Earlier this week, Israel began a ground invasion of Lebanon. This followed Israel’s significant aerial bombardment of Hezbollah weapons stockpiles, and its assassination of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. On Tuesday, Iran, which backs Hezbollah, fired some two hundred missiles at Israel; no Israelis died in the barrage—which was repelled in part with help from the U.S. military—but Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, has promised to retaliate. (The strike did kill one Palestinian man in the West Bank.) The prospect of an all-out regional war in the Middle East raises questions about the relationship between the United States and Israel, and how far the Biden Administration will go to continue to protect one of its closest allies. A year after the October 7th attack, in which more than twelve hundred people were killed, Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than forty-one thousand people, including, on Wednesday, scores of people at an orphanage and several schools.
Last week, ProPublica reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau had made clear to the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in April that Israel was intentionally blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Federal law forbids U.S. weapons from being sent to countries that block U.S. aid, but Blinken testified to Congress in May that Israel was not “currently” blocking aid, thus preventing the law from being triggered. The State Department told ProPublica that its “concerns” over aid being blocked after October 7th were ameliorated because Israel “subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.” Meanwhile, human-rights organizations continue to report that sufficient aid is not being allowed into Gaza, where the humanitarian situation remains extremely dire.
To discuss the U.S.-Israel relationship, and the motives behind Israel’s latest military actions, I recently spoke by phone with Andrew Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian affairs until June, 2024. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed why the Biden Administration keeps getting misled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, how the U.S. should approach Israel’s actions in Lebanon, and how the State Department actually dealt with Israel’s blocking of humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
What is Israel trying to accomplish with this invasion of Lebanon?
The explicit purpose is to permit the return of approximately sixty thousand Israelis who live in northern Israel and were displaced after October 7th, when Hezbollah commenced near-daily strikes. The Israelis have indicated that they’re trying to destroy Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the southernmost parts of Lebanon, particularly below the Litani River, hoping that they can push Hezbollah back across the river. That doesn’t prevent Hezbollah from being able to strike Israel, but it takes some of Hezbollah’s weapons out of range, and that would make it more difficult for Hezbollah to launch any type of ground operation.
You said the “explicit” purpose. Do you think that that is in fact the purpose, or were you implying something else?
I think that is clearly a purpose. What is unclear is whether they have grander objectives. Netanyahu has talked about pursuing “total victory” against Hamas. Are they going to try to pursue total victory against Hezbollah, which would potentially involve Israeli ground operations in other parts of Lebanon? Israel is saying that that is not their intention at this time. They’re going to limit their operations to areas near the border. But we’ve seen historical examples in which Israel has gone into Lebanon with avowedly limited purposes, and then they move to other places because they found circumstances different than what they expected or because they had planned a bigger campaign all along, but wanted to approach it in a piecemeal fashion in the hope of garnering greater international support.
There had been talk about a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel last week. The White House said it thought that Israel had agreed to some version of one—which has happened a number of times with the ceasefire talks in Gaza—but then Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was assassinated, and it all fell apart. You even had John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, who is seen as one of the more hawkish members of the Administration, say that Israel was “fully informed and fully aware of every word” in the proposal, implying that Israel had pulled the rug out at the last minute.
They were discussing a temporary ceasefire of twenty-one days. It’s possible that the Biden Administration misunderstood Netanyahu, but I think it’s much more likely that there was some degree of misdirection on the part of the Israelis. And as you mentioned, we’ve seen this time and again, including in Gaza, where I had more inside knowledge, I know that Netanyahu would indeed accept certain terms and then would come out and say something that was ostensibly inconsistent with that agreement.
The real question is whether Hezbollah was prepared to accept the twenty-one-day ceasefire. The indications that I’ve seen are that they were. The ceasefire would at least have bought an opportunity to explore whether a ceasefire in Gaza could be reached, too. And Hezbollah has long said, since they intervened in the conflict, that they would be willing to discuss ending their firing into Israel only after there’s a ceasefire in Gaza. So the failure of a ceasefire in Gaza effectively precluded a ceasefire in Lebanon, which could have paved the way for a diplomatic solution to conflict in both locations.
There’s a piece out in Politico this week that essentially reports that though the U.S. isn’t pushing a war between Israel and Lebanon, the Administration is somewhat happy with action against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Is the Administration being used, or is it at some level happy with Israeli strategy and maybe just doesn’t want to say so?
I think there are two possibilities, and they’re not mutually exclusive. One could be that this is an attempt to rationalize why our inability to persuade the Israelis not to launch the invasion isn’t so bad after all—so it doesn’t appear as such a slap from Netanyahu. The other possibility is that the individuals in the Administration who were referenced in the Politico article genuinely believe that this is an opportunity for Israel to deal a crippling blow to Hezbollah. I certainly can’t discount that. [The article identifies Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and White House coördinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk as two officials who believe this.]
And, while I think we all should be skeptical of the idea of positive long-term effects of any tactical military action, it is interesting and noteworthy that the response by both Hezbollah and Iran to major blows to Hezbollah has not been at the magnitude we would’ve previously expected. Now, I know there’s reporting that an Iranian missile attack may be imminent, and if that happens then that line of argument falls apart. [The Iranian missile attack occurred during our interview.]
Yeah, it seems like some people in the article actually think that a war between Israel and Hezbollah could be beneficial to the region.
Sometimes you have unintended consequences that are good, and certainly you can’t completely rule that out. But my assessment of the situation in Lebanon would be the same as that in Gaza. Even if Israel is as successful in militarily degrading Hezbollah as it has militarily degraded Hamas, how do you translate those military victories into a political, strategic victory? Ultimately a political, strategic victory rests on who is governing that territory after military action ends. And I’m unaware of what Israel’s plans are for the post-conflict phase in Lebanon. I have some idea of what it is in Gaza, but I haven’t heard at all what they’re thinking in Lebanon.
What do you think the plan is in Gaza?
The plan is, as Netanyahu has said, neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. The ideas that Netanyahu’s government has been considering are akin to putting in place the so-called Village Leagues that Israel tried to install in the West Bank following the peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, which were a colossal failure. Most of the people who took leadership roles in those conflicts were assassinated or run out by the local population. [The idea behind Village Leagues was to empower Palestinians whom Israel considered compliant, but many other Palestinians viewed them as collaborators.] So I don’t have a great deal of confidence that an option without either Hamas or Abbas is going to produce stability. In Lebanon, Israel has said precious little publicly, nor has the Biden Administration said what it hopes will come out of this. If it thinks there’s a real opportunity, if it thinks some good can come out of this, I think there is an onus on the Administration to explain what that would be.
