The View From Israel’s Front With Hezbollah The Iranian proxy’s attacks have forced 60,000 northern civilians to evacuate. Is war their only way home? By Elliot Kaufman
Manara, Israel
Orna Weinberg can read my eyes. “In peacetime, this is heaven,” she says from atop a mountain ridge overlooking the Hula valley. The kibbutz of Manara, in Israel’s Upper Galilee, is breathtaking. Yet it feels obscene to take in the beauty amid so much pain. The only conclusion from our brisk walk through her battered, dangerous, evacuated community is that Hezbollah has made the north of Israel into hell.
The people here are no fragile flowers. “I learned to walk in a bomb shelter,” Ms. Weinberg, 57, a caregiver, says cheerfully. Frederieke Shamia, 48, stresses that “this community had never evacuated, ever—until now.” Rockets from Lebanon and Syria are nothing new to northern Israel, “but the antitank missiles changed everything,” Ms. Weinberg says. Her home was the second in Manara to be hit.
The southwest of the kibbutz is closed off. “The moment Hezbollah sees movement inside a building there, they fire,” Ms. Shamia says. “Turn on a light or adjust a blind—they fire.” Unlike the rockets, which can be intercepted and are typically inaccurate, the antitank guided missiles hit their targets in seconds.
Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy that holds the real power in Lebanon, fired on Manara half an hour before I got there. We drove east through an empty Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, which received 30 rockets that day, the first of Ramadan.
I had come from Rhadjar, an eerily normal village on the border between the Golan Heights and Lebanon. Israel controls it, Lebanon claims it, and locals say it belonged to Syria. “Now we’re Israeli,” the mayor says with a smile. His village is Alawite, the same sect as Syria’s ruling clique. That affords it some quiet.
Hezbollah takes Lebanon’s claim to Rhadjar and other small territories as a justification to flout United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ordered the demilitarization of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon. U.N. peacekeepers were supposed to enforce that. Instead, Hezbollah entrenched itself and uses the peacekeepers as human shields in its war to destroy Israel.
Could the Lebanese military, funded by the U.S. to the tune of more than $3 billion since 2006, restrain Hezbollah? That’s another joke, as if Lebanon could act like a state rather than a willing captive to the war Hezbollah launched from its territory. The speaker of Lebanon’s Parliament leads a separate group that is also shooting at Israel.
Anyone focused only on Gaza, to Israel’s southwest, is missing half the story. Hezbollah has fired more than 3,500 rockets, missiles and mortars at northern Israel since Oct. 7. It fired 4,500 in the entire 2006 war with Israel, yet the world calls this a “low-intensity conflict.” At least 60,000 northern Israeli civilians have been evacuated from their homes for five months, at an unbearable cost in national morale. How can it be, Israelis ask, that Hezbollah has moved the hard-won buffer zone to the Israeli side of the border?
Israel is getting the better of the military exchange, killing more than 300 Hezbollah operatives and systematically destroying the group’s southern positions. Hezbollah has killed 21 Israelis, but its achievement is far greater. It depopulated an entire region of Israel, and for months it has been getting away with it.
If Hezbollah had been ready on Oct. 7 and invaded, the fighting could have reached Tel Aviv, several Israeli officials say. The terrorist group likely considered invading in the following days, but it was discouraged by the surge of Israeli troops and U.S. warships to the area.
U.S. strategy hasn’t adjusted since those early days. A senior Israeli security official says the Biden administration fails to appreciate that “the goal in the north isn’t to prevent a war, it’s to get Israelis home.” He asks why the administration sends no envoy more senior than Amos Hochstein to negotiate, and why President Biden rarely talks about the north. “Do they understand how many lives are riding on this?” War in the north could dwarf the Gaza fight and change Lebanon and Israel forever.
Visiting the north, one gets a glimpse of a longstanding vision of the destruction of Israel: Life is made so dangerous that the Jews pick up and leave. This misreads the people. Oded Stein, leader of the premilitary academy of the Upper Galilee, says, “The state and military are more scared of Israeli civilian casualties than the civilians are.” He asks, “Will Israel ‘defend itself’ to death? Sometimes the enemy needs to know that you, too, can be aggressive, that you can attack, not only defend.”
Like many Israelis, Mr. Stein bemoans the “Oct. 6 army” and mind-set. “We told ourselves stupid stories, stupid lies,” he says. “That Hezbollah was deterred and contained. No, it was growing stronger.” The terrorist group has become a formidable army with around 200,000 rockets and other munitions, thousands of which can menace Tel Aviv. Hezbollah now deters Israel.
A former Israeli commander in the area who asks to remain anonymous argues that Israel erred by accepting the “equation.” In 2014, he says, after Israel killed a top Hezbollah fighter, Hezbollah killed an Israeli company commander, and Israel let the terrorists get away with it. “We did something, so they did something, so it’s OK, we’re even,” he summarizes. Anything to avoid a larger confrontation—that’s how it was for years. “But in the Middle East, you need to solve problems directly.”
In Jerusalem, I put the problem of the “equation” to Israeli leaders and find them receptive. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replies: “People aren’t going to come back to the north if we don’t change the equation and if they don’t have a sense of security—which means actual security.” A senior minister emphasizes that there have to be new rules of the game so Hezbollah can’t return to the Oct. 6 status quo.
Israeli strikes in Baalbek, Lebanon, nearly 60 miles from the border, and in Beirut suggest that some rules have already changed. Israel also didn’t let Hezbollah rebuild during the weeklong pause in November.
But Israeli escalation isn’t expected for now. Amit Segal, Israel’s leading political columnist, says Jerusalem is “counting down the days of the Biden administration.” A full war with Hezbollah could be too great a risk with an increasingly hostile U.S. president. Retired Gen. Amir Avivi, founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, says Israel’s best hope to avoid that war is to win decisively in Gaza’s Rafah before turning to Hezbollah and saying, “You’re next.” Others worry that Israel will take a deal to achieve quiet and kick the can down the road.
Gen. Avivi says the Israeli military shed three divisions in the past 20 years. Without them, it struggles to fight wars on two fronts without huge, costly call-ups of reserves. Munitions shortages, with much held back for the north, have also plagued Israeli operations.
Israeli military officials point out that the “smaller, smarter” army pursued by military leaders such as Ehud Barak and Benny Gantz ended up small and dumb. “An army should at least be big and dumb,” Mr. Stein of the premilitary academy says.
Nearly every Israeli I meet describes Hezbollah as the protection for Iran’s nuclear program, conserving its arsenal in Lebanon to deter an attack on the reactors in Iran. That may be right, and Hezbollah may now be firing only to keep up appearances and divert Israeli troops from Gaza, not to spark a larger war before Iran is ready. The prevailing view in Israel is that Iran and Hezbollah don’t want to escalate in the north.
But this is an assessment of intent, not capability, which is how Israel justified allowing Hamas and Hezbollah to fester in the first place. Facing up to Hezbollah’s capabilities would mean seeing diplomacy as a stopgap, not a solution. Even if a U.S.-brokered deal could get Hezbollah to agree to retreat north of the Litani River, as Resolution 1701 requires, its terrorist army and arsenal would persist, saved for a time of Iran’s choosing. The north will never be safe so long as Israel allows that.
“The Litani? It’s bull—,” the former commander says. Hezbollah’s elite Radwan fighters live in southern Lebanon. “They aren’t leaving, no matter the deal. They’ll ‘become civilians’ and hang around.”
It is reasonable for Israel to hold back in the north while the main fighting in Gaza continues, but how long will Israel wait? “We can’t live with the threat of Hezbollah and Iran the way we did with Hamas,” venture capitalist Arik Kleinstein says. Even the business interests in Tel Aviv seem to understand this. Some corporate and tech leaders also wonder if the “Iron Beam” laser missile defense, present capabilities unknown, will be the ace up Israel’s sleeve.
For now, Israel pushes back Hezbollah from the air, knowing that only a ground force can truly establish the buffer it needs. Hezbollah’s attacks so far have almost all been short-range, from south of the Litani.
If a deal is struck, Israelis know that no one will enforce it but themselves. The U.N. and U.S. can always find reasons to let violations slide as Hezbollah returns to the border. They would urge Israel not to overreact but to preserve peace and quiet. For the north of Israel, sheket hu refesh, as an old Zionist song has it: “Quiet” is sludge.
Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.
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