War in Lebanon

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

Israel goes to war again.

Israel now has troops rolling into southern Lebanon for the first time in nearly 20 years. This mobilization comes after nearly a year of the terror group Hezbollah firing rockets into Northern Israel. The Israeli government evacuated civilians from the region, but largely held off from going after Hezbollah.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: That changed late last month, when Israel staged a series of attacks to take out Hezbollah’s communication networks and leaders.

NASRALLAH: (Speaking in Arabic)

BROWN: Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah heard there, promising retribution. One week later, Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

AUDIO: AIR RAID SIRENS

REICHARD: This week, Hezbollah’s patron Iran responded with a barrage of nearly 200 ballistic missiles. Israel and its Western allies repelled most of them, but not all.

The question now is what’s next?

DANIEL GORDIS: What to do is far from clear.

Daniel Gordis is an historian and Koret distinguished scholar at Shalem College in Jerusalem. He told WORLD’s Harrison Watters that hours before Iran launched missiles at Israel, the Israeli Defense Force made a stunning announcement.

GORDIS: The IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari showed videos of the tunnels that IDF special ops forces have been uncovering in Lebanon over the past six weeks or so.

BROWN: Special forces infiltrated hundreds of tunnels and bunkers in Southern Lebanon…where Hezbollah stored incredible amounts of weapons and ammunition.

GORDIS: But more chillingly, they also found maps of the Galilee pointing to where there are different Israeli settlements, you know, sort of small towns and villages where there are major traffic junctions and where the major highways go. This was clearly a preparation for an invasion of Israel's north.

The news that Israel could have been invaded from the south and the north last fall surprised many.

GORDIS: Nasrallah did not want to open up a full front with Israel, and Israel did not want to precipitate a war with Hezbollah… We probably will never know why he didn't attack on the 8th. Thank God he did not. So Israelis, on the one hand, are feeling Yeah, we gotta go. We gotta get this, this, this threat cannot—what normal country would allow this to develop on its border?

REICHARD: Gordis says that although Israelis are angry about the threat at their northern border, many are reluctant to support a full-scale response.

GORDIS: We've gone on into Lebanon twice before, and it has never worked out well. And each time, we've gone in deeper and longer than we thought we were going to.

In 1982, the IDF went into Lebanon to uproot the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The operation lasted three years before Israel pulled back its troops to a security zone in Southern Lebanon. The PLO was destroyed…leaving a power vacuum behind.

GORDIS: But the vacuum did not remain. The vacuum was replaced by Hezbollah. So you have the military unintended consequences, but you also have the geopolitical unintended consequences.

Israeli forces completely withdrew from the security zone in 2000. Six years later, Hezbollah fighters attacked an Israeli unit, killing three and kidnapping two. That sparked 33 days of fighting…ending in a UN brokered cease-fire. Many analysts consider it the first round of the Iran–Israel proxy war.

BROWN: This time, Lebanon is just one front in a much larger proxy war.

GORDIS: There are Hezbollah troops in Syria. There are Iranian troops in Iraq. There's obviously Iran itself. There's there's Yemen. This could very quickly become a regional thing, which we don't want it to become.

While the prospect of a larger war is fearful, Israelis have been encouraged to see the IDF’s strategic attacks in recent weeks.

GORDIS: If you look at the org chart of Hezbollah from a couple of weeks ago, with the exception of one guy from the first three rows, every single person has been taken out. So I think that there is a renewed confidence in the army.

REICHARD: For many Israelis, the widespread geopolitical questions are important…but there is a more personal and pressing question today.

GORDIS: So there's a lot of people trying to figure out, how are we going to actually worship on Rosh Hashanah, are we going to be able to get out of our houses?

Today is Rosh Hashanah…the Jewish new year. Nearly one year after the attacks by Hamas on October 7th, Israeli Jews don’t have the new beginnings they expected.

GORDIS: This was going to be the year that we were going to actually recover. We were deliberating, how much can we celebrate? Because even though it's been a terrible year and it's been a year of war and loss, we are in much better shape than we were on October 8 last year. We've rebuilt large parts of the country. We've rebuilt the army. We've come together in many ways.

BROWN: But with war ongoing in Gaza, a new front in Lebanon, and growing tensions with Iran, that spirit of celebration is all but gone.

GORDIS: And now we don't feel any more secure than we did on October 8th… It's a very sad way to have to usher in a new Hebrew Jewish year, but that's how we are, and we have to do the best we can.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.