After beheading Hezbollah, it’s time for a cease-fire, not an Israeli invasion

No one should weep for Hassan Nasrallah.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese group that Nasrallah led before he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday, is indeed a terrorist organization, funded and armed by Iran with around 150,000 missiles and rockets, that has killed Israelis, Jews, and Americans around the world. The group has effectively taken over the state of Lebanon by virtue of its military power. It is despised by at least half the Lebanese people, if not more.

The group’s operatives were responsible for the bombings of a Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 along with the infamous bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

They were behind the assassination of a popular Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in 2005 — leading hundreds of thousands of Lebanese to take to the streets in the Cedar Revolution. Hezbollah crushed that pro-democracy uprising.

But Nasrallah, 64, made a fatal decision when he chose to support Hamas after its Oct. 7 massacre inside Israel. The group’s missile attacks drove around 70,000 Israelis from their homes in northern Israel with rocket fire, and have made it impossible for them to return.

So there is no question why Israel wants to wipe out Hezbollah’s leadership and destroy its missile arsenal, much of which is stored in the basements of private homes or under urban apartment buildings.

The question at hand is whether and how Israel can keep the group from reviving — and whether force or diplomacy is best suited to enable Israeli citizens to return home.

This is where my memories kick in. As news broke of Nasrallah’s assassination, my mind flashed back to the days I spent in south Lebanon in the early 1980s as a Middle East correspondent, where I witnessed the birth of Hezbollah up close.

There are lessons to be learned from those early days, about the relative worth of diplomacy and force, and the appropriate timing for either. The biggest lesson for Israel: If you act to destroy your enemies inside Lebanon, don’t stay there. Occupations breed bad results.

In 1982, long before Israel was engaged in any peace negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the infrastructure of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which then dominated part of Beirut as well as southern Lebanon.

At that time, a more moderate Shiite Lebanese group, Amal, with strong roots in Lebanon, was ready to help Israel curb the PLO and prevent cross-border attacks. But, as Israel settled into an occupation of south Lebanon, Amal was soon displaced by the newly born and more radical Hezbollah, funded by Iran to fight the Israeli presence.

I was based in Jerusalem, but also covered the Arab world, which was very different then than now. Iran had only recently gone through a revolution and overthrown its monarch in favor of a Shiite clerical regime. Its new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was just starting to exert influence in Shiite communities abroad.

I watched Israeli soldiers explore with awe the cafes and restaurants of the glittering Lebanese capital, and nervously maneuver in the narrower streets and alleys of Sidon in the south. Fighting in unfamiliar surroundings, some of them died. As I reported from Beirut and Sidon, I found almost no Israeli officers with any grasp of Lebanon’s intricate religious politics, or the increasing power of Shiite militias backed by Iran.

One rare exception, an intelligence reserve officer, who was a professor and an expert on Shiite Islam in normal life, told me that he had tried in vain to alert senior brass to the importance of the Lebanese Shiite community, largely based in the south. The Israelis were focused instead on Lebanon’s Christians and Sunni Muslim elite, with whom they thought they could make a deal to expel the PLO and sign a peace treaty.

That scenario turned out to be terribly wrong.

Lebanese Shiites, who comprised a plurality of the population, were relatively poor and largely farmers in the south. But they were sending their sons to universities abroad or to set up businesses in West Africa and were poised to enter the political scene in a big way.

They also resented the Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon, who lived in refugee camps where United Nations agencies provided free schooling and hospitals. The Lebanese government provided no such benefits to Shiite citizens in the south. Locals there were unhappy that PLO fighters were the cause of Israeli retaliation across the Lebanese border, harming their farms.

I spent hours talking with Shiite businessmen in Sidon and southern Lebanese villages, including four brothers who had attended the University of Montana in Missoula and were active in a growing Shiite social and political movement known as Amal, which means hope. What I heard was their eagerness to see the PLO gone.

That didn’t mean, however, that they wanted Israeli troops to remain in Lebanon. Nabih Berri, then the head of Amal (and now, amazingly, still around as speaker of the Lebanese parliament), offered Israel a deal whereby that Shiite group would police the border and prevent any cross-border attacks. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon wanted a public signing ceremony but Berri wanted a quiet understanding.

My sources in Sidon, meanwhile, told me that a group called Hezbollah was gaining strength based on opposition to Israeli occupation.

Long story short: Sharon stiffed Berri. Christian leader Bashir Gemayel, with whom Sharon wanted to sign a peace treaty, backed off and was soon assassinated. The PLO was driven out of Lebanon, but Israel wound up occupying the southern part of the country for 18 years, as Hezbollah grew ever stronger. Israel ultimately withdrew in 2000. The fight with Hezbollah goes on.

As for whether force or diplomacy offers the best hope for a quiet border, I asked retired U.S. diplomat Ryan Crocker, who was inside the Beirut embassy in 1983 when it was blown up, famously walking out of the rubble with a white cloth wrapped around his bleeding head.

“I had a sense of retribution,” he said, when one of the architects of the embassy bombing was killed by Israel in a series of assassinations that have wiped out seven of Hezbollah’s senior leaders over the last week. But Crocker was also U.S. ambassador to Lebanon when Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was assassinated by Israel in 1992 and worries that the current attacks “won’t solve anything.” He thinks the best option is to turn to diplomacy and work for a cease-fire that will stop the cross-border fighting — for now.

I am skeptical. In 2006, after a brief Israeli invasion and withdrawal, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1701, calling for the Hezbollah militia to withdraw behind the Litani River, 18 miles from the Israeli border. That buffer zone was supposed to be policed by Lebanese army soldiers and U.N. peacekeepers, but Hezbollah never complied and those forces were too weak to push the militia men out.

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If Resolution 1701 could be activated, diplomacy might have meaning. Yet even if it fails, I believe the most dangerous alternative is for Israel to invade on the ground and try to police the buffer zone itself.

That failed miserably from 1982 to 2000 and gave birth to Hezbollah. I saw it happen. To make the same mistake again could revive local support and help the group reformulate itself after being badly wounded by Israel.

Better for Jerusalem to take a breather, and accept a shorter cease-fire while warning Lebanon — and Iran — that it will return to use of force if Tehran tries to resurrect its proxy. To keep bombing, on the contrary, risks pushing Iran to retaliate — and dragging the United States into a regional war that must be avoided. As for an invasion, now is not the time to fall once more into the occupation trap.