Is it a Ceasefire if the Fire Doesn’t Cease?

The Biden ceasefire in Lebanon fell apart in four days, but officially it’s holding. In what seems like a Seinfeld routine come to life, administration officials and their media allies are propping up the dead ceasefire by arguing that you can have a ceasefire even if the fire doesn’t cease.

“There has been a dramatic reduction in the violence. The monitoring mechanism is in full force and is working,” White House National Security Spokesman John Kirby explained. “Largely speaking the ceasefire is holding… we’ve gone from dozens of strikes down to one a day, maybe two a day. We’re going to keep trying and see what we can do to get it down to zero.”

Biden had promised in his ceasefire announcement that “this is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities.” The permanent part of that cessation barely lasted that week.

The administration had achieved a ceasefire that lasted even less than its Gaza aid pier.

The media reacted to the ceasefire that isn’t by arguing that having a war during a ceasefire is a perfectly normal thing. “Why Israel and Hezbollah Are Still Firing Amid a Lebanon Cease-Fire,” the New York Times tried to explain. Multiple media headlines described the ongoing firefights as “testing” or “straining” the ceasefire rather than more sensibly nullifying the whole thing.

A ceasefire in which the fire does not cease is a fiery but mostly peaceful ceasefire.

Why did the firing not actually cease during the ceasefire?

Biden had promised that, “what is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed, I emphasize, will not be allowed, to threaten the security of Israel again.”

The emphasis proved to be as impotent as the rest of Biden’s “don’t” doctrine.

Rather than withdrawing from Israel’s borders under the terms of the ceasefire, Hezbollah violated the ceasefire, began moving personnel and rocket launchers south of the Litani river, as well as smuggling weapons in preparation for a resumption of the fighting.

Israel quickly responded by enforcing the terms of the agreement and taking out terrorist forces. Hezbollah fired mortar rounds into Israel, and Israeli forces struck back as fighting across the border resumed. Within days the ceasefire wasn’t even one in name only.

And the Biden administration blamed Israel.

“The Israelis have been playing a dangerous game in recent days,” an anonymous Biden official fumed to the media. The “dangerous game” is refusing to let Hezbollah violate the ceasefire. But after Oct 7, Israelis believe ignoring terrorists preparing to attack is more dangerous than triggering the displeasure of the White House by taking them out.

Biden envoy Amos Hochstein blamed Israel for violating the ceasefire by flying surveillance drones over Lebanon. Those drones are one of the reasons that Israel knows the ceasefire is being violated by the terrorists. Hochstein complained that Israel was enforcing the terms of the ceasefire “too aggressively” and needed to let some Hezbollah violations go.

Ignoring terrorists violating the ceasefire is the only way to have a ceasefire with terrorists.

Ambassador Jack Lew described the ceasefire as holding but argued that “it’s going to take having days of going through the ups and downs” when the ceasefire isn’t holding. So that the ceasefire is holding except for all the times that there are firefights taking place.

Lew however claimed that the ceasefire however wouldn’t hold unless Israel stopped ignoring Hezbollah violations. “Israel has made clear that it has to be able to defend itself, but they also have to act in a way that doesn’t take small things and turn them into big things.”

How big does a Hezbollah violation need to be before Israel is allowed to fight back?

The “small things” included setting up mobile rocket launchers, smuggling RPGs into Lebanon, using border villages as bases of operations, including at least one mosque, and a firefight near a church. These “small things” however suggest that Hezbollah has no intention of following through with the ceasefire that is supposed to remove the terrorist forces from Israel’s border.

The ceasefire calls for dismantling “all existing unauthorized facilities involved in the production of arms and related materiel, and prevent the establishment of such facilities in the future” and the dismantling of “all infrastructure and military positions” and the confiscation of “all unauthorized arms inconsistent with these commitments.”

Hezbollah is instead preparing for a new round of fighting.

The Biden administration promised that this wouldn’t happen. It also assured Israel that if Hezbollah violated the ceasefire, it would have a free hand to respond to the terrorists.

Not one single part of that proved to be true.

The Biden administration used a cutoff of arms sales and threats of a UN weapons embargo to force Israel to sign on to a worthless ceasefire backed by another false promise of peace.

Israel abandoned its campaign to end the threat from Hezbollah on its border for a ceasefire that isn’t real. And whose only real purpose appears to be allowing Hezbollah to rearm.

The Hezbollah attacks on Israel since Oct 7 had turned some 65,000 Israelis into refugees in their own country. Despite the official ceasefire, during which the fire has not ceased, the majority of Israeli refugees still haven’t returned to their northern communities. Unless they believe that the fighting is finally over and that Hezbollah is gone from the border, they will not return home. And that means that Israel will still be full of refugees from the border fighting.

Did the Biden administration ever really believe in its own ceasefire? If it did, why did it use a 60 day period that dumps it right in the Trump administration’s lap rather than taking responsibility for its implementation?

The Biden administration may well have expected that Hezbollah would wait longer to violate the ceasefire. Instead, the terrorists proved unwilling to wait and the Israelis refused to be doormats. Nevertheless the administration and the media are still propping up the narrative of a ‘ceasefire’ in order to be able to blame the Trump administration for the ‘resumption’ of the war.

And if that doesn’t work, the Biden administration can always blame Israel.

The one thing that the administration will never do is acknowledge that Islamic terrorists can’t be negotiated with in good faith and that they will always break every deal. But if the Democrats admitted that, they would also have to admit that every one of their diplomatic initiatives to bring peace between Israel and the terrorists has not only failed for thirty years, but will always fail.

Every peace accord with the terrorists has been a ceasefire in which the firing never ceases.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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