The Biden administration is reportedly seeking to encourage “land swaps” between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah. The White House is hoping to prevent a wider war between the Jewish state and the U.S.-designated terrorist group. But history is clear: Concessions don’t deter Islamist terrorists. They embolden them.
Amos Hochstein, a Biden administration envoy, visited Israel this week. He was there to avert a greater war between Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed proxy that de facto rules Lebanon, and Israel. Hezbollah has been launching rockets into Israel, resulting in several deaths. Israel has been taking targeted action against Hezbollah officers and forces, most recently with a remarkable attack on Hezbollah’s pager network on Tuesday. But Hezbollah is the problem here.
Several United Nations Security Council resolutions, notably 1559 and 1701, call for Hezbollah to be disarmed. Yet, both the Lebanese armed forces and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon have been unable (or unwilling) to enforce these provisions. Israel has been warning that it will step up where the U.N. and Lebanese armed forces won’t. The need for action is clear.
An estimated 100,000 residents of Israel’s north have already had to evacuate from areas near the Lebanese border. Many of the displaced are living in temporary residences. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has warned that “time is running out to reach a diplomatic solution in southern Lebanon. Israel will act militarily to return the evacuated citizens in its northern border area if no diplomatic solution is reached.”
The problem is that a wider conflict would be cataclysmic. Hezbollah has more than 150,000 missiles, many of them precision-guided. Even worse, the terrorist group has made extensive use of human shields, embedding fighters, launching pads, and weapons depots in civilian communities. Accordingly, a war would result in a tremendous loss of human life. It is fitting and proper that the United States and others would seek to prevent that from happening. But the plan reportedly being considered is doomed to fail.
The Jerusalem Post, citing a report by al Jarida, a Kuwaiti newspaper, reported that “American officials recently proposed, in a virtual, meeting with their Israeli counterparts, a land swap between Lebanon and Israel as part of a comprehensive agreement to end the border conflicts and resolve the land dispute between the two countries.” Such a proposal rests on flawed assumptions. Both the U.S. and Israel have tried variations of this strategy — only to meet with ignominious failure.
In late 2022, Hochstein pressured Israel and Lebanon to sign a U.S.-brokered agreement that established a maritime boundary and exclusive economic zones and regulated rights to gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Both before and during negotiations, Hezbollah threatened Israel in what one scholar called a “textbook case of coercive diplomacy.”
The White House, the State Department, and others hailed the arrangement, saying that the deal would prevent war. Yet, less than two years later, Hezbollah began attacking Israel, following the massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas and other Gaza-based Iranian proxies.
In 2000, the Israel Defense Forces unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon. Ehud Barak, who was the Israeli prime minister at the time, asserted that the withdrawal would make the Jewish state safer. Similarly, the Clinton administration and the State Department cheered the withdrawal, saying that it would lead to peace and a cessation of hostilities. But in the intervening years, Hezbollah’s power and influence has only grown. The reason is simple.
Hezbollah is not a Lebanese national movement fighting for a Lebanon free of foreign influence, as its propaganda claims. Rather, the terrorist group is itself a foreign influence, the tip of the spear of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hezbollah itself has acknowledged that Tehran is its chief benefactor. Hezbollah are but loyal foot soldiers, working to carry out the messianic vision of Iran’s ruling theocrats, a vision in which the Middle East itself is dominated by Iran, free of any American influence, and Israel is destroyed. Top line: Hezbollah doesn’t want a parcel of land controlled by Israel — it wants Israel’s destruction.
Slivers of land only whet Hezbollah’s (and Iran’s) appetite. What the West takes as part of a “back and forth” negotiation, Islamists see as weakness: a sign that their opponents lack will. Tehran and its proxies often talk of the “Zionist entity” as an aberration whose existence is both regrettable and temporary. To them, ceding land proves it. “Israel,” Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah frequently says, “is weaker than a spider web.” In other words: easily swept away.
A proposal for a land swap is indicative of a broader failure in U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
For decades, American policymakers of both parties have treated the various Islamist terrorists at war with Israel as if they are rational actors who can be induced to make peace with the Jewish state if offered land, foreign aid packages, or some other incentive. For their part, the terrorists have been happy to pocket the concessions, ask for more, and then break the promises that they made. In fact, this summarizes much of the so-called “peace process” that followed in the Cold War’s wake. In 2005, for example, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Hamas rode what was seen as Israeli weakness to an electoral victory, eventually seizing power.
In Lebanon, Gaza, and swaths of the West Bank, Israel has offered “land for peace” but hasn’t received any peace in return. No fewer than seven wars have taken place since Israel left southern Lebanon.
However, there is another strategy that the White House can take to avert war. It’s extremely simple: peace through strength. The U.S. can make it crystal clear that it stands forthrightly with Israel. By standing foursquare with its ally, both in word and deed, Washington can work to restore the deterrence that it has so obviously lost in the region.
Instead of false equivalency and pretending that both Israel and Hezbollah are equally at fault, the U.S. can take aim at those enabling the Hezbollah war machine. The U.S. gives copious aid to both the Lebanese armed forces and the UNIFIL. It should use this assistance as leverage, ensuring that both fulfill their mandates and enforce existing U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Washington should also enforce the sanctions already in place against the Islamic Republic, including the oil industry that is its lifeblood. The U.S. should be emptying Iran’s coffers, not filling them by failing to enforce existing sanctions and delisting Iranian proxies like the Houthis from the list of foreign terrorist organizations. Hezbollah may be Iran’s “ace in the hole,” but the Iranian threat itself is an octopus — there is no separating Hezbollah from its master.
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Regrettably, these are steps that only Washington can make — Israel does not have America’s economic or diplomatic might. And the U.S. seems loath to make them.
But repeating past mistakes will not bring peace. History is clear: It will only bring war. Should the U.S. continue to double down on failed policies, it will bring about the very war that it is seeking to avoid.
The writer is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.