(JNS) Some 80,000 Israelis have been displaced from northern Israel since Oct. 7, their towns and villages declared as military no-go zones under constant threat from Hezbollah.
JNS recently caught up with Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, who took a detailed security tour of the north earlier this month and has spoken extensively with displaced families about how to re-establish an Israeli civilian presence along the Lebanese border. (JNS spoke with the former envoy prior to Hezbollah’s deadly rocket attack on Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights on Saturday, that killed 12 children and wounded over 30 people.)
“The army’s estimate,” Oren told JNS, “was that as many as 40% of the population will not come back even if there is a ceasefire.”
That estimate was anecdotally affirmed when JNS spoke with seven Israelis displaced from the north that Oren brought to Washington in June.
Among the group, only one said she would definitely go back to her home if the threat of Hezbollah was not decisively resolved.
“I would, but I don’t have children and I believe in fate,” said Judith Javor, 77, from Metula.
Javor’s husband George died of a stroke in December. She buried him in the dark, under rocket fire. The frequency of attacks in the north has prevented her from erecting a proper headstone for the grave.
Karmelle Yang, a single mother of three children, said that the Oct. 7 attacks, which included the mass abduction of women and children, made her question how she had previously lived within range of the Lebanese terrorist organization.
“I look back, like, wow, I would just get out of the house, go into the car and go on with my day or go for a walk right by the border,” she said. “What was I doing? I personally cannot go back.”
With Hezbollah guerillas operating just hundreds of feet from abandoned Israeli towns, the open question is what military response Israel could take against the terrorist group that would allow these people to safely return to their homes.
“It would mean basically laying waste to southern Lebanon,” said Oren.
‘The U.S. believes there’s actually a place called Lebanon’
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 in response to the Lebanese Civil War and the PLO’s use of Lebanon as its headquarters for terrorist activities. Israel’s particular concern has long been the territory south of the Litani river, the southern stretch of which lies about 15 miles north of the Israeli border and which is widely referenced in diplomatic negotiations as dividing Southern Lebanon.
From 1985, Israel formally occupied a security zone in Southern Lebanon but controversially withdrew in 2000 under prime minister Ehud Barak.
Lebanon south of the Litani is now predominantly Shi’ite, and dominated militarily by the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, the only Lebanese militia that was permitted to remain armed at the end of the Civil War in 1989 under the Taif Agreement because of its role as a “resistance force” against Israel.
Since then, Israel has not found either a military or diplomatic solution to Hezbollah’s presence south of the Litani. The 2006 Lebanon war ended inconclusively, and while U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 called for Hezbollah’s disarmament and withdrawal north of the Litani, that resolution has never been enforced.
Oren noted that the belief that Lebanese state institutions can act independently of Hezbollah’s influence is a significant divide between American and Israeli diplomats.
“The United States believes there’s actually a place called ‘Lebanon’ and believes that there’s an entity known as ‘the Lebanese army,’” said Oren. “Israel has long since regarded Lebanon as Hezbollah and the Lebanese army as Hezbollah.”
The lack of a strategic vision in both Israel and the United States for how to restore security in the north of Israel, either by diplomatic or military means, stands in contrast to what has been accomplished in and around Gaza since Oct. 7, according to Oren.
The military capabilities of Hamas and other terror groups in the Palestinian enclave have been significantly degraded by Israel’s military operations since Oct. 7. Even if Hamas were to retain an arsenal of rockets and mortars, those can be countered by Iron Dome and other Israeli countermeasures.
Hezbollah, by contrast, retains a reserve of between 150,000 and 170,000 rockets—enough, it would seem, to overwhelm Israeli missile defense batteries—and there is no Israeli missile defense system that can intercept the anti-tank rockets that Hezbollah is able to directly fire into towns like Metula along the border.
“Hamas posed a tactical threat to Israel,” Oren said. “As horrible as Hamas was, it’s just a tactical threat.”
Hezbollah, by contrast, “is a strategic threat, and Hezbollah is one of the strongest military forces certainly in the Middle East, or anywhere,” he added. “It’s not just Hezbollah. We could be in a war with Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria, even Yemen and then with Iran itself. We’re talking about a regional conflagration into which the United States could well be drawn.”
Despite the risk of the United States being drawn into a region-wide conflict with Iran and its proxies, Oren said that when he traveled to Washington in June, the White House had no good answers for Israel’s northern residents.
“One of the members of the delegation asked the advisers to the president, what would you have us do? And the response was nothing,” said Oren. “There was no response. I mean, basically, just sit there and take it. That’s not that’s not an option for the State of Israel.”
That Hezbollah has depopulated a significant swath of Israeli territory raises a fundamental challenge to Israeli sovereignty. With minor exceptions like the Shebaa Farms, no part of northern Israel is disputed in international border disagreements or considered as part of a potential future Palestinian state.
Oren said that if this situation persists, Hezbollah can challenge Israeli sovereignty deeper and deeper into the Galilee region.
“It’s a creeping war of attrition,” he said. “The day that I went up to the north, we were in lower Galilee, and we were hit by a barrage of 20 rockets,” he said. “One of them killed an American. That’s an untenable situation.”
“If somehow someone thinks that we can lose the north and not lose the center, they’re kidding themselves,” he added.
Gift that keeps on giving
Oren served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s second premiership from 2009 to 2013 and then as a deputy minister in the government from 2016 to 2017.
Ahead of Netanyahu’s trip to Washington to address a joint session of Congress last week, amid fierce protests from some congressional Democrats and growing divides between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government about Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas, Oren said that mistakes and misunderstandings on both sides had contributed to the increasing partisanship in U.S. support for Israel.
“Netanyahu is the gift that keeps giving to American critics of Israel, because they can focus the criticism on Netanyahu and not on Israel,” he said. “Were Netanyahu to step down tomorrow, 90% to 95% of our policies would be exactly the same,” he added.
“The people around Netanyahu actually know that he’s very conflict averse,” Oren added. “He doesn’t like war. He’s the opposite of his image in the United States as sort of this warmonger. He’s anything but.”
Oren believes that fixing the relationship between Israel and the United States begins with ending Israeli reliance on U.S. military aid, which has been both a cornerstone of the U.S.-Israel alliance for decades and a bête noir of American opponents of Israel on the left and right.
“I think we should get off American aid and get into a relationship of cooperation and not handouts,” said Oren. “We should be cooperating with the United States on a partner basis in areas like cyber defense and laser defense and intelligence.”
Those areas of cooperation contrast with some of the specific munitions transfers that the Obama administration and now the Biden administration have withheld from Israel over U.S. concerns about Palestinian civilian casualties.
That viewpoint led Oren to be the only member of the Israeli government to oppose the 2016 memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel for Washington to provide $38 billion in military aid over a 10-year period.
“One of the concerns I raised about the memorandum of understanding was a recurrence of what had happened in 2014 during ‘[Operation] Protective Edge,’ when Barack Obama held up the resupply of vital forms of ammunition because ‘we’re killing too many Palestinians,’” he said. “I asked myself what would happen in the same situation, on a much … larger scale? We would be vulnerable, and I wanted to be, as much as possible, munitions-independent of the United States,” he added.
Even as Israelis are concerned about the political, strategic, diplomatic and military disputes in the U.S.-Israel alliance, they are nonetheless more confident in their partnership with Washington than with other states in the increasingly anti-Israel west.
“Many Israelis are far from convinced that the west will stand by itself,” Oren said. “On Oct. 8-9, about 360,000 Israelis picked up arms to defend this place. These were not people off the street. These were heads of corporations and families and school teachers and administrators.
“They knew that some of them wouldn’t come back; 360,000 Israelis would proportionately be equivalent to 20 million Americans, which is significantly more Americans than fought in all World War II,” he said.
“You ask yourself, where else in the west does this happen?” he added. “Is someone in Belgium willing to pick up a gun to fight for Belgium?”
