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Restoring Israel’s sovereignty in the North shouldn’t be tied to the war in Gaza
Why isn’t the world blasting Hezbollah for this unprovoked act of war? Why isn’t there enormous pressure on the Lebanese government to rein in Hezbollah?
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken framed what is happening in the North in jarring terms on Monday.
“You have 60,000 or so Israelis who have been forced from their homes in northern Israel,” he said at Washington’s Brookings Institute. “Israel effectively lost sovereignty in the northern quadrant of the country because people don’t feel safe going to their homes.”
The reason this was so jarring is because the last nine months of war — both in Gaza and a low-intensity war on the northern border — have habituated Israelis to certain realities, one of them being that towns, moshavim and kibbutzim along the Lebanese border are deserted.
The public hears the numbers of residents forced to flee their homes, hears them relate their hardships in the media, feels horrible about the situation and commiserates and empathizes with the residents but — for the most part — chalks it up as yet another casualty of October 7 and the war that followed. What’s truly at stake is not necessarily considered.
But the way Blinken framed the situation was stark: Israel has lost sovereignty over a strip of its territory. No less. If a country’s residents cannot live in their homes in a particular region of the country because of security threats, then that country has lost its sovereignty — defined as supreme power or authority over a territory — over that territory.
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