Last Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak at the UN General Assembly in New York. As he reached the podium to give his speech, some representatives of the countries present left the hall. But Netanyahu did not careand said instead that “we will not accepta terrorarmyperched onournorthernborderableto perpetrateanotherOctober 7-style massacre,” a reference to the Israeli military campaign against the Lebanese group Hizbullah.

During Netanyahu’s speech, information apparently arrived from the Israeli intelligence service Mossad that there was an important meeting that would see Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and other groupleaders gathering with Iranian leaders in a fortified bunker deep underground in the Dahiya area of Beirut.

The location was given to an Israelihunting formationof F-15I aircraft armed with seven heavy bombs each. Israel then attacked the bunker by air, killing all those present including Nasrallah and later officially announcing his assassination.

While the Israeli Air Force attacked Lebanon, Netanyahu held up maps indicating Israel’s new Middle East strategy. The maps were drawn in a simplified style, but the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were not clearly defined on them, leading tovarious questions.

Did they confirm Israel’s stubbornness regarding the diplomatic path and the two-state solution?Would the Palestinians now be displaced again and expelled from their land?

Earlier, Netanyahu said that “I am proudbecause I prevented the initiation of a Palestinian state, because today everyone understands what that Palestinian state could have been… now that we have seen the small Palestinian state in Gaza, everyone understands what would have happened if we had succumbed to international pressure and enabled such a state in the West Bank.”

Another point made by Netanyahu’s maps regarded what he called the “curse” of Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen.

 “Now look at this second map,” he said. “It is a map of an arc of terror that Iran has created and imposed from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Iran’s malignant arc has shut down international waterways. It cuts off trade, it destroys nations from within, and it inflicts misery on millions… And if you think this dark map is only a curse for Israel, then you should think again.”

Netanyahu used this map to emphasise what he said another map provided in terms of a “blessing.”

“I presented this map here last year,” he told the delegates. “It is a map of a blessing. It shows Israel and its Arab partners forming a land bridge connecting Asia and Europe. Between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, across this bridge, we will lay rail lines, energy pipelines, and fibreoptic cables, and this will serve the betterment of two billion people.”

This new bridge has been promoted since last year, when an Israeli TV channel reported on a plan to establish a land route connecting the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel that would run directly from the Gulf to Israeli ports. According to a report released by the Israeli website Ynet, the route will enable trucks to deliver goods while drastically lowering transportation expenses and cutting cargo transit times. It will reduce the latter from many weeks to two or three days and save up to 20 per cent on shipping costs, in the opinion of US State Department personnel.

This could be the hidden intention behind Israel’s political decisions and military actions, and it may help us to understand the continued escalation of the conflict in the Middle East by the Israeli army. It may explain the stubbornnessof the Israeli governmentin continuing its military operations and in exploiting the threats coming from Iran in order to impose a new reality in the Middle East in which Israel will be able to exploit itsnormalisationof relations with the Arab countries to strengthen its overall strategic and economic position.

After last week’s assassination of Nasrallah in Beirut, Israel turned the equation in its favour after almost collapsing on 7 October last year and in several military operations in the Gaza Strip. Hizbullah is paying the price for its strategic mistake when it insisted on following Iranian orders without using the opportunity of the Israeli military failure on 7 October to better its position. Instead, Hizbullah carried out a gradual escalation of its actions against Israel over time and provoked heavy Israeli air attacks that tracked down and destroyed weapons caches and then killed its leaders.

Netanyahu highlighted such incidents as evidence of Israel’s strength in carrying out its operations. Our enemies thought we were like a spider’s web, he said. But “what spider’s web are they talking about? We have tendons of steel, both of will and power.”

“There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach,” Netanyahu said. “The same goes for the entire Middle East.” On Sunday, the Israeli air forces carried out a long-range attack on Yemen. In the operation, powerplants and Hodeida port, used to import oil, were attacked.

Such statements have pushed the Iranians to take exceptional security precautions.According to Reuters, “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been taken to a secure location inside Iran amid heightened security, a day after Israel killed the head of Hizbullah in a strike on Beirut.” The Iranian move to safeguard Khamenei is the latest show of nervousness by the authorities there, even as Israel launched a series of devastating attacks on Hizbullah, Iran’s best-armed and most well-equipped ally in the region.

The Iranians have maintained their position as a regional power since the early 2000s, and this was strengthened after 7 October last year. But their strategy collapsed last week because the Iranians are keen to reach a nuclear agreement with the US, as this is the only guarantee of a future deterrence strategy, and they will be reluctant to react even to the death of their ally Nasrallah at Israeli hands. Israel understands this and is taking advantage of US support to reestablish the element of deterrence, which is its main objective.

A press release from the Pentagon said that US “Secretary of Defence Lloyd J Austin spoke twice with Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant yesterday about events in Lebanon. The Secretary expressed full support for Israel’s right to defend itself and its people against Iranian-backed terrorist groups. Secretary Austin stressed that the United States is determined to prevent Iran and Iranian-backed partners and proxies from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict. The secretary made it clear that the United States remains postured to protect US forces and facilities in the region and is committed to the defence of Israel.”

What will Israel do next? Was the assassination of Nasrallah a way to avoid a wider war in Lebanon? Hizbullah is currently in a state of confusion due to its lack of political and military leadership, making it difficult for it to make any important decisions. However, any wider Israeli intervention in Lebanon may be ineffective because it has the potential to erode the prestige of Israeli ground forces while uniting Hizbullah.

The story will undoubtedly not end there.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 3 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly