{"id":114239,"date":"2024-07-18T17:05:32","date_gmt":"2024-07-18T15:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=114239"},"modified":"2024-07-17T18:01:12","modified_gmt":"2024-07-17T16:01:12","slug":"18-05-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=114239","title":{"rendered":"The Lebanon War Is Coming"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Lebanon War Is Coming<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

JUDITH MILLER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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MANU BRABO\/GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Whose side will America be on?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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Israel faces a conundrum to which there is no easily discernible, sustainable solution: how best to counter the growing strategic threat posed by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group that runs Lebanon.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On July 4, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets and more than 20 drones into northern Israel\u2014one of its largest attacks to date\u2014after Israel killed yet another of its high-ranking commanders in a drone strike in the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre. Lebanon\u2019s National News Agency said that Muhammad Nimah Nasser, aka Abu Nimah, was killed along with two other passengers in the drone strike on July 3. Nasser, the head of Hezbollah\u2019s Aziz unit, was reportedly responsible for military operations in southwestern Lebanon and for firing hundreds of rockets into Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nasser is the latest senior Hezbollah commander to be killed since Oct. 7, when Palestinian Hamas slaughtered some 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 240 hostages in the deadliest single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel has killed seven Hezbollah lieutenant generals and some 360 fighters and commanders overall, according to estimates. For its part, Israel has lost at least 19 soldiers and 12 civilians in rockets fired from Lebanon.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hezbollah\u2019s latest rocket and drone barrage\u2014part of a total of some 7,000\u00a0rockets and missiles<\/a>\u00a0that it has fired into Israel since Oct. 7\u2014has increased concern about a possible escalation of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza into a full-scale conflict between the two heavily armed foes. With some 45,000 fighters and an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets, drones, and missiles, many of them precision-guided, Hezbollah has always posed a far greater strategic threat to Israel than Hamas, which has been significantly degraded since Israel\u2019s offensive in Gaza.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Biden administration\u2019s ongoing effort to broker an agreement between Israel and Hezbollah promises to hand the terror group a major win.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Moreover, while world attention has been focused on the Gaza war to Israel\u2019s south, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s focus has been on the north. His government has been under increasing political pressure to find a way to allow the estimated 70,000 Israelis who fled Hezbollah\u2019s missiles and shelling there and have been living in hotels and temporary shelters to return home. The depopulation of the north near Lebanon and parts of southern Israel near Gaza has hurt Israel\u2019s economy and depressed morale. \u201cA 5-kilometer swatch of Israel in the north has effectively been rendered uninhabitable by Israel\u2019s foes without occupation,\u201d said Peter Berkowitz, a fellow at the Hoover Institute who worked in former President Trump\u2019s State Department. \u201cThe land of Israel has become so small,\u201d said Smadar Perry, the Arab affairs correspondent for Yediot Ahronoth, Israel\u2019s largest newspaper.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hezbollah has said it will stop firing rockets and missiles into Israel when there is a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza\u2014a position that has been endorsed by the Biden administration and that now serves as the basis for its diplomatic initiative to broker a cease-fire on the Lebanese front. Still, American and Arab negotiators say that while progress has been made in this latest round of talks, such a deal between Israel and Hamas may not be imminent. Nor is it immediately clear that Hezbollah would stop its tit-for-tat strikes.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Even if a cease-fire is negotiated, Israeli analysts say, Hezbollah has repeatedly violated previous agreements with and commitments to Israel. Moreover, the U.S. initiative\u00a0reportedly<\/a>\u00a0adopts the Lebanese side\u2019s insistence that Israel stop all flights over Lebanon, hampering the IDF\u2019s ability to monitor and interdict Hezbollah\u2019s military buildup, something Israeli intelligence would be reluctant to do, and which would put Israel at a strategic disadvantage.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Soon after Oct. 7, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah\u2019s leader, indicated that his \u201cParty of God\u201d did not intend to open a second front when Israel invaded Gaza to decapitate Hamas\u2019 leadership and destroy its ability ever to harm Israelis again. Nasrallah and his patron, Iran, undoubtedly feared jeopardizing the military presence the group has steadily built up since its last major clash with Israel in 2006. During that war, which Hezbollah provoked by killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers, Israel bombed the homes and offices of Hezbollah\u2019s leaders in Beirut\u2019s southern suburbs and decimated the country\u2019s infrastructure.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nasrallah subsequently expressed regret for the war, which the Lebanese blamed on Hezbollah, saying that he never imagined that the capture of two Israeli soldiers would result in a war \u201cof this magnitude.\u201d Now, as in 2006, Hezbollah prefers the ongoing tempo of contained tit-for-tat strikes, allowing the group to achieve significant tactical and strategic gains without incurring the cost of massive devastation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The current stalemate suits not only Hezbollah, but also its Iranian patron. Tehran has made good use of Hezbollah and its other proxy militias to keep Israel and its allies on the defensive and to set new precedents that advantage Iran. Attacks on ships in the Red Sea by the Iranian-supported Houthi militants in Yemen have depressed shipping there, giving Iran the de facto ability to obstruct freedom of navigation and global trade.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet Tehran\u2019s strategic gains are only partly the result of actions by its regionwide network of proxies. They are also a consequence of a U.S. posture that has failed to punish Iranian-inspired aggression while calling for restraint by Iran\u2019s targets. For months, American forces in Syria and Iraq were forced to protect themselves against repeated attacks by Iranian proxies. In Omani-mediated\u00a0talks<\/a>\u00a0with Iran last March, the Biden administration pleaded with the Iranians to curb these attacks. U.S. ally Jordan, too, continues to fear infiltration from Iranian-backed fighters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Soon after Oct. 7, Israel, fearing that Hezbollah militants might cross the border and seize Israelis as Hamas did in the south, ordered the removal of some 70,000 people from the country\u2019s northern border area. While Hezbollah\u2019s clashes and rocket attacks have caused few civilian casualties so far, the internally displaced Israelis are furious that the government has not protected their homes, fields, and shops from Hezbollah\u2019s daily rocket and missile strikes. This passivity, too, was the result of American preferences. In December,\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that President Joe Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forgo a preemptive strike against Hezbollah days after the Oct. 7 attack.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nasrallah has made no secret of his desire to raid Israel\u2019s Galilee. In fact, in the months before the Oct. 7 massacre, Hezbollah held a military exercise near the border and released a propaganda video of precisely such raids against Israeli military outposts across the border. This may well have been a diversionary tactic to keep Israel off balance and focused on the northern front while Hamas, whose fighters received training in Lebanon and Tehran for their Oct. 7 attack, planned their assault from Gaza.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Increasingly, there is a growing view in Israel that, given Hezbollah\u2019s enduring enmity and its vast, sophisticated military arsenal, a war with the Party of God and, in effect, with its patron Iran, may be inevitable.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there remains deep division within Israel\u2019s national security establishment over when such a war should occur. Some analysts say that now is the right moment to strike. The threat from Hamas has been severely degraded, if not neutralized. The north is already evacuated and the Israeli Defense Forces are already mobilized and in fighting mode. Many Israelis, terrified by their country\u2019s obvious vulnerability, favor striking Israel\u2019s enemies sooner rather than later, suggesting that a war with Hezbollah would enjoy strong public support. The assassination of so many senior Hezbollah commanders suggests that Israel\u2019s operational intelligence is far better in Lebanon today than it was in 2006, when the IDF had only 10 days\u2019 worth of targets to strike.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If Israel chooses to go to war with Hezbollah, it would have to strike before October and the start of the rainy season and then winter. In fact, some Israeli analysts believe that the ongoing IDF strikes in Lebanon and targeted assassinations of key Hezbollah commanders are not simply opportunistic but have been methodically shaping the battlefield for an eventual, though not necessarily imminent, ground invasion. Amiad Cohen, an IDF reservist officer who heads the Herut Center, a conservative think tank, recently\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0what he saw as the IDF strategy over the past eight months: \u201cWe\u2019re crushing, mostly with airstrikes, first of all the people running the operations in southern Lebanon, and the second part of it, the infrastructure,\u201d including underground structures.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cohen told me over the phone that Israel should have invaded southern Lebanon months ago. \u201cIn April I said that this was the time to force Hezbollah back behind the Litani River,\u201d he said. \u201cBut President Biden\u2019s opposition to escalating the conflict prevented us from doing that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Other analysts argue that current conditions are not ideal for a large-scale war, albeit for different reasons. \u201cNot now,\u201d said Tamir Hayman, the former head of Israeli military intelligence who now heads Israel\u2019s Institute for National Security Studies. In an interview with\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Hayman said it would be better to wait a couple of years. Israel, he said, now lacked the resources, international legitimacy, or Washington\u2019s approval for such a war. Israel should strike Hezbollah \u201cwhen we\u2019re ready.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Although Israel would ultimately win a war with Hezbollah, the price could be horrendous. While Hezbollah rockets and drones now fall on houses in northernmost towns like Metula, and set fields and forests on fire, they may well overwhelm Israel\u2019s air defenses and level villages and parts of cities. Israel\u2019s civilian death toll in such a war could easily dwarf the cost of Oct. 7.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cohen disagrees. He said that with shelters in almost every Israeli home and a new system of laser defenses against rockets and missiles coming online soon, Israel could win a war with Lebanon and establish a defensible border at the Litani River within two or three months, at an acceptable cost to the Israeli military and civilians.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Analysts in D.C. argue that such a war would require American buy-in. They note that Israel remains dependent on the U.S. for military supplies that would be required for such a war, and President Biden is adamantly opposed to an escalation. His administration, which has publicly criticized Israel\u2019s operations in Gaza and withheld 3,000 bombs and 23,000 munitions, has incentivized Israel\u2019s foes. Moreover, because of its longstanding military aid relationship with the U.S., Israel is now more dependent on American supplies than it was during the last war. The relationship also had the effect of undermining Israel\u2019s defense industry, which has been scrambling to meet\u00a0demand<\/a>\u00a0for ammunition and weapons systems since Oct. 7.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After nine months of fighting in Gaza, \u201cIsrael needs to refill its stocks of JDAMs and other critical munitions needed to fight Hezbollah,\u201d said David Schenker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who has worked closely on Lebanon policy, including the funding of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Plus, many reservists are now on their third consecutive rotation. \u201cThe IDF badly needs a break,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Biden administration\u2019s ongoing effort to broker an agreement between Israel and Hezbollah also risks handing the terror group a win. For months, U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein has been trying to negotiate a de-escalation plan loosely based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. The\u00a0document<\/a>\u00a0called for establishing a zone free of military personnel and weapons save for those of the Lebanese government. However, its critics say, the resolution was predestined to fail, as its implementation relied on Hezbollah\u2019s accomplices and subordinates, the Lebanese government and the LAF, as well as a neutered U.N. force mandated to coordinate its activities with the Lebanese. While UNSCR 1701 may have looked good to Israel\u2019s supporters on paper, its aims were at odds with the realities on the ground, rendering its promises of security practically meaningless. Critics of Hochstein\u2019s talks fear a repetition of this failure and a similar outcome if by some chance his negotiations succeed.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While the need for security has almost always trumped the desire for economic growth for Israelis, a full-scale war with Hezbollah would come at a high economic cost. In the last quarter of 2023, Israel\u2019s economy contracted sharply and its gross domestic product shrank by 20%. By May, however, the economy had\u00a0rebounded<\/a>, and first-quarter GDP grew some 14%, demonstrating its resilience.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Israel\u2019s astonishing economic record, however, may have also contributed to its current strategic peril. For too long, Israel\u2019s success as the \u201cstartup nation\u201d has blinded the country and its leadership to growing dangers posed by its neighbors. Now, to protect themselves against Hezbollah and its patron Iran, the cost for Israelis has become far higher.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Judith Miller<\/strong>, Tablet Magazine\u2019s theater critic, is a former\u00a0New York Times\u00a0Cairo bureau chief and investigative reporter. She is also the author of the memoir\u00a0The Story: A Reporter\u2019s Journey<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Lebanon War Is Coming JUDITH MILLER MANU BRABO\/GETTY IMAGES Whose side will America be on? Israel faces a conundrum to which there is no easily discernible, sustainable solution: how best to counter the growing strategic threat posed by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group that runs Lebanon. On July 4, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114239"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114268,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114239\/revisions\/114268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}