Dimi Reider
+972 Magazine / April 16, 2026
Israel’s push for buffer zones and ‘natural borders’ suggests the emerging ceasefire is unlikely to halt its ongoing ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon.
As of the time of writing, it remains to be seen whether the ceasefire announced between Lebanon and Israel will hold. Despite the undeniable relief in many quarters, from Beirut to Tel Aviv to Washington, it still feels more like a forced, reluctant sop from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump than a genuine turning point in Israel’s stated campaign to occupy the south of the country.
It is not much of a sop, either: What Trump needs from Netanyahu is for him to stop bombing Lebanon, to align the mismatched expectations of Iran and the United States under their fragile ceasefire. So far, Netanyahu has managed to initiate talks without halting the bombing, and even these talks are an anomaly in the two countries’ shared history.
Given Israel’s propensity to undermine ceasefires and negotiations — whether it is a party to them or not — and its track record of assassinating negotiators mid-process, it seems likely that the Israel-Lebanon dynamic will revert to type before long. This is especially true given that Lebanon is Netanyahu’s nearest and most convenient arena for blowing up Tehran–Washington negotiations and resuming an all-out war before American forces can withdraw.
There is, of course, a specific Israeli-Lebanese history. No other Israeli border has been as consistently restive for so long, and no outside actor has inflicted devastation on Lebanon as routinely or as dramatically as Israel: from cross-border raids in the first decades of statehood, to full-scale invasion in 1982, to the current war — the most lethal conflict in Lebanon since the devastating civil war of 1975-1990.
Lebanon has also been the unwilling setting for a more definitive strain of Israeli wars — those against the Palestinian national movement — and the site of the last major public paroxysm of Israeli conscience, when hundreds of thousands protested the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which were facilitated and enabled by the Israeli army.
There are several reasons why Israel is ignoring opportunities for a peace agreement with the Lebanese government (the current half-hearted engagement, conducted under fire, cannot yet be taken seriously) and instead prefers to bomb, invade, exploit proxies, and, as of this year, ethnically cleanse and openly promise to annex the country.
The two lesser reasons are those cited by both Israel’s supporters and its critics: David Ben-Gurion’s stale security doctrine, which holds that Israel’s natural border is the Litani River, and its stunted sibling, the buffer zone doctrine, now being deployed in both Lebanon and Gaza.
Ben-Gurion first proposed the Litani as the “natural border” of a future Jewish state back in 1918, arguing that the river marked a demographic and economic boundary between the Galilee and Mount Lebanon proper. Over the years, a particularly expansionist faction has adopted his demarcation of southern Lebanon as merely the “northern Galilee,” and the steep-banked river has acquired a new military aura as a more defensible border than the current one. Proponents of annexation and settlement in southern Lebanon invoke ideological, territorial, and military arguments.
At the same time, another Israeli military doctrine — the buffer zone — has acquired a fresh lease on life as a putative endgame of the current war. Its logic is to push the front line away from Israel’s internationally recognized borders, especially from civilian communities; in contrast to a demilitarized zone, a buffer zone presumes freedom of operation for the Israeli military.
A pretext for ethnic cleansing?
Unlike expanding Israeli sovereignty to the Litani, the buffer zone idea has been attempted before in Lebanon, during Israel’s 18-year occupation of the country from 1982 to 2000. It proved a resounding failure.
Hezbollah rockets were launched from within the buffer zone into Israeli communities even more frequently than before the occupation, while Israeli soldiers operating in southern Lebanon became constant targets. After hundreds of casualties and amid mass protests at home, the Israeli army withdrew unilaterally. Now both approaches are being proposed again, with the added claim that because Hezbollah relied on support from the civilian population, those civilians must be expelled.
Wildly misreading the lived experience of the heterogenous and interwoven Lebanese society, Israel is reportedly planning to expel only Shia residents, warning Sunni and Christian residents not to harbour their neighbours — a chilling instruction on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Morality aside, there is no reason to assume either doctrine has become more workable in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. A river may serve as an obstacle for infantry, mechanized units, and heavy armour; it might even impede the movement of heavy artillery (though Israel is indeed the only actor utilizing artillery in this particular theater at the moment). But today, from Ukraine to Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the bulk of warfare takes place in the air. Drones, rockets, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles can easily traverse rivers and proposed buffer zones alike, retaining momentum even as ground operations are minimal or deadlocked.
This should be obvious from Israel’s experience with Iranian missiles alone — fired from thousands of kilometers away — but Hezbollah has also launched rockets hundreds of kilometers into Israeli territory. That means the group can move two, three, or four times beyond the Litani and still strike Israeli communities at will.
Even if such a buffer zone were established, Israel would likely seek to retain “operational freedom” far beyond it, and it is only a matter of time before someone proposes pushing the demarcation line up, even deeper into Lebanon.
So why is Israel insisting on this antiquated plan, openly carrying out mass ethnic cleansing in its service? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the causality is, in fact, reversed. Just as in Gaza, where buffer zones serve as a pretext to corral residents of the already crowded enclave into 12 percent of its territory; just as in the West Bank, where “security areas” and “firing zones” have been used to disrupt Palestinian agriculture and push communities off the land, what we are seeing in Lebanon is buffer zones in service of ethnic cleansing, not the other way around.
While the loudly proclaimed endgame of annexation is especially salient for expansionist elements within Netanyahu’s coalition, the “liberal” opposition can’t help but roll over when “national security” is invoked. Some, like opposition leader Yair Lapid, have even promoted the depopulated buffer zone idea as though it were a moderate, halfway measure compared to open-ended expansionist wars.
As elsewhere, the Israeli right is more than willing to let moderates meet it halfway — then halfway again, and again — until the distinction between them all but disappears.
And there is another, deeper reason for the decades-long refusal to pursue a serious, equitable peace agreement with Lebanon. For Netanyahu and many other Israelis, diplomacy and compromise devalue any achievement that could have been secured by force alone, because they suggest that further compromises might follow. In Israel, there is a near-intoxication with hegemonic power, a belief that the sacrifices and losses incurred in pursuing objectives through force are preferable to the uneasy uncertainty that comes as a result of treating other regional actors as equals.
Finally, there is a more immediate incentive for continuing attacks in Lebanon. Whether through oversight or design, the United States initially failed to include Lebanon in the terms of its ceasefire with Iran (contradicting Netanyahu’s own framing of Lebanon as Iran’s forward operating base). This left Netanyahu with a wide opening to collapse the U.S.–Iran ceasefire before it can solidify into
This opening remains even as a ceasefire is announced also in Lebanon. Ceasefires are fragile, especially when one or more of the parties are compelled by external actors, and especially when it is unclear if Hezbollah is meant to be a party to the negotiations — however indirect — or a target.
Netanyahu wants the war to resume; he wants the United States to invade; and he wants state collapse in Iran. He appears to believe he is within reach of that outcome. If the United States withdraws from the war now, amid midterm pressures at home and a precarious political moment in Israel, he knows such an opportunity may not come again in his lifetime.
Dimi Reider is an Israeli journalist and a co-founder of +972 Magazine; he is currently a Senior Fellow at the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley
