The only way to stop the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, I believe, is to deploy an international force to the blue line. But let us be precise: I don’t mean blue helmets like the useless U.N. “peacekeepers” of UNIFIL, who currently operate in southern Lebanon and have done nothing to stop the periodic launching of katyushas into northern Israel. I’m talking about the force of NATO or British soldiers with a mandate to disarm Hezbollah. But, first, a bit of history often lost in the current coverage.
Hiz b’Allah — “party of God” — was created in 1982, when Israel (commanded by Ariel Sharon) invaded Lebanon, hoping to disarm the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had taken up residence in Beirut.
That war turned into Israel’s Vietnam. The Israelis failed to dislodge the PLO and became bogged down policing Lebanon’s internecine factionalism; the whole endeavor is now widely considered a mistake.
But the unintended consequence was that Lebanese Shiites living in southern Lebanon rallied around Hezbollah’s acts of resistance and, as they saw it, protection. (One backstory is that the Shiites had long been at war with the Sunnis and Christians, and one Christian militia fighting under Israel’s indirect command razed two small towns and massacred their inhabitants.)
Hezbollah also bought Shiites’ hearts (using Iranian money to build schools, roads, and hospitals) and minds (professing a Muslim imperative for uncorrupted politics, a first for Lebanon at that time).
When Israel finally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah, considering itself victorious but also foeless, moderated its political wing and won several seats in Lebanon’s parliament. But, instead of allowing Beirut to run social services and security in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah demanded that it retain its de facto control of the area.
And so, even with the political wing on the rise, Hezbollah’s social and guerrilla wings remained intact, exercising the domestic prerogatives of Iran and the military prerogatives of Syria (which also helped train and fund the group).
That’s why, today, the government of the sovereign state of Lebanon insists that it has no control over its southern border and no obligation to control it.
This, of course, is nonsense. (If the Branch Davidians, acting in concert with the Venezuelans, had taken control of Waco and begun bombing nearby Mexican towns, we would have put a hasty stop to it.)
But overcoming such nonsense will probably require a civil war to disarm Hezbollah, and with fresh enough memories of the country’s last civil war — an endless, bloody affair that consumed much of the 1980s — Lebanese Sunnis and Christians are less than sanguine about this course of action.
But where does that leave Israel?
Obviously, a country has the right to defend itself from a neighboring state’s rocket attacks. Although I believe Israel’s response has been disproportionate and often unjust (I do not believe that civilian objectives like power plants are legitimate targets), there is a simple logic behind the Israeli strategy: “We cannot disarm Hezbollah short of outright occupation — and probably not even with that — so our only option is to neuter them as best we can and stifle their resupply routes.” (That is one reason Israel has been destroying key Lebanese roads.)
This will not work. Eventually, Iran and Syria will find ways to resupply Hezbollah; until it is disarmed the intermittent rocket attacks will go on. And disarmament by Israel itself will only create more chaos (and counter-counterattacks) than already exist.
So if Lebanon won’t disarm Hezbollah and Israel can’t, somebody else has got to do it. Israel has many justifiable reasons for anxiety about international forces along its borders, not least of which is that, historically, they are not always neutral.
There are vague plans that outline international military options, and I’m not qualified to assess their tactical viability. But it’s time for Israel hawks, like me, to concede that a multinational force with a clear mandate is, at this point, more likely to end future rocket attacks by disarming Hezbollah than Israel is.
Adam B. Kushner is assistant managing editor of the New Republic.
