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Coming home to roost

After Hamas’s brutal and shocking assault on Israel last year, Israel responded with a devastating bombing campaign and ground offensive into the Gaza Strip that’s lasted since—and now includes the killing of Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar. Last month, however, Israel began taking its fight to Hamas’s ally Hezbollah, the powerful militia and dominant political party in Lebanon.

On September 17, thousands of pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s members exploded in Lebanon and Syria. The next day, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies also blew up. Then, on September 27, Israel assassinated the party’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a bombing raid on southern Beirut. And now, Israel has begun a ground offensive into southern Lebanon and stepped up its airstrikes in south Beirut and other Hezbollah bases. It’s full-scale war on Israel’s northern front.

Meanwhile, the United States is stepping up its involvement, too. On October 18, American B-2 stealth bombers carried out strikes in Yemen against purported underground weapons stores belonging to the Houthis, who’d been launching missiles at Israel to support Hamas.

Together, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—who refer to themselves as the Axis of Resistance—have one main thing in common: They get most of their money and weapons from Iran—and Iran is now getting more directly engaged in the conflict itself. On October 1, it fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel—though Israel managed to intercept nearly all of them—in what Iran called “self-defense” against Israel’s recent spate of assassinations of Axis leaders.

Exactly what is Iran’s role in this whole conflict?

Alex Vatanka is the director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute and the author of The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy and Political Rivalry Since 1979. Vatanka says that ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Tehran has followed a single strategy: It arms and funds its proxies to keep up pressure on Israel—and to keep any armed conflict as far away as possible from Iran. Yet now the battle is threatening to come to Iranian territory, leaving the regime in Tehran with a momentous decision to make. It can either stick to its longstanding, unyielding stance against the very existence of Israel, or it can make the compromises necessary for its survival …

• “The basis of Iran’s strategy: It wants Israel to continue its campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, because it believes this delegitimizes Israel and reduces international support for them—and for America. Iran used to think time was on its side; it thought Israel was digging its own grave.”
• “Tehran doesn’t support Hamas because it likes Hamas; it supports Hamas because supporting Hamas helps Tehran threaten Israel and project Iranian power. Proxies like Hamas are Iran’s aircraft carriers: They’re stationed 1,500 kilometers away from Iran—but close to Israel.”
• “Just as the Iranians have shaped the agendas of Arab militants, Arab militants have shaped the agenda of Iran—going back even before the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In that revolution, Iranian allies of Arab militants—allies such as the Palestine Liberation Organization—took over the Iranian state and all its resources. A lot of the anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism in Iran is Arab-militant vocabulary that found its way into Ayatollah Khomeini’s inner circle.”

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The Starmer Project

Yet Starmer won the election in a landslide. What’s happened since?

A number of explanations are already in circulation:

• Despite the landslide, Starmer was never popular. After fourteen years in power, voters were simply tired of having a Tory in 10 Downing Street, and Rishi Sunak ran his campaign as though he too were tired of it.
• The right-wing vote was split by the Reform Party, meaning Labour got only one-third of the votes but two-thirds of the seats—making it the highest seat-to-vote ratio of any Labour victory ever.
• Starmer has taken several hits since winning. He had to force the Downing Street chief of staff to resign following internal squabbles. The press revealed that his backers had given him more than £100,000 in freebies, including expensive suits. He suspended a few arms export licenses to Israel, irritating its supporters without satisfying its critics. And this summer, racist rioters looking to beat up immigrants overran several British towns: The police charged several hundreds of them, but Britain’s prisons were so overcrowded that Starmer then had to release prisoners early to clear space. Whatever the merits of that decision, it wasn’t the PR Starmer wanted.

Beneath all of this, however, is the reality Starmer has never endeared himself to the left wing of the Labour Party. It’s a reality Oliver Eagleton explores in The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right. Published in 2022, the book makes the case that Starmer’s once-professed leftist convictions had always been more for public consumption than sincere. And the early days of his premiership may back the argument up.

In his first speech as prime minister, Starmer said the U.K. had “voted decisively for change.” Yet he’s retained the Conservatives’ cap on welfare payments to families with more than two children. He’s restricted winter fuel payments, leaving only the very poorest pensioners still eligible for the benefit. And last week, the Financial Times reported that Labour is looking to keep the Tories’ plan to slash £1.3 billion worth of sickness benefits. That’s a lot of continuity.

—Gustav Jönsson

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