Understanding Israel’s war threats against Hezbollah – Mondoweiss

Tensions on Lebanon’s southern border are at their highest since October 7. Both Hezbollah and Israel are increasing their threats of all-out war, and now it actually seems possible.

On Thursday, June 20, CNN quoted anonymous US officials as saying that Israel had informed Washington of its plans to move military equipment to the northern border in advance of a war with Lebanon. The reports came a day after Hezbollah Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah gave a speech in which he threatened that the Lebanese group would “fight without borders and inhibitions if war is imposed on Lebanon.”

Nasrallah delivered his speech during a ceremony commemorating the killing of Taleb Abdallah, a senior Hezbollah commander, a week after the assassination. Abdallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a town in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah responded with the largest series of rocket attacks from Lebanon since hostilities between the two parties began in October. Over 250 rockets and dozens of guided drones hit Israeli positions in the Galilee, causing widespread fires for thousands of kilometers in the region.

As Israeli politicians called for war against Hezbollah, the Lebanese group released 10 minutes of drone footage on Monday, June 17, showing strategic Israeli facilities in the Haifa area, including weapons factories, oil and chemical storage facilities, power plants, warships, the Haifa seaport and densely populated residential areas.

This latest escalation followed a visit by US special envoy Amos Hockstein, who met with Lebanese and Israeli politicians to defuse the situation on the southern Lebanese border. Hockstein proposed a plan that would see Hezbollah forces withdraw north of the Litani River and permanently demarcate the border between Israel and Lebanon.

Hochstein’s proposal is essentially an attempt to separate hostilities on the Lebanese border from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which Hezbollah fundamentally opposes. This has led Hezbollah to condition the cessation of hostilities on a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Hockstein’s plan, on the other hand, would free Israel from Lebanese pressure by addressing Lebanon’s unresolved issues with Israel, particularly the border issue.

Israel’s unresolved problems with Lebanon

Hezbollah is the driving force behind the larger Lebanese resistance movement, which officially began after the withdrawal of PLO troops from Beirut and the entry of Israeli troops into the Lebanese capital in September 1982. At that time, the “Lebanese National Resistance Front” was formed, consisting of left-wing and pan-Arab parties, and began an armed campaign against the Israeli forces. The name of Hezbollah was not yet known to the public.

After the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, all Lebanese forces involved in it agreed to surrender their weapons, including those that formed the Resistance Front. While some communist and nationalist guerrilla units remained active in occupied southern Lebanon, it was the Shiite Islamic Resistance of Lebanon and its political wing, Hezbollah, that received the most support from Syria and Iran. Until 1992, Hezbollah was essentially the only force fighting the Israeli occupation south of the Litani.

Israel’s sudden withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 was seen by many, including in Israel, as a victory for Hezbollah for two main reasons.

First, because it happened without any security agreements with the Lebanese state. Although the Lebanese army was stationed in the south, there were no restrictions on Lebanese military activities on the border, as imposed on Egypt in the 1979 Camp David Accords. And, most importantly, there were no agreements guaranteeing that Hezbollah would disappear from the border.

Second, the political disengagement sparked a moment of awakening among Arab onlookers, who saw unprecedented images of Lebanese civilians streaming into evacuated Israeli detention centers and freeing their prisoners. Lebanese farmers tore down barbed wire fences and reached their fields for the first time in 18 years, and villagers let abandoned Israeli vehicles pass through villages in southern Lebanon. The nature of the disengagement gave an unprecedented political boost to the cause of the resistance and to Hezbollah as a political party, as well as to the influence of its main ally and sponsor, Iran. This political strength received an even greater boost after Israel’s 2006 war against Lebanon, in which Israel failed to achieve its stated goals and suffered military losses.

The biggest unresolved issue for both sides, however, is that there was no official establishment of mutually recognized borders. The UN oversaw the establishment of the line to which Israel withdrew, calling it “the Blue Line.” The line kept the Shebaa Farms and the Kufr Shuba Hills, two Lebanese agricultural areas, under Israeli control. The Shebaa and Kufr Shuba area became Hezbollah’s preferred area after 2011 to respond to Israeli incursions into Lebanon or bombing of its members in Syria, since it was not attacking Israel per se but occupying Lebanese territory.

The border issue became linked to the region’s economic big games in 2009, when natural gas was discovered in the eastern Mediterranean, including near the Lebanese coast. Israel began offering gas companies contracts to extract gas from the area disputed with Lebanon. In 2022, Lebanon and Israel signed a maritime border agreement after a series of negotiations during which Hezbollah threatened to attack Israeli gas facilities located in waters claimed by Lebanon. Hezbollah even released footage of Israeli oil fields and its own rockets. Many saw the agreement itself as another victory for Hezbollah.

Israel’s second attempt to undermine Hezbollah after the failed 2006 war came in the years after the Syrian war broke out in 2011. Israel systematically bombed targets in Syria that it claimed belonged to Iran and Hezbollah, taking advantage of the chaos in the country. Israel claimed it targeted the corridors through which Iran supplied weapons to Hezbollah. Israeli military officials described these attacks as a “battle between the wars” aimed at weakening the northern enemy.

Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian war on the side of the Syrian government was a major factor in the defeat of rebel groups in strategic areas such as Damascus’ Eastern Ghouta, the Qalamoun mountain range, and the Quseir region, all of which were key points in the rebel takeover of Damascus. Hezbollah also helped defeat ISIS on the Lebanese border by fighting alongside the Lebanese army and becoming a major player in the regional war to defeat the fanatical group. Most importantly, Hezbollah secured the necessary territory in Syria to maintain its open supply lines from Iran itself, thus circumventing Israeli attempts to weaken it.

Essentially, Hezbollah’s strategy since the early 1990s and during major events in the region has been to accumulate both military and political power. This has involved gradually increasing Hezbollah’s military experience through fighting in Syria, strengthening its alliances, and expanding its influence domestically and regionally. All of this has been used to provide Israel with a serious deterrent.

But the purpose of these assembled forces has always been to prevent war with Israel, not to provoke it.

US failure and the war that nobody wants

Israel faces its own dilemma. It too does not want war with Lebanon because it knows that Hezbollah is quite capable of harming Israel. Since October 8, Hezbollah has systematically attacked Israeli surveillance and espionage capabilities along the border while collecting intelligence on Israel’s military operations. Israel, which does not have the necessary intelligence on Hezbollah’s forces, knows that it would be at a great disadvantage if it went to war on its northern front now.

At the same time, the escalation between both parties has exhausted all other escalation levels before it leads to open war. While Hezbollah cannot back down from making the cessation of its cross-border attacks dependent on the end of the war in Gaza, Israel is unable to admit that the chimera of “total victory” has been buried in the sands of Gaza.

Hezbollah faces a difficult choice, risking its country’s security. But Israel faces an even greater strategic dilemma: to avoid a very destructive war for which it is unprepared and unable to win, it must accept an end to its current genocidal course in Gaza. The only way out for Israel seems to lie in the hands of the United States – the only party capable of enforcing an end to the war.

But the only US strategy since October 7 seems to have been to do everything in its power to prevent pressure being exerted on Israel – even after Israeli politicians repeatedly rejected the ceasefire agreement presented by the US as an Israeli plan.

This US policy is unlikely to change in the months leading up to the presidential election. While no one wants a major war on the Lebanese border that could have serious regional repercussions, the possibility of its realization is closer than ever. It could happen that the war that no one wants breaks out because the only side that could have prevented it chose not to act.