Israel is in the position to dictate terms. Why would it abandon the upper hand now? Why would the West ask it to?
As of this writing, we do not yet know the status of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but we do know that a massive Israeli airstrike targeting his headquarters on Friday found its mark. If Nasrallah has joined his fellow terrorists in the great beyond, he will find himself in voluminous company.
The Israeli response to the firing of over 8,000 Hezbollah rockets into Israel since the October 7 massacre — a barrage that forced tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes, functionally rendering vast swaths of Israeli territory unlivable — has been a long time coming. And when it finally came, it was astoundingly successful. In the campaign of highly discriminating airstrikes and covert sabotage operations that began on September 17 with the detonation of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, hundreds of Hezbollah fighters and well over a dozen of its high-ranking operatives have been taken off the battlefield.
Hezbollah seems to be now so disoriented and enervated that it may not be able to mount a counteroffensive, delaying or even foreclosing on an Israeli ground invasion into southern Lebanon to enforce the United Nations resolutions neither the U.N. nor the Lebanese government observe.
That would be a happy outcome for the West. Western democracies squirm with discomfort whenever Israel vigorously exercises its right to self-defense, but the group it is presently dismantling with extreme precision is a terrorist sect with Western blood on its hands. Israel is meting out long-delayed justice not just in its own name but ours, too. And for this generous dispensation, Israel gets nothing but grief from its supposed allies.
The watchword in the halls of Western diplomacy has been “cease-fire” for months, and there have been few revisions to that language even as Israel’s focus shifted away from Gaza’s battlefields. But while Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was receptive (within reason) to a temporary cessation of hostilities in Gaza to liberate its hostages, Jerusalem has balked at demands from the Biden government and its European allies to stand down in Lebanon. To bend to those demands wouldn’t rescue any Israeli civilians in Hezbollah captivity. It wouldn’t restore the Israelis who have been displaced from their homes for nearly a year to their properties. It wouldn’t advance Israel’s tactical goal of degrading the capacity of Iran’s proxies to rain missiles and drones down on its territory, and it wouldn’t secure its strategic objective of restoring deterrence with Iran.
It’s not clear how Israel benefits from an immediate cease-fire, but it’s patently obvious what Hezbollah would get out of the deal: survival. The terror organization is reeling from blow after blow, bereft of reliable communications networks, and exposed amid the breathtakingly comprehensive penetration of its command-and-control nodes by Israeli intelligence. Hezbollah needs time to regroup, and the Western powers seem keen to provide it.
Neither the Israeli people nor their government are salivating over the prospect of a ground war in Lebanon that culminates in the reoccupation of Lebanese territory. Both would likely welcome a negotiated truce that restores stability to northern Israel — but not on terms that allow Hezbollah, and its Iranian sponsors, to resume its terror war at a time and place of its choosing. Israel is in the position to dictate terms. Why would it abandon the upper hand now? Why would the West ask it to?
The contingencies in which Israel is presently engaged are attacks on an avowed enemy of the United States — one responsible for the deaths of 241 American soldiers. Their war is our war. But the Biden administration cannot muster the courage of its own convictions necessary even to share intelligence with its Israeli partners. Nothing, it seems, can convince this administration to join the side it’s on.