This Sunday will mark the third anniversary of the start if the 2006 War between Israel and Lebanon, and it’s still unclear what was accomplished.
Lebanon suffered tremendous damages, both economically and in terms of lives lost. Israel didn’t suffer nearly the same damages, but the brief war tarnished the image of the IDF as an invincible fighting force and further eroded the moral high ground that Israel has tried to cling to since its founding.
The war between Israel and Hizballah broke out in mid-July 2006, but the seeds were planted many years earlier.
Hizballah was formed by Iran in 1982 to be the Shiite proxy resistance to Israel, which had invaded Lebanon that year. Hizballah and the IDF battled constantly over the years until Israel was finally expelled from Lebanon in 2000, but even after that they continued to clash in sporadic battles.
The two sides got to know each other very well and Hizballah became adept at kidnapping Israeli soldiers and exchanging them for captured Hizballah fighters. Sometimes Israel would exchange dozens of prisoners in return for a single IDF soldier. Since then, hundreds of prisoners held in Israel had been returned to Lebanon and the strategy seemed to be a success.
In the summer of 2006, however, this strategy went off course.
On June 25th, Corporal Gilad Shalit of the IDF was taken prisoner by Hamas in a cross-border raid from Gaza. Hamas was apparently taking a page from the Hizballah operations manual, and they quickly demanded the release of hundreds of Hamas fighters that had been captured by Israel. The capture of Corporal Shalit put Israel on high alert and set the stage for an abrupt escalation in the event of another kidnapping.
Seventeen days later, on July 12, Hizballah entered Israel and seized two IDF soldiers of their own. The situation escalated quickly, and later that same day Israel launched a massive air assault on Lebanon. Targets were hit all over the country by the Israeli Air Force and Hizballah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s office was bombed in South Beirut.
In response, Hizballah started a relentless Katyusha rocket attack on Israel. Thousands of the rockets were launched into Israel from well-hid locations. Two days later, an Israeli war ship anchored off the coast of Lebanon was badly damaged when a C-802 Silkworm missile hit the vessel. Such a sophisticated missile strike was a surprise to everyone outside of Hizballah, and quickly the Israelis knew that they had underestimated their opponent.
Israel was not in a situation that it was comfortable with. It’s one thing for the IDF to be taking fire in other countries, but it’s entirely another when rockets are raining down inside Israel, hitting civilian areas with seemingly no way to stop it. For 34 days this kept up. The IDF kept bombing civilian and military targets in Lebanon and Hizballah rockets kept landing in Israel.
Many in the international community were outraged and demanded the United Nations Security Council call for an immediate cease-fire. The United States and United Kingdom stalled this process though, as each country had an interest in seeing Israel take apart Hizballah once and for all. However, once it became clear that Hizballah would not be so easily defeated, UNSC Resolution 1701 was passed resulting in a cessation of major fighting.
The war was brief but devastating for Lebanon. Over 1000 civilians were killed or wounded and thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed. An oil refinery situated on the coast was bombed resulting in a miles-wide oil slick. The airport was bombed and Lebanon’s infrastructure was severely damaged, including bridges and highways. Towards the end of fighting, Israel dropped thousands of cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon which made large areas uninhabitable for farmers and livestock. Lebanese officials put the damages to Lebanon’s infrastructure at about 3.5 billion dollars, and Lebanon’s GDP growth turned negative almost overnight.
For Israel, nearly two hundred citizens were killed, including 44 civilians. Hizballah rockets caused numerous forest fires in the northern part of the country. Israel also suffered billions of dollars of damages.
The war had many implications in the greater region.
The exact relationship between Syria, Iran and Hizballah has always been speculated on, but after the 2006 War it became clear the trio was a force to be reckoned with. This is exemplified in the launching of the C-802 Silkworm missile. It is a relatively large surface-to-ship missile that likely originated in Iran and passed through Syria into Lebanon where it was finally used. It is also likely that Iranian intelligence operatives trained or instructed Hizballah fighters on how to use the weapon.
The 2006 War was Hizballah’s “coming out party” and it launched the group into world-wide notoriety. Never before had an Islamic resistance group been so successful against the IDF. Hizballah’s credibility was now unsurpassed in the Arab world. As a result, Iran and Syria also basked in the “victory” of their proxy, and a message was sent to Israel that it was not safe as long as it was aggressive towards Hizballah’s patrons.
Israel’s most immediate adversary, Hamas, was also affected. Hamas is a Sunni organization and for a long time it was thought that they would wouldn’t accept guidance from the Shia, but for the last ten years or so, Hizballah and IRGC officials have been operating in Gaza training Hamas fighters. The 2006 War cemented Hizballah’s track record of “success” against Israel and removed all doubt Hamas may have had in receiving tutelage from Shiite sources. The end result is that Iranian influence has been extended to Gaza, Israel’s southern front.
It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where Hizballah and Hamas launch concurrent assaults. Israel has a powerful, well funded, and state-of-the-art military, but it is not clear how well it would perform in a sustained war with two fronts.
If there were any benefits for the Israelis, it is that the war has left them with a quiet northern front. After the war, Hassan Nasrallah said that if he knew how Israel was going to respond to the kidnapping of the two soldiers he would not have taken that course of action. Israel’s policy of “severe response” has led to a climate for Hizballah where they must carefully consider how they interact with their neighbor to the south. And now that they have become so invested in legitimate politics in Lebanon, any trouble brought on could have dire repercussions for them at the polls. The ebb and flow of hostile rhetoric between the two sides continues, but for now it seems as though they have reached a stalemate. Perhaps this is the best Israel could hope for.
This state of affairs is reinforced by the current climate of reconciliation in the Middle East aggressively sponsored by the Obama administration. Any act of war on either side could disrupt the complex and slow progress that is being made and would certainly be met with severe scrutiny from Washington. Hizballah understands this and has largely been quiet since Obama took office, especially since the June parliamentary elections. But Israel is also “at odds” with the Obama administration and it’s clear that anything done by Israel to disrupt the peace process in the region would be highly unwelcome.
Israel didn’t make any friends in Lebanon by bombing the whole country, but the point was clear: if we have to deal with Hizballah we will take it out on everyone in Lebanon. The goal may have been to make Hizballah unpopular by bringing such a destructive war into Lebanon, which was the case to a certain degree, but this course of action also galvanized the entire country against Israel. And Israel may be supremely unpopular in Lebanon, but for them at least Hizballah must think long and hard before attempting any more excursions into Israeli territory. For Israel, this may be enough.
This summer in Lebanon, things are very different. Much of the physical damage from the 2006 War has been repaired and the country has recovered economically. Beirut has been rebuilt and the tourist season, predicted to be one of the most bountiful in many years, will soon be in full swing. But just beneath the surface things are not so rosy. Israel and Hizballah continue their hostile posturing toward one another and, though seemingly unlikely, any small act of aggression between the two could escalate quickly; we’ve seen it happen. Each side needs to exercise extraordinary restraint in order to insure that this does not happen again, and the international community needs to apply whatever pressure it can to send a message that a repeat of 2006 would not be tolerated.
