Last week, the Israelis took measures in Lebanon that showed the possible direction of their objectives in the country. They ordered all inhabitants of southern Lebanon, south of the Litani River, to leave and move northwards. And on Thursday, residents were forced to flee Beirut’s southern suburbs, Hezbollah’s stronghold in the capital.
These dramatic developments are reminiscent of what the Israelis did in Gaza. There, they imposed major population movements to enhance their control over certain areas and create bargaining chips that could help Israel secure both military and political benefits. Yet with Hezbollah, the Israeli aims may be even more ambitious.
Hezbollah was always much more than a political-military group. It represented an autonomous society, with its own institutions, forming a para-state that functioned in parallel to a Lebanese state it both excluded and exploited. Hezbollah dominated a geographical space, the southern suburbs, that defined its separation, but which also organised and territorialised the Shiite community’s social and regional networks of relations.
By emptying the southern suburbs, the Israelis may have sought to uproot Hezbollah by breaking its links with this largely self-governed entity, fragmenting and dislocating the community that formed Hezbollah’s base, and denying it an environment in which to thrive. Beyond that, the move allows Israel to play with the demographic balance in the capital. What it does may determine when, by whom, even if, the suburbs will again be inhabited.
For example, if Israel levels the southern suburbs – its Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, claimed the area would soon look like Khan Younis in Gaza – this could be seen as a way of rupturing the Shiite presence in Beirut, therefore the political influence accompanying this. The weeks ahead will establish whether the Israelis actually plan something so radical.
Yet what other objectives would Israel like to achieve in Lebanon? For an answer, the situation in the country’s south may be more revealing. By evacuating the population south of the Litani, which includes the city of Tyre, the Israelis have created a free-fire zone that, for now, it will be able to take and hold. In this way, they will have the latitude to use it as leverage in shaping the aftermath of the border area, which will include political conditions.
By pushing most Lebanese out of the area south of the Litani, the Israelis are also indirectly putting themselves in a position to redefine the adjacent area north, between the Litani and the Awali River at Sidon’s northern entrance.
There has been much speculation about what the Israelis intend for the regions south of the Litani. The former US envoy to Lebanon, Tom Barrack, had proposed that the border area be turned into an economic zone that would reinforce Lebanese-Israeli economic interaction. This zone would provide an incentive for inhabitants of the south to co-operate with Israel and benefit from the prosperity the zone would allegedly produce.
However, assuming such a project is adopted, a more pertinent question is how this area would be managed, and how it might fit in with Israel’s security provisions. There have been suggestions that some form of council could oversee such an economic zone, one in which Israeli representatives would be present. The council would have the latitude to determine who could enter the border zone and who could not. In other words, Israel would have a final say over which Lebanese are permitted to access sovereign Lebanese territory.
If such a scheme sees the light of day, it is highly probable it would also determine the nature of security arrangements between the Litani and Awali. Using the logic that they have applied in Syria and today in Gaza, the Israelis would try to impose a buffer zone north of the economic zone, in which they would limit the quantity and types of weaponry entering, along the lines of the 1949 Armistice Agreement with Lebanon, but also the May 17, 1983 Lebanese-Israeli withdrawal agreement that was never implemented.
All this is meaningless, however, if Israel fails to disarm Hezbollah, which is why the Israeli focus today may be on finding a way to do so. This is hardly as simple as it sounds. As my colleague Yezid Sayigh recently wrote: “Israel cannot ensure the full disarmament of Hezbollah, or its political suppression, alone.” He’s right. Ultimately, Israel will need the collaboration of the Lebanese armed forces to collect the group’s weapons.
However, to reach such a stage, Israel will have to find a means of militarily debilitating Hezbollah, which is no easy task. One of the ways they might do so was highlighted late on Saturday night, and again on Sunday, when Israeli forces landed by helicopter near Nabi Chit in the Bekaa Valley, allegedly to secure the remains of Israeli pilot Ron Arad, shot down in 1986. While this was the official explanation, both operations may actually have been test runs for Israeli attacks in the near future against Hezbollah’s missile and drone production and storage sites, and other sites of strategic value.
Israel has a host of political, military and perhaps even demographical ambitions in Lebanon, but in the end the key question will remain whether it has the means to carry them out. However, too great a reliance on blunt instruments could backfire.
This could potentially lead to a situation similar to what happened after 1982, when Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and for a time dominated it completely. Yet the invasion provoked such chaos and inter-communal tensions, that by the end Israel had created a much greater problem than the Palestinian armed presence it had intervened to eliminate, namely arousing militancy within the Shiite community. Lebanon is a hard country that can derail the best-laid plans.
