News & Archives

  go back

July 20, 2006
Fighting Hizbollah with 'Deliberately Disproportionate' Force
By Pierre Atlas

In response to Hizbollah's unprovoked cross-border raid last week, Israel has drawn from its formidable arsenal to attack targets in Lebanon. The goal is to defang Hizbollah--perhaps the most effective fighting force in the Arab world--remove it from Israel's northern border, and get back the two Israeli soldiers who were captured in the raid.
There is an asymmetry of power in the fighting between the Israel Defense Forces and Hizbollah. Israeli ordnance has far greater lethality and accuracy than the rockets Hizbollah has used thus far against Israeli cities. The civilian death toll is accumulating at a ratio of ten Lebanese for every one Israeli. Even as Hizbollah has been condemned by some Arab governments, Israel's targeted destruction in Lebanon is provoking widespread anger and dismay.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether Israel's response is "proportionate," and if not, whether it is justified. Hizbollah was the instigator of this conflict. Its initial attack and its firing of over 1,000 katyusha rockets at northern Israeli cities are indefensible. But does this mean that Israel is justified in its chosen response? Might this be a case of "two wrongs don't make a right"?

Hizbollah is an unconventional enemy, unique in the world. It is a "state-within-a state" embedded within the Lebanese society and polity, yet it is also a rogue force that is well-armed, violent, and unaccountable to Lebanon's sovereign government. By all accounts, Hizbollah is more powerful than the Lebanese Army, and it has dragged an unwilling Lebanon into war with Israel to fulfill its own agenda, and perhaps the agendas of its patrons, Syria and Iran.

Yossi Alpher, Israeli strategic analyst and co-editor of the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue website Bitter Lemons (www.bitterlemons.org), suggests that "the Israeli response in Lebanon is deliberately disproportional."

Alpher told me that deliberate disproportionality "is an imperative when fighting a guerrilla enemy waging asymmetrical warfare. It is also [Prime Minister] Olmert's strategy for weakening Hizbollah to a point where the Lebanese government, perhaps with international backing and participation, can remove it from Lebanon's southern border and disarm it."

From Israel's perspective, defeating this unconventional enemy requires an unconventional strategy. Hizbollah's headquarters are in urban neighborhoods and it fires its rockets from civilian areas, making it virtually impossible for Israel to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Israel's response is to destroy those elements of Lebanon's infrastructure, including its civilian components, which it says house and sustain Hizbollah.

Israel is using the "opportunity" presented by Hizbollah's attack to take care of the guerrilla force once and for all. But given Israel's choice of methods, it is inevitable that innocent Lebanese civilians will be killed in the process.

Support for the IDF operations cuts across the Israeli political spectrum, especially as more rockets land on Haifa, Safed, and other Israeli cities. Amir Cheshin, former Arab Affairs advisor to Jerusalem mayors Teddy Kollek and Ehud Olmert and a reserve colonel in the IDF, notes that after years of relative quiet on the border, Hizbollah "violated the unwritten understanding between Israel and Lebanon by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers from sovereign Israeli soil." This new reality led Israel to change its approach to Hizbollah and take offensive action, rather than simply deter it with threats of retaliation.
World attention is focused, legitimately, on the level of destruction being meted out on Lebanon. But in assessing Israel's response, one needs to look beyond the asymmetry of power, to a second asymmetry in terms of goals. Israel's goals are strategic, while Hizbollah's are existential. Israel has the greater arsenal, but it is fighting an enemy that won't be satisfied as long as Israel continues to exist. In this case the asymmetry is reversed. And it begs the question: how should you fight such a group as it wages war on you?

Hizbollah is not just a "Lebanese militia," but is Iran's proxy army, with Syria as the middleman. Hizbollah's actions, and Israeli reactions, could spark a regional war. "I'm afraid that if the Iranian president allows Hizbollah to use its long distance missiles against Israel" and they hit Tel Aviv, says Cheshin, "very soon we will find ourselves in a third world war."

The Lebanese people are being squeezed between Israel and Hizbollah, two forces that do not prioritize protecting Lebanese life. But so long as Lebanon and the international community remain unable or unwilling to disarm Hizbollah and remove it from Israel's border, Israel will continue to use its arsenal in a "deliberately disproportionate" manner against the organization that proudly declares itself to be Israel's existential enemy.
It is time for the international community to step into the fray for the sake of the Lebanese and the Israeli people. But any serious proposal must acknowledge that there can be no return to the "status quo ante."

Pierre M. Atlas is an assistant professor of political science and director of the Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian College.