Sadness and dread as the next Lebanon war looms

I’ve been covering the Middle East for nearly 45 years, and I’ve grown to hate these wars and the immense suffering they bring to both Israelis and Arabs. It’s like watching people trapped as a violent hurricane approaches. Each time, you hope they can escape and disaster can be averted. But too often, they can’t.

The spillover of the Gaza war into Lebanon this month might have seemed inevitable, but it wasn’t. This was a war that both sides had hoped to avoid. The Biden administration, knowing the terrible cost, has been trying to find an exit ramp for 11 months. But the hard logic of war proved stronger than the soft logic of peace. Hezbollah wouldn’t stop firing rockets; Israel wouldn’t stop retaliating. The two sides moved up the ladder — and the United States couldn’t stop them.

Many people feel a moral obligation to choose sides in these wars. I’m a journalist, and it’s part of my job to talk to all the combatants, if I can. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions. I think Hamas rule has been a tragedy for Palestinians in Gaza and an intolerable menace for Israel. I think Hezbollah is a terrorist group that kidnapped Lebanon and has the blood of hundreds of Americans on its hands.

But I’ve seen Israel make some recurring mistakes, as well. Those are agonizing to watch if, like me, you think of Israel as an outpost of democracy in the Middle East and, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “a light unto the nations.”

What I’m watching now in Lebanon is hauntingly similar to what I saw in 1982 as a young reporter in Beirut covering the Israeli invasion that year. The problem, then as now, was overreach. Israel wanted to go to the root, to crush its chief adversary at the time, the Palestine Liberation Organization. No more halfway measures; use every weapon in the arsenal.

Israel had dazzling military and intelligence dominance back then, just as it does now. Its troops reached the suburbs of Beirut in days. But then what? Israel’s overwhelming power masked a strategic weakness: Its leaders didn’t have a good answer to the question, “Tell me how this ends?” The siege of Beirut continued until a U.S. mediator finally negotiated an exit for PLO leader Yasser Arafat and his fighters. Israel was caught in what turned out to be a quagmire.

I had the good fortune at the time to be able to talk with Israeli leaders, such as Prime Minister Menachem Begin, as well as Palestinian officials. The last time I visited with Begin was in August 1983, after the war in Lebanon had soured. I described the Israeli leader as “the lion in winter,” brooding about the casualties in Lebanon and the trauma the war had brought to his people.

“The truth is that he is sad,” explained Yehiel Kadishai, Begin’s personal secretary and colleague since the days of the Irgun underground. “He is a person who can’t show a laughing face when there is sadness in his heart.” Aides explained that Begin asked to be briefed each day on the latest casualty figures from Lebanon and the families of each Israeli soldier who had died. He cherished Israel, but friends told me that in his depression, he feared that he had left it weaker.

The scourge of Hezbollah has a special meaning for me, too. I visited the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983, and left about half an hour before a terrorist car bomb demolished the building. Most years since then, I exchange messages with the embassy official who escorted me to the elevator that day. She emailed me last week, after an Israeli airstrike killed Ibrahim Aqil, one of the Iran-backed terrorists who plotted the embassy bombing that day. Suffice to say, she doesn’t grieve for Aqil’s loss.

We talk often about unintended consequences of war. And the hideous truth is that the very existence of Hezbollah was in some ways a result of the 1982 Israeli invasion. By driving the PLO from Beirut, Israel removed the main check against Shiite militia power. The cadres of what became Hezbollah began to assemble almost immediately — with Iran’s covert backing. Over the next 40 years, Hezbollah forced the nation of Lebanon into submission.

Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was another of the unlikely cast of characters I interviewed over the decades. He was not the stereotypical villain. In answering my questions, he was clever, nimble, sometimes teasing. He seemed intrigued by the idea of talking with an American, as though it were a novelty.

But what I remember most was the intense security screening before the interview. His bodyguards disassembled my pens, my notebooks, the contents of my wallet — looking for a hidden Israeli bomb or surveillance device. Thank God this was in the days before pagers. The neighborhood where I met Nasrallah, in the Dahiya, or southern suburbs, of Beirut, has been pounded by Israeli airstrikes this past week.

Memory is supposed to provide clarity, but it can also be a fog. You think you know where you’re going, but when sudden events strike, they obliterate the past and all you see is the present — and the need to act. And then, you’re somewhere you never intended to be.

I wish I had answers to the questions that haunt all of us as we watch the Middle East shattered by an ever-widening war. The only things that seems clear to me are that total victory is an illusion in this conflict, and that security is essential.