The Middle East has been on the cusp of an all-out regional war ever since Hamas struck Israel on October 7, 2023, raping, pillaging, killing and taking hostages. The latest event over the weekend taking it even closer to the precipice was Israel raining missiles on Iran aimed at taking out the anti-missile defences around energy sites processing oil and petrochemical refineries while effectively taking out S-300 systems.
The world now awaits Iran’s response that will define how this war goes and whether an even worse escalation will be ordered by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran had invited action on itself after responding to attacks on its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels — even though it was not threatened territorially in the Gaza and Lebanon wars and still it rained 200 missiles on Israel, though somewhat ineffectively, killing one Palestinian in the West Bank.
If the Iran versus Israel exchanges sound like war games rather than the real thing, consider the fact that Iran wants to fire missiles lest it be seen as weak and intimidated by Israel and yet it wants to avoid escalation lest Israel cross a significant red line and take aim at its oil and nuclear facilities. This is more like a Mexican standoff except that all it needs is very little to light up a conflagration, going beyond the euphemism of measured and targeted responses that Iran and Israel are swearing by.
The avenues for any talks towards a Middle East peace, into which the West and some Arab nations had invested in the recent past, were shut more than a year ago when Hamas was emboldened to attack Israeli territory and kill people and take hostages of many nationalities. Israel, with its existential crisis a ready reason to retaliate cross-border, may have hit back disproportionately, bombing urban parts of the Gaza Strip to smithereens and killing more than 40,000 Palestinians.
Opening a second front in the war by invading southern Lebanon, it was Israel that took the issue beyond its boundaries in its battles, both subtly by way of blasting pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon and directly by way of a ground invasion, against Hezbollah. And it waged war extraterritorially by bombing places in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, all in the name of the security of its people.
How does anyone stop this madness that is probably not going to solve anything? Given the raging war, things are not going to progress towards the much touted two-state concept to satisfy Palestinian homeland ambitions and is only going to take more and more lives across the region, including those of Iranian soldiers on their home soil and Israeli soldiers in Lebanon to add to the toll that was mainly Palestinian.
The world is concerned now that Iran has been dragged into the exchanges but, this is perhaps of its own making in aiming missiles at Israel as a reprisal for its proxies being hit and inviting retribution that may not stop with targeted strikes.
Iran and its axis of proxies are squarely in the thick of it and leaders from around the world are concerned, regardless of where their affiliations may lie. Will the current principal adversaries Israel and Iran see this for what it is or just press on imagining they have the military might to escalate?
