On September 17th, Israel began an unprecedented escalation in Lebanon. First, it carried out a remote pager attack that blew up vast numbers of communications devices, killing and maiming thousands; then, it launched airstrikes that killed 558 people on September 23rd alone in what became the deadliest single day for Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990. And four days later, Israeli warplanes dropped over 80 US-made, 2,000-pound bombs on six high-rise apartment buildings in Beirut, leveling the residences; killing at least 300; and assassinating Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
These events have commenced the deadliest period since Israel started its nearly year-long bombardment of Lebanon on October 8th, 2023, after Hezbollah began launching rockets at Israeli military positions in the occupied Shebaa Farms in a bid to open up a new war front with Israel in order to reduce pressure on its ally in Gaza. Even after its assassination of Nasrallah, Israel has continued crossing new thresholds: Israeli bombings have struck everywhere from the center of Beirut to the northern city of Tripoli, and on October 1st, thousands of Israeli soldiers began a ground invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli military has instructed residents of over 100 villages and city neighborhoods to flee their homes, placing 25% of Lebanese territory under displacement orders and uprooting at least one-quarter of the country’s population.
The United States has done little to deter Israel from escalating further; in fact, ahead of the escalations, certain US officials privately conveyed support for the moves to Israel. After Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris said the assassination was a “measure of justice” for Hezbollah’s killings of Israelis and Americans, making no mention of the civilian deaths that accompanied the strikes. The leaders did call for diplomacy and de-escalation—yet, they have dropped their previous calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, and are instead saying they support Israel’s “degrad[ing]” of Hezbollah.
As the US continues sending weapons to Israel while also deploying American troops and warplanes to the region and extending the stay of warships already there, an even-bloodier confrontation looms, between the US and Israel on the one hand, and the “Axis of Resistance”—the Iran-led formation that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Ansar Allah, and Iraqi militias—on the other. On October 1st, Iran fired around 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Israel has now pledged to retaliate by bombing sites in Iran, and Biden has said Israel has a “right to respond.” To unpack these developments, Jewish Currents interviewed Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, the former director for the Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and a former member of Israel’s negotiations team under Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. Levy discussed Israel’s political calculus, why the US won’t exert more leverage, the response from the Axis of Resistance, and potential future scenarios. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex Kane: What events in the past year led up to Israel’s recent escalation in Lebanon?
Daniel Levy: In the months following October 7th, 2023, Israel and Hezbollah settled into a pattern of exchanges of fire which largely remained within the parameters of what might be termed managed or calibrated conflict. Israel’s decision to preemptively evacuate approximately 60,000 residents from the north had the side-effect of turning that area into a fire zone, making it even harder for them to create the conditions for those evacuees to go back to their homes.
There were several occasions when the parties seemed on the precipice of a more dramatic escalation. But it was only this summer—after Israel assassinated Hezbollah deputy commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, immediately followed by the extrajudicial killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and, seven weeks later, by the pager and walkie-talkie mass maiming attack in Lebanon—that it became clear Israel had chosen to enter a different phase of war against Hezbollah, and indeed against Lebanon and its civilians.
Why was that the case? For years, Israel’s leaders have warned that eventually Hezbollah “would have to be dealt with.” The specific timing probably speaks to a number of factors. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw the prospect of reviving his fortunes by presenting himself as an indispensable wartime leader. Expanding the conflict across additional fronts could serve that goal, but it also required battlefield success. Israel had failed in almost a year of fighting in Gaza to restore deterrence or its mythological sense of power projection, and needed to shift that equation back in its favor. Israel will have known that going deeper into its piecemeal attempts to degrade Hezbollah would ultimately generate a counter-response. There are some reports that Israel’s infiltration of Hezbollah’s communication systems, which enabled the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, was about to be detected, and that this moved Israel to act precipitously. Whether that is accurate or not, once that attack had occurred, Israel decided to drive home the immediate advantage by targeting Hezbollah leadership, weapons stocks, and underground networks in the south—all before command structures and fighting ranks could be replenished. Hence, the subsequent relentless mass bombings and the start of a ground incursion.
AK: How is Israel able to flatten high-rises in Beirut, conduct attacks across Lebanon, and begin a ground invasion without incurring international fallout?
DL: In the past year, Israel has conducted an unprecedented campaign—one that numerous experts tell us is a genocide—in Gaza, in violation of urgent provisions of the International Court of Justice. Along the way, Israel has learned that there are no immediate tangible consequences for its relentless violations of international law. Gentle US discouragement of Israel’s more extreme waves of destruction, and media leaks about Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu, were completely overshadowed by the diplomatic political cover and the conveyor belt of weapons supplies the US offered to Israel, as well as its messaging alignment. These were combined with the US moving more military assets and troops to the region to mitigate any fallout for Israel, all of which tells Israel’s leaders that they could take additional risks and criminal measures. So after testing these limits in Gaza, and knowing that it had the support of the Biden administration (and other Western allies) to act without consequence, Israel was confident that expanding this destruction into Lebanon would be met with impunity.
AK: US officials continue to say that they have tried, and are trying, to de-escalate the situation. For instance, Biden’s adviser Amos Hochstein made repeated trips to Lebanon over the past year to try to strike a deal to end the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. How do these de-escalation talks square with the US’s apparent unconditional support of Israel’s war goals?
DL: The US negotiating strategy is very familiar: Israeli positions are consistently repackaged and put forward as US positions, and when Israel decides it wants to increase or change its demands, the US accommodates. Even if Israel then reneges on its commitments, the US ultimately shifts the goalposts. This is what happened across decades of American-mediated, Palestinian–Israeli talks.
It’s a modus operandi that has been most conspicuous in the past year with regard to the talks on a Gaza hostage release and ceasefire. Those have been stuck because the US creates no incentive for Israel to limit its demands to those that are achievable. Quite the opposite: It encourages Israeli rejectionism. Therefore Israel continues to say, “we can throw our more maximalist designs into the American negotiating pot,” and tries to use political talks to secure the unrealistic goals it set and could not achieve on the battlefield. The demand that Israel remain in the Philadelphi corridor is a very obvious example. Throughout, the US never called Israel out, and has consistently told us that Hamas is the problem, even though the core demands of Hamas—permanent cessation of fighting, full IDF withdrawal from Gaza, full hostage/prisoner exchange deal, aid access—are, in reality, closer to the international and even American consensus. Moreover, the US has even failed to hold Netanayhu’s feet to the fire when much of the Israeli security establishment, the domestic political opposition, and the hostage families were exposing Bibi’s responsibility for preventing progress. At key moments, whether intentionally or otherwise, the Biden administration endorsed Netanyahu’s interpretation of events, and thereby helped Netanyahu in his own domestic arena.
Now, we are seeing these dynamics repeated with Lebanon. A deal to create a ceasefire, which would allow for the return of Israel’s residents to the north, has been available for several months. But that would require Israel to accept diplomacy, accept that Hezbollah would not be defeated militarily and, crucially, accept that a ceasefire in Lebanon can only be achieved in tandem with a ceasefire on the Gaza front. Israel rejected, and continues to reject, these points. In late September, once the Israeli escalation had begun, the US started a new diplomatic engagement which proposed a 21-day pause, which would lead to efforts for a full ceasefire on both the Lebanon and Gaza fronts. On September 25th, senior White House officials briefed reporters that a breakthrough had been achieved and that both parties would soon make an announcement to that effect. But a day later, Netanyahu said the opposite in his UN speech, and soon afterwards, the massive bombardment on Beirut, which killed Nasrallah, had taken place.
It is unclear whether US officials were in on Israeli intentions, making the entire ceasefire plan a decoy and distraction, or whether they were being duped. But what is clear is that there was no consequence. In the same week that Israel flouted the US’s ceasefire proposal, Israeli officials announced that they had secured $8 billion in additional US military aid, and the region has been in its most consequential escalatory cycle ever since.
AK: Some observers look at this situation and say that the US is letting Israel call the shots; that is, the US tries to de-escalate, Israel refuses, and then the US goes along with Israel anyway. How should we assess these claims?
DL: The basic way to understand US policy is to remember that alongside domestic political calculations—the lobby and campaign finance considerations—the US sees Israel as an ally for managing its interests in the region, even if it’s an ally that occasionally goes off on unfortunate tangents. The Biden administration leadership sees a geostrategic advantage in working with Israel to substantially degrade Axis groups, and perhaps attempt to put in place friendly regimes in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran. If that happens, America can finally achieve the shared Trump-Biden vision of a new Pax Americana between Israel and Arab states to marginalize the Palestinians, manage the region, and prevent any hostile hegemon arising, while also serving to block Chinese and Russian interests. That would also help the US shift its attention and assets towards the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific regions.
Such Israeli-American fantasies of a Middle East reshaped around an Israeli hegemon, and around finishing the job of crushing the Palestinians, have failed before and they will fail again, but the US is apparently incapable of learning lessons. Hence, the conveyor belt of arms being delivered to Israel, as well as the deployment of 50,000 US troops to the Middle East and additional warships and aircraft carriers off the coast of Lebanon and in the Gulf—all attempting to restore Israel’s lost deterrence, power projection capabilities, and escalation dominance.
AK: For many months now, the expectation has been that the only forces that would move to restrain Israel on the ground would be Hezbollah and Iran. However, this has by and large not happened. Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel last week, but it hasn’t done the much more substantial damage it is capable of. Hezbollah has likewise fired thousands of rockets, but it has not launched a barrage that US officials fear could overwhelm Israeli defense systems. Why have we seen this relatively muted response, and how is it likely to change now, with Israel’s expected bombing of Iran?
DL: Until recent weeks, Axis of Resistance groups—each of which have their own domestic political positioning and decision-making, but also act in unison—were wary of a broader escalation. Their concern was that Israel could pull the US into a direct confrontation with Iran, achieving something Netanyahu had long angled for, and at a timing Iran was not prepared for. So the different Axis of Resistance groups, including Hezbollah, Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, and even Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units, entered the fray after October 7th to send the signal that Israel’s battlefield would not be confined to Gaza. But while exchanges between Israel and these groups were sometimes deadly, each side was largely calibrating its steps and maintaining certain control and brake mechanisms.
This dynamic is now changing in the wake of Israel’s escalation. With Israel and the US increasingly hinting that once the external rings have been disabled, Iran itself would be in the crosshairs, the Iranian leadership was left debating whether to wait or pre-emptively deter. There was anger in certain Iranian circles that restraint had weakened Iran’s security posture and brought it to a point of unprecedented threat. There was also an image problem—Tehran did not want to be seen to have folded in the face of cumulative Israeli provocations. That is likely the calculation which led to the October 1st strike, and an attempt to restrain Israel’s next move from being a significant escalation. Having launched this strike in order to re-establish deterrence, Iran has now sent a signal that a disproportionate Israeli response will be met with a broadening of the zone of conflict. If Israel strikes Iranian oil facilities, for instance, the messaging seems to be that those won’t be the only oil facilities in the region that will burn. At the same time, it seems that militants from both Yemen and Iraq are increasing their activity, and that Hezbollah is readying to take advantage of a growing Israeli ground operation—which could play to its strengths in asymmetric guerilla warfare and could lead back in the direction of Israel being bogged down in attritional combat.
What all this suggests is that this already year-long war is unlikely to lead to decisive victories. Israel is taking a high-risk gamble if it keeps doubling down. It may achieve tactical battlefield successes, but it cannot secure strategic wins as it has no political vision that comes even close to being realistically achievable. Just as it couldn’t restore deterrence in Gaza, it may now be cornering itself elsewhere.
AK: What scenarios appear imminent at this stage, as Israel continues bombing Lebanon with US backing?
DL: The Israeli airstrikes and ground operation in Lebanon can be expected to deepen. An Israeli attack on Iran appears imminent. If that attack is deemed to be sufficiently escalatory, then we are in the scenario of ongoing military exchanges which involve more of the region, including likely direct US engagement in an offensive capacity. A major confrontation like that could bring new elements into play—including blowback in the Gulf and on global energy markets, and the possibility of unpredictable spillover at a time when Israel has enraged so much of the Arab public across the region. Such an escalation could also take us to unpredictable spaces—one cannot ignore, for instance, that Israel is a nuclear armed state, and ministers and other public influentials have advocated the use of those weapons.
It is technically conceivable that the cost for continuing down this path could become too high for either or both parties in the Israel–Iran standoff. That would lead to either a mutual interest in de-escalation, or the ability of one side or the other to dictate terms. But absent some major and unforeseen rupture that has yet to come into play, this seems unlikely. Currently, there are intensive discussions between Iran and Gulf Arab states— and in particular between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Qatar—that are designed to achieve that de-escalation, but thus far it does not have the crucial traction necessary with the US, the rest of the West, and Israel.
The more likely immediate alternative to both a de-escalation and a cataclysmic rupture—and let’s not pretend that the genocide we are already witnessing is anything but cataclysmic—is the grinding continuation of what we have witnessed this last year. Constant high-level tensions capable of spilling over. Continued Israeli destruction in Gaza and expanding operations in the West Bank, making Palestinian life intentionally and evermore untenable in its scorched earth policy towards the pursuit of Israeli maximalist and unrealizable plans. And as Seth Anziska has written, Lebanon will be both prologue and epilogue to the horrors visited upon Palestinians in Gaza. Over 20% of the population in Lebanon is already displaced, and we see a familiar tale of mass civilian casualty events, infrastructure and homes destroyed, hospitals evacuated and callous disregard for human life. Netanyahu’s recent video message to the Lebanese people essentially boiled down to “kill each other or we will kill you.” These existing zones of conflict will remain open, and the region will remain on edge.
AK: Are you saying that no clear off-ramps exist?
DL: The US has the leverage to bring this to a close, and perhaps part of the US military is inclined to do so. But the Biden White House has been busy building an escalatory trap for itself and burning the off-ramps. At this point, it would buck decades of precedent, as well as the explicit commitments made by the two candidates—Trump and Harris—to still expect a deus ex machina from Washington, DC to save the situation. Yet the truth remains that letting the escalation continue is a political decision, not a decree from heaven.