Such deployments will
undoubtedly incentivize all the major players, most notably Iran and Hezbollah,
not to try to expand the conflict into a wider regional conflagration. But that
may not be necessary. Hezbollah still has ample reasons of its own not to
want a war with Israel under current circumstances. The Lebanese socioeconomic
and political condition in which the group operates is dire. Lebanon’s political
system is deadlocked, with no president and a state that barely
functions. Its economy has collapsed completely, plunging a once relatively
prosperous society into penury, with over 80 percent of Lebanese now living in
poverty. The country simply cannot afford another experience of being
pulverized by the Israeli military. And the Israel Defense Forces are, not surprisingly,
threatening reprisals and mayhem.
After the 2006 conflict
with Israel, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was compelled to go on Lebanese
television several times to apologize for having initiated such devastation. In
one such broadcast, he even said that had he anticipated the consequences, he
never would have authorized the attack on Israeli soldiers at the border that
led to the conflict. Everybody knew he was lying, since no one in Lebanon by
2006 had failed to understand fully Israel’s doctrine of disproportionality and
determination to counterattack brutally when provoked. But his claim
demonstrates that Hezbollah can be accountable not just to its own Shiite
constituency but to the broader Lebanese society and that it must be careful to
preserve its ability to function within the Lebanese context.
Hezbollah does not
operate in a vacuum. It is completely embedded in its Lebanese environment, and
it is in no way immune from the Lebanese economic and political crises that
have racked the country in recent years. Neither Lebanon nor, by extension,
Hezbollah can afford another major war with Israel, particularly under the
current parlous circumstances. That doesn’t mean that Hezbollah would refuse a
command from the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, which
operates the network of Arab militia groups of which Hezbollah is the oldest
and most effective member, to go into action. Despite its own considerable
incentives not to get involved in the current conflict, an Iranian demand would
be extremely hard, and perhaps impossible, to refuse.