Speculation on another war between Hezbollah and Israel has been bubbling away since the end of the last encounter in 2006, but it has intensified of late with many predicting a renewed conflict could be in the offing this winter or early spring.
Israel’s recent interception of the Francop cargo vessel in the Mediterranean and the discovery of 500 tons of Iran-supplied weapons and ammunition on board, allegedly destined for Hezbollah, underlines the intensity of military preparations on both sides and possibly provides Israel with the “smoking gun” to execute a swift and destructive campaign.
The good news is that neither side appears to want another round at the present time. Hezbollah’s leadership does not hide the fact that the group is re-arming. But the leadership is aware that its Shiite constituents, not to mention the rest of the country, are in no mood for more military adventures. Israel, too, has been making preparations for another war, which includes retraining its ground forces, the introduction of new weapons and defense systems and devising a new strategy for dealing with Hezbollah. The new strategy, however, is intended principally as a means of deterrence, to prevent a war breaking out in the first place. It is based on the concept of punishing, rather than defeating, the enemy. Israeli strategists have accepted that Hezbollah cannot be defeated on the battlefield and that less ambitious goals need to be set. A year ago, General Gadi Eisenkot, the head of the Israeli army’s Northern Command, coined the phrase “Dahieh doctrine” to describe the use of “disproportionate force” upon any village from which rockets are fired into Israel — in other words to inflict the same level of destruction as experienced by Beirut’s southern suburbs (“the Dahieh”) in 2006.
The doctrine has been further refined since then, most notably by Giora Eiland, a former national security advisor when Ariel Sharon was prime minister. Eiland advocates treating Lebanon, rather than just Hezbollah, as the enemy, turning the next war into a state vs. state affair rather than state vs. non-state actor. The justification articulated by Eiland and others is that, first, the Lebanese government includes members of Hezbollah and second, it is complicit in Hezbollah’s military build-up because it has not prevented armaments from being smuggled into Lebanon. The advantage to Israel would be a far broader range of targets in the event of a war. The intention would be to launch a swift and devastating offensive, mainly waged using air power, while deploying ground forces on select missions to suppress Hezbollah’s cross-border rocket fire. There would be no mass invasion with armored columns racing up the coastal highway and into the Bekaa Valley. Instead, it would be more streamlined and focused.
Israel’s political and military echelons are reportedly in agreement on the need to define Lebanon as the enemy, suggesting a stronger degree of coordination and strategic unanimity between the two than was demonstrated in 2006.
The strength of Israel’s new strategy toward Hezbollah rests in its deterrence factor. The threat of massive punishment will have the effect of dismaying the Lebanese and jangling the nerves of the government, while dampening Hezbollah’s enthusiasm for recreating the finely-calibrated war of attrition that existed along the Blue Line between 2000 and 2006. Hezbollah has been engrossed in a debilitating political struggle since the end of the 2006 war, which, along with the necessity of building up its military assets, has ensured that the Lebanon-Israel border has witnessed its longest period of calm in four decades.
However, Israel’s strategy of punishment could unravel very quickly if circumstances were to arise that lead to another war. It takes two to fight a war and no one can say that Hezbollah will stop fighting just because Israel considers that it has accomplished its goal of punishment. Hezbollah’s rockets are likely to strike deeper into Israel than in 2006, possibly hitting Tel Aviv. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has already articulated a Dahieh-for-Tel Aviv strategy in which Israel’s largest city will be struck if the southern suburbs are bombed again. That means that a larger tract of territory in Israel will be paralyzed than in 2006, placing additional domestic pressure on the Israeli government to conclude the war as quickly as possible. Furthermore, it is widely believed that Hezbollah will take the war into Israel next time, dispatching commando units across the frontier to cause havoc in border settlements, mining roads, blowing up bridges and attacking military bases.
The last thing Israel wants is to become bogged down in a prolonged conflict with Hezbollah, as was the case in 2006. International tolerance for Israel’s military adventures is wearing thin, even if many Western nations feel there was some justification for Israel’s attacks on Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008. The Goldstone report on the Gaza war has set an ominous precedent for Israel. Israel’s “Dahieh doctrine,” if implemented and prolonged because of Hezbollah’s refusal to yield, will beg another Goldstone style investigation, further eroding the Jewish State’s international standing. Thus, the only way Israel can be assured of winning the next war is if its doctrine of punishment prevails and prevents another war from starting in the first place.
Nicholas Blanford is the Beirut-based correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and The Times of London
