Terrorists and Diplomats Are Trying to Redraw Israel’s Borders
Seth MandelJuly 29, 2024 for Commentary
“One of the reasons that we’re continuing to work so hard for a ceasefire in Gaza,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken after Hezbollah murdered twelve children in northern Israel, is to create “an opportunity to bring calm, lasting calm, across the blue line between Israel and Lebanon… We want to see Israelis, we want to see Palestinians, we want to see Lebanese live free from the threat of conflict and violence.”
I have no doubt Blinken really wants peace, and I know that the Israeli political opposition, specifically Benny Gantz, has been tempted into making similar remarks. But this attitude erodes Israeli sovereignty—and a state is nothing without its sovereignty.
Tying Gaza and Lebanon together is reminiscent of the long-debunked “linkage theory” of the Middle East, in which a peace deal with the Palestinians is considered a prerequisite to solving any other conflict in the region. The idea here is that Israel does not deserve peace with Hezbollah/Lebanon until it has first made peace with Palestinians.
No other country is made to follow such inane rules of engagement. Were the U.S. to be at war with Mexico, we would not countenance the idea that Canada can bomb us until we reach a truce with Mexico. Once again, putting any other country in Israel’s shoes reveals just how ridiculous are the standards to which the Jewish state, and no one else, is held.
But there’s a more serious erosion of sovereignty at play if Israel cannot deter Hezbollah and quiet its northern border.
Tony Blinken should visit the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa. The facility recently gave journalists from the Wall Street Journal a tour, and I’m sure they’d happily show Blinken the same courtesy. A glimpse of what he’d find:
Four operating rooms, a maternity ward and a dialysis center are among the facilities the hospital has set up three levels down in its underground parking garage, part of its plan to keep functioning if the daily tit for tat exchange of fire between Israel and the U.S.-designated terror group across the border with Lebanon escalates.
Hospital beds are set up next to oxygen and suction lines embedded within the parking lot’s walls, medication is piled on rollable shelves, and ventilation ducts have been strung from the ceiling. Doctors practice evacuating their wards to the parking garage, primed to transfer operations underground within eight hours and get ready for new patients.
Israel is preparing to live—or at least to survive—underground. Rambam isn’t the only healthcare facility making such preparations. Hezbollah’s missile stockpile is deep enough to likely overwhelm Iron Dome with sheer numbers of rockets fired every day for two months—the baseline time period for which the hospitals are preparing.
Citizens, too: “Homeowners associations across Israel are clearing out dusty shelters in apartment buildings, fixing plumbing and stockpiling water and supplies to be ready for long stays underground… supplies of necessities such as blood are being secured.”
The Majdal Shams massacre highlights the danger of staying above ground even before such an “escalation.” The Druze community in northern Israel were far less likely to relocate when the calls for evacuation went out. Their decision was a defiant stand in favor of Israeli sovereignty—if Hezbollah could evacuate the north on a whim, then the borders of Israel would shrink, no matter where the official international lines were drawn.
The same is true of the Gaza envelope. Towns along the Gaza border evacuated after October 7, and return has been slow. As I wrote earlier this month, the IDF recently showed journalists an area about a mile from the border inside Gaza where they had blown up a tunnel mere hours earlier. “Israel must be able to exercise its sovereignty to the very edge of its borders,” an Israeli military escort said at the scene.
Blinken’s linking of the two borders to a Gaza ceasefire legitimizes the strategy of eroding Israeli sovereignty, more or less giving a green light to the folks ready to rain down thousands of rockets a day from up north. This is not how you get peace; it is how you get war. And Israelis have a right and a duty to defend their sovereignty.