Akbar Shahid Ahmed
Huffington Post / September 30, 2024
Fighting on the ground in Lebanon risks millions of lives, and officials tell HuffPost the White House is prepared to let it proceed.
Israel has told the U.S. it is planning ground operations inside Lebanon, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller told reporters on Monday.
Miller cast the Israeli incursion as short of an invasion, saying the U.S. believes it will be “limited” and focused on infrastructure belonging to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. But U.S. officials similarly believed Israel’s campaign in Gaza against the Palestinian militant group Hamas would be relatively constrained as they started funnelling support to it last year.
Further escalation inside Lebanon, regardless of scope, would endanger millions of lives and put the Middle East and the U.S. in an incredibly precarious situation. With no end in sight to the war that started on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants invaded Israel and Israel began pummelling the Palestinian territory of Gaza in response, a second major front would be open, risking a spiral of bloodshed that could implicate the U.S. in war crimes, expand into all-out regional conflict, and prove as hard to end through diplomacy as the devastating fighting in Gaza.
Despite the likelihood of further violence, one course of action from President Joe Biden is extremely unlikely, sources told HuffPost: an American veto on Israel’s actions.
Within Israel, there is still a debate over whether a full invasion makes strategic sense, analysts say. As the country’s chief military and diplomatic backer, the U.S. is the only party that could pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prioritize reaching a deal with Israel’s foe in Lebanon: the armed group Hezbollah, which was led by Hassan Nasrallah until Friday, when he was assassinated by Israel.
Yet Biden is currently not expected to use American leverage in that way. His reluctance to wield influence over Netanyahu to cease the war in Gaza has fuelled frustration globally and inside his administration; it is widely seen as a key reason a cease-fire there has not yet been reached.
“Everyone internally is just shocked at the across-the-board weakness” given U.S. sway over Israel, a career U.S. official working on Middle East policy told HuffPost. The official said Washington is permitting “a nihilistic regional murder spree.”
Some government staff “are just stunned and speechless about what we’ve become. Biden and his crew have taken the region and world to a dark place,” the official added.
Another U.S. official familiar with discussions about Lebanon told HuffPost they see the Israeli moves as “an invasion.”
Asked about the suggestion the ground operation will be “limited,” the second official responded: “It will be big. Everyone who says it’s going to be ‘limited’ is a white man who thinks a million dead brown people is ‘limited.’”
White House spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
One route for addressing Israel’s security concerns in Lebanon is to reach a compromise in which Hezbollah withdraws from the border areas between the two countries and an Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire takes hold. The Lebanese group’s heavily armed forces there have inspired fears of an Oct. 7-style assault, pushing tens of thousands of Israelis to flee the north of their country, and Hezbollah has lobbed rockets into Israel for nearly a year to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza, fuelling the increasingly intense Israeli response.
Amos Hochstein, a top Biden administration official, has tried for months to craft such an agreement but has been unsuccessful, in large part because U.S.-led diplomacy has failed to end the war in Gaza, which Hezbollah casts as its chief concern. The State Department’s Miller said the administration still seeks a bargain in Lebanon and believes military manoeuvres could make that more likely.
“There is a short window of opportunity for a cease-fire deal to be negotiated” over the Israel-Lebanon border but that will require “a heavy diplomatic lift by the U.S. president,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank.
“It is unlikely that we will see that materialize in the waning days of this administration. Moreover, if Israel were to decide on a ground invasion of and eventually a re-occupation of parts of south Lebanon, the potential for de-escalation and cessation of hostilities will dissipate,” Slim told HuffPost. Israel previously occupied parts of Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.
Simultaneously, some influential voices in the U.S. are promoting the idea of significant Israeli military escalation.
Having killed Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah commanders in recent weeks — in attacks using U.S.-provided weapons that killed more than 1,000 people and displaced up to 1 million — Israel has a chance to permanently reduce the threat it faces from the group and, by extension, its ally Iran, they say.
Some Biden administration staff see the current moment as presenting a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to weaken Hezbollah, per The New York Times.
Such thinking is being loudly promoted by some Republicans, demonstrating how hawkish views on U.S. foreign policy often transcend partisan lines, particularly when it comes to Israel.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Saturday issued a statement urging the Biden administration “to end its counter-productive calls for a cease-fire.”
“The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job,” Jared Kushner, who helped run Middle East policy during the Trump administration, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) the same day.
“Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north. It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end,” Kushner argued, saying an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah would help the Lebanese people broadly.
His comments reflected how the pro-escalation calculus largely discounts harm to civilians — even of Israelis killed on Oct. 7 — and the danger of inspiring further militancy.
Though Hezbollah has many critics in Lebanon, “the idea that much of the country is going to somehow thank and embrace Israel does not square with the grievances and anxieties in full display at present” amid the prospect of a Gaza-style invasion, Emile Hokayem, a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, wrote on X. Kim Ghattas, a Lebanon-based analyst, highlighted in a post how Israeli leaders in the 1980s saw “an opportunity to bring about a new regional order” by invading Lebanon and unintentionally unleashing “chaos” as backlash grew, including the rise of Hezbollah.
Some still believe Biden can achieve a settlement that averts a sweeping Israeli offensive.
“We’re very concerned about further escalation and still pushing for work towards a cease-fire. The big difference is those who think a cease-fire is still worth working for and those who do not,” a senior congressional aide told HuffPost.
Andrew Miller, a Biden aide who left the State Department over the summer, argued for American pressure on Israel and intensified diplomacy to calm tensions in both Gaza and Lebanon in a Foreign Affairs essay on Sunday.
“Every U.S. president since Lyndon Johnson, with the exceptions of Clinton and Donald Trump — that is, nine of the last 11 administrations — has threatened to withhold, or has actually withheld, weapons systems or other aid in order to influence Israeli policy,” he wrote. “The administration should use every tool at its disposal. The lives of Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Americans literally depend on it.”
Moves by the U.S. could bolster voices inside Israel who are seeking a settlement in Lebanon.
“Carried upon the ‘wave’ of operational successes, and what so far appears as a Hezbollah and Iran inability to react, many Israelis are almost euphoric. They feel vindicated, finally regaining a sense of national competence,” Eran Etzion, the former deputy chief of Israel’s National Security Council, told HuffPost. “However, cooler heads are advising against getting carried away, and for leveraging the current advantage into a diplomatic strategy designed to create a new set of agreements and a [United Nations Security Council] resolution.”
Still, even Netanyahu’s political opponents embrace the idea that Israel “has a lot more that it can do” in Lebanon, said Mairav Zonszein, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank.
Given “the fact that the U.S. really hasn’t put up any kind of pushback, I think Israel really feels like this is its moment to seize as much as it can and to take out as many targets as it can,” she continued. “The question is what exactly is it trying to achieve and how far it’s going to go, whether it’s going to try to use this for diplomacy or not — those are things that we don’t really know yet.”
Fear over Lebanon’s fate has grown throughout the course of the fighting in Gaza, and many officials and experts see the tensions in both regions as inextricably linked.
As Israel sought additional U.S. weapons following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and other militants from Gaza, U.S. officials last year told HuffPost they worried Israel was stockpiling American arms for eventual use in Lebanon.
Negotiations between Israel and Hamas are stalled. But both that Palestinian group and Hezbollah argue a deal for Gaza is possible and the key to stability.
“If the Americans put an end to their collusion in this madness and use enough pressure on their allies,” Netanyahu could agree to a cease-fire, argued Basem Naim, a senior Hamas leader.
Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the Senior Diplomatic Correspondent for HuffPost, based in Washington, D.C.
