Will incrementalism work in Lebanon?
Israel carried out an airstrike in Lebanon on Wednesday that eliminated “a senior commander in Hezbollah’s Radwan Forces, his deputy commander, and an additional terrorist operative in Lebanese territory,” the IDF said on Thursday. This is an important development because it came after rocket fire from Lebanon struck Safed and killed an IDF soldier and wounded eight other people.
However, the strike in Lebanon raises other important issues. First of all the IDF says that the man hit in the airstrike was “a commander in Hezbollah’s Radwan Forces, Ali Muhammad Aldbas,” who “was among those who directed the terrorist attack at the Megiddo junction in Israel in March 2023. He led, planned, and carried out terrorist activity toward the State of Israel, especially during this war.”
However, it is also interesting that he was only eliminated a year after this serious Hezbollah escalation. It’s important to understand that the Hezbollah escalation against Israel to redraw the red lines in the north, and alter the “equation” as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah calls it, did not begin on October 8. That is the date Hezbollah decided to back the Hamas attack on Israel that had occurred the day before. Hezbollah was likely encouraged to begin attacks by Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran then also keyed in the Houthis in Yemen and also militias in Iraq and Syria.
However, Hezbollah’s moving of the goalposts did not start on October 8, but had already begun to escalate in 2022 when it threatened war with Israel if Israel didn’t sign a maritime deal, brokered by the US, with Lebanon. Hezbollah used the lead-up to the 2022 elections in Israel to create threats and potential chaos. As such, Israel agreed to delineate the maritime border. This showed Hezbollah was controlling Lebanon’s foreign policy in southern Lebanon. Rather than withdrawing from the area as it was supposed to do after the 2006 war, it was now showing it controls
Lebanon and the borders of Lebanon.
In early 2023, Hezbollah increased its escalation. First of all it enabled the Megiddo operation. It also set up a tent in Mount Dov, an area it claims is “disputed.” Then it began to demand changes to the border near Ghajar, an Alawite village in northern Israel. This area had recently been opened to tourism. Hezbollah wanted it closed down and wanted to cause trouble. Then Hezbollah went further over Passover when two dozens rockets were fired at Israel, one of them landing
in Shlomi. Hezbollah had also threatened Israel’s gas platforms off the coast over the last several years.
Before October 7 there was a kind of sleep-walking policy in Israel, trying to downplay these threats, just like the Hamas threats were downplayed. Instead, Israel concentrated on Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, and a short flare-up in Gaza.
It’s important to understand this background because even though Israel closed accounts on the Megiddo affair, Hezbollah is the one that has continued to dictate the tempo of operations.
WHAT HAPPENED on February 14? Hezbollah appeared to shy away from taking credit for the attack on Safed. However, Al-Mayadeen media, which backs Hezbollah and is pro-Iran, sought to glorify the attack, claiming it was a precision attack that the Iron Dome failed to intercept. Later the same day media reported that the attack was carried out by unguided grad rockets. Is it plausible to assume that Hezbollah wasn’t behind it and a deadly attack just happened to occur like this?
It’s not clear, but what is clear is that Israel has preferred proportional responses to Hezbollah. There is a kind of Janus-faced policy here. On the one hand Israel’s leaders, including the Defense Minister and Chief of Staff, continue to warn Hezbollah and we’ve heard over the last month that Israel can do to Hezbollah what it did to Hamas, and that the likelihood of war in the north is higher than it was.
However, the current policy is incremental and has some aspects of the policy of “deterrence” which preceded the Hamas attack on October 7. That means Hezbollah is supposed to be deterred from escalation, even though it has already driven through all the red lines and chooses the time and place of attacks in the north.
This is not to say Hezbollah doesn’t take losses. It does. It has lost some 200 fighters. Meanwhile, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that Israel recently had an ”intense day” in the north. Israel has also stepped up its response, “but it’s one step out of ten.”
This leaves many questions. The deadly dance with Hezbollah has become a kind of dangerous chess game now. Each side prefers only to advance pawns a bit, but this is not a game when 80,000 Israelis have been evacuated from the north. The dance and chess game with Hezbollah is not taking place in a vacuum. Iran wants to unify various “arenas” against Israel and Iran has keyed Hezbollah in with limited attacks.
Even if there is an agreement with Hezbollah, it appears the incremental policy has now reached a new level. This means that even if there is an agreement, any new tensions would start from where they left off, which means more serious attacks by Hezbollah than in the past. Basically, what that means, is that while the Megiddo incident was considered very serious in March 2023 we are now in a new Middle East order largely defined by Iran, its proxies and partners.