This article was originally published with Amwaj
Since the Palestinian Hamas movement’s outrageous attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Tel Aviv has found itself in a multifront war that it cannot win militarily. Israel’s military superiority has lost the ability to deliver a strategic punch against a network of networks administered by Iran. This highlights how in the decade or so following the Arab Spring protests, networked non-state actors have become the key movers and shakers in the region—outperforming state hierarchies on matters of resilience.
Israel is now finding itself encircled by the most potent network in the region: the ‘Axis of Resistance’. The Iran-led umbrella entity gathers Iraqi Shiite armed groups, Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Syrian government, and Yemen’s Ansarullah movement, better known as the Houthis. These state and non-state actors are deeply embedded in the socio-political fabric of the region.
While the standoff between Tehran and Tel Aviv has remained largely in the greyzone in recent years, it has following Oct. 2023 been gradually moving out of the sub-threshold space. Israel has been able to fight Hamas to a stalemate—at an unacceptable human cost to Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip—but along the border with Lebanon, the costs of the war of attrition with Hezbollah have become increasingly unbearable for Tel Aviv.
Resilience of network of networks
The networks on which the Islamic Republic relies predate the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Transnational Shiite networks connecting Iran via Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and beyond date back centuries, providing clerics, communities and civil-societal leaders with access and connectivity. Indeed, the Islamic Revolution relied on these networks to mobilize support for the theocracy established in Iran in 1979. The emerging Axis has also provided the Iranian state with further strategic depth.
To counter the most potent hierarchies in the region—namely the US and the Israeli military—Iran has invested in heterarchies loosely tied together under the banner of the ‘resistance narrative’. At the heart of this networked strategy is the notion of dispersion and de-centralization. In so doing, Iran has translated the western military concept of mission command—centralized intent but de-centralized execution—from the operational to the strategic level. In this framework, Iran provides its partners with varying degrees of autonomy in strategic and operational decision-making. Cut off from global supply chains and financial services, Tehran has in effect externalized statecraft to alliance networks.
Even on the organizational level, the nodes in Iran’s ‘resistance’ network exhibit a hybrid of hierarchical and networked formations. Hezbollah and the Houthis consist of different cells that revolve like satellites around the jihad councils as hubs for direction. It is through these hubs that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) maintains connectivity with the various nodes in the network. The various operational cells in these organizations operate as swarms, seemingly amorphous, but still coordinated and united under one overall strategic objective. Learning from bees and birds, these cells are able to strike simultaneously from various directions with relatively small units that a major hierarchical organization such as the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) finds hard to engage with overwhelming firepower.
An all-out war with Hezbollah, an integral hub of the ‘Axis of Resistance’, would likely expose Israel to the most damaging war in its history. Hundreds of thousands of missiles, drones and rockets are aimed at every inch of Israeli territory. Doomed if it does, doomed if it does not, Israel is strategically boxed in by a networked system that Iran has been building in the region since the 1970s. Concentrating overwhelming firepower against a decentralized network of networks will not meet Israel’s objectives. This is partly because the very center of gravity in the ‘Axis of Resistance’ is not just its grand strategic narrative of ‘resistance’, but the umbrella organization’s network format in itself.
Broader mandates at play
On the system level, the ‘Axis of Resistance’ does not just consist of local military cells. It is also made up of global financial vehicles to reportedly launder money; provides logistical components to ship arms and material support across the network; generates cultural and educational structures to maintain ideological buy-in from the ground; operates media outlets to shape perceptions regionally and globally; and offers governance that provides public goods as quasi-state entities in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. Each of its hubs break down into networks as well, leaving Israel with the Sisyphean task of eliminating individual nodes without bringing down the organization as a whole.
What Tehran has created is an organic network that is self-sustaining. In the past, the Axis relied on funding from the Iranian hub, but the Islamic Republic is presently focusing on transfers of technology and know-how across the network. As for the operational burden of ‘armed resistance’, it can be shared. And even if support for Hamas has been largely performative so far, the dispersed nature of various cuts being inflicted on Israel simultaneously has left the IDF exposed in a costly war of attrition on multiple fronts and domains.
Most of all, the network model allows Iran to play a three-dimensional game where moves are happening simultaneously. Israel, on the other hand, is playing sequential chess on a two-dimensional space. While Tel Aviv is relying on overwhelming firepower to ‘annihilate’ actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah, they do not measure their performance in binary terms.
In simple terms, the ‘Axis of Resistance’ wins by simply not losing. And Israel is losing by not winning. In this equation, as long as the Axis is able to impose costs, the IDF will be unable to construct a victory narrative—despite any tactical achievements. More so, since Oct. 7 the cumulative effect of dispersed and yet coordinated armed operations launched by Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi armed groups have increased the pressure on Tel Aviv. What was once a greyzone space in which Israel enjoyed escalatory dominance is now a standoff too costly for Israel to sustain indefinitely.
Looking ahead
The networked approach Iran is relying upon for its national security and to project power appears far more resilient over time than the hierarchical approach Israel is taking through its military. Deep strikes to decapitate Hezbollah or IRGC cells are meaningless in a networked space as no node is central enough to strategically disrupt the Axis. Connections can easily be rerouted even if one or more nodes are eliminated.
Meanwhile, as Iran leads a networked regional order, Israel seems to limit statecraft to the iron fist delivered by its military hierarchy. In absence of a political strategy, the IDF finds itself in an infinite game of Whac-A-Mole, having to respond to a growing number of disruptive activities across a widening three-dimensional battlespace.
An all-out war with Hezbollah—as destructive as it might be for the Iran-backed group and Lebanese civilians—might bring Israeli society to the brink of collapse, especially if other nodes in the Axis simultaneously end their restraint. Indeed, the ‘Unity of Fronts’ strategy—pillared on an ‘All for one and one for all’ mentality—will surely kick in if Iran fears that its long-term investment in Lebanon is at stake. At a time when Israel’s omnipotence and invincibility is put into question by the Arab street, Israel would be well advised not to test the resilience and resolve of the ‘Axis of Resistance’.
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