For the next four days, leader after leader will take the podium at the UN General Assembly meeting that opened in New York on Tuesday and, reflexively, blast Israel for its recent actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
For more than 11 months, many of those leaders were deafeningly silent as Hezbollah — with no provocation on Israel’s part — sent rockets, missiles, and drones to the north as a show of solidarity with Hamas’ barbaric attack on October 7.
Had the international community shown an ounce of concern for Israelis getting fired upon by Hezbollah that it is now showing as Hezbollah is getting pummeled by Israel, then months ago, it would have concentrated diplomatic efforts to get Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to stop firing on the Jewish state.
But this was not to be, and Hezbollah’s firing on Israel was seen as a natural and even understandable show of solidarity with Hamas. The international community largely put the onus on Israel to prevent the tit-for-tat in the North from devolving into a full-fledged war, with calls on Israel not to “escalate” the situation.
A week ago on Monday, Israel’s security cabinet upgraded the country’s war aims to include returning the 60,000 displaced civilians of the north to their homes — a sign that Israel was finally saying, “Enough is enough.”
The next day, thousands of pagers exploded across Lebanon, demonstrating that Israel was serious. Each day after, Israel stepped its actions up a notch, sending a clear message to Hezbollah that it is in their interest to climb down from the high perch they’ve occupied for 11 months, stop firing on Israel, and pull their forces back to the Litani River, as outlined in UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which effectively ended the Second Lebanon War.
Diplomatic efforts fail to resolve conflict
That war began on July 12, 2006, and lasted for some five weeks. Serious diplomatic efforts aimed at putting an end to that war started about three weeks into the conflict.
The current fight in Lebanon has been going on for nearly a year. US envoy Amos Hochstein has, for months, been trying to broker a deal. Basically, an updated version of 1701 whereby Hezbollah would withdraw from southern Lebanon, the Lebanese army would move in, Israel and Lebanon would negotiate border disputes, and Israel would cease flyovers over Lebanon.
For months, Hochstein came and went — but he could not put this deal together in perhaps what is a sign of America’s waning sway in the region.
Israel has signaled clearly to everyone that it’s gradually ratcheting military pressure in Lebanon up a notch after notch is designed to get Hezbollah to stop firing and to enable the displaced Israelis to return home.
Notably, a senior State Department official, speaking anonymously to reporters on Monday, rejected this rationale, saying, “I can’t recall, at least in recent memory, a period in which an escalation or intensification led to a fundamental de-escalation and led to profound stabilization of the situation.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had this to say about the matter: “We believe that there are better ways to try to get those Israeli citizens back in their homes up in the north, and to keep those that are there, there safely, than a war, than an escalation, then opening up a second front there at that border with Lebanon against Hezbollah.”
He may be right, but Washington has not succeeded in de-escalating via diplomacy. The US either does not have the right levers to pull or is not pulling them correctly. Hochstein tried and failed.
The French, whose president Emmanuel Macron underlined this week in a video the country’s special relationship with Lebanon — France was granted a mandate over Lebanon by the League of Nations after World War I — also tried its hand at diplomacy but failed. The reason is simple: The only real country with leverage on Hezbollah is Iran.
According to various media reports, in addition to France and the US now stepping up their efforts, Turkey, Qatar, and even Cyprus — which has a good relationship with Lebanon — are getting involved and have either sent or are sending envoys to Lebanon.
Expectations should not be great, as those countries, too, have limited influence on Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is embedded in the Lebanese government, which remains without a president and has only a caretaker prime minister.
Turkey, in competition with Iran for influence in the Mideast, has only limited sway with Hezbollah, as does Qatar. Plus, putting any stock in Qatar is a fool’s errand.
Qatar, which does have leverage over Hamas because it has funded it for years and hosts its leadership in Doha, has been unwilling or unable to use its sway on Hamas to agree to a hostage deal, so to expect that it can move Hezbollah is nothing but wishful thinking.
And then there’s Russia.
Russia developed a relationship with Hezbollah when it moved into Syria in 2015, as both had an interest in making sure that President Bashar Assad’s regime survived. This relationship included military coordination and collaboration and a significant economic component.
Russia, however, has no interest in de-escalating the situation in the Middle East. Its interest, rather, is to destabilize it for a number of reasons: to weaken US influence in the region, to divert US military resources from Ukraine to Israel, and to divert the world’s attention from the war in Ukraine.
As White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said, a diplomatic resolution to the crisis in Lebanon is certainly preferable. But achieving one seems unlikely.
Up until now, the international community has largely remained indifferent, and those with real leverage over Hezbollah — first and foremost Iran — have no incentive to push it to back down and agree to a diplomatic solution that will lead to a withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
This makes the continued IDF escalation almost inevitable. Pummeling Hezbollah and inflicting upon it the most serious damage since its founding may incentivize Iran to use its leverage. If Iran sees its multi-billion-dollar investment in Hezbollah going up in flames, it might, just might press it to stand down to salvage what it can of its most significant proxy — a strategic asset it has spent years and a fortune building up.
But even this is far from certain.
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