Let’s be clear about why Israel signed onto this ceasefire. There are three reasons:
1. Joe Biden has been slow-walking aid to Israel. That slow-walking has gotten Israeli troops killed. The ceasefire is designed to allow Biden to leave and Israel to be re-armed by the incoming Trump administration.
2. Joe Biden has been threatening Israel with U.N. abstentions on his way out the door if Israel does not end action in Lebanon; furthermore, Israel is attempting to broker a deal with France to end France’s support for the antisemitic International Criminal Court targeting of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
3. Even under these conditions, Israel has an interest in taking Hezbollah off the board as a chess piece with regard to Hamas. Hamas has attempted throughout the Oct. 7 war to rope in other powers to save it. Hezbollah openly pledged that it would not stop its war until Hamas was preserved. Hezbollah failed. Its leadership is dead, its weapons caches largely destroyed, all at an insanely low military cost to Israel. Now Hezbollah is no longer there to split Israel’s attention and prolong Hamas’s resistance. What does this mean? It means that Israel sees this ceasefire as just that: a ceasefire until Joe Biden is gone. It is a 60 day ceasefire. Joe Biden leaves office in 54 days. That is not a coincidence.
If Hezbollah abides by the terms, so much the better: Israelis go home and live in security in the north. But Israel is working under the likely correct assumption that Hezbollah will not abide by the terms, and that the agreement as interpreted by the Trump administration will actually allow Israel freedom of action (a freedom of action denied by Biden under his spurious and ugly interpretation of the same agreement).
How can you tell all this is true? Netanyahu in his statement openly said that if the agreement is violated, they will go back in, and that the goal in the north is the return of the residents—and he hasn’t called for them to go home yet. The durability of the ceasefire is completely dependent on Hezbollah and Lebanon abiding by it. If they don’t, and Jan. 20 comes, Israel will do what it must.
How about Gaza? Israel will renew its efforts in Gaza to free the hostages. They hope that Hezbollah’s absence from the war will create new leverage against Hamas. Perhaps that’s true. But presumably, the Biden administration will now attempt to leverage Israel into some sort of premature and unhealthy agreement in Gaza that leaves Hamas in power, akin to Lebanon. Israel simply will not and cannot do that. Instead, Israel will stick by its goals in Gaza and will consolidate and refresh its forces in anticipation of the next round of fighting, when there is a president who isn’t a pathetic coward in relation to Iran and its proxies.
