It seems that not much is left from the promises that Lebanon will return to the Stone Age, Gallant’s speech, and statements by politicians saying Hezbollah won’t be allowed to rampage and do as it pleases in Israeli territory.
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Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's commitment months ago that the government would pass a national plan within ten days, budgeted at 3.5 billion shekels to reconstruct the Galilee area, remains an open check Israelis can’t cash.
In the Galilee, we’re losing trust and hope that tens of thousands of displaced residents will return to their homes to a reality different than the murderous one from which they fled when they saw how Hezbollah's plans were being realized, on the southern front, in the form of massacres in Israeli communities close to the Gaza border.
We then understood the scale of Hezbollah plans after they were copied by Hamas. The best of our sons and daughters in the Galilee cashed in their evacuation grants for a one-way out of the north - and have announced that they won’t return to their homes. Israel’s most beautiful stretch of land lies abandoned and desolate.
The fruit trees sag under their weight, and there’s no one to pick the fruit which is now rotting. The IDF strikes Hezbollah relentlessly and inflicts damage, but Nasrallah is resolute in his war efforts. He knows that the path he leads us on is a path we walk with open eyes and with our hands feet and bound in iron shackles imposed by the U.S., France, and other countries.
It seems Netanyahu is facing an unfair and inhumane diplomatic choice - between the U.S.’s political considerations, which ask Israel not to disrupt U.S. President Joe Biden’s plans to be elected for a second term, and the tens of thousands of Israelis who weren’t even able to vote in their municipal elections in communities they were evacuated from – and Netanyahu chose Biden.
Decades of a policy that left us reliant on the political whim of a superpower across the ocean are giving their signals, and we can’t fight for our lives without the U.S.’s permission, blessing, and ammunition of the Commander-in-Chief.
In March 2015, exactly nine years ago, during the Purim holiday, Netanyahu realized the situation was dire, and faced with President Obama's plans to accept a nuclear deal with Iran – he took action. Faced with the choice between the American president and the future of the Israeli people, he chose Israel.
He went to the U.S. Congress and sought to speak to the hearts of American elected officials and sway them against the nuclear deal offered by their president. Netanyahu did this on the grounds of moral obligation and believed that the Iranian nuclear threat was an existential one for Israel.
While the hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah's drones, missiles, and artillery batteries don’t pose an existential threat to Israel, they certainly pose a threat to the lives of Israeli residents in the Galilee.
It’s up to Netanyahu, the Israeli magus of public diplomacy, to go to the U.S. at once and work to reshape the puzzle pieces. He must go to France, Germany, the UK, and other foreign countries and recruit them for our cause once again, to support a military operation that will deter Hezbollah.
He must clarify the lives of over 100,000 people, most of whom have been uprooted from their homes for over six months to achieve a diplomatic arrangement, which will likely never happen.
All northern Israelis participated in the diplomatic experiment imposed on us by UN Resolution 1701, which led to the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 with an arrangement that was both unfeasible and unenforceable. A few months later, it was clear the resolution was worthless, and so we paid and continue to pay the price for Hezbollah's military bolstering.
Yair KrausIsrael no longer believes that the same failed agreement will succeed, should the international community try to revive it with futile attempts. As long as Hezbollah won’t be forcibly removed, we’re the ones who are being pushed away instead. It seems that world leaders who arrived in the country have already forgotten the bloody price that Hamas and Hezbollah took and continue to take from us on and since October 7.
It’s time to remobilize all of our support so that the government can fulfill its commitment to us and so that the residents of the Galilee can return to their homes feeling completely safe. It’s time for us and our children to stop paying the price.
Yair Kraus is a Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth correspondent covering Israel's northern regions including the Galilee, Golan Heights and northern border.