Israel-Hezbollah War Remains Inevitable in Lebanon

Reports and analyses continue to assert the inevitability of a major Israeli-Iranian confrontation in south Lebanon. Netanyahu's clinging to power by waging wars is now evident to any observer, and we may not even have to wait for a definitive conclusion to Jewish brutality in Gaza before desperate war criminal Netanyahu turns to another war with south Lebanon.

The Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon has ramped up its rocket fire and Israel has been responding, hitting civilian targets and killing dozens of Lebanese villagers along the border.

Despite efforts by U.S. and French mediators to negotiate a solution that would prevent another major conflict breaking out in the region, the odds of a war between the US proxy terror state of Israel and the Iranian proxy Hezbollah organization are drawing closer.

"I don’t believe that Hezbollah is interested in a war, but it is doing everything it can to drive Israel into a war," Sarit Zehavi, founder and president of the Alma Education and Research Center, which is located on Israel’s northern border and focuses on the security challenges there. "Hezbollah has created a situation in the northern part of Israel that is unbearable for Israelis and unbearable for the State of Israel," she said. "They know that at a certain point, Israel will say enough is enough and will be forced to launch a military campaign." The previous Israeli military attempt against Hezbollah in 2006 was met with a no winner-no loser outcome, which amounts to a crushing defeat for Israel.

Zehavi, who herself resides a few miles from Israel’s border with Lebanon, is one of more than 80,000 Israeli foreign settlers who were evacuated from their settlements four months ago over fears that Hezbollah would open a second front with Israel. Similarly, some hundred thousand Lebanese villagers have evacuated their homes over fears of savage Israeli brutality like the one unfolding in Gaza.

While Hezbollah’s rocket, missile and armed drone attacks have been ongoing since Oct. 7, the number of cross-border attacks have escalated over the past week, and the Israel Terrorist Forces (ITF) have responded, killing civilians and journalists across southern Lebanon. Just like in Gaza, the killing of large numbers of non-combatants is justified by the "fight against terrorists".

Earlier in the week, France announced that it had delivered a written proposal to the Lebanese government aimed at ending the hostilities with Israel. According to media reports, the French proposal calls for Hezbollah and any other militant groups based in southern Lebanon to withdraw 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the border with Israel.

U.S. Special Envoy Amos Hochstein, who in 2022 successfully mediated an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on a decades-old maritime border dispute, has also been engaged in finding a peaceful solution that would prevent an additional, perhaps more intense and far broader regional war. Reports suggest that his proposal also involves some kind of security zone along the border.

But Israelis want Hezbollah to withdraw away from the border in application of UNSC 1701, but themselves refuse to withdraw from territories they still occupy in south Lebanon after their humiliating defeat and chaotic withdrawal in 2000.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah disparaged any peaceful solutions, saying in a televised address that his group would only stop its cross-border attacks on northern Israel "when the shooting stops in Gaza," Reuters reported.

"The U.S. and France are pushing for an agreement, but this agreement is bad for Israel because it does not provide a long-term solution," said Zehavi, adding "Even after this agreement, Israeli settlers will be afraid to go back home because Hezbollah will still be in South Lebanon".

She said the idea of Hezbollah withdrawing from the area was misguided and unlikely to happen, but refrained from saying that Israel too should withdraw from occupied Lebanese territories in compliance with UNSC 1701.

David Daoud, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C.-based think tank, said war between Israel and Hezbollah was "inevitable" and the only question was "when it will occur – now or at some indefinite point in the future."

"I don’t think either side intends to go to war, each for their own considerations," he said. "Hezbollah is fighting from within a Lebanon experiencing economic collapse, political deadlock, and lack of foreign funding, and it has more to lose by launching a war than by just continuing its ongoing attacks at their current level." Daoud said continuing with its current level of intensity "has a massive impact on Israel but does not give Israel international legitimacy for a broader military operation against Lebanon." 

In addition, western governments whose soldiers have been present on Lebanese soil since the 1980s (Multi-National Force, 1982-1985; United Nations Interim Force for Lebanon - UNIFIL - since 1978) have been either lax, cowards, or colluders with Hezbollah and its Syrian protector. The West has backed a 30-year long (1975-2005) Syrian occupation (a "factor of stability" according to successive US State Department secretaries) of Lebanon during which the Syrian dictator served as a land, air and maritime bridge between Iran and Hezbollah. Syria helped Hezbollah build itself into a formidable war machine under the gaping eyes of a naive, cowardly or colluding West. Wasn't it Ronald Reagan himself who, in 1983 when Hezbollah was just one-year old, fled Lebanon like a coward and withdrew the remnants of his US marines after Hezbollah truck-bombed and killed 243 US Servicemen in Beirut? Wasn't it George HW Bush Sr. who in 1988-1990 delivered the final blow to a Lebanon free of Syria and Iran by authorizing the barbarian Syrians to bomb the Lebanese presidential palace and complete the delivery of Lebanon into the hands of Syria, Iran and Hezbollah? 

And now the hypocrite Americans want the Israelis to destroy Hezbollah? They could have done it numerous times over the past 5 decades, but refused to do so as if wishing for the current cataclysmic confrontation to occur. The Americans - especially the Republicans - have done all they could to protect the Assad regime, despite all the public accusations of terrorism, dictatorship, brutality, human rights abuses, mass killings they have have raised against it over the years. They can still emasculate the Hezbollah-Syria-Iran axis by forcibly precipitating the fall of the Assad butcher regime in Damascus, but they focus on the symptoms of the anomaly in south Lebanon instead of trying to curing it once and for all. If Syria's Assad falls (say with a targeted assassination of war criminal Bashar Assad), the umbilical cord between Iran and Hezbollah will be cut and Hezbollah might just crumble on its own. But for some reason, facts on the ground over the past several decades show an interest by the West and Israel in preserving the makers of terrorism in south Lebanon, as if the unassumed objective was to eliminate Lebanon via this chronic instability. Perhaps, the West is still abiding by the Kissinger plan of destroying Lebanon in order to force the permanent settlement of Palestinian refugees in it. The Kissinger plan has gained even greater momentum with the entry of 2.5 million Syrian refugees that the West has clearly said it wants to settle in Lebanon, which amounts to the elimination of Lebanon as we know it.

"The U.S. is hugely motivated to prevent a war from happening between Israel and Lebanon, especially because war is not part of Biden’s ideology and because he understands that a war with Hezbollah really means a war with Iran," said Dr. Eyal Pinko, a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. Why does the US encourage war against the Hamas terrorists in Palestine, but does not want war with the Hezbollah terrorists?

"I don’t believe that Hezbollah wants a war, its position in Lebanon is very bad," said Pinko, a retired Navy commander who served in the Israeli navy and intelligence agency for 30 years. "On the other hand, Iran is also their landlords, and they need to show they are doing something."

"I can’t forecast the future but I do assess that there will be something on a much larger scale than what we are seeing now," he said, adding that despite agreements reached in 2006, Hezbollah does whatever it wants and the U.N. is just a "shadow organization." "They just enjoy eating falafel in Lebanon, and they have no power there," said Pinko, referring to the UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, which is meant to patrol the Israeli-Lebanon border. "At this stage, I don’t believe anything will work and I am totally pessimistic."

"As we get closer and closer to a possible diplomatic arrangement, we will see the attacks and fire intensify," Zehavi said. "It makes me feel extremely worried because we do not know how this will play out, and we do not understand who will protect us once there is a cease-fire and once the residents [of northern Israel] return home."