The Mistakes Israel Can’t Afford to Repeat

“They’re cheering us now,” I said to the soldier next to me in the jeep, as we drove through Beirut to applause and showers of rice. “But soon they’ll be shooting.” It was June 9, 1982, four days after Israel had invaded Lebanon. The war followed years of Palestinian rocket fire on northern Israel, but the proximate trigger was a Palestinian gunman’s attempt to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. The goal of Operation Peace for Galilee, as then–Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called it, was to push the terrorists out of rocket range, but Defense Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the army to advance farther north and besiege Beirut. After evicting the terrorists and the Syrian troops occupying the country, Israel hoped to install a Christian, pro-Western government that was committed to peace.

I was serving in a reserve reconnaissance unit of the Israel Defense Forces at the time, but in civilian life, I was studying Middle East history. I’d learned that the Lebanese had often cheered invading armies but later turned on them. Previous efforts to pacify the country had uniformly failed. Sharon’s plan, I thought, was reckless. “We’ll never get out of here,” I said to the soldier as we drove, rice-pelted, through Beirut’s suburbs. “We’re stuck.”

Stuck we were, both militarily and diplomatically. President Ronald Reagan at first backed the operation, but then, appalled by the number of civilian casualties, forced Israel’s troops to fall back to southern Lebanon. The U.S. Marines who replaced us also abandoned Beirut after 243 of them were killed by a suicide bomber from a previously unknown Shiite group named Hezbollah. Those same Iranian-backed terrorists relentlessly attacked IDF positions in the south, until finally, a full 18 years after they’d invaded Lebanon, the last Israeli soldiers withdrew.

[Gal Beckerman: A naked desperation to be seen]

Though Israel succeeded in freeing Lebanon of Syrian troops and evicting many Palestinian terrorists, and a peaceful Christian government emerged, that progress proved fragile. The new president was soon assassinated, and the country gradually came to be dominated by Hezbollah. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah terrorists ambushed an IDF patrol, killing eight soldiers and capturing two. Israel responded with the Second Lebanon War.

The conflict raged for 34 days, during which Hezbollah rockets pummeled Israeli cities and towns and IDF jets bombed strategic targets in Lebanon. President George W. Bush initially supported Israel’s right to self-defense, before recoiling from the high civilian casualty rate and demanding a cease-fire. A last-minute thrust by Israeli ground forces succeeded only in further antagonizing the Americans. Their response was United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the fighting and instructed Hezbollah to withdraw to north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone in the south of Lebanon.

In this second war, I served as an IDF spokesperson, rather than a combat soldier. But on its last night, I volunteered for battlefield duty. My assignment was to help transport the remains of fallen soldiers out of the combat zone and back over the border to Israel. Their comrades watched us as we worked, their faces grim with disappointment and fatigue. More than 100 soldiers had died, yet none of us could say exactly for what.

Although Israel managed to inflict a toll on Hezbollah—its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly regretted ambushing that patrol—it gained little in the long term. In defiance of Resolution 1701, Hezbollah deployed along Israel’s northern border and burrowed multiple attack tunnels beneath it. Directly opposite the frontier fort where I served after 2006, Hezbollah erected a huge billboard on which a laughing terrorist hoisted an Israeli soldier’s severed head.

Israelis deluded ourselves by thinking that the war had deterred Hezbollah when, in fact, the war had deterred us. We remained largely passive while, over the next 17 years, Hezbollah expanded its rocket arsenal tenfold and grew to become one of the region’s most formidable military forces.

Israel’s indifference ended after October 7, 2023. We now know that 3,000 terrorists of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit had been planning to smash through the border and ravage Israel’s north much as Hamas had in the south. Timely bombing by the Israeli air force preempted that attack, but Hezbollah compensated by shelling the Galilee. Nearly 100,000 Israelis became refugees in their own country, their fields and houses scorched.

Historically, Israel has never done well with wars of attrition, yet Hezbollah was waging one that steadily crept south, toward the Sea of Galilee in the east and toward Haifa in the west. Israel’s return fire failed to deter Hezbollah and, by its very ineffectiveness, may have egged it on. Throughout, Hezbollah declared its readiness to agree to a cease-fire if Hamas did, but Hamas wanted a war in the north that would relieve the pressure it faced in Gaza. It was only a matter of time before Israel, assured that Hamas was sufficiently degraded, would turn its attention to Hezbollah. On September 19 of this year, after the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives simultaneously exploded, seriously wounding thousands of people and killing at least 37, the Third Lebanon War began.

Though also launched in response to terrorist attacks from Lebanon, the Third Lebanon War differs from its predecessors in several crucial ways. For Israel, Lebanon is now just one front in a year-long, multifaceted struggle with Iranian proxies throughout the region, as well as with Iran itself. Unlike the previous two wars, both of which were perceived by many Israelis as wars of choice, the current conflict is seen by almost all Israelis as fully justified. We know that Israel cannot lose the north and survive.

For that reason alone, Israelis need to consider how the Third Lebanon War can succeed where the first two failed.

Success will depend principally on setting clear and realistic objectives. Israel cannot, as it did in 1982, seek to remake Lebanon into a Middle Eastern Belgium or, as in 2006, merely retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression. Rather, Israel’s limited goals must be to drive Hezbollah beyond the Litani and to end the rocket fire on the north. Israel must deny any intention of permanently occupying southern Lebanon and declare its openness to any diplomatic means of implementing and reliably enforcing Resolution 1701.

[Dara Horn: October 7 created a permission structure for anti-Semitism]

The United States must also avoid its former mistakes, committing instead to supporting Israel and allowing it to complete its military mission. Israel began this war with a series of brilliant strikes against Hezbollah’s leaders and military infrastructure, but the fighting ahead is likely to remain brutal. The U.S. must desist from imposing premature cease-fires or sponsoring UN resolutions that the terrorists can handily violate. But the United States should also insist that Israel honor its pledge not to occupy Lebanon, and that it engage earnestly with diplomatic envoys.

Although I recently volunteered for reserve duty guarding a Galilean kibbutz, I will not take part in this Lebanon war. For the young Israeli soldiers engaged in close combat, I can only offer one older veteran’s advice: You are fighting to restore security to your people, not to refashion Lebanon or to remain indefinitely on its soil. Your job is not to punish Hezbollah for any specific act of aggression, but to deter it and its Iranian sponsors from further attempts to destroy us. Your job is to fight with all the skills you’ve been taught, the superior gear you’ve been issued, and the values you learned at home, in order to complete your mission—and then to return to help lead Israel into the future.

The third time—so the colloquialism goes—is always a charm. The Third Lebanon War can yield positive and perhaps transformative results. Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons can be defeated, Israel can reinforce its security and revive its deterrence, and the United States can reaffirm its superpower status. But all of that will require a consistent effort to study the mistakes of Israel’s first two wars in Lebanon, and to avoid repeating them.