Why Hezbollah and Israel Can’t Make a Deal
6 min read
At about 3:30 on a seemingly normal, relatively calm Tuesday afternoon, all hell suddenly broke loose across Lebanon. Pagers belonging to fighters, operatives, allies, and associates of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia suddenly exploded, injuring at least 2,750 people, including civilians, and killing 12, including two children. The details of the operation are still unfolding, but Israel is almost certainly behind the detonations, making them one of the most audacious acts of sabotage ever conducted.
The attack demonstrated, not for the first time, the extraordinary degree of Israel’s penetration into Iran and its Arab allies. Just since January, Israel has assassinated the Hamas operative Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut, the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh at a guesthouse in Tehran, and the Hezbollah military leader Fuad Shukr, again in Beirut. But the pager explosions mark an escalation, specifically, of the conflict that has been building between Israel and Hezbollah since October 8.
That day, following Hamas’s attack on Israel, Hezbollah fired rockets across the Lebanon-Israel border in a rather pro forma show of solidarity with the Palestinian extremists. But to Hamas’s disappointment, Hezbollah did not immediately ramp up its attacks beyond what had become routine across that border for more than two decades. In fact, Israel has been largely responsible for the escalation of conflict near the border over the months that followed, for reasons that are not impossible to discern. Hezbollah’s interests, however, are a bit more opaque, and have set the group against both a wider war and the terms of a negotiated peace.
Neither Iran nor Hezbollah has much to gain from a regional conflagration or a war with Israel in Lebanon, particularly one started on behalf of Hamas. For Iran, Hezbollah is a precious asset not to be wasted. Tehran sees the militia—and its estimated 150,000 missiles and rockets, many with precision guidance—as its prime deterrent against an Israeli or American attack on its homeland or nuclear facilities, as well as a regional trump card. To expend this capacity on Gaza would be irrational from an Iranian point of view. Gaza has no strategic, religious, or historic significance to Iran—or really to anyone other than Palestinians, Israelis, and some Egyptians.
In addition, Hamas isn’t nearly as important to Iran as Hezbollah is. Hamas is a Sunni fundamentalist organization linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and its inclusion in Shiite Iran’s “axis of resistance” is a marriage of convenience. In fact, Hamas broke with the Iranian network from 2012 to 2019 over the Syrian civil war: The Muslim Brotherhood was a major part of the Syrian opposition that Iran, Hezbollah, and their allies, including Russia, intervened to put down. Hamas returned to the Iranian fold only after that war ended. By then, both parties understood the limitations of the relationship.
Hezbollah instigated a war with Israel in 2006—its leader later apologized for it on Lebanese television—but it has shown little appetite for entering a new war with Israel on behalf of Gaza and Hamas. Many Israelis, by contrast, appear to be ambivalent about such a conflict. Some say that a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon is “inevitable”—better to get it over with. Others point out that the population on both sides of the border has largely evacuated, and that the Biden administration has pledged to support Israel if it is “forced into” a war.
The more sophisticated argument from Israeli hawks is that, since October 7, Israel and the Palestinians have suffered strategic losses, while Iran and its network of armed gangs have pocketed some gains. To reverse this equation, an Israeli attack in Lebanon could deliver a humiliating blow to Hezbollah and Iran. It could also help reestablish the legitimacy of Israel’s national-security institutions after the debacle of October 7. These are the deeper reasons Israel has recently added curbing Hezbollah to its Gaza-war aims.
Some Israeli officials point to the 80,000 or so Israelis evacuated from the border area and claim that they cannot return safely unless Hezbollah withdraws its forces and heavy equipment from the other side. That concern surely reflects the trauma of October 7, but it’s worth noting that senior members of the war cabinet began pressing to invade Lebanon in early October, when no evacuations had taken place (some have since changed their minds).
So if Hezbollah doesn’t want a war, why doesn’t it accept a sensible settlement, like the one the Biden administration has spent the past year negotiating? Israel had been demanding that Hezbollah withdraw its forces and heavy equipment to about 25 kilometers, or 15 miles, away from the border; Hezbollah refused to consider this and instead insisted on an end to the Gaza war. The U.S. envoy, Amos Hochstein, reportedly proposed a compromise, with Hezbollah pulling back to seven or eight kilometers from the border rather than 25. The Lebanese military or United Nations forces would ostensibly step in to secure the frontier. Evacuees on both sides could return to their homes, and a devastating war that Lebanon, especially, cannot afford would be averted.
The proposal is eminently reasonable, but Hezbollah will never accept it. To understand why, consider that the agreement that ended the Lebanese Civil War in 1989 required all warring parties to disarm. Hezbollah managed to carve out an exception, first because Israel was still occupying southern Lebanon, and later, when that was no longer the case, on the grounds that the militia would protect the border area and liberate two small towns that remained under Israeli control. This is the rather flimsy basis on which the militia group has been permitted to maintain its own army—and therefore its own foreign and defense policy, and the ability to plunge Lebanon into war at any moment, without consulting the rest of its citizens or its government.
Any formal understanding that pulls Hezbollah back from the border threatens the rationale for its existence as an armed group within Lebanon. How can Hezbollah protect a border or liberate villages from five or so miles away? Sooner or later, someone in Lebanon would be liable to point out that if the Lebanese military or UN forces are securing the border area, Hezbollah needs to finally follow the other militia groups and disarm.
Of course, Hezbollah could simply refuse. It could even turn its guns on other Lebanese, much as it did in 2008, when the Lebanese government attempted to dismantle Hezbollah’s independent military-telecommunications network and regain administrative control of the Beirut airport. But doing so would mark an end to Hezbollah’s domestic legitimacy as a proponent of Lebanon’s national interests and convince many Lebanese that the militia is out for little more than political power and service to Iran. Hezbollah cannot function outside the Lebanese context, and functioning within it requires maintaining at least the appearance of cooperation with the political system.
Whether the exploding pagers presage an invasion of Lebanon remains to be seen. Some Israeli hawks purportedly envision establishing a security buffer zone between the two countries, on Lebanese territory. But a new Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon—which is what such a zone would amount to—would greatly strengthen Hezbollah’s argument for retaining its arms (and using them to eject the Israelis).
Much like the war in Gaza, a renewed occupation of Lebanese territory could well become a quagmire of constant warfare—one that would be considered entirely justified by many Lebanese who otherwise greatly dislike Hezbollah and its Iranian backers. Some Israelis may believe that October 7 justifies a new security doctrine of renewed occupations and buffer zones across the country’s borders. But expanding the territory of the war not only will not end it, but could render it virtually irresolvable.
