Hassan Nasrallah is dead. The Israeli bombing that killed him on Friday was the climax of a week of Israeli attempts to decapitate Hezbollah, the most powerful militia in Lebanon and Iran’s closest ally. Just a week before, Israeli operations had disrupted Hezbollah’s communications network by exploding booby trapped pagers across Lebanon, and had killed other senior Hezbollah leaders.

Israel’s supporters have been basking in the seeming superiority of Israel over its decadent, weak American ally. “Right now Israel and the [Israel Defense Forces] are showing the defeatist, self-hating secular elites of the west what it looks like to defend your nation, your faith, your honor, and your borders — and what it looks like to win,” right-wing pundit Noah Pollack whooped after Nasrallah’s assassination.

Critics, meanwhile, have taken successful Israeli operations abroad as evidence that its actions towards Palestinians are unnecessarily malicious. “If Israel was similarly careful in Gaza tens of thousands of civilian lives would have been spared,” antiwar Israeli activist Benzion Sanders wrote of the pager operation.

… the campaign against Hezbollah is an American one as much as an Israeli one

Both of these stances miss an obvious if unspoken reality: the campaign against Hezbollah is an American one as much as an Israeli one. For years, the United States has counted Iran among its most serious global threats, and run sophisticated intelligence operations against Iran alongside Israel, such as the joint CIA-Mossad assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in 2008. Even if Washington is keeping its distance from the current Lebanese campaign, Israel is no doubt benefiting from continued U.S. resource and intelligence sharing.

Meanwhile, before October 7, the United States had treated the Palestinian question as an internal Israeli security issue. Although the U.S. military has since blanketed Gaza with surveillance, Washington had completely outsourced its prior intelligence-gathering on Palestinians to the Israeli security services. The failure to stop the October 7 attacks and the ham-fisted campaign in Gaza since then — which has likely killed as many hostages as it has saved — are a reflection of what plucky little Israel actually can accomplish by itself.

Amidst all the American calls for “concern” and “deescalation,” many in the commentariat have assumed that a hapless President Joe Biden is being cuckolded by a reckless, daring Israeli leadership. But the apparent U.S. attempts to restrain Israel are simply part of the broader U.S. strategy to free Israel from external constraints. Domestically, the constant talk of a ceasefire helps defuse unrest over U.S. involvement and build public apathy. Internationally, Biden is playing “good cop” to Israel’s “bad cop,” holding out the option of diplomatic surrender as an alternative to Israeli bombing.

For example, a day before Nasrallah’s assassination, the United States and its allies had proposed “a diplomatic settlement consistent with UNSCR 1701,” which would have Hezbollah disarmed and replaced by Lebanese government forces along the Israeli border. Those government forces, of course, depend heavily on U.S. aid. Putting southern Lebanon under the control of a friendly army, using American funds and Lebanese manpower, would be a better outcome for Israel than having to occupy the country directly, as Israeli forces attempted to do between 1982 and 2000.

Since the 1990s, the throughline of U.S. policy has been building an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran, identified as the root of all evil. The Palestinian issue was always a fly in the ointment, but Israeli leaders were confident that they could diffuse it through a combination of endless diplomacy and security crackdowns: “shrinking the conflict” and “mowing the grass.” Meanwhile, the failure of the Arab Spring and the muted public reaction to the Abraham Accords had convinced Washington that Arab solidarity with Palestinians was nothing more than a fading historical hangup.

October 7 proved that vision wrong. The most elaborate panopticon in the world crumbled before Hamas gunmen in hang gliders. Unrestrained race war broke out not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but also Israel proper for the first time since 1948. The Palestinian question once again became a salient issue for the Arab public. And Arab elites, left feeling that Israel was actually an unstable liability rather than an asset to their power, began to scale back their security cooperation.

Escalating against Iran plays to Washington’s strengths. Arab elites, who still fear Iranian missile capabilities, are happy to quietly cooperate with U.S. and Israeli air defences. After weathering an Iranian missile attack in April 2024, Israel loudly ran a victory lap, even though most of the projectiles were shot down before they reached Israeli airspace. And many Arab publics still resent Iran and Hezbollah for their intervention in the sectarian wars that followed the Arab Spring. Some Syrians in opposition-held territory publicly celebrated Nasrallah’s assassination, an event Israeli media was quick to draw attention to.

But like the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was designed to bring victory in Vietnam, the U.S.-Israeli strategy of “de-escalation through escalation” also carries serious risks. The Israeli campaign was designed to end Hezbollah rocket fire on northern Israeli towns without a ground invasion of Lebanon. The rocket fire, however, continued even while Hezbollah tried to ascertain Nasrallah’s fate. There may yet be a ground war against a new Hezbollah leadership that is less infiltrated by and less well known to the United States and Israel.

The question is who will fall into whose trap first. Israel, a small society that cannot afford wars of attrition, prefers decisive shock-and-awe campaigns. “With the Arabs a weapon doesn’t have to be lethal to frighten them. If it makes a big boom and throws up a flash of light and lot of smoke they almost die of fear,” one veteran of Israel’s 1948 independence war wrote. The decapitation of Hezbollah, carried out with impressive theatrics and technical finesse, fits into the history of Israeli lightning victories.

Iran, shaped by its own experience with gruelling trench warfare against Iraq from 1980 to 1988, is most comfortable with exactly the kind of attrition that Israel seeks to avoid. U.S. official Ariane Tabatabai describes the Iranian strategy as one of “no conquest, no defeat.” It has sought to develop strategic depth, a deep pool of manpower, an economy that operates in isolation from the world, and a martyrdom culture that keeps adherents from losing their nerve. Israel, meanwhile, is facing serious economic strain from keeping its conscript army mobilised for nearly a year and having its export-heavy industries come under sporadic missile fire. 

Washington’s preferred outcome, of course, is that Israel has made enough of a “big boom” for Iran to bow out of the conflict without U.S. involvement. But the United States may fall into the same pitfalls as Iran did. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a way of sucking outside patrons in.