Decision Time In The North - with Matti Friedman
This past weekend we saw a major and brazen escalation against Israel by Hezbollah. This war front is not new, but it will now come into much sharper focus.
And with the slaughter of Druze children, we have received a number of questions about Israel’s Druze community in Israel’s North, as well as questions about the options for Israeli decision-makers now.
To help us unpack all of this, we are joined by Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism. He is a columnist for The Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/
Matti’s most recent book is called “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” Before that he published "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel," and before that "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.” Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, and other hotspots across the Middle East and around the world. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section.
Matti Friedman's published works that are relevant to this episode:
-“The Wisdom of Hamas” — The Free Press
-“What if the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?” — The Free Press
-"There Is No 'Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'" -- The New York Times
-"An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth" -- Tablet Magazine
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
MF: The decisions made by Israeli leaders now are going to decide in a very dramatic way the course of events over the next months and perhaps over the next years, because if there's an all out war between Israel and Hezbollah, that is going to be much worse than the war we've seen so far against Hamas. And we actually might remember the war against Hamas as the preliminary to the real war. And it could quite conceivably draw in the Iranians directly, which would mean that this would become a regional war. And if that happens, then we're talking about an event on a completely different scale.
DS: It's 6:00 PM on Sunday, July 28th, here in New York City. It is 1:00 AM on Monday, July 29th in Israel. If you have been following the news over the weekend, you would have learned, according to the BBC, that, quote, ‘11 dead in rocket attack on Israeli occupied Golan’. That was the BBC headline. 11 dead in a rocket attack? Did the rocket just Attack Israel on its own, or did some terror organization launch the rocket attack? Given that that terror organization, Hezbollah, trained, funded, and armed by Iran, has been fighting a second front against Israel, is the organization that launched the rocket attack, one would think that that would be an important detail in the headline. Or that the victims were all children playing soccer on a football pitch. Also, tragically, an important detail, and ‘Israeli occupied Golan’? According to whom? The U.S. government recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. And sadly, the BBC was not alone. This headline was typical of the reporting across the media landscape over the weekend. Here's the New York Times headline, quote, ‘Fears of escalation after rocket from Lebanon hits soccer field.’ Again, a rocket just makes its way, on its own, to a soccer field. And of course, no mention of 12 dead children. And, no mention of Hezbollah. And then here's NPR, quote, ‘A rocket hit Israeli controlled Golan Heights after Israel struck a Gaza school’, close quote. Is this to suggest that this was a Hamas rocket fired in defense of an Israeli attack? No mention of Hezbollah, no mention of 12 children murdered. In any event, you get the point. This weekend we saw a major and brazen escalation against Israel by Hezbollah. This war front is not new, but is now going to come into much sharper focus. We had a lot of questions about this growing crisis, which seems to have entered a new phase this weekend, and its history, how Israel got here. We also had questions about Israel's Druze community in Israel's north, which were the victims of this attack. And also, what are the options now for Israeli decision makers? To help us unpack all of this, we are joined by Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism. He is a columnist for the Free Press. Listeners to this podcast know I'm a big fan of the Free Press, and Matti has been contributing some important reporting and analysis there since October 7th. Matti's most recent book is called Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. Before that, he published Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel and before that and most relevant to this conversation Pumpkin Flowers: a Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War that deals with Matti's experience in Lebanon. Mati's army service includes tours in Lebanon. He has served there and written and reported from there extensively and his work as a reporter has taken him not only from Israel to Lebanon, but other hotspots around the Middle East and around the world. Matti is also a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section, Matti Friedman on decision time in the North. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, my longtime friend Matti Friedman of the Free Press, regular columnist for the Free Press and author of numerous books, but most relevant for this conversation is his book, Pumpkin Flowers, which was about his time serving in southern Lebanon. And now we are here today to talk about a brewing war between Israel over the border between Lebanon and Israel and developments over these last couple days. Matti, thanks for being here.
MF: Thanks for having me, Dan.
DS: Matti lives in Jerusalem, but he spends a lot of time in northern Israel, and he's written extensively over the years about northern Israel, including not just the book I mentioned, but also a very important piece a few months ago for the Free Press, which we'll post in the show notes. Matti, let me just start about the attack over the weekend in Majdal Shams. What do we know about this attack as of now?
MF: Israel and Hezbollah have been trading fire over the border since October 8th. Hezbollah opens fire to support the Hamas offensive of October 7th, and since then there's been a kind of a low grade war on the northern border. But the incident on Saturday late afternoon evening is the worst attack in northern Israel since the war started. A Hezbollah rocket, which seems to have been aimed at a military facility on Mount Hermon, missed and hit a soccer court in a Druze town in the northern Golan Heights called Majdal Shams. There were lots of kids playing soccer on the grass and 12 of them were killed by the rocket. And, uh, they're being buried as we record this, this podcast. So this is the biggest civilian tragedy in the North since the beginning of the war and for the Druze of the Golan, this is basically an unprecedented occurrence and people are really shattered by what's happened.
DS: The attack seems to have been targeted, as you said, a military base near the soccer field. We're not sure whether or not it was intentional to hit that soccer field, right?
MF: My impression is that it was not intentional. I don't think Hezbollah has any interest in killing Druze civilians. Hezbollah launches a barrage of rockets on Saturday and announces it on one of their Twitter channels. And they say they're targeting an Israeli military base on Mount Hermon. And what seems to have happened and we don't really know is that they missed and hit a bunch of kids in the middle of this town, which is not too far away. And, um, it could be an incident that really changes the direction of events in the North, we'll see.
DS: We've been hearing since October 7th about communities in the north being evacuated and how all these Israelis, Jews and Druze, and we'll get to the Druze in a moment, but we've been hearing about all these communities in the north that have been moved to other parts of Israel because of the close range to Hezbollah rocket fire. Why hadn't these people been evacuated?
MF: The Golan Heights was never traditionally a target for Hezbollah rockets. That's only evolved in the course of this most recent round of fighting. And I don't think anyone ever thought that the Druze towns of the Northern Golan would be targeted. There are four Druze towns that are home to about 25,000 people. The Druze of the Northern Golan are different from the Druze citizens of Israel, who are to a large extent integrated in Israeli society and serve in senior positions in the military and in the intelligence services. The Druze of the Golan come under Israeli control after the six day war in 1967, and, and traditionally they've maintained an allegiance to Syria. That's changed over the past decade or so since the Syrian civil war, but most of them are not Israeli citizens. And I just don't think it occurred to anyone that Hezbollah would target these people. And my assumption is that they were not targeting the civilian residents of these villages, but if you send, as they have, hundreds or thousands of rockets into Israel over the course of 10 months, then the chances that one of them is going to miss its target, the chances are pretty good. And that seems to be exactly what happened in yesterday's tragedy.
DS: Okay. I want to talk to you about the Druze, which you just touched on. Their role in Israeli society is very complicated to the point that Ilan and I were talking this morning. We realized we just have to dedicate a whole episode to who the Druze are, which we'll do separately, because there's going to be a lot of questions and a lot of I'm curiosity now about the Druze, and like I said, they're among the most complicated community to explain that lives in Israel, perhaps even more complicated than the Jews. The Jews are pretty complicated to explain, but I think we can't really talk about this event without at least providing a few minutes of context on it. So, can you do your best here to summarize who are the Druze?
MF: Druze are an offshoot of Islam. Um, they split off from Islam about a thousand years ago. And are persecuted over many centuries by the mainstream of Islam. And they tend to live in remote locations that allow them to defend themselves. So largely in mountainous areas. Today, there are Jews populations in Israel, in Syria, and in Lebanon, inside Israel, the Druze have always been very loyal to Israel. That's part of the Druze approach to navigating the very treacherous geopolitics of this region. Similar in many ways to the way Jews navigated the treacherous geopolitics of Europe 100 years ago, which is to be unimpeachably loyal to the power in which you live. So the Druze in Israel are, as I said, members of the military, including at least one general.
DS: So first of all, they're an Arabic speaking community, this particular Druze community that was hit is indigenous to Northern Israel, and also areas of Syria and Lebanon. Right? I mean, that's when you say they have that connection to Syria and before 2012 had a deep connection even to the government, the Assad regime in Syria.
MF: The assumption was always that the Golan Heights were eventually going to be returned to Syria. And given that that's the case, they didn't want to be implicated in collaboration with Israel. That has changed to some extent since the Syrian civil war changed people's attitude toward the Assad regime. But the Druze are very closely tied to each other and the Druze of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel are connected to each other. But the different groups have a different approach based on which political entity they live in. So the Druze of Israel proper are very much Israeli and they're subject to the draft, the men are. My sergeant, for example, in, in a regular infantry unit of the Israeli military was Druze, lovely guy named Wissam from a village called, or a town called Ussifia, which is on Mount Carmel, not far from Haifa. And that's quite common. The commander of the Golani Brigade, one of our best infantry brigades until not long ago was Druze. So that's the Israeli Druze. The Druze of the Golan about, 25,000 people have a different political identity. They have the same religious identity as all the other Druze-
DS: But just on the religious identity. So they're not actually Muslim, but they practice a sort of distinctive Abrahamic faith, right? I mean, it's not Islam.
MF: No, it's not Islam. It's an offshoot of Islam. It's a fascinating religion with a lot of wisdom, and it's really worth a deep dive. If you haven't done one, it's very complicated to understand, but it's kind of an anomalous community that defies national boundaries. And I think as Jews, we can identify with this kind of predicament. Of course, you have co-religionists living in other countries, but you're loyal to the country that you live in. And this really reminds me of this situation of Jews in the First World War, where you had Jews fighting in the German army and Jews fighting in the British army. And that's kind of where the Druze are. So they're in a pickle, but the area in the Northern Golan where the Druze live, where there are these four villages, these four Syrian Druze villages, it's kind of like a Druze autonomous zone, almost not, not politically, but if you drive up there, it's really, it's their country and they grow excellent apples and they grow cherries and they have this unique culture. My experience has been that they're lovely hospitable people. There's even an alternative rock scene in Majdal Shams that it's just a fascinating corner of the country and I don't think that they expected to be drawn into this war in the way that they just were.
DS: Yup, okay. So now let's talk about where Israel goes from here. And like I said, for our listeners, we will do a whole episode on the Druze because it's certainly important and worthy. So Matti, as I said in the introduction, you've written extensively about Lebanon. You've worked on a documentary series about Lebanon. How did you end up, you Matti, focusing so much on Lebanon?
MF: I moved to Israel in 1995 with a very European story in my head, so I knew the story of the kibbutz and I knew about David Ben Gurion and I arrived in Israel, decided to stay, got drafted and ended up inside Lebanon in a military outpost called Outpost Pumpkin, which was part of what we call the security zone, which is a strip of land inside Lebanon that Israel kept from the early 80s until the year 2000 as a way of keeping terrorists away from the border, initially PLO fighters, and then Hezbollah fighters. So Israel maintained a buffer zone in Lebanon that was manned by Israeli soldiers. And I found myself in this country that I'd never thought about at all, because when I moved to Israel, I wasn't thinking a lot about Shia Islam or Maronite Christians or any part of the very complicated ethnic makeup of Lebanon. And I found myself in this country, which was first of all, just beautiful and bewitching and dangerous and confusing. And the landscape was gorgeous. And behind every rock, there could be a bomb and there were tripwires in the bushes. And we were shelled quite frequently by people who we couldn't see most of the time. So the whole mix was extremely compelling especially for a 19 year old and I think since then I've been trying to figure out what that was. And I got out of the army, went to study Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew university, took every Lebanon course that I could find. Then eventually went back to Lebanon as a journalist, a few years after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. So I spent a lot of my time in Israel trying to figure out exactly what happened to me and to my friends in Lebanon in the late 90s, in retrospect, what we saw was the first war of the 21st century. At the time we thought that the small-scale guerrilla war in the security zone in South Lebanon was the last war of the 20th century, because it seemed that the conflict was about to be wrapped up as part of the peace process.
DS: And then ultimately the Israeli withdrawal.
MF: And the withdrawal. And that seemed to be part of it.
DS: Right. Under Ehud Barak.
MF: Right. Ehud Barak pulls forces out of Lebanon. Our outpost was blown up by my company and we. interpreted that as being part of the end of the war. And in retrospect, what we'd really seen was the birth of a new kind of warfare, which Hezbollah really pioneers. And we're seeing it now, of course, here, but we've also seen it in Iraq, where a lot of the most potent enemies faced by U.S. troops were Shia militias trained by Hezbollah. A lot of the same guys in some cases who are building the IEDs that we had to deal with showed up in Iraq afterward. And even Afghanistan, the Taliban were using a lot of tactics that were pioneered by Hezbollah and the Palestinians too, were very much inspired by Hezbollah's success in the security zone in the 90s, and then implemented those tactics and are still implementing those tactics against Israel. So I think anyone who, you know, is trying to understand the Middle East in the 21st century really has to have a close look at what happened in South Lebanon in the 80s and 90s. And I saw a tiny piece of that as, as a soldier, and I've been preoccupied with figuring it out since then. DS: And it's not just the nature of the attacks and war fighting and terrorist attacks that Hezbollah orchestrated and implemented that were the model for a lot of what U.S. forces faced in Iraq, a lot of you said what Israel faced against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but it's also the way Hezbollah controlled the media narrative during these conflicts or these spikes in terrorism.
MF: Hezbollah is really one of the first groups, maybe the first group of this kind to understand the propaganda war and to understand that video in many cases can be a more powerful weapon than an RPG. So, very early on, Hezbollah starts sending a cameraman along with their fighters. And the first incident where this really works, where they score a huge propaganda victory using video, actually happened at the outpost where I served, although it happened before I arrived there at this outpost called Outpost Pumpkin, which in Hebrew is called Mutzav Blat. And at the very end of October 1994, a Hezbollah force attacks the outpost, catches the soldiers off guard. They manage to get up on the embankments of the outpost. One of the soldiers is killed, a few of them are wounded, and the Hezbollah guys manage to stick a flag in on top of the outpost, so it's kind of like an Iwo Jima moment and they film it with a camcorder and then they run away. So the Israeli army doesn't understand what, what happened because the outpost wasn't captured and it seemed that the soldiers managed to fight off the attack and then a few hours later Hezbollah airs the video. And this is early 90s, mid 90s, so the beginning of satellite TV information is really moving around across borders for the first time freely. This is pre internet, but it's very much the beginning of the kind of free information age. And the footage is so good. It's so powerful. It's incredible reality footage that even the Israeli stations play it and they play it in a kind of loop. And the Israeli public is shocked by this because it's the first time they've really seen enemy fighters score what seems to be a major victory against Israeli soldiers. And there hadn't been a victory. It was purely staged for the camera, but it didn't matter. And Hezbollah understood that you don't have to capture the outpost in order to score a propaganda victory. You don't have to capture the outpost in order to make a movie that makes it look like you've captured the outpost. And I think that this is kind of instinctively clear to us now in 2024, in the age of the smartphone, and we've seen the ISIS videos, and this has been adapted and perfected many times since the nineties, but the first group to really understand how this can work and how it could be used as a force equalizer against a more powerful enemy. That's Hezbollah fighting Israel in the South Lebanon security zone in the 1990s.
DS: Okay. So in terms of Israel's response now to what happened over the weekend, there are obviously two scenarios being discussed. There may be more, but the two scenarios being discussed is, is this to trigger for the all out war that many have been speculating would happen? It was just a matter of time between Israel and Hezbollah, or is there going to be some sort of measured escalation? Or something in between, or, and I'll give you one more, the war has been going on for some time and no one has been really paying attention. And so now this is just the latest escalation in a war that has been going on that we all thought was a sort of cold war, but actually has been a hot war.
MF: Anything that I say about the future will make me look stupid, probably within a matter of days. But I think that the decisions made by Israeli leaders now are going to decide in a very dramatic way the course of events over the next months and perhaps over the next years. Because if there's an all out war between Israel and Hezbollah, that is going to be much worse than the war we've seen so far against Hamas. And we actually might remember the war against Hamas as the preliminary to the real war. It might end up being remembered kind of like the Spanish Civil War is remembered as a prelude to the Second World War. Hezbollah is a much more powerful organization than Hamas. They have a lot more rockets. They have an estimated 140 or 150,000 rockets. They can strike anywhere in Israel. A war against Hezbollah will be devastating for Israel in a way that we haven't experienced yet and it will be much more devastating for Lebanon. And it could quite conceivably draw in the Iranians directly, which would mean that this would become a regional war. And if that happens, then we're talking about an event on a completely, on a completely different scale. And I know that people, certainly people here are watching this with great concern. My parents live very close to the Lebanon border in a town called Nahariya. So I'm, of course, uh, you know, watching this with some, uh, very direct personal investment, but I'm also watching this as someone who cares deeply about Lebanon. And it's strange to say, maybe as someone who was there initially as an infantry soldier, but have very warm feelings for Lebanon. It's a, it's just a beautiful, complicated, fascinating country that is a lot like Israel in many ways. They have beaches, and they have ski slopes, and they have business, and they have amazing food, and they have a bit of Europe, and they have a bit of the Middle East. And if they had better luck and better government, Lebanon would be an absolutely fabulous place. And the fact that it's a basket case is really a tragedy. It might end up being a tragedy for Israel as well, if we get dragged into a war, but it's primarily a tragedy for the Lebanese who could have had a different kind of country. And I, you know, I'd like to point that out because we talk about Lebanon in very military terms. And of course, Hezbollah is a real military threat. Hezbollah is de facto the army of Lebanon. There isn't really a state of Lebanon. Other people pretend that there is, but I think we can't lose sight of the fact that there is a country there that isn't Hezbollah and most people in Lebanon aren't Hezbollah. And there are large populations of people in Lebanon who are watching these events with extreme concern, if not terror, because whatever the effects are on Israel of an all-out war, for them, the effects will be worse.
DS: Now I wanna drill down on this, why this war could make the Israeli defensive war against Hamas seem like, you know, as you said, the Spanish of Civil Wars, that's a powerful analogy precursor to World War II because I think there's a tendency in the popular press coverage to just say yeah Israel's got a tense border on the south with Gaza and Hamas and it's got a tense border in the north with Hezbollah and southern Lebanon, and there are two terrorist organizations one on each border and Israel's it's one of Israel's many fronts, but no Hezbollah and its threat to Israel and its capacity, the um, scale of a war with Hezbollah in terms of its impact on Israel is at a whole other level from anything Hamas could do, even with the horrors of October 7th, you know, fresh in our, in our rear view mirror. So can you just explain why Hezbollah and the threat from southern Lebanon and the possibility of a full on war there is something that would completely eclipse the scale and the potential damage to Israel than what Israel has been dealing with on its Southern border.
MF: Hezbollah is a better trained organization. It's an organization with closer relations to the Iranians and the revolutionary guard. They're trained by them at a higher level and they have far, far more rockets and other weapons than Hamas does. And I think actually part of the problem on October 7th was that Israel was very much aware of that and didn't take Hamas seriously enough so Hamas didn't have as much to work with in terms of weapons and tech, but they were very smart and caught us off guard in many ways. I think because Israel was more minded toward a threat from the North than the threat from the South, but there's no question that a war with Hezbollah will be much worse. And when I spoke to people who follow this stuff from inside the system, they use the term 10x, meaning that a war with Hezbollah will be 10 times as worse as the war with Hamas. And because of the closer ties between Hezbollah and the Iranians, I mean, effectively Hezbollah is a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It's not as distant as Hamas. Hamas is part of the proxy alliance in a, in a general sense, but Hezbollah really Is equipped and trained and, and takes orders from the Iranians. So the chances of drawing the Iranians directly into the conflict is, is much higher than we saw. You know, that night that the Iranians fired 300 cruise missiles and suicide drones at Israel a few months ago, we saw what direct Iranian involvement would look like. The awareness of the nature of the Hezbollah threat is very much present at the highest levels of Israel's leadership. And it's quite clear that in the first days after October 7th, there were figures in the government who thought the move should be against Hezbollah because Hezbollah is the prime Iranian proxy on our borders.
DS: Not just figures, Gallant, the defense minister.
MF: Yeah. Primarily the defense minister thought that we should take out Hezbollah because Hezbollah is the prime Iranian proxy. And if you can deal with them first, then you've removed the main Iranian power on our borders. Hamas is a secondary power. And for many reasons, I think it was decided not to do that. One of the reasons was I think American pressure, the Americans were trying to limit the war and were in quite a misguided way, pressuring Israel and micromanaging Israel's response in a way that might've led or helped Israel make decisions that ultimately weren't the right ones. I mean, we're dealing with an Iranian proxy alliance. We’re dealing with an Iranian force on our northern border attacking us from Lebanon. In Gaza, attacking us in the form of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. We have Iranian forces on our northeastern border with Syria. We have Iranian proxies in Iraq, which fire at us on occasion. And of course we have the Iranian proxy in Yemen, which is the Houthis firing at a lot and interfering with shipping in the Red Sea. So the idea that Israel needs to fight on Iranian terms by kind of getting drawn into the mud with their proxies is one that I think we need to think about if the war is being run by the Iranians out of Tehran, then there's probably not going to be any kind of conclusive solution as long as the Iranians themselves don't pay a price.
DS: And just to put this in context, in the Syrian quote unquote, ‘civil war’, I always find that term civil war an odd term. I mean, the government of Bashar Assad has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Syrians. It's not exactly like there are two sides duking it out. But one side is unleashing a massacre on one community basically for over a decade. But be that as it may Hezbollah was deployed in that war. So just to give our listeners a sense Hezbollah fighters were fighting in Syria to protect and prop up Bashar Assad's regime, so this is a real light infantry army, Hezbollah, that is, as you say, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, so much so that when Iran was trying to protect Assad, they deployed different units to Syria, Iranian units, and Hezbollah because, Hezbollah was viewed as just one of the Iranian units that had at its disposal. So, that's how close Iran feels to Hezbollah, and that's how well trained the Hezbollah fighters are. They've had real experience in the last number of years fighting a real war. This is much different than Hamas in terms of its capabilities.
MF: It's one of the many facts that should lead us to understand that what's going on here is not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I think that if there's one way that press coverage of this conflict has been fictionalized, it's that if you present this as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then you can credibly present the Israelis as being more powerful, more militarized, more prosperous, more western, and the Palestinians as kind of third world innocents who are being crushed by the Israeli war machine. But of course, we're looking at a part of the world where there are 6 million Jews in one corner of the region called Israelis. And the Arab world is about 300 million people. And the Islamic world is one and a half billion, maybe two billion, depending on who you ask. And the war is clearly not limited to Israelis and Palestinians. In fact, that night, a few months ago, when the Iranians fired directly at Israel, you could really see the Iranian alliance in action, and you could really see the nature of what the war is. You know, we had rockets from Iran, rockets from Iraq, rockets from Lebanon, rockets from Yemen. It's not a war that's limited to Israelis and Palestinians. So the western press has really fallen in love with this narrative about Israelis and Palestinians. And usually will show Israelis as being powerful. Usually the Israelis appear in the form of a tanker, an F-16, and the Palestinians appear in the form of a child who's been caught in the, in the crossfire. And this is one part of a much more complicated regional conflict in which the prime mover is not Israel or the Palestinians, the prime mover is Iran. And I think it's crucial that we understand that because otherwise Israel's decisions are impossible to understand. So if you don't understand what's going on in the northern border, it's very hard to understand what's going on in Gaza. Much of what Israel is doing in Gaza is done with an eye toward the north, toward Hezbollah, toward demonstrating to Hezbollah what will happen if they pursue a certain course of action. And I think that it's, you know, it's, it's, it's necessary for people to zoom out and understand the regional contours of this conflict and abandon this very popular, but mostly fictional story about an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That term really obscures much more than it reveals.
DS: We're talking about Hezbollah's capabilities. I just think it's important for people to understand those capabilities. Also, it's Rockets the reach of its rockets the sophistication of its rockets again a whole other level from Hamas in terms of A its reach, B the precision guided sophistication of some of their capabilities which means they can hit big parts of israel that are largely untouched by hamas and the israeli population and critical infrastructure.
MF: Right. The war against Hezbollah will not be a war in the north. I think that's important to, to understand. Hezbollah has rockets that can reach across the country. Some of the rockets are very accurate. We've seen their success with suicide drones, which kind of changed the equation in many ways because they seem to be able to get under Israel's rocket warning systems with some success. So we're talking about a war that will affect all of Israel. It won't be like previous rounds with Hezbollah, which have largely affected Northern Israel. Um, the North might be affected more than other parts of the country, but we're going to see rockets hitting more or less everywhere. And I do think if it happens, God forbid, if it happens, it will be a war of a different order. It'll be the kind of thing that we haven't yet experienced. I think Israel will ultimately persevere, but it won't be easy. And every civilian in Israel will be affected by it. So I think that's why we've seen Israel's government go to such extreme lengths to avoid it. So Israel's been talking, of course, with a lot of confidence about what it can and will do to Lebanon if necessary. But at the same time, you've seen Israeli leadership do everything possible to avoid escalating the war with Hezbollah. And part of it is the understanding of what that war will look like. And part of it is, I think, the knowledge that we can't really handle a war on two fronts simultaneously, or if we're forced to handle a war on two fronts simultaneously, it's going to stretch the army to the breaking point. And Israel's military is, of course, still heavily engaged in Gaza, so the ideal scenario is to finish in Gaza in some way, even if it's not completely conclusive, and then turn the focus north. The ideal solution in the north would be a diplomatic solution that forces Hezbollah to move away from the border fence because Israeli civilians will not return to their homes on the fence if Hezbollah fighters are on the fence. And I had the experience a couple of years ago of being up on the fence with Israeli soldiers. And a few yards away from me, I guess it was about four or five yards from me on the Israeli side of the fence, a guy popped out of the bushes on the Lebanese side and he was dressed in civilian clothes, but he was clearly a military man, and he had a camera and he's pulled out his camera and started taking pictures. And it was clearly a Hezbollah scout who was in the bushes a few yards away from me on the Lebanese side. So if I'm an Israeli who lives at Kibbutz Manara or Kibbutz Hanita or Kibbutz Matsuba, the Kibbutzim that are really on the fence, I can't go back in those circumstances because October 7th could happen to me, you know, the next day after I returned to my home on the Lebanese border. So Hezbollah has to be pushed back in some way. Ideally that will be done with diplomacy. The war in 2006 against Hezbollah ends with an agreement that Hezbollah will operate only north of the Litani River, which means miles from the Israeli border. And in the buffer zone between Israel and Hezbollah, the United Nations inserted a military force called UNIFIL, which was supposed to keep the peace. And, and the force has been completely ineffective. In fact, the only thing it's achieved is making Israel's life harder because it's harder to operate against Hezbollah when you have a lot of Irish or Fijian troops in, uh, in South Lebanon. Other than that, it has been completely ineffective. So it's going to be hard to convince Israelis that a diplomatic solution engineered by the United Nations with international peacekeepers is going to keep us safe. And I think the most likely scenario, even though it is a terrible scenario, will be Israeli military action in Lebanon at some point in the near future.
DS: By the way, parenthetically, it's that experience with UNIFIL from UN resolution 1701 that many in Israel think the idea of having a third party security force in Gaza is completely unworkable too, because they've just seen what a disaster it's been in the North. But I want to, if Israel winds up in a full on war with Hezbollah, what does victory look like? Is victory just getting Hezbollah back to North of the Litani River? Or, is victory something similar along the lines of how Israel's declaring what victory would look like against Hamas, which is in Gaza It's removing basically wiping out Hamas, wiping out Hamas's capabilities, wiping out Hamas's leadership, crushing its military structure and Preventing it from being able to operate on Gazan territory Is that what victory looks like if Israel winds up in a war against Hezbollah?
MF: No, I mean, that kind of victory would not be feasible in Lebanon because it would require the occupation of all of Lebanon. And Israel has had, of course, as listeners will know, several misadventures in Lebanon when trying to intervene in different ways in Lebanese politics, most notably in 1982 when the Israeli army invades Lebanon in order to expel the PLO. Does expel the PLO. Yasser Arafat gets on a ship and is, uh, sent away to Tunis. And then Israel stays in Lebanon and tries to engineer the election of a pro-Israeli government in Lebanon. And it's an absolute disaster that leads to the massacres at Sabra and Jatila by Christian militiamen allied with the Israelis and Israel sinks into the Lebanese mud, that's how people say it here in Hebrew, the Lebanese mud, and people have this memory of just being embroiled in the swamp of ethnic warfare inside Lebanon. Israel only manages to extricate itself 18 years after the invasion. So I don't think you're going to see Israel trying anything along the same lines, which would probably mean that a victory against Hezbollah would be moving them far enough back from the border that normal life in Northern Israel could resume, deterring them to such an extent that they would not dare to attack us for a period of time. You know, forever might be a bit too much to ask, but ultimately I think none of these problems are likely to be solved, as long as the regime and Tehran is actively trying to surround Israel with proxies and, ultimately that is going to have to be addressed because Hezbollah is a symptom of the problem and Hamas is a symptom of the problem and the Houthis are a symptom of the problem, and we're not addressing the actual problem. So the Iranians have established a kind of great situation for them where they can attack Israel through proxies and Israel does not attack them. And that equation will have to change if we're to see a real change in Israel's position in the Middle East.
DS: And you said earlier that the story of Lebanon is a real tragedy, that it really is this beautiful country with all this potential and it's in a pathetic state. I mean, the country itself already feels like a failed state or a failing state or on the verge of collapse. So if Israel were to attack, the implications for Lebanon could be much broader and deeper than just, you know, Hezbollah getting crushed.
MF: Absolutely. I was in Lebanon as a tourist or as a journalist in 2002 and I was in Beirut and I was really struck by how similar it is to Tel Aviv. There were people with fashionable sunglasses and mini skirts and cell phones and people were at the beach and then you'd cross the street and it would be pictures of bearded clerics on the wall and women just all in black. And if you live in Israel, it was all very familiar. And since then, I've really seen Lebanon as kind of an open alternate future for Israel. Two countries that start out in similar circumstances with their backs to the Mediterranean, you know, one leg in Europe, one leg in the Islamic world. And when I look north, I don't just see an enemy state or a threat. I see an alternate future for Israel, a failed state that does not get its act together, a state that parcels out government power among competing ethnic groups, a state that surrenders to corruption and that's really happened in Lebanon and we've seen it play out over the past couple of years where garbage has piled up in Lebanon because there's no one to collect it, electricity works for a few hours a day, gas has run out and there's been a lot of emigration of the people who are Lebanon's future and they've, they've been leaving and they'd be going to places like Canada, where I'm from, and I hope that they can build better lives there, but it's a tragedy for Lebanon. So we're looking at a state that is on the brink of becoming a failed state. And, and an Israeli war in Lebanon, if Hezbollah triggers one, it won't just hit Hezbollah. It could push Lebanon over the brink in a way that I think could have very unpredictable consequences. Israel might not have a choice. I don't think we can live with kind of a, an Iranian proxy army dictating our lives on the northern border. And I think it's Lebanon's weakness that's been its undoing. They haven't managed to establish state sovereignty. They don't control their own territory. It's just a very loose alliance between different groups. And one of those groups is Hezbollah and they have their own plan that has nothing to do with building a better future for the Lebanese. So one of the many tragedies that I hope we can avoid in the next couple of months is a tragedy that could really push Lebanon into the abyss.
DS: What would it take to, I know you're not a military strategist, but you write a lot about military strategy and military strategists. What would it take to remove the threat, the Hezbollah threat from Israel's north? I mean, really removed.
MF: Saying I'm not a military strategist is a bit of an understatement. I'm a very low ranking infantry soldier who loses interest basically over the company level. So as soon as it gets to the battalion level or the brigade level, it's for me, so theoretical that I can barely understand what's going on, but you're not going to see the eradication of Hezbollah in Lebanon in any circumstance because Israel cannot occupy all of Lebanon. So if Israel goes into South Lebanon, as we did in the 80s, we held a strip of land in South Lebanon, but Hezbollah didn't operate from the strip of land that we controlled, they simply went north. And they operated north of the Israeli occupation zone, and that's what they'll do if Israel goes into Lebanon, reaches the Litani River, Hezbollah will move north of the Litani River and operate from there. So you're not going to see a situation where Israel is going house to house in Beirut looking for Hezbollah fighters. All that can be done is to push them back from the border and establish an equation that makes any attack on Israel not worthwhile. Unfortunately, because, as we know, Hezbollah is not an independent actor. It serves the interests of the Islamic Republic in Iran. Without addressing that problem, you're not going to see a fundamental solution to the Hezbollah problem. And I think that many of us have realized over the past 10 months that we're fighting the war that Iran wants us to fight. We're behaving as they want us to behave. They're sending their proxies at us and we're fighting with the proxies. Iran doesn't mind sacrificing tens of thousands of Palestinians and they won't mind sacrificing tens of thousands of Lebanese. And until the Iranians pay a price for their strategy, they don't have any interest in desisting. And I think that's where this is going. Unfortunately, it's going there 10 months into the Gaza war with Israel's international position very much eroded with American leadership, nowhere to be seen with America flying into an election that has very unpredictable results. So all this is happening at a very bad time. So the Iranians have a coherent strategy. They're very disciplined. They're pursuing a coherent goal. And the Western Alliance system, such as it is, is kind of headless and running around in a way that's not likely to solve the deep problems of the region.
DS: We often hear about some connection between what Hezbollah is doing and the ceasefire negotiations, the hostage negotiations with Hamas. That is to say that, and I've referenced this on this podcast in previous episodes, the idea that some folks in the administration who are working on deescalating the situation between Israel and Hezbollah are arguing that if there is some kind of temporary ceasefire deal reached between Israel and Hamas, it could allow Hezbollah to climb down from the tree because a lot of its senior officials and commanders have been knocked out by Israel over the last few weeks. We shouldn't ignore that. So they may have their own interest in deescalating, but they can't appear to be deescalating from a position of weakness. So their deescalation from a quote unquote position of strength optically will be, well, they're doing it in solidarity with Hamas, which reached a deal. And because there's less pressure on Hamas in a post deal situation, even just for a few weeks, it allows Hezbollah to claim a small victory and say, we're climbing down from the tree as well.
MF: I think that is what the U.S. administration is hoping. And I think that policy will ultimately prove to be misguided because there are wars that need to be won. And the, the West has this idea that the goal is to Ceasefire. The goal is deescalation, but that just kicks the ball down the road. And we had deescalation in Ceasefires, numerous ceasefires in Gaza, and the price that we paid for it was unbearable on October 7th. So certain problems have to be dealt with, and it's possible that Israel might see some virtue in quiet along the northern border for a few months while we reorganize and prepare for the next round. But I don't think that Israel, knowing what we know, knowing what we learned on October 7th can allow itself to go to sleep again in the way that we did until October 7th. Hezbollah is an organization that's dedicated to the destruction of Israel. They're very open about it, by the way. One thing that I like about these organizations is that they're quite honest about their goals. They're dedicated to the destruction of Israel. They're dedicated to the assertion of Islamic power across the Middle East and beyond. They're dedicated to fighting American power in the Middle East. If they're breathing room to pursue those goals, they will attack at a time that's convenient for them and that can't be allowed to happen. So it's possible that we will need to pause in the fighting in order to get hostages home. It's possible that we'll need to pause in order to pivot to the north. But I don't think that Israel's goals are served by the illusion of deescalation. That will pay for quite dearly 4 months, 6 months, 12 months down the road. I think it would be very unwise of us to forget what we learned about the Iranian proxy Alliance on October 7th. We have to deal with this problem and not tell ourselves all kinds of stories about how we're outsmarting it or why we'll just build a fence and let it fester on the other side. Those solutions failed on October 7th and we, we need a strategic rethinking of how we deal with our enemies on all of our borders.
DS: This operation over the weekend, even if it didn't slaughter a group of children playing soccer, if Hezbollah was successful in what we understand to be its original goal, which was hitting an Israeli military base, what on earth did they think the response to that would be? I mean, if they had successfully hit an Israeli military base and slaughtered a bunch of Israeli soldiers, I mean, do they not think at some point there is going to be a response from Israel that is a full on war? Is that what they want?
MF: It's hard for me to say exactly what they want in part because I think we've all been chastened by the experience of October 7th where we were very confidently explaining what Hamas did and did not want. So I'm very cautious about doing that. I don't think Hezbollah wants a full on war that could push Lebanon over the brink. Hezbollah, unlike Hamas, has to operate as part of the Lebanese political system. They're not a majority in Lebanon. They can't cause the collapse of the state in which they operate because they need the state and they need the support of, of people in the state who are not Hezbollah fighters. So I don't think Hezbollah wants the kind of war that would end Lebanon as a country, which is quite possibly the outcome of an all out war should it happen. So I think they're playing a very dangerous game. They've been given the impression that they can take things to the brink. And they've been given that impression by Israel, which has tried to contain their actions on the Northern border. And it's been given that impression by the West and by the Americans who've said, you know, let's deescalate. Let's have a ceasefire. But they've clearly been tying Israel's hands and kind of setting limitations to Israel's actions. And everyone, everyone knows it. Everyone knows that Israel is playing by a certain set of rules. And if you don't break those rules, then you'll probably be okay. So you might lose a lot of your field commanders. I think Hezbollah has lost 360 or so. That's a lot, but it's not going to cripple the organization. They can deal with it. And they're playing this very dangerous game where they're firing hundreds or thousands of rockets into Israel. The problem with that is that ultimately you're going to hit the wrong thing. And of course that's true of Israel too and we might remember that convoy of the food aid workers were hit by mistake by Israeli aircraft. It's going to happen in a war and it just happened to Hezbollah. They thought they could control exactly the level of violence, but you can't. You'll never be able to control the level of violence because something will, will go wrong. And something just did on Saturday when they killed 12 Druze children. And the way this plays out is extremely unpredictable. It could be the fatal error. It could push everything over the brink. It could be contained in a way that allows us to continue the current situation for a few more weeks or months. It's hard to say, but the idea that you can control 100% this kind of game, whether you're Israeli or whether you're Hezbollah is fanciful. It doesn't work that way.
DS: Let's move on to the situation for Israelis in the north. If I were to go to Northern Israel today, what would my experience look like? I've been there many times, but I have not been there since October 7th. I've stayed up there. I've traveled extensively up there, but again, I have not been up there since the 7th. So if I were to go up there today, what, what would my experience be like?
MF: So if you've been there, you know, that it might be the best part of the country. The landscape is, it's beautiful relations between Jews and Arabs in the north are very different from what they are in Jerusalem. They're less tense. There's a kind of coexistence up there that I love. And there's a very complicated ethnic mosaic in the north, the Druze, the Jews, a lot of Israelis of Russian extraction, of course, Muslims, you have Christian villages, and it's just kind of a fascinating and wonderful part of the country. If you go now, and I go quite frequently to visit my parents who live, as I mentioned, in a town called Nahariya, which is the northernmost town on the coast that hasn't been evacuated. So it's a town of about 70,000 people. It's a beach town, kind of looks maybe a bit, Miami might be pushing it, it's a lot smaller, but it's a, it's a town on the Mediterranean coast with palm trees and, you know, uh, restaurants on the beach. And then what happens today, if you keep driving North, so you pass through my parents apartment, you keep going North through Nahariya, you get to a famous beach called Aghzi, which is a beautiful beach just North of Nahariya, and there's a military checkpoint. So you're not close to the Lebanon border, but there's a military checkpoint and effectively the country ends. So what Hezbollah has succeeded in doing is moving the Israeli border South; 5, 7 in some cases more kilometers, so you have a security zone inside Israel. So if once I served as an infantry man in a security zone inside Lebanon, which was a buffer zone meant to keep the hostile fighters away from our border. Today we have a security zone in Israeli territory. So if you keep driving north from Nahariya and you pass the military tech point, and I did this a few months ago. The towns are deserted. So you can go to a town called Shlomi, which is usually a very bustling place and there's no one there. It's a ghost town. It's very eerie. The only cars on the road are military vehicles. And if you keep going farther and you actually reach the border, which, which is quite dangerous and you need an army escort to get there, you'll see that the border settlements, which are in some cases really on the fence, they touch the fence. A lot of those communities have been badly damaged. If you see pictures from there, you'll see that parts of them look like Stalingrad, a place like Metula has been really hit very hard. Many houses have been damaged. Kiryat Shmona, which is a small city in the north, which has been evacuated. Parts of Kiryat Shmona are rubble. And the residents of Kiryat Shmona are people who I see a lot in Jerusalem because many of them have been evacuated here and are being put up in hotels, not far from where I'm speaking right now, but 70,000 people have been evacuated from, from the north. So you, you find yourself in a region that is deserted and pockmarked by rockets and the houses are, some of them are burnt out shells and some of the kindergartens have been turned into military posts and it's, uh, it's extremely disturbing. It's a success for Hezbollah. I mean, I don't think there's any other way to portray it. They've managed to depopulate a large swath of Israel. And I understand why Israel did it. They wanted to move civilians out of harm's way in order to concentrate on the South, but we've established a precedent that we might regret. And by moving our civilians out of this swath of land in the North, we've basically given Hezbollah license to fire thousands of rockets at it and claim to only be seeking military targets. And we'll see where all this is going, but that's, uh, that's what you would see if you went North right now, it's not the beautiful kind of tourist heaven that it was last year, it's um, it's a war zone.
DS: How many people have left their homes in Northern Israel? How many Israelis?
MF: About 70,000 people.
DS: Okay. They have now missed, including the children of those families, they've now missed an entire school year, right? Since the evacuations began in the days after October 7th. Defense Minister Gallant had talked about the goal being to get those kids back to school so they were back to the north so they don't miss a second school year. That now seems entirely unrealistic, right?
MF: That's very unlikely to happen.
DS: Right. So we are heading into a world in which these families may now be dealing with a second year of not living in their homes and these ghost towns still existing as ghost towns and no end in sight.
MF: Right, and it's potentially even worse because at least some of those families will not go back after you live for a year in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, and your life begins to take on a different shape, and you won't necessarily go back to the place you were living before, you might see that there are advantages to living in a big city, you might prefer not to live too close to Hezbollah given what we know now. So I don't think that all evacuees will necessarily rush back north as soon as that becomes possible. They might go eventually, if we see that peace is restored to the north. But this is a major event. It's not a blip. It's not that people left home for a couple of weeks and everything will, will go back to normal, which is really the way it was in the 2006 war, which I, covered at the time for the AP and my parents stayed in their town in Nahariya, but most people left Nahariya and the town was a ghost town and the traffic lights, I remember just blinked yellow. It was very eerie, the whole thing. But as soon as the war was over, everyone came back and life went on as if nothing had happened. That's not going to happen this time. We're in a real change for Israel. The idea of abandoning communities is anathema to Zionism. We always had the idea that you farm to the last furrow, you literally plow along the border fence. And if there's a Hezbollah guy on the other side of the border, you plow anyway, and that's always been the way Zionism did it. And that's why those kibbutzim were built on the border. Hanita is a, you know, kind of a symbol of Zionist pioneering built on the Lebanon border by a very brave young people who lived there until October 7th and have now been away for 10 months. And they're kind Kibbutz has largely been destroyed. So we're looking at the undermining of a major precept of Zionism. And the idea that we live on the fence, that we plow to the last furrow, that idea is not going to return the day of the ceasefire. I think we're going to see a change in that regard and it's going to take real rehabilitation. It's going to take a different kind of Israeli leadership to kind of restart the country after this, um, very traumatic experience of the past 10 months, however long it ends up lasting.
DS: Alright, Matti, we will leave it there, and for our listeners, Matti has committed, offline with me, to a fully dedicated educational episode about the backstory.
MF: Dan, the word educational sounds terrible. Who wants an educational episode?
DS: Our listeners, actually. Mati, no, no, no, no, no. This has been one of the great discoveries of the Call Me Back podcast, is that our highest performing episodes are the ones that you and I would think are the most boring, dense, wonky, and dare I say, educational. And those Episodes are like off the charts in terms of downloads and they have this incredibly long tail. So you were wrong. People want education. I've been shocked by this. We were doing these episodes because we like doing these episodes and we said, you know the downloads and the rankings be damned but actually there is a extraordinary appetite. For instance, Benny Morris, a two part episode of Benny Morris on the origins of the war and independence in the history leading up to the war of independence has been one of our, among our best performing episode. I was excited to do that two part episode. I just didn't think it would find much of an audience to my surprise. It will only rival the Matti Friedman episode on the history of the Lebanon chapter in Israel's history.
MF: The very non educational episode about the Lebanon chapter in Israel's history.
DS: Right. Right. Right. Okay. Alright, Matti, we will leave it there. Stay safe and thank you for this and we will look forward to being with you soon.
MF: Thank you so much for having me.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Matti Friedman, you can find him on X @mattifriedman You can also find his work on the Free Press website at the FP and you can order his books from wherever you order books. We will put links in the show notes to them. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.