OPINION:
If Israel and Lebanon had been teetering on the brink of war for nearly a year, Hezbollah’s strike in Majdal Shams on Saturday, which killed 12 Israeli children, could tip matters over the edge.
The tit-for-tat that erupted nine months ago quickly became a war of attrition that has decimated both sides of the border, displacing tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese. This conflict has always been one mistake away from erupting into a full conflagration between Israel and Hezbollah that promises to be even bloodier than the war in the Gaza Strip.
On Oct. 8, Hezbollah unilaterally ignited the border between the two countries to support its allied terrorist groups in Gaza. Its objectives, laid out in a Nov. 3 speech by its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, were clear: to divide Israel’s attention and forces along two fronts and increase the cost the Israelis would bear to prosecute their war in Gaza. Hezbollah’s ultimate purpose was to force Israel into a premature cease-fire so “the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, in particular Hamas, will emerge victorious,” to fight the Israelis again in the future.
Enter the diplomats. French and American envoys have spent months shuttling back and forth to Beirut and Jerusalem to avert this conflict — they’ve brought to bear every carrot, every bit of leverage they have in Lebanon to get the Lebanese to save themselves and restrain Hezbollah, or at least cajole the group into backing down by halting its attacks or withdrawing from the border with Israel. To no avail. The group answers to higher powers in Iran and will not disarm or withdraw from the region, and is stubbornly sticking to its promise to continue attacking Israel until the latter halts its campaign in Gaza. In desperation, then, the emissaries of Washington and Paris have been trying to merely restore quiet to the Blue Line — the de facto boundary between Israel and Lebanon — by any means possible.
But quiet has become a sacrosanct end, not merely a means to gradually degrade Hezbollah. Since taking office, the Biden administration has wanted to reorient U.S. foreign policy to other fronts — namely, supporting Ukraine and confronting China. It has also become imperative to silence the emerging discord over Gaza that threatens to tear the Democratic Party asunder in a critical election year.
The cease-fire proposals are therefore focused on ending the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah for now. They center on some mixture of distancing Hezbollah a handful of kilometers from the Blue Line coupled with the unreliable guarantee that the Lebanese military and the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon will prevent them from returning — despite the failure of these forces to restrain the group in any way for decades.
To give Lebanon incentive to accept of these deals, as if the ultimate decision were Beirut’s, these Western powers have reportedly offered sweeteners: to help Lebanon overcome its presidential impasse, provide the financially crippled country with economic assistance, or to resolve its outstanding border disputes with Israel — on the assumption that doing so will deprive Hezbollah of continued justification to attack the Jewish state.
At best, this would achieve a cosmetic resolution to the conflict raging on Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah’s enmity toward Israel and its designs to destroy it would remain — and a cease-fire, without more, would give Hezbollah breathing room to resume its rearmament and preparations, to attack Israel at a more advantageous time later.
That time will come because the group’s enmity toward Israel is unconditional and uncompromising. Hezbollah believes the Jewish state has been built upon stolen Arab land that is sacred to Islam and must therefore be destroyed. Yet the group opposes not just Israel, but Judaism itself, which it considers the true source of the problem.
Proposals to calm the northern border leave Israel to choose from a series of bad options. The first is to bow to the pressure arrayed against it — from the U.S. administration and the international community, a growing domestic constituency opposed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s premiership and the grind of a 10-month war.
At best, this would restore a deceptive, Oct. 6-style quiet to the north and allow the 80,000 Israelis displaced from the region to return to their homes in the shadow of Hezbollah’s ominous presence. But it would enable Hezbollah to claim victory and erase any semblance of Israeli deterrence: The group would say that it not only endured a 10-month Israeli onslaught, but that it also accomplished something unprecedented — for itself or any other Arab force — of creating a de facto no-man’s-land in Israel and forcing the Jewish state to seek the group’s permission for Israeli citizens to return home.
This would damage Israeli morale while giving a Hezbollah a much-needed popularity boost at home. Demonstrating Israeli frailty would also help justify the group’s demand of its own base that it continue enduring the pain necessary to liberate the Palestinians from the river to the sea.
The alternative option for Israel would be to go to war against Hezbollah, despite being battered by the Oct. 7 massacre and subsequent war in Gaza, bruised by international opprobrium and growing isolation, and without the guaranteed but vital support of its most critical ally, the United States. War could eliminate the spreading threat to Israel’s security before it becomes existential. It could also prove far more painful than the war in Gaza, in light of Hezbollah’s arsenal of 200,000 rockets, missiles and drones whose quality is far superior to that of anything in Hamas’ hands.
But there is a third option, one that could avert a war: for the United States to demonstrably back Israel’s right to defend itself, including through a campaign in Lebanon, while holding Beirut’s — and not Jerusalem’s — feet to the fire. Washington’s message to Hezbollah should be that, if its provocations continue, it stands to suffer irreversible and inescapable consequences. This restoration of U.S.-backed Israeli deterrence could keep the group in check indefinitely.
• David Daoud is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) focusing on Israel, Hezbollah and Lebanon. Follow him on X @DavidADaoud.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.