In this episode, Mohamad Bazzi, our Senior International Fellow and the Director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, and Nora Boustany, award-winning journalist and professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), dive into the current escalation in Lebanon and the broader Middle East. The conversation touches on the dynamics of U.S. policy towards Israel and Iran under President Biden, the potential for a regional war involving Iran, and the shifting balance of power with the weakening of Hezbollah’s leadership. Bazzi and Boustany bring unique insights from their extensive experience covering Middle Eastern conflicts and U.S. foreign policy.
Transcript
(This transcript has been edited for clarity.)
Nora Boustany: Hello everyone. My name is Nora Boustany, and we are about to have a very rich conversation with Mohamad Bazzi, who is the director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He was the former Middle East Bureau Chief for Newsday based in the region from the years 2002 to 2008 and has recently written prolifically for columns appearing in American and British publications. He is also a Senior International Fellow at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at AUB. I am now teaching journalism at the American University of Beirut (AUB). I have been involved in journalism for the past 50 years. I covered the Middle East, basically, the Lebanon war, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other countries for the Washington Post, the newspaper for which I worked for 30 years, and now we are going to open the floor and have this very enriching conversation with Mohamad Bazzi.
Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you, Nora.
Boustany: We are in the middle of a major war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Israelis claim that communication networks and a center for intelligence gathering were the latest targets today, along with other strategic centers. They were the main targets so far today by Israeli fighter jets. In South Lebanon, Israeli forces have pummeled scores of villages and Hezbollah positions. They claim they have hit as the Israeli Defense Forces struggle to cross into the border area, which they want to help protect citizens in northern Israel. So, President Biden’s so-called red lines, as with Rafah in Gaza, have quickly turned from red to pink to non-existent. One million Lebanese have been displaced in their own tiny land, as Israeli officials told The Wall Street Journal, “We do not want to expand the invasion into Lebanon, but we may get dragged into it” and not a word from President Biden or presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the plight of one million refugees in Lebanon. They make the false equivalence between sixty thousand Israeli residents from the north, who were evacuated by their own government, and the Lebanese, who had to flee their homes under bombing and shelling. Please give us your thoughts on what this means for the coming days.
Bazzi: Thank you, Nora. I’m very glad to be talking with you at this time. I think you laid it out very succinctly. You laid out the scene with this dramatic escalation, this war that Israel has unleashed on Lebanon in the last two or three weeks. I think one of the first points I want to convey is that we are seeing that Israel is exporting the worst tactics and war crimes that they’ve committed in Gaza, which is starting with the mass bombardment of civilians, which in Lebanon happened on Monday, September 23rd with that day-long bombardment in the South and the Bekaa, really all over the country. They didn’t really hit Beirut very much on that day. But that was the day where over 550 people were killed, something like two thousand people were injured in a single day and I would say that that marked the use of that brutal tactic that the Israeli military developed in Gaza — and had developed certainly in years past — but that they’ve deployed in Gaza in ways that they hadn’t really deployed in Lebanon in recent history. And then we had the mass displacement of civilians as you pointed out.
Bazzi: And also this tactic of specifically trying to spread fear and terror among civilians, so, on the night of the massive attack in Dahyeh, the attack that killed Hassan Nasrallah, there were calls to civilians at 2:00 or 3:00 AM calls coming from the IDF and other Israeli sources that were warning people in Dahyeh that their building, their block, their area would be hit immediately. And so you had this mass panic, this mass spread of fear and panic, with people fleeing from their homes, with people sleeping on the streets with people sleeping on the beach, people sleeping in Martyrs Square — and this is all part of that general strategy, that overall strategy of exporting the most brutal tactics, a lot of them underlined by essentially war crimes by this targeting of civilians and mass displacement to spread fear and panic in Lebanon. And to try to break the will of Lebanese civilians as much as possible, and we’ve seen it now play out for several weeks [in Lebanon] as it had played out for many months in Gaza.
Bazzi: I think where the Biden administration comes in is on multiple levels. But one of the ways recently is the red lines as you pointed out. For months, we were hearing from Biden and his top aides that they didn’t want the war in Gaza to expand to Lebanon, that was a red line for them because they saw that as the first step toward a regional war. And in the last few weeks, as Israel stepped up its attacks really starting with the attack using the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in mid-September that targeted Hezbollah, and crippled a significant portion of Hezbollah’s communication and their ability to operate. Starting with that, there was very little response from the Biden administration, and we saw the red line turning to pink as you put it so well. And then the red line receded and the red line seemed to be, at least as far as the Biden administration was concerned, the red line was OK, there can be escalation in Lebanon. There can be a war in Lebanon. You can go into Lebanon — they weren’t saying this publicly — but please don’t instigate the wider war. Don’t instigate a war that would directly engage Iran and Israel, and then also potentially the United States. And, then of course, we’ve seen that red line wither away in the past couple of days and we’ll talk about that a bit more in-depth a little later on. Those red lines mean nothing if the Biden administration is not willing to enforce them, and Biden does have a lot of leverage over Israel, as I think many of us have been saying for months now. There’s very significant leverage when you’re the administration that controls essentially the supply of weapons to Israel. You can cut that off. You can threaten to cut that off. But you no longer have leverage if you’re not willing to use it, and Biden hasn’t been willing to use this leverage for many months now. And so he’s lost it. He lost that leverage and he has put himself in this position of no longer having any influence over the Israeli government and especially over the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Boustany: Excellent. I’m going to jump to a question I had saved for later, but it really fits in here with what you’ve just said. As the Gaza playbook that the Israelis are applying to Lebanon now, as that plays out in Lebanon, and as the line has been crossed between what Iranians had hoped, would be their policy of restraint in regards to the situation in Lebanon, all these, this framework, this paradigm, has been scrambled. Nasrallah had promised in one of his last speeches that Iran would not have to step into the fray and fight with Israel. Clearly, that line, as you so aptly described, has been crossed. Can you tell where Iran is headed with what some analysts say has been a grave miscalculation? Where does Lebanon figure in all of this? If Hezbollah starts launching guided ballistic missiles to Israel? Iran’s urging, when Israel retaliates, what does that forecast for Lebanon?
Bazzi: That’s a great question, and it’s a great way to try to make some sense of this point we’ve reached and I think, you as someone who’s covered the region so deeply and for so long, you will have a lot of perspective on just how fast this has been moving. I can’t think of, maybe in 1967, as the comparison for the pace, for the very dramatic pace of how quickly this is moving. I can’t think of another example, of how quickly within weeks we’ve seen these extremely dramatic events unfold like the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah. The very intense bombardment that Israel launched and the US administration being a deer in the headlights during so much of this. And then, the Iranian retaliation that you just mentioned, the Iranian retaliation on Tuesday, I believe it was because we’re all losing track of the days as they unfold. And that retaliation where Iranfired, something like 200 ballistic missiles at Israel for the second time after the retaliation in April, after Israel bombed a building connected to the Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus killing a number of Revolutionary Guard officers and other Iranian officials in Syria. This kind of attack on essentially, a sovereign Iranian building in Syria.
Bazzi: But that retaliation in April was contained partly because the Iranians spent a lot of time back in April trying to telegraph it, to send the message that they would be sending drones, then sending missiles, and then basically the message got through to the US, through to Arab allies, through the Arab partners and the Gulf, through other ways that this attack would unfold. But now, today especially after Nasrallah’s assassination and Israel launching a new war on Lebanon, Iran was put in this position. Over the past few days, as we prepared for this [conversation], you and I were talking about this theme, we were reflecting a lot of what everyone was thinking on the ground, in the region, in the US: what will Iran do? What will Tehran do? What will the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, do because he was being put in this position where he is being embarrassed by not responding to these very dramatic attacks, these very dramatic events that were unfolding in the region, to the dramatic attacks and escalation by Israel. And so, in a way, Khamenei and the Iranian regime were cornered into this kind of response.
Bazzi: I think they didn’t want to do this. There’s a general alignment that Iran doesn’t really want this fight. Iran has been trying to avoid this escalation — and to a large extent, Hezbollah had been trying to avoid this escalation — for many months. Previous attempts by Israel to instigate this large-scale escalation hadn’t quite worked, through the bombing of the diplomatic mission in Damascus in April, and other attacks on senior Hezbollah leaders, before the assassination of Nasrallah. All of that didn’t lead to this level of response and escalation until today. And so we’re at this uncharted moment where I’m not sure if Iran has figured out the policy of what they’re going to do. It’s also not entirely clear what Israel’s end goal is either, aside from inflicting maximum damage on these countries, on Iran, on Hezbollah, on all of its enemies. That seems to be the driving force for what Netanyahu and his government are doing, and they’re taking this opportunity four or five weeks before the US presidential election when they feel no one [will stop Israel]. I mean Biden and the Western powers haven’t tried to restrain Netanyahu very much, but now, he especially feels he has a free hand and he’s using it in the most destructive way he can.
Boustany: Well, he obviously took this opportunity so close to the election to get away with as much as he could and there is no doubt today, in my mind, that the Israelis are getting ready to broaden the scope of what they said was a very limited operation in Lebanon. They did the same in 1982 when their ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, was attacked. And now we see that unfolding in an interview today with Nicholas Blandford, who is a real specialist on Hezbollah. He said that Hezbollah has not yet used any of its ballistic missiles, as I mentioned in my question, because Iran has asked it not to, but we may be in a situation in a couple of days where Iran may ask them to do so. And it’s very clear that the hawks have the upper hand now in Iran, , my next question is that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the assassinated chief of Hezbollah, was the architect and force behind setting up the axis of resistance against Israel. He was the glue that kind of helped bring it together and held it together, he facilitated Iranian training and supplies to fighters in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Where does the axis of resistance stand now? Can you give us, like, a brief, as brief as you can, run down on why and when Hezbollah was created, kind of its trajectory from 1982 until now?
Bazzi: I’ll take the first part about the axis of resistance and the impact, and I think the other moment that we should think about in that history is the assassination by the US of Qassem Soleiman in early 2020. That assassination in Baghdad, where Soleimani was targeted by a U.S. drone. Along with Nasrallah, or on the Iranian side, Qassem Soleimani — who was the commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, but that title alone didn’t capture his importance and what he did —set out the axis of resistance policy and setting out those Iranian interests. Working with the [militia] groups together, and working with leaders of individual militias like Nasrallah. After Soleimani was assassinated, Nasrallah, in many ways, stepped into that role.
Bazzi: So even though the Iranians had appointed other generals and officers into that role, no one of Soleimani’s charisma and influence emerged. In some ways, this put Hassan Nasrallah at the center, as a [leadership] figure for many of these militias. And we’re talking about Shia militias in Iraq, we’re talking about some of the militias in Syria, we’re talking about the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hamas was never quite a full-fledged [member], it’s in that orbit, but it hasn’t been as much a core part of that axis. And especially after Hamas had its falling out with Iran and Hezbollah over their support for the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iran and Hezbollah’s brutal role in the crackdown on Syrian factions that were fighting Bashar al-Assad during the [Syrian] Civil War. so that rift between Hamas, and Iran and Hezbollah, extended for quite a few years, after the Hamas leadership left Damascus and ended up basing itself in Qatar and some went to Turkey. Different factions worked on repairing some of these rifts. After Soleimani’s assassination, Nasrallah became a kind of a leading light to keep those groups together and to keep them coordinating, and working with Iran.
Bazzi: And now there’s a tremendous void. There’s a tremendous vacuum. Iran never quite successfully filled Qassem Soleimani’s role because they didn’t have someone of his charisma and perhaps capability. Now we’re going to see if Hezbollah, which is going through the most difficult period since its founding. Hezbollah had been prepared to replace its leader, or some leaders, but I’m not sure if they were prepared to replace the entire [leadership] — they’ve lost almost the entire military leadership of Hezbollah in the last couple of weeks. It’s yet to be seen how effectively and whether they can replace that leadership, and how quickly. Nasrallah had a lot of particular qualities that made him very effective as the leader of Hezbollah. Even under normal times, it would have been difficult to replace Nasrallah, [but] under this extreme time of war and pressure by the Israelis, it’s almost impossible.
Boustany: Yes, and, actually, the word here in Beirut is that the leadership that remains is very reluctant to name a successor to Sayed Hassan Nasrallah just because they fear that he may be targeted, and as you said, it’s going to be very difficult to replace Sayyed Nasrallah with someone of his shrewdness and political acumen and charisma to kind of take on that mantle successfully. But Hezbollah is on the back putting, so to speak, and they are not making any grand announcements about his succession. I just wanted to come to one last question, Mohamad, if we have the time, Nasrallah was the architect behind setting up this force, but clearly, in the last couple of days, we have seen that the breaching of Hezbollah intelligence, and even of Iranian intelligence, has been grave and very detrimental to whatever they tried to set up. With the Supreme Leader Khamenei in Iran giving the green light to the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards, to launch its attacks against Israel a couple of days ago. It was, it is clear that the hawks have the upper hand [in Iran], but also that Khamenei is extremely nervous about his security, about people around him, and nobody knows where this crisis is leading everyone. In fact, there were reports this morning that the IRGC commander who was killed with Nasrallah, had been in fact sent by Khamenei to warn Nasrallah that the Israelis were about to kill him and to convince him to leave Lebanon for Iran, something he refused to do. Can you address, as far as you can gather, what the reaction has been between the rank and file of Hezbollah about all these breaches of security crashing into their usually very tightly wound precautions and safety measures?
Bazzi: I think there’s been a tremendous sense of confusion, a sense of disappointment, a sense of extreme loss, obviously, because of the way this unfolded, starting with the pager attacks and walkie-talkie attacks, which showed a depth of Israeli infiltration and penetration of Hezbollah security and Hezbollah systems that no one had conceived, no one had publicly conceived. It also showed that Israel [had been] planning for this for years, because of the pager attacks the walkie-talkie attacks. There’s been quite a few leaks coming out of the Israeli security establishment that indicate that the planning for that had started several years ago, long before October 7th. Israel had been — its security agencies and vast security apparatus, the military intelligence, the Mossad and others — had been focused on Hezbollah for many years, basically, since the 2006 war. It had invested tremendous resources in this infiltration in being able to gather data or to use AI and use satellite technology. So, all of this technology and resources are at Israel’s disposal to infiltrate Hezbollah, but also to be able to track its leaders, including mid-level members and even lower-level members. We’ve seen the effect of this unfold over the past three weeks, in the way that Israel is able to target so many leaders but also other members of the group.
Bazzi: And then, of course, Israel doesn’t care about civilian casualties. So, they’ve killed massive numbers of civilians. When I looked this morning, the latest figure was according to the Ministry of Health, was close to two thousand Lebanese civilians killed and seven or eight thousand injured. And that’s certainly an undercount, right? Because there are many people buried under the rubble in Dahyeh, there are people buried under the rubble in the South and the Bekaa, and elsewhere. We also had the massive bombing in Dahyeh that killed Hassan Nasrallah, that, through the force of that blast, they may never recover, some of the bodies. So, we’re talking about an extremely high casualty count that will only keep increasing at this pace.
Bazzi: There’s a sense of shock within Hezbollah. There’s a sense of shock in the Shia community in Lebanon, because a lot of what Nasrallah had tried to build was the sense of deterrence that Hezbollah’s missiles would serve as a deterrent so that Israel would not do this, would not attack [Lebanon]. For a long time, he had that equation ofattacks on Beirut or attacks on Dahyeh would mean Hezbollah attacks on Tel Aviv. But, as you said, we’ve been hearing these reports that Iran has asked Hezbollah [not to use them], and I think one thing that many people in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region are wondering is “what happened to these missiles?” What happened to the more precise ballistic missiles and other more sophisticated missiles that Hezbollah has? Why haven’t they been used? And we have been hearing these reports that Iran had asked them not to use these missiles even until now — the idea had been that these missiles would be Iran’s deterrent against Israel attacking its nuclear facilities, or Israel directly attacking Iran. And that is something we might see unfold in the next few days as Israel expands this war, and as Israel really, and Netanyahu, are trying their best to ensnare the US into a direct confrontation with Iran. Because we’re not entirely sure that Israel on its own can take on Iran and cause the kind of damage to Iran’s nuclear program that Netanyahu wants to cause.
Bazzi: So, we’re in this position today, where — and I know you have a lot of experience with this — where there’s a knee jerk way of saying, the Middle East is staring at the abyss. But we really are staring at the abyss, and I would like to hear your thoughts on this because of your long experience in the region and since you’ve covered a lot of conflicts in the region. You’ve covered the region from the region for so long, longer than almost any other foreign correspondent for a US publication that I can think of. So, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this, on the moment we’re in, because I think you have that historical perspective and depth that’s important for listeners to hear. Are you seeing this moment as staring at the abyss or whatever [term] we want to use?
Boustany: I think it’s like standing on the edge of a very steep cliff and looking down, this is what it feels like right now. Although President Biden kind of nonchalantly said that the Israeli retaliation will not take place today, but it’s coming. And what happens after that is anybody’s guess. , I covered in 1977, I was in Kawkaba when the Israelis fired cannon shells into a Lebanese army convoy that was trying to take positions in Kawkaba in South Lebanon and the Israelis prevented them from doing that. Of course, subsequently the Syrians and the Iranians didn’t want the Lebanese army to deploy in that part of Lebanon, which is part of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, that I think the Israelis don’t want to see implemented either way. I covered the Israeli incursion in 1978 when they occupied a lot of villages in the South and set up this zone under a Christian militia commander Saad Haddad, and later Antoine Lahad. Of course, I covered 1982 when the Israelis were bombing the South trying to get the PLO to leave Lebanon with gunboats and aerial shelling and strafing, and when their tanks rumbled into Beirut all the way to Yarzeh at the time.
Boustany: Of course, there were different weapons being used then and, the US administration of President Reagan was much more forceful in telling [then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin that he couldn’t keep doing that, especially after Sabra and Shatila, after the Marines had been pulled out. But now we have a whole new ball game with different technology, precision weapons, and what the Israelis don’t realize is that, if Hezbollah decides or is urged to use their ballistic long-range missiles, they don’t have to be in that 10-kilometer zone south of the Litani River. They could be anywhere in Lebanon. These are long-range guided missiles that can reach deep into Israel, but if the world doesn’t react, we may see Lebanon completely overrun by what Israel is planning to do. There is no way to tell where all this is headed, and unfortunately, with all these crimes against humanity, violating the laws of war, taking a page out of their genocidal playbook in Gaza. Now, they started attacking Red Cross convoys as they were trying to rescue the dead and wounded, and before we know it, they’ll be bombing each hospital in Beirut. We don’t know where that’s headed, and if the leaders of the First World don’t know how to stop this, nobody deserves to live on this planet.
Bazzi: That’s a very powerful way of putting it, Nora, thank you. And you’re right to turn this around to the leaders of the so-called First World. You mentioned a lot of things that I want to talk about further, but we probably don’t have a lot of time and maybe we could do another conversation later on in the coming weeks. One of the points you mentioned about Reagan, and the pressure he exerted [on Israel] — you reminded me of a quote I pulled up a few months ago and I wrote a piece about it. I’m going to read you a part of this quote, which was Joe Biden, speaking as a presidential candidate during a speech in July of 2019. It was his [major] foreign policy speech and he really made this forceful case for restraining U.S. military intervention and for ending the wars that the U.S. had unleashed on the world after the September 11th attacks.
Bazzi: So, he said, “the use of force should be our last resort, not our first.” He added that military power should “be used only to defend our vital interests when the objective is clear and achievable. It’s past time to end the forever wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure.” When I came across that quote, it struck me for how succinct it was and how it advanced this idea of [core] US interests. So never mind the moral arguments that seemed to carry no weight with the leaders of the US and other countries of the so-called First World, they clearly don’t care about the moral arguments. As you pointed out in your opening question, they’ve shown no interest in expressing any sympathy for the civilians targeted and killed in Lebanon and Gaza, basically anywhere in the region — except the sympathy they’ve expressed for Israeli civilians, as they should express sympathy for civilians targeted anywhere. But they’ve shown no interest in civilians in the Arab countries and they will show no interest if there are a lot of Iranian civilians killed.
Bazzi: But Biden is making the argument that it’s actually against US interests to get involved in these endless wars. And this is one of the things you and I have talked about as we prepared for this conversation and I’ve talked with other colleagues and friends, and you have as well, it’s perplexing. This was on his [Biden’s] radar for several years, and still none of what he and other [Western] leaders have allowed Israel to do — it’s not even in the short-term interests of the West and Western countries. One of the costs that Biden might pay is that Kamala Harris could potentially lose the [U.S. presidential] election if this gets worse in the next five weeks and Netanyahu shows no interest in stopping the war. As you pointed out, Netanyahu may very well keep trying to expand it and instigate the US into a conflict [with Iran] in the next few weeks. That could seriously damage Kamala Harris’s chances to win and help Donald Trump get elected, which is what Netanyahu and his government want. And in this process, Biden will have helped ensure that. So I am at a loss, for words or analysis as to what is going on in this administration’s mind — to put at a very basic level, all of these US interests, all of their personal interests, even as Democrats, at risk. I don’t know if you have thoughts on that.
Boustany: Yeah, I have. No analysis is needed. The Biden administration is in the moral gutter along with the Israeli leadership right now, and even if they get embroiled militarily, this is going to work against them. It’s going to work against the Democrats. Trump is against deploying American troops and he will play this to the hilt. So, they have a very small window in which to turn this wreck around. I don’t know that they’ll take the challenge, but all our lives, our countries, our survival as a sovereign nation, is at their mercy right now. I hate to say it, but that’s the way it is.
Bazzi: Yeah, that’s very well put. I think you’re absolutely right. We, unfortunately, are at their mercy right now and they don’t have the backbone to make the most basic decisions.I guess this is a very bleak note for us to end on, but these are very bleak times in Lebanon and throughout the region. If there’s one small ray of hope, it’s as always in Lebanon, civil society, the secular forces, the forces not attached to the government and not attached to the corruption of the political parties and any part of the regime. They are the ones that have generally shown themselves to be most adept at helping those displaced. I know there also have been some individual ministers and ministries that rose to the occasion as well, and we should give them credit for that. But from my distance, I can see civil society deploying in the ways it always has in these recent crises, and maybe we have to hang on to that small ray of hope.
Boustany: Civil society has been stepping up and doing its fair share in Lebanon. They are the heroes and the champions of this very, very miserable predicament we find ourselves in. What’s missing in this is Israeli civil society because they are ill-informed, they don’t know what’s going on, and that’s according to Israeli journalists and commentators, and their fears have been manipulated. Benjamin Netanyahu has been behaving like any autocratic Middle Eastern leader and I think eventually this will come back to haunt him. Maybe not in my lifetime, maybe yes. I wish we hadn’t had to have this conversation, Mohamad, but it’s been an excellent and very insightful one, if, as you mentioned, a very bleak one. We can only hope for the best and pray that people will be safe. Thanks.
Bazzi: Thank you, Nora, for having me.