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In-depth: As Israel’s war expands, Netanyahu has issued Lebanon a chilling threat: rise against Hezbollah and risk civil war or be destroyed like Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered Lebanon a choice.
In an address last week, he called on the Lebanese to “stand up and take your country back” or risk “the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering just like we see in Gaza”.
In the two weeks since Israel launched what it called a “limited, localised, targeted” ground invasion, 2,255 people have been killed, and over 10,000 wounded, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Over 1.2 million have been displaced, with a quarter of the country now effectively under an Israeli evacuation order.
As social tensions in Lebanon simmer and the scale of Israel’s ambitions grow, there are fears Netanyahu is trying to exploit sectarian anxieties, offering the choice of a civil war or suffering the same fate as Gaza.
Israel’s growing war aims
On 10 October, Israel targeted Wafiq Safa, a senior Hezbollah official, in central Beirut, killing 22 and injuring 117.
Although it appears Safa survived the strike, this incident is the latest in a string of assassinations that have decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership.
As Netanyahu put it in his address, we killed “Nasrallah himself, and his replacement, and his replacement’s replacement”.
For the Israeli leader, this represents – what he called – “an opportunity that hasn’t existed in decades”.
“Through these assassinations Israel has gained an upper hand, they feel like Hezbollah is in disarray and they have become thirsty for a more significant victory,” says Yeghia Tashjian, Regional and International Affairs Cluster Coordinator at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.
“This war is no longer about pushing Hezbollah back beyond the Litani, now it’s about entirely destroying them as a military force,” he told The New Arab.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu reportedly told President Macron that he would not accept any arrangement that allows Hezbollah to reorganise and rearm.
However, Tashjian noted, “it remains unclear how successful Israel will be in defeating Hezbollah. They have completely devastated Gaza over the last year and yet Hamas is still active”.
ACLED, a conflict monitoring agency, has found that, in contradiction to Israeli claims that Hamas has been effectively defeated, up to half of its fighters may still be active in Gaza.
For Abbas, displaced from his home in the south, the possibility of Israel turning Lebanon into a second Gaza is his “greatest fear”.
He told The New Arab, “we are now living in the unknown, we don’t know how long the war will last, or even if we will be able to return to our homes if Lebanon becomes like Gaza”.
Israel has mobilised five divisions in support of its invasion, a force of comparative size to that used in Gaza.
“The destruction of this war has surpassed 2006,” says Mohammed Al-Basha, an independent US-based Middle East analyst. “Netanyahu is threatening to turn Lebanon into Gaza, but the south is already becoming akin to it, its people have been displaced and its buildings largely flattened.”
Gaza ceasefire talks have essentially collapsed, and Biden, ostensibly a lame-duck, is either unwilling or unable to put redlines in place that limit the growing destruction. As a result, multiple analysts believe, there is little chance of an end to the conflict until a new president is inaugurated in January.
It seems Netanyahu may be seeking to exploit that, believes Michael Young, a senior editor at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, who argues that Netanyahu’s message is targeted at a US audience, designed to frame Israel’s invasion as ‘liberation’.
According to Young, Netanyahu is trying to bring the US administration onside as only they are capable of frustrating his designs on the country.
It appears to be working. The US has dropped its previous calls for a 21-day ceasefire, and Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, is instead now briefing that the US supports Israel’s incursions in Lebanon.
Alongside this, according to Axios, the US special envoy to Lebanon Amos Hochstein’s June peace proposal has been taken ‘off the table’, with the administration now seeing Hezbollah’s weakness as an opportunity to elect a US-aligned president.
Inflaming sectarian anxieties
Young also sees Netanyahu’s speech as “psychological warfare”, designed to increase the pressure on Lebanese society.
The war is “increasing sectarian anxieties, and the Israelis are playing on those to make the presence of displaced Shia toxic in order to further pressure Hezbollah,” he says.
Abbas and his family, after their harrowing displacement to Beirut from the south, experienced such hostility firsthand.
“We found several apartments, but when the landlords learnt we were Shia displacees with names like Abbas and Ali, we were told the apartments were no longer available,” he told The New Arab.
After a week of living between hotels, Abbas’ family finally managed to rent an apartment in Dhour El-Choueir.
“We feel a sense of security now because the people here are very kind, but despite this, I still feel like a stranger, you can still see the looks of pity in people’s eyes.”
On Monday, an Israeli airstrike on the Christian village of Aito killed 20 people, families internally displaced from the south, intensifying fears that displacement is putting Lebanon’s other communities at risk of becoming targets themselves.
“I feel worried. I’m not worried about the displaced themselves, but I’m worried about Hezbollah and the fact we don’t know who among them is Hezbollah or not,” Roland Gemayel, a Christian from Broummana, told TNA.
Despite these concerns, Roland opened his home to displaced civilians from southern Beirut. “I wanted to set an example for my family, many of which would never dare take in a Shia. I’m also trying to show that not all Christians are hostile to the Shia community,” he said.
“Ultimately I am trying to embody a new way of thinking, because this country really needs it.”
However, social media is awash with incidents of communal tensions. One video depicts a Syrian man who had been assaulted, blindfolded, and tied to a lamppost in southern Beirut.
The man filming the video says, “this one is from Idlib, they were distributing baklava after Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah died”.
In another, a Shia man in Tripoli is assaulted by a group of individuals for having previously uploaded a video insulting venerable Sunni figures.
Growing social tensions have led some to arm themselves as a precaution. After taking in thirty displaced family members from southern Beirut to his home in Hamra, Saleh decided to retrieve his cache of weapons from the mountains.
“We don’t know how bad this could get,” he told The New Arab. “I’m not so worried about the bombing to be honest, but it’s chaos breaking out in the streets that is the real danger, so it’s good to have my weapons nearby just in case.”
With the weight of trauma pressing down on all, the possibility of sectarian conflict represents a shared nightmare.
“I lived through the civil war. When I was just nine, I was taught how to use a gun in case we had to defend our village. I can’t bear putting my daughter through that,” says Roland.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Abbas, who believes that “Israel’s attempts to stir up sectarian strife are more dangerous than their war against us, we need to avoid falling into such a trap, and stay united”.
Although internal divisions exist in Lebanon, Netanyahu’s ‘liberatory’ rhetoric is perceived as wholly incongruent with the suffering that Israel has unleashed across the country.
As Yeghia Tashjian put it, “whilst many are furious at Hezbollah, Israel’s incursion is still a clear red line, because we all, regardless of sect, consider every metre of Lebanon a sacred territory”.
