The fate of the unity of the arenas after the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah

Last Tuesday, 11-26-2024, Israel announced its approval of the ceasefire proposal with Hezbollah, which was reached through indirect negotiations between the two parties with American mediation.

While the details of the agreement were not published, the majority of Israeli society, 61%, according to a poll conducted directly by the Hebrew Channel (13), saw that the agreement does not embody Israel’s victory in the war, and did not achieve any of its declared goals. The poll also revealed that there is a division within Israeli society regarding support for the agreement, with 44% in favor and 37% against.

This prompted Prime Minister Netanyahu to justify Israel’s approval of the agreement by explaining three justifications. The first was that the agreement allows Israel to focus on confronting the Iranian threat. The second was that the agreement enables Israel to give the exhausted army time to rest, and also gives the state time to fill its weapons and ammunition stores. The last was that the agreement breaks the concept of the unity of arenas and separates Gaza from Lebanon.

Despite what these justifications reveal about Israel’s strategic reality and intentions in the next phase, this article will seek to examine whether the agreement has truly broken the concept of the unity of arenas and separated Gaza from Lebanon.

The objectivity of the examination requires clarifying the angle from which Israel views the unity of the arenas, as Israel sees the unity of the arenas or the unification of the Arabs into an effective and influential military force as a threat to the conditions for the state’s survival. In this regard, Israeli national security experts, as well as Jewish geopolitical experts around the world, argue that Israel has succeeded during the past century, that is, from the declaration of its establishment in 1948 until the year 2000, in providing the conditions for the state’s survival, as the well-known geopolitical expert George Friedman wrote several years ago. Here are three conditions:

The necessity of preventing the Arabs from uniting into a single, influential and effective military force.

- The necessity of Israel’s continued control over choosing the time, place and sequence of the war.

- Israel must not go to war while there is an internal Palestinian uprising.

A reading of Israel's strategic reality after the year 2000 shows that Israel's strategy of preventing the Arabs from uniting into a single, influential military force was successful with regular Arab states and armies, but after the year 2000 this strategy proved to be a failure with the forces of the axis of resistance, which are considered to be organizations outside the state system.

It should be clarified here that this failure is considered one of the most important drivers of intellectual and political debates, including social divisions within Israel, especially since this debate began to appear publicly after the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon to escape the Lebanese Islamic resistance led by Hezbollah, then the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 to escape the Islamic resistance in Gaza led by the Hamas movement, then its defeat at the hands of Hezbollah in the July 2006 war, and its failure to achieve any military victories over the resistance in Gaza during any of the wars it has waged on Gaza since 2008, the most prominent of which was the Battle of the Unity of the Arenas in 2022, then the development of the idea of the Unity of the Arenas into a strategy as it was manifested in confronting the war of extermination that Israel has been waging since October 2023.

Perhaps the above shows how Israel views the unity of arenas, and the question that arises now is: Has Israel succeeded, through the ceasefire agreement on the Lebanese front, in breaking the concept of the unity of arenas and separating Gaza from Lebanon, as Netanyahu says?

To answer this question, Israeli national security experts themselves say that the ceasefire with Lebanon (Hezbollah) may have contributed to calming the front temporarily, but it did not clearly achieve the goal of disintegrating the unity of the arenas for the following reasons:

1- Continuing strategic coordination between the components of the resistance axis.

2- The media discourse of the axis of resistance, as this discourse reinforces unity between the fronts, which means that the calm on the Lebanese front did not radically affect this dimension, which was evident in the victory declaration speech of the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sheikh Naim Qassem, who clearly announced the party’s continued adherence to the strategy of resisting the occupation in Palestine until liberation, and in the speech of Mr. Al-Houthi, who announced his continued support for Gaza, its people, and its resistance.

3- The high possibility of a return to escalation again, especially since Israel is not willing to abide by the terms of the agreement signed with Lebanon, and to abide more by the terms of the undeclared US-Israeli bilateral agreement.

4- The Yemeni arena announced its continued commitment to supporting the resistance in Gaza and its bombing of central Israel with a ballistic missile yesterday morning, 12-1-2024.

5- Hezbollah was keen not to deviate from the unity of the arenas and to commit to resistance as a liberation strategy within precise calculations that take into account the internal Lebanese situation and the regional situation, as was clearly demonstrated in the speech of the Secretary-General of the party. Hezbollah, which is strong in Lebanon and the region, is more capable of supporting the Palestinian people, their resistance, and their liberation project from the occupation than Hezbollah, which is weak and isolated in Lebanon and the region.

6- The components of the resistance axis realize that they express the conscience of the Arab and Islamic peoples, despite the heavy prices that the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples have paid and are paying.

Israeli national security experts add that the Gaza front is the most influential front on the rest of the arenas, a front in front of which the Israeli army appears to be on its knees, which is evident in the army’s failure to free its prisoners from the grip of the resistance there, as retired Israeli General Giora Eiland said yesterday morning, Sunday, in a morning interview on the Hebrew Channel (12N).

The above reveals that the Israeli government, led by the wanted war criminal Netanyahu, continues to deceive the Israelis. Netanyahu says that he succeeded in dismantling the unity of the arenas and separating Gaza from Lebanon by announcing his approval of the ceasefire agreement. Even the youngest Israelis realize that the Gaza front, despite its small geographical area and the genocide and cleansing it has been subjected to (as former Defense Minister Bogie Ya’alon recently publicly acknowledged) over the course of fourteen months, still has the final say on all fronts and arenas.