Paris, August 3, 2006 – The expectation, or shall we say hope, even for stopping, not solving, the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, is frail because of the illusions that surround a war no one apparently planned or wanted, yet from which some seem to expect impossible results.
Even if the UN demands a cease-fire, its observance seems remote since both sides are uncompromising. Israel and the United States want Hezbollah defeated-destroyed-deterred: whichever is possible; but Israel currently is having difficulty accomplishing this. Before the war began it totally opposed cease-fire and an international force. It thought the latter – above all if composed of Europeans -- would interfere with its freedom of action.



Prime minister Ehud Olmert, at this writing, says there will be no cease-fire until an international force is completely deployed, which could be weeks. In the meantime Israel will continue to attack Hezbollah. Olmert said today that Israel will accept nothing short of the “dismantlement of Hezbollah, Lebanese regular army control of the frontier with Israel, and the unconditional return of captured Israeli soldiers.” On the same day, leaflets told the southern neighborhoods of Beirut to evacuate before being bombed. Yet Washington now wants a quick cease-fire, being damaged by the blowback of its support for Israel.
Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said that if Beirut is bombed, so will Tel Aviv, with rockets much more destructive than any used yet. If Hezbollah continues successfully to resist Israel’s ground attack, why should it stop firing rockets into Israel? It has not achieved its own stated goals, which are the return of Lebanese prisoners and Israeli withdrawal from the Shebaa Farms border district, claimed as Lebanese.
France, expected to lead the international force, has no intention of fighting Hezbollah on Israel’s behalf. It wants political settlement before any troops go in. Israel considers any agreement with Hezbollah “defeat.”
Before Israel’s ground intervention in Lebanon, Olmert promised that Hezbollah would be “eliminated” within days (or disarmed, or at least its rockets destroyed – the promises weakened as the air attacks failed to produce such results). He promised that the organization soon would no longer threaten Israel.
That seems to be what was told by his generals, and like the Bush administration officials who confidently launched the invasion of Iraq, he is not himself a man of military experience (perhaps, like Richard Cheney, having had “other priorities”).
It is astonishing, though, that as late as August 2, the prime minister could claim that Hezbollah’s infrastructure had already been “entirely destroyed.” This suggests that Israel’s political leadership is in persisting lack of touch with the reality that their fellow-citizens are experiencing. On that same day more than 230 rockets were fired into Israel, a record number to that date, and they were going farther south into the country, causing still more Israelis to abandon the paralyzed north for more distant safety.
Meanwhile, although there was a helicopter-transported commando raid near Balbaak in northern Lebanon, the penetration into Lebanon of Israeli land forces, from their starting-line on Lebanon’s southern border, was reported by the American press as less than six kilometers (3.7 miles). The following day, Israeli military sources spoke of establishing a “defensive line” 8 kilometers into Lebanon. In earlier invasions of Lebanon they were already in Beirut by this time.
Olmert’s government is telling the American press that the operation can even now be construed as a victory, because it has sent “a clear message” to the Palestinians as well as “Hezbollah and its sponsors, Syria and Iran” that future attacks on Israel would again be met “with overwhelming force, and that the cost is not worth the adventure.” Everyone knows, he implied, that the only thing Arabs understand is force.
This was the same message sent in the same way to Israel’s Arab enemies in 1967, 1973, 1982, 1993, 1996, during the two intifadas, and in numerous individual retaliatory rocket attacks and “targeted killings.” It has yet to deter the country’s enemies.
No one seems capable of acknowledging that Hezbollah, like Hamas, is not the agent of a vast conspiracy intent on bringing down western civilization, but a violent nationalist resistance movement, imbedded in a population committed to its cause, and cannot be “eliminated” or defeated in the way that regular Arab armies were routed in the 1948 and subsequent Arab-Israeli wars.
One would think that at least the Israeli military would have grasped the last point as a result of their own unhappy 22-year experience with Hezbollah, during a previous attempt to maintain a “zone of protection” in Lebanon. It ended in ignominious Israeli withdrawal in 2000, claimed by Hezbollah as victory.
These promises of “eliminated” enemies, or delivery of “clear messages” able to deter all future attack, seem to demonstrate that illusion if not delusion prevails in at least one ruling faction of Israeli government and politics, and possibly in the defense forces. What they really suggest is that it is the Israelis who only understand force. If so, it is a very serious matter for the Israelis, because their own power in the Middle East, like that of their American ally, has peaked, and is now diminishing. And in the United States, this is beginning to be perceived.
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