Dimi Reider writes:

No other Israeli border has been as consistently restive for so long, and no outside actor has inflicted devastation on Lebanon as routinely or as dramatically as Israel: from cross-border raids in the first decades of statehood, to full-scale invasion in 1982, to the current war — the most lethal conflict in Lebanon since the devastating civil war of 1975-1990.

Lebanon has also been the unwilling setting for a more definitive strain of Israeli wars — those against the Palestinian national movement — and the site of the last major public paroxysm of Israeli conscience, when hundreds of thousands protested the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which were facilitated and enabled by the Israeli army.

There are several reasons why Israel is ignoring opportunities for a peace agreement with the Lebanese government (the current half-hearted engagement, conducted under fire, cannot yet be taken seriously) and instead prefers to bomb, invade, exploit proxies, and, as of this year, ethnically cleanse and openly promise to annex the country.

The two lesser reasons are those cited by both Israel’s supporters and its critics: David Ben-Gurion’s stale security doctrine, which holds that Israel’s natural border is the Litani River, and its stunted sibling, the buffer zone doctrine, now being deployed in both Lebanon and Gaza.

Ben-Gurion first proposed the Litani as the “natural border” of a future Jewish state back in 1918, arguing that the river marked a demographic and economic boundary between the Galilee and Mount Lebanon proper. Over the years, a particularly expansionist faction has adopted his demarcation of southern Lebanon as merely the “northern Galilee,” and the steep-banked river has acquired a new military aura as a more defensible border than the current one. Proponents of annexation and settlement in southern Lebanon invoke ideological, territorial and military arguments.

At the same time, another Israeli military doctrine — the buffer zone — has acquired a fresh lease on life as a putative endgame of the current war. Its logic is to push the front line away from Israel’s internationally recognized borders, especially from civilian communities; in contrast to a demilitarized zone, a buffer zone presumes freedom of operation for the Israeli military. [Continue reading…]