In our second episode of this series, Mohamad Bazzi, our Senior International Fellow and Director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU, joins Nora Boustany, an award-winning journalist and professor at the American University of Beirut, for a discussion on the complex dynamics shaping the Israeli war on Lebanon. They explore the intensified Israeli-Lebanese border conflicts, the historical challenges facing the Lebanese army, and the role of UNIFIL in maintaining fragile peace. They also examine the evolving U.S. policies on military aid to Lebanon, the influence of pro-Israel lobbying in Washington, and how Hezbollah’s social infrastructure impacts Lebanon’s economic resilience.
Transcript
Nora Boustany: I am Nora Boustany. This is the second in a series of in-depth conversations on events in the Middle East, and especially Lebanon, in the lead-up to the US presidential elections with Mohamad Bazzi. He is the director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He was the former Middle East Bureau chief for Newsday, based in the region, from 2002 to 2008. He has written prolifically in American and British publications. He is also a Senior International Fellow at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut. I teach journalism at the American University of Beirut after a long career with the Washington Post, and previously with the Financial Times and other publications. I have been involved in the field of journalism for the past 50 years, since 1977, covering the Lebanon war, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, for the Washington Post, a newspaper for which I worked for close to 30 years.
Boustany: Now, to you, Mohamad. US envoy to the Middle East Amos Hochstein left Beirut this week en route to Israel, where his shuttle diplomacy was geared inconclusively, towards defusing the catastrophic events in Lebanon with Israeli incursions and attacks against South Lebanon, the capital’s southern suburbs, Beirut itself and its outskirts. Fighting in South Lebanon continues unabated, with intense attacks engulfing the ancient port city of Tyre and recurring with renewed ferocity almost every night against the Beirut suburbs. Despite reported intelligence leaks, we are still none the wiser about Israel’s intentions or timing for a counter-strike against Iran. Its Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, headed to Riyadh a few days ago and to other Arab capitals to coordinate with Tehran’s erstwhile Gulf rivals ahead of a planned Israeli retaliation to avenge an Iranian ballistic missile attack on October 1. What’s your readout, as far as you can tell, from this apparent rapprochement?
Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you, Nora, for doing this series of interviews. I think Iran is trying to buy as much time as possible, and in some ways, the Biden administration is also trying to buy as much time as possible to put off this Israeli retaliation that’s been promised for weeks now. Iran seems to have made clear to most of its neighbors in the Gulf that it’s drawing a red line around the use of their airspace. The Foreign Minister and other Iranian officials are trying to convey to the Gulf Arab states that if they allow Israel to use their airspace for this strike, Iran will consider that an act of war, and there might be retaliation to that. That’s one way Iran is trying to contain this. And then we see the Biden administration, we’ve seen a number of leaks over the past two weeks saying that Biden had personally convinced Netanyahu not to target Iranian oil installations or nuclear enrichment sites. Those are the red lines for Tehran, and that Israel should steer clear from attacking those sites because that would instigate another round of Iranian reprisal.
Bazzi: So far, the leaks that have come out of Washington, and some leaks out of Israel, say that the Israelis have agreed to limit their retaliation to Iranian military facilities. But I think the important thing to remember here is that we’ve seen a pattern where Netanyahu and his government will make promises to Biden and to the US, and then they’ll break them fairly quickly. We’ve seen that pattern throughout the past year of this war, where Netanyahu will [promise] Biden administration officials, the Secretary of State will say something behind closed doors, and it will get leaked, it will get into the media, and then Israel will go ahead and do the opposite. Israel will escalate, it will widen the war, and it doesn’t pay any cost. From the beginning, over the past year, Biden has decided not to impose any costs on Netanyahu for widening the war, for escalating the war, and for getting us to this point we’re at, which is a regional conflict that could drag in all of these players.
Boustany: While we’re on the topic, Mohamad, what is your instinct telling you as you watch the final stretch before the US election of how an Israeli operation against Iran, and probably its consequences, would affect the Democratic candidate? Would it play into the hands of former President Trump, do you think?
Bazzi: That’s an important question, and we’re now less than two weeks from the US presidential election. One of the things we’ve seen unfold over the past 10 days or so is that Biden decided to deploy a new missile defense system at Israel’s request, and this is part of the whole diplomatic dance and military setup, military cooperation ahead of Israel retaliating against Iran. Biden and the Pentagon, decided to deploy this THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense system, which is designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. So, it’s intended to help Israel defend against a potential Iranian counterattack, and for the first time, at least publicly, Biden decided to deploy U.S. troops to Israel. There will be a hundred U.S. troops who are actually now pretty much all on the ground because the THAAD batteries were delivered over the past few days. So there are now a hundred U.S. troops on Israeli territory that are there to help operate this missile defense system.
Bazzi: It’s a dangerous gamble by Biden because he is putting U.S. troops in the theater of war. He’s putting U.S. troops at risk, and now, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, where his vice president and the Democratic nominee, his chosen successor, Kamala Harris, is facing Donald Trump, who has gone out of his way to tell the U.S. public that he is against deploying U.S. troops overseas. [Trump says] he’s against using U.S. resources on foreign wars, and Trump has had a lot of success conveying that message over the past few months, even though that’s not what he might actually do if he’s in office because he’s also very strong and consistent in his backing of Israel and in his support for Netanyahu. He personally gets along with Netanyahu, certainly much better than Biden does personally, although, in practical policy terms, it hasn’t really made much of a difference in terms of U.S. support for Israel under Biden.
Bazzi: We’re seeing a democratic administration that’s putting U.S. troops in a theater of war so close before the U.S. election, at a time when Israel might well decide to carry out its retaliation against Iran maybe a week or even days before the U.S. presidential election, throwing the entire process into chaos and introducing this level of uncertainty. There’s very little doubt that Netanyahu favors Trump, that’s been clear from the beginning [that] he would like Trump to win the presidency. Although, to Netanyahu’s credit, he has been very smart at playing U.S. politics. In some ways, I’d argue [that] Netanyahu has been smarter at playing domestic U.S. politics than Biden himself, and so Netanyahu would be a little reluctant to be seen blatantly trying to influence the U.S. presidential election. Although we never know, [Netanyahu] has been taking tremendous risks throughout the past year, and he’s paid no price for any of them. So, this is something else he might decide to do ahead of the U.S. election.
Boustany: Let me interject something here. I just thought of it. While we were on the precipice of this regional Armageddon, I think it’s worth noting that, and not to take anything away from the horrific events of October 7 a year ago, it is important to note that so far, Hezbollah’s targets and Iran’s targets when it launched the ballistic missiles against Israel, were mainly against military-industrial installations. While in Lebanon, not to say anything about Gaza, we have over 2500 dead, most of whom are civilians, and about 11,000 injured. I think that’s worthy of note because Israel’s pretext is that it’s doing all this to secure and protect its residents, who were evacuated in northern Israel.
Boustany: Anyway, to go back to politics, there is much talk about regional realignments as countries, including Syria, try to avert more Israeli attacks and the threat of having unexpected strikes in the middle of Damascus or in other areas close to it. There have been reports of hundreds of Hezbollah combatants who once fought alongside Syrian troops leaving Syria to come back to Lebanon while sending their families to Syria. Also, reportedly, the Syrian Army has confiscated the contents of two Hezbollah arms depots in Syria in the wake of these stepped-up Israeli attacks. There have also been reports of members of Iraq’s Al Hashd Al Shaabi moving into Syria, while some Hezbollah operatives, scores of them, I think about 300, have gone to Iraq. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Bazzi: One of the things we’ve seen over the past year is the reluctance of the Syrian regime under Bashar al-Assad to get involved directly in this war. Pretty much every other member of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – the alliance of Iran and various militias and non-state actors in the region – has gotten involved, even though they haven’t really wanted to get involved after Hamas and Yahya Sinwar launched the attacks of October 7th and started at least this phase of the conflict. We had Hezbollah starting that support front the next day on the Lebanon-Israel border; the Houthis in Yemen starting to target the ships in the Red Sea; and some of the allied militias in Iraq targeting U.S. troops who are present in Iraq, and some of the militias in Syria targeting U.S. troops [there] as well.
Bazzi: The one actor that stayed on the sideline the entire time has been the Syrian regime, which is probably the biggest beneficiary of the Axis of Resistance and the deployment that Iran carried out, and Iran putting this axis together certainly benefited Bashar al-Assad greatly. It was one of the main factors that kept him in power. Hezbollah’s role in the Syrian civil war, we certainly know, made a huge difference in Bashar al-Assad’s ability to stay in power to fight the uprising and to brutally put down the uprising of the Syrian people, and that later transitioned into the civil war. We’ve seen the Syrian regime take these actions to try to limit damage to itself – and that’s been Bashar al Assad’s priority, certainly, to stay in power through all of this. We’re seeing these various movements of Hezbollah pulling some of its members back to Lebanon after sustaining severe damage from the Israeli attacks, especially over the past month.
Bazzi: I think one of the other factors here is that, in many ways, the Axis of Resistance – Tehran and its allies – are looking for a way out of this conflict that’s proven increasingly costly and destructive because they’re facing a far superior Israeli military that’s backed by Washington. Pretty much all of Iran’s allies have made clear that they would stand down if and when Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. It seems Iran’s leaders are particularly eager to stem the damage to Hezbollah, and while we don’t yet know the extent of that damage, we do know that Iran has spent decades funding and training Hezbollah so that it could serve as a deterrent to potential Israeli attacks on Iran. What’s unfolding now is that Iran is being targeted precisely because of its support of the Axis of the Resistance, as opposed to the other way around, as opposed to using this axis as a deterrent. All of this is in flux right now, and I think we’re in this transitional phase where it will go on until we get to a ceasefire. Until we get to the end of this horrible conflict, we won’t know exactly where the different players will end up and what the regional dynamics will be moving forward.
Boustany: In the wake of Israel’s unbridled aggression and apparent lust for land in Gaza after what happened last year in October and in Gaza and Lebanon, the Lebanese government under caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and House Speaker Nabih Berri have been scrambling to finesse and process requests to upgrade UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to possibly include progress on a maritime agreement between Lebanon and Israel, something which Hezbollah had said it would agree to in the past. Of course, the resolution calls for a beefed-up presence by the Lebanese army and UNIFIL in South Lebanon while Hezbollah militants withdraw north of the Litani River. Lebanon seems to be at a crossroads right now. What will it take to decouple Lebanon from the Gaza quagmire and Israel digging its heels there and to also disentangle Lebanon from regional conflicts and Iran’s agenda?
Bazzi: This is a very important question, and this is one of the things that’s not entirely clear because, for months, Israel and Netanyahu had been trying to decouple Lebanon and the southern border from Gaza, and Hezbollah refused to do that. Hezbollah, like the other actors in the Axis of resistance, insisted that a ceasefire in Gaza must come first, and then there would be quiet on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Now, things have shifted in some ways, where Israel is on the offensive. Israel is feeling a sense of euphoria. Netanyahu has regained a tremendous surge of popularity that he hadn’t seen since October 7th, especially after he assassinated Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. That euphoria, in some ways, is now clouding Netanyahu’s judgment. There’s a quote that sticks out to me, this is a statement that Netanyahu issued a few days after he ordered the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah.
Bazzi: He said, “We are changing the strategic reality in the Middle East.” One of the things that was striking to me about that quote is the way it echoed the rhetoric of George W. Bush’s administration right after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, meeting very little resistance initially and being able to sweep its way to Baghdad with that huge number of U,S. and other allied troops. That was before the US got bogged down fighting a very long and bloody insurgency, and that echoes the history that Israel itself experienced in Lebanon, certainly in the 1980s, with the invasion in 1982 to expel the PLO and the early success that Israel [experienced] in being able to expel the PLO. But then, of course, that invasion and Israel’s brutality were one of the major factors that gave rise to Hezbollah – and Israel ended up creating one of its fiercest enemies and one of its most effective enemies [Hezbollah] as a result of this policy of expelling the PLO.
Bazzi: In many ways, the Israeli leadership and the Israeli public seem to have forgotten their own history. They’re now opening the door to getting bogged down in an invasion of South Lebanon, in a prolonged insurgency and a potentially prolonged occupation – and there’s no one on the global stage to restrain them. The US has shown no interest in restraining Israel in Gaza certainly, and now in Lebanon. And it’s very bleak to think that there is no restraint and to think that these mistakes can be repeated. Who will bear the most serious consequences, the most serious costs? The civilians in Lebanon – as they’re already bearing the cost of this tremendous war and Israeli aggression.
Boustany: While I’m sure, no doubt, severely affected by Israel’s attacks, the assassination of leaders such as Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, other senior commanders and officials, its rank and file, residential neighborhoods, the Hezbollah banking system, Hezbollah is still fighting and putting up quite stiff resistance in the South. The Lebanese government, though bankrupt and somewhat marginalized, is trying to salvage what it can from UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to beef up the Lebanese army and have a more assertive UNIFIL presence, and a 10-kilometer border zone. Can you address the many challenges the Lebanese government has faced in recent weeks, and this whole notion of Resolution 1701, with 11 Lebanese soldiers killed so far, at least two dozen, or a little bit less maybe, UN peacekeepers wounded as the entrance to one of their barracks was attacked, and the Lebanese army watchtower was knocked out by the Israelis? Historically, since the 1970s and up to now, Israel has been very antagonistic and opposed to a strengthened Lebanese army presence in the South.
Bazzi: That’s a very important point that often gets lost in the discussion in Washington DC, and sometimes in European capitals as well, which is this core discussion that says let Hezbollah withdraw from South Lebanon, let Hezbollah move north past the Litani River, and let the Lebanese army deploy in the South. One central problem with that is, as you just pointed out, the Lebanese army is ill-equipped and has been ill-equipped for decades now. It’s been ill-equipped since the end of the [Lebanese] Civil War, and one of the main reasons is that Israel has resisted – and pro-Israel groups in the U.S. – have worked very hard whenever there’s been discussion in Washington to provide meaningful support, meaningful weaponry to the Lebanese army, those groups have opposed it. They’ve worked through Congress – they’ve leveraged their influence in Congress and also Congress’s tendency to support Israel in the region above any other U.S. ally in the Middle East. They’ve used that leverage to block significant aid to the Lebanese military.
Bazzi: We would often hear these arguments that the U.S. can’t arm the Lebanese army because the weapons would fall into the hands of Hezbollah. But the reality on the ground, as we’ve seen over the past year – and certainly over the past 20 years or so – Hezbollah has its own source of weaponry, largely through Iran and also what it can manage to produce itself. So Hezbollah doesn’t really need the night vision goggles and other supplies that the U.S. might send to the Lebanese army. We’ve had this history of the Lebanese army being starved and unprepared, and also, since the economic collapse, we also now have an army that’s very underfunded and underpaid. All of those are factors that affect the ability of the Lebanese army to be deployed in the South, and to carry out this mission that the U.S. and other Western countries, that European countries, want it to carry out. Here I’m going to turn to you, Nora, to ask about your own experience covering Israeli attacks on the Lebanese army, going back to the 1970s. What patterns have you seen over the years in the targeting of the Lebanese military?
Boustany: One of my earliest memories covering South Lebanon was when the Lebanese army, [which] was in better shape than it is now, wanted to deploy in the southern town of Kawkaba, and the Israelis at the time tried to discourage us journalists from going by sending a message to the American embassy here to tell us that we were going to be shelled. We went anyway, and true to their word, they did shell us, we had to jump into ditches to avoid their rockets and their shells. My recollection is that there is animosity by Israel towards the Lebanese army, and although their spokesman says almost on a daily basis that they have no fight with the Lebanese army, what we are seeing on the ground is the exact opposite. Today, three Lebanese soldiers were killed while they were trying to evacuate the wounded from an area in South Lebanon, and not only that, the Israelis warned that they’re very suspicious of ambulances that may come to evacuate the wounded. Other than UNIFIL and the Lebanese army, there’s nobody down there who can help the civilians trapped in South Lebanon, pinned down by Israeli gunfire and aerial bombing. Either the Israelis are lying, or they’re saying that to deflect criticism by the Biden administration, just like they try to deflect criticism by the human rights community when they make these lip service declarations about the fact that they are abiding by international humanitarian law. Their good intentions are yet to be proven for an effective and assertive deployment of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL.
Bazzi: That’s an excellent point, that’s excellent context. You’re right; there is this deep-seated animosity and this desire from Israel to have a very weak Lebanese army. They certainly don’t want a well-equipped and motivated Lebanese army on the northern border of Israel – and a lot of it is lip service to try to have a weak army and army that they can have significant influence over especially if Washington controls the purse strings to the Lebanese army, then Israel will naturally have tremendous power over it.
Boustany: It’s worth noting that today, there was a kind of a donor conference in Paris called for by French President Emmanuel Macron to collect pledges to help Lebanon, at least in the immediate context of the humanitarian crisis that it is facing. But one of the things that were said was that European countries should also pledge to help the Lebanese army, but we’ll see.
Boustany: Anyway, the parallel banking system that Hezbollah had developed in the late 1980s to serve its community with microcredit loans and small – you know, $5000 loans in return for gold – which Israelis are targeting right now, is under heavy bombardment as we speak. Israel has claimed that Hezbollah uses the system to sidestep international banking sanctions to receive financial assistance from Iran and to pay its fighters and the families of martyrs. Talk us a little bit through this system of al-Qard al-Hassan and its appeal to low-income families who are spared from paying interest, and it’s the financing of other social services such as medical care associated with Hezbollah.
Bazzi: Al-Qard al-Hassan is a Lebanese association that’s affiliated with Hezbollah. It’s been around since the 1980s, [and] it has grown over the years to take on this larger role as a banking association providing loans, as you pointed out. It has hundreds of thousands of clients who receive these zero-interest loans, they’re typically up to $5000, and it operates dozens of branches, something like 30 branches across the country, most of them in predominantly Shia-populated areas, in Dahyeh, in the southern suburbs, in southern Lebanon, and the Bekaa Valley. But since the Lebanese economic crisis in 2019, an increasing number of Lebanese people, both from the Shia Muslim community, but also outside of the Shia community, became clients of the association because it was seen to be separate from the corrupt and bankrupt banking system within Lebanon. It was seen as a financial institution that would give you access to your deposits, unlike the majority of Lebanese banks after the financial crisis. It became more and more important, and at one point after the financial crisis, Nasrallah said that al-Qard al-Hassan had provided close to $3.5 billion in loans to almost 2 million people, who had received loans since the association was founded in the 1980s. So, it’s an important social service organization affiliated with Hezbollah, providing important services largely to the Shia community in Lebanon, but to others as well.
Bazzi: Israel decided, over the past week, to repeatedly attack and bomb the offices, apartment buildings, and other sites that host al-Qard al-Hassan institutions in Dahyeh, in the suburbs of Beirut, in the Bekaa Valley, and in southern Lebanon. In many ways, these deliberate attacks on a civilian structure amount to war crimes. This is what Human Rights Watch concluded, Human Rights Watch issued a statement outlining this and explaining how these deliberate and unlawful attacks on Hezbollah’s civilian wing constitute a war crime. Here I’ll quote briefly from the HRW statement. Human Rights Watch said, “designating a civilian institution as a military target because of its affiliation rather than its effective contribution to military action puts all commercial operations at risk during wartime.” And that’s something that doesn’t pass muster under international humanitarian law.
Bazzi: As we discussed earlier, Israel has tried to dance around these issues by making these grand proclamations of designating these civilian institutions as targets, ones affiliated with Hamas in Gaza, and is now using the same strategy in Lebanon. But just because the Israelis decide to make this designation doesn’t make it proper and appropriate under international law. Of course, the problem is that Israel isn’t being held to account for all of these violations of international law, and all of these war crimes. It might take years and years for us to see that kind of accounting. But it’s certainly part of the Israeli strategy to put as much pressure as possible on Hezbollah and on the Shia community in Lebanon, on Shia civilians, who use these institutions and depend on them as a lifeline.
Boustany: As usual, it’s the Lebanese civilians, the people who deal with al-Qard al-Hassan, who are most affected by the Israelis’ attempt to kind of dismantle this sector that has proven resilient and even necessary for these communities when the trust in Lebanon’s banking system was so low, but how will this targeting affect Iranian efforts to continue pumping credit into the veins of the Hezbollah body politic because, as you well know, banks in Lebanon are prevented from dealing directly with Iran?
Bazzi: That’s an important question, and we’ll see over time how this might affect it. It probably will limit some of Iran’s options and the task of reconstruction. We haven’t talked about that, and I don’t think many Lebanese can even imagine that question of reconstruction while the aggression, while this war is ongoing, but it’s going to be an important question. It’s going to be different than the 2006 war, when the international community and so many of the Gulf Arab states and Iran lined up to provide funding so that people could rebuild their homes. We’re facing a different picture [now]. Lebanon economically is much weaker today than it was in 2006. All of those questions will become interconnected: of how people will be able to rebuild, what kind of support they’ll be able to receive, and what Hezbollah’s future will look like both in the kind of operational and logistical [sense] and in its military role moving forward. Whatever political agreements are hopefully worked out to end this war, are going to include some limitations on Hezbollah’s ability to operate in the South, but it might also affect its civilian infrastructure as well. I think, with time, we’ll see how that unfolds.
Boustany: I think this past month, if not this past year, has made us all witness how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not only trampled on every standard of international humanitarian law but also redefined what victory should mean. We don’t know what he means when he says victory and that many victories are expected down the line. I think our whole understanding of this precarious balance of deterrence in the region has been totally upended, but as we contemplate these two broader concepts and step back, victory and deterrence. What is winning? Is it on the battlefield or for Israel? Or is it occupying and annexing more land in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Golan? Are we settling in for a war of attrition in South Lebanon? Or does Israel’s victory end up engulfing and slicing off a piece of South Lebanon, carving even a bit of the Bekaa, providing the Israeli entity with more living space to bring in Jews from around the world? So, is it providing a safe homeland for Jews at the expense of the sovereignty of peoples and nations around it by just kicking its modus operandi further down the road, and crying wolf, we are in a bad neighborhood. We are surrounded by this line of fire. Are Netanyahu’s victories or perceived victories, and I want this to remain an open question, are they not setting the stage for more death, more depravity, and more destruction for everyone in the region, including Israel?
Bazzi: That’s a very good way of wrapping these themes together and posing these open questions. I would share one brief thought on this, which is that while Netanyahu has expressed these very lofty ambitions to reshape the Middle East, like some [of his] predecessors in Israel and also in various US administrations, he’s had very little to say about Israel’s post-war plans for Gaza, certainly, and or Lebanon. In fact, he has defied most international and domestic pressure to outline an end game beyond seeking this “total victory” against Hamas, as he describes it. This is another way that Biden’s unwavering support emboldens Netanyahu to prolong the conflict and prioritize his own political survival. Let’s remember that Netanyahu spent most of his career helping expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and resisting any form of a two-state solution to end the occupation of Palestinian territories. Today, some of the extremist members of his ruling coalition and some members of his own Likud party openly call for the de facto expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, followed by the establishment of new Jewish settlements in the territory.
Bazzi: It’s a very bleak picture, and Netanyahu has a very bleak history in this regard, and he has been able to get away thanks to this unbridled US support. He’s been able to get away with this rhetoric of total victory against Hamas and possibly against Hezbollah, since we all know having followed the region, these are impossible goals to achieve. There is no total victory to be achieved unless Israel and Netanyahu are willing to turn the entire region into rubble, to turn all of the neighboring countries into complete rubble.
Boustany: Including his own.