I spent a lovely Friday evening this summer on a friend’s terrace in northern Israel drinking cardamom-scented coffee a few kilometers from the Lebanese border. With the sun low on the horizon and a Mediterranean breeze blowing in from the west, the scene was idyllic. Except, that is, for the Iranian missiles falling from the sky and the Israeli rockets flying up to stop them.
It was a surreal moment. But since October 7, 2023, scenes like these—intense clashes between Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia that controls Lebanon, and the Israel Defense Forces—have been a daily reality for the people who live here. According to the Galilee-based Alma Research and Education Center, Hezbollah has launched 2,712 missile, rocket, and drone attacks on Israel since Oct. 7, killed 20 Israeli soldiers and 25 civilians, and forced at least 60,000 people out of their homes for almost a year. Fears of the Gaza conflict boiling over into a regional war are a constant refrain in the media but, as Assaf Orion writes at Foreign Affairs this month, “In some ways, this wider regional war is already at hand.”
With neither US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken nor his special envoy Amos Hochstein nor any of their Arab or European peers able to stop Hezbollah’s attacks through diplomacy, Israelis are demanding action from their prime minister—and Benjamin Netanyahu has no choice but to listen. Last Thursday he warned his security chiefs that a “large scale confrontation” with Hezbollah is coming. On Monday Yoav Gallant, his minister of defense, told US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that the time for deal-making with Hezbollah is about over. On Tuesday Israel’s security cabinet made the return of displaced families an official war aim.
Arriving in the Upper Galilee region of Israel from Tel Aviv that Friday morning, I found it eerily deserted. Houses empty, stores shuttered, whole towns abandoned to nature—a near-total shutdown of a region that is already one of Israel’s least developed. But while the economic damage was stunning, the psychological damage is undoubtedly worse.
As the missiles collided above us, I asked my friend how she and her family, Israeli Christians, got on amid such chaos. “Oh this happens every day,” she answered with a weak smile. “You get used to it.” Feeling the bumim (a Hebraicization of the English word “booms”) reverberate in my chest, I couldn’t understand how.
“How will this end?” I asked her.
“We destroy Hezbollah—it’s the only way. These people only understand power.”
I knew that people back home would hear my friend’s call for a new (and more catastrophic) war in Lebanon as insane. But I also knew that most Israelis agree with her. And after seeing the situation with my own eyes, I couldn’t help but join them.
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As it happened, I’d heard the same sentiments from retired Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser two days earlier in Tel Aviv. Infantryman, artillery officer, head of research for military intelligence, director-general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs—“Kuper,” as he’s known to many, has done it all.
Arriving at a café in Milano Square, I found him already seated. He looked tired, but smiled as I sat down. “Get the schnitzel,” he said. “You’ll like it.”
After ordering my food, I chit-chatted with Yossi and told him a bit about my trip. He wanted to know who else I was meeting with and what I was hearing. “It’s my first time back since Oct. 7, so I’ve been asking people what they’re feeling, what they’ve learned, stuff like that.” I paused. “And I have to say, I’m hearing a lot of the same things.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”
“If I had to summarize: Oct. 7 proved that containment doesn’t work, that the old way of doing things is over, and that it’s time to be more aggressive.”
Yossi sat up straighter, more awake now. “Yes, I think that’s right,” he said. “The lesson of Oct. 7 is that Israel cannot tolerate heavily armed radical Islamists on its borders, even if they stay quiet for years. They must be destroyed, preemptively if necessary.”
I found it an astonishing statement. Israelis are often caricatured as warmongers, but almost always prefer quiet “live-and-let-live” deals with their enemies over military confrontations. Harboring no illusions about changing hostile societies through force (at least since the First Lebanon War in 1982), they avoid grand adventures and apply violence only in limited circumstances. It’s the reason why Israel has been such a pioneer in the field of targeted killing, meting out pinprick strikes against high-value terrorists, applying the smallest amount of force to the fewest number of people as possible. US presidents often work to foster good around the world; conscious of limited means, Israeli prime ministers focus on preventing the worst.
Yet many in Israel now believe it was their very aversion to war and willingness to embrace a modus vivendi in Gaza that made the horrors of Oct. 7 possible. Netanyahu is assigned the most blame for his now-infamous policy of containing Hamas in the Gaza Strip, periodically degrading its military infrastructure in short wars, yet working to keep the Hamas regime afloat with cash infusions from Iranian ally Qatar. Though odd, the policy had its rationale.
“I have to admit,” I told Yossi, “Bibi’s approach made sense to me. In my mind, it was the best you could hope for. Honestly, what was the alternative: a preemptive Israeli invasion and regime change in the Gaza Strip? No one would have supported such a thing before Oct. 7.”
Bemused, Yossi dropped a bombshell on me. “I helped design that policy,” he said. It was more a confession than a statement. “And yes, it worked—until it didn’t.”
My food arrived and I began eating (the general’s intel on the schnitzel proved accurate) as Yossi explained his epiphany. A terrible danger was brewing in Gaza and only the total disarmament and destruction of Hamas would erase it—four months before Oct. 7, he published the warning in a policy paper at the Middle East Forum and began doing Hebrew language media to the same end. He made calls and visits to officials in the government, including to Bibi’s close aides. “Kuper, haven’t you heard?” he was told. “Hamas is deterred.”
Thinking back, Yossi shakes his head. “The idea that religious fanatics sworn to our destruction would ever live quietly on our borders was delusional.”
I was still struggling with the implications of what he was saying. “Aggressive, overwhelming, and preemptive force against enemies both active and inactive—that’s a seriously expeditionary posture.” I looked at the hipsters and young couples who filled the Tel Aviv café around us, adding, “Do you think these people are ready for that?”
He sighed, weariness returning to his face. “We need to finish the war in Gaza, turn to Hezbollah in Lebanon—and then to Iran,” he said. “Whoever wants to destroy us, we must destroy them first. What choice do we have?”
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Sitting on my friend’s terrace two days later, I knew she and Yossi were right: Even if Iran’s leaders ease up in response to an Israel-Hamas ceasefire, the presence of a massive terrorist army on Israel’s northern border cannot be left to fester after Oct. 7. A major war in Lebanon is coming—indeed, it must come. And it will be ugly.
War is coming not because Israel wants one or because its leaders are spoiling for new entanglements. It’s coming not because diplomacy hasn’t been tried or because Israel has ambitions for new territory. (In Hebrew, the word “Lebanon” carries the same dismal notes that “Vietnam” does in English.)
War is coming because the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, moved by eschatological conviction, seek the destruction of Israel—and America, with Allah’s help—as a matter of policy, and because successive US administrations have ignored, excused, and thereby encouraged the ayatollahs’ behavior for 44 years. War is coming because my friend is right: The record shows that dialogue is impossible. These people only understand power.
As it happens, the feeling is mutual. A 2023 survey found 80 percent of Israeli Jews saying that Palestinians only understand the language of force, but 74 percent of Palestinians said the same thing about Israelis. Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khameini readily agree. When Palestinian prisoner Suheir Barghouti was released in a December 2023 prisoner/hostage swap with 239 other Palestinians, she used her first public interview to say, “The Israelis only understand the language of force, they only understand the language of blood. They always break their promise, they even gave the Prophet hard times back in the days.”
But the sentiment goes well beyond the Israeli-Palestinian arena, being common at the seam zone of every civilizational conflict. Barack Obama believed that ISIS only understood force, and Iraqi resistance groups believe the same about us; Madeline Albright believed it about Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, who believed it about the Bosniak Muslims and Croatian Catholics he fought; these days Democrats and Republicans believe it about Vladimir Putin (as did George S. Patton about the Red Army), and Putin believes it about them.
The best way to get what you want in international affairs is through diplomacy in the context of shared values, where two countries with a common view of history work toward common goals. Think of the US and the United Kingdom. In the absence of shared values, diplomacy is more difficult but hardly impossible. So long as the two countries aren’t enemies, they can pursue common interests through non-zero-sum transactions that are beneficial to both sides. Think of the US and Japan.
But when countries see history in terms that are radically different or indeed antithetical, even interest-based transactions become hard. Hailing from conflicting cosmological starting points, the two sides can’t understand, much less trust, each other because they can’t see the world through the other’s eyes. Every transaction, even if apparently value-neutral, implicates values and threatens domestic identity. For a country like the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose self-understanding is premised on the destruction of its infidel opponents, the very idea of win-win arrangements is nonsensical and repugnant.
Like it or not, power is the only lingua franca that reliably transcends cultural fault lines like those that separate Israel from Lebanon. That isn’t to say interest-based diplomacy across such boundaries is impossible—history is filled with pragmatic compromises between enemies. But these compromises, when they occur, are almost always reached in response to a real or threatened show of force that appeals to one or both countries need to survive. Think of the US and the USSR under the shadow of mutually assured destruction.
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The much-feared regional war is well underway—the only question now is how to end it. Paradoxically, the best answer is to skip multiple rungs on the escalation ladder and make a dramatic show of force that stops the Iranian regime in its tracks. This is where the US can help.
War-weary critics, eager to extricate themselves from the Near East, will cite truisms like “you can’t kill an idea” to prove the futility of this approach—but people living on fault lines know better. Israelis aren’t naïve enough to think that military force can eradicate the religious beliefs that drive Hamas and Hezbollah fighters, but that’s not their goal. Their goal is to prevent the weaponization of such beliefs against the homeland. You can’t kill an idea, but you can break its kneecaps.
Sitting on my friend’s terrace, this all became very real. I imagined what would happen if Hezbollah breached the border fence like Hamas did in the south, leaving me mere minutes before they reached my position. Needless to say, neither warm greetings, clever turns of phrase, nor generous bribes would do anything to stem their bloodlust. Inspired by a love for Allah, they would kill me, my friend (probably raping her first), and her entire family in a fit of spiritual euphoria.
When my friend went downstairs to pour another cup of coffee, I went inside to use the bathroom. Passing by her son’s room, I saw his IDF-issued M-4 assault rifle on the bed. Walking over to it, I picked it up and ejected the 30-round magazine to find it stacked with 5.56 mm rounds. Another full magazine lay nearby.
I raised the rifle to my shoulder and peered through the optic. For the first time that evening, I felt a little better.