US Secretary of State Antony Blinken framed what is happening in the North in jarring terms on Monday.
“You have 60,000 or so Israelis who have been forced from their homes in northern Israel,” he said at Washington’s Brookings Institute. “Israel effectively lost sovereignty in the northern quadrant of the country because people don’t feel safe going to their homes.”
The reason this was so jarring is because the last nine months of war — both in Gaza and a low-intensity war on the northern border — have habituated Israelis to certain realities, one of them being that towns, moshavim and kibbutzim along the Lebanese border are deserted.
The public hears the numbers of residents forced to flee their homes, hears them relate their hardships in the media, feels horrible about the situation and commiserates and empathizes with the residents but — for the most part — chalks it up as yet another casualty of October 7 and the war that followed. What’s truly at stake is not necessarily considered.
But the way Blinken framed the situation was stark: Israel has lost sovereignty over a strip of its territory. No less. If a country’s residents cannot live in their homes in a particular region of the country because of security threats, then that country has lost its sovereignty — defined as supreme power or authority over a territory — over that territory.
And that is very significant.
Homes, villages deserted
According to a Yediot Ahronot report on Tuesday, 1,023 homes, public buildings and infrastructure facilities have been hit by rockets, drones and missiles from Lebanon. The hardest hit communities are Kiryat Shmona (147 incidents), Menara (130), Metulla (121), Shlomi (115) and Arab al-Aramshe (88). More than 130 communities have been affected.
Just to illustrate the degree to which Israel has lost its sovereignty in those areas, in many cases — because of the security risks — families have not been able to go to their homes to even assess the damage.
Blinken said something else jarring in this context. “Hezbollah”has tied what it is doing with the situation in Gaza, and has said that if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, it will stop firing at Israel. Now they shouldn’t be firing to begin with, it’s wrong in and of itself. But it is also a reality, so that only underscores why getting that cease-fire [in Gaza] could also be critical to further enabling that diplomacy to try and create the conditions where diplomacy can really solve this problem.”
In other words, what Hezbollah is doing is bad, but it is doing it, so in order to get it to stop, Israel should agree to a cease-fire with a terrorist organization in Gaza that is demanding an end to a war that they started after violating Israeli sovereignty in the South in the most barbaric fashion.
Imagine the following scenario: Just after al-Qaeda’s attack on 9/11, a Mexican drug cartel starts lobbing missiles at Texas to show solidarity with the Jihadist terrorists, and will only stop if the US permanently halts Operation Enduring Freedom to root out al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
That logic doesn’t make sense.
Equally jarring was the equanimity with which the US Secretary of State essentially said this: “Hey, it’s wrong what Hezbollah is doing, but that’s the reality.”
It’s a reality that has not been sufficiently addressed nor condemned by the international community, first and foremost the UN.
Why isn’t the world blasting Hezbollah for this unprovoked act of war? Why isn’t there enormous pressure on the Lebanese government — admittedly extremely weak — to rein in Hezbollah?
Why does the world accept as normal a situation where an attack of one UN country is taking place continuously from another? Why isn’t this an issue in the world’s media? Why isn’t the international community slapping economic sanctions on Hezbollah and its supporters – first and foremost Iran — to discourage attacks? Why isn’t it more intensely targeting Hezollah’s financial networks
Not only is the international community not mobilized against Hezbollah, but last week the Arab League removed the “terrorist” label it placed on the organization in 2016. In other words, in the eyes of the Arab League, Hezbollah is no longer a terrorist organization. This might have been motivated by an attempt to deny Israel legitimacy in going after the organization in a more serious manner.
Limitations of American policy
And how does Blinken suggest Israel regain its sovereignty over the north? By agreeing to a cease-fire in Gaza. At what terms? At terms dictated by Hamas, which began this war?
Beyond urging Israel to refrain from launching a full-scale military action against Hezbollah, the Biden administration does not seem to have any other plans or strategies to help Israel deal with the issue and regain its sovereignty. The slow-walking of weapons shipments to Israel — weapons that will be needed if a major operation is to take place in Lebanon — only hampers Israel if it takes the decision to restore its lost sovereignty through military means.
Blinken’s words show the limitations of American policy. It was the US that pressured Israel in the very beginning of the war not to take preemptive action against Hezbollah, a position supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and both Benny Gantz and Gabi Eisenkot, but opposed by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the top IDF brass.
The US goal since October 7, Blinken said, has been to prevent a wider regional conflagration. That’s a noble goal. But, as he admitted, in the meantime Israel has lost sovereignty over part of its own country – meaning that Hezbollah, which long ago stripped Lebanon of its sovereignty, has now effectively done the same to a sliver of Israeli territory. US diplomatic efforts to prevent this have proven ineffective.
Rather than placing all the US hopes for stabilizing the situation in Lebanon on a long-shot cease-fire in Gaza, Blinken should be exploring with US allies and with Israel additional ways and means to get Hezbollah to stand down.
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