Israel’s declared objective of eliminating Hamas is unachievable, according to most experts, even if Gaza were to suffer the fate of Carthage at the hands of the Romans. But assuming Israel achieves most of that objective, it is unthinkable that it would allow Hezbollah, a threat several fold greater than Hamas, to remain on its northern border. In theory, there are three scenarios that might obtain:
- Either an unlikely regional arrangement is reached with Iran that would mute the Hezbollah threat;
- A return to the status quo preceding October 7, again unlikely to be countenanced by Israel given the probability of Hezbollah doing in the Galilee what Hamas did in the Negev;
- Or a major eruption of violence between Israel and Iran’s Hezbollah militia as a way for Israel to try and eliminate the threat once and for all.
This third scenario is increasingly plausible once the Gaza situation comes to a steady state of some sort, and it will be characterized by violence reaching beyond the immediate border and spilling over into all of Lebanon.
Hezbollah has threatened many times to launch a ground incursion into the Galilee, which, in hindsight, suggests some degree of coordination with Hamas, whose October 7 attacks might be a blueprint designed by Tehran for its allies. Hezbollah and Iran’s denial of knowledge of the October 7 attacks by Hamas could simply be a tactical lie. Furthermore, Hezbollah’s arsenal, if one is to believe its propaganda, is much more powerful now than it was in 2006; it says it has sophisticated, made-in-Iran guided long-range missiles that could reach any location in Israeli territory.
For its part, Israel has repeatedly declared that its retaliation for such cross-border violence will not be limited to targeting Hezbollah positions and supply lines as was the case during the 2006 war between the two sides. Back then, Hezbollah was not part of the Lebanese government structure; it had no ministers in the cabinet and no representatives in parliament. It was merely a rogue “military” organization, and Israel spared the Lebanese state much of its destructive power. But now that Hezbollah has integrated the Lebanese body politic with MPs and ministers, it constitutes a responsible “political” entity with which the Lebanese population and government are accomplices because they have elected it to parliament and into the government.
Just as the extreme right-wing and ultra-nationalist Israeli government is using the Hamas attack as a pretext to fulfill its long-held dream of completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, it might exploit Hezbollah’s stranglehold over the Lebanese state as a license to devastate not only Hezbollah’s positions and supply lines but the entirety of Lebanon. In other words, should an all-out war erupt between the two sides, Israel will target Lebanese state institutions, army positions, ministry buildings, infrastructure, and residential areas regardless of whether Hezbollah uses or profits from them.
United Nations Security Council resolution 1701 requires Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani River, some 18 miles (30 Km) from the border. Only yesterday (December 6), Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told a gathering of mayors and heads of councils of Israel’s northern settlements, “We’ll push Hezbollah beyond the Litani River before the residents of northern Israel return home.” With tens of thousands of restive Israelis having evacuated from the border to the Israeli interior, this pledge by Gallant can only be fulfilled with a major war. “People will not continue to be on the border with Hezbollah breathing over them and shooting at the fence or the houses with anti-tank missiles,” said the head of an Israeli venture capital firm. “Something is going to need to be done about that, either diplomatically or militarily.”
This “perfect storm” scenario is only waiting for its triggering event, which may or may not wait for hostilities to simmer down in Gaza. Meanwhile, the United States is so sorely aware of the high probability of its occurrence that it immediately dispatched a fleet to the eastern Mediterranean, not merely to assist Israel in Gaza, but with the declared objective of intervening should Hezbollah join Hamas in the current hostilities. In other words, the US is likely to actively participate in a Lebanon-Israel border outbreak while Israel concentrates itself on ethnically cleansing Gaza and perhaps even the West Bank.
The US here is not merely backing Israel; it has its own bone to grind with Hezbollah. It has not forgotten what Hezbollah did in the 1980s to its embassy, its hostages, TWA Flight 847, and more poignantly to its 341 Marines and servicemen killed on October 23, 1983, by the first-ever truck-bomb terrorist attack. Back then, a cowardly US president, Ronald Reagan, pulled out of Lebanon instead of fighting the then-still-nascent and underwhelming Hezbollah threat and abandoning Lebanon to Syria and Iran, whose threat has since multiplied by a thousand-fold. The present situation offers an opportunity for the Americans to settle the score.
The Lebanese have always wondered why the US is building one of its largest and most fortified embassies – ironically rumored to have underground tunnels – in Awkar, northeast of Beirut in the Christian heartland of Lebanon, at a time when Lebanon has been decaying for decades thanks to what the Lebanese perceive as a repeated sellout of the small country by the US to all the neighborhood bullies like Syria, Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The answer may be in the expansion of the Gaza war to a confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah that would start in the south, spill over into all of Lebanon, and drag the Lebanese Army and possibly the USS Eisenhower-bound US Marines. Given Israel’s retreat in international public opinion and rising sympathy for Palestine, the present circumstances offer the US-Israel tandem a last opportunity to raise the stakes and maximize its positions in the three conflict zones contiguous with Israel (Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank), and try and resolve all these issues to Israel’s advantage.
One may discount Syria from the list of threats to Israel because a much weakened Syrian regime has never seriously resisted or opposed the annexation of its Golan Heights: Unlike in Lebanon, there is no open war front on the Golan, and while Syria has for decades encouraged and backed ant-Israeli resistance in southern Lebanon, it has virulently restricted it on its own border with Israel, even though the Golan is not only occupied but is annexed, by Israel. The frequent Israeli sorties in recent years against Syrian targets focus on Hezbollah’s supply lines and training and weapons storage locations rather than on Syrian military institutions per se. It, therefore, seems to be a tacit mutual non-aggression agreement between Israel and Syria, the latter having abandoned the Golan to Israel as part of the 1974 deal mediated by war criminal Henry Kissinger in exchange for Syrian dominion over Lebanon. In the grand scheme of history, should Lebanon continue on its present path of disintegration, Syria might be rewarded and compensated for the Golan loss by recuperating territories annexed to Greater Lebanon some 100 years ago.
In conclusion, there is a high probability of an expansion of the Gaza conflict to Lebanon, and Israel – and Washington – might not wait for Hezbollah to pull the trigger.
