A reckless new ambition to dismantle Hezbollah has taken hold in the White House and Knesset.
Rather than a reasoned calculation based on probable outcomes, this shift appears to have come over policymakers while drunk on Israel’s killing of more than 25 Hezbollah leaders last month, which came atop sabotage operations that wounded thousands of the group’s rank-and-file.
Clearer heads would have recognised the turn toward the abyss this new aspiration entails and how its proponents fundamentally misunderstand Hezbollah, Lebanese society, and the country’s political fabric.
At best, these efforts will fail. At worst, they will cascade into a new Lebanese civil war, further internationalising what is already a regional conflict.
There is an alternative path to securing peace on Lebanon’s southern border, but this requires a sober reassessment that shifts the focus from trying to destroy Hezbollah to addressing why so many Lebanese see the group as an existential necessity.
Biden Administration officials, in press statements as well as private consultations with regional stakeholders, have emphasised the “opportunity” Israel’s blows against Hezbollah present to break the group’s “stranglehold” on Lebanon.
For Washington, this includes forcing Hezbollah to disarm and breaking the two-year political impasse that has prevented the Lebanese Parliament from electing a new president.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “message to the people of Lebanon” was tinted with more menace. “Hezbollah is weaker than it has been for many many years,” he said, calling on the Lebanese to “stand up and take your country back” lest Israel visit upon Lebanon “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
His notable assertion that Hezbollah would “fight Israel from densely populated areas” seemed to preemptively try to justify Israel expanding its bombing of civilian neighbourhoods since to areas unaffiliated with Hezbollah.
Some opportunist Lebanese politicians have also adopted the narrative that the time is ripe for Hezbollah to be brought to heel and to break its ties with Iran. Such thinking is, however, myopic and flawed.
Has Israel misread the room?
First, the American and Israeli position is premised on the assumption that Hezbollah is at or near terminal decline militarily and the ongoing Israeli ground invasion will only further this trend.
While the group has recently lost a swath of senior commanders, Hezbollah’s comprehensive succession planning and decentralised leadership means they have since been replaced. Its organisational structure remains standing.
Also intact is Hezbollah’s stockpile of rockets and armed drones, which, even by the most optimistic Israeli estimates, still number in the many tens of thousands. Hezbollah’s ability to deploy them in deadly escalation was demonstrated in the strike on Sunday on an Israeli military base south of Haifa, which left four soldiers dead and almost 70 wounded.
Moreover, for Israel to sustain the current escalatory pressure, its so-called “limited incursions” in South Lebanon would need to be dramatically more effective against Hezbollah than its now year-long invasion of Gaza has been against Hamas.
Instead, Israel has already up its ground troop commitment by a third, following numerous reports of Hezbollah ambushes and dead and wounded Israeli soldiers being sent back from the front. While Hezbollah is certainly taking losses, the group’s reserve is vast, and Israel’s land invasion is quickly taking on the contours of a quagmire.
Washington’s misreading of the current “opportunity” also stems from an inability to grasp that many Lebanese – particularly, but not exclusively, in the Shia Muslim community – see no alternative to an armed Hezbollah.
The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), Lebanon’s army, made a logical choice to withdraw from their posts in the face of Israel’s land invasion: why take needless casualties against an enemy that is overwhelmingly more powerful? But the LAF’s retreat also resonates with those who live in the South and across the country, another reminder that no other force in Lebanon can protect their homes and communities from Israel. Only Hezbollah.
More than ever today, people see what is happening in the occupied West Bank, where hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers continue to build upon stolen land, displacing Palestinian families who had lived there from time immemorial. South Lebanon would be little different were it not for Hezbollah’s 18-year armed resistance to Israeli occupation. And while Israel withdrew in 2000, fears of its expansionist agenda remained, and for good reason.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has explicitly stated that Israel intends to “little by little” continue expanding its borders into the territory of all neighbouring states.
Meanwhile, invading Israeli soldiers recently planted their flag in the Lebanese village of Maroun al-Ras, while a settler group published a map of South Lebanon reworked with Hebrew village names. Devoid of other options, Hezbollah – many of whose members hail from the south themselves – is seen as the only force capable of defending Lebanese homes from a Zionist advance.
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Over Hezbollah’s evolution since the 1980s, its arms have also grown into a source of strength and protection for Lebanon’s Shia community within Lebanon, where it has historically been the most economically and politically marginalized of the major sects.
This systemic subordination was flipped on its head in recent decades through the implied recourse to force Hezbollah’s arsenal provided, which the group flexed briefly in May 2008, when its allied forces overran Beirut to force the government to rescind key policy decisions.
Where representatives of the Shia community would otherwise have been sidelined in Lebanon’s sectarian power dynamics, their implied recourse to force has instead made them dominant players in political decision-making.
Washington would be wise to keep in mind that any Lebanese president seen to have come to power on the back of an American or Israeli tank is also unlikely to have an extended tenure.
The last time Israel strongarmed its favoured Lebanese candidate into the president’s chair, Bashir Gemayel, following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he was assassinated within weeks.
The paths to ceasefire or civil war
Without the external and internal impetuses for Hezbollah’s arms being addressed, there will be little support for its disarmament among its core confessional community.
Bomb as they may, neither Israel nor the US are unlikely to force the group’s hand. Other parties within Lebanon attempting to compel Hezbollah to disarm would lead directly to civil war – one in which Hezbollah would be the most heavily armed participant with the most battle-hardened troops.
The previous civil war drew in more than a dozen countries as supporters of the various warring factions, caused hundreds of thousands of casualties and many more refugees, devastated the country, spawned global criminal networks, sewed regional instability, saw Hezbollah founded and Iran plant the seeds for its so-called Axis of Resistance.
This woeful legacy must not be repeated, and indeed, with Hezbollah showing more openness to compromise now than ever, it need not.
A ceasefire in Lebanon is also essential in the short term to preserve the Lebanese state, which was already in existential crisis after five years of financial collapse, political paralysis, the Beirut port explosion, and a Syrian refugee crisis. Added to this, the ongoing war has killed more than 2,000, injured 10,000+, displaced 1 million, and left large parts of Beirut, the south, and elsewhere in rubble.
A necessary part of buttressing the state is for any ceasefire agreement to include a path for Hezbollah’s military capacities to come under the control of the Lebanese Army. For the state to assume this role, however, other structures must be brought in to supplant the protection Hezbollah’s arsenal represents for the Shia community against Israel and within Lebanon.
First, ongoing Lebanon-Israel ceasefire negotiations must be linked to a new regional security agreement supported by the international community. This agreement must include international guarantees backing a new and sustainable balance of power with Israel, one that restrains Israel’s expansionist proclivities in exchange for secure and peaceful borders.
Second, in exchange for Hezbollah turning over its arms to the Lebanese state and relinquishing its political veto power, other Lebanese powerbrokers must agree to negotiate a fair redistribution of political power within the country. While the exact formula for such an arrangement should be the product of those negotiations, the result must be a mechanism that guarantees the Shia community a prominent role alongside the other sects in political decision-making.
Lastly, Lebanese parties should negotiate a new national defense strategy to reform and modernise LAF operations and priorities. This should receive international support and be integrated with the new regional security arrangement.
This is the sober path to securing peace on Lebanon’s southern border. The current trajectory the US and Israel have taken assures little but a broadening of the war and its tragic fallout for all involved, to no clear end.
Spencer Osberg is a Senior Editor at Badil | The Alternative Policy Institute, a Beirut-based think-tank
Follow him on X: @spencerosberg
Sami Halabi is the Director of Policy at Badil | The Alternative Policy Institute, a Beirut-based think-tank
Follow him on X: @sami_halabi
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