As we watch Israel pummel its enemies in Lebanon and beyond, dramatically escalating its war on the first anniversary of the bloodthirsty attacks by Hamas last October, those of us who witnessed first-hand the first time they bombarded Beirut surely recall that epithet about those who forget their history being condemned to repeat it.

As in 1982, and again in 2006, victory today for the apparently masterful Israeli Defence Force comes at a chilling price for tomorrow. Yes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played his military card brilliantly, if murderously, from those pagers and walkie-talkies exploding across Lebanon to surgical air strikes killing leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Yes, again, he has implemented a super-strategic war plan that has effectively compelled allies such as the United States and Britain to be behind his conflict with the godfathers of Hamas and Hezbollah, the leaders of Iran. Witness the way, as the wider world remembered the gruesome murders of the innocent in Israel a year ago, Netanyahu masterminded an assault that makes the need to attack Tehran look inevitable, if not the right thing to do. 

So much so that the President of the United States, no less, has been reduced to seeking an opportunity to “discuss” Israel’s targets in Iran with the leader of Israel, and fretting aloud about whether Netanyahu would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities — with American-supplied weaponry, lest we forget. In short, Bibi Netanyahu seems to have outfoxed all, no wonder his poll numbers at home have soared and all talk of his demise looks forgotten. I have long since argued, in these pages, that the Israeli leader was a law unto himself.

Yet throughout the countdown to this grim anniversary, Netanyahu’s onslaught against Israel’s enemies has re-written the rules on taking unilateral action in the name of Israel’s security. The question now is not how far he can go, and take others with him, but rather whether his pursuit of “total victory” signals eternal conflict in a region that has never known peace in the modern age.

The war for Lebanon in 1982 is surely a stark reminder of the path once taken by Netanyahu’s predecessors, with such consequences for Israel and its allies. Those of us who lived through the savage bombardment of Beirut that year, then the mass evacuation of the Palestinian militias that were the target, concluded that the war ended as we saw Israel’s enemies loaded aboard boats for Tunisia and Algeria, planes to Iraq and Jordan.

“Our enemies have lost their kingdom of terror,” exulted Israel’s Defence Minister, the warrior king himself Ariel Sharon. Boy, did he get that one wrong. Within a year, we Beirut correspondents were reporting the murder of hundreds of US marines in Beirut, sent to keep the peace, victims of car-bomb attacks executed by the fledgeling Islamic militia that later became Hezbollah. The worst day for the US military since the Vietnam war, and the prelude to two decades of simmering conflict that erupted to engulf the region in the past year.

… total victory in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, let alone Iran, is an illusion

So there lies the lesson of history as we watch Netanyahu’s government look like the all-bestriding colossus in the Middle East, reducing the American President to seeking a conversation about what he chooses to attack in Iran, or banning the Secretary-General of the United Nations from visiting Israel to discuss peace. In what can only be described as a blistering rebuke to the establishment of the world at large, Israel has just declared the head of the UN “persona non grata” and lambasted Antonio Guterres as “an anti-Israeli Secretary-General who lends support to terrorists.” Israel throwing off the leash, indeed.

Yet it’s surely time to be sober about what comes next. By common consent, among the Generals in Jerusalem, Washington, London and Paris, total victory in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, let alone Iran, is an illusion.

As we hear the daily death toll from the cradle of this latest war, Gaza, we have to recognise that Israel has gravely wounded yet not destroyed Hamas — an organisation living underground, and still capable of taking back zones the Israelis occupied months ago.

Likewise, it seems, the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon may have been killed, but there are still tens of thousands of fighters in their ranks, with weapons aplenty supplied by their paymasters in Tehran, and bolstered by a civilian population that has come to be dependent on the political wing of Hezbollah for health, food and welfare.

As importantly, my years in the Middle East taught me never to underestimate the mothers of those fighters. You saw them in Gaza, on the West Bank, in the Lebanese cities of Sidon, Tyre, Beirut. They would send their sons (and on occasion their daughters) to war, they would acknowledge the possibility of their deaths in doing so, they would bless their children as potential martyrs in the name of the cause, with or without invoking Allah. 

In short, it is sobering to reflect that for every death today, in Beirut, or Nablus, or Rafah, there will be countless volunteers tomorrow. In the words of George Santayana, those who forget their history are indeed condemned to repeat it, amid such tragedy for all embroiled in such war.