Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
It was a stunning display of intelligence sophistication, but it’s not necessarily the opening salvo of a war that is best avoided.
Israel is believed to have simultaneously exploded almost 3,000 pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives. At 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the devices detonated across Lebanon, killing at least 12 people including two children, and injuring nearly 3,000. More explosions of handheld devices occurred in Lebanon on Wednesday, resulting in additional casualties. These events will be viewed as acts of brazen terrorism by many Lebanese, including those who otherwise dislike Hezbollah.
It’s another escalation toward a war few really want. Cooler heads need to prevail on both sides.
The current fighting began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Hamas demanded Hezbollah join the fray, but the Lebanese militia demurred, insisting it would limit itself to continuing efforts to drive Israel out of some border towns claimed by Lebanon, most notably Shebaa Farms.
But Hezbollah increased cross-border rocket attacks, albeit mostly within the mutually accepted parameters of “routine” border violence within a mile on either side aimed at military targets.
Hezbollah vows to continue until the Gaza war ends. But for many Israelis, Oct. 7 redefined border security doctrines.
Reports suggest that Israel detonated the pagers prematurely following Hezbollah suspicions about the devices. They had been intended for use during a full-blown conflict.
Yet apart from Hezbollah’s initial salvos, Israel has established escalation dominance. Israeli leaders wary of a conflict in Lebanon are ambivalent, seeing potential advantages as well as risks.
Iran and Hezbollah definitely don’t want a major conflict. Hezbollah’s role is to deter an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. It’s pointless to squander Hezbollah’s potent arsenal on a place (Gaza) with no real significance to Iran, or an unreliable ally like Hamas, which broke with them over the Syrian war.
Israelis commonly insist that war with Hezbollah is inevitable. But war is hardly inevitable when the other side doesn’t want one.
Starting a war based on “inevitability” – not in evidence – is reckless. Israel’s history, and that of other states that have tried to use occupations or buffer zones to fend off militia groups, suggest it would be folly and only drive the region into an open-ended conflict.
Hezbollah’s impulse will be to retaliate to “restore deterrence.” But it has been strikingly restrained following recent Israeli provocations, including the July assassination of its military commander.
Hezbollah is under heavy pressure within Lebanon, which can’t sustain a devastating war with Israel, to avoid dragging the country into a conflict on behalf of either Hamas or Iran. Outrage over the pager explosions is unlikely to change that decisively.
American negotiators have proposed a compromise that neither side has yet endorsed. A repeat of the successful negotiation of a Hezbollah-approved maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon may not be possible.
But everyone needs to avoid a further escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel’s military is still bogged down in Gaza and exhausted from the conflict with Hamas. It is likely to face a more potent Hezbollah than it expects, as it has every time since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. Creating a new occupation in the form of a “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon would be an act of total madness.
Such a conflict would also signal the ultimate failure of the Biden administration’s policy toward the post-Oct. 7 Middle East crisis: containment of the conflict to Gaza. The main point of U.S. policy in the past year has been preventing an Israel-Hezbollah war.
It’s up to Tehran and Washington to restrain their allies, Hezbollah and Israel. It’s essential to decouple Israel-Lebanon tensions from the war in Gaza, which Israeli and Hamas leaders appear determined to continue. If Israel and Hezbollah continue to view this as an extension of Gaza, they cede control to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israel’s Gaza war hawks, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Reason needs to triumph over fear and hatred. Otherwise, the pager explosions could be the next major step toward a war that no one, other than Hamas and Israel’s extreme right, wants.