In this episode of International Horizons, Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Center, discusses the possible trajectories of the Israel-Palestine conflict with RBI director John Torpey. Clarke introduces the linkages of Hamas with Iran and the way in which the Iranian government backs a number of different proxy groups in the Middle East. He argues that Hamas miscalculated the attack on Israel and that Israel’s overreaction (backed by the U.S.) is very dangerous, threatening a wider war in the region. Clarke also comments on the role of the “international community” in all this, as there are no credible brokers to negotiate peace, potentially making the conflict harder to end. Moreover, Clarke contends that Israel acknowledges that it will be criticized internationally no matter what it does; thus, the focus of Israel’s policy is on domestic public opinion, which may be backfiring for Netanyahu.

International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes.

John Torpey 

The war between Israel and Hamas rages since Hamas’s gruesome attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, which were the deadliest attacks on Israel since its foundation in 1948. Hamas is affiliated with Iran and with Hezbollah in the so-called “axis of resistance,” and these ties raise questions about whether the war will widen into a regional conflict or even beyond. As I speak, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is on his way to Tel Aviv to try to persuade the Israelis to undertake “humanitarian pauses” to allow aid into the Gaza Strip, where desperate Palestinians suffer severe shortages of food, water, medicine, and fuel. Meanwhile, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has just broken his silence on the war since before the initial Hamas attacks. Will Hezbollah, which is based primarily in Lebanon intervene in the war, with potentially cascading consequences? 

John Torpey 

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

John Torpey 

We are fortunate to have with us today Colin Clarke, who is director of research at the Soufan Group, a security consulting organization. Prior to joining The Soufan Group, Clarke was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he spent a decade researching terrorism, insurgency, and criminal networks. At RAND, Clarke led studies on ISIS financing, the future of terrorism and transnational crime, and lessons learned from all insurgencies since the end of the World War II. His assessment of the threat of a widening war in the Middle East appeared in a New York Times op-ed a week ago. Thank you for joining us today, Colin Clarke.

Colin Clarke 

Thanks so much for having me.

John Torpey 

Great to have you with us. So we just finished listening to Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. He’s just finished giving a speech that’s widely seen, as you know, sort of an indication of Hezbollah’s plans with regard to the Israel-Hamas War, in which it’s mainly stayed out of the conflict so far. So based on his speech, how do you assess what Hezbollah is likely to do next?

Colin Clarke 

Yeah, I mean, it kinda was exactly what I was expecting from him; a lot of tough talk a lot of chest thumping and fiery rhetoric, without actually committing Hezbollah definitively, to further action. I think, you know, much like Iran, Hezbollah has perfected the art of walking right up to the line without crossing it and engendering significant blowback. So, I think they’ve really figured it out… it’s almost like an algorithm and a sense that they almost always know what buttons to push, without having a massive response that follows. It’s kind of, if you think of like, strategic pinpricks, right? and kind of this death by 1000 paper cuts. That’s the way that they operate; that’s the way that Iranian proxies operate. My fear is that with so much US military hardware in the region, all it takes is one miscalculation, one proxy group to go rogue and we’re in on the verge of a very serious regional conflagration. This is not a minor skirmish, like we’ve seen in the past. There’s a lot of assets in the region, and everybody’s got their fingers on the trigger.

John Torpey 

Well, that sounds worrisome, indeed. And certainly your New York Times op-ed struck me anyways, very, rather, very worried about the possible widening. So maybe you could talk to us a little bit about how you see that potentially happening. Maybe it’s just a miscalculation by somebody or trigger happy proxy party of some sort. What do you think is going to happen? And what do you think is the kind of strategic posture of the United States in all this?

Colin Clarke 

Yeah. So, with the US moving into carrier strike groups moving in fed missile battery moving in patriots having, thousands of troops on standby. Initially, I think the first layer to that is deterrence, right. It’s a clear shot across the bow to Tehran of saying, “You need to stay on the sidelines here. We mean business.” It’s unequivocal that the United States is very serious about backing up Israel and engaging in conflict if necessary, I don’t think Washington wants to go there, but stands by ready and prepared to do so.

Colin Clarke 

The second part is force protection, right. And so, there’s already been more than two dozen attacks by Iraqi Shia militia. What we call al-Hashd al-Shaabi, various kinds of Iranian proxy groups like Kataeb, Hezbollah, and others, against US bases in Iraq and Syria. We’ve had reports of multiple US troops and service members that have suffered traumatic brain injuries from that. And so, to me, that’s something to keep an eye on, right? Because there’s only so much the US is going to tolerate with its troops being repeatedly attacked before the US strikes back, right.

John Torpey 

So you’ve just mentioned Iran. And I wonder if you could describe a little bit, you know, how we should think about the relationships between Iran and these other groups.

Colin Clarke 

And we can go back to the Trump administration, where we were getting in this tit-for-tat with the Iraqi Shia militias. And before you knew it, the US killed Qasem Suleimani. So exquisite capabilities on the US side. And I think to me, it’s a clear trigger, or a clear tripwire. You’ve got other actors in the region. We’ve got the Houthis in Yemen, they’ve been popping off missiles toward Israel, they’ve all been kind of intercepted. My sense is that the threat from the Houthis is probably closer to Yemen, and shipping lanes off the coast. And then you got Lebanese Hezbollah, which is the real wildcard here. I think, if we look at Hamas has improved capabilities and what they were able to do on October 7, what Hezbollah brings to the table dwarfs that, right? We’re talking about, in my opinion, the most complete, capable, non-state armed group in the world. And they have been for some time, right. So, if even going back to 9/11, we were talking about Al-Qaeda, I always thought–and this might have even been a quote from Dick Armitage–if Al Qaeda is the B-team Hezbollah was the A team. And this is a group that has been around since the early 1980s, receives hundreds of millions of dollars from Iran each year. They’re battle hardened, they’re experienced, they have high tech weaponry, very, very capable, probably more capable than many nation state militaries. So, if Hezbollah does decide to get into the fray fully, it completely changes the equation of this conflict. And that’s a major concern, I think of mine. And clearly, it’s something on the minds of us policymakers as well.

Colin Clarke 

So, Iran calls at the Axis of Resistance and listening to Nasrallah speech, he made several references to this Axis of Resistance. It’s basically the core of Iranian foreign and security policy and at the Soufan center, we had a report on this back in 2019, called “The Iran’s Playbook,” right, where we kind of laid out how Iran operates in a region they do so through these kind of front groups, these proxy groups because it gives them you know, people call it plausible deniability, I like to call it implausible deniability, because we all know that it’s Iran behind them, and much of the training and the equipment… The important part here, I’d like to focus on is tacit knowledge transfer, right? So this isn’t directions that are being conveyed through the internet. This is hands on training, and there’s no substitute for that. That’s provided by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force IRGC Qf, I mentioned Qasem Soleimani a short while ago, he was the leader of IRGC Quds Force was thought to be the most capable leader that it’s had in some time. Various administrations in the US have flip flopped on whether it’s a foreign terrorist organization or not, but essentially what the Quds Force does is employ a trainer model. So they go out, they train up these proxy groups, the proxy groups can then train one another. But this is Iran’s kind of elite vanguard that they use to act throughout the region. They see these borders on the map as just that just, you know, lines drawn there, they look at the region, the entire region, as their own sandbox.

John Torpey 

Fascinating. So maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that larger picture. I mean, I’m curious, I’m puzzled, why did Hamas do this at the particular moment that it did it? and why did it do it with such brutality? I mean, I’m no expert, of course, but it did seem to me that that was intentional, and an effort to provoke a certain kind of response, which it seems to me in many ways they’re getting from Israel, for better or worse. So what do you make of the timing and the aims of Hamas’ attacks.

Colin Clarke 

So let’s start with the second piece of that, which is brutality. I mean, this was a savage attack by any definition, targeting civilians in really quite heinous and barbaric ways, and bodies that were mutilated reports of rape. Now, there’s a lot of people that want to argue over whether babies were beheaded or not. But let’s just focus on the fact that babies were killed. And I think that’s enough whether or not they were beheaded. I didn’t want to wade into that because it’s now become subsumed by disinformation. The fact that babies were killed to me speaks to the barbarism enough.

Colin Clarke 

I think Hamas actually miscalculated here big time. If you heard Benjamin Netanyahu come out, he started soon after the attacks equating Hamas with ISIS and “Hamas is ISIS. Hamas is ISIS” and it’s catchy, and it’s a good slogan, it’s a good bumper sticker. Hamas isn’t ISIS. And it’s not ISIS for a lot of reasons. And I’m actually writing a piece on that right now. But the fact that Hamas’ attack was so barbaric, opens the door to that analogy in comparison, I think is actually quite counterproductive for Hamas’ goals. So now let’s shift to the first part of that, which is Hamas’ objectives. A lot of speculation there. We don’t quite know exactly why Hamas did this, and there’re all sorts of hypotheses and conspiracy theories, especially the closer you get to the region, the closer you get to some of these conspiracy theories. In the piece I wrote for The Times, I mentioned the timing of this in terms of… we went from a place where people were talking about the potential for an historic deal between the Israelis and the Saudis and normalization of the Saudis, kind of joining the Abraham Accords,  where these kind of normalization deals brokered by the Trump administration with Israel and UAE, Israel, and Bahrain, a handful of other countries, including Morocco, I think, Sudan. And this is essentially detente, right? This is a kind of peace agreement that’s largely built on economics and trade.

Colin Clarke 

So, I think that’s part and parcel of this is one to kind of torpedo any normalization talks, because it makes it far more difficult for the Saudis now, to move forward with that. I do think the deal is potentially still on the table. And I think that’s almost a whole other podcast interview about the details and nuances of that.

Colin Clarke 

And the Palestinians were sidelined and marginalized and all of this. And so to me, one of the possible motivations, in terms of timing, was the Iranians, preparing Hamas, giving them the equipment, giving them the capabilities to conduct this type of attack that would inevitably draw a harsh Israeli reaction. And I think, Israel has every right to defend itself 1400 of its citizens were killed. We wouldn’t expect anything less. I think, almost like 9/11. And there were a lot of 9/11 comparisons to saying this is Israel’s 9/11. I think the most apt part of that analogy is the risk in Israel overreacting in the same way the United States did, and falling right into the trap, or the plans of its adversary of getting dragged in to an occupation, to a conflict that’s going to set blood and treasure, draw the ire of the Arab and Islamic world. And the United States embarked on 20 years, were the global war on terrorism, which was terribly named, because how do you declare war on a tactic? Really what we were at war, was it with Al-Qaeda. But the goalposts kept moving back, then it was the Taliban. We spent 20 years in Afghanistan, only to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. And, you know, at the same time, taking our eye off strategic competitors near peers like China and Russia.

Colin Clarke 

Then there’s talk about one of these trade routes that President Biden announced after, or on the heels of the G20, which was going to kind of route through the Middle East, and very much the normalization deal is a linchpin of that potential trade route, which interestingly cuts out Iran. And so, we don’t know how much of a factor that was. But these are some of the things that could have played a role. And like anything else, it’s multifactorial, right? I think it was a bit of a perfect storm, including in the way that I don’t even think in their wildest dreams Hamas could have seen an attack this successful, right. Everything had to line up perfectly for Hamas. Everything had to line up poorly for Israel. And I think if you played this attack out in a military simulation 1000 times you might get the outcome you saw only once; it was really just a perfect storm of factors and variables that led us to where we are.

John Torpey 

Fascinating. So, I mean, I guess the question in a way that appears to me now is to say is this real winning? I mean, militarily, it seems unambiguous that Israel can subdue Hamas. It can, and his leveling much of the Gaza Strip. But you know, the way it’s doing at or the fact that it’s doing that is raising, as you just said, much of the ire of the Islamic and Arab world. And so what does it mean to win? I mean, their strategic objective is to decapitate or eliminate Hamas. But various people have pointed out, it’s hard to eliminate an ideology. So, you know, what can they really do? And are they shooting themselves in the foot by what seems as much like revenge, as you know, war with strategic games?

Colin Clarke 

Very complicated. When I was at RAND, we did a study, where we looked at 71 insurgencies from the end of World War Two to 2009, which was the universe, and we kind of pulled through all the different factors and variables. The genesis of the project was, what do counter insurgent forces do? What are their best practices? Right? What are the lessons learned, and one of them was they don’t engage in some of the things that we’re seeing now, which is the strikes that injure large numbers of civilians; this kind of draconian scorched earth response that the Israelis are engaging in; cutting off water, electricity, what we would call collective punishment, is usually counterproductive, in the long run for a lot of these insurgencies. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that Hamas is hiding out amongst civilians, right? I mean, it’s not the Israelis just deciding we’re gonna go in and start killing civilians willy nilly, they’re going after targets and command and control nodes that have nested themselves among civilian populations. Right. So when we talk about war crimes, we have to acknowledge that Hamas is deliberately putting Palestinian civilians at risk. And I have to ask, does Hamas actually care about the lives of Palestinians? Right? People say the Israelis don’t care? You know, and certainly, I think, when it comes to Western militaries, the way that the Israelis are going about this is hard to watch, when you see images of dead children, right? At the same time, those children are being killed because the targets are hiding out amongst them. And so the real losers in this are Palestinian civilians. They’re caught in the crossfire of a war between a terrorist group and a nation state with a military that’s hell bent on revenge. And that’s understandable. Right? So, I think is Israel is clearly capable of winning this militarily in terms of, you know, if we define that as inflicting damage, more damage on the adversary, but they’re definitely going to lose in the information space. Right. And in 2023, most wars are decided in the information environment. And I’m not sure the Israelis take consideration of that. And part of that, and I have many Israeli friends, including friends that have served in the IDF, who have said a long time ago, the decision was that no matter what Israel does, the international community’s going to look upon it harshly. And so, they’ve stopped attempting to win over international public opinion, and they’re mostly focused on domestic; they don’t really care what people abroad think they just care what their domestic population thinks. But even that is no longer unified because of Netanyahu. I think he’s been extremely divisive. He said to people, essentially, his kind of slogan was, you may not like me, right? You may not like my policies, but I’ll keep you safe. And now that’s gone. Right now, that luster is gone. So, what does he bring to the table? And there was a piece in Foreign Affairs recently, where Amy Ayalon and some others, the former director of Shin Bet said, “Netanyahu gotta go not after the war. He’s got to go. Now. He’s not capable of leading the country during this conflict. And he’s certainly not suitable to be the leader of this country after this attack happened on his watch.” And I wrote a piece for our monitor a few weeks ago, where I kind of broke down the Israeli intelligence failure. And look, a lot of this was well known. I mean, if you watch the protests that were taking place in Israel, in the lead up to this event, they were all based on Netanyahu was power grab; his attempting to kind of grab the reins of the Supreme Court in the judiciary, right? Very selfish, self-centered, it was about helping himself stay out of this corruption charge. Well, there were interviews with IDF, reservists and others on the streets who are out there protesting saying, “this is negatively impacting military readiness.” There was a story by Mark Mazetti, and some others in The Times that really got into the details here. People were coming to Netanyahu saying, “the lights are flashing red, and he didn’t want to hear it.” Right. And so, I think a lot of the blame for the initial October 7 attack clearly lies with him. The question now is he attempting to kind of salvage his legacy by destroying Hamas? And I think maybe that’s something we could talk about, because I don’t think it’s actually possible to destroy Hamas. And I think the pursuit of that is likely to be highly counterproductive for the Israelis.

John Torpey 

Right. I mean, it seems to me there’s a lot of criticism within Israel. It’s not anti Semites and Israel haters around the world, it’s within Israel. Netanyahu is held responsible for much of what has happened. And, whether he’s using the situation to try to maintain his longevity, one could argue about, but seems certainly like a possibility.

John Torpey 

But I’m curious what would you say about Hamas, and its kind of place in the Palestinian political universe, you know, one hears, similarly, a great deal of critical commentary on Hamas as a self-interested party, as not concerned really about the Palestinian people, those kinds of things. And now it has brought death and destruction on a lot of Palestinians. So, how are they going to get out of this? Even if some people in that region think that they did a great thing by what they did on October 7?

Colin Clarke 

That’s going to be very difficult, right? I mean, I’ll skip ahead to how I think this conflict could end. And I think the only way that it actually ends, right, and that we’re not back at this in 6-12, 18 months, is a political settlement. I mean, even the Israelis, I think, have come around to that realization that this is only going to end with the Palestinians getting a state. Now, there are people who are saying “that can’t be the outcome of this, because it then just encourages terrorists and incentivizes them, right that if you launch an attack, you’re gonna get what you want.” But they’ve been denied the state. It’s a very complex situation, right? I’m trying to talk to some lay people about this. And, you know, how far do we go back? Do we go back to the First Intifada, do we go back to 1967? 1948? Like, where can we go back? It’s not as black and white as many would like it to be. Even compared to Russia, Ukraine, which there was a little bit clearer, at least in my mind, of “good guys and bad guys” (quote, unquote.) And I’m not suggesting at all that Hamas isn’t a bad actor. It’s a terrorist group that attack civilians. But at the same time, why do people join Hamas? Right, and I’ve studied a lot about what motivates people to join violent non-state actor groups, and 2 million people living in a densely populated area. If you look at the demographics, extremely young, right youth bulge, massive unemployment, that’s a perfect dish for radicalization and for people joining these groups.

Colin Clarke 

Now, a lot of hardliners didn’t like that. So, they broke off, you had continuity, IRA, you had the real IRA, right, you have the splinter groups. And that’s a normal part of when terrorist organizations transform into political parties, it’s actually what I wrote my PhD dissertation on. So, I know a little bit about it. We’ve seen similar evolutions in South Africa, with the African National Congress, right before he was known as a peacemaker. Nelson Mandela was an insurgent for lack of a better term.

Colin Clarke 

So moreover, Netanyahu was trying to play off the Hamas with Palestinian Authority; divide and conquer back and forth. And so that’s part of it. So, in any kind of future Palestinian state, as unpalatable as it might seem, and it’s especially unpalatable right now, Hamas is likely going to have some sort of governing role. You know, it’s not just going to be the West bankers. It’s not just going to be Muhammad Abbas and his crew. When we look at political solutions that are durable, they often include some of the most unsavory actors, right? Otherwise, those actors go back to the field and continue fighting. Even still, if Hamas were to agree to be part of some kind of future Palestinian state, you’re likely going to have a fraction of the group that splinters off. The hardliners that say “we will never agree to a deal,” because if you look at Hamas, its charter, much of it is about the destruction of Israel, right? There are people that are truly committed to that; they actually don’t care about a Palestinian state. We saw this with the IRA in Northern Ireland, with the transformation of the IRA, the shift and resources to Shin Fein, which is the political party, folks that were former IRA commanders like Jeremy Adams and Martin McGuinness then becoming part of the formal government in Northern Ireland.

Colin Clarke 

So, I would say, look at the history of Israel against the British, right. So, the Stern Gang, all these other groups that got their start, but then became politicians. So there’s precedent for this. Nobody wants to talk about rewarding Hamas at the moment. But if we are going to be realistic about a future Palestinian state, it’s likely that some kind of Gaza or Hamas representation is going to be necessary for that to be viable going forward.

John Torpey 

Interesting. So maybe as the last question, I’d ask you, how long do you think this is going to take to play out? I mean, it doesn’t look good at the moment, but there are more discussions about possible deals and continuation of normalization that has surprised me. So, how long is this going to take to play out? And sort of how does it relate to other conflicts in the world, particularly Ukraine?

Colin Clarke 

It’s really anybody’s guess how long this is going to take to play out? I’m already surprised at, typically, when these conflicts flare up, there’s about a week’s worth of media attention, and then things fade. We’re now moving on a month, and actually, it’s getting more attention than ever. And that just kind of gives you a sense of how important this particular conflict is. I mean, I go back to grad school, when I had a professor that asked, “who in here wants to be a diplomat, who wants to work for the State Department.” And I’d say maybe a quarter of the class, maybe a little bit more raised their hands. And he said, “I urge you to go to the Israeli-Palestinian file or portfolio.” And somebody said, “Well, why professor?” And he said, “well, the conflict’s never going to end. So you’ll have lifelong employment.” And a couple of people chuckled and looking back on it, I’m not sure that he was joking. Right. So I don’t know how long this will take to be resolved. Again, there’s the military part, there’s the diplomatic part, I think the hostages complicate this further. There’s so many different vectors here. The answer is it’s likely to take a really long time. And I don’t think the outcome is going to be satisfactory for any of the sides.

Colin Clarke 

But again, that’s typically how you get a durable solution, right? If everybody gets what they want, if one side gets everything they want, and another doesn’t, well, you’re going to be kind of back in the situation sooner rather than later. So we talk all the time about the international community, right? I mean, I guess I’ve never been more cynical about the international community than I am now. What does that mean? Who’s coming to the table? Right, who are the great powers in great power competition? You know, Russia certainly shouldn’t be considered in that and they’re waging their own war of aggression in Ukraine. You know, the Chinese got a lot of credit for brokering a, (quote unquote) “rapprochement between the Saudis and the Iranians a few months ago.” Well, how’s that holding up? Right, the region’s back in conflict. And the US, frankly, can’t be trusted as an honest broker because of overt support to one side and the conflict, which is Israel. So who steps in here, and kind of acts as a mediator. I think even the UN itself lacks a lot of credibility. You know, Guterres came out and said, “the attack can’t be viewed in a vacuum” right? What he meant was that this is a very complicated and nuanced issue, but the way that he said it, the timing, and people will hear what they want to hear was not received warmly, especially in Israel. So I don’t see a clear broker here. I mean, people have talked about Turkey and some others. But but who is objective enough and who doesn’t have a dog in the fight to the point where they’d be trusted by both sides to move this forward? And I don’t see anybody waiting in the wings to do that. So I’m pretty pessimistic about the outcome of this, even when the fighting stops, I don’t see a clear political resolution forthcoming.

John Torpey 

Well, that’s the sad, kind of bottom line. But unfortunately, I tend to agree with you. I think this is going to take a long time. And it’s going to bleed in a way into the previous conflicts that you mentioned, 1967 1948, and it’s just going to continue to seem like it just is intractable. And that’s sad for the people in the region, certainly.

Colin Clarke 

So what’s the thing that say about the Middle East things can, things can always get worse before they get worse?

John Torpey 

I hadn’t heard that. But alas, sounds like it makes some sense.

John Torpey  So that’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Colin Clarke of the Soufan group for sharing his insights on the war between Israel and Hamas. Remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on SoundCloud, Spotify and Apple podcasts I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons