A letter to Lebanon: Could Northern Arrows free Lebanon from Hezbollah? - opinion

To our Lebanese neighbors, Israeli troops finally entered southern Lebanon following some 12,500 projectiles – missiles, rockets, and drones – launched at the Jewish state from your country since last October. About 60,000 Israelis from the North have been displaced and dozens killed, including 12 Druze kids just enjoying soccer on a Saturday afternoon.

This incursion followed a two-week campaign humiliating Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization that ruined your state and made your lives miserable. Let me be clear: Israelis are fighting most reluctantly. We tried avoiding this conflagration for 18 years – and have nothing against the Lebanese people. But ask yourselves: What would you do in our shoes? 

In that spirit of friendship, as a historian, I propose renaming Israel’s northern clashes. The IDF codenamed the 1982 war “Operation Peace for Galilee”; it became known as “The Lebanon War.” That made the operation in 2006 “The Second Lebanon War,” and this, alas, “The Third Lebanon War.”

Instead, 1982’s conflict should be “The War with the PLO’s State within a State” or just “The PLO War,” to be catchy. The 2006 conflict should be “The First Hezbollah War,” which Hezbollah began by murdering three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two reservists. That makes this conflict “The Second Hezbollah War,” or most accurately, “The First Iranian War.” 

Technically, these were “military operations” because war means violent conflict between two states. That helps explain our sympathy for you. In 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organization dominated southern Lebanon, brutalizing you, and undermining Lebanese stability. I need not tell you how many Lebanese suffered when the Palestinians took over and devastated parts of your homeland. Subsequently, the Hezbollah cancer spread so deep in your country that it’s made Lebanese sovereignty a joke. 

'We're not at war with you. We're at war with Hezbollah'

That’s why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps telling the Lebanese people, as he said at the UN, “We’re not at war with you. We’re at war with Hezbollah, which has hijacked your country and threatens to destroy ours.” And that’s why I hope that if Israel wins decisively, the international community backs you up boldly and creatively, empowering new Lebanese leaders to restore your country’s sovereignty, dignity, and prosperity. 

The international community can finally justify itself here. Instead of yapping “ceasefire, ceasefire” whenever Israel defends itself, the French and Americans should use their deep ties in Lebanon to muscle out the terrorists and gangsters draining your country. With moral clarity and courage worldwide, most Lebanese could soon be thanking us for liberating you from Hezbollah’s grip. 

This Beirut Breakthrough could be the formula for a Tehran Turnaround, too. Israel is poised to counterattack Iran. Even though I, as an American historian, think America should be taking the initiative to show “you don’t mess with America or its allies,” maybe America and the world can follow-up effectively.

The mullahs know they’re weak. Since the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, they expanded their influence via proxies while trying to keep conflict from Iranian soil. If Israel humiliates them, the international community should stir internal Iranian dissidents to try to collapse the regime from within.

Admittedly, while hoping for peace everywhere, I couldn’t write a similar letter to my Palestinian neighbors – nor could most Israelis. We know that hundreds of Gazans also rampaged on October 7, following the better-trained Hamas terrorists, including Palestinians who had worked on the kibbutzim they pillaged.

We have long seen Palestinians delightedly distribute candy whenever Palestinian terrorists murder Israeli children, women, and men. We read the polls showing the high percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, the disputed territories, and worldwide who approved of October 7’s sadism. And we hear the Palestinians’ blood-curdling cry justifying the mass murder of Jews on campus in downtown districts: “Globalize the Intifada!” and “From the River to the Sea!”

Like your parents and grandparents, older Israelis once called Lebanon “the Switzerland of the Middle East” and Beirut “the Paris of the Middle East.” Lebanon never loomed large in Israeli demonology. In the mid-1970s, most would have bet on Israel making peace with Lebanon long before it made peace with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco – or negotiated with Saudi Arabia.

Tragically, first, the PLO, then Hezbollah, trashed your country. Even after the Second Lebanon War, er, the First Hezbollah War, Hezbollah treated the international community as contemptuously as it treated the Lebanese people. In 2006, a UN Security Council Resolution required Hezbollah to redeploy away from Israel’s border. Instead, those terrorists spent 18 years fortifying themselves along the border – and under it, in tunnels – while amassing over 150,000 rockets, all purchased to kill Israelis.

In the American TV series The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, a crime boss, lets an old friend, Davey, who owns a prosperous sporting goods store, amass a serious gambling debt. Mobsters quickly overrun Davey’s business, stealing what they can and using this once-legitimate business as a front for nefarious schemes.

With his business folding, Davey asks Tony, “Why did you let me do it?” Tony’s reply laces his folksiness with menace: “Well, I knew you had this business here, Davey. It’s in my nature. The frog and the scorpion ya know. This is how a guy like me makes a living; this is my bread and butter!”

Similarly, Hezbollah terrorists Sopranoed your country, hiding behind Lebanon’s legitimacy and its parliamentary system, to wreak havoc. It’s in their nature, too. That’s why we need your help explaining to the world that the first step in our shared road to liberation from these psychopaths begins with the international community guaranteeing a sweeping Hezbollah – and Iranian – defeat. It’s for our sake, certainly. But for your sake, too.

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, 'To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream', was published recently.