I want you to ask not why the Wall Street Journal is reporting this, by why they are reporting it now.
President Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon days after Hamas militants’ Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel, warning that such an attack could spark a wider regional war.
Israel had intelligence—which the U.S. deemed unreliable—that Hezbollah attackers were preparing to cross the border as part of a multipronged attack, pushing some of Israel’s more hawkish officials to the brink, officials said.
Israeli warplanes were in the air awaiting orders when Biden spoke to Netanyahu on Oct. 11 and told the Israeli prime minister to stand down and think through the consequences of such an action, according to people familiar with the call.
Now, your immediate reaction might be that the Biden administration wants it known that they’ve been a moderating force on Israel’s government. That’s important because, with military operations in Gaza producing more than 20,000 deaths and widespread starvation developing, the United States in increasingly isolated in their support.
And that might be part of the explanation.
But, more likely, the WSJ article is a message to the Lebanese government that they better be serious about their offer to negotiate with the Israelis.
Lebanon is ready to implement a UN resolution that would help end Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks on Israel if Israel also complies and withdraws from disputed territory, Lebanon’s prime minister claimed on Friday.
The border between Lebanon and Israel has seen escalating exchanges of fire since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, raising fears of a broader conflagration. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated from northern border towns, which have been repeatedly targeted by the Hezbollah terror group.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended a 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, called for the removal of armed personnel south of Lebanon’s Litani River, except for UN peacekeepers and the Lebanese army and state security forces. But the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group has entrenched itself across much of southern Lebanon for decades, where it holds strong support, and has regularly launched rockets against Israel, while Beirut does nothing to reign in the group.
The Israeli government wants Hezbollah pushed north of the Litani River, a distance of 30 kilometers from the border. Israeli’s foreign minister Eli Coehn has said, “There are two ways to do that: either by diplomacy or by force.” And the Times of Israel reports that “Israeli diplomatic officials have suggested in recent weeks that Jerusalem is open to a diplomatic solution to the conflagration along its northern border.”
The offer to push Hezbollah out comes with conditions. In return, Israel would have to retreat from areas it has long occupied in the border region, including “the disputed Shebaa Farms, the Kfarshuba hills and the Lebanese side of the village of Ghajar.”
That might be a deal worth making for both sides, but it depends in large part of the Lebanese government’s ability to influence Hezbollah or dictate to them through force. It would not be easy to convince them to abandon their positions.
For that reason, the government needs to feel that confronting Hezbollah is the least bad option. They do not want to see a repeat of 2006 when Israel used a border skirmish and kidnapping as a casus belli to pound Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods far to the north in the capital of Beirut.
The message in the Wall Street Journal article is that the Israel government very nearly responded to the October 7 attacks by going apeshit on Lebanon and was only restrained by the Biden administration at the last moment when their jets were already in the air. This is supposed to focus their minds about what is likely to happen to their country if Hezbollah keeps killing Israeli soldiers and civilians with cross-border rockets and attacks.
The Israelis are sending the same message.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel does not want a war, but that “if Hezbollah wants to go up a level, we’ll go up five.”
“We don’t want that, we don’t want to get into a war situation. We want to restore peace and we will do it either through an agreement, or with forceful action, with all its implications,” he told a group of soldiers along the northern border. “We don’t want war, but we won’t hold it off for too long.”
Now, I don’t know if Israel will agree to withdrawal terms acceptable to Lebanon, but I suspect the bigger problem is that Hezbollah doesn’t take orders from Lebanon and may be too powerful for the central government to push around.
In any case, what we’re witnessing is diplomacy by news leak. You are not the audience. The audience is everyone in Lebanon who doesn’t want to see their country look like Gaza.
