After one hundred days of fighting in Israel and Gaza, who is winning? Iran. Hamas, Gaza’s ruling political party and its military wing inflicted a stinging blow to Israel when it launched its October 7th attack killing twelve hundred mostly Israelis and taking hostage over two hundred others, about half of whom have now been released. Although a propaganda victory, this attack was not militarily significant. It has, however, become significant as a triggering event.
Israel-Gaza 100 days later
After one hundred days of fighting in Israel and Gaza, who is winning? Iran. Hamas, Gaza’s ruling political party and its military wing inflicted a stinging blow to Israel when it launched its October 7th attack killing twelve hundred mostly Israelis and taking hostage over two hundred others, about half of whom have now been released. Although a propaganda victory, this attack was not militarily significant. It has, however, become significant as a triggering event.
With that attack, Iranian-supported Hamas successfully triggered a retaliatory attack by Israel that has destroyed much of the Gaza Strip, dislocated an estimated ninety per cent of Gazans, interrupted a growing peace process between Israel and much of the Arab world, refocused US energies from Ukraine and China to the Middle East and disrupted a significant portion of world trade. All of this to the benefit of Iran and collaterally Russia and China. All of whom seek to see the US displaced as the world’s most significant superpower.
From a street-level Gazan’s perspective, the October 7th attack was at best a Pyrrhic victory. In exchange for a brief cross-border excursion, killing twelve hundred or so mostly civilians, Hamas provoked an Israeli response that has killed likely twenty times as many Gazans, again mostly civilians, while devastating Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, which will cost billions and decades to restore.
From Iran’s operational view, this has been a brilliant success. With no loss of Iranian life and minimal expense to Iran, they have successfully turned much of world opinion against Israel and the US. They have embroiled the US in an intractable Middle East conflict that has thousands of years’ history, with no possibility of a peaceful solution.
From a long-term strategic view, the view is cloudy. Iran has successfully temporarily papered over the long-standing enmity between the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam by invoking hostility to the Jewish state and the largely Christian West. As a sidenote, two of the Iranian-supported militias causing so much strife, the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, are Shia, while Hamas is Sunni. Another underlying historical conflict is between Persian Iran and the Arab states. Any alliance between Shia Iran and its surrounding Sunni neighbors will be relatively short-lived, but potentially very damaging to not only Israel but also regional and even world peace.
Any significant deployment of US ground forces back into the Middle East would only further play into Iran’s game plan and benefit Putin and Xi.
As for Israel, its destruction of Gaza may well turn out to likewise be a Pyrrhic victory. Iran, at little expense to itself, has via its proxies united most of the Middle East against Israel. Netanyahu seeks to prove that any attack on Israel will provoke such a devastating response that it will serve as a deterrence. So long as the theocrats ruling Iran are in power that is unlikely to be a successful strategy, as the Shia mullahs don’t care how many Gazans the Israelis kill.
(c) William L. Enyart, 2023
Reflections from the River
www.billenyart.com
Audio production by: Tom Calhoun, www.paguytom.com