Israel vs. Hezbollah

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Noel King: Israel's 11-month war with Gaza has a few different fronts. There's Gaza, of course. On the other side of the country, there's the West Bank. Israel launched a big operation there this week. And in the north, there's the fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon. This Sunday morning volley of rockets, drones, and interceptions aimed at military targets, the largest between Hezbollah and Israel since the war in Gaza began. And we hear again and again that if Israel v. Hezbollah goes even one step further, it very well could pull the region in. Fears are growing of a wider conflict in the Middle East. Hostilities raised concerns of a wider war in the Middle East. By nightfall, both sides pulled back in a show of de-escalation. Tonight, fears of a wider war in the Middle East appear to be subsiding for now. Again and again, fears of a wider war that doesn't happen. Coming up on Today Explained, what is holding this region back from the brink?

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Noel King: You're listening to Today Explained. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. So many times in the past 10 months, we've woken up to headlines about a broader Middle East war looming in the hours after Israel and Hezbollah trade fire across their shared border. Why do they keep stopping before it escalates further? We called up Vali Nasser of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Vali Nasser: I think neither Hezbollah nor Israel, despite claiming otherwise, actually want a full war. Going into Lebanon at this time for Israeli military is a very tall order. It's much more complicated. It's a much bigger operation than what they've done in Gaza. Hezbollah is much more capable and lethal than Hamas was when Israel went in there. And Israeli military is also fairly exhausted. It's short of soldiers. It's not capable of starting a kind of operation that Lebanon would require. So it wants to deter Hezbollah from attacks. It wants to show that it is willing and capable of inflicting huge pain on Lebanon and on Hezbollah. But it does not want an all-out war.

Noel King: All right. So you've explained that neither side wants a war. And yet, you know as well as I do that every weekend when this tit-for-tat happens, we hear that this is the variable that could tip the entire region into war. Israel and Hezbollah's back and forth could tip the entire region into war. Why do people keep saying that again and again and again if neither side wants this to happen?

Vali Nasser: Saying it again and again is actually a way to get everybody mobilized to not let this get out of hand. I mean, for instance, the United States does not want a full war in this region. And therefore, it raises the alarms that this might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. And the more time goes by of escalated tensions, the more time goes by of daily conflict, the more the odds and the chances go up for accidents, for mistakes, for inadvertent targets to be hit that could easily cause escalation that gets out of control. And that is why the time is now to get us into a better direction. And for the Lebanese people, my message...

Vali Nasser: Hezbollah is capable of inflicting huge damage on Israel in an outright war. And therefore, that would then compel Israel to escalate even further against Hezbollah. And if we come to a ground invasion or a kind of bombardment of Lebanon that we saw in Gaza, then Iran and the Houthis are also likely to get involved in the war. They're not going to allow Hezbollah to be demolished the way they've watched Hamas be demolished. And then the United States would would have to enter the war if Israel and Iran get into it. So everybody's trying to avoid the domino that fell in Gaza to cause a domino to fall in Lebanon, because the domino in Lebanon is far larger and is much more likely to cause other dominoes to fall.

Noel King: Can you tell us what Hezbollah is exactly?

Vali Nasser: So Hezbollah is both a political organization and a military organization. It's a political organization in the sense that it's a government for large parts of Lebanon, including large parts of its capital city of Beirut. It funds schools, hospitals, social institutions, services that because of the economic crisis, many communities depend on. It's basically a second state within Lebanon, and it has technically its own citizens. But is also a very powerful military force, which is stronger than the Lebanese military. The group's leader referred to having 100,000 fighters in 2021. Last year, the U.S. estimated that Hezbollah also has 150,000 rockets and missiles, more than enough to overwhelm Israeli air defenses and cause significant damage to infrastructure in a war. So we call it a terrorist organization, but that doesn't quite describe what it is. Hezbollah is essentially a Middle Eastern state carved out of the larger state of Lebanon with government and with military capability.

Noel King: Hezbollah's citizens, if we think of it as a state, are Hezbollah's citizens loyal to it, civilians? Some are, some are not. And Hezbollah used to be much more popular in the areas that it governed, partly because it provided better social services to people who lived in Shia areas of Beirut or in South Lebanon than the Lebanese government provided them. But also because after 1982, Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when Israeli forces did not leave South Lebanon, many Shias in South Lebanon came to the conclusion that Israel perhaps covets Lebanese land and may turn South Lebanon into West Bank, build settlements there, never leave. Now the Israelis have annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, settled down more or less permanently on the West Bank and occupied close to half of Lebanon. In the interests of self-defense, that gallant little underdog Israel has suddenly started behaving like the neighborhood bully. And Hezbollah was the force that caused Israel to leave South Lebanon. We wish that Lebanon will remain independent, peaceful. We do not seek a part of her waters, neither a part of her territories. And do not want to play a role in her politics. So there was a sense that Hezbollah's presence and Hezbollah's ferocity, military capability was what was protecting South Lebanon from Israel.

Vali Nasser: But increasingly over time, many, even in South Lebanon, have tired of the conflict, have tired of Hezbollah's rule. And populations that never liked Hezbollah, like the Sunnis in Lebanon, Christians in Lebanon, or even become more anti-Hezbollah in that sense. So Hezbollah still does command popularity and loyalty in Lebanon, but not to the extent that it once did. And in the last elections we saw in Lebanon, it actually did lose constituencies. The country's Iran-backed Hezbollah group and its allies scored 62 seats in the 128-seat assembly, falling short of the 65 needed to retain a majority in parliament. A turnaround for the Shiite faction, who has held majority support since 2018. But we don't have a gauge about what the mood is in, particularly South Lebanon, after October 7th and the shelling that Israel has been doing. It's very clear that it has held Hezbollah in the rest of the Arab world. Its popularity has gone up, but not necessarily in Lebanon itself.

Noel King: How did Hezbollah develop its ties to Iran? Were they there from the beginning or is that something that happened over time?

Vali Nasser: No, they were there from the very beginning. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization's military machine in Lebanon. The Israeli armed forces have been massed along the northern border of their country at least four times over the last few months. By June, tensions were at their height and the Israeli military were finally given the go-ahead. The Israelis said they had one goal, to root out once and for all Palestinian bases across the border from their northern settlements, and then to establish a buffer zone 40 kilometers wide so that Palestinian shells would never again threaten Israeli civilians. There was an assumption that they can militarily eliminate completely a Palestinian force. And they did so. They put a siege on Beirut and they forced the PLO to leave Lebanon. When PLO left, there was a military vacuum in Lebanon. And it's in this moment where Iran becomes involved and organizes the religiously most militant part of the Shia militias into sort of a nucleus of Hezbollah. And Hezbollah ultimately forces Israel to leave Lebanon. And that was the first time Israel, first and only time Israel has left Arab territory involuntarily under military pressure. And with that victory, essentially Hezbollah becomes the dominant political military force of South Lebanon and the Shia neighborhoods of Beirut and also the Shia enclaves on eastern parts of Lebanon. And Hezbollah's accomplishments owed a lot to Iran. And Hezbollah and Iran therefore forged, if you would, a strategic partnership. Each needs the other. And the two basically are now wedded together in this strategic alliance to contain and combat Israel and the United States in the region.

Noel King: You've laid out how there are a lot of players involved here, including the United States and Iran. How does this particular cycle, Lebanon-Israel, Israel-Lebanon, back and forth every couple days or every couple weeks, how does that end?

Vali Nasser: It's very clear that Hezbollah says there has to be a ceasefire in Gaza. The ceasefire in Gaza is no longer about just ending the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. It's about avoiding an escalation along the northern border. So they've made that conditionality that there has to be a ceasefire in Gaza if we're going to avoid a free-for-all on Israel's northern border. And the United States has a vested interest in avoiding a larger war in the region. It doesn't want to come back into the region after three presidents have said that we need to free ourselves of wars in the Middle East. They don't want to end up in a war with Iran. They don't want to destabilize the Gulf region and its economy. Everything the United States says suggests that they want to go quickly back to before October 7th, talk about normalization, economic growth, trade corridors, etc. And the last thing the United States wants is a bigger war that would bring it into the region. And the only way to achieve that is essentially to arrive at a ceasefire in Gaza. And so that is really the linchpin here.

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Noel King: This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Aaron David Miller first joined us on Today Explained about a week after the war started. Aaron is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. He's also a former Middle East State Department advisor, and he negotiated in this region for both Republican and Democratic administrations. He says the path to a ceasefire runs through two men. And in ways both metaphorical and literal, neither man is going to survive this war. So they're holding on to it. Hamas political chairman Yahya Senwar is a marked man. He's living and hiding in a tunnel. Israel's killed the other Hamas leaders. And then there's Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political days were numbered even before his catastrophic failures of leadership that many people blame for leading to the attacks of October 7th. Aaron David Miller, welcome back to Today Explained.

Aaron David Miller: The two principal actors, Yahya Senwar and Benjamin Netanyahu, can you tell us briefly what each man wants most? Let's start with Senwar. I mean, this is highly speculative, right? How Senwar is communicating with the external leadership conveying his positions is anybody's guess.

Noel King: Releasing this footage, they say, was taken from a Hamas security camera and shows the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Senwar, in a tunnel with his family, Ndurk Khan Yunis...

Aaron David Miller: But it's also anybody's guess, I think, to really try to divine the calculations and motives of this man. This is a 62-year-old man. He was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences. He was released from Israeli prison in 2011, and he has skyrocketed to an influential position in Hamas, leading it. I mean, he must understand, given the traumas that they've managed to inflict on the Israeli population, that he's on Israel's list. A fierce foe for Israel, Senwar is closer to the military wing of Hamas, yet able to maneuver its multi-layered political ranks and become its leader. And, I mean, I think it doesn't make much imagination. Israelis have killed Salah Haruri in Beirut. They killed Mohammed Daif, who is the second most important Hamas figure. They killed Marwan Issa, who was a senior Hamas commander. They assassinated, even though they didn't claim responsibility for it. Melania, the head of Hamas's political organization. Sinwar must know, ceasefire or no ceasefire, that he is a marked man. So you have to wonder, what are those calculations?

Aaron David Miller: I just think right now, he is not prepared to accept what the Israelis want, which is an Israeli presence along the Philadelphia corridor, which is essentially the border between Gaza and Egypt, is not prepared to accept what the Israelis want, and that is to monitor the movement of Palestinian civilians from southern Gaza, where most of the Palestinian population now resides. And he wants a permanent cessation of hostilities. So all of this strikes finwar, I think, as, you know, why do I need to give into this. I've got Israel and Hezbollah on the cusp of a serious escalation in the north. Hezbollah is obligated to respond, and the enemy is watching and counting every strike. I've got the Houthis part of this axis of resistance. They will continue to prevent Israeli vessels or those headed to the occupied Palestinian seaport from navigating in the... Abbas, Mahmoud Abbas is virtually deemed to be irrelevant. He controls 40 percent of the West Bank. Israel's name and credibility has perhaps been blackened for years to come as a consequence of the exponential rise in deaths that the Israelis have caused in trying to, you know, end my organization. I've got a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, which, of course, could alienate Palestinians from what I've done. But then again, that they will always hold the Israelis first and foremost accountable for their misery. Look like this is the new technique. The Israeli army is now committing more than one massacre at the same time, so you don't talk about everything. Or at least one of the massacres will not be recorded, will not be heard, will not be seen.

Aaron David Miller: So he's in no hurry to give up his leverage. What are Netanyahu's calculations here? What are the sticking points on his end? The organizing principle of Benjamin Netanyahu's universe is political survival. He on trial in a Jerusalem district court before three judges for bribery fraud and breach of trust That trial is four years in running Case 1000 in which he said to have received a continuous supply of champagne and cigars Case 2000 involves positive coverage from a media tycoon. It's alleged Mr. Netanyahu offered to restrict the circulation of a rival paper. And Case 4000, it's alleged that he promoted regulatory decisions that favoured a telecoms company. The only way he can evade a conviction or somehow undermine the charges against him is by remaining prime minister. Elements in police and the general attorney's office have allied with left-wing media. I call them the Just Not BB gang in order to stitch up unfounded and hallucinatory cases against me. So he needs to maintain his coalition of 64 seats. To do that, I think he needs to keep this pot boiling. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bible says that there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war, a war for a common future.

Noel King: Because he knows, or he should know, given the polls. When the war de-escalates to the point where most Israelis could say it's over, even though the Israelis may still be operating at some level in Gaza. Questions are going to be asked how Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest governing prime minister in the history of the state of Israel, presiding over the most extreme government, could preside over the single bloodiest day for Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, and the single greatest intelligence failure in Israel's history. And how could this Israeli government, who is responsible for funding Hamas, through the Qataris. What kind of legitimacy and credibility does he have to maintain himself in power? So the longer the war goes on, the greater the odds that he'll achieve some additional success.

Aaron David Miller: You would be aware, Aaron, that here in the U.S., a ceasefire deal is a major issue in the 2024 election and that there are two main stories that you hear. The first is that Hamas is unwilling to come to the table, even though Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been tireless in his efforts to get him there. The other you're going to hear is that Hamas accepted a deal back in May and Benjamin Netanyahu is obstructing it because he needs to survive. It sounds like what you're saying is there is some truth to both of these stories.

Aaron David Miller: Yeah, because I think in the end, since October 7, And these two stories, calculations of Yahya Senwar and Benjamin Netanyahu, and the stakes are near existential for Netanyahu and existential for Senwar. I think they are the two parties that have fundamentally shaped the trajectory of this conflict. And it demonstrates with a terrifying clarity the lack of influence, or perhaps will, on the part of the vaunted international community, including the United States. To fundamentally alter or change the trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ICJ, the ICC, the G7, the UN, the US, the EU. I mean, it demonstrates something that I think should have been evident and is evident about relatively modern Middle Eastern history, that it's littered with the remains of schemes, dreams, and aspirations of external powers who believed wrongly, they could impose their will on smaller ones.

Noel King: You may or may not recall that you and I talked just about a week after October 7th, and you said that every agreement in the Middle East comes after a war. And your hope was that somewhere amid all this horror, this violence, this tragedy, would come what you called a new sort of opening to put Israelis and Palestinians on a different course than they've been on. Almost a year later, How optimistic are you that this is possible?

Aaron David Miller: I would never say never. I do believe that the least bad option to this conflict, which is two states, I believe that it is still possible. But as I look out over the damage, the wreckage, trauma of these two communities over the course of the last year, what I see is two traumatic peoples who are leaderless. I don't see, Noel, the counter to the drama. I don't see it right now. It doesn't mean it can't happen, but it is going to require three things. Leaders who are masters of their political houses, not prisoners of their ideologies in their own politics. A degree of ownership on the part of Israelis and Palestinians, that they care more about doing something for themselves and their respective peoples. Than any outside observer, and it's going to require a third party. Now, I would argue the U.S. has demonstrated at times that it can be an effective broker, but it's going to require a heroic lift by an American president, by an Israeli prime minister, and by the president of the Palestinian Authority and key Arab leaders to get this done. Because right now, I would be dishonest with you and myself if I could identify somehow that there was an inexorable pathway forward. I can't.

Noel King: Former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller.

[Closing credits]

Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Halima Shah and Victoria Chamberlain. Amina El-Sadi edited, Andrea Kristen's daughter and Rob Byers engineered. Laura Bullard fact-checked. The rest of our team includes Avishai Artsy, Hadi Muagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Patrick Boyd, and my co-host Sean Ramosfer. Matthew Collette is our supervising editor. Our EP is Miranda Kennedy. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC and the show is part of Vox. I'm Noelle King. This is Today Explained.