Why Netanyahu’s next showdown will be with Iran

Wednesday morning in south Beirut started as daybreak has for much of the last two months – with explosions and gunfire. This time, however, it was peace breaking out that was being marked by the volleys.

As has happened so many times before, Hezbollah’s supporters wanted to celebrate fighting Israel to a standstill, regardless of the cost.

Cynics are probably not wrong to say that this ceasefire will only be temporary. However, it could endure for a long time if it suits the calculations of the power brokers on either side – and their foreign backers.

Ordinary people in Lebanon and northern Israel can be forgiven for letting out a deep sigh of relief. The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon (as a proxy for Hezbollah) means that after 60 days the Israeli army will withdraw back to the border in the south and Hezbollah’s fighters will go beyond the Litani River 30km or so from the Israeli border.

This is a score draw, not a knock-out blow.

Israel continued ferocious air strikes until the last moment. Hezbollah fired 250 rockets into Israel the day before. Hezbollah – and Lebanese civilians – suffered many times the casualties and damage that the militant group could inflict on the IDF and Israeli civilians. But what is ominous for Israel is that despite the devastating mix of intelligence-led targeted strikes with booby trap pagers – and bunker busters killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah – two months later Hezbollah were still fighting and not defeated.

This ceasefire will likely hold, for now. But it is hardly likely to be a harbinger of a wider peace.

Benjamin Netanyahu justified stopping the war on Israel’s “northern front” as necessary for his forces to replenish their munitions from the USA and other Western suppliers, so it could redouble its efforts to suppress Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It was also aimed at dealing with Iran as a strategic threat and Tehran’s various “proxies” from Syria and Iraq, via the West Bank to the Houthis in Yemen.

Rather than hoping that, at last, the Lebanese army and the blue-helmeted United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) will really be able to control southern Lebanon, it is Hezbollah’s need to lick its wounds that means it may stay out of the coming fighting further south.

Netanyahu’s failure to pacify Gaza so far might suggest that he will now relocate the IDF there to crush Hamas and free any remaining hostages. But he went out of his way to identify Iran as Israel’s enemy number one now and gave the Houthis an “honourable” mention as continuing targets.

Netanyahu notes Israel has increasingly crossed other countries’ “red lines” – and he meant, above all, the USA’s attempts to rein him in. Announcing the ceasefire with Lebanon, he boasted that critics had said: “We won’t go back to fighting [after the abortive ceasefire with Hamas] but we did go back – big time. And we will go back in Lebanon” if necessary.

The Israeli Air Force dropped three huge bombs on Beirut as Joe Biden went out in front of the press at the White House to present the ceasefire as the triumphant conclusion to his presidency’s foreign policy. These noises from Jerusalem were cruelly discordant. Sadly, Biden’s role looks less decisive and more like a footnote.

Biden says he hopes yesterday’s ceasefire in Lebanon will be a precedent for Israel’s relations with Gaza. He also talked about wider normalisation between Israel and the Arab world.

Netanyahu suggested that the northern ceasefire paved the way for a “new normal”. That Israel’s military power rather than pious hopes for peace would calm the region.

Netanyahu seems to be calculating that Trump 2.0 will let him loose on Iran. Calming the war with Hezbollah, while Israel prepares for the real showdown with Iran, will make the 60-day ceasefire running out look less like Biden’s legacy, than his epitaph.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump declared the ceasefire as the “Trump effect: peace through strength”. It may well be that the president-elect had a hand in persuading Israel to cut its losses in Lebanon, where Hezbollah was willing to buy time by accepting a ceasefire that gave it a chance to rebuild its organisation – and gave time to Israel to redraw the map further south.

Will Trump and his hawkish team now step in to knock heads together to get a peace deal that Biden could not? Or will Netanyahu blend big military blows on Israel’s enemies with rhetoric about achieving a Trumpian peace through strength? Appealing to the new president’s vanity while letting him carry the can for anything that doesn’t go according to plan would be typical Netanyahu.

The Israeli prime minister doesn’t expect permanent peace even after a victory. Trump, however, wants to be the peacemaker from Gaza to Ukraine. Tensions between the new broom in the White House and the veteran in Jerusalem are on the cards.