Articles & Videos
All PoliticsPolicyEconomyCivil RightsJusticeInternationalConflict & SecurityClimate & EnvironmentTechnologyHealthMediaCulture & Society
Chris Hedges and Gideon Levy on Israel’s Expanding War and the Future of the Middle East
Gideon Levy believes Israel’s rampant militarism has infected the minds of its entire population. Without an impossible reversal, the Jewish state’s destructive warpath will rage on. ScheerPost Staff For decades, Benjamin Netanyahu treated war with Iran not as a last resort, but as a strategic horizon—an objective pursued across administrations, summits, and crises until Washington […]
Transcript: Leavitt Goes Full Cult as War Leaks Humiliate Trump Badly
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 26 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump gets his updates on the Iran war in video form. Compilations of the most successful strikes on Iranian targets are shown to him in a montage. This has his own allies worried that he’s only getting a partial view of what’s happening on the ground. At the same time, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt praised Trump’s handling of the war in ways that were truly strange during a briefing—and sounded like she was speaking only for the benefit of Trump’s ears and no one else’s. Which got us thinking: This is just not at all how a president and a White House should be conducting themselves at such a moment. We’re at the point where we’ve forgotten what basic leadership should even look like.So we’re talking to Emily Horne, a veteran of the National Security Council and State Department, to get a sense of why all this is so deeply abnormal and what we should be demanding instead. Emily, great to have you on.Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg.Sargent: Emily, I think you have the distinction of being the only guest who’s come on twice in a row in such short succession. So, congratulations.Horne: Well, there’s a lot to talk about, unfortunately, in this case.Sargent: Well, you’re perfect for this topic. So let’s get into it. We just learned that Donald Trump made some sort of offer to the Iranians in hopes of getting a ceasefire—some sort of 15-point plan. But Iran has rejected Trump’s offer. There do appear to be some sort of back-channel talks going on, but it’s unclear who’s talking to whom. What does seem clear is that Trump really wants to get out of this, but that that’s turning out to be really hard. Emily, can you bring us up to date on where the war stands and explain why it’s hard for Trump to find a way out?Horne: So you said a word in that summary—“unclear”—that unfortunately is, I think, the perfect word to describe the current state of play. One of the things that makes this a very difficult situation for the American public to try to understand is that, frankly, we cannot trust the information that the White House and the Pentagon are putting out about this war. When President Trump says that the Iranians have agreed to talk and the Iranians say they haven’t, it’s really difficult to know who is telling the truth. And as an American, that really alarms me—that I have to acknowledge that while I will never trust what the Iranians are saying, I can’t trust what the commander in chief is saying here, either.That’s pretty alarming for all of us. We still don’t have a consistent definition of what success looks like. We still don’t have a consistent explanation for why—whatever the U.S. aims are—they appear to be very different from those of the Israeli government. We still don’t have a description of what a diplomatic off-ramp could even look like. So there’s just so much that we don’t know and that we have never really known about what this war is about or why we’re undertaking it at this particular moment.I think a good question for reporters to be asking when they’re in those briefing rooms—and the press secretary or spokesperson says victory is nigh or success is at hand—is, OK, well, remind me: what is your definition of success? What does victory look like according to this administration, and how will you know when you have achieved those objectives? Don’t just give them the easy win of declaring mission accomplished.Sargent: Let’s listen to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt for a bit. Here she is after being asked whether Trump will be able to get our allies behind whatever he negotiates with Iran, or whatever the outcome is at the end of the day.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): I think the president has shown that he is absolutely the leader of the free world, the head of the most powerful military in the world. And in various examples—the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, the ceasefire between Israel and Gaza—the president has shown a very unique skill at getting our allies to get on board with what’s in the best interest of the United States, but also the world.Sargent: Emily, this is extremely strange. Everyone in that room—except for maybe the hand-picked Trump propagandists—knows full well that Trump alienated our allies extremely badly in the run-up to the war, and that he’s been unable to get them on board to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Yet she just goes full cult right in their faces. What did you make of that?Horne: You know, I’m not surprised. This has always been the administration’s M.O.—to just willfully assert their definition of reality and wait for others to react to it. These reporters in these briefing rooms have an opportunity to say directly to Karoline Leavitt’s face, directly to any spokesperson: What is your evidence for that? Why should we believe what you’re saying? They have the opportunity to challenge this administration directly, and it would be doing a great public service for all of those who don’t have that opportunity—if they would be willing to be a little more pointed and a little bit more intentional in actually asking for backup when someone asserts that the sky isn’t blue, it’s red, or that the pope isn’t Catholic today because we say so.Sargent: Well, let’s just clarify what the truth is for people. Trump isn’t actually good at getting our allies together, is he?Horne: I mean, he’s very good at getting our allies together insofar as they would be acting in coordination to not do what he’s asking them to do—as we saw when he tried to get our allies and partners together to support military action that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and everyone politely said, no, thank you, we will not be doing that. So perversely, yeah, he’s kind of great at getting our allies together—just not necessarily in service of whatever he happens to define as victory that day.Sargent: Yes. Well, that is certainly true. So let’s listen to a bit more of Leavitt. Here she is saying that whatever Trump says is true by definition.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): If you’ve heard it from the president of the United States, obviously it’s true.Sargent: And here’s Leavitt talking about what will happen to Iran if, well, things don’t go the way Trump wants them to.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): But the president’s preference is always peace. There does not need to be any more death and destruction. But if Iran fails to accept the reality of the current moment, if they fail to understand that they have been defeated militarily and will continue to be, President Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before. President Trump does not bluff, and he is prepared to unleash hell.Sargent: So Emily, you’ve been part of this process a lot. This just doesn’t sound the way previous press secretaries have sounded. I mean, OK, press secretaries will spin—they will sometimes lie, they will do whatever they have to do to advocate for the boss. But this is another type of thing entirely. To assert that things are true simply because Trump has said them, and to say Trump is going to “unleash hell”—that’s just not often how you hear press secretaries talk. Can you get into that a little bit? What’s wrong with that, and why don’t we want it?Horne: Look, these are serious times that demand serious people. I wouldn’t say, as a communications professional, that it’s not terribly serious to hear a press secretary or spokesperson who treats matters of war and life and death as if they are a video game to be won—where by owning your opponents, you somehow dominate. That’s really upsetting to hear, frankly, for someone who’s worked in national security for a very long time and has been in the room when decisions about deploying U.S. troops overseas were being debated with a gravity that was appropriate for the situation. You have to be humble if you’re going to be dealing with life-and-death issues. And I don’t hear a lot of humility or an understanding of the weight of those decisions in these kinds of conversations.Sargent: Yeah, there’s a sadistic, relishing-of-domination aspect to all of this that I find incredibly off-putting. I mean, the Bushies—the people around George Bush—sort of talked like this a little bit; there was a lot of swagger. But to hear things like “Trump will unleash hell,” it’s just really, really grating and I think morally abhorrent in a way, because these are human beings on the ground and there has to be an awareness of that.Horne: Look, ideally you would want a commander in chief who is centering the humanity of people who are going to be impacted by war when he or she is thinking about whether or not to send U.S. troops into battle. And that goes for not just those troops and their families and all American citizens, but also thinking about the civilians on the ground who are going to be impacted by American strikes or American military action.You ideally, as a national security professional, try to avoid war—war is the last resort that you would go to. And so yes, it is very chilling to hear this White House talking about war as if it is a game to be won, when in fact it is not. You should not relish the idea of unleashing hell on the people that will experience it. That is upsetting to hear, certainly.Sargent: Well, that brings us to the next topic here, which is NBC News is reporting—it’s amazing stuff—it describes how Trump gets briefed on the war. Every day since it started, U.S. military officials produce a video compilation that shows the biggest and most successful strikes on Iran over the previous 48 hours, according to NBC. This is from current U.S. officials who seem to have leaked this to NBC. One official describes this as video of “stuff blowing up.” Now, Trump does get briefings from other sources, to be fair, but according to those officials, there’s concern among Trump’s own allies that he isn’t getting the full picture of what’s going on. Emily, you’ve been inside this process before. What do you make of that reporting?Horne: So this is a wild story, and I think everyone should read it—and they should also understand what it is they’re reading. And I’m going to tell you my little conspiracy theory about this story. I think this story is a White House plant. And here’s why I think that. There are always a couple of tells that you can kind of look at. One tell that I always look for as a communications professional is if there’s a round dateline, then that means that this story was written ahead of time—you know you’ve kind of gotten an exclusive, you’re not trying to race the competition for it and push it out as soon as it’s ready. So you can preload it into your CMS and have everyone vet it, and then it pops early in the morning—5 a.m. in this case, on the dot—and then it drives the day. That says to me that the comms team, or someone, planned this story. They seeded it.You’ve got multiple sources, both current and former, who are all singing from the same sheet of music—which says to me, again, this is coordinated. This is a plan. So what does that tell us? That tells us that even though this is a story that on a casual read looks kind of embarrassing for the president—and is, I think, being treated as such on social media, like the president of the United States needs a greatest-hits compilation of CENTCOM strikes in order to understand how the war is going?—I understand that reaction. But to be clear, there’s a deeper message that I think they want planted in people’s minds, which is that this White House is now creating excuses for why the war is not going well and why the American people do not approve of this war. And one of the excuses that they are creating is, well, the president of the United States is not being fed good information by his military. That is what they are trying to plant with this story, if—as I suspect—this is a planted story. They’re trying to create a paper trail and a narrative that says this is going badly not because Donald Trump made terrible decisions but because his military leadership is not being honest with him about what is happening.Sargent: Yeah, well, that certainly sounds very plausible. Let me ask you, though, on the substance of it. It absolutely is embarrassing—it sounds almost infantilizing. He’s presented with this video reel of things going boom, boom, boom. And then you can kind of see why Trump talks the way he does, right? So the other day he went before reporters and he said something along the lines of, We’ve got them totally under our submission, our bombers are flying overhead, and we could just bomb anything we wanted any time. And he spoke about it in this really kind of crude and stupid way. But when you realize that he’s getting fed video of things going boom, then you realize why he talks that way about what’s going on. I mean, it is extremely humiliating, don’t you think?Horne: I mean, there’s a lot there that we could unpack, and I am not a therapist. So perhaps there are some roads we should not go down. Again, though, what I will say is, when you are the president of the United States, you do live in a bubble. You are reliant on your staff to bring you information and to tell you the truth of what is happening. And if this president is not getting good information from his team, then that is a problem. And as Americans, we should all be concerned about that. Even if you don’t agree with the decisions that the president is making, you still want them to be informed and to have the information that they need to make better decisions. So if that’s not happening, then yes, that is a problem.That said, you do not need a CIA briefer to tell you that this war is not going well, that it is not an unalloyed success and that it is not just things going boom. You can look at your phone, which we know the president does a lot. You could talk to reporters, which we know the president does a lot. You could turn on the television—and even if you watch only Fox News, as we know the president does—you would still see things like the news out of the Strait of Hormuz being shut for now well over a week. You would see reporting on gas prices soaring. You would see reporting on allies saying, No, thank you, we will not be participating in this war with boots on the ground, Mr. President. You do not need bespoke intelligence information to understand reality.And so again, what I see here is just—as yesterday the president started to point the finger at Secretary Hegseth and say that Pete, you were the one who first started this—I see them starting to cast about for whose fault this really is, and laying the predicate for the buck stops anywhere but with the commander in chief.Sargent: Well, Karoline Leavitt reacted angrily to the NBC story. And I think this is interesting because what her imperative here is, is to push back really ferociously and angrily against the thing in the story that makes it so humiliating and infantilizing. So she said it was false, and she added this: “He actively seeks and solicits the opinions of everyone in the room and expects full-throated honesty from all of his top advisers.” Emily, I found that comical because anyone who’s watched those Cabinet meetings he holds will notice that one top adviser after another slathers him with the most absurdly obsequious praise imaginable and lies endlessly about how triumphant his presidency has been. He’s incredibly prone to manipulation by falsehoods about his greatness, and everyone knows it. But Emily, it would be good if he did expect full-throated honesty from his advisers. Isn’t that what we need right now?Horne: Absolutely. But those are not the dynamics he has created in his administration. Again, the loyalty tests, the purges of people who tell him things that he does not want to hear—all of this, regardless of whatever his spokesperson says, I think actions speak louder than words.Sargent: Well, how is this process supposed to work? How would a normal president be getting updated, and how would he or she be conducting these conversations about the latest info and the latest intelligence in the war? What would we like to see happening?Horne: You want to hear from your team as much as possible when you are conducting a war. You want to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. You want to have your team be honest with you about how things are going. Every president needs a team that will be honest with them. And the job of a president’s team is not to rein them in or move them in a particular direction—it is to bring them vetted options that have been stress-tested, that have been carefully reviewed, that have been tested against what the reality is on the ground. So you have a plan, but is this going to work as we thought it would, given all of these other factors? And you bring them that information so that they can make informed decisions. You keep them from making preventable mistakes. And presidents cannot do that if they are not getting real-time, honest, accurate information about—again—the good, the bad, and the ugly.And war is full of unexpected moments where things do not go according to plan. If you as a leader create the dynamic that you are going to punish your team if they bring you bad news, or punish them for things that they don’t want to hear, then you’re not going to get good information from them. And I think that’s one of the many differences between good leaders and bad leaders.Look, what we are seeing with this administration—again, actions are speaking louder than words. No matter what Karoline Leavitt says, it is very clear that this is an administration that punishes people who do not toe the company line. And the company line for this administration is that Donald Trump is always right and never can be wrong. And unfortunately, we’re seeing the consequences of that right now. We’re seeing it in casualties that are piling up across the Middle East. We’re seeing it in gas prices rising. We are seeing it in costs here at home being borne by the American people. We’re seeing it in our allies and partners who are backing away slowly from the chaos that he is creating. And we’re seeing it with a lot of confusion over whether a diplomatic off-ramp is even possible now. Sargent: The way they talk about the war, the way they talk about Trump’s world-historical greatness, has kind of boxed them into a place where they can’t even compromise without it looking like failure. And of course the despot never fails, right?Horne: Yeah. And again, I think we should all be prepared for them to keep moving the goalposts—and no matter what the end result of this is, eventually they’re going to declare total victory, because as you quite rightly note, they’ve created a dynamic where they can’t have anything less than that. And their base will probably believe it—they’ll believe whatever they’re told. But for the rest of us, I think we should keep pressing for that definition of success. We should keep holding them accountable for the impact that this is having on all of us, as we live through the impact of their terrible decision-making here and the lack of a plan as they’ve started this war.Sargent: Absolutely, a hundred percent. We really can’t let them slither away and claim total victory here. We need them to define what success is and stop lying to us all the fucking time. Folks, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack—it’s called Spin Class. Emily, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Horne: Thanks, Greg.
Kenya flower shipments hit by Mideast war
Horticulture is one of the country’s most important economic drivers, generating close to 1% of its GDP.
Russia sends drones to Iran: Western intelligence
Moscow’s support for Tehran is likely to further escalate tensions with the West and especially the US.
Iran war propels shift to EVs, renewables
Rising prices sparked by the war in Iran have accelerated the shift globally, including in the world’s second-biggest oil consumer, China.
More Pregnant Women Around the World Die When the U.S. Has a GOP President
A new study reveals global maternal mortality increases by about 10.5%, or about 44.7 additional deaths per 100,000 live births, whenever a Republican is in power.
US eyes end to war as Iran digs in
US President Donald Trump has reportedly told aides he expects the conflict to end within weeks, but Washington and Tehran remain far apart in their respective demands.
In Beirut, Old Anger at Israel, but a Newfound Rage at Hezbollah
Lebanon is exhausted. On March 1, Hezbollah yet again initiated a completely unjustifiable war with Israel by launching missile and drone strikes supposedly in revenge for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. For most of the country, it was the last straw. And it could well prove to be an inflection point, if Israel doesn’t overplay its hand. But Israel may indeed be doing that by creating a new occupation of the lower fifth of the country south of the Litani River, and vowing that hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians displaced from there cannot return until Hezbollah is disarmed to Israel’s satisfaction.Lebanese were disgusted at Israel’s completely disproportionate and brutal response to the ineffective and virtually symbolic Hezbollah attack. Over 700,000 Lebanese were displaced in a matter of two or three days, with another 300,000 following soon after. In a country of fewer than six million people, that’s an extraordinary dislocation, especially in so rapid a time. In Beirut, where I was while this was unfolding, I suddenly saw refugees everywhere, sleeping on the streets, in their cars, in tents provided by the government, and anywhere they could lay their heads. Over 1,000 Lebanese have been killed in the past few weeks, and Israel vows that this war will likely continue even if the conflict with Iran is concluded. So there is obvious rage and disgust with Israel. But that’s familiar, and most Lebanese expect nothing else from the Israelis. Israel has launched major invasions of Lebanon countless times in recent decades, including in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006, and 2023–2024. For many Lebanese, this is just what Israel does: invade and occupy their country.What’s new, and unprecedented, is the overwhelming and near-total consensus of rage against Hezbollah. The militia group was seen by many Lebanese as heroic as long as it was fighting against a large and long-standing Israeli occupation that lasted from 1982, when Hezbollah was founded under Iranian guidance, until 2000, when Israel was driven out. Even after that, when Hezbollah insisted it needed to continue to be the only militia group that retained a private arsenal of heavy weapons, quite a few Lebanese (including many who did not otherwise like or trust Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons) viewed it as a necessary evil to combat Israel’s ongoing occupation of small areas in the south and offset the potential for another invasion.This perspective began to shift in the aftermath of the 2006 war, which originated with a Hezbollah attack on Israeli soldiers in the border region. As the conflict subsided, many Lebanese began to ask themselves, and Hezbollah, why this conflict was necessary and why this organization had decided to inflict it on the country without consulting anybody else. The backlash was so severe that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah felt it necessary to apologize, saying that if he had only known the extent of Israel’s retaliation, he would never have authorized the initial attack. But everyone in Lebanon was well acquainted with Israel’s doctrine of disproportionate response to Arab adversaries. Nasrallah was, in effect, pleading incompetence and stupidity as indemnification against recklessness and preferring a foreign master to his own country’s government. That’s a good barometer of how serious the backlash had become.A similar dynamic played out in 2023–2024, when anger against Hezbollah was stronger than ever. But that was of secondary concern to the organization, which was primarily focused on the intense losses Israel inflicted on it in a matter of weeks after the pager explosions that blew up all over Lebanon in September 2024. In less than a month following, Hezbollah’s arsenal, military command and control and battlefield officers, political leadership, and other organizational structures were decimated and lay in ruins. Unpopularity at home was, at that point, the least of its worries.Many Lebanese were absolutely outraged that Hezbollah would drag the country into war over Gaza and Hamas and on behalf of Iran. Yet again, no aspect of Lebanese national interests—or even Hezbollah’s interests—was served by joining the conflict initiated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Worse, Hezbollah tried to have it both ways, initiating what it hoped would be a limited conflict with Israel that would maintain its “revolutionary” bona fides without risking the destruction of a full-scale war with the Israelis. Israel was not interested in playing that game and instead sought to inflict a major strategic defeat on Iran and its core allies (Hamas is in a loose marriage of convenience with Tehran and its Arab proxies) by attacking and decimating Hezbollah. When the pagers exploded and Israel unleashed a flurry of full-scale attacks on Hezbollah, the cost of holding back almost all its most powerful potential blows against Israel became clear. The cliché of “Use it or lose it” was never better illustrated, as Hezbollah never threw their big punch and saw themselves destroyed on the ground before they could even gather their wits.It was clear to all serious observers in Lebanon that Hezbollah’s weapons were not only not meant for Hamas and Gaza, or for Lebanon; they were not even meant for defending Hezbollah itself. They were strictly to provide deterrence, and potential retaliation, against an Israeli or American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And since that only happened after the decimation of Hezbollah, Tehran never gave a go-ahead. This confirmed the worst suspicions of many Lebanese that Hezbollah was simply a puppet of Iran that was cynically using Lebanon and the Lebanese people as a tool without any regard at all for their own interests, lives, or livelihoods.It was against this backdrop that, less than two years later, Hezbollah once again plunged Lebanon into a war with Israel on behalf of Iran. For an overwhelming majority, it was the final straw. On March 2, the day after Hezbollah joined the war, the Lebanese Cabinet held an emergency meeting, after which Prime Minister Nawaf Salam announced a unanimous decision holding that all Hezbollah’s military activities were “illegal” and “banned” and instructing the military to confiscate Hezbollah’s “illegal weapons.” The next day, President Joseph Aoun told Arab and Western diplomats that the decision was “final, irrevocable, and irreversible.” The government, he insisted, would have the sole monopoly over the use of force and decisions over war and peace.Obviously, Hezbollah’s paramilitary activities have always been illegal and extra-constitutional. No state authorizes a private army to operate on its soil, let alone maintain its own independent foreign and defense policies. Yet the Lebanese government had never said this to Hezbollah after it was founded in 1982. It has repeatedly refused to disarm: in 1989 (as everyone else did as part of the Taif Agreement), after Israel was chased out of southern Lebanon in 2000, or even after Hezbollah turned its weapons on other Lebanese to defend control of its independent (and illegal and extra-constitutional) military communications network in 2008. So it’s not as if this current behavior by the group was suddenly unlawful and extra-constitutional. It is, rather, that the government leaders concluded that there was suddenly an unprecedented political opportunity to speak, and hopefully act, against Hezbollah because of the outpouring of outrage against the organization for once again subjecting the country to a completely unnecessary, avoidable, and pointless war in behalf of another country, far away.The depths of the consensus was illustrated by the fact that Cabinet members from the Amal Party, a Lebanese Shiite grouping that predates Hezbollah and maintains a close alliance with it, were authorized by its leader, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, to stand with the rest of the Cabinet in these unprecedented declarations. Effectively, the whole country is now divided in two camps: Hezbollah’s core members and supporters on one hand, and everybody else on the other.I was taken aback by the depth and breadth of the outrage I heard against the group on the streets of Beirut before I left the country a week ago, after two months there. Several times, people who did not know me, or know anything about me, and did not know or care who else was listening, launched into diatribes against “the terrorists,” clearly referring to Hezbollah and spewing venom at their recklessness, stupidity, and lack of patriotism. In the past, out of concerns for self-preservation, people would’ve hesitated before expressing such opinions to strangers and in the earshot of many other strangers. But partly there was a sense that everybody thinks this, so why not say it, combined with a feeling of “Who cares?” Such talk was unimaginable in the past, and members of the Cabinet, being canny Lebanese politicians, were aware of, and counted on, this national mood before moving, at least rhetorically, against Hezbollah.They are also relying upon their hope that the Army would not split in an unmanageable way if the order came to confront Hezbollah and confiscate their weapons. The Army commander, Gen. Rudolphe Haykal, remains hesitant to give the order. Partly he’s genuinely concerned that the military could split in a way that would render it ineffective if troops were ordered to disarm Hezbollah. Even more, though, he is probably hedging against the military—and himself as its leader—being left holding the bag for a failed policy, especially if it plunges the country into another round of civil unrest and even conflict.The irony is that by attacking Hezbollah on the ground in the south, Israel is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the Lebanese government and military. But its stated plan to create a new, semipermanent occupation and “buffer zone” across southern Lebanon could fatally undermine the government’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah. Worse, it could throw Hezbollah a lifeline, saving it from its own endless miscalculations and blunders. If Israel institutes a new occupation in Lebanon’s south, it would be providing Hezbollah with an opportunity to do the one and only thing it has consistently proven it can do well: fight Israeli occupying forces in southern Lebanon. That is what the organization was founded to do in 1982, what made it into a strong fighting force through 2000 and beyond, and it is what could well give it the opportunity to rebuild by pursuing exactly the agenda for which it was initially established.Israel seemingly has forgotten the lessons of earlier adventures in Lebanon, most notably 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon determined to drive out or wipe out fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization once and for all. In the late summer of that year, Israel did secure an agreement that led to the departure of PLO fighters and leaders from Lebanon to Tunisia. But that hardly produced the “Peace for Galilee” quiet along its northern border that Israel purported to be seeking. Instead, the result was the creation of Hezbollah, a new militia that was far more capable, implacable, and at home in southern Lebanon than Palestinian fedayeen ever had been. In short, it backfired.For Lebanon and Israel, it’s Groundhog Day again. These repeated invasions since 1978 have never resulted in calm along the border, and have almost invariably left the security situation worse than when they began. Much like Donald Trump’s campaign against Iran, why Israel expects this time to be any different defies rational explanation. In both cases, a national neurotic repetition compulsion seems to be at work. The alternative for Israel is quite clear. The Lebanese government has issued an unprecedented—and, until now, virtually unthinkable, call for direct negotiations with Israel (the two countries have technically been in a state of war since 1948). France has offered to broker these talks in either Cyprus or Paris and reportedly proposed a negotiation framework that would involve Lebanese recognition of and diplomatic normalization with Israel in return for Israel ceasing to bomb Lebanon and pulling back from areas it has held onto since 2024. In this context, Hezbollah would be disarmed, but over time and carefully so as not to ignite another civil war in Lebanon.Israel gets to choose. It can have peace with Lebanon, a disarmed Hezbollah (though not overnight), and after that, a calm border in the north for the first time in over half a century and into the foreseeable future. Or it can experience another occupation of southern Lebanon, the likely resurgence of Hezbollah, and a squandered opportunity to actually achieve peace for Galilee. Unfortunately, because Israel is applying, as it boasts, the same tactics in Lebanon that it has employed in Gaza—near-total destruction and displacement in order to render inhospitable the environment in which its adversary operates—the outcome is hardly likely to be any better.In Gaza, instead of Hamas being “destroyed,” the group is now ruling in all areas from which the Israeli military has withdrawn. Wars of vengeance can result in satisfying revenge, but they don’t produce stable, sustainable, or advantageous strategic and political outcomes. Israel may well view the wars in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon as all part of the same “mighty vengeance” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised on the evening of October 7, 2023. But such vengeance only feeds a self-reinforcing vicious circle of attack versus counterattack with neighboring societies, and enemies who are not going anywhere and are often only strengthened in the long run by policies informed by anger instead of careful strategic analysis. Surely it’s time to finally heed the obvious lessons of a long and painful history for both countries.
Headlines
(6,392) 6,392 headlinesPage 1 of 640