1. Home
2. Lebanon
3. Is Israel Shifting from Containing Hezbollah to a Resolution in Lebanon?

A historical examination of Israel’s military campaigns in Lebanon against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hezbollah reveals striking parallels and key differences, while raising the question of whether Jerusalem is moving toward a more decisive strategy against Hezbollah.

Israel has regarded both the PLO in the 1970s and 80s and Hezbollah more recently as direct threats to its national security, effectively making southern Lebanon a permanent arena of confrontation. Yet the political context of each case study, the nature of each organization’s ties to Lebanese society, and their regional alliances have major distinctions.

At the outset, Israel adopted a containment policy toward both the PLO and, later, Hezbollah. Against both organizations, Israel relied on powerful military strikes or limited wars designed to establish deterrence, curb their activities, and reduce the threats they posed.

Israel’s containment strategy against the PLO was demonstrated by its March 1978 campaign (Operation Litani) in southern Lebanon. Jerusalem aimed to push armed Palestinian groups away from its northern border, but the effort failed, as the PLO maintained a military presence and continued to threaten Israel. Under the 1969 Cairo Agreement, the Lebanese state effectively ceded part of its sovereignty to Palestinian armed groups by allowing them to carry out military actions against Israel.

Only four years later, Israel shifted to a radically different strategy. On June 6, 1982, Israel launched a wide-scale ground invasion (Operation Peace for Galilee) that extended to Beirut.  With this new, far larger campaign, Jerusalem had shifted from a strategy of containment to seeking a decisive outcome. At the time, Jerusalem’s primary objective was to expel the PLO’s military apparatus from Lebanon altogether, which it achieved following a multi-month siege of Beirut.

Within this analytical framework, Israel’s 1978 “Operation Litani” has parallels to the country’s campaign against Hezbollah from September through November 2024 (“Operation Northern Arrows”). In both instances, Israel’s declared objective was to push militia forces away from its northern border beyond the Litani River. Operation Northern Arrows led to Hezbollah scaling back its deployment, an outcome intended to provide greater security and stability for residents of northern Israel, although military and political realities differed significantly from those in 1978.

In that sense, Operation Northern Arrows was aligned with Israel’s logic of containment, rather than an attempt to entirely dismantle Hezbollah’s military and security structure. Its aim was to reduce and manage the threat.

This raises a key question now widely debated in political and strategic circles: Is Israel still pursuing a policy of containing Hezbollah, or is it moving toward a more decisive approach similar to the one it adopted toward the PLO in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon?

In Lebanon today, certain aspects of Hezbollah’s position resemble the situation the PLO found itself in on the eve of the 1982 War. There is widespread opposition to the party’s grip on key political functions and its imposition of strategic decisions on the Lebanese state and society. These are widely seen as destabilizing the country’s delicate domestic balances and undermining its perceived national interests.

Most political forces once allied with Hezbollah now call on it to surrender its weapons to the state and criticize its decisions to open so-called “support fronts” in regional conflicts. Perhaps more significant is the growing unease within the Shia community that Hezbollah claims to protect.

Lebanon’s Shia have borne the heaviest costs of Hezbollah’s two recent wars, the first in support of Gaza and Hamas and the second on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Within the Shia community, questions are increasingly being raised about the wisdom of Hezbollah’s strategic choices and whether it is adequately serving their interests.

For many in Lebanon, Hezbollah’s situation evokes memories of the deterioration in ties between the PLO and Lebanese society in the early 1980s. The Palestinian group’s increasingly domineering and heavy-handed behavior at the time eroded public sympathy. In parts of southern Lebanon, resentment grew to the point that some local communities welcomed Israeli troops in 1982. Even Lebanese Muslim political forces that had previously allied themselves with the PLO eventually called on it to leave Lebanon, signaling the clear shift in the political mood of that period.

Yet drawing comparisons between the two eras is fraught with complications. The most important difference is that Hezbollah is not an organization external to Lebanese society, like the PLO. The party is an integral component of Lebanon’s social fabric, with deep roots in the Shia community. This stands in sharp contrast to the PLO, whose influence and military role in Lebanon was ultimately ended through invasion and forced evacuation by sea.

For this reason, Israel’s strategy for dealing with Hezbollah cannot follow the path it took against the PLO in 1982. The deportation of thousands of Palestinian fighters was possible precisely because the organization was not deeply embedded within Lebanese society.

But this does not necessarily mean that a decisive outcome is impossible. What might be described as a “political deportation” of Hezbollah could offer a viable path forward. A peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel would end the conditions enabling weapons to remain outside state control

Just as Israel’s 1982 invasion forced the PLO’s military exit from Lebanon, the current war should not produce another set of containment arrangements for Hezbollah’s arms. Such an outcome would effectively reproduce the same equation that has defined the Lebanese-Israeli border for decades.

Lebanon and Israel share an interest in ending the current war through a framework that leads to a peace agreement. Only this step would provide a durable and comprehensive solution to a border conflict that has remained unresolved since the 1969 Cairo Agreement, which turned southern Lebanon into an arena for regional conflict.