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Andrew Tobin(Free Beacon)
KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel—Tens of thousands of Israelis have been waiting for more than a year for a resolution to the conflict with Hezbollah that would allow them to return to their evacuated homes in the north.
But according to many of them, a Biden-Harris administration ceasefire proposal reportedly under consideration by Israeli leaders is not it.
In a letter sent to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, Fight for the North, a coalition of residents and evacuees from along Israel’s northern border, condemned a leaked draft of the proposal as a lifeline for Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group that has been bombarding northern Israel on a daily basis since last October. Fight for the North claimed to represent thousands of the evacuees who would refuse to return to their homes if the proposal were implemented.
“The agreement in question is destructive, and is a poke in the eye and a spit in the face of each and every one of the residents of the north who were evacuated from their homes,” the group wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “The agreement itself is not worth the paper it is written on, and will not bring security in any way.”
Under the draft proposal, which Israeli public broadcaster Kan published on Wednesday, the Lebanese Army and international peacekeepers would belatedly enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 and disarm Hezbollah in southern Lebanon—after failing to do so for the past 18 years. This time, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon would be part of a larger international peacekeeping mission overseen by the United States, and Israel would be formally allowed to “act against violations” in consultation with the Americans. A White House spokesman said in a statement on Wednesday that leaks about the ceasefire talks “do not reflect the current state of negotiations.”
Opposition to a ceasefire in Lebanon is widespread among the evacuees from the north, according to a half dozen unaffiliated with Fight for the North.
“I don’t want to tell you even how the citizens speak [about the proposal],” Amit Alfer, 57, a shiatsu therapist from Rosh Nakira, an evacuated coastal kibbutz in the Western Galilee, told the Free Beacon. “There is despair. Nobody is going to come back like this to the north.”
A number of leaders of northern communities have also come out against the draft proposal.
“We need to end this [conflict with Hezbollah] once and for all,” Shimon Guetta, the head of the Maale Yosef Regional Council in the Upper Galilee, told Israel’s Ynet news site on Wednesday. “We are dying to return to our homes, but to return safely.”
The northerners’ rejection of U.S. pressure to end the war in the north is part of a larger clash between the Israeli public and the Biden-Harris administration. With Vice President Kamala Harris in the final days of a campaign for the presidency, the White House has redoubled its push for de-escalation in Israel’s multifront war with Iran and its terrorist affiliates—seeking a return to the relative regional quiet that U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan boasted of days before Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel kicked off the Iranian axis’s unprovoked assault to destroy Israel. But Israelis, however war-weary, overwhelmingly believe the fighting can only end with a decisive defeat of their genocidal enemies.
A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank in Jerusalem, found that 90 percent of Jewish Israelis support a military counteroffensive that Israel launched against Hezbollah seven weeks ago to eliminate Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure near the Lebanon border and return the evacuees to their homes in the north. Seventy-two percent said that “Destroying Hezbollah’s military capabilities and pushing the group north of the Litani River,” about 17 miles north of the Israeli border, is necessary to safely bring home the evacuees.
A rocket-damaged house sits empty in Hanita, Israel, Oct. 1. 2024. (Andrew Tobin)
Refael Slav, 32, a cofounder of Fight for the North, told the Free Beacon that he and his fellow evacuees from the north are fed up with the Biden-Harris administration’s restraint of Israel during the war. While Netanyahu has often been cast abroad as a rogue leader, Slav said many of the evacuees see the prime minister as too deferential to the White House.
“The United States and this government will have blood on their hands if they don’t allow Israel to finish the job,” said Slav, a youth leader from Kiryat Shmona, a city in the Upper Galilee. “If we don’t finish the work in Lebanon, Oct. 7 will happen again, but this time in the north and 10 times over. The only difference will be that our hostages will be kidnapped to Beirut instead of Gaza City.”
Amid high-level U.S.-Israeli meetings in Jerusalem about a potential ceasefire in Lebanon, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Thursday that “good progress” had been made toward understandings on “effective implementation” of Resolution 1701. Hebrew-language media have in recent days been full of leaks suggesting that Israel’s security establishment is ready for a deal.
But the Prime Minister’s Office said Netanyahu, at the start of a meeting with U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein on Thursday, “made it clear that the main point is not this or that agreement on paper but Israel’s ability and determination to enforce the agreement and thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon.”
Some well-connected opponents of a ceasefire in Lebanon have doubted that Netanyahu is serious about a ceasefire. In an interview with Israel’s Army Radio on Thursday, Gabi Siboni, a prominent Israeli national security analyst, called the talk of ending the war “simply ridiculous.”
“Hochstein left here and said he wouldn’t return until after the U.S. elections, and suddenly, we get this pressure, and now he’s coming back, confusing everyone for no reason,” Siboni said. “It’s a waste of people’s time. It frustrates some people, and it doesn’t achieve anything. We’re not going to stop in Lebanon. Everyone knows we won’t stop, there won’t be any agreement, and we’ll have to continue. Why? Because the public won’t let [a ceasefire] happen.”
According to Siboni, Israel could not seriously consider any security arrangement with Lebanon, a borderline failed state, until the military had finished eliminating Hezbollah’s network of tunnels, underground bunkers, and weapons caches in southern Lebanon. That, he said, would take additional months.
“Isn’t it obvious that the residents of the north won’t return under these conditions?” he said. “Isn’t it clear to [Israel’s security establishment] that even if the residents of the north do return, they’ll be exposed to renewed threats?”
Golan Argaman, 48, an evacuee from Hanita, a kibbutz in the Western Galilee, told the Free Beacon he suspects Netanyahu is “just playing along” with the Biden-Harris administration’s demands until the U.S. election, which Argaman hoped would return former president Donald Trump to the White House.
“If the government, if Israel as a country, wants us to go back home, we need Israeli troops all the way up to the Litani with no one living in between for 20 years,” said Argaman, a former elite Israeli commando and the head of a farming collective that represents 260 kibbutzim. “I don’t know if Trump will give us more help, but at least he doesn’t seem to have illusions about the other side. I don’t think he will tie our hands the way Biden has.”
According to a survey published by Israel’s Channel 12 news last week, just 17 percent of Israelis want to see Harris win the election, compared to 66 percent who prefer Trump.
Several members of Hanita, one of Israel’s northernmost and most left-wing communities, told the Free Beacon they support a ceasefire in Lebanon as a step toward long-term peace. But the Israeli military, they agreed, would need to enforce any deal.
Shani Argaman, a 37-year-old teacher from Hanita and Golan Argaman’s sister, argued that Israel should “extend one hand in peace and have the other hand ready to fight.”
“I don’t think we should occupy their territory and stay there. I don’t want to take away their honor,” she said. “Eventually, I want peace with Lebanon. I want to travel there, visit there, sit in their restaurants, go shopping there, and live as good neighbors.”
On the other hand, Argaman said, no international guarantee would be enough to convince her to return to Hanita with her 9-year-old son, who had just celebrated his birthday away from home for the first time.
“As soon as [Hezbollah terrorists] raise their heads—and eventually they will, that’s the way of things—we have to make them pay a price without waiting for the approval of any power in the world,” she added. “We must let nothing pass. That is how you give me a true sense of security.”
Yoram Yitzhaki, a 59-year-old businessman who has refused to leave his house in Hanita as Hezbollah has pounded the kibbutz with rockets and drones over the past 13 months, said “nobody other than old rednecks like me will come back here” unless Israeli troops are active on the other side of the border.
“People expect to see the army on these hills,” Yitzhaki told the Free Beacon, gesturing toward southern Lebanon, a few hundred yards from his balcony. “We don’t want an occupation, we don’t want any of their lands. But we cannot continue to live like this.”
