Lebanon: Where Israel’s Grand Designs Go to Die

Recognizing that Israel’s old policy of securing its northern border by force had turned into a fiasco, a pragmatic Israeli general turned Labor Party politician looks for a way out of Lebanon; talks with the Syrians start promisingly but then collapse; Israel quickly withdraws unilaterally; and the Middle East deck is reshuffled.

Sound familiar? It should. The above events occurred not these recent days when Israel’s decades-long occupation of southern Lebanon collapsed virtually overnight, but in 1985. The general-politician was not Ehud Barak but Yitzhak Rabin, then the defense minister charged with engineering an Israeli pullback after the disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon launched by Rabin’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon. Rabin reached out to Syria--then as now, using the United States as a mediator--but Syrian President Hafez Assad balked at negotiating an Israeli withdrawal.

Finally, in January 1985, Israel decided to leave on its own, quitting Lebanon save for the 9-mile-deep security zone that collapsed last week.

So the turmoil in Lebanon comes as a reminder that after all-out war, the siege of an Arab capital and decades of grinding occupation, Israel still has found no good solution to the basic problem of how to keep its northern border quiet.

Yet last week’s Lebanon echoes are also a reminder of the perils of ambition. Israeli politicians have repeatedly fallen prey to the temptation to use Lebanon not merely to stop Arab terrorists from shelling the Galilee but to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict entirely.

Lebanon, however, is where Israeli strategists’ grand designs go to die. And with two such grand strategies in tatters--Sharon’s and Barak’s--Israel finds itself uncomfortably close to square one.

Take Sharon’s grand design first. Sharon’s boss, Menachem Begin, once joked mirthlessly that if he had not made the relentless Sharon defense minister, Sharon would have ringed the Knesset with tanks. In fact, Sharon hoodwinked Begin, the Cabinet and the Israel Defense Forces, using PLO attacks on northern Israel as a pretext to invade, drive the PLO out of Lebanon and try to install a friendly Maronite Christian regime in Beirut.

Sharon’s daft grand design fell spectacularly apart, of course. Syria had no intention of letting Bashir Gemayel, Israel’s Maronite proxy, take over a country that Assad himself coveted. Bashir Gemayel was assassinated, and Lebanon’s balance of power tipped away from the Maronites and the Sunnis and toward the Syrians, the Druze and the country’s increasingly restive Shiite plurality. The security zone in the south played unhappy host to an ongoing low-intensity proxy firefight pitting Israel and its South Lebanon Army allies against Palestinian and Shiite militants.

If Sharon’s grand design was based on waging war, Barak’s was based on waging peace. If Sharon’s was based on defiance of democratic norms, Barak’s Lebanon ploy centered on his wildly popular campaign pledge to get Israeli soldiers out of Lebanon within a year.

Barak, however, was after more than a campaign issue. He sought to use Lebanon to bring Syria to the peace table, hoping to wrap up the entire Arab-Israeli conflict before Bill Clinton left office. Barak wanted treaties with the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria--a comprehensive peace package that he could deliver to his electorate.

If Assad could not wreak havoc with Israel in southern Lebanon, Barak figured, the Syrian leader would lose his most important inducement to get Israel to return the Golan.

But Assad balked at cutting a Golan deal, apparently irked by the leak of a draft treaty and by Israel’s vacillations over whether it would give back every inch of the Golan.

After Oslo, no sane Middle East analyst excludes the possibility that publicly stalled peace talks may mask backslapping on some Scandinavian fjord, and Barak still has a good shot at a framework deal with the Palestinians. But for now, at least, Barak’s grand design seems to have run out of gas.

The collapse of Sharon’s grand design and the stalling of Barak’s plan leave northern Israel not that far from where it started. Before 1982, Israel relied on the threat of reprisals to deter PLO terror. Now, with no buffer zone, Israel again must fall back on deterrence--boosted by blunt threats to Damascus that if Hezbollah tries any monkey business in the Galilee, the IDF will not limit its counterstrike to Lebanon.

Hezbollah may well not want to endanger its growing political clout in Lebanon by dragging the country too deep into a clash with Israel. But the potential for things to get out of hand is very real.

Israel’s adversaries will probably try to test Barak’s tolerance. Some emboldened Hezbollah leaders will push for more attacks on Israel. Regardless, Hezbollah’s sponsors, Iran and Syria, will both be tempted to push the group to take cross-border shots--Iran to influence its domestic power struggles and embarrass Syria for its peace overtures, Syria to remind Israel that it cannot be ignored. Frozen out, Palestinian refugee groups also may try to make northern Israel feel their pain. In any event, as it crows about driving Israel out with its tail between its legs, Hezbollah knows it will not be shut down any time soon by Lebanon’s feeble, Syrian-controlled central government.

The worst-case scenario is a spiral of violence that starts with border raids and ends with an Israel-Syria war; the more likely ones entail at least some terrorism, guerrilla attacks, and Israeli reprisals that would wallop Lebanon. In either case, civilians will pay.

So two grand designs and two decades later, the Arab-Israeli conflict still has one hot border. American peace processors can be forgiven for groaning at the prospect of having to keep the Israel-Syria-Lebanon-Hezbollah standoff as calm as possible. But for now, southern Lebanon may be a problem that Israel will endure, not solve.

Some problems are acute, and some are chronic.