomacy, is clear.

We may draw two conclusions from this (hopeless) failure. The first is that the big powers are virtually helpless in the face of this rapidly escalating conflict. The second is that Israel has gone from despair and humiliation after the terrible events of October 7, to something approaching hubris. It finds itself virtually unopposed before an open goal and it keeps shooting.

Hostilities since last October have now spread to Lebanon, Syria, the Bab al-Mandab strait which guards the entrance to the Red Sea and the Suez canal, the jugular of world oil supply. Israel has struck at targets in Damascus, central Beirut and Tehran.

There are now four Israeli divisions in Lebanon. Villagers in the south (this is a sovereign country, remember) are being ordered to evacuate their homes as Israeli troops hunt down Hezbollah fighters. A marketplace and a mosque in Nabatiyeh, an important regional centre, were flattened by Israeli bombers on Sunday. The Lebanese government, like the UN, is a helpless spectator.

The killing has gone on for so long it’s losing the ability to shock. The deaths of another few hundred people in northern Gaza no longer registers on the front pages. The parenthetic phrase “including women and children” becomes commonplace. Tens of thousands have died. Millions have been displaced.

The stony-hearted logic of the 24-hour news cycle which fights for our limited attention span is increasingly drawn to tasty morsels served up by the likes of Tik-Tok, X and Instagram. How many need to die to top the last atrocity and breach our rising tolerance of horror? Or is this, too, a loss of hope or perhaps, since it is not we who suffer, interest? 

It is fashionable to blame Netanyahu for ratcheting up the war for personal gain. There is some truth to that. He is a ruthless political operator. The longer this self-styled “Mr Security” can keep the war going, the longer he can postpone his day of reckoning in the courts on corruption charges. But that is far from the whole story.

Netanyahu may have persuaded himself that only he can save Israel from its foes. He may be an extreme example of the hubris of political leaders who find themselves unrestrained leading a victorious army against multiple enemies. He is arrogant enough to have given the order to invade a sovereign country (Lebanon) from his Park Avenue hotel room in New York. This shocking act of disrespect comes as close to giving the finger to the President of the United States as you get.

But – and this is important because it points to where all this is heading and a further loss of hope– he draws on a long tradition of warrior leaders whose preoccupation with Israel’s self-preservation is rooted firmly, not in dialogue, but in deterrence and brute force. 

On November 19, 1973 Golda Meir, Israel’s most emblematic Prime Minister, chaired a meeting of the cabinet. Just over a month earlier on October 6 the Israeli army had come perilously close to being overrun in a surprise attack by a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. In the event Israel prevailed. I covered that war. It was touch and go in the first week. 

October 6, 1973, like October 7, 2024, when Hamas breached Israel’s defences with surprising ease to slaughter 1200 Israelis, was a huge blow to the Jewish state’s self-image as an invincible military power. On both occasions Israel’s guiding assumption — that attacking Israel would bring unimaginable reprisals and therefore deter its enemies — was shattered.

Meir told her cabinet colleagues that she believed that there was no chance of genuine peace with the Arabs. Ever. And that Israel’s survival depended into the foreseeable future, on being a nation “that stands at war”. Was hope lost that far back? 

Meir, it turns out, was both right and wrong. She was wrong because in 1979 President Anwar Sadat of Egypt travelled to Jerusalem and signed a peace agreement. He paid for this astonishing act of bravery with his life: two years later he was assassinated by hardline Egyptian army officers. Jordan followed in 1994. Since then four more Arab states (the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan) have normalised relations with Israel. So peace between Arab and Jew is possible. Why would it not be? 

In another sense, however, Meir was right. Despite being a leader of entirely different timbre to Netanyahu, Meir’s apocalyptic vision lives on. “If at first violence doesn’t succeed, use more violence.” This isn’t as tendentious as it sounds.

Israel remains at odds with its neighbours. Its blueprint of choice to keep safe is to arm itself to the teeth and hit back with overwhelming force if attacked.

The die is cast. For now. Israel is pressing ahead with its assault on Hezbollah, even if this seems to be producing diminishing returns. It is claimed that Israel has dropped more bombs on Palestinians in Gaza in a week than the United States dropped on Afghanistan in a full year (2019). On some days Israeli jets have flown more than 100 sorties in Lebanon. Yet ”total victory” against either Hamas or Hezbollah is a chimera.

Now the next battle looms. Iran, weakened by the assault on its proxies – Hamas and Hezbollah – waits as Israel ponders how best to retaliate against its most recent ballistic missile attack.  Is this the time, as hawks in Israel argue, to go for broke and cripple Iran’s nuclear facilities? What might be the consequences of an attack on, say, Kharg Island, the vast storage facility which handles over 90% of the country’s oil exports? Would that make Israel secure? For how long?

So why does Netanyahu keep upping the ante? His ruling coalition is about as hard-right as it gets. Its religious fanatics see this expanding war as the path to an Israel on the West Bank and Gaza cleansed of Arabs to create Eretz or Greater Israel.  Perhaps they hope that out of chaos, miraculously, will come order. Perhaps that a change in the White House after November 5 will produce a different result. Beyond that there is no road map, just hope. 

The war triggered by the atrocities of October 7 has become a vast, tangled mess. It is breeding a whole new generation of extremists. In Gaza, in Lebanon and among Jewish settlers in the occupied territories.

At some point someone will have to start trying to put together an exit plan. But with so many competing interests this will prove hellishly difficult.

One can see perfectly clearly why people feel as they do, why rage has displaced reason. But what is emerging through the fog of endless war is the loss of hope. It’s like watching a drowning man slowly losing his grip on the last piece of flotsam he’s clinging to.

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