Lebanon Ceasefire Illustrates How Both Israel and Hezbollah Have Lost
Hezbollah's rocket barrage and Israel's ground invasion have proven extremely costly for both sides in the conflict.When Iran and Iraq were fighting each other in the 1980s, with neither regime being much liked in Washington, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked, “The tragedy is that both sides can’t lose.”
Actually, of course, both sides lose in most wars, and certainly the people of both sides do.
That is the outcome of the Israel-Hezbollah War of 2023-2024, for which U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron announced a ceasefire on Wednesday. The ceasefire was possible because both sides had lost.
Lebanon is a small country with perhaps 5 million citizens. They fall into about 30% Christian, 30% Sunni Muslim, and 30% Shiite Muslim, with small groups such as the Druze making up the rest. That’s about 1.5 million Shiites, mainly in East Beirut, Baalbak and southern Lebanon. About half of them, 750,000 people, belong to the Amal party, and the other half are affiliated with the Hezbollah party-militia. Janes, the military information service, said a few years ago that Hezbollah has about 20,000 full-time fighters in its paramilitary and 20,000 reservists. The organization claims over twice that, but Janes’ estimates are probably about right. The point is that Hezbollah is a small part of Lebanon, and its fighters are a small force.
In contrast, before the current wars Israel had 169,000 active duty personnel and some 465,000 reservists. That is, the Israeli military is almost as big all by itself as the total Shiite population of Lebanon that supports Hezbollah.
Since its last war with Israel in 2006, Hezbollah had amassed a stockpile of rockets and drones. These had some value as deterrents to Israeli aggression, as with the Israeli invasion of 1982 and its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. The Israelis made a relatively poor showing against Hezbollah in 2006, and few in Tel Aviv had an appetite for further adventurism on that front. The rockets were only useful for defense, however.
Hamas did not forewarn allies Iran and Hezbollah about its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. As a result, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s clerical leader, told Hamas that he did not intend to get involved, according to Reuters. Likewise, he pressured Hezbollah to avoid sparking an Israeli attack on Lebanon, according to the Israeli press.
Despite Iran’s caution, however, Hezbollah leader, the late Hassan Nasrallah, tried to use its rockets for offensive purposes after Israel’s total war on Gaza began in October 2023. It forced 60,000 Israelis to leave the north near the Lebanese border, launching rocket attacks in sympathy with peoples’ resistance in Gaza.
In September, Israel launched an all-out campaign on Hezbollah. Israeli intelligence had infiltrated Hezbollah and was able to set off thousands of booby-trapped pagers, wreaking havoc on its cadres. Tel Aviv used air strikes to kill many high-level leaders, including Nasrallah. That means some high-level Hezbollah leaders were spying for Israel and providing Mossad with real-time intelligence on their whereabouts.
Israel’s war on Hezbollah depended heavily on airstrikes, but the Israeli army also launched ground operations in the south. Those operations, however, were costly, with at least 62 Israeli troops killed in October. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, were wounded. Although these seem like small numbers to Americans, Israel is a small, tightly knit country, and the loss of dozens of troops a month affects the public deeply. If you figure most people have a close circle of friends and family of about 200 people, a thousand dead or injured Israel troops would be heartbreaking to 200,000 people, nearly 3 percent of the Israeli population. Although the Israeli army has been able occasionally to advance miles into Lebanon, it hasn’t been able to take some key hills that it could have used to dominate highways going north.
This past Sunday, Hezbollah launched 49 operations against Israeli troops inside Lebanon. It also launched 255 rockets and drones at Israel proper, mostly hitting northern military and civilian targets but reaching as far as Tel Aviv.
The long, brutal campaign in Gaza, where Israeli troops still come under concerted fire, has produced low morale in the army, exacerbated by the reckless disregard for civilian life, giving many reservists a guilty conscience (which their cheeky TikTok videos boasting of their brutality are sometimes an attempt to hide). Roughly a quarter of troops fail to show when called, i.e., they are AWOL. The response rate of the Ultra-Orthodox to being drafted is pitiful. In October, only 49 out of 900 called up for military service reported for duty.
So the Israeli air force can bomb apartment buildings, schools and hospitals and kill nearly 4,000 people, mostly civilians. It can displace 800,000 Lebanese — a sixth of the population. But that kind of terror from the air, however, doesn’t translate into clear victories against Hezbollah. As a locally based republic of cousins in Shiite areas, Hezbollah can “honeycomb” its defenses, and the loss of top leadership has not paralyzed it.
So certainly Hezbollah has suffered significant setbacks. It hasn’t come close to being destroyed. The ceasefire, which pushes its land forces beyond the Litani River, merely gives its cadres an opportunity to regroup. Since it springs from the civilian Shiite population, the equivalent of Hezbollah reservists will certainly remain in the deep south, even if the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL take over the main patrolling responsibilities. Hezbollah’s rockets can still hit Israel even if they aren’t on the border. Their usefulness for defensive deterrence remains significant.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dreamed of reshaping the Lebanese government as a prelude to reshaping the Middle East. In that, he failed miserably. Hezbollah dreamed of forcing an end to the genocidal Israeli total war on Gaza while retaining deterrence against Tel Aviv in south Lebanon. In that it failed miserably, and members of its leadership paid the ultimate price for their hubris.
The ceasefire is the truce of the weak on both sides.
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