Israel's attacks should force Hezbollah and Iran to discard their 'unity of the arenas' strategy

Smoke billows over southern Lebanon following Israeli strikes, as seen from Tyre on Monday. Reuters

The injuries and deaths in Lebanon in the past week, as pagers and walkie-talkies in the possession of Hezbollah members exploded, represented a new moment in the nearly year-long battle between Hezbollah and Israel over the Gaza conflict.

The Israelis’ ability to booby-trap the devices showed that they have a panoply of potential actions they can use against a group severely constrained in its actions. This was only reaffirmed last Friday, when the Israelis killed the most senior Hezbollah military leader, Ibrahim Aqil, and several commanders from its elite Radwan Force. And Israel took this a step further on Monday, when it succeeded in displacing a portion of the Shiite population of southern Lebanon and the western Bekaa Valley, after attacks that killed more than 500 people and injured over 1,600.

From the start of the fighting on October 8 of last year, Hezbollah was caught between contradictory imperatives. On the one hand, it had to come to Hamas’s assistance in Gaza in defence of a strategy developed with Iran known as the "unity of the arenas" strategy. The idea was that parties in the Iran-led Axis of Resistance would combine their efforts to combat Israel if one of them came under Israeli attack.

On the other hand, Hezbollah had to avoid a widening of the conflict with Israel that might lead to Lebanon’s destruction. The country’s economic collapse in 2019-2020, the growing sectarian hostility towards the group from elements in the Sunni, Maronite and Druze communities, and Hezbollah’s unpopular hegemony over the Lebanese state meant that the group’s leadership understood the real risks that a devastating war might have for its ability to prevail in the aftermath.

An essential element in the Unity of Arenas strategy was that it was based on the capacity of the Axis of Resistance to deter Israel. Until recently, it had managed to do so to a significant extent, although this did not prevent Israel’s devastation of Gaza and the mass killing of Palestinians. However, Hezbollah’s limits domestically also illustrated the vulnerabilities of the most powerful Axis of Resistance member.

By intensifying its attacks against Hezbollah over the past week, the Israelis showed that a gap was growing in the deterrence relationship between the two sides. As the Israelis were escalating their actions, Hezbollah seemed increasingly incapable of responding in kind. If so, what does this hold for the "unity of the arenas" strategy?

There were always profound risks in the thinking behind the strategy. All the countries or territories in which the Axis of Resistance is present – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza – are highly vulnerable in the event of Israeli retaliation. The reason for this is that Iranian regional power was built on a wasteland: wherever Iran and its allies intervened, they left behind failed or failing states.

One might assume that this played in favour of Iran’s allies, since the absence of functioning states meant Axis of Resistance members could do what they pleased, without opposition. But this reality doesn’t quite hold in Lebanon, where the country’s complex sectarian make-up and traditionally weak state have meant that religious communities and sectarian identities are much stronger than elsewhere.

While such communal identities may have widened divisions enabling Hezbollah’s hijacking of the Lebanese state, they have also created outposts of resistance and resentment to Hezbollah that the group has failed to overcome, but is sometimes mindful not to exacerbate. Yet it is also a measure of Hezbollah’s hubris that it largely disregarded this when embracing the "unity of the arenas" strategy.

With Gaza and large areas of southern Lebanon destroyed and Hezbollah struggling to keep up with Israel in imposing a deterrence equation, it may be time to reassess the "unity of the arenas" concept. Several factors underline why: Gaza has been obliterated; Hezbollah simply cannot afford a wider war; and the Syrian government, fearing Israel’s response, has shown that it will not open a new front against Israel.

What kind of value does this strategy have if, increasingly, the arenas are less and less unified, and less and less capable of keeping up with Israel’s escalations? If a full-scale war happens in Lebanon, for instance, Hezbollah may not be able to count on effective intervention by its allies. Neither its Iraqi nor its Yemeni allies can do much, Syria may hesitate to allow Iran’s allies to cross its territory to wage a war with Israel, and there are no guarantees that Iran will risk a war with the US by entering the fray.

Given all this, quiet abandonment of the "unity of the arenas" strategy once the current conflict ends, or even before, may be the best option. Israel’s ravaging of Gaza has already crippled the strategy by nullifying much of its Palestinian component. However, Hezbollah is unlikely to admit to such a retreat publicly. The strategy has become a pillar of Iran’s regional credibility, so its loss would be a major blow.

One question that needs to be asked is, who came up with the "unity of the arenas" idea in the first place? Since Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, first publicised the idea early last year, it had the potential to be less of a strategy than a mutual suicide pact. It hasn’t actually become that, and to an extent has succeeded in reconfirming Iran’s regional reach.

However, the strategy has now come to be defined far more by its inadequacies than its possibilities. If Hezbollah, the strongest actor in the "unity of the arenas" approach, is now finding it challenging to deter Israel, what of its regional allies? Continuing on this path will probably only further widen the disparity between the Axis of Resistance, on the one side, and Israel and its US patron, on the other.

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