Israel’s Lebanon Strategy Is Self-Defeating
Key takeaways
- There is a paradoxical claim at the heart of Israeli policy toward Lebanon, one that has become so routine that it goes almost unnoticed.
- Having helped engineer the conditions for Lebanese failure, Israel contends that the Lebanese cannot handle it themselves.
- That this is a self-defeating strategy does not mean Israel’s underlying strategic objective is illegitimate.
There is a paradoxical claim at the heart of Israeli policy toward Lebanon, one that has become so routine that it goes almost unnoticed. Israel insists, correctly, that the Lebanese state must disarm Hezbollah and assert sovereign control over its own territory. It then does everything within its considerable power to ensure that the Lebanese state cannot do so—impeding U.S. military assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), attacking the infrastructure of governance, and hobbling the one international force mandated to support Lebanese authority in the south.
Having helped engineer the conditions for Lebanese failure, Israel contends that the Lebanese cannot handle it themselves. Israel must handle it for them. It is a policy that simultaneously demands a formidable outcome and incapacitates the only plausible instrument for achieving it.
There is a paradoxical claim at the heart of Israeli policy toward Lebanon, one that has become so routine that it goes almost unnoticed. Israel insists, correctly, that the Lebanese state must disarm Hezbollah and assert sovereign control over its own territory. It then does everything within its considerable power to ensure that the Lebanese state cannot do so—impeding U.S. military assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), attacking the infrastructure of governance, and hobbling the one international force mandated to support Lebanese authority in the south.