Middle East Braces as Iran & Hezbollah Vow Retaliation for Israeli Assassinations

AMY GOODMAN: Tensions are continuing to escalate in the Middle East after the assassination of two senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials in Beirut and Tehran at the end of July. On Tuesday, Iran rejected a call by France, Germany and Britain demanding it refrain from any retaliatory attacks over the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31st, the day of the inauguration of the new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. He told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a phone conversation Monday night that Iran has the right to retaliate in order to discourage future aggression by Israel, according to Iran’s official state news agency.

Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a guided-missile submarine to head to the Middle East and for a strike group of fighter jets and Navy warships to sail more quickly to the region.

Tensions also remain high on the border between Lebanon and Israel as Hezbollah has vowed to respond to the assassination of its senior military commander, Fuad Shukr, by Israel in an airstrike in Beirut at the end of July. On Friday, Israel continued its assassination campaign by killing a Hamas commander in the Lebanese city of Sidon.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded strikes since the war on Gaza began in October, but Israeli strikes have hit deeper into Lebanon in recent weeks, and sonic booms from military jets rattle the capital Beirut. Hezbollah has also intensified its attacks and broadened its list of targets to include Israeli towns it said it had not previously hit.

For more, we go to Beirut, where we’re joined by Karim Makdisi, a professor of international politics at the American University of Beirut and co-host of the Makdisi Street podcast.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Makdisi. If you can talk about —

KARIM MAKDISI: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — what’s happening on the border and the significance of this escalation?

KARIM MAKDISI: Yes. Thanks, Amy.

Well, it’s a very, very tense time here in Beirut, and in Lebanon more generally. Basically, everybody’s waiting for Hezbollah to respond to the attack by the Israelis a couple of weeks ago which assassinated, as you have mentioned, a senior Hezbollah member, but also, more importantly, that had targeted Beirut. He was in Beirut, and they took down a building in civilian — a very dense civilian area, and they killed seven civilians, including two children. So, the response, as promised by Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, they’ve been waiting for the past two weeks, and they’ve said and they’ve reiterated that the attack is coming. And so people are waiting.

And people, both in south Lebanon and in the suburbs of Beirut, where the attacks took place, many of the civilians are not so much evacuating, but they’re kind of moving out of those areas. They’re trying to find some kind of safe areas in other parts that are not expected to be drawn into this war at this point. So people are leaving.

And people are very stressed and very tense but are expecting something that’s going to come, because it’s very clear — and I think most people would support this — that if there is no response from Hezbollah, then the deterrence gets lost, and that gives Netanyahu and the Israelis a kind of excuse to keep on bombing Beirut, attacking Beirut, assassinating people with no — with impunity and with no response at all. So, this is the mood here.

And as you also mentioned, this has been going on for many, many months. And the context, the immediate context anyway, is a very simple one here, which is that Hezbollah has made clear, Lebanon has made clear, as other — as Iran has made clear, that as soon as there’s a ceasefire in Gaza, all of these support fronts will stop pretty much instantly. So this is the context, and in the meantime, people are just waiting for the response.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Makdisi, is it your sense that the Israeli government, specifically Prime Minister Netanyahu, wants a war with Hezbollah?

KARIM MAKDISI: I’m not sure he wants a war as such, but I do think he wants to not just restore deterrence, which I think they had lost over the past several months, but to try to sort of — you know, if there is a ceasefire at some point, he wants to be on top of the situation. He wants to ensure that the Israelis have taken the initiative, that they’re being proactive and that they will come out of this feeling like they’ve defeated Hezbollah, as well as defeating Hamas in Gaza.

So, I think it’s more — it’s not so much — I don’t think he’s that suicidal to want to start a war with Lebanon. I think it’s fairly clear, even by Israeli military kind of sources and others, that an attack — a full-scale attack on Lebanon might destroy large chunks of Lebanon, but a lot of Israeli cities and areas and infrastructure will also be destroyed. And their economy is already suffering a lot. They already have more than 100,000 people displaced in the northern settlements, you know, in the south of Lebanon. And so, the destruction will be quite, quite severe on the Israeli side, too.

And I should say, and it’s interesting to kind of, you know, make the point, that this is the first time in which this kind of deterrence is taking place, so that when there are people displaced from southern Lebanon, sort of an equal number of people are displaced from northern Israel. When the Israelis hit targets in south Lebanon, Hezbollah responds and hits targets in Israel. And they’ve made it very clear that, for example, if they were to hit — if the Israelis were to hit the Beirut airport, that they would respond and hit the Tel Aviv airport. So, there is this kind of, you know, deterrence that is working. Unfortunately, things are escalating on both sides. And the idea is now that the Israelis, through the assassination in Beirut and through killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in Beirut a couple of weeks ago, they’ve crossed a kind of red line, and so that’s why Hezbollah kind of needs to respond.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the relationship between Hamas and Hezbollah and how it has evolved over the past 18 months?

KARIM MAKDISI: Yeah. The relationship at this point is a fairly close one. You know, Hezbollah made it clear that after October 7th, that they were not involved in that initial Hamas attack on Israel, but, rather, on October 8th, the sort of — basically, they call it here the October 8th war, began with Hezbollah trying to create a support front, as later happened in Yemen and Iraq and the Iranians. So, there are support fronts that are taking place, all of which was intended to pressure the Israelis to end what came to be the genocide there and to kind of establish a ceasefire. So, the position has been very clear that without a ceasefire, these support fronts will continue.

And so, there’s a lot of coordination between Hezbollah and Hamas, and indeed the Yemenis and others, Iraqis. So, they’re all — there’s kind of very close coordination, with Hezbollah being kind of at the front of this coordination, because they have a long history and experience with Israelis. And so, this coordination is getting closer and closer at that military, the strategic and the military fronts. And so, Hezbollah will not stop until Hamas agrees to a ceasefire and says it has accepted a ceasefire. So the coordination is quite close, and I think it will continue to be close.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk more about a ceasefire in a minute, but I wanted to ask you about the latest in Gaza. You have what happened this weekend, the Israeli strike on the school in Gaza City, within which was a mosque, which killed close to a hundred people. It’s not clear if there was any one body that was identifiable, so many body parts strewn all around, and the international outcry at what has taken place there, and then CNN confirming that it was a GB-39 bomb that was used, a U.S. bomb — GBU. And within two days, the U.S. approved $3.5 billion in military aid — it opened up the spigot for it; it had already been approved by Congress — to Israel. The significance of what’s happening now? And even as we’re speaking, Professor Makdisi, the far-right national security minister Ben-Gvir going in with thousands of Israeli settlers to Al-Aqsa, the significance of this?

KARIM MAKDISI: Yeah, this is hugely significant, and this is something that’s been repeated, you know, as you’ve been reporting, for many, many months now. There is no way that what’s going on in Lebanon and at the southern Lebanon front is going to be somehow separated from what’s going on in Gaza.

The U.S. sent — well, Biden’s personal envoy, basically, Amos Hochstein, who, by the way, is an Israeli and served in the Israeli army, he’s the personal envoy of the United States to Lebanon. And they’ve sent him now several times to try to kind of, you know, come up with some deal between Lebanon and the Israelis. And this has not worked. And the reason it hasn’t work is that the main goal of Hochstein, what he’s trying to do, is to try to separate Lebanon and what’s going on on that front with what’s going on in Gaza. And that way — and it’s kind of clear here, that way, it allows the Israelis to continue their genocide in Gaza without having to deal with the support fronts that Hezbollah are doing here and in other parts, like Yemen and Iraq and other areas.

So, this is — there is no way that things in this region will stop until there’s a ceasefire. In a sense, it’s very, very simple. The Americans need to —

AMY GOODMAN: Keep going.

KARIM MAKDISI: Oh, the Americans need to pressure the Israelis to reach the ceasefire; otherwise, all of these fronts will continue. And the danger here is that without a stop — and we know that Hezbollah is going to respond. The question is: Who’s going to stop the Israelis from an even bigger response in Lebanon, which then will precipitate another response from Hezbollah? And then, you know, this is going to keep escalating. And this is something which is extremely dangerous, because while it can continue to kind of escalate slowly, at some point there’s going to be a threshold that’s crossed, and that might lead to an all-out war. And if it does so, the entire region is going to be kind of brought into it. And this is extremely dangerous and something everybody here is feeling very closely.

So, the idea that everybody in Lebanon understands — and as far as Hezbollah is concerned, I mean, they say it very, very clearly. Each time Hassan Nasrallah comes on TV, he makes it clear: As far as they’re concerned, it’s an American war that uses the Israelis. It’s not the other way around. So the U.S. is directly involved. Without U.S. weapons, without daily or weekly supply of U.S. weapons to the Israelis, they would have to stop. It’s not even that they have to accept the ceasefire. They could not prosecute their war in Gaza without continuous American supply of weapons and support and diplomatic support, on top of which now, you know, as I think you reported, in the last few days the U.S. has now sent in even more battleships, including kind of more aggressive and attacking, offensive battleships, into the Mediterranean and not far off the coast of Lebanon, presumably to kind of deter any kind of Hezbollah attack or, if there’s an escalation, a much larger escalation. And the U.S. Defense Secretary has come out and said they will support Israel no matter what. Secretary Blinken has made it clear that they will support Israel no matter what. So, there is this very clear and unfortunate — unfortunate — kind of coming together of the United States with Israel in every action in Gaza.

And I think what’s interesting is that when Netanyahu went to the U.S. a couple weeks ago and there was this kind of, you know, what appeared to be this very grotesque applause within the U.S. Congress, and his other meetings, it’s very clear that Netanyahu emerged, came out of the U.S. either with a green light — some people say it’s a green light by the Americans to kind of escalate in Lebanon and Iran, or, perhaps more likely, that he understood that he’ll have no restraints. So, he came, escalated in Lebanon, escalated in Gaza, escalated in Iran, and clearly relies on the U.S. to increase its deterrence, to send more weapons, to make it clear to everybody in the region that if Israel is attacked in a significant way, the U.S. will get involved.

Now, it’s unfortunate because there is no way that U.S. interest is for there to be a regional war. It’s simply — it’s impossible for anybody to make that kind of argument or that case. So, attaching the United States to a genocide in Israel and a kind of extremist right-wing government in Israel that has an incentive to keep escalating, certainly in Lebanon and even in Iran, this is an old plan. Netanyahu has for many years, if not decades, been talking about, you know, trying to stop Iranian nuclear facilities, to try to quiet Iran, to try to create a weak Iran, and certainly to try to create a very weak and pliant Lebanon by destroying Hezbollah.

So, all of this is doing. And the question is: Why is the U.S. interest so attached to these aggressive Israeli policies and actions and strategies here, instead of trying to do what they can do, which is to restrain the Israelis, because as far as everyone else in the region is concerned, get a ceasefire, everything stops? Get a ceasefire, everything stops. That’s it. It is as simple as that. The only people that can lean on the Israelis are the Americans, and everybody understands that. So, when people are watching social media and television and see the images in Gaza, this comes home, and it becomes more and more difficult to dissociate the United States from Israel. And that’s really unfortunate.

AMY GOODMAN: Karim Makdisi, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of international politics at American University of Beirut, co-host of the Makdisi Street podcast, speaking to us from Beirut.