What If Israel’s Real War Hasn’t Yet Started? https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2024/01/what-if-israels-real-war-hasnt-yet-started/

January 31, 2024 | Matti Friedman
About the author: Matti Friedman is the author of a memoir about the Israeli war in Lebanon, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War (2016). His latest book is Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (2019).

For years, Israeli security experts have warned of the dangers of Hizballah, which has deeply embedded its forces in southern Lebanon, subordinated the country’s government, and developed sophisticated military capabilities aimed at attacking the Jewish state. Now much of the country agrees that it is better to go to war soon than to wait for the Iranian proxy army to strike first. Matti Friedman reports from northern Israel, which has been emptied of most of its civilian population:

When I spoke to one veteran military observer of the northern front, he used the term 10X—by which he meant that to imagine an all-out war with Hizballah, take the current war with Hamas and multiply it by ten.

Like many Israelis his age, Friedman faced off against Hizballah when he served in the security zone the IDF had established in Lebanon in the 1980s:

In May 2000, facing rising casualties and a protest movement led by the mothers of Israeli soldiers, the army abandoned the security zone overnight and pulled back to the border. This seemed to me, and to most Israelis, like the right thing to do, but it didn’t end the war. Hizballah only grew stronger. We let it happen, as we did with Hamas in Gaza, because the alternatives seemed worse. An all-out war would have been so costly, both in lives and in the kind of disproportionate international frenzy that follows any Israeli operation, that we decided to live alongside Hizballah and to tell ourselves we’d contained them.

Fast-forward to early 2024, and Israel has a security zone again—except now it’s inside Israel.

I’ve been speaking to reserve soldiers, some still in uniform, others newly discharged from the alleys and booby traps of Gaza City. They know what it means if we go to war in Lebanon. But they don’t say “if,” they say “when,” and expect to be there in the spring.

Read more on Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-israel-hezbollah-war