3,000 years of madness and death

9th Century BCE

You can measure how dangerous it is to live in both Israel and Lebanon in miles.  You can drive from Tel Aviv to Nahariya, the northernmost city on Israel’s coast, just a few miles from the Lebanese border, in just over an hour.  Metula, the Israeli town furthest away from Tel Aviv on the border with Lebanon is just two hours away by car, about 120 miles.  The distance from Tel Aviv to the largest city in southern Lebanon, Tyre, is 85 miles, just ten minutes away from Nahariya if you could drive there, which you can’t.

This is a very small neighborhood of very hostile countries.  It takes only a minute or so for a rocket fired by Hezbollah to reach its target in Israel.  It takes only a few moments for an Israeli jet aircraft to fly from its base to the point of launch where missiles are fired at Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. 

Hezbollah began a sustained campaign of rocket and missile attacks on Israel a few days ago in response to the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies Israel inflicted on Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Israel has responded by launching more than 2,000 airstrikes on caches of Hezbollah rockets and missiles inside Lebanon.  For all intents and purposes, Israel and Hezbollah are in open warfare.  The only thing missing has been a ground assault by either side on the other.

Exactly that became a much stronger possibility today when Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi told Israeli soldiers to prepare for a ground invasion.  Two brigades of reserve troops were called to duty and sent to holding positions in northern Israel, and Israel’s 7^th Brigade engaged in training exercises near the Lebanese border earlier today. 

You would think that Benjamin Netanyahu would be just a tiny bit chastened after all the international criticism he has received for the slaughter of civilians in Gaza that took place under his orders.  He has even been charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) with the crime of starvation for the siege of Gaza he ordered, and arrest warrants have been sought for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by the ICC’s top prosecutor.

You would also think that with fighting still taking pace in Gaza that Netanyahu would want to avoid opening a second war front.  But Netanyahu seems immune to international pressure at least in part because the longer the war by Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah goes on, the longer before Netanyahu will face criminal charges for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a court in Israel.

The last time Israel launched a ground assault into Lebanon was 2006 in response to a cross-border attack on an Israeli army patrol by Hezbollah.  That war lasted 34 days and caused the deaths of some 1,200 Lebanese and 165 Israelis.  During the 2006 war, Israel launched thousands of air strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, including bombing a suburb in south Beirut where Hezbollah headquarters were located. 

If any of this sounds familiar, it is because it is.  Deadly anger and retribution between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on since Israel declared Independence in 1948.  The conflict included two all-out regional wars, in 1967 and 1973, as well as cross-border offensives by Israel into Lebanon in 1978, 1982, and 1993 in addition to the all-out invasion of Lebanon in 2006.  There have continued to be cross-border military clashes and rocket attacks by both sides since then.  When Hamas attacked Israel on October 8 of last year, Hezbollah joined the conflict with a rocket attack on Shebaa Farms in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights and continued with more rocket attacks after that.

It's difficult in a column like this one to describe how violent and bitter it’s been between the two sides in this decades-long conflict that has involved terror attacks, guerilla warfare, all-out war, artillery shelling, rocket and missile attacks, and air strikes over the years.  It’s madness, all of it.  It is especially insane that Israel and the Palestinians have never been able to come to a lasting peace agreement and a solution that would involve two states, one for Israel, and the other for Palestinians. 

The conflict over these lands pre-dates Biblical times and achieved a religious intensity with the adoption of the Muslim religion by many non-Jews in what became known as Palestine.  It’s also difficult to describe the internecine nature of the conflict, as it is between peoples who have lived on the same land in close proximity to one another for centuries. 

If you go to Jerusalem, you can visit archaeological sites that show how the Old City of today was built by one civilization atop another over the millennia, the city of the Philistines covered over by the Israelites, conquered by the Babylonians, followed by the Greeks, and the Romans, and the Ottomans…

You get the picture.  It’s a sliver of land on the shores of the Mediterranean that has echoed through history with the sounds of the clashes that happened there – swords and spears and primitive siege weapons and then with the invention of gunpowder in the 9^th Century and its arrival in the Middle East in the 13^th Century, the sounds and deadly effects of explosions that persist to this day.  Its history is one of wars and conquest and enslavement and conquest again and destruction and rebuilding and more conquest and more enslavement, until in so-called modern times, with enslavement behind us, what’s left is war and conquest and destruction and rebuilding.

It's not going to stop.  Even if Netanyahu’s Israel doesn’t launch a ground invasion of Lebanon, the cross-border raids and rockets and missiles and airstrikes will go on in a modern copy of the way that armies once invaded the lands and cities of rivals in a never-ending roundelay of violence and conquest.  The so-called “Cradle of Civilization” of the Tigris and Euphrates is close enough that rockets fired from the coast of the Mediterranean where the Romans and the Crusaders once landed can reach the modern-day Babylon of Baghdad and the land of the Persians once overrun by Alexander now known as Iran, yet another player in the never-ending clash of civilizations still going on with its support of Hezbollah.

You may ask why Israel is bombing so many civilian towns and villages in southern Lebanon.  The answer is, that is where Hezbollah stores its rockets and missiles and caches of artillery shells and small arms and ammunition.  When I was in southern Lebanon on Christmas day in 1975, I visited a town in the foothills of Mount Hermon.  It was an ancient town of stone homes and narrow cobblestone streets.  From the outside, it looked like a village from the 5^th Century in a picture book.  But walking through the village, I could see that Fatah, the Palestinian terror group of the time, had removed the fronts of stone houses and parked its military gun-trucks in what were the homes’ living rooms.  The gun trucks, mounted with .50 caliber machine guns, were what Fatah had before they were supplied with Katyusha rockets in later years.  Fatah used the gun-trucks cross-border raids on Israeli villages and farms.  The mayor of the village told me Fatah parked its trucks under nearby olive trees where they could not be seen by Israeli intelligence overflights, but in the winter when the trees lost their leaves, Fatah seized the ground floors of local homes and hid their trucks there.

That’s essentially what Hezbollah is doing with its stores of rockets and missiles and other weaponry – hiding it in civilian homes in civilian villages.  Israel has developed information, probably a combination of on-the-ground intelligence, satellite surveillance, and overflights by aircraft with side-looking cameras and other high-tech devices, showing the locations of Hezbollah missiles and rockets.  So, they are hitting the weapons where they are kept.

Civilians have been killed in the hundreds, according to reports from Lebanon.  This gets into what comprises collateral damage and what comprises a war crime.  I’ve seen allegations that Israel’s use of booby-trapped pagers was a war crime because civilians near the devices were wounded, and some were killed when they exploded.  A report I saw today alleged that even if the pagers were issued to Hezbollah fighters, they were not engaged in combat when the pagers went off, so that made the exploding pagers a war crime. 

This ignores the fact that the purpose of the pagers was to send military messages to Hezbollah fighters.  The message could be something like, “report to your combat duty station,” sending the fighter from wherever he was to a gathering point for Hezbollah military units or groups.  Some of the pagers were said to have exploded in “markets” where the Hezbollah fighter was shopping, causing other shoppers to be injured.  

Saying that an apparently off-duty Hezbollah militant was not a legitimate target is like saying that a soldier in the U.S. Army is not really a soldier when he is in civilian clothes at Target or McDonalds.  Hezbollah is said to have between 60,000 and 100,000 trained fighters.  The way they’re organized is this:  they are part of the Lebanese population until they are called up to fight by Hezbollah…similar to the way a soldier at Fort Moore, Georgia, is part of the population of nearby Columbus until he puts on his uniform and reports for training on the post or is deployed overseas.

Other than the war in Ukraine, not since World War II and Korea have there been enemies in conflict with each other where both sides wore uniforms.  Insurgents in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan wore civilian clothes. Entire wars have been fought in Africa and elsewhere by soldiers not in uniform. Terrorists who attacked buses and movie theaters in Israel wore explosive vests under civilian jackets so they could not be seen.  Only when the explosion went off and killed bus passengers or moviegoers did anyone know they had been in the presence of a terrorist, a “fighter” for the PLO or Fatah or Hezbollah or Hamas.

This stuff isn’t clear-cut, and it isn’t easy.  There are no visible lines that demarcate what is military and what isn’t.  Israel has made a decision to destroy rockets and missiles that belong to Hezbollah before they are launched and must be shot from the sky by Israel’s Iron Dome.  If Hezbollah stored its missiles in buildings marked “Ammunition and missiles,” that would make destroying them easy.  But they don’t.

We don’t know how many civilians were killed when the Neo-Babylonian Empire attacked Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple of the Judaeans.  We don’t know how many civilians died when the Second Temple was destroyed in the Roman siege of Jerusalem. 

This is not to excuse what is happening in southern Lebanon to the civilians whose homes have been used by Hezbollah to store their missiles and rockets.  More than a million are said to have fled southern Lebanon for Beirut trying to avoid Israel’s airstrikes.  We are not in the eras of Babylon and Persia and Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great.  We are in the era of Benjamin Netanyahu and Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar. 

The land is the same.  The conflict is the same or similar.  Death and destruction are still ever-present.  All that has changed is the methodology of killing.