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Jonathan S. Tobin(JNS)
Since Oct. 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely played by the rules set down by his American allies. Though it didn’t spare him from constant unfair criticism in which President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken often echoed Hamas propaganda about civilian casualties in Gaza, Netanyahu was determined to avoid an open split with the United States.
But in the last weeks as he began serious efforts to force Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters to back down and stop firing on northern Israel, the prime minister is trying something different. Rather than be tied into the futile and self-defeating Biden policy that treats diplomacy as an end unto itself, he has chosen a strategy that gives his nation a reasonable chance to achieve victory over its enemies.
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This has proven to be as great a shock to Washington as it has been to Tehran and its Hezbollah auxiliaries in Lebanon. As a series of articles in The New York Times, acting as always as the reliable mouthpiece of the administration and the foreign-policy establishment, has made clear, the expert class thinks Netanyahu has gone rogue. From their point of view, he has exposed Biden as unable to “control” what the administration still considers a dependent minor ally and to prevent a war that it wants no part of, regardless of the consequences.
One may dismiss any Times analysis of the current situation as coming from the same outlet that eulogized slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as a “skilled orator” who was as much a warrior for social justice as for terrorism and whom it incredulously claimed believed in a future for Israel in which all people would live in peace and justice with each other—a messianic era that could, of course, only be achieved, after the Jews were subjected to genocide.
A worldview turned upside down
But there’s no underestimating the shock being felt in the State Department, the National Security Council and at liberal think tanks as Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah has not immediately resulted in disaster for the Jewish state and Netanyahu. The Biden-Harris team, its disgraced special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, and its special envoy for Lebanon, Amos Hochstein, spent the last four years working hard to appease both Iran and Hezbollah. Thus, the series of devastating blows delivered to the terrorists by Israel is a grave disappointment to an administration that has been determined to rein in the Jewish state’s desire for security on its northern border, even if that meant tolerating the depopulation of the region due to Hezbollah missile fire.
The conceit of American policy has been a belief not only in the virtues of diplomacy and of holding onto the futile hope—at the heart of former President Barack Obama’s dangerous 2015 Iran nuclear deal—of a rapprochement with Tehran. It was also predicated on the assumption that any large-scale attack on Hezbollah would inevitably fail and lead to a far wider conflict that would only lead to catastrophe for Israel and the West. This defeatist mindset was similar to the belief that Hamas could not be overcome but only contained, and that any effort to stop, rather than to tolerate (as Obama’s deal had done), Iran’s nuclear program was similarly doomed.
So, the fact that in the course of two weeks, Netanyahu and Israel have exposed these assumptions as dead wrong is not only a humiliation for the Biden-Harris foreign-policy team but has turned their worldview upside down.
As long as Washington was continuing to send the weapons that Israel needed to fight Hamas and Hezbollah, albeit that they were slow-walked rather than expedited, Netanyahu played along with American concerns about Israeli strategies and tactics in fighting the war in Gaza. What followed was an unnecessarily slow grind that has allowed Hamas and Israel’s detractors to claim that the ground campaign was a failure and to encourage those who continue to call for a ceasefire that would allow the terrorists to survive, and thus claim that they had won. Though the Israel Defense Forces has achieved many of its objectives, this perception that its efforts were largely futile has helped encourage the last remnants of Hamas to hold on and refuse to release the remaining hostages that it took on Oct. 7.
The myth of invincibility
But after a year of frustration, and faced with the need to do something to force Hezbollah to stop firing on northern Israel and to get Israelis back into their homes, Netanyahu has finally had enough of American second-guessing and obsessive belief in diplomacy and multilateralism.
Starting with the intelligence coup that resulted in the exploding beepers and walkie-talkies, and followed by precision strikes that took out major Hezbollah commanders and its leader Nasrallah, Israeli forces not only demonstrated their tactical brilliance. They also punctured the myth of Hezbollah’s invincibility that first took root during its successful guerilla war to oust Israel from Southern Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. What began as a Shi’ite militia was transformed by Iran into a formidable military force that also was perceived as having defeated Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
Using its military muscle, Hezbollah eventually took effective control of a country divided by decades of ethnic conflict, thus delivering to Iran control of a strategic outpost adjacent to Israel. It then used that military power to achieve another Iranian victory in Syria, where, helped by Iranian forces and Russian airpower starting in 2011, it won the civil war for the brutal Bashar Assad regime, handing that tortured nation over to Tehran’s dominance.
All that fed the American belief that Hezbollah ought not to be challenged. Its possession of up to 200,000 missiles that might be fired at Israel in the event of an all-out war—a number that would overwhelm Israel’s vaunted missile-defense systems, and result in mass casualties and destruction—was seen as a decisive weapon for which Israel had no answer.
That assumption held even after Hezbollah responded to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacres in southern Israel with missile fire that forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes. For a year, Hochstein (the author of a 2021 deal forced upon the government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid that handed over some of Israel’s offshore natural-gas fields to Lebanon/Hezbollah) has worked hard to pressure the Israeli government not to do anything more than reply ineffectively to Hezbollah fire. This was done to convince the terrorists and Tehran that they were in no real danger of a serious Israeli effort to change the strategic equation.
But Netanyahu and the Israeli military understand a few facts about their opponents that the Americans don’t seem capable of comprehending.
Hezbollah’s true purpose
First, as powerful as Hezbollah is, it is not invincible. Its leadership is mortal, and for all of its obsessive secrecy, had come to believe in its own myths. The leadership was also aware that if it started a large-scale war with Israel, it could do great damage but not defeat the Jewish state. The only certain result of such a conflict would be the devastation of Lebanon. That is something that might rouse the various ethnic groups living there and regionally, which have sullenly accepted Hezbollah and Iranian dominance, to reassert their independence.
Second, and more importantly, Hezbollah’s value to Iran had little to do with its desire to hold onto Lebanon or Syria.
The purpose of those 200,000 Hezbollah missiles and rockets was not the defense of Lebanon or of the corrupt and despotic Hezbollah regime in Beirut. They exist to defend Iran, not the terrorists.
Iran created Hezbollah as part of its imperial project to create Shi’ite hegemony over the region—a quest that must be judged as at least partially successful, given today’s effective Shi’ite control of a section of the Middle East that comprises Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. In recent years, Hezbollah’s main utility has been to act as a fail-safe security system for the Islamist regime in Tehran. Those missiles and the ability to rain down death on Israel only exist to protect the mullahs and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps henchmen in the event of an Israeli or Western attack on Iran’s nuclear project.
That’s why, despite the constant temptation to use Hezbollah’s power to hurt Israel, especially when it is under attack from Hamas or even when Iran itself made some stabs at attacking the Jewish state (as with its spectacularly incompetent missile attack in April), the orders from Tehran have always been for Hezbollah to hold their fire.
The reason is obvious. Should Hezbollah fire its missiles under circumstances that would not protect the Islamist regime, not even the great harm they could do to Israel could make up for the damage that this would do to Iranian security.
That is why the systematic destruction of Hezbollah’s leadership—namely, its communications and ability to wage war—not to mention the threat to its supposedly impregnable weapons supplies, is so worrying to Tehran.
The ability of the Israelis to target Hezbollah’s leaders has certainly gotten the attention of Iranians, who realize that they could get the same treatment—a conclusion reinforced by Israel’s assassination of Hamas “political” leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 31 in Tehran.
More than that, they see that the commitment to keep up the missile fire on northern Israel is something that has finally convinced Netanyahu and the IDF that an effort to take out Hezbollah’s military power is not only possible but the most rational course available.
There are, of course, no guarantees that the series of Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah targets and what is now assumed by many to be an inevitable ground invasion of Southern Lebanon will achieve Israel’s main objective. As much as the clever beeper explosions and the killings of terrorists like Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders have cheered Israelis (and others in the region who have good reason to despise the Iranian auxiliaries), if this effort doesn’t force Hezbollah to stop firing on Israel and allow Israelis to return to their homes, then none of it can be considered a success.
As such, it is a gamble, but a reasonable one given the choices facing Netanyahu. If he were to follow U.S. advice and accept a ceasefire with Hezbollah, it would—like the various similar deals with Hamas that Washington has tried to force on the Israelis—do nothing to help the people of northern Israel and only reinforce Iran’s regional power.
That set up Israel with a choice between certain defeat for Israeli security via American diplomacy or the possibility of achieving a genuine victory over Hezbollah and Iran via a decisive military offensive. Under those circumstances, what Netanyahu is doing is the opposite of the charges of reckless and cynical adventurism that have been lodged against him by the administration and its liberal media cheerleaders.
A lesson the West has forgotten
Netanyahu’s plan of action has been both rational and calculated to exploit the weaknesses of Hezbollah and Iran.
As we’ve already seen, Iran has shown its cards in this standoff. Using the Israeli strikes or even a ground invasion as an excuse for an all-out war against Israel would be self-defeating. Doing so now with Hezbollah having already suffered crippling blows would obviously be unwise. More than that, war would result in the eradication of Iran’s ace in the hole in the event of an attack on its own regime. Preserving what is left of Hezbollah’s deterrent power, such as it is after the last two weeks, should be more important to Tehran than saving face against the Israelis.
Iran can either let Hezbollah be pushed out of Southern Lebanon and see its vital missile arsenal seriously diminished, or it can order its terrorist proxies to stand down against the Israelis.
Might Israel have miscalculated? It’s entirely possible. There are no guarantees in any war. But given the advantage that the Israelis have already seized in this conflict, the risks of disaster have been seriously reduced.
Contrary to the calumnies hurled at him by both domestic and foreign critics, in making this choice, Netanyahu is not cynically prolonging the post-Oct. 7 war to stay in office. Much to the dismay of his opponents, it is clearly boosting his popularity. But if that is so, it is because—like his decision to pursue a war to destroy Hamas—he is following the will of the Israeli people, who want their sovereignty reasserted over all of their country and see the terrorists constrained, if not completely defeated.
At this point, it’s clear that the offensive has to a large extent restored Israel’s deterrent power against its enemies that it lost when the military and intelligence establishments, as well as the government, were caught unawares on Oct. 7. It was Israeli military power that convinced moderate Arabs to make peace with it, not the 30 years of failed peace processing that followed the disastrous 1993 Oslo Accords. As Lee Smith correctly noted in Tablet magazine, Netanyahu and the IDF have reminded the world—and most specifically, Washington and the Europeans—that wars can be won. And the way they are won is by killing the enemy, not by making concessions to genocidal terrorists in diplomatic agreements.
That is a lesson that liberal Americans refuse to learn no matter how many times it is proven true. But it is one that the people of Israel, who are still under siege, understand. Netanyahu’s decision to try for victory is the kind of rational choice essential to their survival and that of the West. It’s a shame that the government in Washington, which still claims to be the leader of the free world, has forgotten this essential piece of wisdom.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
