Back, in the first days after the Hamas attacks on October 7, the Israeli government made a decision not to go to war with Hezbollah. There were a number of considerations on the table at the time and some people were pushing for Hezbollah to be Israel’s target.
The Lebanese terrorist group almost immediately started attacking Israel, and intelligence information later discovered exposed that Hamas and Hezbollah had coordinated their attacks.
More important though was the argument that before taking on Hamas, Israel should first go after its stronger enemy.
For a couple of days there was a true debate about the issue, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was said to have leaned heavily on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to point the IDF northwards, to Lebanon.
In the end, a combination of American pressure, the entry of Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot into the war cabinet and the burning need in Israel to strike back at Hamas for the massacre of 1,200 people and the abduction of 250 more helped make the decision. Israel stood down from doing something in Lebanon and sent the IDF into Gaza.
Hezbollah increases attacks
The last eight months have been a constant rerun of that decision. While Hezbollah has significantly increased its attacks against northern Israel in the last week – IDF reservist Refael Kauders was killed and 10 others wounded near Hurfeish on Wednesday as fires burned practically all week throughout the North – in reality, this has been going on for eight months. Most of the country may have been focused on the South and the IDF operation in Gaza, but the war in the North has been unrelenting.
It has seen the evacuation of close to 100,000 people and the transformation of a large and strategic part of Israel into a buffer zone, a violation of one of the basic principles of Israel’s national defense doctrine as it was set by David Ben-Gurion back in the 1950s. Then, understanding that Israel does not have any depth and cannot afford to fight wars in its own territory, Ben-Gurion set as one of the military’s guiding principles the need to always take the fight to the enemy. This was evident on October 7 when, just moments after crossing into Israel, Hamas terrorists were already inside homes and bases.
To avoid this from happening in the North, Israel evacuated its people. But the truth has to be said: we ceded territory to our enemy. This is something never done before in Israeli history. While the country has established security zones in the past, they were always created in enemy territory: there was the security zone in Lebanon from 1982 until 2000 and, of course, the Israeli control over the Gaza Strip from 1967 until the disengagement in 2005.
The harsh reality is that while the government evacuated these residents to protect them, what it also did was give Hezbollah a massive win, one that it has continued to capitalize on since beginning its daily barrages of rockets, suicide drones, and anti-tank missiles against Israel.
Beyond protecting its citizens, Israel had another motivation for moving the people out of the North – it wanted to give Hezbollah targets that it could strike without needing to have to forcefully strike back. In other words, if people remained in the homes, Israel would not be able to tolerate the Hezbollah attacks and would have had to respond harsher and earlier. Now, after the Hurfeish strike, it almost definitely will need to escalate its own response.
The question of what to do with the North is a mix of politics, security, and diplomacy. On the one hand, the world does not have an appetite for another Israeli war, this time against a terrorist group/country that the US and France are particularly invested in.
Additionally, Netanyahu is not exactly angling for another war, one that would be even more devastating for the Israeli home front than what we have seen in Gaza. He is finally climbing back up in the polls and a new war, with even more casualties, could change that trajectory.
In addition, and probably most important, the Israeli people are tired. They have been at war for eight months. The thought of another, harder, and longer conflict is tough to digest.
One of the reasons Israel has held back until now has been due to the prevailing assessment that the moment the war is over in Gaza, Hezbollah will also stop its attacks, and the people of the North will be able to return to their homes (obviously after reconstruction and with the deployment of significant IDF forces along the border).
For this reason, Israel has held back from doing something that would escalate the situation to an all-out war – attacking Hezbollah assets in Beirut as an example – especially now when it is possible that a deal might be reached with Hamas to end the war and bring back some, and hopefully all, of the hostages.
All of these explanations make sense but they miss the real problem – they are all part of an October 6 mindset. They are arguments for why Israel can contain the threat from Lebanon and not have to deal with it right now.
Some of them make sense but what they ignore is that the threat from Hezbollah is not going to disappear. It will grow in power, will become even stronger, and when war does eventually come, it will be even more devastating for Israel.
Does this mean that war is inevitable? To some extent, it might be. October 7 taught Israelis that containment does not work. We want to believe it does, up until the enemy smashes through the border, breaks into our homes and rapes, murders, and kidnaps our people.
Israel’s options are not good. While the government has done everything it can to avoid a wider war with Hezbollah, this might no longer be possible. But it cannot be blamed for trying a bit longer. Breaking out of the October 6 mindset is not that simple.
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On Wednesday, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich gave an interview to one of the leading radio shows in Israel. “The [October 7] massacre has nothing to do with me,” he told Kalman Liebskind and Asaf Liberman at KAN. “It’s an intelligence-operational failure and those responsible needed to go home a long time ago.”
That’s what Smotrich, a security cabinet member and senior Netanyahu coalition member, said.
People were naturally shocked. They wondered how a top member of the government could so easily wash his hands of responsibility for the greatest massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust.
While they were right, they were also wrong to be surprised. Israel has long had an accountability problem. The prime minister refuses to talk about personal liability regarding October 7, the IDF chief of staff says he takes responsibility but makes no sign that he’s leaving anytime soon and instead recently made a round of appointments in the General Staff showing that people can be replaced but just not himself.
Besides for one general who stepped down so far, who has left their job eight months into the war?
The answer is no one.
But shocked? Surprised? Don’t be. The writing has long been on the wall, and you don’t need to go back so far in time. In 2021, 45 people were killed at the Mount Meron in the worst civilian disaster in the country’s history. There were 45 men and boys who were trampled to death despite repeated warnings that the mountain was not safe.
What happened? Nothing! The police chief is the same police chief, the police minister got promoted and is now the Knesset speaker, and the PM is, of course, the same PM.
So you are outraged that Smotrich thinks he’s not responsible for October 7? We should all be outraged with the culture here that encourages zero accountability.
Until that changes, nothing will change.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.