The Israel-Lebanon War is nasty and getting nastier

Hezbollah has confirmed the Israeli claim that their top leader was killed in Israeli airstrikes:

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has been killed, the Lebanese movement said Saturday, dealing a seismic blow to the Iran-backed group that has been engaged in a year of cross-border hostilities with Israel.

Hezbollah's statement confirms earlier announcements from Israel's military that they had killed Nasrallah in an air strike on Beirut's southern suburbs, in a move that could destabilise Lebanon as a whole. (1)

Deutsche Welle reports: (2)

Events so far seem to confirm that Netanyahu, with the full support of his government coalition, is pressing ahead with a war with Lebanon that threatens quickly to become a ground war and very possibly a direct war with Iran. This is consistent with Netanyahu’s years-long goal of drawing the US into a direct war with Iran. And with his goal of getting Trump elected President again in November. Because he knows that Trump is generally committed to enabling Israel to do anything they want. And also that Trump is obviously very “transaction-oriented,” i.e., he’s happy to be bribed. And he has no problem dealing with people who have the mentality of mobsters.

Politico EU reports:

Nasrallah’s death could send a seismic shock across the Middle East and runs the risk of triggering a wider regional war that Israel’s Western allies have been scrambling to avert.

It will also test Israel’s theory that by escalating a long-simmering fight with Hezbollah it can get the group to back down. If Hezbollah and its Iranian supporters decide to keep up their fight — and the militant group vowed on Saturday to “continue the holy war against the enemy and in support of Palestine” — it could lead to a broader regional conflict. (3)

Some of the reporting speculates that the loss of key commanders recently will make it much more difficult for Hezbollah to respond to Israeli attacks. We’ll soon see, I suppose. Other reporting suggests that Hezbollah’s training system takes into account the likelihood of leaders getting assassinated, so there may be much more redundancy in their leadership capabilities than the more optimistic (from Israel’s viewpoint) assumption.

The big risk for Israel would be a ground invasion of Lebanon. Such an invasion could lead Iran to directly enter the battle in Lebanon against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Iran considers Hezbollah to be one of its most significant assets. Responding to the assassination, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on Muslims “to stand by the people of Lebanon and the proud Hezbollah with whatever means they have and assist them in confronting the … wicked regime [of Israel]”.

Khamenei, who Reuters reported had been transferred to a secure location inside Iran, did not mention Nasrallah in his comments. He added: “The fate of this region will be determined by the forces of resistance, with Hezbollah at the forefront.” Israeli “criminals must know that they are far too small to cause any significant damage on the strongholds of Hezbollah in Lebanon”, he said. “All the resistance forces in the region support and stand alongside Hezbollah.”

Iran has so far been reluctant to involve itself in the fighting between the Lebanon-based group and Israel. [my emphasis] (4)

Ori Goldberg, Israeli analyst and former editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine, argues that Iran’s leadership, contrary to how Israel’s leaders portray it, does not aim to wipe Israel out but it more focused on a broadly defensive view of preventing the Iranian regimes overthrown and threats from other nations:

This is one of our biggest blindspots in Israel. We cannot begin to view ourselves as aggressors; we only want peace, the common thinking goes here. But Israel attacks Iran — inside the country and outside of it — at a rate that far outweighs Iranian attacks on Israel. And then we tell ourselves that this is because they are bad guys and we are simply trying to defend ourselves? Which country has hundreds of nuclear bombs? Which country has the biggest and most powerful army in the region? …

Israel believes in a tactical approach of isolating itself and acting with surgical strikes against threats. The Iranians believe that if they isolate themselves, they will allow all of their enemies to surround and attack them.

Thus, the Iranians are trying to build influence in every place where decision makers have the power to influence Iranian national security. They want to be present in Lebanon and Iraq and Yemen because they believe that being aware of what nearby states are planning is what will truly safeguard their national interests.

Israel is not interested in being part of the Middle East; even the Abraham Accords were a way to parlay its presence in the region. Israel wants to build walls, to be friendly with Europe and the United States. If someone threatens the state, Israeli war planes and soldiers will carry out a surgical attack and come back home to their bases. [my emphasis] (5)

This is a helpful way to portray Israel’s “tactical” approach, which basically assumes that it will have to carry out short military conflicts periodically to control the Palestinians and to eventually establish what is the official goal of Netanyahu’s currently governing coalition, i.e., permanent Israeli control of the land between Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, i.e,, “from the river to the sea,” in the words of the protest slogan that critics accuse of being a call for genocide against all Israeli Jews.

Israel’s previous ground incursions into Lebanon have not been happy experiences: the First Lebanon War of 1982-2000 (with most of the fighting 1982 with an occupation of southern Lebanon following) and the Second Lebanon War of July-August 2006. Hezbollah actually came into being as a resistance force against Israel during there long presence in Lebanon in that first war.

It was also in the first year of the First Lebanon War that a much sharper political sensitivity emerged among Israelis compared to previous attitudes, as Yagil Lev recounts:

Politically, the First Lebanon War (1982) was the watershed event after which bereavement became politicized and Israel gradually distanced itself from the historical hegemonic model of bereavement that justified losses without question. It spurred parents of fallen soldiers to take collective action against the army’s operations. The catalytic event took place during the first week of the war, which claimed the lives of about 230 soldiers. (5)

That intervention turned into a long-term occupation that was a very different experience than the much shorter wars of 1967 and 1973:

Later, protests were staged against the transformation of the war from the previously declared and widely politically acceptable short-term operation (that took barely one week in June 1982, during which Israel conquered south Lebanon) into an attempt to reshape internal Lebanese politics, which prolonged the war beyond the first week and culminated in a siege of Beirut in July and August 1982. In 1982, [Israeli activist group] Peace Now led the mass protest movement against Israel’s invasion of south Lebanon. Its main achievement was the massive rally it organized in Tel Aviv in September 1982 in response to the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, in which two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut were attacked by Christian Lebanese forces in an area controlled by the IDF. Peace Now effectively demanded the establishment of an investigative committee, which ultimately removed Defense Minister Ariel Sharon from his position. Yet, Peace Now voiced antiwar grievances, rather than concerns about casualties as such. [my emphasis]

A ground war with Hezbollah, and maybe even with Iran, won’t be nearly as easy for Israel as they tried to make it look with their recent exploding-pagers attack. Israel has configured its military to focus on short wars using heavy airpower and brief operations like the cynically named “mowing the grass” actions in Gaza prior to 2023. As Yagiv Lev describes, since the early part of the First Lebanon War, it as a “partial transformation of the IDF from a labor-intensive organization to a technology-intensive one, with heavy reliance on aerial assaults, precision weapons, and artillery and reduced use of intrusive ground troops.” (p. 63)

And he notes, “The decisions made during the Second Lebanon War … reflected [the] priority [of minimizing casualties among IDF soldiers]. The General Staff relied on massive airstrikes and deferred the ground operation for as long as possible because of the concerns over casualties.” (p. 134)

Lev also gives this description of how the IDF and the government viewed the infliction of civilian casualties in the Second Lebanon War:

In ... an attempt to exhaust the advantages of counterfire in reducing soldiers’ exposure to risk, the military learned the lessons of [previous engagements in] Lebanon. The Dahiyah Doctrine (named after the South Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyah, which was heavily bombarded by Israel during the war) was adopted after the war. This doctrine referred to the use of disproportionate power against every village in Lebanon from which rockets were fired on Israel, with the aim of causing immense damage and destruction, rather than hunting down individual missile launchers, which the IDF had failed to do during the war. The doctrine eliminated the need for clearing out the launchers through a costly ground attack. (p. 165)

Notes:

(1 Al Khoury, Laure (2024): Hezbollah chief killed in Israeli strike on Beirut. Al Monitor 09/[28]/2024. <https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2024/09/hezbollah-chief-killed-israeli-strike-beirut> (Accessed: 2024-28-09).

(2) What Nasrallah's death means for the Middle East conflict. DW News YouTube channel 09/28/2024. <https://youtu.be/eoHBNMmAkPo?si=Zos79d7EZjTMFmlE> (Accessed: 2024-28-09).

(3) Gavin, Gabriel & Detmer, Jamie (2024): Hezbollah leader Nasrallah killed by Israel in major escalation. Politico EU 09/28/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/hezbollah-hassan-nasrallah-kill-lebanon-strike-israel-war/> (Accessed: 2024-28-09).

(4) Beaumont, Peter & Christou (2024): Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah killed by Israel in major escalation of conflict. Guardian 09/28/2024. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/28/israel-says-it-has-killed-hezbollah-leader-hassan-nasrallah> (Accessed: 2024-28-09).

(5) Goldberg, Ori, interviewed by Edo Konrad (2024): What Israelis don’t want to hear about Iran and Hezbollah. +972 Magazine 09/20/2024. <https://www.972mag.com/iran-israel-hezbollah-ori-goldberg/> (Accessed: 2024-28-09).

(6) Lev, Yagil (2012): Israel’s Death Hierarchy: Casualty Aversion in a Militarized Democracy, 51. New York & London: NYU Press.