Lebanon Arrests a Hizballah Critic for the Crime of Talking to Israelis

In December, a Lebanese military tribunal sentenced Kinda el-Khatib to three years of forced labor, ostensibly because she helped to arrange for an Israeli journalist to interview a dual Lebanese-American citizen living in Oregon. Joseph Braude tells her story:

Kinda el-Khatib, a twenty-three-year-old . . . from the northern province of Akkar, was arrested on June 20, 2020, by the internal-security arm of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). Sixteen masked men barged into her home and took her away to be interrogated at length, deprived of food for two days, denied counsel and contact with her family, and brought to a court-martial—though she is a civilian—without being apprised of the charges against her.

When finally informed of the charges in court—“violating the law boycotting Israel” and “communicating with enemy agents”—Khatib was astounded.

What was [her] real offense? She had been politically active on social media, accusing Hizballah and its allies of responsibility for most of Lebanon’s governmental dysfunction, corruption, and suborning of its armed forces. Earlier run-ins as her popularity grew enabled her detractors to get permission to tap her phone. She was not intimidated.

America, Braude explains, is not powerless in this situation:

As the U.S. government provides substantial military assistance to the LAF, the Biden administration, U.S. lawmakers, and the American human-rights community should mobilize to demand Khatib’s immediate and unconditional release. The local Lebanese protests on her behalf may have saved her from worse abuse in prison, but it will take more substantial, international pressure to show the LAF that it will incur a price for upholding the bogus sentence.

[Meanwhile], several Arab states are now escalating retribution against their own citizens who connect with Israelis for any reason, in an attempt to counter recent diplomatic breakthroughs between Israel and four Arab states. An ensemble of U.S. actions should be marshaled to confront them.

Read more at American Purpose

More about: Hizballah, Israel-Arab relations, Lebanon, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF