On September 23, Israel began a major military offensive against Lebanon that left around 500 people dead, mainly civilians, and caused mass panic across the south of the country. This followed days of strikes against Hezbollah commanders and a surprise attack on Hezbollah personnel by triggering the explosion of thousands of low-tech communications devices like pagers and walkie-talkies, in what Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah called a “declaration of war” and a group of UN human rights experts called “a terrifying violation of international law.” In this interview with Afkār, Rami Khouri, Middle East scholar and journalist, unpacks this series of major escalations and its implications for Lebanon, Palestine and the region.
1. Israel has conducted several attacks on Hezbollah’s leadership and rank and file over the past few days. Has this successfully put Hezbollah on the back foot, and what might that mean in the event of a major escalation that appears imminent?
There is no doubt that the Israeli attacks—using the pagers, walkie-talkies and aerial rockets that were fired at Hezbollah leaders in the south and around Beirut—hurt Hezbollah. The loss of some of their top military commanders is especially painful. But it is also true that Hezbollah has the most experience of anyone in the Arab world with fighting against Israel, and they know what to expect generally. The exploding pagers were a surprise, for sure, but the group is prepared for battle losses. This is part of their strategy—whether it was in Lebanon 15 to 20 years ago or when they fought in Syria, they understand that this kind of military resistance entails people getting injured and killed and communities getting disrupted. They are well prepared for this. I do not think these setbacks are defining moments in the Israeli-Hezbollah battle. If Hezbollah keeps losing senior commanders and field commanders, it could become a problem, but it is not at this level yet.
The next steps are going to be escalations on both sides. Hezbollah already started retaliating, and we will need a couple of days to find out definitively how many of their rockets got through, how many were intercepted, and what the Israelis will do next. It seems likely that we are going to have a continuing escalation of the bilateral war—that is Hezbollah and the Israeli military attacking each other’s targets. Whether these are pinpoint attacks by both sides against specific targets, especially military ones, or they escalate into broader, indiscriminate attacks against civilian populations, we will have to wait and see.
The Israelis have been killing civilians all along. Hezbollah has been much more careful in targeting mostly military sites, but we will see where that goes. The important point is that Hezbollah anticipates these kinds of losses and very quickly replaces its commanders. I presume that they also have taken precautionary measures to protect their missile sites, launchers, storage sites and, above all, their communication system. There is no doubt that they have backup communication systems. We do not know how many actual fighting members of Hezbollah or command and control people were injured or killed by the exploding devices, but they also prepared for this kind of eventuality. They know that their communication system is vital, and they have always had backup systems to make sure that if one is interrupted, they can continue talking to each other—especially in a situation of war and especially in south Lebanon.
2. Lebanese society has faced the anxiety of a major war on the horizon for the past year. Has there been a noticeable change over the past week among the Lebanese as war has finally begun, what has that looked like and how is the country responding politically and economically?
Since the last major war in 2006, there has been a sense in the country, particularly in the south, that anything could happen at any moment. People are not always on edge, but they are always prepared to deal with the prospect of a war that might cause them to move houses, flee to safety and even leave the country to meet their basic needs.
In the last week, especially since the explosions of the electronic devices, the war-related anxiety has clearly escalated. Some of the international airlines stopped flying to Beirut, as well as to Tel Aviv, and that always causes panic. The airport is probably the most sensitive barometer of how the Lebanese feel and if they are worried. Some people can always get out by sea and some can go by land to Syria, but the airport is the main way in and out of the country. But there has been more anxiety. As the attacks increased in intensity in the last few days, they have forced some people to move out of their homes in the south—those who can afford it. Many Lebanese do not have excess money; they do not have the capacity to just go out and stock up on certain items, whether that is food, medicine or other basic goods.
Lebanon has been an economic disaster zone for the last three or four years, and the government also does not have the economic resources to suddenly expand its military capabilities or even its civil defense capabilities. At all levels of life in Lebanon, including the government, political institutions, private citizens and civil society, this is a shattered and battered country that is reeling from the series of catastrophes that it has suffered in recent years—and this is yet another one.
What people really worry about is if the Israelis repeat what they did in 2006, which was to knock out the bridges, the airport, some of the electricity supplies and major public facilities, which made just moving around the country difficult, and this is a huge concern. I am not sure that is going to happen this time, and I suspect that Israel is going to keep focusing on Hezbollah targets, or areas where Hezbollah supporters are, to try to critically weaken the support base for Hezbollah. However, that has been tried before, and it has never really worked. Lebanon is about evenly split between supporters and opponents of Hezbollah and that does not particularly change over time. Even in times of war, when things are difficult, if people see that Hezbollah is striking a blow against Israel or weakening it, it gives them an emotional lift, even though they suffer terribly in their day-to-day lives. People get injured or killed, but this has been the norm for the last 20 to 30 years.
One of the great tragedies of Lebanon is that this vicious, indiscriminate warfare has been part of its modern history—sometimes waged by its own citizens against each other, sometimes waged against the Israelis. The political response of the government is not very robust, because it lacks the capacity to do much. The foreign minister made a statement at the UN Security Council meeting the other day, and they simply do not have the ability to move the needle on anything and get people to take serious action to help or protect them. The government will clearly have to ask for, and will probably get, emergency economic aid to handle some of the requirements of assisting citizens or institutions in need during the war, especially if there are facilities that are knocked out, like a bridge, or if they have to rebuild a water plant or something like that. The government has no money; it has very little income even to support its basic defenses. The armed forces need grants from different countries just to pay the salaries of the soldiers.
But this is not a war between the Lebanese government and Israel. Even though many in the government support Hezbollah and like to resist Israel, they are not really part of the battle—unfortunately or fortunately, however you look at it. I would expect the government to do whatever it can to harness support, aid and emergency funding or materials to help people who are displaced and in special need because of the fighting, but not much more than that.
3. If there is a full-scale war between Hezbollah and Israel, do you expect the active involvement of Hezbollah’s allies in the region? How about the United States and others, and what will that mean for the region?
The idea of a full-scale war is really hard to define. The nature of the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel has always been defined by the rules of engagement after 2006: tit-for-tat attacks, trying to avoid civilian damage and keeping it restricted to certain regions. That held for many years, until earlier this year, when Hezbollah started attacking parts of northern Israel to support Hamas.
If the war expands much more and either side is threatened with defeat, foreign actors may intervene. Defeat here would mean that either Israel or Hezbollah can no longer carry out the war because they have been hit so hard by the other side—whether their personnel, facilities, arms, telecommunication system or whatever have been damaged so badly that they are unable to defend themselves. Warfare today is not just trenches full of men with helmets shooting each other; it is highly sophisticated electronics, missiles, drones, surveillance systems and other devices.
If Israel is threatened, the U.S. will quickly step in. If Hezbollah is threatened, you will see the involvement of its supporters in the Axis of Resistance around the region. Ansar Allah and Hamas cannot do much more than they are doing now, but supporters in Syria, Iraq and Iran itself may engage more. However, Iran would be very hesitant to get into a war directly with Israel. Tehran would indirectly increase its support to Hezbollah and others, but direct engagement would bring in the U.S. to hit Iran very hard. The Israeli-U.S. combination remains technologically more proficient than the Hezbollah-Iran one from what it seems now—unless there are some amazing capabilities that Hezbollah and Iran have developed that we do not know about, and if that is the case, we will probably find out soon. But I still do not see an all-out, free-for-all regional war involving Iran, the whole Axis of Resistance, the U.S. and Israel as a likely outcome.
Tehran’s calculus was clear from the incident in April, when Iran launched 300 drones and missiles at Israel. They were flagged in advance, and it was a slow motion attack designed to minimize Israeli casualties and to send the symbolic message that we can reach you. Some of their missiles hit air bases in southern Israel and got through the defenses, but this was not designed to spark a war.
But with these kinds of situations, tempers flare, people’s dignity comes into play, they want to show that they cannot be pushed around and they sometimes do irrational things in warfare, especially when people are existentially threatened, and we are dealing here with existential threats—both on the Israeli part and the Hezbollah part. So I do not predict a serious, direct intervention to help either side, but rather regional and international, indirect support.
4. Is there any pulling back from the brink?
If we get to that point where it looks like it is going to become a full-fledged, open war, I would anticipate a massive diplomatic intervention by many actors to de-escalate the situation, but that would just get us back to where we were a few weeks ago or a month ago, and that is not such a great achievement. Unless the underlying issues are addressed, we are going to have this go on for years and years. The issues are now more complex, because they include the Israeli attack on Gaza in the short-term, which is why Hezbollah started firing more rockets at Israel; and in the longer term, it has to do with the whole conflict involving Israel, Palestine, Hezbollah and Iran. The underlying political, military and strategic issues that have driven this conflict for 40 to 50 years need to be addressed, and that is a tough nut to crack.
However, most of the issues in this conflict are created by human beings, and they can be resolved by human beings. We just have not had the kind of wise leadership, either in Israel or in the Arab world, or the effective international intervention and mediation that could help bring about a negotiated, permanent peace. Unlike in Northern Ireland or South Africa, where conflicts were resolved with good leadership and serious international mediation, which allowed both sides to define their basic rights and demands and compromise on issues that were secondary. When both sides achieved their fundamental rights and needs, they could stop the fighting and have a political process get underway. That is the best we can hope for, but we must first prevent this from expanding into an all-out war, because if it starts moving in that direction, it may be impossible to stop.
And Israel has nuclear weapons that it would not hesitate to use. I have no doubt that Israel would use its nuclear weapons if it felt that it was existentially threatened. Remember that in the 1973 war, Israel loaded tactical nuclear weapons onto some of their jet fighters, and they were ready to use them. So let us hope we do not get there and that wiser heads prevail.