As the one-year mark of the October 7 Hamas attack looms, the Middle East is on the brink of all-out war. What’s going on inside Israel and Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, the Sunni nations and Iran? Does anyone really want war? And why is this happening now? These are just a few of the questions addressed by Middle East analyst Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Moment Institute Middle East Fellows advisory board member, and Moment Editor-in-Chief Nadine Epstein as part of Moment’s “Insight into the Middle East” series.
This discussion has been lightly edited for clarity. Watch the full conversation here.
Nadine Epstein: I’m hearing that Israeli military reserves are being called up as we speak. Is a ground invasion of southern Lebanon by Israel imminent?
Aaron David Miller: I’m not sure whether or not the security cabinet has made a decision. I can see it as a possible option, but I don’t think it’s a preferred option on the part of the Israelis. The experience that Israel has had in Lebanon—from 1982, when the Begin government invaded the country, to 2000 when then Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to withdraw to the blue line, the international border—has been an incredibly unhappy one, and the obstacles and circumstances that confront the Israelis in any ground operation, let alone a permanent or sustained occupation of Lebanese territory, are increasingly fraught.
Hezbollah is not Hamas. And I think it’s instructive to point out that 11 months after the terror surge of October 7, Hamas survives, not as an organized military structure but as a potent political force; probably, over time, Hamas will not be able to govern Gaza, but it will remain and there and be able, through intimidation and co-optation, to exert a significant influence over who or what ultimately does govern Gaza.
Hezbollah is the most lethal non-state actor in the world. It has a repository of high trajectory weapons, anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000, including at least 400 precision guided missiles. Hezbollah could launch 3,000 missiles a day for several weeks in a saturation attack. No air defense system, certainly not Israel’s, has ever encountered such a redundancy and saturation, which could involve the deaths of hundreds if not more Israelis in major population centers and the destruction of infrastructure, the electricity grid and water desalination plants.
So, Lebanon is fraught for the Israelis. They have achieved tremendous tactical success over the course of the last week: They’ve degraded Hezbollah’s communications, they’ve eliminated many of its senior commanders, and they’ve destroyed hundreds of launchers and missiles. A key question now is: How are the Israelis going to capitalize on those tactical successes? Another question is, what is the long term Israeli strategy to return the 70,000 Israelis who have been relocated as a consequence of the government being forced to create the security zone from the Lebanese-Israeli border south? It’s one of Hezbollah’s tremendous achievements. It’s stunning to think that this organization has actually, through its own military potential, created a sizable area of Israel that is essentially not a normal area. People can’t live there. They can’t do business there. Kids can’t go to school.
Nadine Epstein: Hezbollah is a formidable enemy even now, even though it’s been weakened, and it seems like the response has not been full blast. Why is that?
Aaron David Miller: Largely because geography is destiny. It takes 12 minutes for a cruise missile to travel from Iran to Israeli airspace. It takes 90 seconds for Israeli aircraft and missiles and artillery, as well as Hezbollah’s high trajectory weapons, to enter one another’s airspace, and there’s an escalation dominance. The Israelis simply have a military capacity that goes beyond anything that Hezbollah possesses. And Hezbollah knows that if they launch one short-range ballistic missile in the direction of Tel Aviv, either David’s Sling, which is one of the three layers of the Israeli air defense system, will intercept it, or, if they kill large numbers of Israelis, the Israeli response will be massive. And I think Hezbollah is aware of the fact that the Lebanese public, even Hezbollah’s own constituency, the Shia constituency, is not interested in a major war. I also don’t think Iran is interested in a major war. I don’t think Hezbollah wants a major war. So that’s a huge constraint, but there is still a threat.
Nadine Epstein: How weakened is Hezbollah? We had this pager and walkie-talkie attack last week. How effective was that followed up by all these bombings? Was the upper leadership really hurt or is that not true?
Aaron David Miller: One of my Carnegie colleagues, who is at the Malcolm Kerr Carnegie Center in Beirut, has argued that what the Israelis have done, with the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies and the assassinations of key Hezbollah leaders, is, basically, Hezbollah’s October 7. It’s a cosmic, galactic intelligence failure. I think Hezbollah is badly weakened. Its command and control has been disrupted. The confidence that Hezbollah can protect the Shia community in Lebanon has been strained. And its capacity to trust its own communications equipment has been strained.
The elimination of two veteran commanders, Fuad Shukr and Ibrahim Akil, really hurt Hezbollah. Akil, by the way, was instrumental in both the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy and the attack on the Marine barracks south of Beirut on October 23, 1983, which killed 241 Marines and, minutes later, 58 French soldiers. The single bloodiest day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima. So, I don’t think this organization is in a position to respond to a major military operation by Israel. In fact, I don’t think Hezbollah is in any position to launch one.
That said, with organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, that are political organizations but also undertake terror activities, it’s hard to kill an idea. But there are ways to make an idea less relevant, less potent. I’m not so sure the Israelis have the capacity to do that with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but surely they had it—I’m using the past tense here, maybe at some point they’ll come around to making the idea of Hamas less relevant for the Palestinians of Gaza and in the West Bank. To do that, Israel would have had to engage in much more serious post-war planning, trying to figure out a way to create a security structure, an economic structure and a political structure offering Palestinians a political horizon. That’s what they would have to do in order to make an idea less relevant. I think the Israelis have much less capacity to do that with Hezbollah.