Hours after spurning a US-led proposal for a 21-day truce with Hizbollah in September, Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that he was changing the balance of power in the region for years to come. Israel’s prime minister had just ordered the assassination of the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, signalling that Israel was turning its focus from Gaza’s wastelands to step up its offensive against the Lebanese militants. As the year ends, the dynamics in the Middle East have unquestionably shifted in Israel’s favour.
The Israeli military’s relentless pounding of Hizbollah forced it into a ceasefire agreement that has essentially given Israel the right to continue striking in Lebanon. Iran appears at its most vulnerable in years. Its “axis of resistance” of Iranian-backed militants, including Hizbollah and Hamas, looks ever more a paper tiger. Israeli bombs destroyed much of the Islamic republic’s air defences in October — the biggest conventional attack on Iran in decades.
The Islamic regime suffered another devastating setback this month when Syrian rebels toppled Bashar al-Assad, the dictator it propped up during Syria’s civil war. Some 4,000 Iranians were rushed out of the country as Iran lost a critical state ally in the Middle East and a vital land link to supply Hizbollah, its most important proxy. Israel may not have had a direct hand in Assad’s spectacular demise, but its pummeling of Iranian targets in Syria, and of Hizbollah, which had also helped shore up the regime, smoothed the rebels’ path to Damascus.