The Third Lebanon War: Is It Really Over?
I swear sometimes I actually do see the future. Who could have predicted that mere days after the globally-announced ‘ceasefire’ between Israel and Lebanon that Hezbollah terrorists would immediately violate said ceasefire by taking up offensive positions that had been previously used to fire rockets aimed directly at the Jewish state?
Oh wait, I already said that there’s zero chance the terrorist proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran honor any ‘ceasefire’ whatsoever. Last week I said that before the ceasefire was even announced, and probably many times in the past. To terrorists, “ceasefire” means that their enemies will cease, and they will continue firing. The newly-minted ceasefire agreement between the governments of Israel and Lebanon to me seems a bit of a moot point, as Israel’s war in the north is not with the Lebanese government or people but with the occupying terrorist forces of Hezbollah which are nothing more than a puppet in the hands of the Islamic Republic. In spite of the entire world’s desire to see peace in the Middle East, so long as Khamenei sits on the ‘Terrorist Throne’ there can be no peace. He will not allow it, as the past decades have shown over. And over. And over again.
Where does one war end and the next begin? The answer is not as simple as you may think. I am not officially a military historian; but I do know my history. Some may claim that World War II began in September of 1931 with the Empire of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria or in 1937 with the broadening of the war to all of China; others more commonly that it began on September 1st, 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Yet others may say that ‘World War II’ was really just a continuation of World War I as the Treaty of Versailles virtually guaranteed—which is a point of view I do not agree with, but you should not take my opinions as sacrosanct. And then there’s the Korean War, which we say “ended” in 1953…but North and South Korea still haven’t even a treaty in place to point to for peace.
The first questions we must ask to determine whether the ‘Third Lebanon War’ is really over are the more fundamental questions of when and how the war really began. Let’s recap how we got to this point in Israel’s war with the terrorist forces of Hezbollah.
Since October 7th, 2023, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets primarily at civilian targets in Israel. This has internally displaced up to a hundred thousand Israelis from their homes in the north, for well over a year now. To put this in perspective, that’s over one percent of the entire population of their country. Imagine if the entire populations of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont (one of whose Senators recently voted to allow Hezbollah to butcher Israelis unchallenged) had to flee their homes to escape unrelenting terrorist attacks from Trudeau’s Canada—an absurd hypothetical that is sadly becoming more and more plausible each passing day. Even a single rocket fired into civilian populations with the intent to injure or kill civilians is enough casus belli to justify utterly neutralizing the threat to our people. Every single country on Earth would agree with this as applied to every other nation (at least in theory) as it forms the foundation of the concept of self-defense—except for when it comes to the lone exception, the Jewish state. Jewish lives count for less in the eyes of the wider world. It is a disgraceful period of time to be a living human being.
Israelis have tolerated situations like this before—such as during the ‘Second Intifada’, when thousands of Israelis and Palestinians both were killed via terrorist attacks or attempts to stop them. Ironically, the measures then put in place to secure Israel’s defense that save Palestinian lives too are the basis of what ignoramuses call “Israeli apartheid”—a conception as absurd as it is offensive to people who actually suffered apartheid.
After a year of tolerating Hezbollah’s unrelenting terror rockets, Israel finally had had enough. Suddenly, pagers and walkie-talkies began exploding in the faces and pants of Hezbollah middle management. Operation ‘New Order’ culminated in the bunker-busters dropped on Hezbollah HQ that killed Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah and now if there is any justice in this life or the next the personal chew-toy of Cerberus. And then, Israel’s ground campaign began. It has been a grueling operation, with far too many of the world’s best youth giving their lives in service to protect and defend the Jewish state. Hezbollah’s management may have been sleeping with the fishes already, but isolated terror cells of jihadi radicals are still incredibly dangerous. Israel reached all the way to the Litani river a little ways north of Tyre (the island city Alexander the Great turned into a peninsula) before the ‘ceasefire’ was announced. Israel is still striking Hezbollah as they attempt to do what they always do, but the operation seems to be mostly paused. What happens next is not something I can even really hazard a guess at. Is it all over? Will Israel pull back entirely? Will they keep going until nothing remains of Hezbollah? I cannot say.
To tie back in to the original question presented, the fact of the matter is that whether the ‘Third Lebanon War’ is over or even began in the first place depends on a great number of things; but most of all, it depends on the intentions of the parties involved. There is indeed a case to be made that Israel has been at war with Hezbollah since their founding in 1982, as Hezbollah has only ever desired to be at war with the Jewish state and people. Every opportunity they get, they will attempt to kill Jews and their allies. There will never exist true peace between Hezbollah and Israel. It simply cannot be. And in an effort to explain why that is, let me dive into a little historical-cultural-religious tangent.
I’ve heard it said that whereas Hamas works with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah works for them. This has to do in no small part with the particular religious radicalism of the parties. The Islamic Republic is a “revolutionary” Shia Islamist regime—so-called because they have a desire to “revolutionize” history and rectify the fact that Sunni Islam has been the dominant force in the Islamic world for basically the last thousand years. They believe that the best (and perhaps the only) way to do so is to take Jerusalem (Al-Quds in Arabic; I’m unsure of Persian) and expel the “Zionist Entity” from the land—even though to my knowledge Shia Islam has never had a dominant presence in the ancient homeland of the Jews. Hezbollah is a Shia Islamist, militant terrorist group just as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran is. They follow the drumbeat of a Shia “revolution” across the entire world.
Other denominations have different goals. The Sunni Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is a large focal point, and has been since it was built on the Temple Mount and the ruins of the Second Temple of ancient Jewish history. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) follow a radical Sunni Islamist interpretation that seeks to impose their religious fundamentalism on the entire region; and, eventually, the world. They don’t want a “revolution”—they want a return to a thousand years ago when Sunni Islam looked like it might just conquer the entire Earth. It has never been about the ‘Palestinian’ cause. Hamas wouldn’t care if the next caliphate swallowed ‘Palestine’ whole—in fact, they would cheer it on. So long as it is a Sunni caliphate.
The only, only group that these diametrically-opposed radicals within Islam hate more than each other—is apparently the Jewish people. Jew hate is the great unifier of history. It is such a powerful motivating force that people oblivious to its nature will take the side of literal genocidal terrorists and the most extreme of religious fundamentalists over the Jewish people.
More interestingly, the various jihadi groups that are for now united against Israel are fractured even within the Shia denominations. Some are ‘fivers’ and some ‘twelvers’, which has to do I believe with the particular Imams (or priests) of history they follow. But I have much studying of Islamic history to do yet before I can go too in-depth with any confidence. Suffice to say that history is extraordinarily complicated, and only gets moreso the more you study.
And I am fast approaching the point of exhaustion. I know that I have left many threads tangled yet. I hope you at least found something useful in this scrawling text without a defined end. Until the next.