U.S. efforts to hamper the IDF’s efforts to defeat Hezbollah and its paymasters could doom the region to more years of Tehran-sponsored terrorism.
Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS)
The post-Oct. 7 war that Israel has been waging against Islamist terrorists that threaten its existence seems to have shifted its focus in the last month. While the fighting against Hamas in the Gaza Strip continues, it’s clear that most of Israel’s military efforts are now aimed at ensuring that Hezbollah’s forces in Lebanon do not have the power to continue to depopulate northern Israel. But one thing hasn’t changed: an American policy bent on not entirely abandoning the Jewish state while also determined to avoid a full-scale confrontation with Iran, which is behind both Hamas and Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel.
Preventing a broader war sounds reasonable. But at this point, the problem is not only the fact that Israel cannot afford to let Hamas survive in Gaza or allow Hezbollah to continue to use Lebanon as a base for attacks on its northern border communities and the rest of the country. It’s that amid the confusion caused by more than a year of fighting and the way that the conflict has already spread, Washington is still hopelessly committed to a policy of diplomatic compromise with Iran that has proven over and over again to be an abysmal failure.
Yet that hasn’t stopped the Biden/Harris administration from continuing to push for ceasefire agreements on both fronts and for what amounts to a truce with Iran that essentially grants the Islamist regime and its nuclear program immunity from Israeli attacks. That is a formula not just for Israeli defeat. It also signals a willingness to accommodate the Iranians in a way that is a disaster for American interests and dooms the region to many more years of further instability and terrorism.
Course correction is needed
What makes it even more frustrating—both for Israelis and Americans who recognize how counterproductive this addiction to Iran diplomacy has become—is that the people running America’s foreign-policy establishment seem unable to realize their errors. Years of efforts at bribing and appeasing Iran have done nothing to change the Islamic Republic’s desire to achieve regional hegemony or to dampen its enthusiasm for funding terror groups that seek to destroy Israel. Nor do U.S. policymakers seem to contemplate the kind of course correction that might at least afford a chance of obtaining different and hopefully better outcomes.
That problem is even more acute at this point in the conflict than perhaps before.
The Israel Defense Forces seem to have accomplished a great deal in its current campaign to degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities in the last few weeks. It has also begun the difficult job of cleaning out areas of Southern Lebanon where not only Hezbollah stored quantities of armaments but also planned to use as a starting-off point for their own Oct. 7-style invasion of northern Israel.
Despite the great success of the exploding beepers and walkie-talkies—and their ability to take out much of Hezbollah’s leadership and command-and-control structure—the terrorist group is a long way from defeat, let alone collapse.
Rather than accept the setbacks dealt to it, the Iranian proxy group has doubled down on its attacks on northern Israel and even expanded them. The longer the fighting goes on and the IDF is free to strike its weapons supplies and forces, the less useful it will be to Iran when and if it is called upon to help Tehran fend off Israeli or Western attacks on its nuclear program. Nevertheless, Hezbollah still has vast quantities of arms and missiles at its disposal. While the Lebanese have expressed widespread dismay about how their country has been hijacked by the Shi’ite organization into fighting a war against Israel that is causing massive suffering, that fact hasn’t loosened Iran’s grip upon their nation.
This is a moment when Washington’s support for a campaign to defeat a terrorist movement that has American, as well as Israeli and Jewish, blood on its heads would be crucial. Instead, the administration is desperately signaling to its media cheerleaders and the international community that it wants no part of an ongoing conflict whose ultimate target is to defeat Iran.
Even gestures of support—such as the sending of a sophisticated THAAD missile-defense system to Israel, along with 100 American personnel to operate it—seem aimed more at restricting the Jewish state’s freedom to make a decision about retaliating against the latest direct Iranian attack. The fact that the administration has made sure to leak to the press that it wants Israel to avoid striking at Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, which is an existential threat not just to Israel but to Arab nations and the West, was a shocking indication of its ongoing devotion to the idea that Tehran and its most important assets should not be threatened.
Not a personal quarrel
The differences between Washington and Jerusalem are often portrayed as largely rooted in the bitter personal quarrel that seems to exist between the leaders of the two governments. Or at least that is the way that American officials have sought to depict in the never-ending leaks of information about their communications with Israeli officials that they pass along at regular intervals to their favorite journalists at The New York Times or The Atlantic who share their contempt for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As was the case during the Obama administration, in which most of the Biden-Harris foreign policy also served, differences are often described as a form of impertinence on the part of Netanyahu and the Israelis. Their willingness to talk back to the Americans and even ignore their advice is viewed as a sign of disrespect. For all of their focus on highlighting Netanyahu’s obnoxiousness (a character trait that few objective observers would deny is part of his complex personality), President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the rest of the Obama alumni at the National Security Council and State Department seem to have an insatiable need for gestures of deference, if not acknowledgments of weakness, from the leader of the tiny Jewish state. They also refuse to recognize that Israel’s leaders might have a better grasp of the situation than they do. They also think it wrong that they would prioritize their nation’s security over reinforcing the administration’s efforts to pretend that Biden is a strong leader.
That tends to say more about their shortcomings than those of Netanyahu. But it is also a misrepresentation of a fundamental philosophical split between Israel and the Biden-Harris team.
Their smearing of Netanyahu and nonstop attempts to humble him notwithstanding, the source of the problem remains this administration’s commitment to a realignment of the Middle East in which conflicts between the United States and Iran would be replaced by a rapprochement with the Islamists. That was the reason for former President Barack Obama’s otherwise puzzling decision to accept that Iran would become a nuclear power via a 2015 nuclear deal that guaranteed that it would eventually get a weapon. It also explained Biden’s futile efforts to woo back Tehran with billions in released frozen funds and relaxed sanctions after Trump left the pact in 2018.
That is also why the Biden-Harris team has, despite sometimes paying lip service to the goal of stopping Hamas or curbing Hezbollah, also continuously sought to bring an end to Israel’s efforts to eradicate Iran’s terrorist proxies. Above all, it wants to stop Israel from striking Iran in a way that would put an end to any hope of reviving their dreams of better relations with the tyrannical regime.
A campaign window for Israel
For the moment, the presidential election and the administration’s realization that abandoning Israel in the middle of a fight would hurt Vice President Kamala Harris’s prospects for victory in November more than it would help her with the Democratic Party’s left-wing anti-Zionist base has aided Netanyahu. It’s given him the ability to hit Hezbollah harder than anyone in Washington dreamed possible.
But no one in either Israel or the United States should be under any illusions that this is necessarily a permanent state of affairs, especially if Harris wins what is now a toss-up election. Much like the decision of Hamas to hunker down in what is left of its Gaza tunnel complex and refuse to either surrender or free the hostages, Iran and Hezbollah are counting on the West—in particular, the Americans—to bail them out of a tough spot.
Without U.S. support, any hope of Israel being able to sustain a campaign to fundamentally degrade Hezbollah’s ability to inflict suffering on the Jewish state is not likely to succeed. That’s especially true if the mullahs in Tehran and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah henchmen believe that either Biden or Harris will eventually pull the plug on weapons shipments to Israel or allow the U.N. Security Council to vote to mandate a ceasefire that Jerusalem couldn’t ignore.
Until that happens, Israel shouldn’t let Washington’s self-destructive addiction to pointless diplomacy with Iran stand in the way of an all-out effort to knock Hezbollah out of the war or strike a blow against Iran’s precious nuclear assets.
The stakes in this dispute couldn’t be higher and have little to do with the personal aspects of the long feud between Netanyahu and those Americans committed to appeasement of Iran.
Should Hezbollah emerge from this conflict with its ability to control Lebanon and be able to fire on northern Israel intact, it will do more than harm the Jewish state. It will ensure that Iranian proxies will be increasing their efforts to undermine every government in the region not already under Tehran’s control. And it will mean more rounds of fighting for Israel, as it will be forced to endure more terrorist attacks, regardless of who is running the government in Jerusalem.
On the other hand, if Washington were to back Israel’s efforts to topple Hezbollah and strike the sort of blow against Tehran that might shake the regime’s hold on power, it would—rather than escalating a seven-front war that has already gotten out of control—give the region hope that the mullah’s reign of terror as the Middle East’s “strong horse” is ending. Should America choose more pointless diplomacy rather than a path towards Iran’s defeat, the price will be paid in the blood of Israelis as well as Arabs. So long as he has an opening to do so, Netanyahu should not waver from seeking to avoid such a disastrous outcome.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
Image: An Israel-based air-defense system fires interception missiles towards rockets fired by Hezbollah, near the border with Southern Lebanon, Oct. 13, 2024. Photo by Ayal Margolin/Flash90.
