This ends in one of two ways: Iran’s regime is toppled — or it prevails
IT IS Pesach week in Israel, and what is chiefly remarkable is the general atmosphere of normality, despite it all. Restaurants and cafes are full to capacity, with families enjoying the spring warmth. It has been a long and bitter winter, after all, and who knows what may be coming tomorrow?
This very strong, apparently unconquerable, human urge to put regular life back in place at the first possible opportunity is something I have observed frequently over the years in my coverage of conflicts across the Middle East. I remember in rebel-controlled Aleppo City in the summer of 2012 seeing the few remaining inhabitants of a ruined neighbourhood adjoining the front line set up a small vegetable market, just metres from the rebels’ positions, and sit by their stalls sipping black tea and enjoying the summer sun. The tanks of the Assad regime, which would within a few weeks roll forward, were perhaps 100 metres away across the rubble.
In the Israeli case, this very strong inclination towards quickly re-establishing regular life has long been particularly apparent. At the height of the Second Intifada, when bombings of restaurants, buses and cafes were a weekly occurrence, the speed with which all evidence of the destruction would be cleared away was very notable. The crowds in the city might thin out for a day or so after a particularly large incident. But then it would be as before, the destroyed place gone, the ground quickly coming together again over its ruins. Almost too quickly, I remember thinking at the time. Shouldn’t there be some process of mourning and reflection? But the urge towards quickly repairing the rent in the daily continuum was stronger. After a few weeks, small monuments would appear bearing the names of the dead.
And so now. A week after the largest
Israel now is pre-festival, business as usual
air attack by an enemy state on Israel since its establishment in 1948, the atmosphere is pre-festival, frenetic and, at least on the surface, business as usual.
Where does this tendency toward the rapid re-embrace of regular life come from? It is, as noted, to some degree a general human inclination. But I think there are two particular aspects to note in the Israeli case.
The first is a certain fatalism deriving from the Jewish experience. And indeed, when witnessing the indecent
rapidity with which anti-Jewish manifestations appeared on the streets of European cities following the October 7 massacres and the astonishing willingness of large numbers to believe the absurd accusations of Hamas spokesmen, it is difficult not to re-affirm the simple truth that Jews throughout the world will recite this week at their Seder tables – that “it is this which has stood by our ancestors and by us. That not just one has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation, men rise against us to destroy us, and God delivers us from them.” The second element is the awareness that we are still, very probably, somewhere near the beginning of a very long fight which has almost certainly not yet reached its height.
The shadow war long under way between Israel and Iran has already re-commenced, following its brief illumination by the recent incidents. A mysterious explosion at a base maintained by the IRGC and the allied Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) at Kalsu, 20 miles south of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, took place over the weekend. Shipping containers used to store weaponry appear to have been targeted. No one has claimed responsibility. The Kalsu base is a point on the long trail through which the IRGC transports weapons across Iraq into Syria and beyond.
But there is much that is no longer in the shadows. This war is being conducted by the forces of political Islam, led by, assembled by and assisted by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their goal is the destruction of Israel.
It is being waged across a vast canvas. Iran today is in control of, or with
There is much that is no longer in the shadows
freedom of action in, the entire land area between itself and Israel, comprising three nominal and broken Arab states – Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. These constitute one front in the war. Gaza, ruled by another Islamist client of Tehran, is a second. The Red Sea/Gulf of Aden, attacked by yet another IRGC client, the Yemeni Ansar Allah/Houthis, constitutes a third. This war will end, it seems to me, in one of two ways: either with the toppling of the Islamist regime in Tehran or with the achievement of its aims.
The countries of the West have not yet grasped the starkness of this situation nor its gravity. In Israel, however, all is clear. The response is to be aware that these are not normal times – and therefore to behave as far as is possible as if they were. “You don’t seem alarmed,” remarks the lawyer James Donovan, played by Tom Hanks, to his client, the accused Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on trial for his life, in the 2015 movie Bridge of Spies. “Would it help?” replies Abel, in the film.
And I recall George Orwell’s comment as he watched republican Barcelona prepare to fight General Franco’s forces in 1936: “There was much in it I did not understand. In some ways I did not even like it. But I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.” Chag Pesach Sameach.