The Fragile Triangle: Israel, Lebanon and Iran – the Danger of War by Miscalculation
We’ll begin at the end: in the summer of 2023, the danger of a war by miscalculation has become a possibility that cannot be dismissed. It could be a descent into an unintended war on the border with Lebanon in which neither side is interested. Or a series of tactical incidents which escalate to the strategic level of war. And not just in relation to Hizbollah but also to Iran.
From the beginning of July 2023, there have been an increasing number of reports in the Israeli media of military incidents along the Lebanon border fence. The quiet that we enjoyed over the past years has been broken. The dominant narrative is one of Hizbolla “provocations”. To the news reports, have been added calls by Israeli commentators and politicians for the IDF to react immediately to each incident which are presented as “violations of sovereignty and the collapse of deterrence”.
But things are not so simple. Before going into a strategic analysis of the current events on the Lebanon border and their implications, it is worth looking at a historical analogy which can show us how a full blown war can breakout because of miscalculations on the tactical level. The Six Day War did not break out, as many believe, with the surprise entry of the Egyptian army to the Sinai Peninsula in May 1967, nor was it the preemptive strike by the Israeli air force on the morning of 5 June. The Six Day War broke out on the Syrian front on 7 April 1967. The continued deterioration of military incidents, goadings and provocations by Israel encouraged by farmers in the “demilitarized zones” (no man’s lands between the armistice lines and the international Israeli-Syrian border) ended on 7 April 1967 when six Syrian MiG jets were shot down over Damascus. This activated the Egyptian Syrian defense agreement and the entry of the Egyptian army into the Sinai Peninsula which posed an immediate threat to Israel.
Back to today. The current situation on the Lebanon border is highly volatile, and could deteriorate very quickly. The picture is made even more complicated by the fog of war and the contradiction reports from the border with Lebanon. To this can added a number of misconceptions that hamper the discussion. The first thing we must do is to filter out the background noise in order to concentrate on the true signals. And we should not forget that it takes two to tango: Israel is not simply a passive agent observing incidents and that are liable to escalate into war, it is an active player in the game.
The first misconception: “the Blue Line” is not a border line between Israel and Lebanon. The line which runs along the area of the Sheba’a farms and the village of Ghajar is not part of the border line that was drawn between Israel and Lebanon at the end of the 1949 War of Independence. It is a “temporary” demarcation (with a no man’s land between the two lines) which was drawn by UN cartographers following the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. It is not an internationally recognized border determining Israeli sovereignty.
The second misconception: Not all the locations of incidents along the “Blue Line” are of equal importance. Some carry more weight, some less. They should be categorized according to the danger they pose for a deterioration into war. A Hizbollah tent placed 30 metres into land under Israeli military control in the Sheba’a farms area (Har Dov) or the throwing of stones over the fence are not comparable to the incidents in the village of Ghajar which are extremely dangerous and could ignite war. We will thereforce focus this analysis on the village of Ghajar.
The third misconception: Based on the history of the border demarcations in the area, the UN’s Blue Line determined that the village of Ghajar should be divided as follows: the northern part under Lebanese sovereignty and the southern part under the control of the Israeli army (not sovereignty). This fragile arrangement on the ground held up until recently. But it was undermined in September 2022 when a security fence was built that encircled the village of Ghajar on all sides and thereby de facto annexed sovereign Lebanese territory to territory under Israeli military control in contravention of the “Blue Line” agreement. The way in which the decision to build a security fence (which may soon be replaced by a concrete wall) was reached was never made clear in the days of Minister of Defense Benjamin Gantz and Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, and there are have been no proper reports about the issue.
The building of the security fence which led to the annexation of the village of Ghajar resulted in a disruption of the delicate balance of forces. Hizbollah which sees itself as the “Protector” of Lebanese sovereignty sent indications of its displeasure by launching a single antitank missile into an uninhabited part of the village. Overnight the village of Ghajar turned into microcosm of the “divided” Berlin crises during the Cold War with all the accompanying implications of the danger of deteriorating into an active war, as was the case with the Berlin crises. If a concrete wall is built to enclose and annex the village of Ghajar, the crisis will only deepen. Furthermore, beyond the formulations of the “Blue Line” – according to French Mandate maps, the whole of village of Ghajar is under Lebanese sovereignty. At the beginning of the 1960s, Syria annexed the village of Ghajar and thus Ghajar appears on old Syrian military maps.
The fourth misconception: things get even more complicated. During the Six Day War, the IDF conquered the Syrian Golan Heights. In the momentum of war, the Ghajar, the Lebanese village that had been annexed by Syria, was also conquered by Israel. International law does not recognize Israeli sovereignty on the Syrian Golan Heights. UN Security Council Resolution 497 which was made unanimously (including by the US) declared that the annexation of the Golan Heights was null and void, and without any meaning in international law.
Thus, we arrive at the double complication of the Ghajar affair: both regarding Hizbollah and the military force that it has established in Lebanon and regarding the international arena. There is a danger of descending into an escalating war scenario in the short term if international mechanisms for de-escalation are not activated. The US and France are aware of the sensitive situation and are already acting behind the scenes via special envoys in an effort to calm and defuse the tensions.
The one whose voice has not been heard regarding the Ghajar affair is the elephant in the room – Iran. According to the Iranian security doctrine, Hizbollah’s military forces are an “Forward Defense Position” in distant places in case of war. In the meantime, the missiles and rockets that they have supplied to Hizbollah are intended as a deterrent in light of the Israeli discussions of scenarios for possible attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. This is the reason that Iran is staying “in control of the situation” and is not keen to give Hizbollah unbridled freedom of action against Israel. Iran is aware of the dangers of loss of control and deterioration into miscalculation as happened in the 2006 Lebanon war, and has made this clear to Hizbollah’s leader.
Paradoxically, Iran and Israel have a common and overlapping interest: to prevent an unintended deterioration into war. This leads Israel to be extremely careful regarding incidents on the Lebanese border and not to concur with “patriotic” voices in the Israeli discource which demand tough retaliation in reaction to “violation of sovereignty”. Israel which has managed to block and hold off “Iranians at our fences” on the Golan Heights has no intention of bringing them back to the Ghajar arena just a few hundred meters from the towns and villages in the Galilee.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst