MOUNT HERMON, Israel — “Before October 7th, you couldn’t stand here,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officer tells me, looking toward Har Dov, a strategic peak on the Israel-Lebanon border.
And if the Biden-Harris administration had its way, Israeli troops would not have been able to stand there, either.
Har Dov is near the Shebaa Farms, an area that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terror organization, claims for Lebanon, but which Israel seized from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967. The United Nations, normally hostile to Israel, actually agrees with Israel that Lebanon has no legal claim to the farms or Har Dov.
In recent years, Hezbollah has attempted to encroach on the area. It has also used the Har Dov issue in its effort to persuade Lebanon’s people of the need for war against Israel, rather than admitting that the Iranian regime has been using war for its own narrow interests.
Rather than dismiss Hezbollah’s claims, the Biden-Harris administration took them at face value, and attempted to persuade Israel to withdraw its forces from the Har Dov area as a condition of the ceasefire deal it wanted to impose after Hezbollah had fired missiles, rockets, and drones at Israel for nearly a year, starting in October 2023.
But Israel could not accept such a deal, primarily because Har Dov has a commanding view of almost all of the upper Galilee, making it a key strategic location.
Since Israel began its counteroffensive against Hezbollah in earnest in September, killing almost all of the group’s senior leaders and destroying its infrastructure near the border, the terms of a ceasefire have improved dramatically.
Har Dov is no longer on the table — and the Biden-Harris administration, like its proposed surrender, is on the way out.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.