Preventing a ruinous war between Israel and Lebanon

Iran is going to lose its deterrent force in southern Lebanon. The question remains how.

We cannot know where the war will end that started last October between Israel and Iran’s terror proxy, Hamas. But the next theater is certain to be southern Lebanon, the stronghold of Iran’s older and more lethal ally, Hezbollah.

Israel has responded to the killing of 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights, but not with a major military escalation. Tensions could yet spark a broader, bloodier regional war.

Lebanon’s part in this tragedy did not begin with the terror attack on Saturday, nor even last fall, when Hezbollah began firing missiles into northern Israel, displacing over 100,000 Israelis — many of whom, like the Druze, are non-Jewish.

Perhaps the tragedy began in 1948, when Lebanon welcomed Palestinian refugees, after five Arab governments refused to recognize Israel and instead attacked it. Or perhaps in 1970, after the Palestinian Liberation Organization attempted to overthrow the government of Jordan, failed, was expelled, and went to Lebanon. The PLO were soon firing rockets into northern Israel from southern Lebanon, where local Shiites formed militias to fight the newly arrived Palestinian terrorists. In 1975, Lebanon was plunged into a civil war that lasted 15 years and from which the nation has never recovered.

While historians still debate the causes of Lebanon’s civil war, militant Palestinian groups were bound up with that war’s seminal violence. The role of Palestinians in Lebanon’s civil war remains sensitive to this day, the subject of the 2017 Oscar-nominated film “The Insult,” which reminded viewers how precarious peace is.

There were several terrible slaughters during Lebanon’s civil war. The Damour Massacre in January 1976, just months into the war, is one that has been largely forgotten. There, hundreds of unarmed Christians, including women and children, were murdered by Palestinians. The U.S. and other Western countries refused to supply arms to the Christians. Only Israel helped Lebanon’s Christians against their common threat; this too has been forgotten.

In 1982, the Israelis launched an ill-advised invasion of Lebanon to defeat the PLO, allied with Lebanon’s Christian-majority government, led by Bachir Gemayel. Gemayel was assassinated later that year, the alliance fell apart, Christians fought each other, and Israel withdrew. Iran partnered with Syria and Hezbollah to occupy and control Lebanon.

In 2005, after 15 years of ruthless occupation by Syria’s Baathist regime, the people of Lebanon took to the streets in the Cedar Revolution, peaceful protests that ended with Syria withdrawing from Lebanon — a model that Lebanese who today hope for peace should ponder well.

In 2006, Hezbollah and Israel fought to a bitter stalemate in southern Lebanon before the U.S. pressured Israel to withdraw. In the nearly two decades since, fiscal irresponsibility and corruption ruined Lebanon’s economy, while Hezbollah expanded its military capabilities and political influence over the weak Lebanese state, which has been strained to the limits by the influx of over a million Syrian refugees.

Israel knows very well, though most outsiders do not, that Hezbollah is a significantly more lethal threat than Hamas. The real war was always in the north — and the fury of that war, once it begins in earnest, will be beyond reckoning.

But Iran has, perhaps unwittingly, put Israel into a situation in which it has little choice but to confront Iran and Hezbollah on its own terms in response to Oct. 7. Iran has, after all, avoided the consequences of sponsoring terror across the region for more than four decades.

Is there an alternative to a full-blown war between Israel and Iran-Hezbollah? Sadly, Western policymakers have spent little energy on these kinds of questions in recent years.

But what’s at stake seems fairly plain. Iran is going to lose its deterrent force in southern Lebanon. The question remains how.

The Iranian regime cares little if Lebanon is bombed back to the Stone Age. How could the region avoid such a catastrophe? First, a government, likely from Europe, would have to be willing to broker negotiations between Israel and Iran. Second, there would have to be a vague outline of objectives for the talk. For Israel, this would mean a reliable process for the dismantling of advanced weapons in Lebanon — and there’s no reason to suppose, absent a credible threat to the Iranian regime, that Iran would ever negotiate.

For the sake of argument, however, the salient terms would consist of things like the phased withdrawal of Hezbollah’s weapons along Israel’s border; Lebanon’s agreement to a serious international inspection regimen (a non-UN successor to UNIFIL); and economic aid packages in exchange for urgent but phased drawdowns of advanced weapons systems.

Iran won’t agree, so neither will Hezbollah. But the mere discussion of such terms in the press by an intermediary government would at least explore what an alternative to war could look like. This alone could drive a wedge between Hezbollah and those Lebanese who hope to avert a war — indeed, even with some Lebanese Shiites, who would rather their villages and families not be destroyed to serve Iran’s interests.

It’s much easier to be creative and clever about matters of war than matters of peace. In the Middle East, the only enduring strategic habit is to endeavor to make an ally of time. On this point, Iran has been masterful — and the U.S. has been abysmal.

But not all efforts to buy time are cynical. Several years ago, a Lebanese man recounted for us a conversation he had with a prominent Shiite leader from Lebanon in which he said, “If there could be a generation without war, we could have peace with Israel.” His words were begrudgingly received.

Lebanon has gone nearly two decades without war with Israel. The problem for Lebanon, however, is that the generation of Israelis who would fight Hezbollah have been burying their friends since Oct. 7, are already battle-hardened and will do whatever is necessary for their countrymen to return to their homes — and to remain there for the rest of their lives.

The coming days and weeks will be crucial for Lebanon. If war is to be averted, it will require a mix of brinksmanship, creative diplomacy and courage. And perhaps a miracle — to which end the Maronite Patriarch Bechara Cardinal Rai called for a day of prayer for peace in Lebanon earlier this month.

Miracles are of course beyond the realm of statecraft, but the former points are not. This is an opportunity for a Western power to prevent the war that began on Oct. 7, and escalated this past weekend, from spreading across the region, and perhaps beyond.

Andrew Doran is a senior fellow with the Philos Project and previously served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State. Robert Nicholson founded the Philos Project, where he previously served as president and is an expert on Israel and the Near East. Richard Ghazal is executive director at In Defense of Christians and a retired Air Force judge advocate and intelligence officer.