Israel's logic in Lebanon—and the Friedman Factor

Why is Netanyahu starting a cataclysmic new war when he can get the same results through a ceasefire, and why he is betting the house on Iran staying out.

For much of the last year, the prospect of an all-out war in the North was presented to Israelis as a pitfall to avoid. Israel, they were told, doesn’t want a second war - especially not one that could escalate to a regional one with Iran - and neither does Hezbollah. All in all, both parties would prefer a long-term accommodation or regularisation (hasdarah). Israel wants Hezbollah to stop firing and ideally move its forces further north, Hezbollah wants to stay put but was more than willing to stop firing if a ceasefire in Gaza was achieved. The sensible thing, therefore, was to try to avoid escalation but maintain a tit-for-tat balanced enough for neither party to lose face; work hard on a hasdarah; but mostly concentrate on ending the war in Gaza before even thinking of decisively engaging Hezbollah.

That narrative went out the window as pagers and walkie-talkie began blowing up in Lebanon last week: Even hitherto reluctant defence minister Yoav Galant and the skeptical army leadership have whipped round to declare themselves in favour of a new front. This seeming u-turn produced some rather extravagant Orwellianisms. The new war, Israelis are now told, was not chosen in preference to a hasdarah vis. Hezbollah: hasdarah vis. Hezbollah is the whole purpose of the war. Or, as a presumably straight-faced American diplomat put it to Axios’s Barak Ravid, Israel’s strategy is “escalation to de-escalate”.

Escalating to de-escalate and a declaring war for a peace that was on offer anyway might be seen as bordering on the inanity. But there is a reading in which Israel’s strategy makes a degree of brutal, calculated sense - especially once you take human lives, Lebanese and Israeli alike, out of the equation. And seen that way, the u-turn is not much of a u-turn at all - merely a detour. So here is the rationale I personally discern in Israel’s recklessly belligerent behaviour - with the caveat, of course, that I don’t agree with it myself, and hope everyone involved in both this escalation and in the war in Gaza find themselves in the Hague as soon as possible.

“A lot has changed since October 7”

Let’s revisit the earnest argument against the war. Israel can’t spare the forces from Gaza to fight an intense war on two fronts; having been surprised and thrashed by Hamas on October 7, Israel can’t possibly hope to defeat Hezbollah, which it’s long known to be considerably stronger; and it can’t risk provoking Hezbollahs’s patron - Iran; the US will not join the war on Israel’s behest; even if Israel wins militarily, it’ll be a textbook Pyrrhic one, with Israel’s cities and industry pulverised by Hezbollah and Iranian rockets and drones; why go through all this when a negotiated settlement is within reach?

And here is the cynical argument in favour. Put simply: a lot has changed on both arenas since October 7. The war in Gaza is slowly morphing into permanent occupation, with much of the Hamas rocket arsenal depleted or destroyed, most of its prominent leadership dead, and the urban terrain where it planned to fight Israelis was not so much overrun by Israeli forces as pulverised out of existence. True, there are estimates that most of the Hamas fighting rank and file survive; but with long-range rocket fire from Gaza apparently choked off, Israel may well think these guerilla forces can be crowded into segregated sectors and slowly crushed. The hostages, once a key focus of and pretext for the war, have been effectively reframed by Netanyahu as collateral damage.

---

Please consider pledging your support for Divided, Indivisible - every cent you pledge will go toward commissioning guest writers and freeing up my time for interviewing and research.

---

Hezbollah was long known to be a far more powerful rival than Hamas, but a) this means Israel has had much longer to prepare for a confrontation, map its abilities and, as we’ve seen in the pager attack, infiltrate its systems to a ridiculous degree; and b) power can be depleted, which is what we’ve seen with the relentless wave of airstrikes against alleged Hezbollah weapon caches, positions, and especially rocket launchers; this, after destroying the core of its communication network, sowing confusion and paranoia among its rank with regard to just about all electronic devices, and wiping out the bulk of its military leadership (along with dozens of civilians) in one opportunistic strike. Iran, meanwhile, has proven to be far more reluctant to go to war against Israel than most observers anticipated. Its non-retaliation even for the assassination of Hamas’s political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh, the heart of Tehran, seems to have convinced Israel that to Iranians, proxies are just proxies: expendable assets that can be rebuilt with time, not allies worth risking the country for.

“For Israel, it’s always hegemony or Treblinka. Any middle ground slopes towards the ash pit.”

So long as Iran stays out of it, Israel seems to think it can not only hack it alone, limiting the damage to its own civilian heartland by intercepting or preemptively destroying most of Hezbollah’s longer-range missiles. For now, dragging the US into the war becomes less of a priority; but at any rate, involvement is a spectrum, not a binary. Washington needs to balance its wariness of a regional war with enough deterrence to protect its own regional proxy - one that it knows it can’t rebuild or replace once lost. At some point, this deterrence will need to be demonstrated in action, and as Joe Biden’s red lines to Israel have proven to be infinitely elastic, Israel can be fairly confident that little by little, America can become involved enough in the war to take on anyone Netanyahu picks a fight with.

All this only makes sense if you attach very little value to the human beings in front of you - whether Lebanese, Palestinian or Israeli - and fix your gaze firmly above these real lives onto some cold, theoretical, tactical horizon. And it all, quite simply, may well be a miscalculation. Hezbollah might have capabilities Israel hasn’t accounted for; Iran’s patience might snap overnight rather than wane slowly; a stray rocket might hit an ammonia plant and goodbye, Haifa. A lot can happen. But for now, Israel is betting the house that it will not.

Pyrrhic either way: the Friedman factor

This leaves us with the question of why go through all this bloodshed, all this risk, only to achieve - best case scenario - what could have been reached through negotiated settlement. This is a familiar question; even the previous great war between Israel and Lebanon - in 2006 - ended up with a trade of prisoners for the bodies of Israeli soldiers, which was the offer Hezbollah started the war for.

But in Israel’s very own logic this, too, makes sense. The answer, counterintuitive to a sane person, is that nothing achieved through compromise can ever have the same value as something won by force.

Back when he was a sharp young war reporter in Beirut in the early 1980’s, Thomas Friedman jotted down the most succinct distillation of Israeli geopolitical psyche ever put on paper. It goes like this: “If I’m strong, why should I negotiate? If I’m weak, how can I negotiate?”

This has been often cited as an explanation for Israel’s reluctance to embark on negotiations and peace processes. But it can also help explain Israel’s preference for war. Elaborating on Friedman’s aphorism might read like this: “Any negotiation from other than a dominant position projects weakness. Therefore, whatever result I find acceptable is better achieved by force; even an apparent gain, if made in negotiations, will reveal that I can be pressured, and invite more aggression. Violence, conversely, is a win-win; either I’ll get what I could’ve gotten through negotiations, but at such a cost to the enemy they will swear off trying any leverage on me for a good long while; or I’ll get that, and then some.” If you think pyrrhic victories are bad, this approach is saying, pyrrhic compromises are worse. Hubris insulates Israel somewhat from considering outright defeat an option, and at any rate defeat and compromise are seen as one and the same: for us, it’s either hegemony or Treblinka. Any middle ground slopes towards the ash pit.

From its leadership’s perspective, Israel isn’t rejecting a comprehensive peace ceasefire in favour of a two-front war that risks become regional. It’s rejecting any relationship between Hamas’s interest and Hezbollah, by taking on the latter only after militarily weakening the former, while gambling on Iran staying out of this round, too. The end result might be very close to what Israel could’ve gotten without killing tens of thousands of people and losing thousands of its own soldiers and citizens; but to Israel, the how it gets it matters as much, if not more, than what it gets. And there is a crucial personal consideration too: by all indicators, Netanayahu really does want to continue some level of war indefinitely, at least until Israel’s opposition has been compromised enough to ensure his victory in the next election, and the judiciary system has been eviscerated enough to ensure his corruption trials collapse.

So what does Israel want? On the immediate level, it wants to separate the Hezbollah issue from the Gaza one; destroy as much as it can of Hezbollah’s military capacity across the country; and, if possible, push it beyond the Litani river. The ramblings by Israeli ministers about Lebanon not being a real state and ripe for Israeli annexation are primarily flares in internal political jostling, the eternal struggle by individual politicians to stand out from the spineless blob that coalesced around Netanyahu - at least for now.

But at the end of the day, the same old rule applies: Israel simply wants as much as it can get. The only way for anyone to make it stop continually reaching for more is to inflict some pretty hefty stick, not dangle nice juicy carrots down negotiation lane. Under a more decisive president and a less lacklustre foreign policy team than the Blinken-Sullivan-McGurk leadership, the stick would come from Washington. As things stand, it looks like Washington will hum and haw until things escalate so far that the stick will eventually come from Tehran - at a far higher cost to everyone, Washington included.