The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a vortex as a “mass... with a whirling or circular motion that tends to form a cavity or vacuum in the center of the circle and to draw toward this cavity or vacuum bodies subject to its action.”
That seems a fair way of describing the role that Lebanon has played for Israel, over much of the last half-century.
This year, Israel marks the 20th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War. I took part in that war as a reservist, in the eastern sector around al-Khiyam and Marjayoun. Each year on Remembrance Day, former and current members of the battalion in which I served gather at the graveside of one of our number who was killed in the fighting.
Afterward, we usually go back to the house of the family of our fallen comrade. This year, around the tables, there was much talk and laughter about episodes from the war and various characters from our ranks. Time has softened some of the more challenging memories of that time.
Everything becomes suffused in the warm glow of legend in the end. Receding into the past and into memory.
Not so fast, though. Some of the officers and fighters from 20 years ago are still active in the unit, mostly in HQ and management positions now.
The battalion is in the process of preparing for another of the long stints of reserve duty, which have become routine in the IDF since October 2023. The location is a familiar one. After a series of deployments in Gaza and one in Syria, they are returning to Lebanon after a 20-year hiatus.
The “Lebanese mud,” as the Hebrew phrase has it, never seems quite to be finally scraped off the IDF’s boots.
Rather, the long-collapsed sovereignty of Israel’s northern neighbor appears to have the capacity to produce never-ending travails for the residents of Israel’s northern communities, the fighting units of its army, and the Jewish state as a whole.
Lebanon, long the launching ground for a variety of irregular and semi-regular military formations, once appeared as an anomaly in an Arab world characterized by tight, centralized, authoritarian governance. Now, it appears more as a harbinger.
Governments in Beirut lost the crucial monopoly over the means of violence in the country as early as 1969. In that year, the authorities signed an agreement with Palestinian militias, giving the latter the right to use the country as a launchpad for “armed struggle” against Israel.
Beirut has never regained this monopoly. Israel has been searching for an adequate response to this unfortunate reality ever since. The Palestinian nationalist militias are long gone, defeated and expelled by Israel in the 1982 invasion.
The Islamic regime in Iran, looking for an entry point into the Israel-Arab conflict for a mix of ideological and pragmatic reasons, found this point in collapsed Lebanon, and has been operating its proxy Hezbollah militia from the northern border ever since.
Fragmentation, state collapse or erosion, and militia rule, once the more or less unique preserve of Lebanon, have now become a norm in the Arab world. Variants of this theme are found in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Gaza, and Syria. Meanwhile, in the place where the phenomenon first emerged, it continues to thrive.
For various reasons, Western policy vis-à-vis Lebanon has been to ignore or minimize this reality. European countries, the United States, and the key states of the Arab world maintain relations with the legally constituted government in Beirut as if it were sovereign.
The Lebanese Armed Forces receive support and assistance from the West as if they were the holders of the monopoly of violence throughout the formal area of Lebanese sovereignty. Western media coverage of the country reinforces this illusion.
Indeed, the current formal Lebanese government of President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam is widely portrayed in Western and even some Israeli media as, if not yet fully in control, certainly representing a uniquely promising hope for the full return of normal governance in the country.
Hezbollah are represented in the Lebanese government
THIS IS an illusion. Hezbollah and its Shia ally Amal, after all, are represented in the government. Hezbollah has two portfolios (including Health). Amal has three (including Finance).
But more importantly, Lebanon has had Western-leaning, reformist-sounding governments before. Prime minister Fuad Siniora from 2005-2009 and then Saad Hariri from 2009-2011 and 2016-2020 once received similar accolades in the West.
The problem, glaring and obvious, was that these men, and Aoun and Salam the same, had and have neither the will nor the capacity to take on the Iran-implanted structure, which is the real holder of power in the country. All the declarations and obfuscation (and there are plenty of them) won’t change this crude, obvious fact.
Which brings us back to my old battalion, preparing for its stint in what appears to be a renewed version of Israel’s old security zone north of the border.
This week, I traveled to southern Lebanon with a group of Israeli military correspondents to the town of Ayta ash-Shaab and the surrounding countryside.
We wanted to take a closer look at what exactly the IDF is building north of the border, the thinking behind it, and why Israel thinks this latest initiative won’t go the failed way of the last buffer zone that Israel established in this unforgiving landscape between 1985 and 2000.
The first clue is visual. Ayta ash-Shaab, where the IDF’s Paratroopers Brigade fought a fierce battle in 2006, is mainly rubble today.
Neighboring Beit Lif, another Hezbollah-supporting Shia stronghold, is much the same. Officers of the 162nd Division, which holds this area, told us that a key difference this time around is that the Hezbollah-supporting population would not be permitted to return to the area south of the Yellow Line.
This term, coined in the context of Gaza, is already in regular use by the army to describe the line north of the border dividing the de-facto buffer zone carved out by Israel from the remainder of Lebanon.
Hezbollah will have nothing with which to build an insurgency
The intended result: Hezbollah, or any other organization, will have nothing with which to build an insurgency. Technical means, we are told, are available to ensure that any unauthorized attempt to enter the zone from the north will be detected in time and neutralized.
The Yellow Line in the Ayta ash-Shaab area, now held by the 162nd Division, is located around 15 km. from the border. The distance of the line from the international frontier varies with the area’s topography.
Still, the plain intention is to place Israel’s northern border communities beyond the range of Hezbollah’s anti-tank missiles. The drones and longer-range missiles are located north of the Litani and will require another solution.
The new buffer zone in southern Lebanon (no one uses the old term “security zone” except to hint at skepticism toward the current policy) is in keeping with the general contours of Israel’s security doctrine in the post-October 7 period.
According to this approach, Israel seeks to place physical buffer zones between its civilian populations and areas held by hostile forces. Such zones now exist in Gaza and Syria. Lebanon’s is the newest one.
It is an approach designed to manage, not solve, the core problem. Then again, the crisis of Arab governance, the preference among large populations in neighboring areas for political Islam, and the tendency for political power to be expressed via militias are all issues that are not really available to be solved by outsiders.
Israel intends to insulate its own population from the consequences of these phenomena. It’s an imperfect and partial solution. But at least for as long as the Iranian regime survives, some variant of it is probably the best that can be achieved. As a result, another generation of Israeli combat soldiers is now deployed or preparing to deploy in southern Lebanon. The more things change, the more they stay the same.