Israeli troops are now fighting to rid Hezbollah cadres and infrastructure from the area between the Lebanese border and the Litani River, about eighteen miles north; on Tuesday, Netanyahu appeared to confirm in a video that a bombing raid in Beirut had killed Hassan Nasrallah’s apparent heir, Hashem Safieddine. The I.D.F. claims not only to have decimated the Hezbollah leadership but also to have killed hundreds of Hezbollah fighters. But, as in Gaza, massive air attacks on Hezbollah’s strongholds in Beirut, and on a Palestinian refugee camp, have produced civilian misery. More than two thousand have died and some ten thousand have been injured, many of them noncombatants. More than 1.2 million civilians have been displaced.
Hezbollah is responsible for far more bloodshed in Syria, where it has propped up Bashar al-Assad, than in Israel, and many Arabs would join Israelis in wanting to see it disarmed. Still, Nasrallah, before his death, had openly claimed that Hezbollah would stop firing on Israel if a ceasefire were achieved in Gaza, which seemed likely to open the door to a diplomatic settlement. Ehud Olmert, who was Prime Minister during the 2006 war with Lebanon, told me, back in February, that he believed that a revision to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701—which ended that war and arranged for a peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, to patrol areas south of the Litani, which Hezbollah evacuated—might have served as a stable arrangement. (The revision would see Israel ceding to Lebanon a small territory, the Shebaa Farms, captured from Syria but claimed by Lebanon; Hezbollah could present this as a diplomatic victory.) If Hezbollah would agree to pull back from the Litani again, with augmented U.N. inspection, Olmert told me more recently, then “1701 envisions a reasonable compromise” that would also “allow Israelis to return to their homes and also stop the fighting.”
Olmert is assuming that, eventually, there will have to be a diplomatic agreement; shocking air attacks may produce, initially, an aura of “deterrence” but also more enduring hatred. And the new leaders of Hezbollah, holding thousands of rockets and missiles in reserve, cannot be kept out of the equation; more than a hundred and thirty penetrated Israeli airspace on Monday, with some landing in Haifa, injuring ten. “In 1992, when Israel assassinated Sayyed Abbas Musawi, the then leader of Hezbollah, American and Israeli newspaper headlines claimed that his assassination marked the beginning of the end for Hezbollah,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian Ambassador to Germany—who, in 2004, was the spokesperson for the Iranian negotiating team on nuclear enrichment—told me. “However, fourteen years later, in the 2006 war, Israel was, in effect, stalemated, and the world was shocked by Hezbollah’s new power. The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, [the Hamas political leader Ismail] Haniyeh, and other commanders of Hezbollah and Hamas will spark the rise of a new generation of resistance, even more powerful and determined than today.” Many of Hezbollah’s jihadist forces, Mousavian said, lost family members in previous conflicts.
Mousavian is currently a visiting scholar at Princeton and no friend of the current Iranian regime. (By 2005, he had come into conflict with hard-liners led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and cannot now return without risking prison.) Yet he sees a diplomatic opportunity for Iran here, too. “The new Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, came to the U.N. three days before Netanyahu, and spoke of a ‘new era,’ ” Mousavian said, “with Iran playing ‘an effective and constructive role in the evolving global order.’ ” Pezeshkian’s is not the only voice; Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is gathering political and economic power. Nevertheless, “relations with Israel go through Washington,” Mousavian said, and Pezeshkian’s offer should be tested. “The U.S. should open a broad dialogue, in which bilateral and regional issues are all on the table—including a renewed nuclear deal, a denuclearized Persian Gulf, ceasefire between Israel and Iran, a regional conventional-arms arrangement, and the security of the Persian Gulf.” He added, “I believe that Iran would respect a Palestinian decision, and if the Palestinians are on a pathway”—to a two-state solution—“then Iran would not impede or disturb it.”
Perhaps Netanyahu’s most disquieting elision in his U.N. speech, in this season of atonement, is that Moses’s admonition to choose blessings over curses was aimed specifically at the Children of Israel. The paramount sin, according to Moses, was idol worship, to “go after other Gods to worship them.” In contemporary Israel, the idol, ironically, is the promised land itself. Netanyahu’s strategy, if that’s the word for it, is de-facto annexation under an umbrella of deterrence. But, absent diplomatic agreements and regional alliances, deterrence seems bound to become a permanent curse. Then, as Moses warned, “the Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.” ♦
