Column: No more diplomatic games from Biden and Blinken
President Biden has seen enough. On Sept. 26, the United States joined nine other countries and the European Union to demand a three-week ceasefire across the Lebanon-Israel border. “It is time,” the group said in a statement, “to conclude a diplomatic settlement that enables civilians on both sides of the border to return to their homes in safety.”
I’ve consumed a lot of multilateral mush during the Biden years. Never have I encountered a statement as disingenuous, deluded, and feckless as this.
Notice who signed it: the United States, Australia, Canada, the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Not Israel. Not Lebanon. And, most significantly, neither Hezbollah nor Iran. The terrorist army and its patron aren’t mentioned. How do you negotiate a ceasefire without naming the belligerents?
Israel isn’t fighting Lebanon. Israel wants nothing to do with Lebanon. The IDF left there 24 years ago. Israel is attempting to restore deterrence against Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that functions like a state-within-a-state inside its Lebanese host.
Since the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, Hezbollah has used its safe harbor to fire rockets into Israel’s north. The shelling has forced some 60,000 Israelis from their homes. In July, a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 Druze children playing soccer. Hezbollah’s onslaught is unprovoked, indiscriminate, illegal.
Why? In 2006, Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah agreed to U.N. Resolution 1701. It said that Hezbollah would move its forces north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone between Iran’s proxy and Israel’s north. Hezbollah never complied. And the multinational U.N. force that operates in southern Lebanon never bothered to enforce the agreement.
For 17 years, Hezbollah restocked its arsenal of rockets and ballistic missiles, waiting for orders from the terror masters in Tehran. The green light arrived on Oct. 7. Now, rather than a security buffer in Lebanon, there is one in Israel—a ghost zone of abandoned communities and uprooted lives.
The situation is intolerable. No nation would stand for it. No democracy would countenance it. That Israelis have put up with such disruption for so long is a reminder of their fortitude and clarity of purpose. Destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages came first. Hezbollah could wait.
But the wait is over. Hamas is devastated. The Egypt-Gaza border is secure. The IDF has control of the Gaza Strip above ground, as its forces methodically explore and collapse Hamas’s tunnel network below. The search for the remaining hostages goes on. Hamas won’t free them. They must be rescued. It’s slow, tough, grueling work under extraordinary conditions and relentless pressure. Work that requires fewer resources than before.
Which allows Israel to turn to Hezbollah. Last week’s remarkable device attack wreaked havoc on the militia’s operatives and communications. Sophisticated airstrikes took out the leadership of Hezbollah’s special forces and damaged its weapon stockpiles.
Preparations for a ground incursion have begun. No one wants it to happen. But it might have to. If Hezbollah doesn’t stand down, there is no other way to diminish the threat. No other way to make good on the promise of Israel to provide security for the Jewish people.
Diplomacy hasn’t worked. Biden’s joint statement reads as if negotiations haven’t been tried. On the contrary: U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein has been traversing the region for months. He’s been as ineffective as Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the quest for a Gaza truce. It’s not Israel that has made Hochstein and Blinken look like fools. It’s the terrorist psychopaths they treat as good-faith interlocutors who won’t take yes for an answer.
In Hezbollah’s case, a deal has been on the table since 2006. Move your forces back. Stop trying to kill Israelis. Peace is elusive because Hezbollah’s not interested. Hezbollah doesn’t exist to make friends. It exists to destroy Israel and America. It’s an Iranian asset in a strategic location meant to deter Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear program. Lebanon’s central government is either uninterested or incapable of challenging Syria and Iran. And the U.N. is worse than useless.
Israelis understand. Prime Minister Netanyahu has seen support for his party rise since Israel began taking the fight to its enemies in unorthodox ways. The division over hostage negotiations with Hamas is absent in conversations about the north. Hezbollah prevents Israelis from living in safety. It must be stopped.
Rather than building sandcastles with his friends in the U.N., President Biden could try applying to our besieged ally in the Middle East the same rhetorical and material support he bestows on Ukraine. But that is not the president we have. Biden’s policy of escalation management has produced expanding circles of ruin from Kiev to the Gulf of Aden. His Defense Department’s statement that it’s not providing intelligence to Israel in Lebanon is disgraceful. Israel would be right to ignore him—and to do what’s necessary to restore balance to the region and Israelis to their homes.
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