Last week, Israel began a ground war in Lebanon. It recalls, in both scope and apparent strategy, the 1982 Israeli ground war in Lebanon. More than forty years ago, Prime Minister Menachem Begin assured US officials that IDF troops would simply establish a ‘security zone’ 40 kilometres north of the border. Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon described the invasion as ‘limited’ and ‘targeted’ – the aim was to push the Palestinian Liberation Organization back far enough to ensure Israelis living close to the border would no longer fear rocket fire.

In addition to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assurance that the invasion will be both limited and targeted, many other echoes of the 1982 Lebanon war reverberate across the decades. Like Netanyahu, Begin insisted that Israeli incursions in  Lebanon were not targeting Lebanese citizens, and, indeed, would ultimately protect civilians from further clashes. Like the PLO, Hizbollah has a complicated relationship with the Lebanese state and with Lebanese civilians, providing necessary services while simultaneously inciting resentment. And, just as in 1982, the United States finds itself trapped in its own equivocations on the Middle East, caught in the usual tension between its commitments to Israel and its commitments to international law.

With this many historical parallels, it is tempting to believe that history is repeating itself. Yet for every familiar echo, there are other, important differences. Hizbollah, unlike the PLO, is a Lebanese organisation (notwithstanding its close ties to Iran, which are neither as close nor as straightforward as has been portrayed). Lebanon in 1982 was, despite seven years of civil war, much stronger economically than it is in 2024. Syria, once the dominant regional power in Lebanon, is a shadow of its former self after the Assad regime’s war against its own people. In the early 1980s, Israel was not engaged in the high degree of destructive combat in the Palestinian territories that has been seen in the past year. The IDF’s technical capacities in 1982 already outstripped their opponents; in 2024, the difference between Hizbollah and Israel’s military capacities is likely to be orders of magnitude greater. The 2020 Abraham Accords, which signal Israel’s growing alignment with the Arab Gulf nations, would have been an impossibility in 1982.

It would be good for Israel if history did not repeat itself. After all, Hizbollah owes its existence to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. More than that, the variables at play in 2024 increase, rather than decrease, the likelihood of what unfolded in 1982: a protracted, messy conflict that ultimately created more insecurity for the entire region.

Less than a week after IDF troops crossed the border in June 1982, they ringed around Beirut, laying siege to Lebanon’s capital city—far past 40 kilometres north of the border. Three months later, after the PLO evacuated out of Lebanon under international escort, Israeli troops occupied the Lebanese capital. Under the watch of those forces, Lebanon’s president was assassinated. When his personal militia retaliated against the remaining Palestinians, they perpetrated one of the worst massacres of the Lebanese Civil War. It was not until June 1985 that IDF soldiers ceded control of West Beirut and South Lebanon to the Lebanese government (and to the militias still at war with the government). Israeli established a ‘security zone’ in South Lebanon that remained under occupation until the year 2000.

Despite their complicated relationship with the PLO, Lebanese civilians deeply opposed the Israeli occupation of their capital city and the southern regions. They formed a range of resistance groups, coordinating with returning Palestinian fighters, Syrian intelligence officials, Lebanese left-wing parties, and Iranian operatives to pressure the IDF to leave Lebanon. Israeli retaliation against these pressure tactics—what became known as the ‘Iron Fist’ policy—sharpened a strain of Islamic fundamentalism in the resistance. With Syrian and Iranian support, Hezbollah publicly announced its formation in February 1985, just months before Israeli soldiers withdrew to the border strip ‘security zone.’ The timing bolstered Hizbollah’s reputation and, over the next several years, it established itself as successor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s resistance war against Israel.

Instead of eliminating the threat of terrorism, Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war helped create new, longer-lasting security threats. It was a paradox that many Israeli leaders at the time observed with dismay, a strategic miscalculation of terrible proportions. Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF General Staff have either forgotten this lesson, or  believe themselves exempt from its implications.

Lebanon’s economic situation will make the experience of the war categorically more destructive. It’s still warm in Lebanon in October, although the heat is sharper now that it was some years ago, edged with the metallic tang of pollution from the private generators that provide the majority of the city’s electricity. Since the Lebanese civil war, power has been in short supply; the 2020 explosion in Beirut’s port worsened the electric grid’s inconsistency. Even the private generators do not run as frequently as they once did. When jets streak up from Israel in the night, many Lebanese citizens have to find shelter without light, groping down to basements in the heat and in the dark.

The experience of aerial bombardment, the experience of one’s nation being invaded—these are not easily forgotten. There are buildings in Beirut that still bear the scars of the civil war, and of Israel’s 1982 siege of Beirut. Watching them collapse under yet another wave of Israeli artillery is both sickening and surreal.

Iran has already retaliated on Hizbollah’s behalf. Tehran’s involvement threatens to draw Gulf interests into the conflict. Without an end in sight for the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territories, the IDF could soon find itself engaged on a two-front war. While Israel’s capacious technological and military expertise makes this less of a threat to the state than it would have been in 1982, the ability to prosecute a long war is not always an advantage. Historically, the longer a conflict stretches, the more confused, violent, and senseless it becomes. With Israeli democracy already on a knife’s edge, the country’s domestic situation will undoubtedly suffer from any such protracted war (the 1982 war sparked vicious political polarization in Israel—a wave that Netanyahu rode into prominence).

While it is difficult to predict the short-term effects of Netanyahu’s limited 2024 Lebanon war, in the long term, the results are clear. It will fail to improve security for either Israeli, or Lebanese citizens. It will kill as many or more Lebanese citizens than Hizbollah fighters. Many more Israelis will die, too. And, even if the IDF successfully incapacitates Hizbollah—as it did with the PLO in 1982—a new threat, eventually, will arise.