Lebanon: six snappy views

1. Israel's On Wrong Course (Madison Capital Times Editorial)

Israeli gunners clean an artillery piece today near Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border.
(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Congressional "Friends of Israel" are busy making noises about the "need" for the U.S. to provide that Middle Eastern land with full support as it assaults its neighbors.

But no genuine friend of Israel can be happy with what is being done in that country's name by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his misguided followers.

Israel's attack on Lebanon, which has already killed and wounded hundreds and destroyed much of that fragile democracy's infrastructure including airports, seaports, bridges and roads has done nothing to make Israel safer or more secure from threats posed by the militant Islamic organization Hezbollah. Indeed, the terrorist group's attacks on targets in northern Israel have become more brazen and deadly since Israel began striking Lebanon.

No serious participant in the contemporary discourse would deny that Israel has a right to protect itself. But many would agree that Israel is not going about the mission in a smart manner.

As Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress, explains, "In Lebanon as in Gaza, it is not Israel's right to protect its civilian population from terrorist aggression that is at issue. It is the way Israel goes about exercising that right.

"Despite bitter lessons from the past, Israel's political and military leaders remain addicted to the notion that, whatever they have a right to do, they have a right to overdo, to the point where they lose what international support they had when they began their retaliatory measures," adds Seigman. "Israel's response to the terrorist assault in Gaza and the outrageous and unprovoked Hezbollah assault across its northern border in Lebanon, far from providing protection to its citizens, may well further undermine their security by destabilizing the wider region."

Seigman's right. Israel's assault on Lebanon won't bring stability to the Middle East. Instead, it makes a bad situation worse.

Unfortunately, President Bush has chosen to direct his anger over the crisis toward Syria, a largely disempowered player, and Iran, a powerful player but not one that listens to the U.S. By failing to express blunt concern about Israel's over-the-top response, Bush has encouraged Olmert to continue on a course that has already proved devastating for Lebanon and that, ultimately, will threaten Israel's stability.

Bush should start listening to moderate voices from Israel. Both Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Public Security Minister Avi Dichter opposed last week's bombings of Beirut, a move that dramatically increased tensions and violence.

In the Israeli Knesset there is a good deal of opposition to the current strategy.

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, former Israeli Cabinet member Yossi Sarid argues that Israel and the U.S. need to recognize that they are going about things the wrong way. Instead of destroying the infrastructure of Lebanon and Palestine, Sarid wants to increase economic opportunities for those who now see violence as the only way to demand fairness.

"Iraq is destroyed, Afghanistan is destroyed, the Gaza Strip is destroyed and soon Beirut will be destroyed for the umpteenth time, and hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested solely in the vain war against the side that always loses and therefore has nothing more to lose. And hundreds of billions more go down the tubes of corruption," wrote Sarid.

"Maybe the time has come to put the pistol into safety mode for a moment, back into the holster, and at high noon declare a worldwide Marshall Plan, so that the eternal losers will finally have something to lose," Sarid adds. "Only then will it be possible to isolate the viruses of violence and terrorism, for which quiet is quagmire and which in our eyes are themselves quagmire. And once isolated, it will be possible to eradicate them one day."


2. Savagery For Savagery: All Lose By Taking Bait of Islam's Fanatics -- by Pierre Tristam (from Daytona Beach News-Journal)

When I was traveling in south and east Lebanon six years ago, it was hard to think of the place as Lebanon rather than as some Ayatollah-worshipping, America-hating Iranian outpost that had taken the place hostage. Images of Ayatollah Khomeini and whatever Iranian mullah was hip at the time hung from utility posts and at Hezbollah checkpoints. One image sticks with me to this day: The picture of a turbaned mullah against a backdrop of Baalbek's famous Roman ruins, like two reflections of the same ambitions two millennia removed. My guess is, most Lebanese would take Roman legionnaires over Hezbollah's Party of Goons any day.

Hezbollah -- Arabic for "Party of God," one of those ironies of Holy Land proportions -- is a Lebanese militia and political party that amounts to the Shiites' version of the Taliban. Its power is strong but limited to the southern third of the country. The rest of Lebanon has settled for hard-won peace and prosperity after 15 years of war in exchange for leaving Hezbollah alone, and, more to the point, getting Hezbollah to leave the rest of Lebanon alone. Not the best of bargains, but every country has its Missouri Compromise.

Don't be fooled: Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon have nothing in common except opportunism and anti-Semitism. One is fundamentalist Sunni, the other fundamentalist Shiite. Hezbollah claims to have captured those Israeli soldiers in solidarity with its Hamas "brothers" in Gaza. But Hamas and Hezbollah would, on the same territory, be blowing up each others' mosques and cutting each others' throats with as much savagery as their "brothers" are doing in Iraq. The common denominator here is Allah-addled Islamism, the kind co-evil with fanaticism, not sympathy for Palestinians or Arab solidarity. A few diehard imbeciles in Lebanon may be cheering Hezbollah as a "resistance" organization. Most Lebanese aren't. They see Hezbollah for the puppet it is, doing Syria's and Iran's dirty work while regressing Lebanon's claim to being more cosmopolitan than your off-the-rack Arab autocracy.

That doesn't mean that in this case, as the old saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." No Lebanese in his right mind, if he can hear himself think over the din of Israeli bombs, is cheering the Israeli assault. Not by any stretch of a self-defense rationale does the kidnapping of two soldiers justify the killing of 30 civilians a day, the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure, the blockade of the entire nation, the demolition of an economy that had finally, finally put itself back on its feet after a 15-year war, and the conditioning of a cease-fire on what a rogue militia does, and what a Lebanese government cannot control.

Israel can't at the same time claim that Iran and Syria are calling Hezbollah's shots while punishing the Lebanese and making it contingent on their impotent government to stop Hezbollah.

In a remarkable moment at the United Nations Security Council last week, Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador, quoted plenty of Hezbollah-badgering by one Lebanese official after another, then looked at the Lebanese ambassador, who sat there, stone-faced, and said: "I would like to make a personal appeal to my esteemed Lebanese colleague. Your excellence, you know deep down that if you could, you would add your own brave voice to those voices of your brave compatriots and colleagues. You know deep in your heart that if you could, you would be sitting here right next to me right now, because you know that we are doing the right thing, and that if we succeed, Lebanon will be the beneficiary."

The words sound right. The logic sounds right. The sincerity is unquestioned. But aren't these very words what Israel told its esteemed colleague in 1982, when it invaded Lebanon to rid it of the Palestinians' state-within-a-state, killing 18,000 Lebanese civilians in a matter of 12 weeks along the way and seeding the rise of Hezbollah in the PLO's wake? Aren't these very words the words the Bush administration used in its defense of the Iraq invasion, and uses still, in the name of "doing the right thing" for other people?

Spare us the opportune rationales. Spare us the false moral metrics. You don't answer savagery with savagery -- not in Iraq, not in Lebanon, not in Gaza. There is no excusing Islam's little franchises of barbarians all over the Middle East. But there's no excusing their enablers, either. And that's what Israel has been, what the Bush administration has legitimized -- not only taking the bait of those Islamic fanatics and their terror-toting vermin, not only playing into their hands and perversely reinforcing their causes by responding in spades, but laying waste to lands and lives that don't give a grape's wrath about bleeding their part so the appearance of resolve can live another day. The notion of a proportionate response is derided only because it is made to look like a lesser alternative by trigger-happy leadership. But it's been all disproportion, especially since 2001. It shows. And with our own "stay the course" fanatics still calling the shots, it's bound to get worse.

(Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Email to: ptristam@att.net)


3. A Crisis Foretold
Israelis' dream of peace achieved unilaterally is dead -- and the way out of the current crisis will involve engagement with some unlikely people.
By Jo-Ann Mort

Early last week, I visited friends in Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. Their apartment is at the top of the Carmel, a mountain that leads to the University of Haifa. From their living room I looked out over Haifa’s port to the mountains of Lebanon and thought about the beauty of that area along the border. By week’s end, Haifa was struck by Katushya rockets from southern Lebanon. Israelis in that border area are now being ordered to stay inside and sleep in bomb shelters, as Lebanese are subjected to heavy bombardment by the Israeli army.

On Friday morning, my cousin called me from a suburb of Nahariya to tell me that everyone is OK; her kids had a slumber party with neighbors the previous night -- in a bomb shelter. Nahariya, a quiet, quaint Mediterranean town, is experiencing the worst of the Katushyas. One resident has already been killed.

I am now in Tel Aviv, where the tourist hotels are full and people spent their weekend at the beach. But, unlike the situation just a few weeks ago, when Israel began its incursions into Gaza and much of the country was still tuned out, the military escalation on both fronts -- in the north and south -- has gotten Israelis’ full attention. A brewing sexual harassment scandal between Israeli President Moshe Katsav and a former employee grabbed headlines and offered a brief respite, but now, all Israelis are again focused on a war scenario they didn’t expect.

They should have expected it. The status quo that was limping along here, with Hamas and Hezbollah armed and angry on both sides of Israel and no national authority among the Palestinians or in Lebanon that could take charge, was a recipe for disaster.

Yet, even as the military situation escalates, it seems clear that there is no military solution. Somehow, and with someone, Israel must negotiate a cease-fire; most likely it will have to be accompanied by international intervention and involve forces that Israel finds objectionable. As long as the escalation continues, the stakes only rise regarding the question of exactly which objectionable enemy Israel may have to talk to.

After elections in the Palestinian Authority toppled Fatah in favor of Hamas, Israel, backed by the United States and the European Union, refused to talk to the Hamas government. But the first lesson of the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit more than two weeks ago on the Israeli side of the Gaza border was that the Hamas government, based in Gaza under the leadership of Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, was not in charge anyway. The abduction was a byproduct of factional fighting between Haniya’s government -- which has wished to focus primarily on a domestic agenda that has been frustrated by diplomatic and financial isolation -- and Hamas’ political and military wing, which is led by Khaled Meshal from his protected perch in Damascus. Meshal has been quoted in Israeli papers reasserting himself as the sole Palestinian address for discussion and negotiation. Meanwhile, when Hezbollah leader Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah decided to seize the moment to strut his stuff, complementing the Qassams hitting Israel in the south with Katushyas shot from inside southern Lebanon and raining deep into Israel’s north, it further underscored the degree to which established governments lack control over some of the major actors involved.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza last August, it had every right to expect that its internationally recognized southern border would be peaceful -- that the Palestinians would not terrorize Israeli citizens by lobbing Qassam rockets into Israeli towns. But unilateral disengagement was always a flawed premise for peace, and Israel is now bearing its consequences. The need to withdraw from nearly all of the occupied territories is urgent and immediate -- but it was a doomed proposition to begin the process without any negotiated security arrangements and without the Palestinians having secured the ability to forge a different political, economic, and civil scenario for themselves.

As the well-respected Israeli journalist Avi Shavit recently wrote in Haaretz , the experiment of unilateral disengagement succeeded in confirming both that a majority of Israelis desire to end the occupation and that the republic is capable of acting on that majorities’ desire; but for the Palestinians and other Muslim populations in the area, the disengagement failed. “It strengthened the extremists among them, and weakened the moderates,” wrote Shavit. “It bolstered the ethos of an armed struggle, and brought Hamas to power; it undermined Israel's deterrence, and prompted Hezbollah to attack.” There are still voices of moderation in the region -- but they are not as moderate as Israel would like, nor as moderate as they once were. And they are in unlikely places.

Just as the situation in Gaza was escalating, many Palestinians were voicing support for a joint document, negotiated between factions of prisoners representing Hamas and Fatah, calling for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, set by the pre-1967 borders. The Fatah leader involved in the proposal is Marwan Barghouti, who was sentenced to five life terms for his role in the 2nd Intifada. These days, his name is on the tongues of many politicians, observers, and journalists, Israeli and Palestinian alike. There is hope that he may be someone with the capability to control the street while opening a political horizon for the Palestinians. Many are suggesting that the most useful prisoner exchange Israel could make would be one that frees Barghouti. One Palestinian businessman, close to the Fatah faction around Barghouti, told me that he thought the reason that actors in Syria -- and now Lebanon and perhaps Iran -- currently felt emboldened to strike was precisely because of the complete political vacuum in the Palestinian territories.

The dream of peace achieved unilaterally is clearly dead. Israel -- with international support -- must seek out voices in the region with which to engage, even ones that can’t quite accurately be described as “moderate,” and that discomfort Israelis. After all, an escalation of the current situation in the absence of such engagement -- with Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran all involved in the mix -- offers an array of possible scenarios that are considerably worse than discomforting.

(Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel for The American Prospect ,The Forward , tpmcafe.com and elsewhere. She is co-author of Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today’s Israel ? She is an officer of Americans for Peace Now, affiliated with Israel’s Peace Now movement.)


4. Nasrallah, Palestinian hero -- by Danny Rubinstein (from Haaretz Daily)

Abu Omar's neighbors in the market next to the Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem say they haven't seen him this happy in a long time. His eldest son, Omar, about to complete his high-school studies, joined an underground cell of the Popular Front three years ago. According to the charge sheet drawn up against him, he and his fellow movement members were planning to carry out a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. Somebody turned informer, and Omar was arrested. He is now awaiting trial - a trial that is taking time to get under way.

Abu Omar has been running around for the past two years between police officers and lawyers, and even asked this journalist for help in devising a plea bargain, so that his son will not sit for a prolonged perid in prison. Now, for the first time, there is a glimmer of hope for him: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah will bring about his son's release.

The clear impression that one gets from the mood in the street is that Nasrallah is now the unchallenged hero of the Palestinians. He is running a one-man show. Unlike the gaggle of Palestinian leaders - Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Meshal, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Mohammed Dahlan and many others - who compete with, gossip about and plot against one another, Nasrallah is serving in all of the posts: president, prime minister, foreign minister, ideologue. He has no competitors; he is the sole spokesman. In a brilliant move - according to the Damascus Gate pundits - he has succeeded not only in kidnapping the Israeli soldiers, but even more importantly, he "kidnapped" the entire Palestinian problem and wrested control over it. The last person to do this before him was Saddam Hussein, after the invasion of Kuwait, when he declared that he would withdraw only if Israel got out of the territories. He then threatened to launch rockets. Saddam Hussein failed.
What will be Nasrallah's story? The world according to the Palestinians is now divided into two: the camp of struggle versus the camp of negotiation and compromise. There are four main elements in the first camp: Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. The camp of compromise is much larger, with Egypt, Abu Mazen and Fatah, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the government of Lebanon and nearly all of the other Arab states; it also has the backing of the West and nearly the entire international community.

According to the balance of forces, the camp of compromise is much stronger, but what changes the arithmetic here is Palestinian public opinion, and to some extent, Arab public opinion. There's no doubt that Palestinian public opinion tilts almost exclusively toward the camp of struggle. The 10,000 Palestinian security prisoners have hundreds of thousands of relatives waiting for the release of their dear ones. That is not all. The violence of the past few weeks - especially the Israeli bombings in Gaza, the siege and the large-scale collective punishment meted out - have given rise to rage and calls for vengeance. From the perspective of the Palestinian street, the camp of compromise is rotten, corrupt and subject to the control and manipulation of America.

One example of this position may be found in the numerous cartoons that appear in the Palestinian newspapers. Barely a day goes by when one of the papers does not publish a cartoon that ridicules the rulers of Arab states, who live a life of luxury without taking any account of Palestinian suffering (and in the past few days, Lebanese suffering, as well).

One of the best-known cartoonists is Omayya Juha of the Palestinian Authority's official Al-Hayat al-Jadida paper, whose Hamas-commander husband was killed in a battle with the Israel Defense Forces. And yet it is interesting to note that the cartoonists - and other media critics - do not as a rule draw the likeness or cite the name of any specific Arab leader. They do not, for example, depict Hosni Mubarak or the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Rather, they draw the general likeness of a fat Arab with a big mustache wearing a traditional robe, enjoying the finer things in life.

There is, of course, significance to the likes and dislikes of the Palestinian public, but it is debatable whether this sector actually carries much weight when it comes to tipping the scales of war between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas.


5. Young, Desperate and Hot -- It's a Volatile Mix
Forget the '60s and 'Make Love, Not War.' Today's world is facing a Summer of Rage, especially in the Middle East.
By Niall Ferguson

ARE WE HEADING for a Summer of Rage? A generation ago, young Americans flocked to San Francisco with flowers in their hair for a hippie Summer of Love. But in other parts of the world today the potent combination of young people and sunny weather is producing something very different. The '60s slogan was "Make Love, Not War." The 2006 slogan seems to be the very opposite.

Last week saw a worldwide eruption of violence. As many as 200 people were killed in India on Tuesday when a succession of bombs exploded along Mumbai's western railway line. In Somalia, Islamist extremists tightened their grip on the area around the country's capital. And the Taliban continued to menace Western soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. The crucible of this Summer of Rage, however, is without question the Middle East.

On Wednesday, members of Lebanon's Islamist organization, Hezbollah, attacked an Israeli border patrol, killing eight soldiers and capturing two. Israel, already grappling with a hostage crisis in Gaza, retaliated by bombing Beirut. Hezbollah responded in kind by firing yet more of its rockets into Israel. All of which makes it tempting to conclude that the clashes in this Summer of Rage will be mainly between Muslims and non-Muslims.

But wait a second. The continuing violence in Iraq runs counter to that idea. This time last week, a gang of Shiite gunmen — possibly members of Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi army — briefly took over Baghdad's mainly Sunni Jihad district and proceeded to murder about 40 people. This was just the latest in a succession of sectarian attacks by Shiites against Sunnis, or vice versa. According to the Brookings Institution, the number of incidents of sectarian violence recorded in May was 250, compared with 20 in May 2005 and 10 in May 2004.

What this means is that, as I have been arguing for some time, the insurgency directed against American-led foreign forces is morphing into a civil war. Worse, as Leslie Gelb, a former assistant secretary of State, recently warned, the cancer of sectarian violence has the potential to "metastasize into a … regional conflict."

Events in Lebanon show just how easily this can happen. For Israel is now no longer just fighting a Palestinian intifada in the occupied territories. It has all but declared war on a neighboring sovereign state. And Lebanon is only one of several potential targets in the region.

Hezbollah and Hamas are supported by Iran; the exiled leader of Hamas is based in Syria. The Middle East is to our generation what the Eastern Question was to the Victorians: a baffling tangle of issues that defies simplification. Two things, however, are both simple and important: youth and heat.

Young people and hot weather are the common factors in all the conflicts that erupted last week, just as they played a part in the Summer of Love in 1967. The key differences are, first, that the proportion of young people is exceptionally high in the Middle East today, higher even than in the heyday of the baby boomers; second, that the temperature is a great deal higher in places such as Gaza than it ever was in Haight-Ashbury; and third, that Middle Eastern youths are much more likely to be poor and unemployed than their counterparts in the swinging — and affluent — '60s.

It is no coincidence that the most dangerous places in the world are among those with the most youthful populations. According to a recent study by Population Action International, countries in which young adults (ages 15 to 29) accounted for 40% or more of the adult population in 1995 had a 1-in-3 chance of experiencing civil conflict in the 1990s. Countries in which young adults were 30% or less of the adult population were far less likely to have experienced civil unrest (a probability of just 11%).

IN THE UNITED STATES today, young adults account for just 26% of the adult population. In Iran, however, the proportion is nearly twice as high — 49%. It is the same in the occupied Palestinian territories. In Iraq, it is 48%. In Jordan, it is 46%. In Syria and Somalia, it is more than 50%. Young men are innately violent, as the parents of teenage boys will readily confirm. But they are much more likely to give vent to their violent urges if they are hot, poor and unemployed. This is precisely the predicament of the youths of the Middle East. Take Syria.

The average July temperature in Damascus is 80 degrees, unmitigated by widespread air-conditioning, compared with a mild 60 degrees in San Francisco. Per-capita gross domestic product in Syria is less than a tenth of what it is in the United States. And the youth unemployment rate is a whopping 26%. Forget, for a moment, the terrible technicalities of Middle Eastern politics. These straightforward figures give you the essentials. They explain the difference between hippies and Hezbollah. They explain the difference between swingers and suicide bombers. Above all, they explain the difference between the Californian Summer of Love and the coming Middle Eastern Summer of Rage.


6. The Way We War
By ETGAR KERET (Tel Aviv)

YESTERDAY I called the cable people to yell at them. The day before, my friend told me he’d called and yelled at them a little, threatened to switch to satellite. And they immediately lowered their price by 50 shekels a month (about $11). “Can you believe it?” my friend said excitedly. “One angry five-minute call and you save 600 shekels a year.”

The customer service representative was named Tali. She listened silently to all my complaints and threats and when I finished she said in a low, deep voice: “Tell me, sir, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? We’re at war. People are getting killed. Missiles are falling on Haifa and Tiberias and all you can think about is your 50 shekels?”

There was something to that, something that made me slightly uncomfortable. I apologized immediately and the noble Tali quickly forgave me. After all, war is not exactly the right time to bear a grudge against one of your own.

That afternoon I decided to test the effectiveness of the Tali argument on a stubborn taxi driver who refused to take me and my baby son in his cab because I didn’t have a car seat with me.

“Tell me, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I said, trying to quote Tali as precisely as I could. “We’re at war. People are getting killed. Missiles are falling on Tiberias and all you can think about is your car seat?”

The argument worked here too, and the embarrassed driver quickly apologized and told me to hop in. When we got on the highway, he said partly to me, partly to himself, “It’s a real war, eh?” And after taking a long breath, he added nostalgically, “Just like in the old days.”

Now that “just like in the old days” keeps echoing in my mind, and I suddenly see this whole conflict with Lebanon in a completely different light. Thinking back, trying to recreate my conversations with worried friends about this war with Lebanon, about the Iranian missiles, the Syrian machinations and the assumption that Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has the ability to strike any place in the country, even Tel Aviv, I realize that there was a small gleam in almost everyone’s eyes, a kind of unconscious breath of relief.

And no, it’s not that we Israelis long for war or death or grief, but we do long for those “old days” the taxi driver talked about. We long for a real war to take the place of all those exhausting years of intifada when there was no black or white, only gray, when we were confronted not by armed forces, but only by resolute young people wearing explosive belts, years when the aura of bravery ceased to exist, replaced by long lines of people waiting at our checkpoints, women about to give birth and elderly people struggling to endure the stifling heat.

Suddenly, the first salvo of missiles returned us to that familiar feeling of a war fought against a ruthless enemy who attacks our borders, a truly vicious enemy, not one fighting for its freedom and self-determination, not the kind that makes us stammer and throws us into confusion. Once again we’re confident about the rightness of our cause and we return with lightning speed to the bosom of the patriotism we had almost abandoned. Once again, we’re a small country surrounded by enemies, fighting for our lives, not a strong, occupying country forced to fight daily against a civilian population.

So is it any wonder that we’re all secretly just a tiny bit relieved? Give us Iran, give us a pinch of Syria, give us a handful of Sheik Nasrallah and we’ll devour them whole. After all, we’re no better than anyone else at resolving moral ambiguities. But we always did know how to win a war.

(Etgar Keret is the author of “The Nimrod Flip-Out.’’ This article was translated by Sondra Silverstone from the Hebrew.)