No wonder Donald Trump swore at his supposed friend and ally Benjamin Netanyahu recently. Within days of that June 1 phone call, Israel and Iran were back on track for the kind of military escalation that can no longer be explained away as a ceasefire breach, presenting a potentially fatal threat to the U.S. president¡¯s attempts to end the war.
The cause of their dispute is, on the surface, simple. Israel says the April ceasefire between Tehran and Washington did not cover Lebanon and that its troops would therefore go on fighting Hezbollah so long as the Shiite group posed a security threat to Israel¡¯s northern border communities. Iran says the deal did cover Lebanon, which is just another front in the same war ¡ª and of course it is.
It¡¯s precisely because it sees Hezbollah as a tool of Iran¡¯s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that Israel wanted the war in the first place. Israelis correctly blamed the IRGC for having orchestrated an entire proxy network of militias ¡ª from the Houthis in Yemen, to Hamas in Gaza, to Hezbollah in Lebanon ¡ª against the world¡¯s only Jewish state. That Iranian strategy contributed directly to the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023.
Only such an Iran-controlled or -inspired network can explain why Hezbollah opened a second front against the Israelis on Oct. 8 of that year, long before it could be described as a response to Israeli military excesses against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Likewise that Hezbollah would join in the fight again when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, in February. And it¡¯s why the Houthis chose this week to lob a missile at Israel and announce they were closing the Bab al-Mandeb Strait to Israeli shipping.
These last Houthi gestures were largely symbolic. Yet the collective message Tehran seeks to deliver is clear; it is that reports of the death of its so-called Axis of Resistance have been greatly exaggerated. The latest bout of escalation has notably been directed at Israel alone, serving to drive a wedge between it and the U.S., as it exposed the point at which their interests divide.
Tehran on Monday appeared to want to draw a line under spiraling tit-for-tat air and missile strikes, saying it would refrain from further attacks ¡ª so long as Israel doesn¡¯t bomb Hezbollah¡¯s strongholds in Beirut. Netanyahu now faces a painful dilemma: Should he obey Trump by limiting his campaign against Hezbollah in the face of Iranian threats, thus granting them a level of impunity and deterrent power? Or should he ignore Trump and unleash the Israel Defense Forces on the Lebanese capital?
Tehran¡¯s new leaders understand this. No doubt they see it as a...
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