It's not Israel's Watergate, but Bibi has a new problem
Amos Hochstein, Biden’s special envoy to the Middle East, spent the final week before polls closed in the United States in a series of meetings across the region, in a last-ditch attempt to secure a ceasefire in Lebanon.
While reaching a deal in Gaza seems as difficult to achieve as splitting the Red Sea, in light of the complex reality of 101 hostages, alive and dead, held by Hamas and other factions in the strip, in southern Lebanon, an arrangement hinges on the crossing of the Litani River.
The aim of the war in Lebanon was to return evacuated residents of Israel’s north to their homes. The IDF leadership now believes that goal has been met, and that prolonging the operation will only bog Israel down in the Land of the Cedars, after two scarring wars that scorched Lebanon and left a deep mark on Israel’s collective consciousness.
The clearing of Hezbollah from southern Lebanon to a depth of two kilometers along the border illustrates the magnitude of the miracle that the “convergence of arenas” sought by Sinwar didn’t materialize. A good friend of mine who’s an officer in the reserves and has been in Lebanon for two months after being redeployed from Gaza told me about the contrast between the pastoral landscape above ground, in what was once described as the Switzerland of the Middle East, and what was found underground.
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