In light of the major geopolitical developments to Israel’s north in recent months, a conference was held on Tuesday at the Leonardo Plaza Hotel in Tiberias to discuss the Jewish state’s security needs on the Lebanese front.
Despite the conference’s name, “Securing the North: A Buffer Zone Is a Must,” no consensus was reached by the participants, a string of senior Israel Defense Forces reserve officers, regarding the viability of such a buffer zone.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Guy Hazut, who headed the operational learning branch of Israel’s ground forces, said that Israel had missed its opportunity to establish a buffer zone when it chose in October to carry out a limited ground operation in Southern Lebanon.
“I want to raise a hypothetical question,” Hazut told the audience. “What would have happened if, like in the [1967] Six-Day War, the military’s ground forces had launched an offensive until the Litani River and beyond after [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah was eliminated?”
Had Israel done this, he continued, “Hezbollah would’ve collapsed like Bashar al-Assad’s forces collapsed against the jihadi rebels. After the pagers explosions and the elimination of Hezbollah’s leadership, Hezbollah was in disarray. We had a historic opportunity to subdue this organization once and for all.”
His preferred strategy would have been to capture large areas in Southern Lebanon up to the Litani River and subsequently establish a demilitarized zone, similar to the one dividing North and South Korea. However, since Israel chose a limited ground operation, and struck a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah that came into effect on Nov. 27, Israel’s strategic achievements in the north were more modest, he asserted.
The threat of invasion posed by Hezbollah’s Radwan Force had been removed, he said, but Hezbollah as an organization remains a threat and Israel will not be able to prevent the return of Shi’ite residents to their villages in Southern Lebanon.
Hazut proposed two methods of operation moving forward. First, “to invest in military intelligence for collecting concrete information. We saw what this approach did to Hezbollah.” Second, he said, “military freedom of action to thwart [Hezbollah] bolstering its strength.”
He went on to argue that Israel should not rely on international supervision of the Lebanon agreement, and should act immediately against violations committed by Hezbollah.
Col. (res.) Hezi Nehama, a former commander of the IDF’s Menashe Brigade, aka the “Jenin Brigade,” agreed with Hazut’s analysis but not his conclusions.
“We can still make a difference,” Nehama stressed. “It is our responsibility, the responsibility of the residents, of the heads of regional councils and towns, of NGOs like ours, to express their views [and influence the decision makers].”
What Israel needs to do in Lebanon is similar to what it has done in Syria, he said. Namely, create a demilitarized zone of about two to four miles that ensures there is no friction between Israeli forces and local civilians.
Nehama, who organized the event, is the co-founder of Forum of Reservist Commanders and Fighters, an NGO comprising officers and combatants critical of the IDF’s strategy since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023.
While he offered no concrete suggestions regarding how Israel could now achieve a buffer zone given the truce, he insisted that “the situation is not lost.” Things in the region remain “very dynamic,” he added. “We’ve seen what happened in recent months [referring to Assad’s collapse]. Tectonic changes are still ahead of us, be it an attack on Iran or the forthcoming change [in the U.S.] with the Trump administration. Our role is to put this option on the table, so when the opportunity presents itself, we’ll be able to take it.”
“Frontal depth”
Col. (res.) Gabi Siboni, a researcher at Israel’s Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, said that a security buffer zone would not only ensure the safety of Israel’s northern residents, but was also in the interest of the world at large as it would prevent another war from breaking out.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Effi Eitam, the former commander of the IDF’s 91st Division, explained that buffer zones distance civilians from the front, thus providing politicians with a wider range of decisions with regard to how to respond when terrorists carry out attacks against Israel.
Eitam grew up in Ein Gev, a kibbutz on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, before Israel conquered the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War.
“I understood the significance of the Golan Heights as a buffer zone for Ein Gev, the northern Jordan Valley and the Hula Valley,” he said. “This enabled the government to develop civil life and infrastructure without fanatic terrorists firing from right across the border,” he added.
The alternative, Eitam stressed, is incidents like the 1980 Misgav Am hostage crisis, in which a squad of Palestinian terrorists from Lebanon snuck into a children’s dormitory in Kibbutz Misgav Am and took toddlers hostage, demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Eyal Gluska, 2, Sammy (Samuel) Shani, 36, and Sgt. Eldad Tsafrir, 19, died in the military rescue effort. All five terrorists were eliminated.
“It is impossible to prevent this reality without a defensive concept of ‘frontal depth’,” Eitam said, coining the term as a substitute for “security buffer zone.”
The Jewish state had launched the First Lebanon War to stop terrorist infiltrations in the north, he noted, after which a security buffer zone was established within Lebanon. “For 18 years the civilian communities were untouched … the fighting was in the security buffer, with the IDF foiling Hezbollah’s ability to bolster its strength,” he added.
Frontal depth, he argued, prevents total war; distances civilians from the front; serves as an effective military training ground and prevents the need to call up reserves, saving the state significant costs.
Without it, he continued, “No matter how sophisticated your fence is, with electronics for detection and [automated] shooting, at the end of the day we’ll find terrorist squads in our kindergartens, in our cities, in our schools.”
A mental buffer zone
Other conference participants, however, were less enthusiastic about the concept of a buffer zone, calling instead for a change in Israel’s overall defense strategy.
“We paid a heavy price in the period of the [previous] security zone,” said Lt. Col. (res.) Sarit Zehavi, founder of the Alma Research and Education Center. “Before we speak about a security zone, there are many things that can be done to protect the [northern] communities. First, we need to define our red lines as a state. Second, we must transform our defense strategy.”
Brig. Gen. (res.) Dedi Simchi, whose son Guy was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, 2023, concurred.
“I have a difficulty with this buffer zone [idea]. I think that the buffer zone should be in our minds. If we establish a 10 kilometer [6 mile] buffer zone, Hezbollah will retreat 10 kilometers and build tunnels that run underneath the buffer zone.”
Like Zehavi, Simchi argued that a conceptual change is needed.
“The minute we see a threat, we must deal with it. No more closing our eyes, no more indulging in serenity,” he said. “The buffer zone needs to be a change of mentality: We detect a threat, organize, attack. We will pay the price for this, but if we don’t pay it now, we will pay it with compound interest in the future.”
Appealing to the northern residents in the audience, he said, “I hope that we’re no longer shrouded in innocence. If you live in the north, you should know that in the next 30 years you will be more threatened than if you live in Tel Aviv. For 10 years I lived in the Gaza Envelope. We experienced missiles, rockets and [terrorist] infiltrations. My son was born in Kibbutz Re’im and he fell in Kibbutz Re’im.”
‘Deep mistrust’
After Hezbollah joined Hamas’s war effort in an “act of solidarity” on Oct. 8, 2023, roughly 60,000 residents of Israel’s north were evacuated from their homes. The northern front became a battle zone for more than a year until a truce was reached in late November. Despite the ceasefire, the vast majority of evacuees have yet to return to their homes.
Their emotions were apparent at the conference, as several residents and regional council heads kept angrily interjecting.
“Nobody is talking to them,” Ofri Eliyahu-Rimoni, 38, a public relations consultant and activist, told JNS on Wednesday.
“No one is offering them a clear picture of the future. No one is saying: you will return home on this date, [medical and educational] institutions will resume on this day, your grant will be X shekels, this is the service center that will take care of your property tax—everything is blurry. The state says they don’t know, they haven’t decided yet,” she said.
“A clear exit strategy from this crisis could have been established a long time ago,” she added. “The northern residents have been calling to start working on ‘the day after’ since January 2024.”
Refael Salab, 31, a displaced resident of Kiryat Shmona and a social activist who spoke at the conference, told JNS on Wednesday that northern residents are not only angry but desperate.
“They are baffled that a security zone wasn’t established. Some of these people want to return home whatever the price, or leave whatever the price—as long as they get to end their intermediate state,” he said.
Compounding the issue, added Salab, is that “there is a deep mistrust in the state. Those who saw the footage on the morning of Oct. 7 [have lost their trust]. Yesterday there was a weapons exhibit [confiscated from Lebanon], and people saw how many weapons [Hezbollah had] stored right next to their homes. How can they sleep well at night? Who will they believe? A general who said two years ago that ‘everything is fine’?”
A buffer zone could at least provide a psychological feeling of security to the residents, as well as an opposite psychological deterrence for the enemy, he said.
Trust in the security establishment “is at the lowest levels in Israel’s history,” he said. “I still underestimate Hamas [as a military force], but that’s what makes it worse. These terrorists on bikes achieved a mental victory over us.”
Eliyahu-Rimoni said that displaced residents gave the government their full backing while lodging in hotels as a temporary solution “because they believed that when the time comes, the state will be there for them.”
However, she added, “Leaders arise from every crisis. We discovered the human capital in the Galilee region. A host of civil organizations—Matzpinim [Heading North], Lobby 1701, Fighting for the Galilee, Magen Otef Levanon [Lebanon Envelope Shield]—demonstrated who the people of Israel really are, and that we are not waiting for anybody for the rehabilitation efforts.”
PR consultant Eliyahu-Rimoni, originally from Yesod Hamaala in the Hula Valley, stressed that these organizations are determined to rebuild the Galilee, and said people are invited to join them. “We are very proud of what we’re doing and we have already started civilian rehabilitation projects that you will hear about soon.”
The weight of Oct. 7
Thousands of Hamas terrorists carried out the deadliest single-day attack in the history of the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023. Roughly 1,200 people were murdered in the Israeli communities along the Gaza border and some 250 more were taken captive into the Gaza Strip, prompting a multi-front war against Israel that is still unfolding.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Hazut accused the IDF of abandoning basic defensive military principles prior to Hamas’s deadly attack. “This is a fact that can’t be denied. Why did [the IDF] do this? That is a good question that the IDF has thus far not answered,” he said.
He stressed that Hamas had identified the “center of gravity” of the IDF’s Gaza Division and took out 40 of the divisions information and communications technology sites, blinding its command and control apparatus.
“Everybody asks where the air force was on Oct. 7. If you don’t have command and control abilities, you can’t tell [the air force] where to attack. Around noon we started communicating with pilots via Whatsapp messages,” he said.
Although the speakers at the event did not necessarily agree whether a security buffer zone was plausible, given the current circumstances, they all agreed that a profound conceptual change was required within Israel’s defense establishment in light of the past 12 months and the Jewish state’s challenges ahead.