Mitchell Bard is a foreign-policy analyst and an authority on U.S.-Israel relations. He has written and edited 22 books, including The Arab Lobby, Death to the Infidels: Radical Islam’s War Against the Jews; After Anatevka: Tevye in Palestine; and Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler’s Camps.
(JNS) Israel’s critics, and even many of its friends, consistently fail to grasp the brutal reality of Israel’s security dilemmas: They rarely present good options, only variations of bad ones. Lebanon exemplifies this predicament.
Israel cannot tolerate a heavily armed Hezbollah threatening its northern population, yet every available strategy-containment, escalation or occupation-carries serious costs. The current path, a potential reoccupation of Southern Lebanon, risks dragging Israel back into a protracted quagmire reminiscent of the Second Lebanon War that many Israelis still view as their Vietnam.
For years, Netanyahu-led governments watched as Iran armed Hezbollah with an estimated 150,000 missiles (this in defiance of the 2006 UNSC Resolution 1701 touted by then Froeign Minister Tzipi Livni which called for disarmament, ed.). Occasionally, Israel interdicted weapons shipments or destroyed caches and manufacturing sites. Despite these efforts, the Sword of Damocles still hung over Israel as Netanyahu pursued deterrence and containment.
That strategy appeared to work-until it didn’t. Hezbollah was not deterred; it was preparing. We now know it had planned a Hamas-style invasion from the north. If that attack had been coordinated with Oct. 7, Israel might have faced an even greater catastrophe. The last-minute rush of forces to the northern border may have averted disaster, but it did not eliminate the threat.
The sword fell when Hezbollah entered the war. For nearly a year, Israel endured rocket attacks, forcing most border residents to flee before ground troops entered Lebanon. Israel’s campaign delivered tactical successes: eliminating senior commanders, degrading missile capabilities and disrupting infrastructure. Netanyahu called these achievements decisive and claimed that they had weakened Hezbollah enough for displaced Israelis to return. But reality proved more stubborn.
Israel was pushed into a ceasefire in November 2024 by the incoming president before finishing its objectives, a fact underscored when the Israel Defense Forces began operations in Southern Lebanon. While Israeli propaganda touted dozens of daily strikes, announcing the elimination of terrorists and the destruction of infrastructure, a contradiction remained: If Hezbollah was truly degraded, why did Israel continue to uncover large reserves of weapons and infrastructure?
Progress in destroying missiles should show as fewer launches, yet Hezbollah’s have risen. Similarly, Israeli Air Force sorties should fall as Hezbollah’s capacity drops, but they have increased. No wonder Netanyahu leaves the time frame for defeating Hezbollah vague.
The ceasefire exposed a deeper illusion-that Hezbollah could be disarmed through diplomatic or Lebanese state action. In practice, this was never credible. Hezbollah dominates Lebanon’s political system and deeply penetrates its military. It has no intention of surrendering its weapons, and the Lebanese government has neither the will nor the capacity to force the issue without risking civil war; hence, the government’s deadline at the end of last year for establishing a monopoly on weapons passed without results.
Before the ceasefire, we knew Hezbollah had withdrawn most of its forces and weaponry north of the Litani River, where U.N. Resolution 1701 required them to be confined. Israel did not attack, allowing them to rebuild. Iran quickly replenished Hezbollah’s resources with massive financial support. As a result, Hezbollah remains resilient, lethal and capable of renewing attacks that force Israeli civilians back under fire.
Its decision to attack Israel after Iran’s leadership was assassinated gave Netanyahu the pretext to resume fighting with the intention of permanently ending the threat it posed. Israel’s vaunted air-defense system, however, can’t stop many of the missiles and anti-tank weapons Hezbollah uses to terrorize the population, and the northern communities are again under fire just as some were beginning to recover from the earlier bombardments.
In an unusually candid admission, a senior IDF officer acknowledged that fully disarming Hezbollah would require conquering all of Lebanon, an objective Israel is not pursuing. As a result, the army cannot entirely halt Hezbollah rocket fire since most launches originate north of the Litani River. Although the IDF later sought to walk back the remarks by reaffirming its long-term goal of disarmament, Hezbollah seized on the statement as evidence of Israeli limitations.
Now Israel faces a familiar, painful dilemma: Reoccupying Southern Lebanon might push Hezbollah north of the Litani River, but it cannot remove the group’s long-range capabilities or prevent its rebuilding. Worse still, such actions risk repeating the dynamics that once empowered Hezbollah: civilian displacement, mounting resentment and a prolonged Israeli military presence on Lebanese soil, all of which invite condemnation and erode both domestic and international support.
The displacement of up to 1 million Lebanese has a double-edged impact: It alienates potential Christian allies while enabling Hezbollah to blend into Shi’ite communities-a dynamic that, as Middle East analyst and author Seth Frantzman notes, “has the effect of cementing the group in power."
We’ve seen this movie before when Israel set up a much smaller security zone in Lebanon after the last war. With most of Hezbollah’s fire aimed at the IDF, it suffers more casualties, generating domestic discontent.
Also, unlike the situation in the 'West Bank', this would be a true occupation, as Israeli forces will be on sovereign Lebanese territory. This will trigger the predictable global condemnation-human-rights NGOs producing reports about violations of international law, U.N. resolutions calling for an end to the occupation and worldwide protests against Israeli “aggression."
And yet, the alternative remains elusive.
Israel cannot simply absorb ongoing attacks from a heavily armed, ideologically committed enemy, nor can it rely on international guarantees, which have repeatedly failed. Time alone will not diminish the threat. This forms the heart of Israel’s security dilemma: Every option is imperfect, every course entails risks, and even inaction has consequences.
The question critics rarely confront is fundamental-if not this, then what?