Ben Gvir and a war in the north
Summary: expert opinion has largely decreed that Israel and
Hezbollah will not engage in a major war as it is in neither’s strategic
interest but that ignores the wild card that is Israel’s National
Security Minister, the far right extremist Itamar Ben Gvir.
Last week a panel assembled by the Washington-based Middle East
Institute (MEI) discussed the probability of the Gaza conflict igniting a
second war along the Lebanon-Israel border. The broad conclusion was
that it would not.
The panellists were the Lebanese journalist Hanin Ghaddar, Jonathan
Panikoff from the Atlantic Council, the MEI’s Firas Maksad and Fadi
Nicholas Nasser (serving as moderator) and Beirut-based podcaster Ronnie
Chatah, whose father a prominent Lebanese politician was assassinated in 2013.
Ghaddar spoke about the “period of deterrence,” that is the 17 years between the end of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war
and the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. With the attack, that period has
closed, she argued, while noting that Hezbollah had in those years
“taken over the military, suppressed free speech and sustained Iranian
power in the region.” A strengthened Hezbollah was not prepared to
sacrifice its gains on behalf of the Palestinian cause beyond a few
limited actions with missiles that did not include their stock of
precision guided missiles (PGMs). The Hezbollah leader, Ghaddar said,
had made it clear that this was “not our war and we will not use or lose
our assets for the Palestinians.”
For its part Israel while it would need to deal a resounding blow to
Hezbollah sometime down the road was not prepared to take the decision
for a pre-emptive strike. “The time,” she said “was not right for either
Israel or Hezbollah.”
Jonathan Panikoff while agreeing on the big picture argued that if
Israel went all in with a major ground assault on Rafah then that could
push Hezbollah into a more active role. US diplomacy was critical to how
events play out over the next days and weeks. Should the Netanyahu
government respond to the growing pressure from the White House not to
go into Rafah and to agree a ceasefire then there was room for optimism.
Otherwise, though, a regional war was likely.
Both Firas Maksad and Ronnie Chatah played the probabilities game
with the former saying it was 60-40 against a major war and the latter
upping that to 80-20. Maksad pointed out that in the skirmishing that
has gone on since 7 October, Israel has established what he called
“escalation dominance.” Hezbollah was displaying “strategic patience”
encompassing both the desire to protect assets and the acknowledgement
of the ‘Iranian ceiling” that being Teheran’s fervent desire to avoid a
regional war with Israel.
For his part Chatah decried the short-sightedness of Washington. The
US “has no strategic policy regarding Lebanon” and appears unaware of
the need to “bring Lebanese actors back into the conversation.” He
argued that UNSC Resolution 1701
which ended the 2006 war worked “because it involved the Lebanese
state.” However he also reflected on the stranglehold that Hezbollah
has. As he put it “the Lebanese state exists because Hezbollah needs it
to exist...it is a symbiotic relationship.”
Nowhere is that more obvious than in the ongoing failure to provide
accountability for and justice to the victims of the August 2020 Beirut port blast for which Hezbollah is seen as bearing a significant responsibility. In Chatah’s words “it’s just no longer talked about.”
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