Paris, July 18, 2006 – What is happening now in the Middle East provides still more cause for profound pessimism about the future.
First, current events seem all but certain to destroy the previous Israeli public willingness to accept the policy, originated by Ariel Sharon and taken up by Ehud Olmert, to build a “separation wall” between Israel and the Palestinians. This plan was bad for the Palestinians, but probably better than things that now seem possible.
These events have also crucially undermined Israeli acceptance of a two-state solution, as sought in one or another way, with more or less good or bad faith, during most of the past four decades.


As Gershon Baskin wrote a few days ago in The Jerusalem Post, “Israeli perceptions of the current crises are that in both Gaza and the northern border, Israel completely withdrew to the international line and that the international community recognized the Israeli withdrawal in both cases. As such, Israel expected quiet on those borders from the other side. Instead, on both fronts Israel was attacked, without provocation and for no good cause.
As Baskin notes, with exemplary fairness, this is not at all how the Palestinians understood the Gaza withdrawal, since Israel continued effective military control and quasi-blockade of Gaza, and continued its illegal occupation and colonization on the West Bank, while doing its best to overturn the democratically elected Palestinian Authority government.
It is not the Palestinian view of the situation in the north, where Israel continues to occupy the so-called Shebaa Farms sector, formerly part of Lebanon.
Israeli opinion counts most in what is happening, and right now 89% of public opinion supports the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. The Israelis feel, as Baskin says, that in both cases they were betrayed by the Palestinians – or by that Palestinian faction responsible for the rockets that continued to fall on southern Israel after the Gaza withdrawal, and by the group, in part Hamas militants, that raided Israel June 25 and captured a young soldier.
They feel the same about the Palestinians’ Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon, who took two additional prisoners in a commando operation in northern Israel.
Worse, the Israelis have proof that Hezbollah now possesses relatively sophisticated rockets capable of reaching major Israeli cities. These have been falling on Haifa, which is some 20 miles (30 kilometers) from Lebanon, and have the possibility of reaching Tel Aviv.
Israeli opponents of the Gaza withdrawal and of the Sharon/Olmert plan to pull West Bank colonies behind the wall now under construction, have always argued that Israel’s Palestinian enemies would simply go on attacking from the other side of the wall. It now has been brought home to the Israeli public that this is perfectly feasible, indeed likely if there is no political settlement.
This reopens the question of trying to control the territory from which the rockets are fired. The Israelis found in Lebanon -- when they tried to occupy and control the area from which Hezbollah was firing rockets into northern Israel during the 1980s and 1990s – that the territory is highly extensible. The area you occupy to prevent attacks needs to be itself protected. The Israelis finally gave up in 2000, and after 22 years pulled completely out of Lebanon.
Now they are back, and some officials are once again talking about protection zones, or better yet, “forcing” the Lebanese government and army to take responsibility for protecting Israel from rockets. The government and army cannot do that without falling once again into civil war. Each dilemma unhappily opens into another one.
A final reason for pessimism is that Israel would seem to have convinced George Bush that it is all the fault of what their UN ambassador Dan Gillerman calls the “new axis of evil,” Syria and Lebanon. Deal with them and Hezbollah and Hamas will collapse, and Israel will be secure.
This was the implication of George W. Bush’s fatuous 4-minute overheard conversation in Moscow with Tony Blair, where he demanded that Kofi Annan “get on the phone with [Syria’s Bashar al-Assad] and make something happen. See, the irony is that what they have to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s---, and it’s over.”
Since it is not otherwise going to be over soon, and Israel is not going to find its solutions inside Lebanon, the conclusion follows that Syria and Iran will have to be dealt with.
This is exactly the logic followed by the Bush administration since 9/11: overturn the Talabin, get ben-Ladin, topple Saddam Hussein, get the top al Qaeda leader in Iraq, or the one who takes his place, or the next top man (so designated by American commanders appeasing Washington and the press). Then the war on terror will be over. You just have to get the man behind the man who is making trouble. With this logic at work, the likelihood of an attack on Syria or Iran would seem greater today than it has ever been.
Copyright 2006 by Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved.