Last week, on a dusty road in the West Bank, I received a phone call from the office of the spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces to schedule a meeting the next day. “Hello,” I said. “It’s difficult to talk right now. I am being menaced by two men with knives.”

“Are they Jewish or Arab?” he asked. He sounded concerned.

“Jewish.”

His level of concern didn’t change. No one ever said being a spokesperson for Israel was an easy job. “Do you want me to talk to them?”

About a minute earlier, these two young men had driven their beat-up white car in front of my Mazda and screamed at me in Hebrew, gesturing for me to pull over and get out. They wore IDF-style olive-drab pants, although their tops were civilian. On their waists they had long, fixed-blade Nimrav-style combat knives, and on their heads, the style of kippah and the sidelocks of hair, payot, common among West Bank settlers.

I had paid for an upgrade at the Hertz counter and figured I could run them over faster than they could stab me. So I declined the spokesperson’s help, prepared to shift my foot over to the accelerator, and yelled back to them that I was a journalist.

“Who are you? What do you want?” they asked. In this case the classic American theory that if you yell loud enough in English, foreigners will reply in English turned out to be correct.

One of them came up to my window. “This place is dangerous,” he said. “Terrorist people. Don’t come here.” I said I’d be fine. The other guy was photographing me and my car. “Don’t come back,” the first one said. He made sure I saw the knife. “Your last warning.”

More than two weeks have now passed since Hamas’s attack on Israel, and nearly as much time has passed since Israel vowed, in response, to destroy Hamas completely. Everyone understood that to mean an invasion of Gaza—a ground campaign that many thought would have commenced as early as a week ago, and that as of this writing remains postponed indefinitely. But another campaign, in the West Bank, is already under way.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government is more aggressively pro-settlement than any in recent memory, and when it came to power in December, Israeli settlers stepped up efforts to establish their outposts and drive out the Palestinians living nearby. After October 7, that process accelerated dramatically, and violently, and some Palestinian communities that existed just two weeks ago are no more.

In mid-September, I visited Wadi al-Siq, a herding community east of Ramallah and a mere 25-minute drive from central Jerusalem. One of Wadi al-Siq’s residents, Abu Bashar, 48, told me that the village’s roughly 30 families had moved there in stages, with most arriving in the 1990s. The community is Bedouin, and it retained traces of its ancestors’ wandering ways. The most permanent dwellings were trailers. Male social life focused on a large wooden-framed tent, with tarps and dusty mattresses on the ground inside.

I watched the men recline on the mattresses, smoking, drinking sludgy coffee, and playing on their phones. (One man had a lock-screen image of the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.) Whenever they heard a car, they’d stand up and walk out of the tent, to see whether friend or foe was coming up the dirt road. The friends were other Bedouins on social visits, and sometimes an Israeli activist who wanted to document the settler incursions.

From the June 2018 issue: A Muslim among Israeli settlers

The principal foe, Abu Bashar said, was an Israeli settler who less than a year previous had pitched a tent just up the road, then encouraged others to join. They established a ma’achaz, or settler outpost. A ma’achaz (the word is from the Hebrew for “stronghold,” or “grasp”) is distinguished from an ordinary Israeli West Bank settlement because it is wilder and rougher, and because it is illegal. Israeli law generally forbids construction of new outposts. The Palestinians of Wadi al-Siq complained that Israel had hardly let them build so much as a new shack in recent decades, whereas the ma’achaz structures sprang up fast, and the Israeli military—which governs the land—seemed not to care.

Even Abu Bashar appreciated the irony that this settler and his friends had “adopted the lifestyle of the Bedouin communities,” as he put it. They brought their own livestock. They built shacks and pitched tents. Then, around the time when the current right-wing Israeli government came to power, Abu Bashar said, they got aggressive.

Netanyahu’s allies consider the West Bank an inseparable part of greater Israel, and quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) cheer on the building of Jewish settlements that would aid the digestion of the land into the Jewish state. The settlers at Wadi al-Siq blocked a road that the Arabs used to reach the highway to Jericho. They tampered with the Bedouins’ rainwater catches. They stopped at the camp, broke windows, and harassed men and women. Nearby is a charming little European-funded schoolhouse; I peeked in after hours and saw spelling lessons in progress on the boards, as well as some light Palestinian-nationalist sloganeering painted on the walls (“My nation! My soul!”). Abu Bashar said the settlers visited the schoolhouse, too, and scared the hell out of the children.

Then came October 7. Hamas’s level of savagery seems to have licensed a new level of settler aggression. One settler WhatsApp group passed around a threat intended for distribution to Palestinians too stubborn to have left their land yet. I saw the Arabic version. “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba!” the settler message said, referring to the permanent displacement of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war. It invited them to seek refuge elsewhere. “We’re giving you a chance to flee to Jordan now in an organized fashion, because we will exterminate the enemy and expel you by force from our land.” The message ended: “You better get packing quickly. You’ve been warned!”

As the settler attacks intensified, Abu Bashar told me in an interview last week, the Arabs left their little ramshackle community—first sending the women and children away, and then the men. When they returned to collect their belongings, Abu Bashar said, “settlers wearing soldier uniforms met us. They shot in the air and said we had only one hour to get our things, or we’d be killed.”

According to a report in Haaretz, the IDF and settlers visited Wadi al-Siq on October 12 and abused three of the Palestinians. The report showed images of two men from Wadi al-Siq, stripped down, beaten, gagged, and bound. “They urinated on two of them and put out cigarettes on them, and even tried to sodomize one of them,” the report says. An IDF spokesperson told me that soldiers were indeed present at Wadi al-Siq that day, to respond to a report of “Palestinian suspects” at a farm. The IDF did not confirm that torture took place, but provided a statement explaining that “commanding officers believed that the conduct of the soldiers were contrary to expectations and decided to remove the commander of the troops who carried out the arrest.” A military-police investigation is underway, the IDF said, and may be referred to prosecutors.

I went back to Wadi al-Siq on Thursday, or tried to. I started with reconnaissance work, driving to a Bedouin encampment called Maghayer al-Dir, on the hill opposite Wadi al-Siq. Two settlers intercepted me when I turned into the village. I tried to chat them up. But they left without saying even a word.

A Bedouin with his two kids confirmed that Abu Bashar and his community had been displaced. “You foreigners,” he said. “I’ve seen many of you, from many countries. Americans! Spanish! Italians! Journalists, activists. And what did you do? Nothing.” He shooed me away and said he didn’t appreciate the attention, or the heat that would come when the settlers visited again. “You come here, and what happens next? The settlers come. They make trouble, they smack my kids.” He lightly cuffed his son on the ear to make his point.

From Maghayer al-Dir, I could see the remains of Wadi al-Siq, which resembled a junkyard. Abu Bashar later confirmed that those remains had been picked through by settlers, and items had been stolen or vandalized. An Israeli activist sent me photographs of mattresses ripped, corrugated metal strewn on the ground, a general disarray that looked like the aftermath of a riot or a tornado. I also saw photos of the school thoroughly vandalized. The pupils cannot return.

Graeme Wood: Hamas’s hostage-taking handbook says to ‘kill the difficult ones’ and use hostages as ‘human shields’

I drove toward Wadi al-Siq, and that is when the two yelling settlers, the ones with knives, intercepted and threatened me. After they issued their “last warning,” I decided I didn’t need to stick around to see what might happen, but they tailed me all the way to the highway. I pulled onto the median to see if they’d stop again. They slowed down, stared at me angrily, and took more video of my rental car. Then they kept driving and turned off on the dirt road to Wadi al-Siq.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, one of the clearinghouses for data on settler encroachment, reports that incidents of settler violence have more than doubled since Hamas’s attack. Allegra Pacheco, the head of the West Bank Protection Consortium, told me October 7 gave the settlers a pretext to do what they had always intended. “We are talking about large numbers of hostile armed civilians who are using the wartime situation to advance their political agenda,” she said.

This violence might seem like a sideshow, a minor violent episode amid two episodes of major violence: the terrorist attack by Hamas, and the Israeli counterattack in Gaza. (Thousands of Gazans have died already from Israeli rocket attacks, according to Hamas.) But the settlers consider their activities closely connected to all of Israel’s squabbles with non-Jews. The most zealous among them consider their mission sacred—the land was promised to them by God—and they have practical aims as well.

To read them in plain Hebrew or English, see the 2017 plan for “decisive settlement” by Bezalel Smotrich, then a member of the Knesset from the Jewish Home party. “This is not a religious manifesto but a realistic, geopolitical, strategic document,” Smotrich wrote, and it would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through “victory by settlement.” He called for “establishing new cities and settlements deep inside the territory and bringing hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to live therein.” Smotrich is now Netanyahu’s finance minister, and one of the most influential members of the government.

Under the Smotrich plan, the Arabs of the West Bank, all 3 million of them, would eventually have two choices: to live as politically neutered residents in a Jewish state, or to “receive aid to emigrate to one of the many countries where Arabs realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world.” These terms make the move sound like an all-expenses-paid vacation. But Smotrich’s “decisive plan” provides for the military conquest of those who don’t take the first two options. The threat of force makes this plan an expulsion, an ethnic cleansing.

Wadi al-Siq has been cleansed—not because Smotrich’s plan was blessed by the government, but because under cover of emergency, heinous actions become possible that would have been impossible in calmer times.

Before my first visit to Wadi al-Siq, in the relative calm of September, I permitted myself the hope that the Bedouins and the settlers could reach some uneasy relationship with each other. They were in the same line of work. In rural places, eventually everyone needs a neighbor’s help—to pull a truck out of a ravine, to drive a boy with a crushed foot to town to see a doctor. Often that is how hatred melts, by forced realization that neighbors who despise each other sometimes still need each other. I am not normally romantic about rural life, but one must take one’s optimism where one can get it.

But between those two groups, there was an invisible wall of separation as high as any of those concrete T-walls between Jerusalem and the West Bank. After spending the night in Wadi al-Siq, I told the Bedouins that I wanted to meet the settlers. They warned me that these people were cruel and dangerous, and said that if I wanted to meet them, I’d have to go alone. The way the Palestinians spoke about the settler outpost reminded me of the way astronauts in alien movies talk about going on a space walk. It was “extravehicular activity,” and if I wanted to pass through the airlock, they would watch me through the portholes and hope I didn’t get gobbled by the monsters out there.

Read: The end of Netanyahu

I walked down the road and saw the little settler outpost about a quarter mile away, across a dry gully. I sat on a rock and watched it for a few minutes. It was as primitive and dilapidated as the Palestinian village: a sheepfold, some vehicles, and stray agricultural equipment. Eventually a flock of sheep emerged, with a lone settler driving it slowly up the side of a hill. I walked toward him, waving my arms like an idiot so he knew I wasn’t trying to sneak up on him.

He was a boy, surely not far past his bar mitzvah, and he wore a dirty work shirt, flecked with bits of fodder. As I got closer I yelled a greeting, and when he turned to me I saw he had on tefillin, the leather apparatus religious Jews wear during morning prayer. I am not sure what he thought was going on, or whether he appreciated the oddity of our situation: a settler praying among his sheep, interrupted very early in the morning by a random fool wearing shorts and Tevas and waving an iPhone and a notebook. He gave me the universal What the hell? look, which was fair enough, and I left him alone.

About five minutes later, a battered pickup intercepted me. I gave the driver a shalom, and watched him dig around the cab of the truck. I wondered if he was looking for a gun, and if he would shoot a guy who had just wished him peace.

In fact he produced a phone, from a door compartment that contained nothing else but a prayer book. He handed the phone to me, impatiently, and pointed at it. A woman’s voice came on. “Who are you? What are you doing here? What are you writing in your notebook?” I told her I was a journalist, and I wanted to meet the settlers and learn about their lives, and I had parked my car back by the Bedouin camp.

He talked with her for a few minutes, agitated, then put me back on. “He will drive you back to your car,” she said, with a note of genuine concern, not menace. “You should be so careful. The Palestinian people are very terrorist.” Then I got into her comrade’s truck, and he drove me back to the Palestinian community. (I could see from the look on his face that the lift was not a favor but a forced transfer in miniature: They wanted me gone.)

Half a dozen Arab men came to the edge of the road to witness my arrival in a settler truck. When I stepped out, they eyed me carefully. I’m not sure they had ever seen someone who was not a settler emerge from a settler truck. When I got out, the settler drove off, spraying dirt and dust on us all.

I asked one of the men there if they recognized the guy who’d given me a lift. His answer contained the one word everyone at Wadi al-Siq, Israeli or Palestinian, seemed to know in English. “He is a fucking terrorist,” he said.

For the first time since 2006, the Lebanese are again facing the prospect of a devastating war with Israel, on the back of the current conflict in Gaza. Much of the population does not want, and knows it cannot afford, such a war. Lebanon is still in the throes of an economic collapse that began in 2019. Yet Hezbollah, which dominates Lebanon’s political scene, seems moved less by what its countrymen want than by the strategic priorities of its sponsor, Iran.

The Iranians have worked painstakingly in the past decade to build up a redoubtable deterrence capability on Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. Hezbollah realizes that a full-scale conflict might weaken its hold over Lebanon and will try to avoid such an outcome. But ultimately, the party will follow Iran’s lead.  

Earlier this year, Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, began referring to a “unification of the fronts” strategy. The idea was that Iran-backed armed groups, joined into the so-called Axis of Resistance, would coordinate operations against Israel, especially in defense of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Last May, amid clashes in Gaza between Islamic Jihad and Israel, Nasrallah described what this meant in practical terms: “The real headline for the resistance response in Gaza is [the creation of] a joint operations room for the resistance groups.”

Collaborative planning and operations have been facilitated by the fact that leading Hamas officials have relocated to Lebanon in recent months, most of them regarded as representing the pro-Iran, pro-Hezbollah wing of the organization. Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the head of Islamic Jihad, which has long had close ties to Iran, is also based in the country. Although support for the Palestinian cause is at the heart of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s identity, many Lebanese, Shiites among them, remain wary. They recall with trepidation how their country suffered during the Palestinian armed presence from the late 1960s to the early ’80s, particularly when Israel’s retaliation against Palestinian attacks destroyed Shiite villages. That Hezbollah has not factored this into its calculations is surprising.

[Read: Is Israel at war with Iran?]

For Hezbollah, one reason for overlooking the domestic discontent may be that throughout the Middle East, Iran’s effort to increase its influence is succeeding. As far back as the early ’80s, Iran understood that if it empowered and backed cohesive armed groups in fragmented societies, especially Shiite groups, it could then push them into the commanding heights of states even where Shiites were not a majority. Hezbollah was the most successful example of this model, but Iran also replicated it in Iraq in the decade after the 2003 U.S. invasion; in Yemen, where it has supported the Houthis; and in Syria, where it backs the Alawite-dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad.  

The Iranian strategy is not entirely sectarian so much as it is linked to a revolutionary vision of Islam and an ideology of “resistance” directed against the United States, Israel, and conservative Arab countries in the region. From the start, the Iranians sought to build relationships with Sunni Islamist groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. As the French scholar Bernard Rougier wrote in his book Everyday Jihad, Iran’s ambassador in Beirut helped bring radical Sunni Lebanese and Palestinian clerics together to create the Association of Muslim Scholars in early 1982.

What took place on October 7 was part of a broader effort by the Axis of Resistance to expand its sway over the Palestinian cause. The Biden administration has said it’s seen no evidence of Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack, but the point may be a semantic one. Hamas’s leadership in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, as well as the organization’s senior official in Beirut, Saleh al-Arouri, are close to Hezbollah, as is the Islamic Jihad’s al-Nakhalah. Even if the Hamas operation was tightly compartmentalized, Hezbollah must have been aware of aspects of the plan, which means the Iranians were too.

In the past two decades, Iran has taken advantage of U.S. missteps in the Middle East. The U.S. invasion of Iraq eliminated Sunni dominance in the country, allowing Shiite parties with ties to Tehran to seize power. Successive administrations, starting with Barack Obama’s, disengaged from the region. As Obama told The Atlantic in a 2016 interview, “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.” As he saw it, the ensuing equilibrium would allow the United States to refocus on regions more vital to its interests.  

Obama’s words must have been music to Iranian ears—a U.S. president acknowledging Tehran’s stakes in the Middle East while downgrading the U.S. role there. The Iranians took advantage of American disengagement to develop their regional alliances. At the head of this effort was Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whom the United States assassinated in January 2020. In Iraq, he cemented ties with militias in the Popular Mobilization Forces, formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State. Last week, a leading PMF militia, Kataeb Hezbollah, whose leader was assassinated alongside Soleimani, announced that it had joined Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation against Israel and would increase efforts to target the United States.     

Similarly, the conflict in Yemen, which began in 2014, allowed the Iranians to develop relations with Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis, whom they supported in order to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The Houthis are not, strictly speaking, an Iranian proxy force, but they are a part of Iran’s regional network of militias and have close ties with Hezbollah. The Houthis launched cruise missiles and drones either at Israel or at U.S. ships in the Red Sea last week, demonstrating that they are part of the coalition of forces Iran can call on if the Gaza war spreads.

[Read: Hezbollah watches and waits]

In Syria, the Iranians also retain the option to strike Israel from across the Golan Heights. Kheder Khaddour, a scholar of Syria at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told me, “Iran is redeploying [pro-Iranian] militias from northern Syria, including Aleppo, to the country’s south” for a possible conflict there. Israel has bombed the Damascus and Aleppo airports, almost certainly because it anticipates that Iran will open a Golan front in a wider war and use the airports to ferry in weapons.

The Axis of Resistance has shown that Israel is vulnerable—and that if Washington can be made to fear becoming embroiled in a regional war, it will press Israel not to attack Axis members. A week after the October 7 operation, the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid revealed that Iran had warned Israel that, although it did not seek a regional conflict, any land invasion of Gaza would bring about an Iranian intervention. The Biden administration is conducting back-channel talks with Iran, suggesting that the message reached Washington too.

The Americans surely want to avoid another Middle Eastern war in the run-up to the presidential election next year. President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel was partly an effort to hold back the Israelis. He warned them to be “deliberate” and to ask “very hard questions” about whether the path they were on would lead to their desired objectives. Hamas’s release of two American hostages and two Israelis seems to indicate that a broader arrangement may be in the works. But the real message of the past two weeks is that Iran has an extensive network in place to back up its challenge to U.S. priorities in the Middle East.

Villagers in southern Lebanon have been heading north, fearing all-out war. Most schools are closed. Israel has ordered its citizens to vacate 28 towns along the border with Lebanon. The Israeli army has exchanged fire with Hezbollah—Lebanon’s Shia political and paramilitary group—every day since October 7, resulting in casualties on both sides. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said, “We must respond to what is happening in Gaza”; its foreign minister, Amir Abdollahian, warned of a preemptive strike by Iran’s allies against Israel.

And yet, 12 days after the Hamas attack on Israel, the man who holds some of the cards and usually sets the tone, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, is still silent—no speeches, no interviews. For someone who loves to give fiery addresses to his followers and does so regularly, Nasrallah’s reticence is notable and can mean only one thing.   

Hezbollah is keeping its powder (mostly) dry while Iran weighs its options and their possible outcomes. Israel has called up 300,000 reservists, the United States has sent two carrier strike groups to the Mediterranean, and President Joe Biden headed to the region with one word for Hezbollah: “Don’t.” For Tehran, regime survival trumps all considerations—and it requires the survival of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamic Republic’s most valuable asset and a key line of its defense. Every Israeli strike on Gaza, every mass-casualty event, will factor into the calculation as both Iran and Hezbollah assess their next moves.

[Read: A message from Iran]

Washington has said it has no evidence directly linking Tehran to the Hamas attack, but a long-standing, though not always easy, relationship binds the Palestinian group to the Iranian regime. Tehran supplies weapons and money to Hamas, and Hezbollah is reported to have provided training. Over the past year, the head of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, General Esmail Ghaani, worked to coordinate Iran’s proxies, and Nasrallah has spoken often this year of the unification of fronts. The order to initiate the attack may not have come from Tehran, but Hamas could have had a sort of blanket approval for efforts to launch such an operation. Tehran may have little understood what the attack would unleash. Despite Abdollahian’s bombast, the so-called axis of resistance appears somewhat stunned by its own horrifying success, which was in part made possible by Israel’s slow response on the day of the attacks.

“We were expecting to get a smaller number of hostages and return, but the army collapsed in front of us, what were we to do?” was how the Beirut-based Hamas leader Ali Barakeh put it to The Washington Post on Monday.

The unexpectedly high Israeli death toll may be one reason Nasrallah has kept silent—he is hedging, watching to see when and how far the Israeli army will go into Gaza, and whether Hamas will face an existential threat that requires Hezbollah’s response. Even then, Iran would likely prefer to sacrifice Hamas rather than waste Hezbollah, unless Iran itself comes under threat.  

By keeping Israel on edge on its northern border, Hezbollah is in effect already helping Hamas, but doing so within the rules of engagement established after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Both sides understand that script, although the risk of a miscalculation is great. For now, Israeli officials are making clear that they don’t want a war with Lebanon—and simultaneously threatening to destroy the country if Hezbollah goes too far. Hezbollah has put out stern statements saying that it’s responding to enemy fire while, at the same time, having its spokesperson claim that the “skirmishes” are only a “warning.”

Hezbollah learned a hard lesson in 2006 about intervening in a war to back up Hamas. In early June of that year, Israel carried out the targeted killing of a Palestinian leader, and Hamas kidnapped an Israeli conscript, Gilad Shalit. By June 28, Hamas and Israel were at war, and the Israeli army had entered northern Gaza. The war would last for weeks. On July 12, as a show of support for the Palestinians, Hezbollah carried out a cross-border raid into northern Israel and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Three soldiers were killed during the ambush.

The Israeli response to the kidnappings was devastating for Lebanon, involving not only a ground invasion but massive air strikes, which killed an estimated 1,200 civilians; flattened large parts of the capital’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah operates; and caused extensive damage to civilian infrastructure across the country. On August 27, shortly after a cease-fire was declared, Nasrallah made a startling admission in a television interview. “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Much has changed since the 2006 war, for all the parties involved. With Iran’s help, Hezbollah’s capabilities have increased considerably in the past 17 years. The group now has an estimated 60,000 fighters and a stockpile of missiles that went from 14,000 to 150,000 and includes precision guided missiles, according to experts. If Israel can level large parts of Beirut or other areas of Lebanon in the event of an escalation, Hezbollah is now also able to inflict devastating damage deep into Israel. This capability will be factored into Israel’s planning for a ground war in Gaza: How far can Israel go before Hezbollah unleashes a barrage of rockets? One possible scenario is that even an escalation would remain scripted, with both sides opting for precision strikes rather than a barrage of fire.

In parallel with Iran’s expansionist agenda, Hezbollah’s role in the region has grown since 2006. A local Lebanese Shia militia and a political party has now become a regional paramilitary group with a presence in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, much to the dismay of other Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. Since 2013, Hezbollah has been assisting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to brutally put down what had started as a peaceful uprising in 2011. Israel has conducted regular air strikes against Hezbollah and Iranian assets in Syria. Over the weekend, Israel struck the Damascus and Aleppo airports, raising the possibility of a Syrian front against Israel rather than one in Lebanon. Hezbollah would still be involved and play a key role, but Israeli retaliation would target Syria, a country that’s still at war and that has a president who owes his survival to Tehran and will have little say as to whether or how he will participate.

Most concerning for Hezbollah is its domestic and regional standing. In 2006, Nasrallah was seen as an icon who stood up to Israel for 34 days and emerged alive, denying the mighty Israeli army a victory—though at great cost to Lebanon. Israel had wrongly assumed that many Lebanese would blame Hezbollah for attracting Israel’s wrath. But after initial outrage that Hezbollah had dragged the country to war, the Lebanese directed their fury at Israel for destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure and for the high casualty toll. For a few years afterward, according to one poll, Nasrallah was the most popular leader in the Arab world (although he won only 26 percent of the vote).

Today is not 2006, however. Hezbollah has lost its shine in the eyes of much of the Arab world. Lebanon has been exhausted by a three-year economic crisis, and it is still recovering from the massive explosion at the Beirut port in 2020. Many Lebanese assign Hezbollah a portion of the blame for both of these calamities. Over the past two years, Lebanon’s Christian, Druze, and Sunni communities have each had an altercation or a violent clash with Hezbollah. On Friday, Hamas called for demonstrations across the region in support of its cause. Several thousand of Hezbollah’s core supporters answered that call across Lebanon, but the response was overall tepid and performative.

Still, the mood can easily turn, even if not in support of war, toward more vociferous expressions of support for the Palestinians or anger at the United States. In the hours after the al-Ahli hospital was hit in Gaza, several hundred protesters on mopeds drove from the southern suburbs to the U.S. embassy on the northern outskirts of Beirut, setting a nearby building on fire.

Tehran may well have been surprised by the extent of Hamas’s operation, but it is adept at recalibrating. It will capitalize on the global sympathy for Palestinians that the devastating pictures out of Gaza inspire, as well as on the fact that Israeli-Saudi normalization talks are on ice and the U.S. president is being shunned by Arab countries. But despite its bombast and rhetoric, the regime in Iran is not suicidal and will not seek to take a last stand and go down in flames. Whatever Tehran does now, together with Hezbollah, will be carefully calculated to ensure the survival of the regime and a smooth transition for the succession of the 84-year-old Khamenei.

Under pressure at home from an agitated, young population and economic sanctions, surrounded by countries cozying up to his archenemy, Israel, Khamenei has been working to improve Iran’s hand thanks to ties with China and Russia and the use of proxy militias. He also bought some breathing space and legitimacy with the rapprochement with Saudi Arabia in March. He is now using the Palestinian cause to re-burnish his regional credentials.

[Read: Four misconceptions about the war in Gaza]

Diplomacy is only now kicking in, with a sputter. Biden’s meetings with Arab leaders have been canceled in protest at the ongoing Israeli military campaign against Gaza and Washington’s refusal to call for a cease-fire. A political opening may be possible at a much later stage of the conflict, and at that time, Tehran may want a part in regional diplomacy.

In 1990, Iran was still exhausted by the Iran-Iraq war, and its pragmatic president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, wanted his country to be readmitted into the international community. He condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and reconciled with Saudi Arabia after a break of several years. In an effort to further garner the goodwill of the United States, Rafsanjani pushed Iran’s proxies in Lebanon to release the Western hostages that they had been holding since the mid-’80s. But when the 1991 Arab-Israeli peace conference was held in Madrid, Iran was excluded, in a slight it never forgot. Today’s Iran is much different; its president is no Rafsanjani, but the country again has domestic and economic problems that could drive it to seek inclusion or guarantees.  

If the current outbreak of violence leads to an opening for a wider settlement, Iran seems unlikely to get a seat at the table. But stranger things have happened in the Middle East—and Iran’s proxies will have made sure that Tehran has been heard and its price has been set.