"We Ain't Going Back": Northern Settler
Opinion
This cease-fire deal won’t get me to return home to northern Israel
Israelis have seen this sort of agreement before. It won’t work: The Hezbollah threat will return.
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A badly damaged home in Shlomi, northern Israel, on Wednesday, after it was hit by a Hezbollah-fired rocket from Lebanon. (Francisco Seco/AP)
By Inbar Ben Harush
December 1, 2024 at 12:15 p.m. EST
The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Lebanon feels like déjà vu — and not the good kind. As a resident of Shlomi in northern Israel who has been displaced for more than a year since Hezbollah unleashed a relentless rocket-fire campaign the day after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in the south, I do not support this deal. It shows that the Israeli government hasn’t learned the lessons of Oct. 7 and expects my family and neighbors to pay the price.
The government also hasn’t learned the lessons of 2006. That’s when Hezbollah sparked a 34-day with Israel by killing three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two others in a surprise cross-border attack. Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of two others, ended with the acceptance of U.N. Security Council
Resolution 1701. This
cease-fire agreement, which serves as the model for the recently proposed one, established a buffer zone — mandating Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the presence of the peacekeeping U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the area and Hezbollah’s withdrawal to north of the Litani River — and required the “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon.”
Instead, Hezbollah reoccupied the buffer zone and rearmed under UNIFIL’s indifferent supervision, if not its tacit approval. Iranian and Russian weapons flowed in, and sleepy Lebanese villages were
transformed into fortresses. For years, residents of the north — my neighbors — had reported hearing the sound of digging. I heard it myself. Our government dismissed these concerns, telling us we were imagining things or hearing rain in the gutters.
Unsurprisingly, during an operation in Lebanon this fall, the Israel Defense Forces uncovered
dozens of interconnected tunnels along the border. Hezbollah had built an invasion network, well stocked with a massive arsenal of rifles, rockets and advanced weapons that could have been used to kill civilians during
a planned invasion of northern Israel. It is only through divine providence that Hezbollah did not launch an Oct. 7-style attack, or I might not be here writing this piece.
Opinion
Despite these grim lessons,
the new cease-fire, to be implemented over the next two months, is like past failed agreements. Without an IDF presence in southern Lebanon, nothing can stop Hezbollah from returning, rearming and rebuilding their tunnels. There will be a new “multilateral” force to manage this cease-fire (though, as
President Joe Biden said, no U.S. troops will be deployed in the area), and all sides involved have no interest in escalation. Israelis will inevitably put off the short-term pain of dealing with the problem, as we did in Gaza.
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The government’s assurances that Israel will “respond forcefully” if the agreement is violated ring hollow. We’ve heard these promises before — after the Israeli army withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, after Israel uprooted its settlements and forcibly removed its citizens from Gaza in 2005, and after every round of war. Israelis know better. We’ve seen what happens when we give up territory without effective security arrangements.
For my family, this isn’t theoretical. After Hezbollah’s rocket campaign started on Oct. 8, we were evacuated from our house in Shlomi to a small hotel room in Jerusalem. Our life was flipped upside down. For nearly 14 months, we’ve been crammed into a tight space with no privacy, no kitchen and no certainty about the future. Our children have had to change schools multiple times. Our sense of home, security and normality has been shattered. We are refugees in our own country.
As I write, Hezbollah still operates with Iranian and Syrian support. It can still fire rockets, and
its intentions remain the same: to destroy Israel. If we, the displaced residents of northern Israel, were to return, it would be to live under the same threats as in the past: rocket attacks at best, invasion at worst — especially given the likelihood of Israel, within a few years, letting its guard down again.
I have lost trust in my government and its promises. The only thing that will persuade me — and many others — to return to Shlomi is visible, tangible security. This means the IDF stationed in a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, dismantling Hezbollah’s ability to fire on us and preventing its return to the border area. Anything less is unacceptable.
It breaks my heart to consider leaving Shlomi for good. I love the Galilee region — the green hills, the sense of community, the life we built there. But I will not sacrifice my family’s safety for nostalgia. I will wait a few months and see what changes with the new U.S. administration. If the Israeli government cannot do better than this agreement, I will return only to pack up my family’s belongings and say goodbye to our home.
Peace is not achieved through deals with terrorists or reliance on international forces that have already failed us. If the residents of the north agree to return home under these conditions, we will have no one to blame but ourselves when the inevitable happens.
