History has a way of repeating in the Middle East. A quarter-century later, Israeli troops are once again fighting in the same part of Lebanon. Hizbullah has spent the past year firing rockets at northern Israel, and it has built up a formidable network of tunnels and bunkers along the border. The war is meant to push it back, as the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers have been unable to do for decades.
Yet, as they discuss how to keep the militia out of south Lebanon, policymakers in Israel and the West have revived some old (and often failed) ideas about how outsiders might try to change the region.
Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, thinks the way to secure the border between Israel and Lebanon is by reviving the SLA. In a By Invitation essay written for The Economist, Mr Lapid called on America, France and the United Arab Emirates to train and fund a new force that would serve as a “buffer” between Israel and Hizbullah.
With foreign funding, Mr Lapid suggested, the new SLA could pay fighters $500 a month, five times more than the regular Lebanese army can pay. That, plus a “patriotic call” to “seize the opportunity for a better future”, would ensure a flood of new recruits.
History suggests otherwise. The SLA, which broke away from the Lebanese army during the civil war in the 1970s, paid high wages yet often struggled to find fighters. It forcibly conscripted thousands of young men, and sometimes used child soldiers. It was a brutal militia, notorious for torturing thousands of people at a detention centre in Khiam, but not a terribly effective one: it could not fend off Hizbullah without constant Israeli support.
A revived SLA would fare little better. Few Lebanese would be willing to join a force that would be seen as an Israeli proxy. The regular army, for all its faults, is seen as one of the few bodies that transcends Lebanon’s endemic sectarianism. A new SLA would be mired in it, alarming Hizbullah’s Shia constituency, which would probably see the force as a threat. That would be true even if, as Mr Lapid suggests, the new militia was placed under the authority of the Lebanese government.
All this is in any case impossible right now: Lebanon has no president to oversee it. The post has been vacant since Michel Aoun ended his term in October 2022. The consensus choice for his successor is General Joseph Aoun, the army chief (the two are unrelated). But Hizbullah is keen to hand the job to Suleiman Frangieh, the head of a small political party, whose main qualification is his fondness for the Assad regime in Syria. Parliament, which selects the president, is deadlocked. After a dozen failed votes, it gave up trying; the last ballot was in June 2023.
Amos Hochstein, America’s special envoy to Lebanon, says his top priority is filling the vacancy. Some lawmakers in Washington are now pushing for sanctions on Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament, if he fails to call for another ballot and break the impasse. “We hope that Hizbullah is degraded enough that they are less of a force in Lebanese politics,” says Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman.
For Lebanese, this is another echo of the 1980s. Back then Bachir Gemayel, the head of Lebanon’s largest Christian militia, cemented his power through an alliance with America and Israel. He was elected president of Lebanon in August 1982 with the help of Philip Habib, who was Ronald Reagan’s envoy to the region. Less than a month later Gemayel was dead, assassinated by a member of a party aligned with Syria.
In Lebanon, it does not serve anyone’s interests to be seen as the American-Israeli candidate. The more the two allies push for General Aoun, the less likely he is to become an effective president.
Joe Biden is old enough to remember all this. In 1982 he was already a second-term senator. He might also remember that Mr Reagan, despite his sympathy for Israel, withheld delivery of F-16 fighter jets in protest over how Israel waged war in Lebanon. A decade later George Bush senior temporarily blocked $10bn in loan guarantees over the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Aside from holding up one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, Mr Biden has so far avoided such confrontations with Israel. On October 14th, though, his administration told Israel to increase the flow of aid to northern Gaza within 30 days or risk losing American military aid. That would be an effective idea to resurrect from the 1980s: America has leverage over Israel, if it chooses to use it.
Critics doubt the president will follow through, however: he has spent a year making demands of Israel only to see them ignored. After warning Israel for months against a big escalation in Lebanon, his advisers now support it; they seem to agree with Israeli officials that the invasion offers a chance to transform the region.
Indeed, talk to Middle East hands in Washington over the past month, and they often sound euphoric. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former adviser, captured the excitement with a tortured metaphor. “The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes,” he mused on X last month. “Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited.”
It is not just Lebanon they hope to reshape. Perhaps regime change is back on the menu: there are discussions about whether Israel should try to topple the Assad regime, or if air strikes in Iran could collapse the Islamic republic. “It’s like 2003 all over again,” grumbles one American diplomat in the region, referring to the heady mood around the invasion of Iraq (which ended badly for its architects).
This is a moment of change for the Middle East. But there are no easy solutions for problems that have evolved over decades. Even if General Aoun becomes president, he cannot push Hizbullah out of political life: Lebanon’s sectarian system ensures it will have a role.
As for the Lebanese army, it is weak because everyone wanted it to be. Its Western partners would not give it sophisticated weapons, while Hizbullah and its allies refused to let it exercise sovereignty. A new, parallel force will not change this. It will simply give Hizbullah a new target—and, perhaps, give Israeli architects reason to build a new memorial.
© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
