With pressure mounting on Israel's Terrorist Cabinet to shift to Phase 2 in its failure in Gaza, Senior Jewish Terrorist Benny Gantz is ramping up his threats against Lebanon's Hezbollah. Deaths are piling up on both terrorist sides of the border. Hezbollah, the terrorist arm of Iran in Lebanon, is now in full control of the country behind an inept or colluding Lebanese government and its army.
Hezbollah is no Hamas. It is Hamas multiplied by a hundred, both in its arsenal, its training in ten years of fighting in Syria, and the troops it musters. As Israel has so far failed to achieve its two goals in Gaza (eliminate Hamas and retrieve the captives) in three months of fighting, and says it will take many more months, all indications are that these two goals are a fake cover for Israel's intent to push Gaza's Palestinians into the Sinai, in a repeat of what Jewish terrorist organizations (Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, Stern...) did in 1948, and annex Gaza once and for all.
On the captives, many more Israeli terrorist soldiers have been killed in the Gaza fighting and the math doesn't add up: upwards of 500 soldiers dead to recover 120 captives? On the elimination of Hamas, this is an unachievable goal. Hamas, like any other resistance to foreign occupation, might be snuffed out for a while and its leadership assassinated, but it will grow back. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Israel and its imbecile US poodles labeled Yasser Arafat as a terrorist, his PLO was deemed a terrorist organization, and they assassinated dozens of PLO leadership figures (who were secular, not Islamic). Yet the PLO survived, Israel made peace with it and the PLO today runs the West Bank.
In fact, this "elimination of Hamas" objective is aspirational and has produced the opposite result: Israel's war on Gaza has been a mine gold for Hamas recruiters in the West Bank.
If we accept the premise that Israel doesn't really care for Hamas or its captives, but is really eyeing taking the Gaza real estate to build more settlements after ethnically cleansing it of its Palestinian population, then it is easy to extrapolate that premise to the south of Lebanon.
Israel is demanding the retreat of Hezbollah to the northern bank of the Litani River, some 30 Km or 18 miles from the border. Even if Hezbollah is pushed back, it can still inflict severe damage to Israel with its medium-range and long-range missiles supplied by Iran. So what gives?
It may be that Israel is uncomfortable with the large Shiite population, Hezbollah's natural incubator, in that area of Lebanon. By eliminating that Shiite environment, it believes it can significantly reduce the threat to its north. In other words, just as it is doing in Gaza, it is using the pretext of pushing Hezbollah to the Litani - knowing that Hezbollah will put up a fierce fight with potentially severe losses to Israel - to in fact push the entire Shiite population of south Lebanon further north into the Bekaa Valley's Shiite hinterland and annex the Lebanese real estate south of the Litani.
Granted that Hezbollah can still mount attacks against the Israeli interior from the northern side of the river, but an important factor works against this possibility. Assuming that an all-out war breaks out, there will be a massive displacement of Lebanese Shiites to the north (to Beirut's southern suburb and to the Bekaa Valley; shown in purple on the map below), leaving only a minority of Shiites north of the Litani, which would deprive Hezbollah of its natural base. The other religious communities (Maronites in red, Druze in blue, Sunnis in green) north of the Litani will not allow Hezbollah to establish itself in their areas, which might lead to a full-flegded civil war pitting a hypothetical Christian-Druze-Sunni alliance against the Shiite "duo", Hezbollah (pro-Iran) and its allied pro-Syrian Shiite Amal movement. The Lebanese army is unreliable because it can always fracture along sectarian lines, like it did in the 1975 war, despite dubious claims by Israel's backer, the United States, that it has continued to boost the army's capabilities.
By Sergey Kondrashov - http://www.katagogi.com/LV2009/LebMap.aspx?l=EN, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23421707
If this scenario were to unfold, it will no doubt cause Lebanon terrible damage for no other two reasons than
1- Israel's despair at failing in these wars to which it is not prepared. Remember that Israel's "great" victories of 1948, 1967 and 1973 were all against regular armies and across borders, not militias and urban fighting. A few days of conventional fighting and it was over. But it took Israel 33 days of bombing before it failed to eliminate Hezbollah in 2006. Fear of failing again will make it act with savagery as it is doing in Gaza.
2- In the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, Hezbollah was not an integral part of the Lebanese body politic. It had no ministers in government, nor did it have representatives in Parliament. Israel targeted only infrastructure that supplied or otherwise served Hezbollah. Today, Hezbollah IS the Lebanese government. It has voided the state of its christian president and it has installed a puppet caretaker government that barely functions. This gives Israel latitude and justification to attack every and any component of the Lebanese state: army barracks, ministries, hospitals, schools, churches, mosques.... just as it is doing in Gaza.
Israel's threats are specific:
"The
stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out. If the world and
the Lebanese government don't act in order to prevent the firing on
Israel's northern residents and to distance Hezbollah from the border,
the IDF will do it." (Gantz)
"the situation on Israel's northern
border demands change." (Gantz)
"the war would be "deep, forceful, and surprising" with the military campaign continuing to widen to "more foci or fronts". (Gantz)
"Today we approved a variety of plans for the future, and we need to be ready for an offensive, if necessary," (Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi)
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