Israel’s survival clashes with America’s Lebanon delusions

Eyal Ozen was a 54-year-old farmer from Kibbutz Gesher Haziv in the Upper Galilee. He was killed by an anti-tank missile fired by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon last Thursday while tending to his apple orchard.

Ozen was the fifth Israeli civilian killed along the border with Lebanon since Oct. 7. His death is further proof that Israelis evacuated from their communities along the border with Lebanon cannot return home until the balance of forces between Israel and Hezbollah is radically transformed in Israel’s favor.

Early last week, Lebanon’s Al Akhbar newspaper reported that Amos Hochstein, President Joe Biden’s senior adviser and point man for dealing with Hezbollah, presented the Lebanese government with a proposal to avoid such a war. Hochstein’s proposal entails Israel surrendering sovereign territory from Nahariya in the west to the Syrian border in the east in exchange for symbolic concessions from Hezbollah.

Since Oct. 7, Hezbollah has gradually escalated its missile and drone assaults against Israeli civilian and military targets in northern Israel. So far, Iran’s Lebanese legion has opted not to launch either a major ground offensive into the Galilee or to expand its missile and drone offensive to areas of Israel further removed from the border.

From the outset, the Biden administration has worked energetically to prevent the expansion of the war in Gaza to the northern front. Biden’s decision to send the USS Eisenhower carrier group to the eastern Mediterranean was informed by this determination.

Israel was initially deeply appreciative of the deployment. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion, Biden’s announcement that he was sending the aircraft carrier group was a life saver. It took Israel several days to mobilize its reserves and remove its civilians from the border with Lebanon. If Hezbollah had attacked before Israel was mobilized and its civilians a safe distance from the border, the holocaust Israel suffered in the south on Oct. 7, would have looked like a walk in the park by comparison.

Hezbollah’s terror army comprises a combination of 150,000 missiles of all ranges and a terror army consisting of fanatical, armed-to-the-teeth veterans of the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. This combined force is capable of invading and occupying large swaths of the Western and Upper Galilee and destroying strategic installations throughout Israel while causing tens of thousands of civilian and military casualties. A Hezbollah assault against an unprepared Israel has the potential to effectively destroy the Jewish state. Which is why the U.S. deployment was a godsend.

Now, however, Israel is in position to block a Hezbollah invasion. And the question of U.S. aims is cause for concern. It is one thing to prevent a war Israel would lose, and perhaps be destroyed fighting. It is another to prevent a war that Israel needs to fight and win to prevent Hezbollah from attacking it in the future. No war means no return of civilians to their homes. It means Israeli farmers permanently unable to return to their orchards and fields, and IDF forces being sitting ducks at the border for as long as they remain deployed. No war, in short, means Israel loses.

This would be true under all conditions, but Hochstein’s offer makes clear that the United States is willing to empower Hezbollah still more and give it an Israeli defeat. In other words, the U.S. policy of avoiding war is actually a policy of standing with Hezbollah against Israel.

The current U.S. position—standing with Hezbollah against Israel in time of war—is a long time in coming. It’s important to understand its origins.