On September 17, Israel updated its war aims, which until that point had dealt solely with Gaza and Hamas, to include “returning the residents of the North securely to their homes.”
Fourteen hours later, thousands of pagers exploded in the hands of Hezbollah officials and fighters throughout Lebanon and as far away as Damascus.
This marked the first of a series of stunning Israeli operational successes – including a ground incursion – that have fundamentally altered the situation in Lebanon by significantly downgrading Hezbollah’s capabilities.
These successes include eliminating the top officers of the elite Radwan forces positioned on Israel’s borders, destroying between 50-80% of Hezbollah’s missile arsenal, uprooting Lebanese villages along the border that were to serve as a launching pad for an October 7-style attack on the North, and killing long-time Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as well as his replacement just a few days later.
By any measure, those are tremendous tactical and operational achievements. Now the trick is to leverage those operational successes into diplomatic ones. The planned visit on Thursday of US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk will give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a chance to do just that.
According to various media reports, an agreement is being discussed that would be based roughly on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War, but would enhance it.
This includes pushing Hezbollah north of the Litani River; bringing some 10,000 Lebanese Army troops down south and stationing them on the Israeli-Lebanese border; developing a mechanism, together with UNIFIL, to monitor the area and prevent the terrorist organization from re-entrenching itself in the region; and giving Israel guarantees and the right to act militarily if it sees Hezbollah violating this agreement.
Some argue that to aspire to such an arrangement now, with Hezbollah tremendously weakened, is shortsighted, and that the IDF should continue and expand its operations in southern Lebanon and beyond and seek to deliver an even more devastating blow – perhaps a knock-out punch – to Hezbollah.
We think this would be a mistake.
Destroying Hezbollah was never the goal
The government limited the IDF’s goals in Lebanon to taking the steps to enable the return of Israel’s residents to the North. It did not, as it did in the South with Hamas, define those goals as destroying Hezbollah or removing it from civilian power inside Lebanon. Given Israel’s unpleasant history of overreach in Lebanon, this was wise.
Israel should not try to engineer a new reality in Lebanon. It needs to secure the border so that the residents of Manara and Metulla, Shlomi and Kiryat Shmona, will feel secure returning to their homes.
What does that mean? It means that there is no longer a threat of terrorist raids from across the border, and the terrorists are now out of range to fire anti-tank missiles at homes, schools, and community centers across the border.
The IDF’s large-scale destruction of the villages along the border that stored staggering amounts of weaponry and its pushback of Hezbollah terrorists has seemingly secured those objectives.
It is now time, therefore, to lock those military achievements into a diplomatic agreement. Any agreement, however, must ensure that Israel has the right to act militarily against Hezbollah if it abrogates the agreement and once again tries to turn southern Lebanon into a forward base for an attack on Israel.
Here, Israel will not only have to demand this right but also be willing to act against any infringements – something it failed to do in its quest for quiet following the Second Lebanon War. Instead of acting against Hezbollah’s violations and risking a confrontation, it opted to turn a blind eye, a policy that led to Hezbollah’s monstrous buildup.
After a year of attacks from the air and a month-long ground incursion, Israel has significantly downgraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. It has removed their fighters from the country’s back porch. It has uprooted the tremendous military infrastructure – both above and below the ground – that Hezbollah had built up along the border over decades.
If McGurk and Hochstein can now broker an agreement that consolidates these gains and grants Israel the right to act if Hezbollah attempts to rearm or move south, then – to borrow a phrase from US President Joe Biden from another context – Israel “should take the win.”