Give someone a hammer, and they will find that everything they encounter needs pounding. The various versions of this adage remain apposite for understanding many human decisions, and not least Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s in Gaza and Lebanon. His conviction that he can bend Hamas and Hezbollah to his will by relying, repeatedly, on the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) huge military advantage over both adversaries remains unshaken.
Yet as the war in Gaza nears the one-year mark, Hamas has yet to accept Netanyahu’s conditions for a ceasefire – which include maintaining a permanent Israeli presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, south of Gaza’s border with Egypt, and checkpoints along the Netzarim Corridor, which bisects the territory. No matter how much military power Netanyahu uses, Hamas continues to steadfastly reject these terms. The prime minister’s larger goal, destroying Hamas entirely, remains even more outlandish, as even senior Israeli military and intelligence officials admit. Still, he continues wielding the hammer. What began as retaliation against Hamas for its brutal 7 October assault on Israel has turned into the collective punishment of all Gazans, with more than 41,000 killed. That has left Israel isolated internationally, as even Israeli commentators acknowledge.
No matter. It has been reported that the IDF chief of staff has ordered preparations for a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Netanyahu seems determined to bet on Israel’s military prowess once again, calculating that this will bring the Lebanese militia and political party to its knees. True, the IDF remains the Middle East’s most lethal, technologically advanced army, and Israel’s fabled intelligence agencies have demonstrated their skills repeatedly, most recently by seemingly turning Hezbollah’s pagers and radios into explosive devices. Plus, Israel retains what wonks of war call “escalation dominance”: it can pound southern Lebanon with far greater force than Hezbollah can inflict on northern Israel. Consequently, the IDF is bloodying Hezbollah’s nose, killing off its leadership, and striking so many Hezbollah military targets daily that it’s difficult keep track of the damage.
However, the IDF’s awesome firepower and Mossad’s James Bond-like subterfuge is deceivingly seductive. Israel is hobbled by the same fundamental problem in Lebanon as it has been in Gaza: a military-centric strategy that is unlikely to produce anything other than short-term gains. The IDF’s relentless airstrikes against Hezbollah, which on Monday alone killed more than 500 people – 50 of them children, according to Lebanon’s health minister, though the proportion of the death toll accounted for by Hezbollah fighters remains unclear – may force Hezbollah to suspend missile and drone attacks for a time. But they won’t achieve lasting calm, let alone destroy Hezbollah as an organisation. The parallel to Gaza, while not precise, is clear enough.
If Gaza is a gaping wound, the Israel-Lebanon border region can be best described, for now anyway, as an eyesore. Since 8 October 2023, Hezbollah’s rocket salvos and drone attacks have forced at least 60,000 Israelis from their homes (more than 100,000 residents in southern Lebanon have been displaced due to Israel’s withering retaliatory air campaign). For Netanyahu, creating the safety that permits them to return is not merely a matter of principle – Israel has as much a right to full sovereignty as any other country does – but also a political necessity. But the ratcheting up of Israeli air strikes will surely prompt Hezbollah to continue swinging its own, albeit smaller, hammer. That, in turn, will make it impossible for the displaced Israelis to return to their homes and may well increase the outflow of people from that region.
The death toll in Lebanon will similarly increase because in its densely populated south, where Hezbollah’s arsenal is scattered across civilian neighbourhoods, the idea of precision strikes by Israel is chimerical. Many more civilians in Lebanon will die than in Israel, though like Hamas, Hezbollah will rationalise those casualties as a necessary price to pay. And as the numbers of dead increase, so will Israel’s isolation, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. As with the war in Gaza, mass protests against Israel’s air strikes in southern Lebanon have begun already.
Diplomacy would be the most peaceful, effective way to accomplish Netanyahu’s goal. But the indirect talks mediated by the US, aimed at convincing Hezbollah to pull back from Israel’s northern border, have been stymied by its unwillingness to countenance any agreement until Israel ends its war in Gaza. Netanyahu, for his part, won’t relent because of his faith in his strong suit: overwhelming superiority in military might. Besides, signing a ceasefire deal, particularly one that leaves Hamas in power, could precipitate the unravelling of his ultra-nationalist coalition, leading to his eviction from office with corruption charges against him still pending. For now, at least, Israel’s solution to its Hezbollah problem is based entirely on coercion – with enough pain, it assumes, the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah will eventually have no choice but to come crawling to the table on Israel’s terms.
But this hope is misplaced. It’s highly unlikely Hezbollah will break faith Hamas. Hezbollah’s position, reiterated by Nasrallah on 19 September – a day after the attack on the group’s communication devices, which killed more than a dozen people – remains the same today as it was when the movement started its low-level war with Israel a day after the 7 October Hamas attack: if you want quiet along the Israeli-Lebanese border, stop the war in Gaza and withdraw your forces. Nothing in the weeks since suggests Hezbollah’s position has become any more flexible. Backtracking in the face of Israeli military pressure would be akin to Nasrallah openly admitting defeat.
If Hezbollah refuses to yield and a diplomatic resolution proves impossible, Israel will have only military options left – none of them particularly good. It could accelerate its air campaign, striking Hezbollah leadership redoubts in Beirut more frequently and expanding strikes in the Beqaa Valley. The damage upon Hezbollah’s missile and rocket stockpiles will be significant. But the group has abundant experience in weathering such attacks and remaining unbowed. Whether it was Operation Accountability in 1993 or Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, Israeli air campaigns against Hezbollah have at best bought a few years of deterrence. Hezbollah, with Iranian support, has rebuilt itself, and it will once again.
Israel appears on the verge of upping the ante. Though the strategy behind any assault remains unclear, the hope may be to drive Hezbollah away from Israel’s northern border so that a buffer zone can be created. Some hard-right Israeli ministers have lobbied for precisely that gambit. But as a retired IDF general warned in Haaretz recently, perhaps with a dash of hyperbole, “Hezbollah… is hundreds of times more powerful than Hamas,” and the IDF lacks the numbers to seize and hold territory on two fronts because it has less than half as many ground troops as it did two decades ago.
Besides, ground invasions in Lebanon have not worked well for Israel in the past. The first attempt, in 1978, sought to create a buffer zone; it didn’t result in much more than a UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon that proved incapable of keeping the peace. The second effort, in 1982, resulted in an 18-year-long Israeli occupation that bogged down, helped create Hezbollah, and became so unpopular in Israel that Prime Minister Ehud Barak abandoned the enterprise. To believe that a third bite at the apple would produce a different result is a fantasy, not least because Hezbollah has spent the years since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war building up its missile stockpile and preparing defences and countermeasures for the very Israeli ground incursion the Israeli military brass is now considering.
Is the IDF, not to mention Israeli society, truly prepared for another prolonged occupation of Lebanon? It already has a resource-intensive war on its hands in Gaza and faces increasing turmoil in the West Bank – including the strengthening of Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade – as Palestinians’ rage rises amid record-breaking settlement building, land confiscations, and armed Israeli settlers’ attacks on their communities.
Much will be made in the days ahead about the number of Hezbollah targets hit, the number of sorties flown by the Israeli air force, and the number of Hezbollah fighters killed. There’s no doubt that the longer Israel continues its air campaign, the more damage will be inflicted on Hezbollah. Even so, Hezbollah has a proven record for absorbing punishment. Moreover, we shouldn’t miss the wood for the trees. Israel is now fighting two-and-a-half wars simultaneously: one in Gaza, which is by no means finished, a second in Lebanon, which is likely to get worse – ground invasion or not – and a semi-war in the West Bank.
Three questions arise as Prime Minister Netanyahu contemplates getting even tougher with Hezbollah. How does this confrontation end? What is the definition of success? Is that definition reasonable and attainable? As Israel fights on multiple fronts, he has yet to answer any of them.
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