Netanyahu invades Lebanon: only two outcomes are possible

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has launched his invasion of Lebanon. As usual in the opening stages of Israeli incursions into that fragile country, the signs and portents look good for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Thousands of Hezbollah’s senior and mid-level leaders have been killed or maimed by the Mossad intelligence agency and the IDF has destroyed a significant portion of the organisation’s huge missile inventory in their launch sites. Iran’s gesture of support for Hezbollah, 180 ballistic missiles fired at Israel on Tuesday, did little damage.

Moreover, Tehran is clearly not interested in a major war with Israel, let alone with Israel’s ally and protector, the United States. The regime said after launching those missiles at Israeli military targets that the penalty for Israel’s recent assassinations of Hezbollah supreme leader Hasan Nasrullah and Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh has now been paid.

Netanyahu, of course, is brimming with confidence and vows that “Iran will pay a heavy price” for its salvo of missile attacks. Indeed, he is so convinced that this is his moment of triumph that he is taking on Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi in Yemen and Iran (population 88 million and the proud possessor of lots of enriched uranium) all at once.

The whole of Israel is on a victory high after the striking success of last month’s attacks on Hezbollah and the interception of most of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s retaliatory missile launches against Israel.

Jubilant former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said out loud last Tuesday what Netanyahu clearly also really believes but cannot say: “This is the greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East.” He then urged Netanyahu to go after Iran’s nuclear facilities and “fatally cripple this terrorist regime”.

It looks and sounds like the jubilation Israelis felt after defeating all their country’s Arab neighbours in 1967. The high is unlikely to last as long this time, but even if this turns out to be a real and lasting Israeli victory rather than just the first round in a much longer struggle, a decisive outcome is not possible.

No matter how many Hezbollah fighters and cadres the IDF kills in its current advance into Lebanon, no matter how many rockets and launch sites it destroys, only two outcomes are possible.

Either Israel opts for a permanent military occupation of the southern part of Lebanon, which would entail a constant flow of Israeli casualties in a guerilla war against it, just like in the occupation of 1982-2000. Or else it withdraws after smashing things up as much as possible, whereupon Hezbollah starts rebuilding its forces and launch sites for the next round.

At some point the shooting will stop, and Israel will still be a country that rules over seven million Jews with full rights of citizenship and seven million Arabs, some with limited rights but most with none.

It will continue to be surrounded by four countries containing 159 million Arabs. Two of those countries have signed peace treaties with Israel, but popular opinion in all four still sees the Jewish state as the enemy. Moreover, regimes can be overthrown and peace treaties can be broken.

And Iran will still be there too. Even if the war that seems to be getting underway now should end in the overthrow of the current Iranian regime (a real though small possibility), any new Iranian regime that relies on popular support would probably also see Israel as a threat and an enemy.

One might add that Israel has had nuclear weapons for about 60 years, and Iran could have them in six months any time it chooses to defy the United States. Its current forbearance is based solely on its confidence that neither the US nor Israel will try to destroy its ‘threshold’ nuclear weapons status.

That Iranian calculation is probably still valid, because President Joe Biden has made it clear that the United States will not support an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. Without US support, especially in the form of tanker aircraft, such an attack would probably fall far short of expectations – and might well make Iran weaponise its uranium.

This is the context in which Israel was born and in which it still lives. The idea that it can break out of these constraints by mere military force is a delusion, and even Netanyahu may not believe it. His primary goal, after all, is not strategic. For him it’s mainly a tactical manoeuvre designed to keep himself in power and avoid jail.

At the moment it sounds deluded to say that this futile, bloody nonsense will only end when Israelis and Palestinians both accept that the borders defined by the end of the 1948 war are legitimate and permanent. But this is not delusion. It is a cold, hard fact.

Gwynne Dyer’s latest book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers