Liberman: Occupy southern Lebanon until Hezbollah not a threat

Israel should occupy southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is no longer a threat, Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman said Monday.

Speaking at the Reichman University International Institute for Counter-Terrorism conference on world terrorism, he blasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his failure to heed warnings of a potential Hamas invasion, including from Liberman himself. But he also significantly supported the invasion of Lebanon and then some.

According to Liberman, a former defense minister and foreign minister, any diplomatic settlement that does not involve an actual disarming of Hezbollah’s main ways to threaten Israel will be a temporary fix and lead Jerusalem back to being stuck with the same Lebanese terrorism problem at some later date.

At the same time, he said Israel should make it clear that it has no intention of establishing a single settlement in Lebanon, and that it is ready to leave immediately once Hezbollah is no longer a threat.

Anticipating criticism that the creation of such a security zone in southern Lebanon would be a replay of what many consider the failed security-zone strategy from 1982-2000, Liberman said just because the strategy failed before does not mean it might not work if employed correctly in new and changed circumstances.

Israel must not back down

Over the past 18 years, he said, Israel lost some 440 soldiers, and while this number seemed enormous during that era, in the post-October 7 era, there are worse scenarios.

The IDF could significantly eliminate such losses if it completely cut off southern Lebanon from the rest of the country, with virtually no exceptions, Liberman said. This would make it harder for Hezbollah to use civilian cover to attack Israeli positions, he said.

Another necessity would be operating three divisions in southern Lebanon to fully staff and cover the area, Liberman said.

Prior to October 7, stationing such a large force on the border would have been unthinkable, but this is a different era, he said. Three IDF divisions are now in southern Lebanon.

Israel must not back down in the current direct fight with Iran, Liberman said.

Restraining Israel’s attack on Iran in exchange for help from a coalition of allies was well-meaning but wrong strategically, he said.

Israel can defeat Iran on its own, Liberman says

Ultimately, the US and many other allies are focused on China, Russia, Ukraine, and other issues besides Iran, Liberman said.

Israel can defeat Iran on its own, it can also destroy its nuclear-weapons program, and it should do so, he said.

Moreover, Israel’s natural regional allies, the moderate Sunni countries, would support Israel once they saw it deal with Tehran in a more definitive way, Liberman said.

Later at the same Reichman University conference, Robert Wells, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, said: “Iran is the puppet master” of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis.

“No one country can fight the terrorist threat alone,” he said. “It is as persistent and complex as ever. The brutality of October 7 cannot be overstated, and the attacks changed the trajectory of the terrorist threat.”

“The US shares in this loss, with its citizens also among the murdered and the kidnapped,” Wells said. “It’s attacks like these that remind us of the importance of maintaining our steadfast partnership… The terrorist organizations in the region understand that their success hinges on the support of the Iranian regime. Together, we can meet the challenges before us.”

In this new threat era, Iran has mounted plots to attack top US officials on American soil, he said.

Wells, who is in charge of thousands of agents, analysts, and professional staff combating the most complex US national security threats on a daily basis, said: “The current threat to US national security is at an all-time high. This assessment is shared around the world” by other countries feeling a heightened sense of threats.

He warned of not only standard terrorist organizational threats but increased “racial, anti-government and anti-authority violent extremists.”

There was a need to be on guard for “China and Russia’s increasingly brazen attempts to disrupt the democratic process,” he said.

With all of these simultaneous threats, Wells said he “finds strength in the resilience of [American-Israeli] families” he recently visited with and who survived the October 7 attacks or whose family members were killed or taken hostage.

Earlier at the conference, Daphne Richemond-Barak, a Reichman University professor and author, warned that despite the IDF overcoming Hamas, most asymmetric adversaries around the world would consider the Gaza terrorist group’s tunnel strategy as a big success. The tunnel strategy significantly slowed down the IDF’s advances and made it difficult to locate hostages, she said.

Richemond-Barak cautioned that other terrorist groups were likely to replicate the massive tunnel network strategy, which would be a large expansion even beyond groups such as ISIS that used tunnels somewhat in the past.

She also said terrorist groups were likely to pursue the strategy of taking hostages into tunnels more in the future given the difficulty that even Israel’s special forces have had rescuing them underground as opposed to aboveground.

Moreover, Richemond-Barak said a major source of the IDF being blindsided was that it had mainly focused on cross-border attack tunnels since 2014, but it had not invested nearly as much energy, resources, and grand strategy in addressing the tunnels’ impact on warfare within Gaza.