Beaufort, the Tehran Grand Bazaar, and Boots on the Ground in Lebanon |
A 12th-century Crusader fortress in southern Lebanon teaches a lesson that Washington keeps refusing to learn: ceasefires are not a strategy, and walking away from the battlefield only guarantees the next generation will have to return to it.
Beaufort is a 12th-century Crusader fortress perched on a commanding height in southern Lebanon. For nearly a thousand years, it has been used to control vast stretches of territory and to launch military operations with relative impunity. Its position is not just strategically significant. It is a symbol of who holds the ground and who does not.
On June 6, 1982, Beaufort became the site of an intense battle when Israeli troops invaded southern Lebanon to eliminate the PLO, which had been using the fortress and surrounding positions to attack northern Israel. Operation Peace for Galilee succeeded in pushing back the PLO and eventually forcing its leadership to flee to Tunisia. Six Israeli soldiers were killed in the initial assault on Beaufort. One of them was Raz Guterman. I was a teenager in Israel that summer, living at Kibbutz Haogen, where his family had just buried him.
I have never been to Beaufort, but Beaufort has never left me.
In May 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon. The withdrawal looked like defeat, and it functioned like one. Celebrations were of leaving rather than winning. The Islamist terror organization Hezbollah filled the vacuum, built an underground military network across Lebanon, and became the country's de facto armed force. That withdrawal led directly to the 2006 Second Lebanon War and to the sustained operations against Hezbollah that followed. Most recently, on the Hebrew calendar anniversary of the 1982 capture, the IDF raised the Israeli flag over Beaufort again.
The 2000 withdrawal inspired a film called "Beaufort," in which........