When Should Israel Fight Hezbollah?

When Should Israel Fight Hezbollah?

Israelis may not get to choose. While Biden dithers, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia fires away.

By Elliot Kaufman, WSJ

“The north.” The term hangs over Israel like a black cloud. It conveys danger and hardship with no hope on the horizon. War with Hezbollah, Israelis agree, is inevitable. The question isn’t if but when, and the answer from political and military leaders is always “not yet.” But timing a war risks becoming a fool’s errand when the enemy has already opened fire.

“ ‘All eyes’ may have been on Rafah,” says Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, Israel’s top military spokesman, “but we need our eyes on Hezbollah.” The world has barely noticed how Iran’s Lebanese proxy militia has depopulated the north of Israel. “The country has been shrunk,” he says.

Israel has evacuated some 70,000 civilians. They watch every day on the news, helpless, as Hezbollah pounds their homes. Who could believe that Hezbollah has fired more than 5,000 missiles and drones since Oct. 7 without precipitating a major Israeli attack in reply?

“It’s inexcusable,” says Oded Stein, head of the premilitary academy of the Upper Galilee. “They’re firing to destroy our towns, and we’re firing pinpoint, waiting for each terrorist to poke his head out.” Israel has killed some 360 fighters, but Hezbollah has an army of tens of thousands, plus at least 150,000 missiles.

As the Gaza war winds down, domestic pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to defeat Hezbollah is mounting. Israelis want their homes and country back, but the stakes are high: “Buildings will fall in Tel-Aviv” is a line I hear over and over. This war would be like nothing Israelis have seen before.

Mr. Netanyahu, far from his caricature in the foreign press, has earned a reputation in Israel for being cautious with military force. He stresses to me, “The way to prevent war in the north is to prepare for it.”

A source close to the prime minister spoke on the condition of anonymity to elaborate on security matters: “We’re building up our arms industry, stockpiling so the U.S. can’t blackmail us.” This will take some time. So too, he says, will a cost-effective solution to Hezbollah’s suicide drones. An Israeli negotiator adds that it would be foolish to attempt the war on the eve of U.S. elections. “Serious Israelis don’t want war in Lebanon right now,” he says. “But the public does.”

“Not now,” agrees Tamir Hayman, the leader of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and a former head of Israeli military intelligence. “Better to do it a couple of years from now.” He explains, “We don’t have the resources, the international legitimacy or the full approval of the U.S. to go to war in Lebanon right now.” The source close to the prime minister says, “We don’t want it and Hezbollah doesn’t want it. We’ll have a war when we’re ready.”

The Biden administration wants to avert war but is going about it all wrong, Israeli military officials say. It needs to get Hezbollah to back down and take a deal, but its focus on restraining Israel emboldens the terrorists—making war more likely. When the Biden administration withholds arms or delays their transfer, Hezbollah can take the threat of an Israeli attack less seriously.

President Biden likes to tout his “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.” The grim joke around Jerusalem is that Mr. Biden’s commitment is ironclad—only without the iron. Behind the 3,000 bombs he admits to withholding are 23,000 basic munitions that have been stalled, according to a senior Israeli official.

Israel’s military establishment knows a war with Hezbollah would likely end with an agreement short of total victory. So, a senior military official suggests, “Why not make a deal now and skip the war?”

War isn’t so easy to push off, argues Amir Avivi, a retired brigadier general who leads the Israel Defense and Security Forum. “Let’s say Israel says, ‘Wait, we have to organize— we’ll attack you in two years.’ What do you think Hezbollah will do?” he asks. “Stand in place?” The more Israel tries to postpone the fight, the more Iran will intensify it.

There are reasons for Israel to strike sooner rather than later. “The Hamas threat is handled. The north is already evacuated,” says Mr. Stein of the Upper Galilee. “The army is already mobilized.” Mr. Avivi adds, “We have been degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities in southern Lebanon for eight months, destroying their posts, pushing them north. When will we have a better moment to go for it, if not now?”

Even if Israel wants a deal, Hezbollah has pledged to shoot on until Israel leaves Hamas alone in Gaza. Those terms may be unacceptable to Mr. Netanyahu and many Israelis, but not to others. Israel’s military establishment is receptive to a hostage agreement that officially ends the war and returns Gaza to Hamas.

Mr. Hayman explains, “Hamas is asking us to lie that the war is over so it can also lie and say it won a great victory.” He doesn’t worry about the challenge of restarting the war against Hamas after a cease-fire: “Hamas will give us so many reasons to resume the fighting. If it didn’t, it would no longer be Hamas.”

The prospect of withdrawing from Gaza’s border with Egypt, which cuts off Hamas from its supply routes, elicits shrugs. “It will take us three hours to get back there,” Mr. Hayman says. “OK, I’m exaggerating four hours.” This view is echoed in the military’s upper ranks.

Mr. Avivi doesn’t buy it. First, there would be zero international legitimacy to restart the war. Second, “Hamas will completely rebuild itself. And everything we lost, all the prices we pay, will be for nothing.” Third, “the inability of Israel to win after Oct. 7 will break down Israeli society and empower our enemies to seek our complete destruction. Then, we will have to fight, but from a place of despair.”

I often hear that the Israeli people are too tired and divided for another major war. But the enemy gets a say. Besides, Mr. Avivi says, “If Hezbollah can fight five years in Syria and still stand against us, we can’t fight eight months?” He thinks Israel will soon face up to the scale of the danger and realize now isn’t the time to fight over “anything but victory.” In a month or two, he predicts, Israeli society will understand that it is in an existential war.

Iran and Hezbollah need to feel U.S. pressure. Right now Tehran feels confident, notes Mr. Hayman. “Iran is a nuclear threshold state. It effectively controls four other states in the region. Practically, it faces no real threat, while Israel faces huge threats. So, of course it considers its strategic posture superior to Israel’s. Why wouldn’t it?”

Hezbollah has long declared its plan to conquer Israel’s Galilee region—an Oct. 7 with advance warning—but for now it trains its fire mostly on empty towns. Ironically, it might not shoot so much if the civilians were still in their homes. It wouldn’t get away with it.

Israel’s assessment is that Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t want a larger war. Some say he cares to prevent Lebanon’s destruction. Others say he needs to preserve his arsenal to protect the Iranian nuclear program. So why risk everything by continuing to shoot? “He knows us too well,” Mr. Stein says. “He knows exactly where the line is for us.”

Israel’s task is to erase all the old lines and let its enemies scramble in fear of where the new ones might be. “After Oct. 7,” says Mr. Hagari, the voice of the Israeli military, “we’re not the same country we used to be. We won’t merely ‘contain’ anymore.” Mr. Nasrallah is playing with fire. He and the “serious” Israelis don’t want war right now, but with a weak U.S. president, they may get it anyway.

Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.