‘We Are on the Edge’: Civilians Brace for All-Out War in the Middle East
There is eerie silence on Israel’s border with Lebanon, when the air raid sirens from cross-border strikes aren’t ringing through abandoned towns and kibbutzim. The roads winding through the northern Israelis hills towards Kfar Yuval are empty, except for a burned-out Israeli military jeep and missile fragments embedded in the concrete. Tall, uncut grass and overgrown gardens, clinging to homes punctured by falling shells, give a ghost town feel to the communities. Only a few foreign farm workers and their boss remain in neighborhoods now mostly filled with soldiers.
After ten months of a war in Gaza that quickly pulled in Hezbollah — the Iranian allied Lebanese Shia organization that forced Israel to end its occupation of south Lebanon in 2000 and fought it again in 2006 — tens of thousands of northern Israelis and more than 100,000 Lebanese have been displaced. These days, however, the Israeli-Lebanese border has never felt closer to completely erupting.
Only a grocery store, pharmacy, and pet store are open in an empty strip mall on the edge of the northern Israeli border town Kiryat Shmona. Tired of the unending war and furious with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Janet Hansen loads pet food into the trunk of her car. In her 60’s, she decided not to evacuate this heartland of Israel’s old Zionist left in order to look after her dog shelter in a nearby kibbutz. “If we don’t get rid of Bibi, we’re never going to end this war,” she says, referring to Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister by his nickname. It’s one of the few sentiments about this war that finds agreement across the region.
Standing in the baking summer heat under still clear skies, it is not the unprecedented death and devastation Palestinians are enduring but the management of the war that has Hansen accusing her prime minister of attempting to expand the conflict that has already killed more than 1400 Israelis for political salvation. Like many of the Israelis who have taken to city streets demanding their country’s far right government prioritize a negotiated release of the remaining estimated 115 captives still held by Hamas since its October 7 attack in southern Israel, she sees freeing them as tied to a cease-fire deal that runs through Gaza, not Beirut, or Tehran.
Away from the border, a thin veneer of business as usual hangs over Tel Aviv and Beirut as residents struggle to keep a sense of normalcy, amid the anxiety of an imminent conflict that could engulf the region and even drag in American forces. People across the Levant have been bracing for a violent spiral as they await retaliation to an Israeli attack in the Lebanese capital late on July 30 and, allegedly, a second six hours later in the Iranian capital. Israel’s killing of senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shuk, in a southern Beirut apartment building and the killing of Hamas’ political bureau head, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran has brought the wider Middle East to the edge of an unprecedented war.
The killings came after Netanyahu cut his Washington trip short to prepare a response to what looks like a Hezbollah missile attack — despite the group’s denial — that killed 12 Syrian Druze, mostly children, in the Israeli occupied Golan Heights. Netanyahu had just received multiple congressional standing ovations for a speech casting a Gaza war that has Israel charged with committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza at the International Court of Justice as a fight with Iran and its proxies. (The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is separately seeking arrest warrants — for war crimes and crimes against humanity — against Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, among others.)
There is a sense of momentary relief since a new round of cease-fire talks started Thursday, and Iran indicated it will hold back its retaliation if the Biden administration’s proposal results in an end to Israeli fighting in Gaza. The delay may only be temporary: There’s little hope that this round of talks will turn out differently than past failed rounds, despite the stakes being so high. While the U.S. is publicly pushing a reluctant Israeli government to compromise on its demand to be able to restart the war, America has also sent aircraft carriers and submarines to the Eastern Mediterranean in a show of military backing for Israel. Washington has also promised an additional $3.5 billion in U.S. military aid since the attacks in Beirut and Tehran.
“We are on the edge, on the brink of war,” says Sami Nader, the Director of the Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs. Having just made it through a regularly chaotic Beirut traffic jam to get to his office, Nader describes people as tense while still trying to go about their daily lives, while they still can. He says people are scared that unlimited war in Lebanon would actualize Netanyahu’s threat to bring the vast devastation Israel has wrought in Gaza to the Lebanese capital.
Nader believes that Netanyahu’s goal is to instigate a wider war that shifts the focus of regional horror and growing Western discontent away from a war in Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians so far. In a wider fight with Iran, he says, Israel can expect even stronger backing from its allies while deflecting from palpable moral outrage to its mass death, displacement, and destruction in a territory it’s occupied for 57 years.
Nader doesn’t see Iran and Hezbollah as interested in more than the currently contained war — believing they don’t see it as the right time to fight one spanning the Middle East. Iran, he believes, wants to wait until it can have a nuclear weapon as deterrence, while Hezbollah worries about the cost to a country already coping with an economic, political, and public infrastructure crises. However, he notes that both may be boxed in and feel the need to retaliate on a comparable scale to deter Israel, even if it widens the war. At this point, he believes Hezbollah — whose firepower alone is thought to be able to do considerable damage to cities across Israel — will not act independently and will follow Iran’s lead. It is why a cease-fire now could be the only off ramp to what Nader depicts as unthinkable destruction. Describing the mass destruction a regional war would also cause to Israel, he says a cease-fire would allow for Iran to claim their pressure and threats led to a win. “A cease-fire would allow them to shout victory.”
Uzi Arad, Netanyahu’s former national security advisor and the former Mossad director of research, doesn’t view the attacks on two foreign capitals as an escalation or believe that Netanyahu has a political interest to escalate to a multi-front war that would strain the Israeli military. Nonetheless, he does see Netanyahu as someone who continues to direct the war based on his political concern of clinging to power. And even if he doesn’t believe it’s a wider war that Israel or its Prime Minister wants, Arad does see Netanyahu as trying to pull America in if it happens. “In his speech to Congress, he alluded again and again to the Churchill example,” says Arad in Tel Aviv, pointing to Netanyahu’s attempt to cast himself as a contemporary remake of the late British Prime Minister, cajoling and convincing the U.S. to join the Second World War.
Fairouz, the dynastic Lebanese singer revered across the Arab world, blasts through a Haifa café as young Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel drink their morning coffee and wonder how much longer they will still be able to do so. The northern Israeli port city with a major oil refinery looks up the Mediterranean towards Beirut, just 80 miles away. Haifa’s increasingly nervous residents stoically await war regardless of nationality.
Twenty-four year-old “Walid” sits at the bar eating a sandwich, waiting for his shift to start. From Israel’s Druze minority in the Galilee, the only Arab community that Israel conscripts soldiers from due to a political alliance that goes back to 1948, Walid, who declines to print his real name amid heightening tension, spent six months in prison for refusing to serve. Part of a small movement of Druze refusniks, he has broken from the community’s leadership that embraces its identity as loyal minority in a Jewish State, instead identifying as Palestinian and having more in common with Palestinian citizens who also don’t benefit from Israel’s Jewish national rights.
A product of Generation Bibi, Walid grew up mostly under Netanyahu governments, watching the gap between the rights of Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish citizens grow. Since the war, Palestinian citizens in Israel have been increasingly attacked in the streets and further politically disregarded. It’s a climate where hardline nationalist Israelis led by far right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have stormed prisons rife with torture where staved prisonsers are released looking gaunt and emaciated to protest the rare charging of 10 Israeli solders for brutally raping a Palestinian detainee in the newly built desert black site, Sde Teiman. When footage of the attack, which occurred behind riot shields while other Palestinian prisoners were forced to lay face down on the floor, was leaked in the Israeli media, cabinet ministers called for an investigation to find and arrest the leaker rather than express concern for the gross violation of prisoners’ human rights.
Long treated as an enemy within, the racism Palestinian citizens receive now combines with the onslaught they are seeing occupied Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank subjected to. “It’s so hard to live here, you feel the energy of the hostility,” Walid says about constant discrimination in Haifa, one of Israel’s comparatively liberal cities. Fearing the destruction that regional war will bring to Haifa, he is less worried about the rockets than he is about how it will shape the government and Jewish Israelis’ treatment of Palestinians. He sees Netanyahu as using the war to transform the country based on the government’s ethnically exclusive religious nationalist vision. “It’s clearly Bibi,” says Walid. “He’s doing it, it’s his nation and his vision.”
‘Little Gazas’
Unlike the rest of the region, there is no sense of foreboding in Israel’s occupied Palestinian territories already being scarred by rising conflict. In the occupied West Bank, where more than 10,000 Palestinians have been taken prisoner since October 7, the attacks in Lebanon and Iran were followed by escalating raids and drone attacks on Palestinian refugee camps while Israeli settlers increased efforts to take over Palestinian land and intimidate them out of their homes.
Under black tarps covering narrow streets in the northern West Bank’s Jenin Refugee Camp, “Abu El-Izz,” a leader in the Jenin Brigade, the main guerrilla force in the camp, sits against the wall, a pistol in his lap and a modified M16 leaning next to him. Unlike the mostly working class fighters who grew up in the camp, Abu El-Izz, whose name is being withheld because he is wanted by Israel, grew up in an upper-class family and only moved to the camp after taking up arms. Jailed as a teenager for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, he later joined Palestinian Islamic Jihad in University and gravitated towards armed struggle. He became central in the Jenin brigade as it formed as a local coalition of fighters from across the Palestinian political spectrum before the war.
In his late 30’s, Abu El-Izz says that while the fighters appreciate Iran and Hezbollah taking up their cause, what happens around the region is divorced from their situation occupied Palestinians find themselves in. The rumble of Israeli warplanes and the hum of drones overhead have become regular in a camp that’s home to more than 20,000 people who come from families forced from their homes in Haifa as part of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe, in 1948. Air strikes and prolonged army invasions have increased this month. During the now regular raids, Israelis use bulldozers to rip up the streets while young men, mostly in their 20’s, fight back with small arms, using hit-and-run tactics.
“The techniques and tactics change according to what we have,” says the fighter, indicating that while the fight has changed since the war, fighters in the camps don’t have the resources to do much more than their current attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers. He restrains a playful smile under his mustache, talking about how fighters in the West Bank camps coordinate locally but lack the resources and ability to connect to outside support to create a West Bank front that is part of any retaliation by Iran and its allies.
It is a similar scene in the city of Talkuram’s refugee camp, where young fighters patrol shattered streets, as the stench from burst sewage pipes fills the air. Residents in apartments with blown-out walls look onto their war-wrecked community. Afaf Rahayma, 62, has been without water for two weeks and her apartment building was made structurally unsound by the last Israeli raid. Sitting with friends who also have nowhere else to go, she describes how Israeli soldiers have taken to invading peoples homes by coming through the walls with local residents put in front of them as human shields. It is these conditions, imposed by the Israeli military on Jenin and Talkkuram’s camps that she says have earned them the nickname of “little Gazas.”
“I can tell you we feel afraid most of the time,” she says, seeing the escalating military attacks throughout August as an effort by Netanyahu to expand the war in the West Bank. Despite her fear, the mother of three adult children believes Iran and Hezbollah need to hit back hard at Israel. She sees it as the only way to counter America’s enabling of Israel with money and arms and blames Netanyahu for destroying her community in a war of want that’s dispossessing Palestinians as part of a political strategy to cling to power. She believes the Israeli government will only relent when Israel pays a higher cost for the war. “Things will get worse,” she says. “And they will need to get worse to get better.”
Besieged under Israeli bombardment and invasion in Gaza for ten months, things are already much worse in the coastal strip. Like in the West Bank, but much more deadly, Israeli attacks have escalated in Gaza since the Beirut and Tehran attacks. Exemplified by an August 10 bombing of a UN school that killed 93 people who took shelter after being displaced in the rubble of Gaza City, Palestinians in the enclave have no time to worry about the future while struggling to survive. “Things are just so horrific and isolated in Gaza that it feels separate from everything else going on,” says Mohammed Rajab about reactions to the prospect of a region in flames.
The 41-year-old local aid worker lives with his family in a tent on a strip of beach in Al-Mawasi, an Israeli declared safe zone that the army regularly shells in southern Gaza. Displaced multiple times after having to flee for his life from his home in Gaza City, Rajab says that despite the continuous Israeli devastating attacks across the strip, it’s starvation and disease that is hurting people most. A lack of clean water, sanitation, and food, has the UN recording famine across the strip. Israel’s obliteration of public infrastructure and its uncompromising siege are the cause.
“People just want to end this fucking war,” Rajab says, exasperated. “They don’t care about Israel, they don’t care about Iran and they don’t even care about any Hamas leaders,” he contends, referencing the events that could export their hell to the region. “They just want to go back home.”
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