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Jonathan Silver:

For the last six months, most of our attention has been devoted to the southern front, to Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza. All the while we have been aware of potential large-scale terrorist activity in the West Bank. We have seen, and Israel has responded to, specific incidents there, but the monthlong celebration of Ramadan has thankfully come and gone without large-scale terror emerging from those territories.

We’ve likewise been attending to maritime and aerial attacks from the Houthis, the Iranian proxy in Yemen, and of course Israel continues to interdict and neutralize arms shipments in Syria and elsewhere. In short, despite our focus on Israel’s military operations in Gaza, the Jewish state has been engaged in a multi-front, multi-theater war for many months, and by some reckonings, for many years.

Our focus today is on Israel’s northern front, on Israel’s border with Lebanon and with a massive powerful, well-armed battle-tested Iranian proxy there, led by the cleric Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah. In a war with Hizballah. We need to consider the timing of that war, whether it’s imminent, and what the trade-offs are—political, diplomatic, strategic, and military—that one has got to consider when reasoning about such a grave question. That’s the subject of our essay at Mosaic this month.

As of our convening today, April 17, Hizballah drones and missiles targeting an IDF facility struck the Western Galilee Bedouin village of Arab al-Aramshe, wounding nearly twenty Israelis. In response, Israel struck a number of Hizballah sites. Yesterday, on April 16, three Israelis were injured by a Hizballah drone attack, and Israel carried out two separate strikes in Lebanon, killing two senior Hizballah commanders. On Sunday, April 14, four IDF soldiers were injured in an explosion, apparently while operating on the Lebanese side of the border.

There have been rockets of one kind or another incoming from Lebanon every single day and have been for months. Between 60,000 and 80,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes in Israel’s north, creating a set of dilemmas in Israeli domestic politics that cannot long endure. To help us understand this, we’re joined by the author of our monthly essay, Raphael BenLevi.

Raphael is the Director of the Churchill Program for National Security at the Herut Center’s Argaman Institute, and he’s a fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. He serves in the IDF reserve’s intelligence branch, with the rank of major. Joining Raphael is the Friedman senior fellow at the Washington Institute, and a expert on Lebanese politics, Hanin Ghaddar, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s senior adviser, former National Security Council director, and Mosaic contributor Rich Goldberg.

I’m going to have a brief discussion with Raphael about his essay, and then I will invite Hanin and Rich into the conversation to pose their questions to him. After that, we should have some time for questions and answers with the audience.

Raphael, thank you for being here. Why don’t we just start with a recapitulation of the thesis of your essay, and in particular, maybe we can talk about some of the historical context necessary to understand the last weeks and months of conflict between Lebanon and Israel?

Raphael BenLevi:

I would like to start with the bottom line and then step back a little bit and provide the broader context.

The bottom line is that Israel must take action in the near future to degrade significantly or destroy totally Hizballah’s missile capabilities, and to push it back a significant distance from the border. What does that mean in practical terms? There are, basically, two possible scenarios. One of them is that as soon as Israel’s finished what it needs to do in Gaza—meaning finished getting rid of Hamas and taking Rafah—then theoretically there could be a situation where Hizballah says, “You know what? We’re just going to stop. We’re just going to turn off the dial for now. Let’s keep everything where it is and have a de-facto ceasefire.”

That would be an unacceptable situation, and why is that? So as you mentioned, we’ve been in a war with Hizballah that Hizballah itself started on October 7. Israel has been forced to evacuate, officially at least, 60,000 Israelis who live near the border with Lebanon. Another 20,000, at least, evacuated voluntarily because they’re right near that area. Take for instance Metula, which is a town right on the border. The mayor of Metula recently explained what this actually looks

The entire town’s population has been evacuated and is staying at a hotel in Tiberias. And that means that entire families who lived in a house are now cooped up in single hotel rooms. They’re trying to run schools out of hotel conference rooms, while the mayor himself is staying in the town. Every time a rocket or missile is fired on a house, he calls the family it belongs to. He has said, “Now anyone who gets a phone call from me doesn’t want to answer the phone, because they know that most likely I’m calling to inform them that their house has now gone up in flames.”

Farmers have abandoned entire crops, unable to harvest them. One of them explained to us there is an area with thousands of pink lady apples just rotting on the ground, which is almost a year’s worth of lost revenue. We’re coming up on the tourist season, where much of the north really does its business, hosting Israeli tourists in the spring and the summer, and depending on the revenue for the rest of the year. Now that’s just what’s happening in Metula. Multiply that by a few hundred to get a sense of the scale. If we put this in proportions of the American population: 80,000 is about 1 percent of Israel’s population, which would translate to 30 million Americans internally displaced because of rocket fire. That’s the situation.

Even if Hizballah all of a sudden stopped the rocket fire, we would still have to worry about its Radwan special forces—infantry units who have trained and planned for an invasion of northern Israel that would make October 7 look mild in comparison. They’re still positioned not far from the border, and thus remain capable of doing that. And obviously they still retain a vast missile arsenal. So if Hizballah just stops the day-to-day cross-border shooting, and Israel does nothing, that would be a huge win for Hizballah. And that would leave them poised to take the next step on their own terms, when they decide the time is right. That would also leave the same number of Israelis with no answer for their security, essentially telling them, “Go live there as sitting ducks waiting for the next attack.”

Jonathan Silver:

Raphael, let me interrupt you for a second, because there’s a lesson that can be gained from Israel’s encounter with Hamas in Gaza that informs the analysis that you just gave. And I want to underscore that the old conception, the conception that had governed the Israeli security establishment up through October 6, attempted to assess the intentions of Israel’s adversaries.

Following the October 7 attacks, there has been a major shift toward instead emphasizing the capabilities of Israel’s adversaries, and making them the key facto in Israel’s decision making, rather than intentions. And that is why, even if one were to stop the rocket fire immediately, nevertheless the very fact that those capabilities remain would be unacceptable to Israel. That’s one of the things that seems to me that Israel has learned from Hamas.

Raphael BenLevi:

Absolutely. I think this is understood at the cabinet level, but in some ways even more importantly, it’s understood viscerally by the evacuated residents themselves, who are just not going to return under present circumstances. So long as the situation stays the way it is, we have essentially created a five-to-seven-kilometer security zone within Israel. And we have an internal refugee problem.

If this goes on long enough, the entire north will go into an economic tailspin, where those Israelis are going to look for other places to live. The effects will then spillover to the economies of the rest of the north, it will become a wasteland within Israel. Israel can’t allow that to happen. It’s almost unbelievable that we’ve allowed it to go on for more than six months, but we’re in the middle of fighting a very significant war in Gaza and we’re approaching the end of the main effort there.

Building on that, I would also say another part of the essay deals with what I see as the broader new konseptzia. The word konseptzia used to refer to the Yom Kippur War, and how Israel missed what Egypt and Syria were planning because it was locked into a certain conception of its enemies’ intentions. What I call the new konseptzia, the new strategic doctrine, has dominated since the 90s, and is based on the idea of strategic retrenchment. Previously, a major pillar of Israeli strategic doctrine involved taking the fight to enemy territory. This meant always being tactically aggressive. This is different than being strategically aggressive: Israel to the contrary wants peace and wants to avoid wars with its neighbors. But it always tried to be tactically aggressive, in the sense that sought to preempt its enemies and bring the fighting to their territory.

Since the 90s, we’ve seen three different areas that Israel essentially abandoned. It was as if it said, “You know what? We’re going to retrench. We’re going to abandon our forward positioning, and then we’re going to focus on defensive tactics, backed by high-tech security solutions: fences and cameras and also the Iron Dome.” Now, the flipside of the success of Iron Dome and Israel’s air defenses is that they allowed us to ignore what was actually being planned. And in some ways, it encouraged us to be disconnected from the intelligence on the ground—from collecting human intelligence and trying to understand what’s really happening on the other side of the fence. Instead, we just built a wall and hunkered down.

And of course, Hizballah in southern Lebanon is a huge example. It’s one of the main examples. That’s exactly what we did when we left southern Lebanon in the year 2000. What I lay out in the essay is how that happened and why exactly Israel did it. When analyzing that decision, you need to realize that there was a broad consensus in Israel that said, “We should find a way out of southern Lebanon while dealing with Hizballah.” That meant arriving at some sort of deal that either dismantled Hizballah, or that had an effective enforcement mechanism for pushing Hizballah away from the border and remove the threat. What wound up happening was very different: a unilateral withdrawal that essentially abandoned the entire area and allowed Hizballah to move up to Israel’s borders and then build its arms and its missile arsenal from what used to be a few thousand missiles and a force using guerrilla tactics to what we have today, which is 150,000 missiles, many precision-guided, and ground forces that are well-trained and well-prepared to invade Israeli territory.

Jonathan Silver:

Raphael, in that context, can you give us some background about what has become of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701? That was something that would’ve been thought to buttress the Israeli decision to retreat from those territories.

Raphael BenLevi:

The decision to withdraw was taken unilaterally by then-prime minister Ehud Barak prior in 2000, prior to the passing of 1701 in 2006. He did this for a number of reasons, which were opposed by the IDF and the security establishment. Here we need to be very clear. People don’t always remember that the IDF and the security establishment, and many others, foresaw what was going to happen in the wake of unilateral withdrawal. It was obvious that Hizballah was going to entrench itself close to the border and that withdrawal would also be a strategic loss for Israeli deterrence. And moreover it was clear that Hizballah would conclude that it had successfully used guerrilla tactics to force Israel out of the security zone. And this was a windfall, for Hizballah, a Shiite terror organization, was also the example that encouraged to Yasir Arafat and the PLO to launch the second intifada. So that’s one aspect of this.

Now, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 only happened after the Second Lebanon War in 2006. That was what resolved the war. That was six years after the withdrawal. After six years of absorbing rocket attacks, kidnappings, and hostage takings, Israel eventually undertook the Second Lebanon War. Of course, there was also Security Council Resolution 1559, if I remember the number correctly, that in 2004 required the dismantlement of Hizballah. Of course, no one was there to enforce that. The idea of 1701 is that the Lebanese military and UNIFIL (the UN International Force in Lebanon) are going to be the only military forces capable of acting in Southern Lebanon.

Since the resolution, Hizballah has used ways of making it look like it’s sort of pulling back for a period of time by essentially just changing its military uniforms for civilian clothes, and then remaining where it is, going underground, acting from within civilian territory. And 1701 was never implemented. And that’s, of course, very critical to understand. Israel’s diplomatic demand now would be the implementation of 1701. The problem is that no one can do that. No one can enforce it. UNIFIL is definitely not going to do it. Since UNIFIL was founded in 1979, it has proven itself utterly incapable of preventing terror organizations from establishing themselves in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese army is also either unwilling or unable to do that.

Jonathan Silver:

At the end of the essay, you actually out a number of additional options. I’d like, Raphael, if you can just explain how you see the trade-offs, the advantages and disadvantages for pursuing each course of action. Maybe let’s start with what reports suggest are behind the American-led effort to broker some kind of compromise?

Raphael BenLevi:

So, my first scenario would be a de-facto ceasefire. And that would be very bad, but what would be even worse is if a deal was reached along the lines of what the reported parameters of the deal currently be negotiated. What’s been said, or what’s been let out publicly, is that the deal that Amos Hochstein, the U.S. envoy to the area, is trying to promote would on the one hand entail a withdrawal of Hizballah up to some sort of distance from the border. At the most to the Litani River, but maybe a little bit less than that. That in itself would be great, again, if Hizballah would agree to it and if someone could even enforce it, which is questionable on both accounts.

On the other hand, the idea would be that Israel, in exchange for that, would have to give up territory on a number of places along the border that Hizballah, with no basis, claims as Lebanese territory. And this would be even worse. First, it’s essentially extortion. It’s not a diplomatic deal. Hizballah starts a war, shelling Israeli towns, and then says, “If you want us to stop, give us land that we have no real claim over.”

And not just that. The most contentious and important piece of these lands being claimed by Hizballah is what they call the Shebaa Farms, which are not really farmland. That’s really a misnomer. These are strategic territories on the slopes of the Mount Hermon, which overlook the entire region, both into Southern Lebanon and across and below into Israeli territory in the Hula Valley and the Galilee. So, Israel leaving those territories, allowing Hizballah to base itself there, would essentially just be putting Hizballah in a much a more advantageous position for the next step when it decided to invade the rest of Israel, or to continue firing rockets at its own discretion.

Now, why it would be even worse than a de-facto ceasefire? Because if Israel were to go along with such a deal, it would then have its hands tied, because now it would be bound by a deal worked out by its most important ally, the United States. And then even though Hizballah would certainly defy the deal by re-establishing itself in Southern Lebanon, whether in military garb or not, the deal would raise the price of any kind of Israeli action against it, diplomatically, by a significant amount. Whereas a de-facto ceasefire might be unacceptable for a certain amount of time, but it would also leave the door open to continue the fight and for Israel to do what it needs to do in another month or two, or whenever.

Jonathan Silver:

As you point out in the essay, it would amount to Israel’s acquiescence in giving up something which is very hard to walk back, giving up something which seems permanent, the acknowledgement that these territories are not Israel’s but Lebanese, in exchange for something very impermanent, something very, by definition, temporary, which is the temporary relocation of Hizballah forces. Let’s just talk about the trade-off of the final thing, which is what you recommend, which is Israel actually taking command of the tempo of this. Tell us what the trade-offs are there.

Raphael BenLevi:

I understood that probably what will save us from such a deal will be Nasrallah himself, who is on record as saying sometime in March, “It’ll be easier to move the waters of the Litani River up to the border with Israel than to move Hizballah forces back from the borders with Israel up to north of the Litani River.” It sounds like Hizballah probably wouldn’t even pretend to go along with such a deal in the first place.

If my conclusion is correct, that Israel must act, and it must act both to push Hizballah back physically, away from the border, and to degrade significantly—if not destroy—Hizballah’s missile capabilities and a large portion of its command structure and fighting forces. That would mean an air operation and a ground operation. But that leads to a new question: let’s say Israel does that. What then? How is Israel then to prevent Hizballah from re-arming and re-establishing itself within two, three, maybe years? That’s the real question.

And so that’s obviously a very difficult dilemma. I don’t say exactly how Israel should deal with it, although I do lay out what elements must be essential any solution, which is obviously very important. One of them would be an air element, and that means that we would have to degrade Hizballah’s capabilities, at the minimum, to the point where it could not then threaten to have a huge war and bomb all of Israel in response to any kind of Israeli action.

Of course, Israel’s been doing this in Syria and in Southern Syria, across the border from the Golan, in a campaign that we call the “War between the Wars,” where it acts militarily mainly with its air force, based on intelligence, to strike at all kinds of capabilities and missiles that are being transferred to Hizballah.

It hasn’t acted in that way in Southern Lebanon itself. Why? Because if it does, then that will likely lead to Hizballah using its missiles against Israel. So Israel has only acted in areas where it could prevent that from happening. But what the end result of whatever campaign Israel decides to embark on needs to be that it has degraded Hizballah to such an extent that it can’t even threaten [further major attacks]. And therefore, Israel would be able to maintain its degraded state of affairs without the threat of retaliation, or significant retaliation.

But that would really not be enough, because if Israel commits to a ground invasion and then pulls back entirely to the border and then has no ground forces, either there or able to cross the border, then it’s going to return exactly to the situation post-2000, after the withdrawal.

And of course, there’s still a price for doing that, and we would lose intelligence capabilities that come with being on the ground and having some sort of capabilities on the ground. And we would lose if Hizballah would over time establish itself again within civilian villages. So what I’m saying is that we also have to have some sort of ground element.

Now, that might be a temporary but open-ended reestablishment of a security zone, until the point where we could significantly be sure that there would be, again, a diplomatic or enforceable deal that would push Hizballah long-term away from the border, hopefully even dismantle it.

If we could do that, essentially, we’d be back to what I was saying would be the more reasonable position in the late 90s: meaning we don’t want to stay there for good, but we can’t leave because if we did, that would essentially abandon the area to Hizballah. I don’t exactly know what that would look like, and it might be something similar to Area A [of the West Bank], where Israel isn’t there all the time, but it can act freely, but that would definitely be a necessary element.

The final element that I put in, which is necessary, and which of course brings us to the events of [April 13], is that Israel needs to go to the source. Just trying to cut off Hizballah’s capabilities without also going to the source is essentially like trying to fix a leaky pipe or a leaky faucet by absorbing the water with a bunch of towels without trying to fix the faucet.

The faucet is of course the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that is who’s behind Hizballah’s capabilities, who funds Hizballah, and sends the capabilities over; it’s the source of the water from the leak. We can’t allow Iran to continue hiding behind its proxies and avoiding direct accountability. That’s Iran’s game, that’s what it wants us to do. But in the long term, we need to take the fight to the source, to make Iran pay the price for what it’s doing in southern Lebanon and for the threats that it poses to Israel through Hizballah.

Jonathan Silver:

Hanin, what do you make of Raphael’s analysis and his essay?

Hanin Ghaddar:

Thank you very much, Raphael. This was a fascinating outline of your essay and discussion. I agree with most of what he said. I think we are getting into a situation where we can only expect either the status quo of continued Israeli strikes on Hizballah to degrade its capabilities, or some kind of escalation that is short of a full-scale war, because this is not the time for it.

And I think he’s right about Resolution 1701 and the diplomatic efforts: that they would be great if certain components were guaranteed. Who is going to guarantee that Hizballah would withdraw from the border? This is a big question. UNSCR 1701 was not implemented because the Lebanese army and the UNIFIL were given this job of guaranteeing Hizballah’s anti-deployment mechanisms, but it’s obvious that the Lebanese army and UNIFIL do not have this kind of mission, or are incapable of doing that or do not want to do that. So these two are not really guarantees, and we still don’t know who can do that. No one is really there on the ground to do that. This is one issue.

Issue two: withdrawing from the border to a few kilometers north of Litani is one thing, but we also know that Hizballah has long-range, precision-guided missiles that can be fired from anywhere in Lebanon. So, it is not enough just to get Hizballah away from the border. It might be psychologically enough for the residents of norther Israel to go back home if they feel that Hizballah is not at the border, but for general security reasons, it’s not enough because their missiles can be launched from Baalbek, Beqaa, or anywhere in Lebanon. And we’ve seen that the Israelis have been hitting a lot of these warehouses where a number of these missiles are, but I don’t think that their precision-missile  facilities, like factories and depots, have been hit.

And this is the main question I have. At the end of the day, Hizballah hasn’t really launched a war against Israel. Hizballah hasn’t used its assets. Hizballah has been sending messages, trying to restrain itself as much as it can. Until very recently, the last two days, it has done a little bit more, but still, it hasn’t really used its assets. It hasn’t used the precision-guided missiles the way it could, and long-range missiles are still kept in stock.

Hizballah will use these assets if there is an all-out war. And not just the missiles, but also the Radwan force, which has not really participated in this war, and other assets, as well as the full support of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the other militias. And I think this is why Iran considers Hizballah its insurance policy. Hizballah’s mission since 2006 has shifted completely; now basically its mission is to protect Iran. It’s not to liberate or resist or whatever.

Iran will activate Hizballah in a new war if Iran itself or its major nuclear facilities or program are hit, if they feel they are under serious attack. I’m not saying that if Israel attacks Iran, definitely Hizballah will be activated, but if Israel attacks Iran and Iran feels a serious threat, then yes, Hizballah will be activated. This is their job.

So my questions to you, Raphael, and this based on your research and your fascinating findings, when will Hizballah escalate, seriously escalate, and go for war? Do you think Israel will respond? And if they respond to Iran’s retaliation, will they respond in a way that would threaten Iran seriously, allowing Hizballah to activate, or will the response also be calibrated and calculated in the sense that Iran will not be forced to unleash Hizballah and Israel? This is one.

And two, without an agreement, which obviously is not going to happen so far. Maybe a temporary agreement might work, but a serious resolution of the security problem is not going to work. And as long as Israel sees the security along the border as a separate issue from internal Lebanese affairs, I don’t think it’s going to work. And I think this is a shortcoming on the Israeli side, really. Israel always sees its own security as border security.

When the border is secure because 1701 or deterrence or whatever, it doesn’t matter what happens in Lebanon, and it doesn’t matter what happens on the other border. But as a Lebanese, I see it differently. I see that this border cannot be secure if the other side of the border is not secure. This border cannot be secure if state institutions cannot control the decision of war and peace. So this is something that also I would like you to comment on.

And finally, how can the U.S. help guarantee Israel’s long-term deterrence, and help to establish serious long-term deterrence against Hizballah? So far, everyone in the US, maybe before the elections, is making sure that Israel doesn’t start another war with Iran, with Hizballah, etc. But eventually, something’s going to give. The diplomatic effort is great, but something’s going to give. So, what do you think the U.S. can do to help establish this deterrence that’s beyond these temporary measures?

Raphael BenLevi:

Okay, great. A lot of good questions there. First of all, I would like to just respond. So that you said that Hizballah hasn’t really started the war, started a war. So I agree with you in essence in your bottom line, but as far as what we call war, I think it’s very important that firing one rocket is an act of war. Hizballah has started a war. In some ways, we’ve become so accustomed to what we call a drizzle, a tiftuf. “Oh, it’s just a few rockets, so that’s normal.”

But I was just speaking recently with someone about an event that happened at the beginning of Russia-Ukraine War, where a rocket was fired or fell across the border in Poland and everyone stopped and said, “Wait a minute, what happened? Who fired the rocket?” And Ukraine said, “No, the Russians did it.” And the Russians said, “No, the Ukrainians did it.” And then I realized, “Yes, this is the appropriate response to one rocket being fired across the border.”

So obviously, in a perspective of what constitutes a casus belli, it’s definitely a war. But what you mean is, and here I definitely agree with you, is that Hizballah has not made a decision to go all out with all of its capabilities to try and have the big war, the biggest war it can. It’s essentially aiming for a war of attrition below some sort of level of escalation and limited to some sort of geographical area of a few kilometers within each side of the border.

Hanin Ghaddar:

Sure. That’s what I meant.

Raphael BenLevi:

Yes. I just think it’s important because people tend to lose all proportion when they’re talking about whatis a war, and this is something that I think should change as a result of the current war. So, given that, what should Israel do or what do I think Israel would do to respond with Iran and how is that going to interplay with the threat of Hizballah?

First, I think the reason that Hizballah has not gone all out, is because it wasn’t planning to do that right now. As you said, the entire reason for Hizballah’s existence is to threaten Israel for the Iranians’ interests. Definitely not for Lebanese interests, not even for its own interests. It’s there as a deterrent, to raise the cost of any Israeli action against Iran, and to be there if Israel were going to do something or if the Iranian regime were in significant trouble. It would then try to go all out and attack Israel.

So under two circumstances Hizballah will start an all-out war: if there’s a [risk of a] full-on war with Iran, Hizballah goal is to prevent it or to threaten [Israeli] retaliation, and if Iran feels that the messiah is coming and this is the time where they’re going to realize their vision of destroying Israel. Hamas made a successful attack. But as much as he applaud it, Nasrallah is not going to be managed by Yahya Sinwar. He’s not going to go to war because Sinwar goes to war. He goes to war on [the Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei’s calendar and not Hamas’s calendar.

On the other hand, it was a little bit embarrassing for Nasrallah because Hamas sort of took the vanguard of showing that it can invade Israel and carry out massacres. So he found a middle ground, saying, “Well, we’re going to participate and we’re going to shoot rockets.” And of course, this is much more than they’ve done since the Second Lebanon War. But they’re going to limit it to try and keep it below what would lead Israel to invade and cause significant damage. This is why it would be a great win for Hizballah if we ended it right here, because this is not the time that it wants the big war. And that is all the more reason why Israel needs to do it right now.

Now, as far as the timing: who goes first? This has been a question since the beginning of the war, since October 8th. I myself published an article saying that we should take the fight directly to Iran. Now, I made a certain argument, there are also good counterarguments to that. The real question is whom should Israel strike first? Both [Iran and Hizballah] require striking. There is an argument made to be made to go to the source first.

There’s another argument, which I think might be even more convincing, which is that Israel should cut off the tentacle first. Because if right now, as a result of the Iran’s attack on Israel last weekend, Israel went for a dramatic, significant retaliation, then it would automatically know the full extent of Hizballah’s wrath. Or it could use this opportunity to respond first against Hizballah, which again, is something it needs to be doing anyway.

But again, Hizballah shouldn’t be understood as an entirely separate organization from Iran. Hizballah is the most ideologically aligned and the strongest Iranian proxy, and the most important, because it also trains the other ones—the Houthis and other militias in Syria. So, the very idea of Israel taking a significant action against Hizballah is itself going to damage Iran significantly, and its entire regional posture of promoting its terror proxies in any area lacking a government that can prevent it.

So I think likely it might be the most advantageous first to take off the Hizballah deterrence threat from the table and then [Israel will] be even more free to take the fight directly to Iran. The only disadvantage of that is the issue of legitimacy and optics. If the retaliation comes closely after the original attack, people will have some sort of understanding of its rationale. BUt strategically, there’s no reason for that, and we should be able to wait a month or two before retaliating against Iran, if that makes more sense, because of the situation that we’re in and the way Hizballah threatens us directly.

Now, what about internal Lebanese institutions and how would we work that in and how would we address that? That is actually something that I address in the article. Historically, most of the time, most of Israel’s previous actions in southern Lebanon were undertaken within that understanding, meaning that we need to act in order to influence Lebanese institutions, either by remaking them or helping support the Christian factions in the First Lebanon War, or in the 1990s using IDF strikes in order to pressure the Lebanese government to kick out the Syrians. And so I go into a lot of detail there about how that was built into the strategy.

Today, it seems to me that that’s actually one of the unfortunate conclusions of the previous rounds, that Israel trying to manipulate Lebanese politics when it uses its military is doomed to failure. Meaning today, as much as I don’t like it, Lebanon is essentially a failed state. And if it’s not a failed state, it’s a Hizballah-dominated state. But, from the state institutions that are not Hizballah-dominated, I would very much like to see the Lebanon of the 20th century, of democracy and multiethnic and multicultural, multi-religious democracy. This was Israel’s great hope in the 50s and 60s, and it worked very closely with Christian and other elements.

Unfortunately, every time it tried to manipulate them and support one against the other, it wasn’t been successful. So I’m not sure if Israel is capable of solving Lebanon’s politics. What I do know, is that Israel taking a direct and significant action to dismantle Hizballah would be one step [toward helping Lebanon rebuild]; in some ways, it’s Lebanon’s only hope. Currently, as you know better than I do, Hizballah is on the trajectory toward turning Lebanon into another Islamic Republic, in that it is dominant politically, it’s dominant militarily, and that’s the trajectory that it’s on.

If another country, like Israel, would then take a significant action again to dismantle Hizballah’s command structure and its military wing and essentially decimate it, that might be something that could tip the scales, that then with broader international interventions, could maybe give hope to the Lebanese factions. I see you’re smiling, so I want to stop here and get your reaction to what I’m saying. Perhaps you think I’m out to lunch.

Jonathan Silver:

Actually, I want to use this opportunity to recommend something that Hanin wrote, I don’t know, almost fifteen years ago maybe. A very poignant, wonderful short piece explaining why her grandmother loves Hizballah, which is an explanation of the role that dignity plays in domestic politics. It’s a very smart piece, you should look it up. I want to bring Rich into this conversation because we’re running short on time. Rich, we’ve not talked about Iran that much. Nobody follows U.S.-Iran politics as closely as you. Tell us what you make of the essay and the argument.

Richard Goldberg:

I thought the essay was framed very well, and I think we sort of got down towards the end to the dilemma and the choice in front of Israel very well. I was just there in the north in February and see things pretty much the same way Raphael has laid out here. Therea are two things on my mind right now, given the events of the last few weeks, that I would love to sort of pull a little bit more on.

One piece that we’ve just been talking about here, and you hit it again in response to one of Hanin’s questions, is we’ve had this idea, myself included, that Hizballah is the response force for Iran. And I think we’ve said that here: if you’re going to attack the Iranian nuclear program in the future, Israel will have to worry about that northern front. That’s going to be Iran’s main deterrent force to make you pay a price for that. Therefore, you might need to remove Hizballah, either at the same time, or by preparing for what you’re going to do in Iran by preempting on the northern border first.

The weekend’s events, [the April 13 Iranian attack on Israel] feel like a paradigm shift to me, because particularly if there is no harsh response militarily to Iran right now, to make the calculation that the supreme leader made over the weekend, a miscalculation, we’ve now normalized the new baseline for Iranian action against Israel: lobbing ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones from Iran.

Iran can now potentially retaliate against Israel in the event of a conflict between Israel and Hizballah, which I think is something we hadn’t really thought about. We’ve crossed the Rubicon now. It’s now normal. You can just launch 120 ballistic missiles on a Saturday night from Iran, and that’s just a Saturday night in the Middle East now.

I’d love to hear how you two think about that in terms of the Israeli thinking of not having to worry about that threat, intertwined with this comment and question as well. Because of what we saw Saturday night, because of the U.S.’s importance and the role it plays in security guarantees for Israel, support for Israel, we’ve already had the nagging question. You touch on it a little bit at the end of the piece, but I think it’s a much bigger part of the equation here. Obviously Israel needs the U.S. for resupply of key munitions that have been depleted in Gaza that you would need for such a large-scale ground operation in Lebanon, for the political support at the Security Council and elsewhere, the potential added military assets in the region to deter Iranian aggression—Iranian aggression that we now should expect will come with ballistic-missile-defense support from the United States, provided we’re able to get the United States to buy into this.

And I don’t see it happening right now. The president’s trying to stop the war in Gaza. He’s trying to stop Israel from responding to 120 ballistic missiles being fired at its country. He’s already called the prime minister, reportedly, the day after October 7th and said, “Don’t you think about escalating in the north. We’ve seen no change in that posture.” How do you see that dynamic now, that the threat from Iran escalating in response and the U.S. buy-in lacking, constraining the option set even further?

Raphael BenLevi:

Yes. You raise a very important aspect to the entire war, which is the idea that the US, is on the one hand, very supportive, provides Israel with munitions, resupply. It’s still nominally supportive of the bottom line of Israel taking Rafah, and there’s some sort of lip service that gets paid to the fact that there’s a problem in the north that needs to be dealt with.

On the other hand, the entire posture of the Biden administration in the region is essentially that their number-one priority is to avoid a war, avoid a war with Iran, to avoid a wide-scale war. And this is a very difficult situation. This is a very problematic position as far as I’m concerned. I’m the head of the Churchill Program, so I like to quote Winston Churchill, who famously said, “You were given a choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, you shall have war.”

If your highest priority, your number-one priority, whatever you do, is to avoid war, then that’s most likely to encourage actors like Iran to escalate and start a war. On the other hand, if the United States was willing to threaten Iran with escalation, I am pretty confident that Iran would know how to interpret that properly and act accordingly. And that means that we wouldn’t have to have a regional war even after Israeli retaliation against Iran.

But what Iran needs, in order to understand that, is a threat that a stronger power, which is the United States, is willing to escalate. And every time that that’s happened historically, the Iranian regime, even the revolutionary regime that’s nominally committed to all of the things that we know it’s committed to, understands the fundamental balance of power.

A few examples just to throw out there: in 1988, the Iranians hit an American vessel in the Persian Gulf and the Reagan administration said, “We’re not having that.” The U.S. launched a few days of bombing. They took out a number of Iranian vessels; they threatened to go further. And then they said, “Okay, we retaliated. We’ll stop if you stop.” And the Iranians said, “Yeah, let’s cut it off here.”

Again, in 2003, when the U.S. had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and at first was still threatening to move on to Tehran, this was when Iran put a pause to its nuclear program. It stopped the development of the military dimensions of its military program, having seen what just happened to both countries alongside it. When it came to developing weapons of mass destruction, instead of going forcefully, it took a step back.

In 2006, when Israel was bombing Lebanon and Hizballah in the Lebanon War, Iran’s message to Hizballah was, “Let’s try and wrap this up. We don’t want to get involved.” After the U.S. assassination of the Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem] Soleimani in 2019, Iran took a few weeks and then responded in a way that was calculated to be under the threshold of escalation. The same thing happened in 2017 when the U.S. pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal: Iran said it was going to respond to in some sort of significant way; it again did not respond in any significant military way.

On the other hand, every time we project to Iran that, “You have a free hand because we don’t want to escalate,” then in understands that, and then it seeks to escalate. And that’s the fruition of Biden’s strategy over the past six months. The culmination of that strategy happened Saturday night, where Iran decided for the first time in unprecedented way, that it can now fire hundreds of drones and missiles directly at Israel. And it sort of is banking on what Biden played into his hands by telling Israel, “No, no, no, we don’t want you to respond in a way that could escalate,” because like you said, his bottom line, his overarching goal, is still to prevent a wider war.

Now, what does Israel do considering that? Because if we can’t convince Biden otherwise, then we have to shape a policy based on that fact. Now, I believe that the dynamic is currently that—and this has always been the case—it’s very difficult for U.S. president to say, “Israel, go for it. Do what you need to do. And even if that means escalating and having a war now.” Of course, having a war now would by far be preferable to having a war in some sort of future scenario where Iran already crossed the nuclear threshold. It would be much preferable to have even a wider war right now than in that future scenario, I guarantee.

But it’s very difficult sometimes in Washington. This whole area feels very far away and it’s easy to think, “Well, why do we want to have a war? Why can’t we just keep that problem under wraps and just wrap it up now so we can go about our business?” And historically, it’s really in Israel’s court to decide when its back is up against the wall and this is an existential issue that it just has to act. And even if it acts, and that means having a conversation with the U.S. saying, “We appreciate you, we love you, you’re our allies. But we think this is in your interest too, and we have no choice but to act, and so we’re going to act.”

And when it does that, the result seems to be that America acquiesces, and understands: “Well, if that’s really the situation, then I guess we’re better off supporting Israel and acting and hoping that they win than trying to punish it for doing that.” And of course, Israel needs to know that when it does something like that, it needs to do it in a way that takes into account American interests, and avoids doing things that undermine American interests. Yet when Israel really believes something is an existential issue, it has to act.

I think the situation in the north is one of those situations, as is a response to Iran. But again, if we were in the position right now where Israel was ready to have an all-out strike on the Iranian nuclear program, that would be great. But I still think that if we can, in the near term, take out Hizballah and then go and do that, that would still be a significant win. That would also be a big win for the United States. It would also be a big win for the entire region, because every one of the camps in the Middle East who are not aligned with Shiite Islamism or Sunni Islamists are rooting for Israel to have a big win.

They don’t always say it, but in the Middle East, you don’t count what governments say, you look at what governments do. And what the Saudis and the other Gulf states, as well as Jordan and Egypt want, is for Israel to deal decisively. First of all with the Sunni Islamists in Gaza who threaten us, and then also threaten them internally, and also deal with Hizballah and the other proxies of Iran, who are the biggest security threats to all of those countries in the region. So this would be a win, not just for Israel, but for the region and for the United States. And I expect my government to understand that and to do it, even though it’s under tremendous constraints and tremendous pressure from the United States not to go all the way.

Jonathan Silver:

We’re going to come to questions from our community of subscribers in just a moment, but I want to get a little sharper answer, Raphael, to a question that Rich posed, which is that we have grown accustomed to thinking of Hizballah as the second-strike capability for Iran, but what if we have to imagine the reverse? What if now Iran is able to shoot directly at Israel and Iran sort of functions as the second-strike capability for Hizballah?

Raphael BenLevi:

I don’t know if that’s entirely new idea. In my discussions with many people over the past few months, they said it precisely that. If the question is, “What would you expect if Israel goes and initiates the larger conflict with Hizballah?” And one of the answers is that we would probably face some sort of direct Iranian response in the form of drones or missiles as well. The question is really to what extent that would happen, not whether it would really happen.

Of course, Iran’s willingness to get involved depends on its assessment of the price it will pay for doing so. I think if there is a clear message to Iran of “If you get involved, then you’re going to be involved in a much larger way,” then it will be a lot more likely that Iran will say, “You know what? We’re going to sit this one out. It’s Hizballah’s problem. Hizballah might take damage, and that’s a huge loss for Iran, but it’s better to let our arm get cut off, then to let the regime be threatened by a larger war directly with Iran.”

And real damage would be the result of a real war with Iran and it would understand that. If that were the choice, I believe Iran would choose to let go of Hizballah or let it be involved minimally and then live to see another day and continue the fight with Israel in the long-term. Of course, there are no guarantees of that, but that’s not a reason not to act. And if we have to prepare ourselves for an all-out war with Hizballah and Iran at the same time, then that’s what we need to prepare ourselves for.

Jonathan Silver:

So let’s talk about practically what that means. I’m drawing now on some of the questions from our subscribers. Dennis Carve, Allen and Clyde Friedman all are asking questions about the particular armaments, the particular rockets, the particular defensive capabilities that Israel has. So this is really a question about weapons.

Can you just say something, Raphael, first of all, about the number of weapons Hizballah now has arrayed against Israel? Second of all, what problems Israel is going to encounter if the number of weapons faced against it overmatch its own defensive capabilities? And finally, can you say something about the Iron Beam laser system that is in development and say something about how close it is to being ready to be a part of such a defensive effort?

Raphael BenLevi:

As far as what’s been fired at Israel since the beginning of the war, we’re talking about some thousands of rockets and artillery, a few a day and sometimes tens a day. And overall, as far as what the arsenal includes, people have quoted for a number of year the figure of 150,000 [rocket]s, but we need to go to a higher resolution than that. That represents more or less the number of regular rockets, rockets that are not precision. And they’re limited, for the most part, in their range to Israel’s northern quarter, meaning Haifa and north of Haifa, maybe reaching as far as Hadera in some cases. That’s the region that would face much greater devastation in the event of a war, because that would involve tens of thousands of indiscriminate rockets that would be fired on Israel within the first hours of a conflict.

Alongside that are the longer-range and higher-precision missiles, of which may number somewhere in the thousands or even a few tens of thousands, but for sure there are a lot fewer of them. And those could reach almost anywhere in the country. On the other hand, because they’re limited and they’re precise, Hizballah would most likely aim those at strategic targets in Israel, like airports and army bases and all of that, and less at random neighborhoods—both because they can and because it would be more the worthwhile for them to try and attack an air base. An attack like that could cause real damage to Israel’s air force, which would be very significant player in what we’re doing there.

The assessment is that Israel would face vast destruction, mostly across the north. Israel would also then concentrate its defensive assets around those strategic sites that Hizballah would likely be targeting. So that might, in some way, raise the level of defense, meaning obviously in the north the defenses would be overwhelmed, but it’s most likely Israel would also prioritize the most high-value targets, and that might minimize damage, and that might also minimize damage of the rest of the country. So sometimes I wonder if the doomsday scenarios people imply when they say, “Imagine Hizballah unleashing all of its missiles and all of its rockets” are perhaps a little bit worse than what reality might prove to be.

Another very important aspect here is how the war starts. If Israel takes the initiative and initiates some sort of surprise attack, where it opens the war with the first few hours by taking out the majority of the precision long-range missiles, that would be very significant change in how the rest of the war would play out and how exposed to damage the rest of Israel would be. So there’s a huge importance to the issue of surprise here. And that also goes to the issue of diplomacy, of how much Israel is expected to hold back and lay out the diplomacy and then take its time, or even absorb some sort of action in order to have justification to then, “react.” Obviously, the situation already justifies significant action, and Israel should be free to act when it sees fit in order to take the initiative and surprise.

Jonathan Silver:

But such an action would also require reliable intelligence, so that you actually know the location of the precision rockets that you need to dismantle in order for a surprise attack to be worth it.

Raphael BenLevi:

I can’t say exactly how much intelligence we have, although I do think that we have a lot more intelligence in southern Lebanon than we had in most other places, because that was what Israel has been imagining its primary area of warfare to be in the next war, and the exercises that IDF does are all focused there. Israel imagined it would have a major war with southern Lebanon and would have to contain Gaza. And the way it turns out, it’s the opposite, but I think we might have a good sense of Hizballah’s deployments.

Jonathan Silver:

And can you say anything about the Iron Beam system?

Raphael BenLevi:

I know it’s still under development. At the beginning of the war, there was some sort of report that it was tested and that the test went well. Beyond that, I don’t know what the situation is at the moment. It is an example of the joint programs, the joint US and Israel funded, where Israel develops it. I think that’s a good model for American-Israeli defense cooperation. That’s a better model that we need to move towards. That’s a broader question though.

Other than that, I’m not sure when it would actually practically come into play, although it would be a big deal because it would change the economics of missile defense drastically. Right now, the economics of missile defense is one of its major disadvantages because we have to spend so much money in order to shoot cheap rockets out of the air. And if turning on the laser, I assume, would cost less than an Iron Dome missile, then I think that would be a big difference.

Jonathan Silver:

Rich, do you know anything about Iron Beam and its development?

Richard Goldberg:

There was one test run right at the beginning of the war, as Raphael was talking about. It was a little bit more hype than real. It’s not ready for prime time next year.

Maybe it’ll be ready next year.

Jonathan Silver:

I would like to add to that. The last system is still affected by the weather. And there’s a problem involving the intensification of the beam itself, something called the blossoming effect, where the light from the laser spreads and disperses. So yes, as I understand, it is still under development.

Raphael BenLevi:

I would like to add something. Even if we were to make it successful technologically, it would still have the strategic disadvantage in that it is a defensively oriented system. And you cannot address Iran’s broader strategy in the Middle East by defensive tactics alone. Iran can’t just think, “Oh, we shot the drones and they shot them down.” Iran needs to pay a price for its actions and it’s aggression. That’s what deterrence really means.

Jonathan Silver:

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re coming toward the end of our time. Let me just get a few more questions from our subscribers. Philip Clapper asks, “Raphael, what would be the offensive response of Israel if Hizballah initiated an all-out war?”

Raphael BenLevi:

Well, again, I don’t see it initiating on its own right now, unless Iran made forced its hand. Israel needs to initiate. Bu what would be Israel’s response in that scenario?

If Hizballah escalated significantly, then we would just have all the legitimacy that we need. Right now, in the past few months, it’s been a point of contention between Israel and the Biden administration, a question of, “What are we going to do and when are we going to do it?” And we’ve been kicking the can down the road because we’re focused on Gaza. But if Hizballah were to do bring us to all-out war, in some ways it would be doing us a great favor by solving that issue between us and the administration, and we would have full legitimacy then to invade southern Lebanon and use our air force.

Although I would point out, sort of what I was saying in response to Hanin’s suggestion, that one of the lessons I think learned from the past experiences in Lebanon, meaning the Second Lebanon War and actions before that, is that Israel, instead of absolutely focusing on destroying Hizballah capabilities and command structure, focused also on making Southern Lebanon pay a price, in terms of its civilian infrastructure, out of the idea that doing so would make the Lebanese state pay a price. And then Lebanon would then have an interest to rein in Hizballah and do what it needs to do.

In the First Lebanon War, and in the 1990 operations, Israel tried to force the Lebanese government to pressure Syria to rein in Hizballah. And I think we should understand that that’s not the winning strategy. We need primarily to target Hizballah—Hizballah, Hizballah, Hizballah. And that will also entail destroying civilian infrastructure and all kinds of things, because Hizballah is integrated in the civilian structure, but it looks very different than what happened during the Second Lebanon War.

And there would be a ground element and there would be an air element to it, and they would both be very significant. And beyond that, until what point? Is this going all the way to Beirut? I don’t know if that’s necessary according to what I’m laying out. A bombing in the Dahieh neighborhood, [a heavily Shiite, Hizballah-dominated suburb of Beirut] definitel. But invading all the way to Beirut, I don’t know if that’s necessary. The most important thing would to uproot Hizballah wherever it is and uproot its capabilities, and decimate its ability to function as a political and military organization.

Jonathan Silver:

The final question is a smart question from Eric Reuter, and it has to do with the arms supply from Iran to Hizballah. “Hizballah has vast armaments at this moment, but it is not an endless supply of armaments. And if one were to focus on cutting that supply, wouldn’t that be the first step to being able to contain the Hizballah threat?”

Raphael BenLevi:

That’s kind of what we’ve been doing in the War between the Wars for eight years or so. And it’s been nominally successful in the sense that it’s limited Hizballah’s ability to arm itself. On the other hand, Hizballah has increase its arsenals tenfold and more since the withdrawal in 2000s. So I don’t think that would be the priority at the beginning. Where it is right now is unacceptable. Also, over the past eight years or so, since it got involved in the Syrian Civil War, Hizballah has turned itself into a ground army as well, and developed its capabilities and experience in actually invading and holding territory. So we are facing an entirely different Hizballah than we remember from the 80s and the 90s, and even from the 2006 war. So, cutting off its ability to rearm, again, that’s part of the day after strategy, depending on how well we decimated it in the actual war. And so that might be necessary, but that’s not really the priority right now. Right now, we need to deal with what it has already accumulated.

Jonathan Silver:

Hanin Ghaddar, Rich Goldberg, thank you for being our external examiners. “Is War with Lebanon Imminent?” was published on April 1st in Mosaic. Raphael BenLevi, thank you for being our teacher and the author of this essay.