The Israel-Hezbollah Cease Fire

Is Israel Returning to October 6, 2023 and Quiet for Quiet?

Is the cease fire agreement with Hezbollah a return to October 6, 2023 or a look forward to January, 2025 and beyond?

Let’s review the essential points of the agreement.

- First is the obvious – neither Hezbollah nor Israel can attack each other and both the governments of Israel and Lebanon agree that UN Resolution 1701 (which ended the 2006 war with a promise to move Hezbollah north of the Litani River) is ‘important’.

- Second, only the Lebanese Army will be permitted to hold arms and use force in southern Lebanon. What this means to the armed Druze and Sunnis is not clear. And if they have weapons the Shiites will demand the same.

- All arms production and procurement in Lebanon will be under the auspices of the Lebanese government and all unrecognized and unofficial production and procurement will be disbanded.

- A committee will be appointed that is acceptable to both Lebanon and Israel that will oversea the above and both countries will report violations to that committee.

- Israel will withdraw its forces to south of the border within 60 days.

- The US will conduct indirect negotiations between Lebanon and Israel.

There is of course the “side letter” that “permits” Israel to defend itself if necessary. The fact that a country needs a guarantee from another country that it can defend itself is strange and after other side letters from American Presidents (see Bush’s after the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, let alone Eisenhower’s promise to keep the Straits of Tiran open after the 1956 war) have been ignored it is hard to understand the purpose of this letter other than as a marketing tool to sell to the no longer naïve Israeli public.

The test behind every international agreement is its enforcement. Security Council resolutions and US brokered deals are all very nice but unless there is actual enforcement it is no agreement at all. This is as true with commercial agreements as it is with diplomatic and military ones. This is especially true when one side to the agreement does not even control the force that needs to be restrained. Worse than that, in this agreement, the Lebanese Army has free reign in southern Lebanon, can decide which arms production facilities and which arms depots are legitimate or not and can patrol on the border with Israel. Any complaints will be sent to a committee.

The US government likes to pretend that the Lebanese Army is a force sympathetic to it as the US has armed it and trained many of its officers. However, the Lebanese Army is controlled by the Lebanese government and the Lebanese government is still controlled by Hezbollah. The terrorist organization sits in the Lebanese parliament and government and has de facto veto power over their decisions. True enough, Hezbollah has been weakened after the last 2 months of war with Israel, but their members have not been thrown out of the parliament or the government.

This pretending – regarding the Lebanese Army and Government - is what is the fatal flaw in this agreement. We have pretended in the past, in the middle east and elsewhere and we have pasted our own impression of the other side’s “interests” on top of what the other side actually considers its interests and it has led to no good.

Israel has purposely not bombed Lebanese civil sites and has limited its attacks to Hezbollah positions, Shiite villages in the south and Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut. I think that was a smart strategy as it told the Lebanese people in no uncertain terms that Israel does not consider Hezbollah to be Lebanon. But it was not just something Israel “told” the Lebanese people (and government!). It is something that needs to be answered by them by tossing Hezbollah from all government agencies and the government itself. A de-Hezbolliztion of the country, so to speak. By keeping the status quo in the government and army the Lebanese government shows it doesn’t necessarily agree with the message Israel has been sending it.

Iran, too must be told to leave the country. Lebanon must break relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran until they stop supplying Hezbollah with military and financial aid. That would be a step in the right direction and a step that could give teeth to this agreement. The fact that the Lebanese government has not been made to initiate a break from Hezbollah and Iran shows that the US negotiator has once again refused to look reality in the eye as he used the same old State Department strategy of getting an agreement for the sake of an agreement.

As for Israel, did it demand these obvious actions? It does not seem so and that makes the government and its negotiators guilty of negligence unless of course there were threats coming from the Biden-Harris-Blinken administration.

But, this is the agreement there is and the question is what does Israel gain from it and why did it enter into it?

There are various wild cards which we don’t know about that could have caused Israel to enter into the agreement. The first has to do with possible threats from the Biden Administration regarding UN resolutions or arms shipments. There are already rumors that the US is again withholding artillery shells and even preventing the shipment of Caterpillar D9s and secretly cooperating on a Security Council resolution harmful to Israel – as Obama did in his last days. The arms embargos by France and the UK were surely done with the encouragement of the State Department and the ICC arrest warrants could not have been issued without at least the tacit agreement of the US administration. Even these were not part of the negotiation eventhough the Administration wanted it so badly.

A second wild card has to do with the incompetence of the IDF General Staff and the man that stands at the head of it, Herzi Halevi. Over the past 14 months he has spearheaded a failed strategy in Gaza where the IDF needs to go and fight and reconquer the same area multiple times since Halevi refuses to take control of Gaza. After 14 months of war where the IDF has at one point or another controlled nearly 100% of Gaza, it now holds just 30%. This is not because the IDF has been forced out of any area, but because Halevi ordered them out. After 14 months of allowing Hamas to control the humanitarian aid and therefore the people of Gaza, Halevi has the same strategy and the same stubborn refusal to create any type of IDF controlled Hamas free zones. The same tactics were used in Lebanon where the IDF would capture a village, at the cost of much blood, only to withdraw after destroying what Hezbollah infrastructure it found. It reached a point where commanders in the field complained, to deaf ears, that Hezbollah were shooting anti-tank rockets at the IDF from positions that the IDF held just days or even hours before.

This strategy, approved by the government’s War Cabinet, has failed and was doomed to fail from the start since it relied on the same ignorance that Hochstein and Co. used in the negotiations – pasting Israel’s concept of the enemy’s interests onto their real interests and pretending that they will learn sooner or later what their “real” interests are.

Even worse than that, the IDF has not done what the entire country thought it was going to do and create more divisions with the tens of thousands of reservists who were inexplicably not called for reserve duty over the last ten years. That, combined with Netanyahu’s stubborn refusal to tell the ultra-orthodox Haredi leaders that the world has changed and so must they, could mean that the IDF is short troops to continue the war in Lebanon along with Gaza and the West Bank, without taking a break.

What else does Israel get for this agreement? If it got carte blanche in Gaza and Iran then it might be worth it, but that does not seem to be the case as now that the US has “solved” the Lebanon problem they can put the last 7 weeks of their time left to force Israel to “solve” the Gaza and West Bank problem, leaving the Biden-Blinken ally, Islamic Iran, intact.

There has been one other argument in favor of this agreement and that is that now the Islamic Republic of Iran has been proven a poor ally as it allowed Israel to destroy much of the firepower of their main ally, Hezbollah. But the flip side of that is that Iran now has a few months to re-arm and refinance Hezbollah while continuing on their path to be a nuclear power.

Israel had a strategy of de-linking Lebanon from Gaza with the argument being that there does not need to be a war in Lebanon just because there is one in Gaza. That made sense at the start of the war and has succeeded just now, but what has been the purpose if the cease fire agreement does not, in itself, give Israel any tangible gains? Again, the argument is that now Hamas might be more willing to compromise in the hostage negotiations since they are in this alone -but they started this alone and after 14 months of fighting they still control 70% of Gaza. What makes one think that this would make Hamas more flexible unless this de-linking is combined with massive force and a takeover of the distribution of humanitarian aid (in which case de-linking would have been irrelevant)? Again, Israel is pretending and pasting its conception of its enemy’s interests over what the enemy considers its interests.

This “pretending” is what got us into this situation and neither the security nor the political elite is willing to get beyond this and face reality. There are no objective national interests in the world. Each country, and in the middle east, each faction in each country sees its interests differently and acts on those interests as they see them. The West, Israel included, besides their respect for other cultures and their globalized utopia, cannot seem to get beyond their own concept of national interests.

What can happen to turn this into a good agreement? The first thing would be more intense pressure in Gaza leading to the freedom of the remaining 101 hostages. That should have been a concrete goal of this agreement, but that feeling was not shared by the negotiators. Second, the isolation and defeat of the Islamic Republic of Iran and third turning Hezbollah into a non-entity in Lebanon. If these – or any of these were to result due to this agreement then I will admit that it was a good agreement.

However, if what comes from this is just “quiet” – even for a number of years, this will be seen as yet another, to paraphrase Abba Eban regarding the Palestinians, “opportunity to miss an opportunity”. The opportunity presented to Israel on October 7, 2023 to destroy Hamas and make them into a non-entity has been squandered, so far. The opportunity presented to Israel by the killing of Nasrallah and the beeper attack to destroy Hezbollah has been squandered, so far. The opportunity presented to Israel by Iran’s two attacks on it, to destroy their nuclear facilities and provoke the downfall of the Islamic Republic, has been squandered, so far.

Victory this is not - or not yet, anyway. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the Chief of the Mossad, Dadi Barnea – who is quoted as telling the Security Cabinet “this is what victory looks like”. Post-modern victory maybe – but not victory that takes reality into account.