Neither War Nor Peace: Israel's Northern Borders

For now, the recent eruption of violence along the Israeli-Lebanese border appears to be contained. With thousands of its fighters bogged down in Syrian battles, Hezbollah’s strategic context is radically different from 2006, when a carefully planned kidnapping of Israeli soldiers dragged Israel into a bloody war in southern Lebanon.  Most analysts seem convinced that Hezbollah is not interested in escalation and that the recent flare-up represents an exercise in chest-beating rather than a march toward serious hostilities. But as calm resumes, recent events underline just how strange the situation on Israel’s northern borders is--one that is neither war nor peace. The details of this week’s flare-up are still being investigated, but the bare facts are already known. On Wednesday morning, Hezbollah militants fired anti-tank missiles from the demilitarized zone in Southern Lebanon into Israeli territory. The strike left two Israeli soldiers dead, seven more wounded, and a military jeep smoldering on the borderside road. Shortly thereafter, Israel retaliated with a storm of strikes aimed at “Hezbollah operational positions,” apparently killing a Spanish member of the UN peacekeeping force in the process. In the words of the Spanish envoy after an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, the death "happened because of the escalation” and the fatal fire “came from the Israeli side." His language was deliberately diplomatic: Israeli fire may have been the proximate cause of death, but blame was unattributed. The diplomatic ambiguity was intended as a run-around the complexity of the Israeli-Lebanese border dynamic. To many observers, including the US State Department, Hezbollah’s cross-border fire at Israeli soldiers represents a straightforward violation of the tenuous August 2006 ceasefire arrangement. Israel’s response was merely retaliation, an appropriate response aimed at maintaining deterrence, and therefore, calm. But as defenders of Hezbollah have been quick to point out, allocating blame for this renewal in hostilities is not quite simple. After all, it was less than two weeks ago that (what is assumed to be) an Israeli strike killed six Hezbollah and Iranian operatives near the Syrian-Israeli border. True, the ceasefire agreement applied to Lebanon only, but it was Israel that ignited the latest violence and Hezbollah that can claim the high ground of deterrence and retaliation.  In turn, Israel argues that the slain operatives were planning an attack on Israel, and that the initial strike was a justifiable act of preemptive self-defense. This kind of back and forth is, of course, exactly what we have come to expect from the Israeli-Arab conflict. The parsing of these causal and moral chains, the distinguishing of aggression from retaliation, is endless and usually pointless. Mercifully, however, this sort of exercise eventually comes to an end once we are engaged in a thing called "war." Once in a war, counterstrikes need not be justified morally on the basis of strikes from the other side. No one asks whether Gettysburg was justified by Bull Run.  It still matters, of course, how and why and whose fault it is that we entered the war. But once in it, retaliation is a question of wisdom and tactics, not morality. So it matters a great deal whether, when Israel struck two weeks ago, Hezbollah and Israel were already at war. In Israel’s north however, the dichotomy of war and peace is particularly vexing. The calm at the Lebanese border is not a true peace--but a UN imposed ceasefire (and one in which some provisions, like the disarmament of Hezbollah, have never been implemented.) The Syrian border is, in some ways, even more complicated: Israel and Syria have been officially at war since Israel’s founding in 1948, but since the late 70s, their border has been among Israel’s most stable. Until recently, military units on both sides maintained hostile postures but held their fire, creating an eerie sense actual but unofficial calm. However, once the Syrian state began to crumble, the situation deteriorated. Occasional cross-border Syrian attacks have drawn fierce Israeli responses, and Israel has launched a number of independent strikes within Syria (especially near its border with Lebanon) attempting to interdict the flow of the highest quality weapons to Hezbollah. So are Israel and Hezbollah, or Israel and Syria, or even Israel and Lebanon, at war or at peace? The question is not simply a semantic one; it carries moral consequences. During peacetime, prospective strikes such as those carried out by Israel in Syria are forbidden acts of aggression. And for good reason: a world in which preventive strikes are acceptable is a world of constant violence. So if at peace, then Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah were a provocation, and Hezbollah’s response, a retaliation. And with Hezbollah apparently consumed with its struggles in Syria and quiet along the “blue line,” there is good reason to view the situation in this light: a peace broken by Israel. But such a view holds too narrow a view of war, especially in the context of Hezbollah. Hobbes, in his Leviathan, argued that “war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.” War, for Hobbes, was similar to nasty weather: “as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.” Hezbollah has no interest in peace talks, and is quite explicit that the current lull is simply a time-out, and one that they keep at their own convenience. So for Israel and Hezbollah, even 10,000 European peacekeepers don’t offer much “assurance to the contrary.” Of course, we needn’t allow a 17th century philosopher to dominate our understanding of important concepts like war and peace. And in fact we don't, but instead view these things through requirements laid down by the law of armed conflict and related rules. But Hobbes’ core insight rings true; the distinction between war and peace is far messier than traditional legal line-drawing may ever like. Like foul weather bleeding into the good, the line between war and peace is hopelessly fuzzy--and some situations may have features of both.. This, then, is a lesson of the recent flare-up on the Lebanese-Israeli border. What exists on Israel’s northern borders--a weak state and a failed state, a supposedly demilitarized zone with a gallant but inadequate team of peacekeepers, multiple terror groups at war with each other and sworn to Israel’s destruction--is sui generis, and exceptional cases are not well-served by abstract legal principles. But most wars the West fights today are in some ways exceptional. And like Israel, the techniques and strategies required will be a mix of those fit for wartime and for peace. This is as it should be. As Jack Goldsmith has argued here, contemporary conflicts have revealed that the distinction between war and peace is often quite useless. Some tools that we expect the US government to use--like detention or targeted killing--reflect the one, and others--like civilian prosecutions--will reflect the other. What holds true for America’s counterterror operations also holds true elsewhere as well:  In an age of long-war, attrition, and unclear victories, our a priori conceptual categories must become less restrictive, and our distinctions, more blurry. And in a place like the Lebanese-Israeli border, perhaps they have lost their use entirely.