After the long, costly US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, a clear bipartisan consensus emerged firmly opposing putting American boots on the ground in another Middle East war.

US President Donald Trump seems open to violating that taboo — despite railing against it in election campaigns — deploying thousands of US infantry troops to the Middle East ahead of a possible invasion of Iranian territory.

But it’s not only the Americans who could be set to reopen old wounds in the fight against Iran and its proxies.

Top Israeli leaders are openly declaring their intention to create another security zone in southern Lebanon.

On Sunday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel has created “three security zones deep in enemy territory,” and that in Lebanon, he has given the order to “further expand the existing security zone to definitively thwart the [Hezbollah] invasion threat and to push anti-tank missile fire away from our border.”

In May 2000, Israel ended its traumatic, 18-year-long occupation of southern Lebanon. Never again, Israelis pledged, would they get stuck in the “Lebanese mud” that saw an average of over 20 IDF soldiers die every year.

Now, Israel looks to be sliding back into that quagmire. And while more than a quarter-century has passed since Israel pulled out of the security zone, it is fighting the same enemy, operating with much the same logic, and risks achieving the same result.

The emergence of the security zone

Israeli leaders did not intend to create a security zone controlled by the IDF in the 1980s. That result instead emerged as the child of imperfect solutions and short-term thinking, which eventually was seen as unalterable.

Since before Israel’s founding, Jewish authorities had maintained ties with Maronite Christian villages in southern Lebanon. In the 1970s, as Lebanon descended into a multifaceted civil war, Israel — in concert with Iran — backed the Christian militias facing off against the Palestine Liberation Organization, providing them with arms, equipment, training, and medical aid.

But Israel expressly ruled out entering that battle. “We will not fight for them. We will help them… so they’ll be able to fight [for] themselves,” Northern Command chief Rafael Eitan said at the time.

What had been quiet cooperation evolved into direct military support in the late 1970s, after Syrian forces moved into Lebanon and PLO terrorists carried out a series of shocking attacks in Israel.

In 1978, after Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Egged bus and left 35 Israelis dead, the IDF responded with Operation Litani, which included massive airstrikes and a ground incursion.

During Menachem Begin’s second tenure as prime minister in the early 1980s, Israel sought the expulsion of Syria and the PLO, and for the Maronites to be put in control of Lebanon. After hundreds of PLO Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel between August 1981 and May 1982, and a Palestinian assassination attempt on Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Israel embarked on Operation Peace for Galilee in June 1982.

Then-defense minister Ariel Sharon tried to engineer the installation of a friendly government in Beirut, but that effort was effectively neutralized by an assassin’s bomb that killed Lebanon’s president-elect Bachir Gemayel in 1982. Three years........

© The Times of Israel