By Yaakov Lappin
Recent weeks have seen encouraging news for the Middle East’s radical Islamist forces. Despite the widespread destruction Hamas brought on itself and the Gaza Strip, the organization has been able to position itself as a leader of the Palestinians, seriously threatening the position of its domestic rival, the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority (PA).
Hamas paid an extremely heavy price for its actions, and the IDF, utilizing first class intelligence, launched an effective air campaign that severely degraded its capabilities. Still, Hamas is once again setting the agenda in the Palestinian arena, and proved that firing rockets until the last day of a conflict serves its radical narrative – a lesson Hezbollah is sure to take note of.
Meanwhile, the PA is fractured, unpopular, and weak in its West Bank heartland.
At the same time, Iran is moving toward a new nuclear deal with world powers, which will likely set it on a path to becoming a nuclear breakout state by the end of the decade.
A common thread runs between these developments. Iran’s threatening activities go far beyond its nuclear program, and include subversive regional activities that have had a major influence on Gaza.
Iran’s efforts to create well-armed fundamentalist proxies and partners throughout the Middle East have been constant. The Islamic Republic nourishes them with weapons-building know-how, funds, and encouragement to destabilize the region.
This pattern includes a long-standing partnership between Iran and Hamas, which helped Hamas stockpile an arsenal of some 15,000 rockets prior to the breakout of this month’s hostilities. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Gaza’s second largest terror faction, is a direct Iranian proxy, and was armed with around 10,000 projectiles before the latest conflict began.
According to assessments in the Israel Defense Forces, 90 percent of the weapons production know-how possessed by Hamas and PIJ came from Iran. Weapons engineers from Gaza traveled to Iran for training, and brought their knowledge back to Gaza to create an entire weapons production industry, which comes at the expense of the welfare of Gaza’s two million people, which Hamas views as mere human shields for its offensive capabilities.
Iran has taught its Gazan partners to manufacture weapons independently, bypassing obstacles to arms trafficking.
The IDF’s destruction of some 100 kilometers of underground tunnels in Gaza that were designed to let Hamas move its fighters, rockets, and missile cells underneath the Strip, out of the sight of the Israel Air Force, meant a huge loss of investment and time by Hamas. It cost Hamas’s military wing 500 thousand dollars per kilometer to dig the ‘Metro’ network.
But as the ceasefire takes hold, Hamas will inevitably seek to begin re-arming ahead of the next round. In order to break this destructive cycle, it is important to connect the dots in the wider region.
Iran is pursuing a long-term strategy to create firepower attack bases and hybrid terrorist armies throughout the Middle East. One day, these can be encouraged to attack Israel from multiple fronts simultaneously, in a bid to destroy it. This effort could happen at a time when they enjoy a ‘nuclear umbrella’ from Iran.
Israel isn’t sitting back and allowing this plan to take shape passively. Still, Iran pursues its conceptual attack framework single mindedly, despite an array of domestic troubles, and a series of setbacks, such as the assassination of Quds Force Commander, Qasem Soleimani last year. Soleimani was the mastermind of Iran’s proxy network plan, and his vision continues to be fulfilled today.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s entrenchment efforts in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and Gazan terror factions are all part of Iran’s ‘deep crescent’ plan.
The Iranian intentions threaten many others in the Middle East beyond Israel.
Saudi Arabia has become a regular target of Houthi ballistic missile and drone attacks on its most sensitive oil infrastructure targets, airports, and cities. A Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen has been unable to extinguish the threat.
The UAE and Bahrain are directly threatened by Iran and its proxies as well, a fact that played a key role in their participation in the Abraham Accord normalization treaties with Israel.
These Gulf states view Israel as a frontline pillar in the regional struggle to keep Iran at bay, and seek to be part of a Saudi-Israeli coalition that can push back against Iran. The coalition building efforts took on a greater urgency after it became clear that the U.S. intends to leave the region in favor of the American strategic pivot toward facing-off against China.
Closer to home, Jordan is deeply disturbed by the prospect of being encircled by Iranian-backed radical militias in Iraq and Syria. The Hashemite Kingdom is aware of Iran’s intentions to undermine its security as part of Tehran’s bid to gain access to the West Bank, and to weaken pragmatic Sunni states.
Egypt wishes to see a calm, stable Gaza, and has been involved in a long-term regional power struggle with Iran over the fate of the Strip. Tehran emboldens and builds up Gaza’s Islamist rulers – the same forces who until recently were accused by Cairo of destabilizing the Sinai Peninsula and cooperating with jihadists and Muslim-Brotherhood forces within Egypt.
Many had written Egypt off as a power that no longer wields influence in the Palestinian arena, but Cairo’s ability to help broker an Israel-Hamas ceasefire shows that such assessments were premature.
The Palestinian Authority, which continues to maintain daily security cooperation with the IDF in the West Bank, is particularly threatened by the Iranian-Hamas partnership. Ever since its violent eviction from Gaza in Hamas’s 2007 coup, the PA has fought daily to keep Hamas cells from threatening its grip on power in the West Bank.
The common PA-Israeli interest in repressing Hamas is what enables the daily security coordination between them — often with little fanfare.
This coordination has gone on, surviving multiple diplomatic crises. The intense diplomatic battles between the PA and the Israeli government do not reflect the security and strategic realities on the ground.
A realist strategy must involve the recognition that Israel has to strengthen moderate elements in order to weaken the Islamists, both at the local and regional levels, and Jerusalem now has an opportunity to inject the Middle Eastern pragmatic coalition with new vigor.
It can leverage the severe blow it has dealt Hamas to kick-start a new, proactive phase of working with pragmatic partners, with whom it can face down the Iranian-led Islamist threats.
Working with pragmatic Sunni partners will act as a force multiplier for Israel’s security objectives in the region, which include achieving stability, economic development, and diplomatic progress with the Palestinians, while weakening Hamas’s hold on power in Gaza and pushing Iran away from the area.
Acting alone, and only relying on advanced military capabilities in between rounds of conflicts is an unsatisfactory approach that fails to leverage Israel’s military achievements into broader strategic steps forward.
The recommendation by the IDF to the Israeli government, to ensure that the PA leads the Gazan reconstruction effort funding program, is a step in the right direction. Although the PA faces many problems, including corruption and internal fractures at home, setting the objective of strengthening it at the expense of Hamas must form a key Israeli objective for the Palestinian arena going forward. This means strengthening the PA in the West Bank by restarting talks with it, and looking for long-term ways to begin injecting the PA back into Gaza in order to undermine Hamas.
Recruiting Israel’s Gulf allies and their considerable ability to provide financial assistance to the Palestinians can provide a major boost to such efforts. Egypt and Jordan can play highly important roles too.
If such efforts succeed in stabilizing Gaza, that will be bad news for Iran and its pyromaniac designs. The same coalition can work together to make it clear to Iran that its regional destructive activities will face a united coalition, one that knows how to work together on counter-terrorism, intelligence sharing, defense technology sharing, and in other ways.
Proactive partnership with pragmatic players will be key for Israel going forward.
Yaakov Lappin is an Israel-based military affairs correspondent and analyst. He provides insight and analysis for a number of media outlets, including Jane's Defense Weekly, a leading global military affairs magazine, and JNS.org, a news agency with wide distribution among Jewish communities in the U.S. Read full bio here.