The only safe way out of Israel’s current imbroglio in Lebanon is to offer a generous peace in which all sides perceive concrete benefits. Waiting for the ultimate victory before offering the peace is foolish. A big stick wielded without any carrots other than an end to the beating is short sighted policy.
Israel might claim “mission accomplished� and leave after destroying most of Hezbollah’s weaponry, but it will have lost because the fighters will use the lull to rearm.
Israel’s focus should be on peace, not on victory. Generosity is a valuable tool of war. It is unwise to insist on clear-cut surrender before using that tool.
Whatever Israel’s existential fears, it cannot win a peaceful life for its children without convincing the mothers of its enemies that it cares for their children as much as for its own. Bombs that destroy entire neighborhoods are not a good way of doing that.
The real strength of Hamas and Hezbollah lies in the safe havens provided by their communities. They will never be defeated until civilians in Palestine and Lebanon perceive Israel and America as reliable and generous friends. That would make the local militias irrelevant to their daily needs. Currently, they see militants as saviors untainted by the customary corruption.
There is a real risk that pulverizing the homes of hundreds of thousands of people across Lebanon will unite all civilians behind the Hezbollah instead of isolating it as a Shiite trouble maker. To prevent further humiliation at Israeli hands, angry civilians may bury the hatchet of centuries old rivalries among various religious factions.
This is feasible because Lebanon is no longer the patchwork of undemocratic power-sharing arrangements created by France to postpone the reckoning among local warlords. That reckoning caused the long civil war. Since it ended, the Lebanese have emerged as a better educated and more united people with a sense of nationhood.
Washington wants Lebanon to grow as a liberal rather than managed democracy with a well defined national identity. If that happens, Hezbollah will gain more political power because of its dense roots among a third of the population. Having tasted political power during the past decade, the Shiites are unlikely to accept their traditional position at the bottom of Lebanon’s gravy train. Shiites were long reviled in that Sunni Muslim part of the Middle East and were also the poorest. They will not easily abandon Hezbollah, which brought them human dignity and social services.
If Lebanon is a free nation not controlled by the US, Hezbollah could also dominate Lebanon’s national army because it contains the only soldiers with experience in resisting a modern invasion. It is already present in the top echelons of the current army.
These prospects are undesirable for Israel and the US without a genuine peace that promotes friendship rather than simply avoiding war.
The hard lesson of recent decades is that violent and hardened militias cannot be defeated militarily whether in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq or India. The visceral Islamist enemies of Israel and India (in Kashmir) proactively seek martyrdom so long as they can kill before dying. They see no difference between soldiers and civilians because they believe that all Jews, Christians and Hindus are their enemies, including Muslims who cooperate with such non-believers.
The only way to win against them is to make them irrelevant for the people who hide them in their homes. That requires making the carrots much bigger and the sticks much smaller.