few months before he was buried under the rubble of his Beirut bunker, the late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, repeated to his followers, as he had done many times before, his famous line that Israel was “weaker than a spider’s web.” That is, Israel was an artificial implant that structurally was bound to collapse. All it needed was sustained violence and patience. The end result was inevitable: Israel would vanish from the map with a wave of the hand.
The fantasy that Nasrallah peddled to his followers and “resistance” fans was not, on its face, entirely ungrounded. Iran, a much larger country with 10 times the population, was a rising power. Its regional reach spanned from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. It had established missile bases on Israel’s borders, and on a critical maritime passageway in the Red Sea. It controlled four Arab capitals and dominated the landmass across Iraq through Syria into Lebanon. In addition, Iran was allied with the United States’ two great rivals, Russia and China. In short, for Nasrallah and the resistance faithful, it appeared certain that Iran was inexorably ascendant.
In reality, Iran’s winning hand was a mirage. It took Israel 21 months to blow through it—15 of which were during a hostile American administration that actively tried to hobble the Israeli effort, to prevent the Iranian Wizard of Oz and his legions of flying monkeys from being scattered to the winds.
Gaza, Iran’s southern front, is now a wasteland, which, if President Donald Trump implements his stated plan, will be emptied out of most if not all of its inhabitants—or at least those who choose not to live in rubble. Whether Trump’s Gaza plans rise or fall, it’s unlikely that Israel will ever cede control over the strip’s border with Egypt, which means that Gaza as an active front against Israel is gone for good.
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