Israel is engaged on multiple fronts, extending between Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and the auxiliary theaters of operation in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The frontlines correspond to the coordinates that define the operational realms of the “unified battlegrounds” set by the Iranian regime. None of the evoked political issues—the recovery of Lebanese territories and the Liberation of Palestine—seem to warrant these fallacies. The political and military irrelevance of these undertakings is quite obvious and damning; their intentional criminality and immorality, the proxy nature of these conflicts, the politics of human shields and intentional victimization, the utter disregard for civilian security, and their many instrumentalizations are salient and necessitate no further evidence.
The battlelines are explicit, and the existing power configuration has to change. The miscalculated moves of Iran and its surrogates have yielded a new military and political power dynamic, which upended the strategic bolts set by the Iranian regime and its regional panhandles. The defeat of Hamas and Hezbollah is the inevitable prelude to a new political dynamic at both the regional and international levels. This new dynamic is unavoidably geared towards the destruction of the Iranian regime's power drive and curbing its influence. The annihilation of its proxies is inevitable if we are to contain its deleterious impact, put the region on a new political and strategic track, and prevent its transformation once again into a wasteland where bloody dictatorships, Islamic dystopias, and organized criminality compete, coalesce, and operate to preempt competing scenarios based on negotiated conflict resolution, democratization, and developmental priorities.
There are no more illusions to nurture regarding the existing political dynamics and their actors. The current military dynamics were able to unlock the institutionalized stalemates in both Lebanon and Gaza and open up the path to alternative politics and elites. Repeatedly treading the same blocked political path no longer makes sense. The last war dealt a mortal blow to what remains of Lebanon which Hezbollah has transformed into a mere operational platform instrumented by Iranian power politics. The extraterritoriality of Hezbollah was a pure negation of Lebanese statehood, whereby state institutions shifted into ancillaries and appendages to Iranian power politics and organized crime.
What’s dumbfounding is the complicity of the political oligarchies and the political trade-offs that were behind the collapse of the state, the plundering of public resources, and the transformation of Lebanese territories into political and security wastelands. The absenteeism of the Parliament, the breakdown of the democratic separation of powers, and the surrender of national sovereignty to a terrorist movement have perpetuated a long-standing tradition of undermined sovereignty, initiated by the PLO, its Lebanese allies, and their regional and international mentors and power brokers.
The genealogy of this war is well delineated and traces back to the endemic crisis of legitimacy spawned by transnational ideologies and their strategic vectors. Lebanon has no chance of escaping the thrall of a highly destructive war unless it restores its sovereignty and reengages the international community as an independent political entity. This scenario is unlikely unless Hezbollah is defeated and dismantled as a political entity that challenges Lebanon’s national legitimacy, foundational narrative, and strategic equilibriums.
The Palestinians’ congenital weaknesses owe to their inability to achieve moral and political autonomy and their pliability to Islamic and Arab power politics. This enduring political dilemma is intertwined with their doublespeak and refusal to acknowledge the Israeli reality or engage with its narratives. Israelis, in contrast, have to reconcile with the shattered myths of mutual recognition and working political solutions, and overcome the pitfalls of national insularity. This conflict has generated a whole corpus of international agreements and a trail of political mediations, which made possible the circumvention of the ideological blinders and the approximations of empirical conflict resolution. The conflation of national irredentism and religious fundamentalism thwarted and finally undermined the legacy of conflict mediation.
The Palestinian initial rejection of political accommodation has elicited and fed over time the Jewish religious irredentism that challenged the Israeli identity, the Israeli project, and its post-Israeli versions and brought back the relationships between the two people into a nadir. The drama that lies at the roots of this conflict traces mainly to ideological irredentism, deftly manipulated mainly by Arab and Muslim power brokers. The actual drama has no chance of unraveling unless Hamas is defeated, Iran is ultimately thwarted, and the dialogue is reengaged with a reformed Palestinian Authority and an accommodating government coalition in Israel.
The current stalemate is unlikely to unravel as long as the extreme fringes are swaying the ability of both Israelis and Palestinians to reconnect based on mutual acknowledgment and negotiated conflict resolution. The zero-sum game plot resurfacing constantly after a centennial of national existence is unacceptable by any standards, and its ideological colorations and strategic reconfigurations should come to an end. The urgency of a truce, the unconditional liberation of Israeli hostages, and the resumption of strategic negotiations are impossible if Iranian power politics are framing the overall political landscape. The destruction of the terrorist sanctuaries in Lebanon and Gaza is essential if the crisis of the Israeli hostages is to come to an end, the restructuring of governance in Gaza is to take place, and the Lebanese sovereignty is to be restored.
The actual predicament is mainly conditioned by political evolutions in Iran, whereby no working solutions are likely to materialize without confronting Iranian expansionism and coming to terms with the inner contradictions of the highly delegitimized Islamic Revolution. The Iranian power projections are interrelated to the survival of the regime, the nuclearization of its security, and the perpetuation of the massive repression of political oppositions arraying themselves against it. While listening to the highly elaborate statements and interviews of Reza Shah, I was struck by his imposing stature and powerful role as the coordinator and catalyst of the Iranian opposition. His last statement conveys a very reassuring message to the Iranian people: do not fear change and be confident that the transition is going to take place smoothly and with no major turbulences.
The Islamic revolution is drawing to an end; its revolutionary saga and myths are debunked and have been hollowed out by forty-five years of bloody dictatorship, state terrorism, crackdown on human and civil rights, regional warmongering, and active sabotaging of the international liberal order born in the aftermath of World War II. Iran is turning into the first post-Islamic polity to reject the bitter legacy of political Islam bequeathed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its worldview. The statement of Reza Shah ushers in the bumpy but steady road unto democracy. My review of his interviews testifies to his intellectual acumen, outstanding international credentials, liberal, ecumenical, and pluralistic worldview, and exceptional ability to engineer the transition into democracy.
The rising regional dynamics owe to the crushing defeats of the Iranian proxies (Hamas and Hezbollah) and to the twilight of the subversion era conducted by the Iranian dictatorship and its disastrous outcomes throughout the Middle Eastern geopolitical spectrum. The awaited Israeli military retaliation to the Iranian carpet bombing combined with its insidious cooperation with the Iranian opposition is likely to secure a smooth transition and contain the cascading effects of an impending implosion. The downfall of this regime foreshadows the dawn of a new era and the rise of a competing narrative, which buries the "bitter cherries" of Islamism. After the defeat of al Qaida, ISIS, and the incoming end of the Iranian Islamic dystopia and its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iraqi militias and their ilk), the Middle East should enter an era of negotiated conflict resolution, geopolitical stabilization, and democratization. The demise of Khomeynism marks the end of another Islamist dystopia and the eventual rise of a new era in this region.
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