Assassinations by Israel give it a short-term high but no durable peace

The resolution of the Israel-Palestine problem hinges on a two-state solution.

The killing of Hezbollah chief in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday is a definite marker in the recent history of volatile Middle East. This is a prized moment for Israeli forces. But it raises questions about the long-term efficacy of a strategy that has been employed repeatedly.

How effective is the strategy of decapitating top leaders in defanging and deflating militant organisations across different contexts and ecosystems?

In its long-standing conflict with both Hezbollah and Hamas, Israel has resorted to this strategy in the hope that eliminating their leaders would throw these groups into disarray, leaving them unable to recover to their previous strength.

Though their avowed enmity with Israel is a common factor, both these outfits operate differently. Unlike Hamas which operates in Gaza strip under the constricting gaze of Israel in many ways, Hezbollah is a state within state with sophisticated weaponry and social capital in Lebanon.

Assassinations that didn’t work

Israel, however, uniformly employed the strategy of targeting the top leadership of these two groups. For example, Israel killed Hezbollah’s military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus in 2008, in one of the defining moments in the four-decade long furtive war between Israeli-intelligence and Hezbollah. But the outfit grew stronger in the following years.

Israel consistently employed the same tactics against Hamas. In 2004, Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, when the outfit was taking a different turn from its origins. Yassin’s killing was viewed as a strategy to strangle the outfit into a slow death.

Almost two decades, on the October 7, 2023, the same Hamas launched one the most daring attacks on the territory of Israel, resulting in the deaths of around 1,200 Israelis and a massive hostage-crisis. The attack pricked the notions of impregnable nature of Israel’s security-apparatus and plunged the Middle East into another bout of war.

More recently, Israel claimed to have killed Mohammed Deif, a key Hamas military commander, and one of the master-minds of the October attack in July this year. Despite this and all the sophistry of Israeli armed forces the war still rages on in Gaza.

Hamas and Hezbollah are different and can be differentiated in many ways, but their conjoined past against Israel makes their present and future interlinked.

In 1982, Israel sent its army to Lebanon in response to Palestinian militant attacks, leading to the formation of a coalition of Islamist groups with Iran’s help with the just killed Hezbollah chief Nasrallah as an eager early recruit. Known as "Islamic Jihad," this coalition launched major suicide bombings against the “invaders” and later targeted U.S. and French peacekeepers. By 1985 these groups came under the banner of Hezbollah, or "Party of God." That year, Hezbollah issued its manifesto, condemning the U.S. and the USSR while calling for Israel's destruction.

The US experience in targeted killings

This hot-pursuit has never been an exclusive preserve of Israel. The US too went after the leaders of militant and terrorist groups in hopes of finishing off their organisations.

Each killing of a leader was hailed as a breakthrough, but it could never serve as an end in itself. For instance, the U.S. killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006. Yet, within a decade, the group transformed into ISIS, which controlled vast territories and orchestrated major terrorist attacks, including the 2015 Paris attacks.

More than anything else, a sustained, localised military campaign supported by excellent intelligence led to the decline of ISIS's once-threatening expansionist agenda. The Iraqi and Syrian forces played their part in it.

But that never deterred the strategy of killing the leaders of these outfits.

The US eliminated Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in 2016 but failed to foresee or forestall the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan.

The U.S. has similarly pursued leaders of militant groups in hopes of crippling their organisations. The 2006 killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was seen as a breakthrough, but eight years later, the group evolved into ISIS, which controlled vast territories and orchestrated major attacks, such as the 2015 Paris attacks.

Cookie-cutter solutions are a myth

More than anything else, a sustained, localised military campaign supported by excellent intelligence led to the decline of ISIS's once-threatening expansionist agenda. The Iraqi and Syrian military played their part as much as the American military power. Each situation and each organisation needs a different approach and treatment and there is never a one-size fits all solution to fixing any problem.

Most of these outfits operate on many moorings, derive sympathy and anger for the same deeds from different quarters. Factors of history, compulsions of geography and imperatives of geopolitics come into play in countries shaping their response even to mounting humanitarian crises.

While there is no condoning of the terrorist tactics and taking of hostages, the resolution of the Israel-Palestine problem hinges on a two-state solution. And the path to that destination is paved with discussions to find a political solution.