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Wars are not only bloody and murderous endeavors, they are also unpredictable. The specter of former forays into Lebanon looms over Israel’s current one: easy to get in, harder to get out. After the stunning assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as most of the secondary leadership of the organization over the last three weeks, we’re hearing voices in Israel and the U.S. talking predictably about a “new Middle East.” Meanwhile others in the international community and the U.S. talk about these new developments as an “escalation” out of nowhere — Israel looking for a new war, basically.
This is complicated stuff, like everything which happens in this region and especially everything tied to Israel, the Palestinians, and the states surrounding both. But I wanted to share some thoughts on why this escalation and Israel’s fight with Hezbollah are qualitatively different from anything that is happening in Gaza.
For all the overlapping rights and wrongs of the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, the overriding reality is that the Palestinians remain under various degrees of military occupation and have been for going on 60 years. The Palestinians in Gaza have a beef, which remains the case even if it has proven difficult or impossible to get to resolution and partition of the land. It remains the case even if groups like Hamas resort to unimaginable acts of mass murder. Lebanon and, actually, Hezbollah have no such beef. Israel hasn’t occupied any Lebanese territory for 25 years. There are numerous parts of the history we could go into, but I want to focus on this elemental and key part of it.
Hezbollah is the centerpiece of the arc of Iranian-backed militia proxies ranging from Lebanon to Syria and Iraq down to the Houthis in Yemen, which is often referred to as the “Axis of Resistance.” But Hezbollah is far and away the first among equals, far more militarily powerful and more closely interconnected with Iran than the others. In conventional military terms, Hamas is a nuisance-level power. Hezbollah is entirely different. It has an arsenal of between 150,000 and 200,000 rockets and ballistic missiles and a militia which by any real definition should be considered an army, if not for the fact that it’s not controlled by a state.
After the October 7th, 2023 Hamas raids into Israel, Hezbollah opened what it calls a “supporting front” in the North, mostly in the form of rocket attacks into Israel but also some limited cross-border skirmishing. This in addition to the fear of October 7th-style raids into northern Israel led Israel to evacuate between 80,000 and 100,000 of its citizens from villages and towns near the Lebanese border; they remain evacuated today. That is an unsustainable situation for Israel and, in response, Israel has demanded that Hezbollah withdraw to behind the Litani River (about 20 miles back from the Israel-Lebanon border), which they had agreed to do under a UN backed agreement in 2006.
For our purposes, Hezbollah provides this “supporting front” to Hamas. But it also provides a deterrent role for Iran. Israel can’t easily attack Iran because Hezbollah remains right on its border with its vast missile arsenal which can be unleashed on Israeli cities. The stated aim of Iran and the Axis of Resistance is essentially to dismantle Israel over time with a death of a thousand cuts, making the country unlivable. The immediate issue for Israel is whether its citizens can live in the north of the country without the constant threat of missile attacks and October 7th-style raids into border communities. No other country that had the military means to resist that would allow such a situation to continue indefinitely. And it was Hezbollah that opened its supporting front in the north on October 8th. Whatever else you can say about this, it’s not a unilateral action and it’s not unprovoked. Hezbollah has no legitimate beef with Israel. Nor does Lebanon. It’s very much an escalation. But it’s retaliatory and defensive in nature.
The best case for the region is that Israel’s current incursion into Lebanon degrades Hezbollah’s military infrastructure along the Lebanon-Israeli border and convinces the Lebanese government to deploy its national military in the country’s south. That was the agreement coming out of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. And as of today the Lebanese government says it’s now ready to implement it. The issue until now is that neither the Lebanese government nor its army have been strong enough to defy Hezbollah.
Again, this is a hopelessly complicated issue which I’ve tried to lay out here in overview terms. The relevant point is that this is categorically different from the situation in Gaza. In Gaza, Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. Lebanese citizens and Hezbollah do not. Hezbollah opened a new front against Israel starting on October 8th, 2023, in support of the October 7th massacres. Everybody who is expressing worry about this escalating into a broader regional war and the inevitable rising death toll of these actions is right to be worried. But it’s Hezbollah’s decision to open that northern front that gets us here.