Why Are We Playing By Iran’s Rules?

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, August 15, 2024

 

On the surface, it makes sense that Amos Hochstein spent the lead-up to this week’s ceasefire negotiations in Lebanon. Hochstein, a presidential advisor on energy, is also President Biden’s envoy to most multi-party negotiations involving the U.S. and Lebanon. Hezbollah is currently trying to draw Israel into a war in south Lebanon, and Hochstein is mediating attempts to avoid escalation.

 

On the other hand, the ceasefire negotiations do not include Hezbollah. Nor do they cover Lebanon. Any ceasefire deal would be between Israel and Hamas. So what exactly was Hochstein doing in Beirut?

 

The answer is, he was playing his role in an elaborate piece of geopolitical theater that is frankly getting old fast.

 

The conceit of this part of the administration’s diplomacy is that Hezbollah will stop firing on Israel—for a few minutes, anyway—if Israel pauses its counteroffensive in Gaza. Which is probably true. But it’s also absurd, and it plays into Iran’s hands by letting a false narrative take hold.

 

Were Hezbollah truly a separate entity, it would simply be called “Lebanon.” Hezbollah and its allies hold seats in parliament and the group effectively has a veto over legislation, control of the airport in Beirut, and its own army.

 

But it’s not a separate entity, it’s an Iranian occupation force. So is Hamas. So are the Houthis, the slave-driving Yemen-based putschists who have joined the regional conflict. And so are, for that matter, the Iraq-based terrorists who killed three American service members in Jordan.

 

Our regional diplomacy is a charade. And it is one that legitimizes Iranian terror groups at the expense of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

 

Essentially, Mideast regional diplomacy is a relic from another era. There was a time when the Palestinians were represented by a faction in Lebanon. The PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, set up a state-within-a-state there in the 1970s after being expelled from Jordan. South Lebanon for a decade became the Palestinian base of operations against Israel. After the First Lebanon War in 1982, and the Reagan administration’s energetic diplomacy, the PLO was bounced from Lebanon, and it regrouped in Tunisia. That’s when Hezbollah moved in to fill the void. In 1983, it carried out the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241. That means for 40 years south Lebanon has been an Iranian-aligned colony and not a Palestinian one.

 

The Palestinians currently have two governments, and neither one is in exile in Tunis or Lebanon. Israel is at war with one of them—not coincidentally, the one that isn’t recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people. Gaza under Hamas is essentially a rogue statelet controlled by Iran in order to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

 

Israel is not at war with “the Palestinians” and their recognized government in the West Bank, based in Ramallah. It is at war with Iran. Throughout this conflict, Israel has been subject to coordinated attacks from four places in the theater: Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Not a single one of those places, you’ll notice, is the West Bank. That is not to dismiss the Palestinian terrorism that has originated from the West Bank during this war or Iran’s attempts to gain footholds there. It is merely to point out that none of our attempts at resolving the regional conflict is geared toward anyone but Iran, and we should just say so.

 

Instead, we have constructed a bizarre Kabuki theater production in which resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is being billed as front-and-center, when in fact we are not currently talking to anyone who is interested in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There aren’t even any Palestinians at the ceasefire talks happening right now.

 

Fact is, the Iranians have systematically worked to erase the Palestinians from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to take their place. This is a war Iran has launched against the U.S. and Israel. Gaza is a front in that war.

 

We have let Tehran hijack the narrative and set the terms of the conflict. If we don’t reverse that, we’ll be further than ever from peace in the region.