Editorial: Israel's wider war of retribution

Fears of a ‘wider war’ in the Middle East are now only a matter of semantics. We are already in the midst of one. Israel’s blind fury shows no signs of abating while Benjamin Netanyahu’s sponsors in the West alternately wring their hands and look the other way. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Israel launched an offensive on Gaza, declaring that its objective was to destroy Hamas, free its captives and uproot the terror infrastructure it had built up in the underground tunnels there. More than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have so far been killed and two million people displaced by an aerial and ground offensive while Tel Aviv scuttles every attempt to bring about a ceasefire.

Since then, however, Israel’s circle of wrath has only expanded—inexorably and relentlessly. It has assassinated top generals in Iran and carried out anti-terror operations in the West Bank, thousands of pager explosions in Lebanon and Syria, covert operations in Yemen, and unabated bombing of Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, taking out several of its leaders, including Hassan Nasrallah last week. Hamas isn’t the lone group in Israel’s crosshairs: Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Iranian government are now targets.

Thousands of innocent civilians in Lebanon, who had nothing to do with the Hamas attack on Oct 7, have been consumed in Israel’s psychopathic fury. Apart from the hundreds killed in the pager and walkie-talkie blasts last week, the ongoing bombings in Beirut and southern Lebanon have resulted in over 1,000 fatalities and triggered an exodus of 1,00,000 towards the Syrian border.

This war is already expansive, affecting multiple nations and threatening to suck several more players into it. Israel's military strategy has shifted to address multiple threats simultaneously, indicating a level of preparedness for sustained engagement on several fronts. Israel has massed its tanks along its northern border with Lebanon and called up its reservists even as its warplanes have been dropping bunker buster bombs on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.

This is no longer about freeing captives from Hamas and sanitising Gaza. This is Israel’s war on everything around it, calculated to seem like an act of rage but of a piece with everything it has done since its founding in 1948 with the sole and relentless purpose of carving out a Greater Israel. Israel’s successes against Hezbollah in the past 10 days are proving to be popular at home, greatly easing the pressure on Netanyahu, who faces political oblivion in any scenario other than war.

The people see this as an opportunity to reshape the reality around them, create more space for their settlements, move enemies further back and make border regions safer. So, both for Netanyahu’s ruling regime and for the public at large, a war has been incentivised. What is adding encouragement to that incentive is America’s forked-tongue statements cautioning against ‘wider war’ but keeping the supply of funds, arms and armaments going. US President Joe Biden’s official statement seemingly welcoming the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, saying it is just deserts for Hezbollah’s killing of Americans in the Middle East since the 1990s, should be music to Netanyahu’s ears. In Tel Aviv, such statements will surely go down as a validation of vengeance as state policy.