Australia / Israel Review

An air of optimism has emerged around the chances for a negotiated end to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in the coming weeks.

On November 12, US special envoy for Lebanon Amos Hochstein told reporters at the White House that “there is a shot” to secure a ceasefire soon and that he is “hopeful” about the deal’s prospects.

Israeli officials have sounded similar notes.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said there has been “certain progress” on a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Another official told the Times of Israel that progress had been made, and now Israel was speaking to the US about letters “to anchor our ability and legitimacy to operate against any threat from Lebanon.”

“If there are any attempts to fire at us, to build up their military, to bring in weapons through Syria, we will act,” promised the official.

The fact that the US Joe Biden Administration and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Government see eye-to-eye on the parameters of a ceasefire in Lebanon is undoubtedly a positive development.

Yet there will be no deal if a central player in the fight doesn’t accept the terms – Hezbollah.

Any arrangement will officially be signed between Israel and Lebanon. At the same time, everyone knows that Beirut will not agree to anything that Hezbollah does not consent to.

And it is hard to imagine the Shi’ite terror group accepting one of Israel’s core demands – freedom of action to operate in Lebanon to counter threats and stop the rebuilding of Hezbollah’s military.

Israel isn’t about to relent on this point either. It wants the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to move into southern Lebanon in force and for countries like the UK and France to train the rather lacklustre LAF. A massive deployment of Lebanese soldiers along Israel’s border is part of a solution, but they are not about to take on Hezbollah militarily when it decides the time is right to start moving assets toward Israel again.

UNIFIL, which has unequivocally failed in its raison d’être of keeping Hezbollah from moving thousands of fighters and massive weapons caches to the border with Israel, would still be part of a settlement, in Israel’s eyes. The force would have to be overhauled, with more capable and assertive militaries making up a larger proportion of UNIFIL.

France, which currently contributes 665 troops to the peacekeeping effort, is sure to become an even more central country to UNIFIL. Its forces have taken peacekeeping efforts in Africa seriously, and Paris understands that the situation on the Lebanon-Israel border cannot return to the pre-October 7 reality.

Still, that wouldn’t be enough for Israel. It will not rely entirely on the weak military of an enemy state or international peacekeepers who have already let Hezbollah build up a formidable force on Israel’s borders once before.

Nor would it likely satisfy the tens of thousands of displaced Israelis who would look with understandable suspicion at yet another negotiated document that is supposed to convince them that no Hezbollah anti-tank missile will strike their homes after they move back.

Further, deeper

It may be that Hezbollah is eager to end the fighting, after losing its leadership, military positions, and thousands of operatives and tens of thousands of rockets, and will ultimately accept the deal that Israel and the US put on the table.

If it isn’t, however, then Israel has no other cards left to play other than expanding its ground operation in Lebanon.

An Israeli official told the Times of Israel that if Lebanon turns down the latest US-Israeli offer, the IDF is ready to drive further into the country.

As negotiators – including Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer – continue their work in Washington, the IDF is already pushing ahead. The military announced that the 91st Division has reached “new targets” belonging to Hezbollah, as commandos raided several new areas.

Though senior officials, including novice Defence Minister Israel Katz, are calling for Israel to keep attacking Hezbollah until it achieves all of its goals, that option comes with considerable problems.

Israel’s ground operation in Lebanon was conceived primarily as an engineering effort – a war on Hezbollah infrastructure in the border area. The IDF said that the “limited, localised, and targeted ground raids” would be focused on border villages that posed an immediate threat to Israeli towns.

IDF forces have completed that task, but northern residents still aren’t in their homes.

Expanding the operation could mean that Israel will destroy Hezbollah weapons caches and fighting positions in villages further away from the border. That is unlikely to push Hezbollah into a ceasefire, nor will it make Israelis more comfortable about returning home. The minute the IDF leaves, Hezbollah can infiltrate the area with missile teams and fire at Israeli towns if it so chooses.

In the meantime, Hezbollah seems to have found its footing again. It was knocked off balance in September, when Israel detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in the hands of terrorists, assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and took out most of the elite Radwan force leadership.

Screenshot from a Hezbollah video showcasing their missiles

But the terror group is recovering. It maintains consistent rocket fire on northern Israel, and Hezbollah attacks have killed 44 IDF soldiers in the month-and-a-half since Israel began its ground operation. It has also managed to carry out high-profile drone attacks, including on the Golani Brigade’s training base and Netanyahu’s house in Caesarea.

It seems prepared for a war of attrition against IDF forces if they stay in Lebanon, a form of conflict that offers advantages to the guerrilla force. Though Hezbollah will lose many times more men than the IDF, Israel is far more sensitive to casualties, and as the death toll slowly ticks up, domestic pressure is likely to do so as well. That strategy worked for Hezbollah in the 1990s, when an Israeli protest movement successfully pushed political and military leaders to accept the need for a withdrawal from the security zone in southern Lebanon.

For all that, there remains a quick way out of the fighting in Lebanon. Hezbollah has repeatedly said it would stand down if the war in Gaza came to an end.

Though Netanyahu would like to see a successful end to that campaign as well, Hamas has no incentive to accept anything less than victory in a deal that sees the hostages released from captivity. That would mean that the group remains in Gaza, and is in a position to slowly recover its governing and military capabilities.

Israel is not about to accept that.

The Trump factor

Still, there is an upcoming event that could change the dynamics in Lebanon.

US President-elect Donald Trump will take office on Jan. 20, and is expected to be much more aggressive against Iran and its axis than Biden was. He has selected Iran hawks to his cabinet, and employed a maximum pressure sanctions campaign against the Islamic Republic in his first term.

Iran is sure to be nervous about Trump’s return, and will be looking to dial down tensions with the US until it gets a read on the direction of Trump’s policy in the region.

Threats from Trump to Iran about the price it will pay if its proxy Hezbollah refuses to accept a ceasefire could well make the cost of continued combat too high for Teheran.

But that message has yet to be issued. In the meantime, Biden’s top aides are throwing their full weight behind the effort to help Israel wrap up the fighting before Trump returns to the White House.

Lazar Berman is the Times of Israel’s diplomatic reporter. © Times of Israel (timesofisrael.com), reprinted by permission, all rights reserved.