By: David Anderson, J.D.
Columnist
Asymmetries and Moral Challenges
A few decades ago I flew to Beirut because my mentor was dying there, to see the old chap off.
As my professor he’d taught me Middle East politics at our university in Australia over a decade earlier and he’d encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to study graduate level Middle East politics at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. so I did. And I stayed in America, became American and now I’ve lived in N.Y.C. for three decades so my mentor changed my life utterly for the better. Which is why I went to care for him in his final days in a grim cancer ward in the American University of Beirut Hospital.
I’ve been studying Middle East politics most of my life, visiting the area many times and I even studied Arabic for a year at night school. I’m not an expert nor an academic but I could be described as a well informed student of the Islamosphere.
Co-incidentally there was a war on about when I visited: the Lebanese have them often.
The genesis of that war started earlier in the 1970s when, due to the arrival of Palestinians expelled for trying to destroy Jordan a few years earlier, the Palestinian “Fedayeen” (fighters) came to Lebanon to establish “Fatahland”in the south of that country that wasn’t theirs. Immediately they began attacking south of the border, shelling northern Israel.So, nearly destroying Jordan, getting kicked outta there and fetching up in south Lebanon – a wealthy, fairly freeChristian country at the time – they wrecked it. If you’re
berserk enough and your sociopathy is strong enough you can wreck an entire country and the Palestinians were very dedicated in their homicidal madness. The consequent Lebanese civil war was a long affair which reduced Lebanon to ruin. After “Fatahland” (1980s), the Israeli invasion stopped the rockets and the IDF returned to base with hopes of peace.
Forward to 2006 and my visit. Repeated Hezbollah rockets into northern Israel provoked yet another Israeli incursion. Israel doesn’t start wars, nor does it ever lose them because in that neighborhood there’s no negotiating. It is a game theory binary: We win, you die*, you win, we die.*with a wrinkle: When Israel wins, being a democracy and civilized, they don’t just murder everybody they can.
In 2024 we are again in the same place. Iran’s obedient servants Hezbollah have been rocketing northern Israel nearly every day since October into now uninhabitable northern Israel. Somebody should tell the BBC or CNNbecause they rarely report on this shelling. They don’t report that nearly 100,000 Israeli civilians, aversive to being exploded, abandoned the top fifth or so of their country since last October.
Try to imagine fellow American readers: our northern states deserted because Canada continually shells Minnesota, the Dakotas and New England. This is the situation Israel unhappily finds itself in. And how would you feel about the UN, say, or the Department of State or the BBC or NBC, if they counselled Minnesotans to just suck it up while Minneapolis burned under Canadian rockets? The ceasefire of the war I saw decades ago in 2006 ended with a UN agreement that Hezbollah would stay “north of the Letani River” in Lebanon. Basically their hungry martyrs and bearded ayatollahs pinkie promised to leave the bottom fifth of that country. They immediately broke their promise and Hezbollah still infests south Lebanon today.
Hilariously, Hezbollah even have a family friendly jihad theme park (!) I wrote about: chutzpah at scale there in Mleeta.
But wait! Imagine at the same time your most precious loved ones are held hostage in Hamas’ Islamic Republic of Gaza in basements a few miles from you as part of their larger “kill Israel” project? They’re there because your precious ones attended a music festival in their own democracy. Or got up to make breakfast on “stolen land” though not a square inch of Israel was actually stolen.
The peace Hezbollah promised in 1983, again in 2006 and 2005 when Israel abandoned Gaza was broken by the Islamic forces, replaced by the hugely popular terror state in Gaza and ultimately the medieval stylings of Oct 7. ISIS would have been proud because all Islamist forces have the same motivations, goals and morals. Were we secular peaceable westerners faced with such evil we wouldn’t run, we’d shoot.
Ceasefire? Anywhere? Some people can’t be trusted. Do you have any evidence the Palestinian movement – in its entirely – can be trusted to just hold off on the whole Jew killing, Israel annihilating project they are so fond of?
I’m an atheist and an attorney so I don’t believe in stuff without evidence. Consequently, I find cries from leftist first world politicians and terrorist LARPing students of “They want peace” hollow …without evidence. I’ll wait while you detail the Palestinian “Co-Exist movement” in the comments below….
I’ve got time.
But Israel is starting to lose patience for political and strategic reasons. A fifth of one’s country abandoned
under rocket fire will put pressure on politicians. Imagine our hypothetical Minnesotans who’d quite like to go home. As a very amateur Middle East scholar I put the odds of an Israeli invasion at 50:50.
Consider though that a self-inflicted war will destroy weak, failed, beautiful Lebanon. Until the 1970s it was a
Christian country which, after Israel, used to be the richest, most functional state in the Middle East until the
Palestinian fedayeen exploited its sectarian and class rifts into the 1975-1990 war and…. well… they wrecked it. The Palestinians wrecked an entire flourishing country. To kill Jews. They reduced Lebanon to a corrupt husk, a spectacularly bankrupt failed state which is about to be thrashed by asymmetrical military power to its south.
Consider that today's tech, and Iranian missiles, make the wars of last century there look like teenage boys with firecrackers. That tech advance is really a game changer.
For a military analysis of an imminent war it is importantto look at larger theories to predict results. We can ask what is behind a Hezbollah fighter? His cousin Mo? A far off ayatollah in Tehran who doesn’t givea damn about Lebanon? And what is behind that first I.D.F. soldier to cross the border? An Israeli Uzi, a (Israeli) Rafael Industries drone swarm or jets, a(n again, Israeli – see a pattern here?) Merkava tank, a nuclear bomb.
Strategically they are laughably unmatched but the main mismatch in this game is reversed: Israel values its
citizens and soldiers’ lives, the Hezbollah-Palestinian- Hamas axis embraces a thirst for martyrdom. This
was a pivotal moral factor in past wars and still is. Who is most “valuable” to those ordering trigger pulls? A few years ago one thousand Fedayeen “warriors” (aka convicted criminals imprisoned in a democracy for killing fellow Arabs, and Jews) was morally “worth” one Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit.
Here is another analysis, a vital difference to take into account in predictions of war or peace: In democracies like Israel and the U.S. politicians, broadly, do what is in the interests and preferences of their constituents. Voters matter.
In failed states, terrorist organizations (the entire Palestinian movement) and dictatorships (Iran and pretty much all of the Islamosphere) bearded leaders are certain they have “God’s remit”: they do whatever their own vision of paradise or personal profit dictate. So there’s another asymmetry in our sum.
We should spare a thought for the non-Hezbollah cohort of Lebanon: Orthodox and Catholic Christians and Sunni Muslims, the Druze and even some Shia’ of Lebanon who very quietly detest Hezbollah and its Iranian masters.
Of course, like in the entire Arab world, there are no more Jews left in Lebanon to spare a thought for. Like 800,000 Jews in Arab lands they were robbed, de-naturalized atthe airports and expelled. That’s another historical asymmetry here.
So. War or Not?
Despite Hezbollah’s Iranian armaments northern Israel must be made safe. Democracies like Israel protect theirpeople rather than use them as pawns like Lebanon/Syria or use them as human shields like Hamas does. The Palestinian project in Gaza and Lebanon use people toprotect its weapons and tunnels. Israelis know the stakes– will they vote for their northern lands to be quietened by a hellish end-war and invasion of Lebanon?
An invasion of Lebanon, more likely every day, is not vengeance and it is not expansion: what would Israel even do with the failed Lebanese Republic anyway?
Differing Objectives.
For a terrifyingly large slice of the Lebanese (and the entire Palestinian) population the goal is a “Judenfrei” Jew free) Eastern Mediterranean. Not land. For Israel the goal is to be less attacked, to defang murderous(loudly, proudly murderous!) neighbors. This is moral asymmetry at its most stark.
Israel will invade to quieten the northern Hizbalistan aggression and southern Hamas-land and if you think self defense is “colonialism” you’ve probably just wasted $100K of Dad’s money in tuition to be taught idiot lefty activism rather than factual history.
So will the Merkava tanks have to grind north and envelope south Lebanon again like so many times before?
I’m not in an I.D.F. command center and I'm not hiding like a terrorist rat under a building either (Hi Nasrallah! Hi Sinwar!) and as a former equities/options trader the best I can tell you is never make predictions about wars and never EVER about wars in the Middle East where Islam – with its bloody borders, its martyrdom cult and its totalitarianism – is involved.
Together, Ukraine and Israel are the moral challenge of our times in the manner of WW2. We now face a similar evil to that our grandparents fought before us. And defeated.
David Anderson is an Australian-American lawyer in New York City with a B.A. (Hon.) and graduate study in Middle East politics from the University of Melbourne and Georgetown University. He travelled extensively in the region and has a luke-warm command of Arabic. His career was in finance and law and he now writes for various publications.
