Responding to Hezbollah’s strategic offensive
Hezbollah is burning a swathe through northern Israel. The nature reserves, grazing land, fields and orchards are burning to the ground. Military bases, including several strategic assets, are incurring major damage. More than 1,000 homes have been destroyed. Businesses are bankrupt.
A large fire started by missiles launched from Lebanon near Kibbutz Kfar Szold in northern Israel on June 14, 2024. Photo by Ayal Margolin/Flash90.
And some 80,000 Israelis are living in hotels with no sense of when they may be able to go home.
Hezbollah has significantly increased the pace and lethality of its attacks on the Upper and Western Galilee, and the Golan Heights in recent weeks, as well as extended its attacks to the Mount Carmel area and the Jezreel Valley.
Haifa, Acre, and Tiberias have all been subjected to missile, drone and rocket assaults. During Shavuot on Wednesday, Hezbollah shot more than 200 projectiles at Israel. On Thursday, more than 100 more continued and expanded the fires, destruction and mayhem.
The Israel Defense Forces claim that Hezbollah’s actions haven’t broken the mould of tit-for-tat assaults that Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging for the past eight months. On Tuesday night, the Israeli Air Force carried out an airstrike on the Nasser Unit of Hezbollah’s southern command. The Nasser unit is a division-sized formation responsible for Hezbollah’s operations along the border with Israel.
The unit’s commander, Taleb Sami Abdullah, and three of his senior staff were killed in the raid. The IDF’s claim that Hezbollah’s massive missile, drone and rocket barrages on Wednesday and Thursday, and into Friday, are a tit-for-tat supports Hezbollah’s line that its massive aggression is a legitimate reaction to Abdullah’s assassination.
The IDF’s claim is, to be sure, self-defeating. But that’s not the main problem.
The main problem with the IDF’s assertion is that it ignores the strategic logic of Hezbollah’s operations. Hezbollah isn’t attacking in response to any specific Israeli operation. It is attacking to achieve its strategic goals. Hezbollah isn’t simply abusive; it is waging a strategic war with clear long-term and intermediate strategic objectives.
Hezbollah began shelling Israel with drones, anti-tank rockets and missiles on Oct. 8. It has maintained and slowly escalated its attacks since then. Far from reactive, Hezbollah’s moves are ends-driven. From one assault to the next, Hezbollah learns more about penetrating Israel’s defences. Its escalatory cycle is a function of its learning curve.
Enabling Hezbollah’s control over Lebanon
What are the goals that Hezbollah uses its projectile campaign to achieve? Hezbollah’s ultimate goal is that of its Iranian overlord: Israel’s annihilation. But it has intermediate goals on the road to final victory. The first is to achieve operational control over northern Israel. Such control, Hezbollah and Iran assess, will force Israel to capitulate on the strategic battlefield. If Hezbollah’s anti-tank rockets, drones and missiles are able to cancel Israel’s ability to defend northern Israel, then Israel will be forced to capitulate on the issue of formal sovereignty at the negotiating table in order to achieve “quiet.”
The specific “deal” Hezbollah seeks involves Israel’s formal surrender of its sovereignty over Mount Dov, a vast area in the Golan Heights that controls all of northern Israel, including the Gulf of Haifa.
Hezbollah is able to advance its operations because it is protected by a series of actors both within Lebanon and in the international arena. As Lebanon affairs expert Tony Badran has argued convincingly for years, Hezbollah is Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion. It is also Lebanon itself.
Hezbollah controls all aspects of politics and security affairs in the country and much of the economy. Lebanon’s official bodies, its state institutions (including the Lebanese Armed Forces), the parliament, the Central Bank and the government are all fig leaves whose purpose is to hide this basic truth. UNIFIL, the U.N. military force mandated to keep Hezbollah away from the border with Israel, operates at Hezbollah’s pleasure. Its personnel live (and die) at Hezbollah’s pleasure. As a result, not only is the agency incapable of carrying out its mandate, but like the LAF, UNIFIL’s continued presence along the border shields Hezbollah forces and assets from the IDF.
Under Hezbollah’s control, Lebanon is not an actual country. It is Iran’s forward military base against Israel that happens to have 5.5 million residents. The job of the residents is to deny that they live in an Iranian missile base.
Iran has made it clear that it plans to escalate the conflict with Israel until it is conquered by Palestinian terrorists and by Iran who has 100,000 rocket bombs aimed at Israel’s heart. Iran itself has not experienced any serious consequences to her increasing attacks on Israel by proxies or the recent rocket attack directly on Israel’s capital.Now is the time for Israel to attack directly Iranian oil production facilities of vital economic importance to her oil industry and the nation’s economy and for Iranian Leadership and People to realize that their frequent attacks of Israel will incur a heavy cost on their daily lives.