After it turned out that Trump’s warning about the “hell to pay” should the hostages not be out by the time he is inaugurated was aimed at Israel, not Hamas, dragging PM Netanyahu into making the very suicidal concessions he had resisted for more than a year – now it appears that the incoming president plans to erase Israel’s security accomplishments in south Lebanon as well.
Israeli officials have been saying that the Lebanese military is not living up to its obligations under the ceasefire agreement, doing nothing to push Hezbollah north of the Litani River, and are, in fact, alerting Hezbollah terrorists in south Lebanon about upcoming IDF weapons searches.
Trump’s PR messages are dedicated to presenting a reality in which as soon as the president-elect arrived on the scene, the war in Gaza ended, and peace reigned on the Israel-Lebanon border. Trump browbeat Netanyahu into accepting the Gaza part of the message, but now Hezbollah has been warning that should the IDF remain north of the border after the 60 days of the ceasefire are up––to do what the Lebanese army is not doing––it would resume the shooting war with Israel. These warnings are threatening the second part of Trump’s PR message, and the solution is, once again, browbeating Bibi.
The Jerusalem Post revealed Thursday night that sources close to Trump have warned Israeli officials, stating, “We don’t want the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon to collapse.”
This means that no matter how successful or miserably failing the Lebanese army is at handling Hezbollah, the IDF must withdraw from south Lebanon at the appointed time, just as it is going to withdraw from all its security assets in Gaza.
How bad are Bibi’s chances to persuade Trump to see things his way? Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), possibly Israel’s best and most dedicated friend on the Hill, told Kan11 News on Thursday that relations between the Trump administration and Israel will be strong and solid, and that the agreement to the hostage deal did not result from Trump’s pressure on Netanyahu: “It’s not just Bibi, but a large majority of Israelis who understood that a deal needed to be made to return their hostages,” Graham said.
Graham knows better than that. He may even know that the majority of coalition voters object to the hostage deal in its latest form (48% to 40% in a Thursday night Direct Polls survey). But ever the political survivor, who morphed into a MAGA warrior minutes after condemning Trump for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Senator Graham prefers to ignore the disastrous consequences of releasing close to 2,000 terrorists, 400 of them into Judea and Samaria where they can start murdering Jews right after munching the last baklawa.
And like the entire world media as well as Israel’s mainstream media, Graham ignores the immediate consequences of an IDF withdrawal from Rafah and the Philadelphi corridor, where mountains of arms and ammunition paid for by Iran are waiting to be transported into Hamas’s hands from the Egyptian side of the borders.
And they ignore the fact that the remaining hostages, dead and alive, could be smuggled across the border and end up in Tehran should the IDF be gone from the scene in southern Gaza.
Back to the second Trump slap in one week: the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli officials have sought to convey to their US counterparts that the Lebanese Army’s deployment has been slow and inadequate, allowing Hezbollah to maintain a significant presence in the region. As a result, Israeli officials argue that their continued presence in the area is crucial.
Israel also wants the US to remain involved in the monitoring mechanism over the ceasefire in south Lebanon. But if the orders from Washington to US officials on the ground are to ignore Hezbollah’s territorial violations while restraining the IDF from responding – then we have just entered a nightmare.
As we say in the Ashkenazi selichot: “We have turned to the right and there is no savior; to the left and there is no support, and for us, we can rely on no one except upon You, our Father in heaven.”
