Netanyahu Can Leverage the Lebanon Cease-Fire for a Broader Deal

(Bloomberg Opinion) — There are at least two possible outcomes to the fragile Lebanon cease-fire that began this week. One, expressed by the country’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, is that it becomes the first step in turning “a new page” on the strife that’s exploded across the region since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The other is both far less peaceful and more likely.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already said he sees the cease-fire as a pause in which to increase pressure on Hamas in Gaza and to rearm, while focusing on the threat from Iran. Key to his signing the deal was a US offer of $680 million worth of small-diameter bombs and J-dam kits, which turn gravity bombs into guided missiles. These weapons have been core to Israel’s continuing war with Hamas in Gaza.This would be a huge missed opportunity and one that I suspect would, in the long term, prove disastrous for Israel, let alone the Palestinians, Lebanese and other populations of the region.Seen from Netanyahu’s point of view, the calculation is clear enough. First, though negotiated by the outgoing Biden administration, this is a valuable gift to US President-elect Donald Trump, who has set himself up as both an avid supporter of Israel and the man who will bring wars to an end.The second part of the calculation is that, unlike in Gaza, this cease-fire deal is possible for Netanyahu to drive through without collapsing his government and exposing himself to potential jail terms from ongoing fraud cases. Lastly, Israel has identified this war as a multifront fight with Iran. This is largely correct. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and militias in Syria and Iraq are all acting in loose concert with Iran. They are armed and funded by Tehran. But if that is true, it’s also correct that eliminating the threats from Hamas and Hezbollah would require defeating Iran militarily. Unlike the debacle with Hamas on Oct. 7, when a relatively weak force was able to catch Israel’s security forces napping and leave a trail of slaughter through Kibbutzes and a music festival, the operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon has been an extraordinary intelligence success. It has led to the decapitation of the Shiite militia’s leadership, disruption of its communication systems and the destruction of much its large armory of missiles and their launchers.  The bigger point here is that Hezbollah was armed and nurtured by Iran precisely to create a threat to Israel, as well as a deterrent against any attack on the Iranian homeland or its nuclear program. That deterrent has for now been rendered ineffectual.

Hamas, for its part, is no longer capable of posing any significant military threat to Israel, even if it will still be able to conduct terrorist attacks. On top of this, Netanyahu has twice this year ordered precision strikes against Iran in a tit-for-tat exchange unwisely begun by Tehran, after Israel targeted the generals coordinating what the Islamic Republic calls the “axis of resistance,” from its consulate in the Syrian capital of Damascus. If reports in Israeli media attributed to unnamed Israeli officials prove accurate, all four of the S-300 air-defense systems Iran received from Russia have now been destroyed.In brief, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s strategy of enveloping Israel in a crescent of proxy militias has been set back severely, while Iran itself has been rendered largely defenseless against air attack. This is a genuine opportunity for Israel; the question is what to do with it.The road apparently favored by Netanyahu is to park the war in Lebanon while attempting to exploit the weaknesses of Hamas and Iran to the end. There may never be a better chance to bomb Iran’s uranium enrichment sites. However, given the way some of the most important of these have been buried under mountains, this would need US participation and might still only delay the program by a few years; it’s much harder to destroy technical know-how than the centrifuges used to enrich uranium. President Joe Biden, who also described the Lebanon cease-fire as a chance to deescalate more widely in the region, isn’t interested. Come January, Trump might be.The argument for pushing on has support in the Israeli public. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are all likely to regroup and rearm when the fighting stops. In the case of Khamenei, the argument for acquiring a nuclear deterrent has never been stronger, and indeed there have been open calls to do so in the official Iranian media. In five years, the so-called axis of resistance could return stronger than ever.However, continuing the war in Gaza, refusing the Palestinians any path to a reasonable settlement and carrying out further, much larger airstrikes that amount to an open declaration of war on Iran — a nation of 84 million — is a plan with no feasible path to success. It is, on the contrary, a recipe for perpetual war. The world’s only Jewish state would likely become not just a pariah in the Muslim world, but globally. As strong as it is today, that’s a position Israel can ill-afford.This war, unlike the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is one Trump could end in a day (or close to it). The US has leverage over the main deciding party, which is Netanyahu, if the White House is ready to use it. Iran appears to be signaling it’s open to a deal, no doubt as a result of the pummeling it has taken.This again seems an unlikely path for Trump, given the appointments he’s made and his position on Israel. But as I’ve written before, that could change as he finds the world much altered from his last term in office. His friends in the Arab Gulf are no longer as aligned with Israeli interests as they were when he produced the Abraham Accords.Trump may need to choose between Netanyahu’s desire to go on fighting and the political need of Gulf leaders to see an end to the war in Gaza their populations can accept. To go down in history as the man who ended forever wars, this would be the place to start.More From Bloomberg Opinion:

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Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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