Axis of Resistance or Axis of Reluctance? The Gaza War in Regional Perspective
Tamara Himani argues that the course of Israel’s war on Gaza threatens to erode the legitimacy of the Axis of Resistance as strategic interests prevail over idealistic rhetoric
Photo via Pixabay.
The Middle East is one of the most successful protection rackets in the world. It is perhaps the only political environment in which victimhood and vulnerability reflect not weakness but leverage. One camp’s survival – Israel, the conservative Gulf states, and their dependents, Jordan and Egypt – depends on its ability to plea for Western arms. The other camp’s persistence – largely Iran and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Palestine – relies on its ability to decry the damage done by such arms. The conservative states are labelled the outcrops of ‘imperial Zionism’; the resistance groups are designated ‘Iran-backed terrorists’. Both the status quo camp and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ survive on negative legitimacy – confronting, or at least not being, their ideological opponents.
Israel’s war in Gaza threatens to upend this legitimacy. There has rarely been such a damning indictment of the harsh realism of ‘Western’ interests or the ineffectiveness of the region’s Resistance Axis in countering these. The consequences could impact not just the territorial reality of occupied Palestine but the political dynamics of the Middle East.
History Repeated
This is not unprecedented. In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel’s military annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. These losses were so immense they had systemic effects.
“There has rarely been such a damning indictment of the harsh realism of ‘Western’ interests or the ineffectiveness of the region’s Resistance Axis in countering these.”
As a result of this war, the ‘radical Arab nationalist’ states – Nasser’s Egypt and Ba’athists in Syria and Iraq – lost their credibility as leaders of a united anti-imperial resistance. By the late 1970s, Egypt had realigned itself with the US and made peace with Israel. The conservative Asad regime had taken power in Syria, repressing Palestinian fighters in Syria and Lebanon. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s rise had redirected international attention toward territorial conflicts in the Persian Gulf in his drive for regional status. Pan-Arab solidarity had fragmented and conservative state-security triumphed; or so it seemed.
At the same time, a new ‘anti-imperial’ front was emerging across the Middle East, not in the name of postcolonial nationalism but religious insurgency: the ‘Axis of Resistance’. This was born of profound grievances. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran responded to decades of repression under the US-backed monarchy. The formation of Hezbollah in Lebanon responded to Israel’s invasion and occupation of the country in 1982; the group gained legitimacy after Israel’s military withdrawal following the war of 2006. Meanwhile, Israel’s crushing of the 1987 Palestinian Intifada popularised Hamas and Islamic Jihad as resistance organisations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Just a few years later in Yemen by the early 1990s, the Houthis became the primary opposition force to their US-supported and Saudi-backed government
All of these resistance groups which had risen throughout the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s shared similarities. They were marginalised groups (often Shi’a Muslims, excepting Hamas) countering authoritarian governments or military occupations backed by the US and the oil-producing Gulf states. They reflected the despair of the political environment: whether the triumph of conservative and repressive regimes in the region; the consolidation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine; or the disenfranchisement of neoliberal reform and its associated programs of social austerity, labour precarity and authoritarian governance. They arose as a response to the perceived failures of the postcolonial Middle Eastern order.
Israel’s war on Gaza
Israel’s current war on Gaza, therefore, should have been their prime opportunity for these resistance groups to demonstrate their credentials after years of revolutionary rhetoric and tit-for-tat rocket-fire. Given that their credibility was built around purported anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist resistance, their relative inaction since October 7th threatens a repeat of the post-1967 legitimacy crisis.
This is because it is far easier to rile a people up than to rule over them. Doubling as ‘state’ and ‘revolution’ is a precarious role. All have therefore accommodated the status quo – and in some cases, become quite comfortably part of it – while claiming to resist it.
Iran, the leader of this axis, enjoyed the high in oil exports enabled by the sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and surging Chinese demand (as well as the ineffectiveness of sanctions on Iranian oil under Biden). It later enjoyed access to the $6 billion in frozen funds released in the September 2023 US hostage deal (now suspended in the wake of Hamas’ attack). Iran also appreciated the diversion of international attention from its own domestic upheaval following the murder of Jina Amini by state security forces in 2022 and the country’s dire economic situation. The Iranian state functions as a disruptor: undermining US sanctions by selling cheap oil, financing militias to attack US military infrastructure in neighbouring states, and enriching uranium supplies and seizing hostages to gain leverage against the US. As it continues to coordinate with regional allies in applying long-term pressure for a withdrawal of US forces from Syria and Iraq, its focus is long-term and indirect attrition to achieve gradual strategic gains, rather than direct confrontation.
Syria’s Assad regime has enjoyed an icy coexistence with Israel and the US for the past decade, given the larger threat of ISIS and Islamist militancy in the country. Assad’s military patron, Russia, has coordinated security operations with Israel in Syria since 2015. Assad has used Iran’s model – gain leverage to extract enough concessions for survival within the prevailing order. By supporting ISIS and other extremist militias, running a lucrative drug-smuggling business into the Gulf, and producing nearly 6.7 million refugees, Assad has generated enough regional chaos to weaken US and Gulf interests in regime change, even if this falls short of real political rehabilitation and often brings retaliatory hostilities from its neighbours (witness recent Jordanian strikes on suspected Syrian drug-traffickers). Iranian economic and military support fuels and arms Assad's regime, and other Arab nations lack meaningful influence to counter this. Assad's utility for American security interests in suppressing militancy, and the inability of other Arab nations to counter Iran's patronage, consolidate his regime's power. Conflict with Israel risks upsetting this position.
“As its de-facto government, Hezbollah knows the country neither wants nor can afford another war with Israel, given the damage of 1982 and 2006 and its ongoing economic crisis.”
In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s tone has been somewhat muted given the scale of Israeli strikes on Lebanese soil, with its leader Hassan Nasrallah emphasising the battle “is purely Palestinian”. As its de-facto government, Hezbollah knows the country neither wants nor can afford another war with Israel, given the damage of 1982 and 2006 and its ongoing economic crisis. Annual war scares and ping-pong rocket-fire across the border does quite enough to maintain the impression of deterrence, allowing the group to claim it is supporting a “dual-front strategy” of preoccupying Israel’s military on its northern border while it also battles Hamas to its south.
For Yemen’s Houthis, attacking Israeli-bound cargo is an attempt to regain its fading wartime legitimacy, helping detract from Yemen’s own humanitarian crisis and political misgovernance as eight years of civil war protract into stalemate.
Between Present and Future
The war on Gaza, therefore, has brought the role of these insurgent groups into focus. Palestinian liberation historically served as the centre of gravity for these nationalist resistance movements; each territorial gain purportedly helped pave the “road to Jerusalem” (signifying the liberation of the Holy Land from occupation). Yet these parties are reluctant to risk such gains for Palestine. This is despite the fact that the popular support visible in mass protests in so-called “US puppet states” such as Jordan and Egypt provides the perfect opportunity for these groups to cast themselves as the ‘true’ resistance by contrast.
Currently, the Axis retains legitimacy as the only line of defence against Israeli or American aggression. But as the war continues, the merits of this alliance – and the blood spilled in its name, particularly in the Levant – may invite greater scrutiny among Arab streets. As it currently stands, Iran, Assad and Hezbollah appear to have spent far more blood and treasure on crushing the Syrian revolution rather than the forces of Zionist extremism. If they continue to appear ineffective as Israel’s war on Gaza enters its fifth month, trading strikes in Pakistan and Iraq instead, what credibility they retain in the region may vanish altogether.
As in the Six-Day War of 1967, the decline of pre-eminent regional powers could mark the rise of a new transnational front of resistance, defined by a youth that has known recurrent war and economic impoverishment at the hands of US-aligned states and the Iranian and Syrian governments, along with their respective allies’ inability to overcome this. More likely however, amid the dire economic crises and exhaustion with the raging civil conflicts of the past decade, is a public abandonment of politics and protest entirely.