By Noah Rothman
Friday, September 27, 2024
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.
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