How Hezbollah beat off the schoolyard bully, and now the bully is licking its wounds, and facing this existential question - now what the f?

1. With Guns Silent, Wartime Unity Unravels in Israel Amid Fierce Criticism of War Effort
By GREG MYRE

JERUSALEM — In a country where raucous debate is the norm, Israelis set aside differences during war. They even have an expression for it: “Quiet. We’re shooting.”

But the guns have gone silent, the debate has resumed and the wartime unity has shattered.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert , Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, are all facing fierce, even vitriolic criticism in a country accustomed to swift and decisive battlefield triumphs against Arab enemies.

“Because everyone served in the army, every Israeli thinks he’s a generalissimo,” said Shlomo Avineri, a political science professor at Hebrew University. “The achievements were less than expected, and the price was too high.”

He added: “From the beginning we should have set more modest goals. A lot of this agonizing is self-inflicted.”

A sizable number of Israelis have challenged the claims of their leaders that Israel won the war against Hezbollah .

“It’s not a victory at all,” said Ziona Dotan, 50, who returned to her rocket-damaged apartment in the hard-hit northern town of Kiryat Shmona on Wednesday. “It’s going backwards. They keep getting more weapons. I don’t see what we got out of this. Many people were killed, and what was it all for?”

An Israeli radio poll released Thursday found that 28 percent of the 513 respondents believed Israel won, 24 percent believed Hezbollah won, and 36 percent thought neither side came out on top. The poll had a margin of sampling error of 4.5 percentage points. Two polls released Wednesday showed similar results.

Israelis overwhelmingly supported the government decision to hit hard after Hezbollah staged a cross-border raid on July 12, killing three Israeli soldiers and seizing two more, who remain captive in Lebanon .

But as the fighting dragged on and the Israeli military faced tough resistance from Hezbollah in south Lebanon, criticism began to emerge. The most common themes: The politicians were indecisive. The military relied too much on air power. The ground offensive should have been started sooner, and on a larger scale.

“At the beginning of the war there was unity, but now it’s broken down because there were many mistakes, by the army and also politically,” said Yakov Hoshkover, 66, who works at a parking lot in the northern coastal town of Nahariya, which was repeatedly hit by Hezbollah rockets.

The grumbling turned into a flood of criticism after a United Nations Security Council resolution to stop the fighting was approved last Friday and a cease-fire took effect on Monday.

“There were many failures,” Benjamin Netanyahu , the opposition leader, said in Parliament this week. “Failures in identifying the threat, failures in preparing to meet the threat, failures in the management of the war, failures in the management of the home front.”

Israel has often been led by former generals or others with long military experience, and Mr. Olmert and Mr. Peretz, who assumed their positions in recent months, had limited military backgrounds. Their performance during the war only raised more doubts.

Mr. Olmert’s approval rating, which shot up to 78 percent on July 19, one week into the war, fell to 40 percent in a poll published Wednesday in Maariv, a leading daily.

Fifty-three percent of those questioned said Israel should have kept on fighting, while 42 percent said Israel was right to agree to a cease-fire. The poll questioned 500 Jewish Israelis on Tuesday and had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.

In a front-page opinion article on Thursday, Nahum Barnea, the most prominent columnist in Yediot Aharonot, the country’s top-selling newspaper, called for the resignation of Mr. Peretz, a former trade union leader whose army service consisted largely of repairing tanks.

“The appointment of Amir Peretz as defense minister was a crazy idea,” Mr. Barnea wrote.

With criticism of the war effort mounting, Mr. Peretz on Wednesday appointed a panel to review how the Defense Ministry and the military performed.

But that move also drew criticism from politicians who said Mr. Peretz quickly put together a handpicked panel with the aim of heading off a more thorough review by an independent body.

The Haaretz newspaper reported Thursday that Mr. Peretz said the military played down the threat of Hezbollah’s missiles when briefing him after he took office in May.

General Halutz, meanwhile, is also facing mounting calls to quit after a newspaper disclosed that he sold about $28,000 worth of mutual fund shares just hours after the Hezbollah raid on July 12.

The general said that he was intending to sell the shares for two weeks, and that his secretary placed a call to his bank on the morning of July 12, before the Hezbollah raid. The bank returned his call about three hours after the Hezbollah attack, and General Halutz said he took the call and placed the sell order as planned.

The explanation has not won him sympathy.

“There is an expectation that in the hour of decision, the chief of staff will dedicate all of his capabilities to conduct the war and not to manage his personal accounts for revenue and loss in the stock exchange,” Zevulun Orlev, a right-wing legislator, said in a statement calling on the general to step down.

Critics of the war effort have included many reserve soldiers who complained that they did not have proper equipment or provisions.

In one unusual incident, a group of reservists from the Alexandroni Brigade criticized and booed their commander, Col. Shlomi Cohen, at a meeting after they withdrew from Lebanon.

The discussion became tense as soldiers raised questions that included why they entered Lebanon during the day, rather than at night, and about a lack of food and water, Yediot Aharonot reported.

One reserve soldier, Yair Levy, 40, confronted the colonel, saying, “I left my house, my job, my three kids, and after two weeks in Lebanon, you say I have chutzpah because I asked for equipment and food.”

“If that’s the attitude and those are your answers, next time we won’t come,” he continued.

The colonel replied: “Don’t come. Don’t bother.”


2. 'The Best Guerrilla Force in the World'
Analysts Attribute Hezbollah's Resilience to Zeal, Secrecy and Iranian Funding
By Edward Cody and Molly Moore (from The Washington Post)

BEIRUT -- Hezbollah's irregular fighters stood off the modern Israeli army for a month in the hills of southern Lebanon thanks to extraordinary zeal and secrecy, rigorous training, tight controls over the population, and a steady flow of Iranian money to acquire effective weaponry, according to informed assessments in Lebanon and Israel.

"They are the best guerrilla force in the world," said a Lebanese specialist who has sifted through intelligence on Hezbollah for more than two decades and strongly opposes the militant Shiite Muslim movement.

Because Hezbollah was entrenched in friendly Shiite-inhabited villages and underground bunkers constructed in secret over several years, a withering Israeli air campaign and a tank-led ground assault were unable to establish full control over a border strip and sweep it clear of Hezbollah guerrillas -- one of Israel's main declared war aims. Largely as a result, the U.N. Security Council resolution approved unanimously Friday night fell short of the original objectives laid out by Israel and the Bush administration when the conflict began July 12.

As the declared U.N. cease-fire went into effect Monday morning, many Lebanese -- particularly among the Shiites who make up an estimated 40 percent of the population -- had already assessed Hezbollah's endurance as a military success despite the devastation wrought across Lebanon by Israeli bombing.

Hezbollah's staying power on the battlefield came from a classic fish-in-the-sea advantage enjoyed by guerrillas on their home ground, hiding in their own villages and aided by their relatives. Hasan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, summed up the guerrilla strategy in a televised address during the conflict when he said, "We are not a regular army and we will not fight like a regular army."

The group's battlefield resilience also came from an unusual combination of zeal and disciplined military science, said the Lebanese specialist with access to intelligence information, who spoke on condition he not be identified by name.

The fighters' Islamic faith and intense indoctrination reduced their fear of death, he noted, giving them an advantage in close-quarters combat and in braving airstrikes to move munitions from post to post. Hezbollah leaders also enhanced fighters' willingness to risk death by establishing the Martyr's Institute, with an office in Tehran, that guarantees living stipends and education fees for the families of fighters who die on the front.

"If you are waiting for a white flag coming out of the Hezbollah bunker, I can assure you it won't come," Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, a member of the Israeli army's general staff, said in a briefing for reporters in the northern Israeli village of Gosherim. "They are extremists, they will go all the way."

Moreover, Hezbollah's military leadership carefully studied military history, including the Vietnam War, the Lebanese expert said, and set up a training program with help from Iranian intelligence and military officers with years of experience in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The training was matched to weapons that proved effective against Israeli tanks, he added, including the Merkava main battle tank with advanced armor plating.

Wire-guided and laser-guided antitank missiles were the most effective and deadly Hezbollah weapons, according to Israeli military officers and soldiers. A review of Israel Defense Forces records showed that the majority of Israeli combat deaths resulted from missile hits on armored vehicles -- or on buildings where Israeli soldiers set up observation posts or conducted searches.

Most of the antitank missiles, Israeli officers noted, could be dragged out of caches and quickly fired with two- or three-man launching teams at distances of 3,200 yards or more from their targets. One of the most effective was the Russian-designed Sagger 2, a wire-guided missile with a range of 550 to 3,200 yards.

In one hidden bunker, Israeli soldiers discovered night-vision camera equipment connected to computers that fed coordinates of targets to the Sagger 2 missile, according to Israeli military officials who described the details from photographs they said soldiers took inside the bunker.

Some antitank missiles also can be used to attack helicopters, which has limited the military's use of choppers in rescues and other operations. On Saturday, Hezbollah shot down a CH-53 Sikorsky helicopter in Lebanon, killing all five crew members, according to the Israeli military. As of late Sunday, Israeli troops still had been unable to retrieve the bodies because of fierce fighting in the area of the crash.

The Hezbollah arsenal, which also included thousands of missiles and rockets to be fired against northern Israel's towns and villages, was paid for with a war chest kept full by relentless fundraising among Shiites around the world and, in particular, by funds provided by Iran, said the intelligence specialist. The amount of Iranian funds reaching Hezbollah was estimated at $25 million a month, but some reports suggested it increased sharply, perhaps doubled, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took over as president in Tehran last year, the specialist said.

Fawaz Trabulsi, a Lebanese professor who helped lead Palestinian-allied militia forces against the Israeli army in 1982, noted that Hezbollah's fight has differed in several respects from that mounted by the Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1980s. In that war, Israeli forces punched straight northward and reached Beirut in a few days with only minor resistance, he recalled, saying Israeli officers seemed to think they could duplicate that performance against Hezbollah.

One reason for the sharp difference is that Israeli intelligence had much less detail on Hezbollah forces, tactics and equipment than it had on the PLO, which was infiltrated by a network of spies, said Trabulsi, now a political science professor at Lebanese American University. "Hezbollah is not penetrated at all," he said.

Nehushtan, the Israeli general, said the Israeli military had enough information to appreciate the fighting ability and weaponry of Hezbollah as the conflict opened. In addition, Israeli warplanes have hit pinpoint targets throughout the fighting, presumably on the basis of real-time intelligence reaching the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv through drones and other surveillance equipment. Other observers, however, said the sweep of fighting over the last month -- when Israel on several occasions said it controlled the terrain, only to continue fighting in the same border villages -- suggested intelligence had not provided an adequate appreciation of the battlefield.

"I think it's no secret that the Israeli military didn't have the intelligence on this," said Richard Straus, who publishes the Middle East Policy Survey newsletter in Washington. "They didn't know what Hezbollah had, how it had built up, what it was capable of."

Another difference that gave Hezbollah fighters an edge is the experience they acquired in combating Israeli troops during the nearly two decades of Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon that ended in 2000. In contrast, Palestinian guerrillas had gained most of their experience fighting Lebanese militias in the civil war here -- using nothing more than assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades -- and were unprepared and unequipped to resist the advance of Israel's modern army.

"The difference is in training, the difference is in weapons, but the big difference is that most of the Palestinians had never engaged in fighting Israel," Trabulsi said. "They were used to fighting a civil war in Lebanon."

Hezbollah's resistance to penetration by Israeli intelligence was part of a culture of secrecy extreme even by the standards of underground guerrilla forces. The code fit with a tendency toward secrecy in the Shiite stream of Islam, called faqih . It also fit with a sense of solidarity against others that Lebanese Shiites have been imbued with since the beginning of their emergence as a political force in the mid-1970s, when their first organization was called the Movement of the Deprived.

One young Lebanese doctor learned that her brother had been a Hezbollah fighter for several years only when the movement notified her he had been killed, colleagues said. Similarly, a Lebanese man found out his brother was a senior Hezbollah militia officer only when informed of his death; the brother had cloaked occasional trips to Tehran by saying he was trying to start an import-export business.

Reporters who over the last month went to the bombed-out sections of southern Beirut suburbs where Hezbollah had its headquarters were approached within minutes by young men asking who they were and what they were doing there. Interviews with the people living there, most of whom were ardent Hezbollah supporters, were not allowed, the young men said. Around the battlefields of south Lebanon, however, the militia was busy fighting Israeli troops and hiding from airstrikes.

Reporters were free to move as much as they dared, since they, too, feared being hit by Israeli jets.

Even the movement's political leadership was kept in the dark about many military and intelligence activities, Trabulsi noted. Ghaleb Abu-Zeinab, a member of Hezbollah's political bureau, said in an interview, for instance, that he was not informed about operations on "the field," Hezbollah shorthand for the villages and hillsides across southern Lebanon where the battle raged.

"They have a military and intelligence organization totally separated from the political organization," Trabulsi said.

A dramatic example of the secrecy and careful preparations for conflict with Israel was Hezbollah's al-Manar television. The station has kept broadcasting its mix of news and propaganda from hidden studios throughout the fighting, despite repeated Israeli airstrikes against relay towers and antennas across the country. Lebanese said some of the broadcasts seemed to include coded messages to Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon. But as with most things about Hezbollah, they were not really sure.

Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, used al-Manar to make a number of speeches rallying his followers and explaining his strategy. With his cleric's turban and student's mien, appearing on the screen in pre-taped broadcasts, he was perhaps the biggest secret of all, hunted by Israeli warplanes and hiding in a location about which Lebanese could only guess.

(Moore reported from Jerusalem. Correspondent Jonathan Finer in Gosherim contributed to this report)


3. THIS ARTICLE, ABOUT PRIVILEGED ISRAELI KIDS WHO ARE ESCAPING MILITARY SERVICE, IS VERY ENLIGHTENING ABOUT BIG FAULTLINES CRACKING ISRAELI SOCIETY.

Death to Yuppiestan, or, Nasrallah was right -- by Bradley Burston (from Israel's Haaretz Daily)

The largest city in Israel is under attack. And not a moment too soon.

The target of these attacks is the tony metroplex that became, in the boom years of the 1990s, Yuppiestan. It is collectively and culturally the garden-gated ghettos of Tel Aviv and the surrounding center of the country, the long-envied and newly-despised upper middle class Comfort Zone of the Jewish state.

Why the anger? Because of the sense that Yuppiestan sat out this war.

Not a strictly geographical Yuppiestan, but a certain sector of the Israeli population. It is the sense that the youth of the largely secular, largely leftist, largely well-educated, largely well-heeled sections of the center, have for some time been all too happy to let the youth of the rest of the country do their fighting - and their dying - for them.

It is the sense that many of the young and smug and, dare we say, spoiled children of Yuppiestan have dodged more than the draft, however convincing their arguments for why they should be allowed to avoid serving in combat units, or allowed to avoid serving their country altogether.

These are not conscientious objectors, who are few in number, serious of purpose, have a lot to lose by sincerely refusing to serve, and do lose a lot, beginning with prison.

These are the young who duck the draft by buying their way out, sleazing their way out, lying their way out using parents' connections, any connections, anything not to serve, and not to pay the price.

But it doesn't stop there.

There is also anger over Kirya Syndrome, the sense that a large percentage of the youth of greater Tel Aviv sees out its army service partly as nine-to-five bureaucrats in the IDF's Kirya headquarters, and partly as nine-to-five mall rats in the adjacent Azrieli Towers shopping/dining/coffee and cake complex.

There is anger over the idea that life went on remarkably smoothly in the Kirya, despite the Home Front Command's disastrous ill-preparedness for wholesale rocket attacks on civilian populations in the north, who were forced to live underground, often in states of distress and want, for weeks on end.

There is anger, no less, over the army's signal failures in adequately equipping and even feeding the tens of thousands it sent over the line into Lebanon. This, as life in the Kirya spun along, well-fed, well-clothed, air-conditioned, close to home.

The anger became stronger this week, as reservists came back and begun to spill their experiences. There was the ambulance medic who took a wounded reservist from a medivac helicopter to the trauma room at Rambam hospital in Haifa, and heard only these words from the soldier:

"Do you maybe have some food? I haven't eaten in three days."

There was another reservist, barely a year out of his compulsory three years of service, whose company was so hungry that they all crowded into the house of an elderly Lebanese couple, to search for food.

"The couple were sitting there," the soldier recalled Thursday. "They could have been my grandparents. It was a horrible scene." Other units, left without supplies for days, broke into grocery stores, searching for water and food.

The war was the catalyst for this week's unprecedented outpouring of resentment toward Tel Aviv, but it has clearly been building for years.

A week ago, with the war still at full horror, the north crippled by more than 200 Katyusha rockets a day, Maariv devoted a full 10 pages to the question of why so many of its readers would like to see Hassan Nasrallah make good on his threat to launch a Hezbollah rocket that would strike Tel Aviv.

We got the letters as well. "I don't want to see anyone in Tel Aviv get hurt," one reader wrote to Haaretz from the Upper Galilee. "But I want the people there to wake up and notice that there's a war going on here."

What exactly is this Yuppiestan, and why does anyone have a beef with it? One hint came on Wednesday, when IDF Major General Elazar Stern, commander of the Human Resources Branch, allowed himself a moment of extraordinary candor in a nationally-broadcast live Army Radio interview.

Asked in a roundabout way whether the military burden of the war had fallen equally on various sectors of the public, Stern replied in a way that appeared roundabout, but between the lines was clearly aimed at Tel Aviv.

"I see the homes that I go to for condolence visits. And then there are the homes that I am not going to, the homes that do not know bereavement, and will not.

"I go much more to kibbutzim, and I hardly go to Tel Aviv at all," Stern said, in an allusion to the high number of war dead who were from kibbutzim, and the remarkably low number from the nation's biggest city.

He also noted the high number of casualties among Ethiopian and Russian immigrants.

"There are things that we know and the public doesn't," he went on. "It could be that there are statistics that we have not released to date, that perhaps we should. Which schools combat soldiers come out of, and which schools officers come out of," Stern said.

"I am a high priest of Tz'va Ha-Am," the old concept of the IDF as "the army of the people."

Stern touched a number of nerves in his remarks, not least the mayor of Tel Aviv, who saw in the recruits from his city "the same level of obligation, of dedication, of fire" as those from elsewhere.

Even if Stern's remarks were misdirected and statistically questionable, the main nerve they touched was the right one.

The war showed that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had been right - if for the wrong reasons - in describing Israeli society as weak and vulnerable.

Everyone here knows what's wrong. We've known it all along.

For years, we have gone along with a system we all know to be untenable. The hallmarks of the system were a grotesque caricature of what Israelis took to be America - bankers who take home a million shekels a year, while milking a burgeoning underclass sinking deeper by the day - combined with a government mired at all levels and in all ministries with apparatchiks who spent most of their time protecting their positions and finding new angles to pad their monthly wage slips.

The war showed, first of all, that the American video-gaming model of bomb from the air, bomb from the air, bomb from the air warfare is as inappropriate, morally disastrous, and ultimately self-defeating in Lebanon as it was in Iraq.

Closer to home, the doctrine of slash and burn economics which managed to deny both the army and the poor needed funds over the last several years, managed to make this a do-it-yourself war.

Soldiers were forced to supply themselves and, in some case, order themselves. On the home front, volunteers of all stripes, secular, ultra-Orthodox, Jewish and Arab, stepping in to help people in the north, sheltering them, feeding them, rescuing them.

There's a clue in this for all of us.

If we can't seem to kill Nasrallah, it's time we learned something from him. It's time we looked inside ourselves and tapped into the inner guerrilla, the caustic and generous and improvisational and entirely unpredictable national personality that created this country and which kicks in when all else fails.

We've tolerated corruption for too long. For too long, we've allowed incompetence to go unaddressed, even rewarded. We've learned to countenance mediocrity, to let failure ride.

We have to rekindle the inner guerrilla that makes this place work. That gives us the strength and the smarts and the edge to keep this place vibrant. To keep us alive.

We know our time is limited. There may not be kibbutzim after the present generation, nor hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

Yuppiestan may still be a bubble. But the country's wake up call to the bubble suggests that it's time its residents rejoined the people outside. To reclaim their guerrilla roots as well.

Nasrallah has shown us the alternative. If we fail to return integrity to this society, if we fail to address the needs of our disadvantaged, if we continue to pretend this can go on for good, you can bet that Yuppiestan's days are numbered, no less than ours.


4. Why the IDF Lost in Lebanon -- by WILLIAM S. LIND

With today's cease-fire in Lebanon, the second Hezbollah-Israeli War is temporarily in remission. So far, Israel has been beaten.

The magnitude of the defeat is considerable. Israel appears to have lost at every level-strategic, operational and tactical. Nothing she tried worked. Air power failed, as it always does against an enemy who doesn't have to maneuver operationally, or even move tactically for the most part. The attempts to blockade Lebanon and thus cut off Hezbollah's resupply failed; her caches proved ample. Most seriously, the ground assault into Lebanon failed. Israel took little ground and paid heavily in casualties for that. More, she cannot hold what she has taken; if she is not forced to withdraw by diplomacy, Hezbollah will push her out, as it did once before. The alternative is a bleeding ulcer that never heals.

But these failures only begin to measure the magnitude of Israel's defeat. While Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, is now an Islamic hero, Olmert has become a boiled brisket in the piranha pool that is Israeli politics. The cease-fire in Lebanon will allow camera crews to broadcast the extent of the destruction to the world, with further damage to Israel's image. Israel's "wall" strategy for dealing with the Palestinians has been undone; Hamas rockets can fly over a wall as easily as Hezbollah rockets have flown over Israel's northern border.

Most importantly, an Islamic Fourth Generation entity, Hezbollah, will now point the way throughout the Arab and larger Islamic world to a future in which Israel can be defeated. That will have vast ramifications, and not for Israel alone. Hundreds of millions of Moslems will believe that the same Fourth Generation war that defeated hated Israel can beat equally-hated America, its "coalitions" and its allied Arab and Moslem regimes. Future events seem more likely to confirm that belief than to undermine it.

The cease-fire in Lebanon will last only briefly, its life probably measured in days if not in hours. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah has genuinely accepted it. The notion that the Lebanese Army and a rag-tag U.N. force will disarm Hezbollah is absurd even by the usual low standard of diplomatic fictions. The bombing and the rocketing may stop briefly, but Israel has already announced a campaign of assassination against Hezbollah leaders, while every Israeli soldier in Lebanon will remain a target of Hezbollah.

Unfortunately for states generally, Israel appears to have no good options when hostilities recommence. It can continue to grind forward on the ground in southern Lebanon, paying bitterly for each foot of ground, and perhaps eventually denying Hezbollah some of its rocket-launching sites. But it cannot hold what it takes. It may strive for a more robust U.N. force, but what country wants to fight Hezbollah? Any occupier of southern Lebanon that is not there with Hezbollah's permission will face the same guerrilla war Israel already fought and lost. Most probably, Israel will escalate by taking the war to Syria or Iran, and what will be a strategy of desperation. That too will fail, after it plunges the whole region into a war the outcome of which will be catastrophic for the United States as well as for Israel.

Before that disastrous denouement, my Fourth Generation crystal ball suggests the following events are likely:

o Again, a near-term resumption of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, with Israel succeeding no better than it has to date. In the past, the IDF has been brilliant at pulling rabbits out of hats, but this time someone else seems to occupy all the rabbit holes.

o A fracturing of Lebanon, with a collapse of the weak Lebanese state and very possibly a return to civil war there (which was always the probable result of Syria's departure).

o A rise of Syrian and Iranian influence generally, matched by a fall of American influence. If Israel and America were clever, Syria's comeback could offer a diplomatic opportunity of a deal in which Syria changed sides in return for a peace treaty with Israel that included the return of all lands. The crystal ball says that opportunity will be spurned.

o A vast strengthening of Islamic 4GW elements everywhere.

o Finally and perhaps most discouragingly, a continued inability of state militaries everywhere, including those of Israel and the United States, to come to grips with Fourth Generation War. Inability may be too kind of a word; refusal is perhaps more accurate.

Are there any brighter prospects? Not unless Israel changes its fundamental policy. Even in the unlikely event that the cease-fire in Lebanon holds and Lebanese Army and U.N. forces do wander into southern Lebanon, that would buy but a bit of time. Israel only has a long-term future if it can reach a mutually acceptable accommodation with its neighbors. So long as those neighbors are states, a policy of pursuing such an accommodation may have some chance of success. But as the rise of Fourth Generation elements such as Hezbollah and Hamas weaken and in time replace those states, the possibility will disappear. Unfortunately, Israeli politics appear to be moving away from such a course rather than toward it.

For America, the question is whether Washington will continue to demand that we go down with the Israeli ship.

(William S. Lind , expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.)


5. An affronted home front -- by Lily Galili (from Israel's Haaretz Daily)

For many years, the surveys that assess the Israeli public's confidence in government institutions indicated that the army enjoyed the highest level of confidence. Not only in comparison to other government institutions, such as the cabinet and the Knesset, but even in absolute numbers, approaching 90 percent. At the other end of the spectrum, with a constant erosion in their status, are the press and the political parties. The pessimists claimed that this dichotomy is characteristic of fascist states; the optimists tended to say that this is natural in a country whose dependence on the army is greater than is common in democratic societies.

Even those who do not accept the picture of society reflected in those surveys cannot but be disturbed by the change wrought by the second Lebanon war. This time, confidence in the Israel Defense Forces has also been eroded. In a Haaretz survey last week, only 59 percent of the public said that they were satisfied with the IDF's functioning; 34 percent replied that they were not satisfied. Confidence shrank just when dependence increased.

These findings could have been considered good news had democratic institutions, such as the government, for example, replaced the army in the ranking of public confidence. But confidence in the government and its leaders has been eroded even more. On the morning of July 12, with the outbreak of the war, Israelis felt part of a nation, but not exactly a functional state. The state failed in both the military and the civilian arenas. Large groups in Israel, usually in conflict with one another, relied on one another for lack of choice (like Vladimir and Estergon in "Waiting for Godot" who does not arrive).

"What happened is a criminal act, a tragic slap in the faces of the poor and of people lacking in political importance. Someone has to go home." These words were said by director Spike Lee, whose documentary about Hurricane Katrina will be screened in the United States at the end of the month. And they are an amazingly appropriate description of the way in which our government abandoned the poor, the ill and the weak residents of the north of the country.

The analogy should not surprise us: In both cases, the American and the Israeli, the behavior of the governments in the face of the disasters is drawn from the same world view that sanctifies cruel individualism and shrugs off a sense of solidarity and of responsibility for the collective. The failure in dealing with the home front is not administrative but structural.

But a society like Israel, which drafts its sons with a Tzav 8 (an emergency call-up notice for reserve duty), can allow itself to engage in such behavior much less than America, which may not give so much to its citizens, but doesn't demand so much of them, either.

To the credit of the State of Israel, it should be said that it has accustomed its citizens to expect very little from their government. Each person and his own disengagement from officialdom. There is the disengagement of the left, which for years has been disgusted by the occupation and by the aggressive-arrogant nature of the state; there is the disengagement of the right, which feels deceived and betrayed because of the uprooting from Gaza, and fears the uprooting that may still come; there is the disengagement of the poor and the ill, who have been abandoned by the wayside by liberal economics; there is the disengagement of the new immigrants who were invited to join the state on the basis of an ethos that collapsed before their arrival.

In the hundreds of interviews with the "home front," there was grateful mention of the name of oligarch Arkadi Gaydamak, who built a tent city in Nitzanim for the evacuees, more than there was mention of the names of the cabinet ministers. Occasionally the interviewees sought the help of billionaire heiress Shari Arison. That is what life in 21st-century Israel has taught them: not to trust their government. To look for charity rather than justice. A sad lesson, which the war has brought to an extreme in a way whose long-term implications are still hard to assess. All these were emphasized even further by the absence of a stunning victory, which could have concealed the depth of the crisis that has been created.

One of the more surprising phenomena of this war is the massive preoccupation with the state of society during the fighting. To those who remember Israel's previous wars, this is an almost incomprehensible change, which stems not only from the fact that the home front has become the war front. It is a result of an ongoing process that has been taking place in recent years, and that has placed social issues on the public agenda. The war no longer provides the government with an escape hatch via which to evade its social failures, and every administration will in the future have to take this change into consideration. "Quiet, we're shooting," no longer works for a public that has been a victim of manipulations, which sometimes demand that it be quiet because a war is being waged, and sometimes because peace is being made.

As opposed to the cliched slogan that the leaders tend to repeat, to the effect that "It is impossible to raise two flags simultaneously" - the public is proving that it actually is possible. This is an expression of strength, not of weakness. Whoever chose to ignore the fact that a year after the disengagement from Gaza there are still evacuees from Gush Katif who are living in tent cities, got more tent cities of evacuees from the north.

"I don't necessarily see the loss of confidence in the state as a negative thing," says Prof. Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "The uprising of the settlers has already led to ambivalence in the attitude towards the state, which is the lifeblood of democracy. This can be the continuation of a positive process."

One of the clearest expressions of the change in the Israeli ethos is the attitude towards the evacuees from the north. No longer "deserters" and "traitors," the epithets attached to the Tel Avivians who left their city during the 1991 Gulf War for fear of the Scud missiles, but "evacuees," or even "refugees," who received massive encouragement from the public to leave. The concept of heroism has changed. Getting hit in the head by a missile is not considered a contribution to the nation and to the country. After two intifadas, innumerable terror attacks and hundreds of Qassam rockets in the south, survival has become a value. Without panic, without hysteria, people took their fate into their own hands.

The Tel Aviv "bubble" was a media invention. The experienced public has simply internalized the basic geopolitical situation, in which the attack is sometimes in Scud-besieged Tel Aviv, sometimes in terror-besieged Jerusalem that nobody wants to visit, sometimes in the Qassam-besieged south and sometimes in the north. At any given time, the role of the "others" is to maintain a maximum degree of sanity. Not only for themselves, for everyone. In all, a healthy survival instinct in a society that insists on holding on to the vestiges of normalcy.

Dangers, possibilities

But the present point in time involves no fewer dangers than possibilities. The process of the demilitarization of society, which was expressed in the election of a civilian leadership, has been dealt a severe blow. Even those who contemptuously hissed the word "generals" now blame the failures of the war on the inexperience of the civilian leadership, among other things. On the face of it, a surefire recipe for the return of the reign of the generals. But when even the "generals" failed, as demonstrated by the surveys that assess the functioning of the chief of staff, where will the citizens take their confusion? At this stage, we are left with a strange creature: a more civic society that is not necessarily less militaristic.

When we examine the nature of Israeli society on this axis, it is impossible to ignore the 20 percent of the population who are Russian speakers, who have a patently belligerent world view. For the vast majority of them, this is their first war in Israel. Because of their structural weakness, they are the most blatant victims of neglect by the government in which they had little confidence in the first place, but of which they nevertheless had expectations. They expected mainly one thing: a decisive victory in war.

"The Russians understand victory in completely different terms from the veterans," says Dr. Eliezer Feldman, a social psychologist who immigrated to Israel in 1998. "One could say that they expect [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert to be like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, who said that the Chechen terrorists have to be destroyed even in the bathroom. The 'Lebanese quagmire' of the first Lebanon War is not part of their collective memory. For them, victory means entering Beirut, not a cease-fire for the purpose of negotiations in which they don't believe."

Even if over a million Russian speakers do not have direct channels of influence on veteran Israeli society, they have in-depth influence. Every politician is aware of the fact that in a future choice between various options, he has the guaranteed support of about one-fifth of the public for the more belligerent option. Even if that fact did not decisively influence this war, there is no question that the change in the social composition of the population will be of political significance for future decisions.

But in the interim - until we know how the various circles of Israeliness will organize to confront one another - Israeli society is enveloped in a mutual feeling that there is a need for radical changes. Some of this feeling is not new, but the war has made it more extreme. For example, the ongoing process of recognizing the limits of power. The transitions from a feeling of heady omnipotence to a feeling of unjustified impotence are sharp and painful. Up to the last moment, most Israelis expected a miracle that would restore the IDF of Operation Entebbe (the 1976 rescue of hijacked hostages in Uganda) or at least Operation Spring of Youth (the 1973 commando raid against terrorist organizations in Lebanon). That didn't happen.

The disappointment can also give rise to a series of sober conclusions. After all, the essence of unilateralism, as expressed in the disengagement, or in the convergence that will probably not take place, comes from the sense of omnipotence of those who can do everything on their own.

If there is an overall lesson in the traumatic experience of this war, it is the lesson of humility - for both the public and the leadership. What began with arrogant expressions such as "We'll crush them" was replaced toward the end with the modest statement "We'll achieve the maximum that we are able." If this insight is translated into a sense of helplessness, that would be bad; but if it leads to a more humble attitude towards reality and towards the region in which we live - that would be good.

A fleeting moment on television illustrated this axis on which masses of Israelis are now cautiously moving: In a meeting with officers and soldiers under his command, Major M. spoke contemptuously about the members of Hezbollah. He was corrected by a young officer who had returned from the battle: "They aren't terrorists, they're daring fighters who really gave it to us." His friends silently expressed their agreement, the major general looked embarrassed. That was definitely a moment of humility and an awareness of the reality, which has not yet penetrated to the senior echelons.

And in all this mess, there is definitely good news, too. This war came into the world at a time when the left and the right are disgusted with the state, and mainly with one another. At the moment of truth they knew how to put their hostile dialogue with the state on hold, and met on the most Israeli common ground there is - reserve duty. Not out of blind obedience, but out of a realization of the need to do so. This war, whose goals were not sufficiently defined and at whose conclusion both right and left had attained far less than they wanted, has eroded what still remained of blind obedience. As a result of the crisis of confidence vis-a-vis the IDF and its commanders, the logic of any future war can be expected to stand a public test.

The left will be forced to confront the collapse of the thesis that "territories for peace" is the magic formula. The war on the recognized international border has eroded the simplicity of this outlook, just as it has undermined the unilateralism supported by the left. The right, for its part, will have to recognize the fact that a continuation of the occupation and cruelty towards the Palestinians fuel other conflicts and make it difficult to identify their other components. Both sides will be forced to reassess their fixed starting points.

The same is true for Israel's Arabs. Although they themselves became victims of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, they did not look for a place in the protected space of Israeliness. It makes no difference what they thought in their heart of hearts: The fact is that openly most of them chose to condemn only Israel.

They connected to Israeliness only by leading the opposition to the war - a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of Israel's wars. That can also be seen as a type of connecting, which will have to be used as a lever for a sober discourse among all elements of society. Without a leader to mend the fractures or assist in shaping new myths in place of those that have collapsed, responsibility devolves onto the doorstep of civil society, which actually proved that in spite of efforts to crush it, it is the stronger side in the equation that comprises the State of Israel.


6. The Lebanon War, a Post-Mortem
Israeli Militarism and the Necessity of a One-State Solution
By ALAN HART

I'm going to suggest to you that what we might now be witnessing is the long beginning of the end of the Zionist state of Israel. In the next 10 minutes or so I will talk my way to an explanation of why I think so; and then I'll address the question of what the most likely consequences would be. I can see two--One State of Palestine for All and real, lasting peace, or Catastrophe for All... and by "All" I don't just mean Israeli Jews and the Arabs of the region, I mean all of us, everywhere. I thought I would be the first to give voice in public to the idea that Israel might be planting in Lebanon the final seeds of its own destruction, but while I was working on my text for this evening, I came across an interview given by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was PresidentCarter's National Security Adviser. He said: "Eventually, if neo-con policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well."As Israel's bombardment of Lebanon unfolded, a great deal of nonsense was written and spoken by pundits and policymakers throughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world about why it was happening. The main thrust of the nonsense was that Hizbullah started the war and that Israel was merely defending itself. I think the truth about Hizbullah's role in triggering the war can be summarised as follows--bearing in mind that the border incident of 12 July was one of many since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, and which more often than not, according to UN monitors, were provoked by Israeli actions and/or Israeli violations of agreements. By engaging an IDF border patrol, killing three Israeli soldiers and taking two hostages, and firing a few rockets to create a diversion for that operation, Hizbullah gave Israel's generals and those politicians who rubber-stamp their demands the pretext they wanted and needed to go to war--a war they had planned for months.

I was reminded of what was said to me on the second of the six days of the 1967 war when I was a very young ITN correspondent reporting from Israel. One of my sources was Major General Chaim Herzog. He was one of the founding fathers of Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence. On the second day of that war he said to me in private conversation: "IfNasser had not been stupid enough to give us a pretext for war now, we would have created one in the coming year to 18 months." Hizbullah's purpose in taking Israeli prisoners/hostages was to have them as bargaining chips - to secure the return of Lebanese prisoners Israel had refused to release in a previous prisoner exchange. As former President Carter implied in an article for The Washington Post on I August, it was not unreasonable for Hizbullah to assume that an exchange would be possible because "the assumption was based on a number of such trades in the past." But on 12 July 2006 the government of Israel was not interested in trades. It did not give a single moment to diplomacy or negotiations of any kind. It did not even consider a local retaliation to make a point. Israel rushed to war. As Defence Minister Amir Peretz put it: "We're skipping the stage of threats and going straight to the action."

On the subject of Hizbullah's rockets, (which are hit-and-miss low tech weapons when compared with Israel's state of the art firepower), it is right to ask-Why, really, were they there? What, really, explains Hizbullah's stock-piling and its bunkering down? The honest answer, which has its context in the whole history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Zionism's demonstrated designs on Southern Lebanon in particular, is this: Hizbullah was strengthening itself militarily for the same reason as Eygpt did when President Nasser, with great reluctance after America had refused to supply him, accepted weapons from the Soviet Union. Nasser did not upgrade Eygpt's military capabilities to make war on Israel. He wanted to be able to demonstrate to Israel that attacking Eygpt to impose Zionism's will on it was not a cost-free option. In other words, Hizbullah had been improving its military capability to deter Israeli incursions and attacks, which was something the Lebanese army was incapable of doing. Am I suggesting that Hizbullah would not have let loose its rockets if Israel had not gone for the war option? YES! The notion that, on 12 July 2006, Hizbullah was joined in conspiracy with Iran and Syria to wipe Israel off the face of the earth is nothing but Zionist and neo-con propaganda nonsense--to justify Israel's latest war of aggression and also, perhaps, to justify, in advance of it happening, war on Iran.

It's true that the rhetoric of Iran's President gave and gives a degree of apparent credibility to Zionist and neo-con spin--but only to those who are unaware of, or don't want to know, the difference between the facts and documented truth of the real history of the Arab-Israeli conflict (as in my book) and Zionism's version of it. To those who really want to understand why the Zionist state of Israel behaves in the way it does, and is (as described in a recent article courageously carried by The Independent) "a terrorist state like no other", I say not only read my book, but give special attention to page 485 of Volume One. On it I quote what was said behind closed doors in May 1955 by Moshe Dayan, Israel's one-eyed warlord and master of deception. He was in conversation with Israel's ambassadors to Washington, London and Paris. At the time the Eisenhower administration was pressing Israel to abandon its policy of reprisal attacks.

Eisenhower was aware that Nasser did not want war with Israel, and that he would, when he could, make an accommodation with it. Eisenhower also knew that Israel's reprisal attacks were making it impossible for Nasser to prepare the ground on his side for peace with Israel.

In conversation with Israel's three most important ambassadors to the West, Dayan explained why he was totally opposed - whatever the pressure from the West - to the idea that Israel should abandon its policy of reprisal attacks. They were, he said, "a life drug." What he meant, he also explained, was that reprisal attacks enabled the Israeli government "to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and the army."

What, really, did that mean? Israel's standing or full-time army was (as it still is and must be) relatively small, not more than about 23,000 souls in all. The other quarter of a million fighting men and women who could be mobilised in 48 hours were reservists from every walk of Israel's civil society. The real point? Without Israeli reprisal attacks and all that they implied--that the Zionist state was in constant danger of being annihilated - there was a possibility that some and perhaps many reservists would not be motivated enough to respond to Zionism's calls to arms.

Put another way, what Dayan really feared was the truth. He knew, as all of Israel's leaders knew, that Israel's existence was not in danger from any combination of Arab forces. And that was the truth which had to be kept from the Jews of Israel. Dayan's fear was that if they became aware of it, they might insist on peace on terms the Arab regimes could accept but which were not acceptable to Zionism. Among those present when Dayan explained the need for Israeli reprisal attacks as a "life drug" was the Foreign Ministry's Gideon Rafael. He reported what Dayan told the ambassadors to Prime Minister Moshe Sharret-in my view, and with the arguable exception of Yitzhak Rabin, the only completely rational prime minister Israel has ever had. And we know from Sharret's diaries what Rafael then said to him: "This is how fascism began in Italy and Germany!"

Ladies and gentlemen, I think future historians may say that was how fascism began in the Zionist state of Israel.

The idea of Israel as a fully functioning democracy is a seriously flawed one. It's true that Israeli Jews are free to speak their minds (in a way that most Jews of the world are frightened to do), and to that extent it can be said that Israel has the appearance of a vibrant democracy... But in reality, and especially since the countdown to the 1967 war, it's Israel's generals who call most of the policy shots, even when one of them is not prime minister.

In June 1967 Israel's prime minister of the time, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, did not want to take his country to war. The war, was imposed upon him by the generals, led by Dayan. As I explain in Volume Two of my book, what really happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war was something very close to a military coup in all but name.

And that's where we are today--the generals effectively calling the shots in Israel, to the applause of the neo-cons. Why, really, did Israel's generals want to make war on Lebanon? There was obviously much more to it than the collective punishment of a whole people as part and parcel of a stated objective - the destruction of Hizbullah as a Moslem David which could hit and hurt the Zionist Goliath. I think there were two main reasons. The first was that Israel's generals believed they should and could restore the "deterrent power" of the IDF (Israel's war machine). They believed, correctly, that it had been seriously damaged by Hizbullah's success in not only confronting the IDF following Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but eventually forcing it to withdraw, effectively defeated and humiliated... I think it is more than reasonable to presume that for most if not all of the past six years, Israel's generals were itching to make war on Lebanon to repair that damage--to restore the IDF's deterrent power. Put another way, it was time, Israel's generals believed, to give the Arabs (all Arabs, not just Hizbullah) another lesson in who the master was.

The second main reason for the insistence of Israel's generals on 12 July this year that war was the only option...? I think it's also more than reasonable to presume that they saw the opportunity to ethnically cleanse Lebanon up to the Litani River, with a view, eventually, to occupying and then annexing the ethnically cleansed territory. For Zionism this would be the fulfilment of the vision of modern Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion - a Zionist state within "natural" borders, those borders being the Jordan River in the East and the Litani River of Lebanon in the north. Israel gained control of theJordan River border in its 1967 war of expansion, but prior to its rush to war on 12 July, all of its attempts to establish the Litani border had failed. Since 1982 because of Hizbullah's ability to cause the occupying IDF forces more casualties than Israeli public opinion was prepared to tolerate. According to those currently calling the policy shots - Israel's generals and politicians, the neo-cons in and around the Bush administration and their associate in Downing Street - the name of the game is creating a "new Middle East". It is happening. A new Middle East is being created.

But what kind of new Middle East will it actually be? In my analysis it will be one in which the Zionist state of Israel, having rejected a number of opportunities to make peace with the Palestinians and all the Arab states, will become increasingly vulnerable and, at a point, actually for the first time ever in its shortish history, could face the possibility of defeat. In my view the seeds of that possible defeat have just been sewn in Lebanon. The fact is that Israel's latest military adventure has been totally counter-productive in that it has caused Hizbullah to be admired by the angry and humiliated masses of the Arab and wider Moslem world. That being so, would it really be surprising if, in growing numbers, Arabs and Moslems everywhere begin to entertain- if they are not already entertaining-something like the following thought: "If 3,000 Hizbullah guerrillas can stand up to mighty Israel for weeks and give it a seriously bloody nose, what would happen if we all joined the fight?" (Do I hear the sound of pro-Western Arab regimes being toppled? Yes, I think so). I imagine that even the thought of Israel being defeated one day will bring joy to very many Arabs and other Moslems. But there ought to be no place for joy because there's no mystery about what would happen in the event of Israel actually being on the brink of defeat. I want to quote to you now from one of my Panorama interviews with Golda Meir. (It can be found, this quote, on the second page Volume One of my book, in the Prologue which is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse).

At a point I interrupted her to say: "Prime Minister I want to be sure I understand what you're saying... You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it?" Without the shortest of pauses for reflection, Golda replied: "Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying." In those days Panorama went on-air at 8 o'clock on Monday evenings. Shortly after the transmission of that interview The Times had a new lead editorial. It quoted what Golda had said to me and added its view that "We had better believe her." How, actually, would the Zionist state of Israel take at least the region down with it? It would arm its nuclear missiles, target Arab capitals, then fire the missiles. Such an End-Game to the Arab-Israeli conflict, if it happened, and which I would describe as a self-fulfilled Zionist prophesy of doom, would probably take many years to play out. But the countdown to such a catastrophe would be speeded up if, as Brzezinski put it, "neo-con policies continue to be pursued." If they are, and if Iran is attacked, I think that a Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, would become unstoppable.

Is there no way to stop the madness and create a "new Middle East" worth having? Yes, of course, there is, but it requires the agenda of the neo-cons and their associates to be thrown into the dustbin of history, in order for there to be a resolution of the Palestine problem, which I describe as the cancer at the heart of international affairs. Unfortunately, and because of the facts Zionism has been allowed to create on the ground in Israel/Palestine, it's already much too late for a genuine two-state solution, one which would see Israel back behind more or less its pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem an open city and the capital of two states. The conclusion which I think is invited is this:

If the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be stopped, the only possible solution to the Palestine problem is One State for All. That would, of course, be the end of Zionism's colonial enterprise and of Zionism itself. But in my view that's what has to happen if there's to be a "new Middle East" in which there can be security and peace for all, Arabs and Jews. Ladies and gentlemen: I'm not a politician or, any more, a working journalist and broadcaster who must write and speak in way that doesn't offend very powerful vested interests. I am a reasonably well informed human being who cares and who is free to say what he really thinks. (Which probably makes me a member of a very small club!)

And in summary of all that I've said this evening, what I really think comes down to this: The equation is a very simple one: No justice for the Palestinians = no peace for any of us.

(Alan Hart is a well-known Middle East scholar. )


7. FOR A LEFTY SOCIALISM VS. US-ISRAEL IMPERIALISM ANALYSIS, this is enlightening:

Results and Prospects of the Second Lebanon War (from Lenin’s Tomb -- http://leninology.blogspot.com)

Another incisive article from Daniel in Haifa:

Haifa, August 13, 2006

A Historical Prognosis for the Middle East after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

On March 17, 2003, against a background imperialist bombast about the quick defeat of the Iraqi army and the images of alleged Iraqi citizens bringing down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, Prensa Obrera published an article by Jorge Altamira entitled “The Middle East: Imperialism's Quagmire,” which gave the following historical prognosis “of what will happen from now on in Iraq”:

Some see the future scenario as a new Intifada; others as a new version of the guerilla resistance that drove out of Lebanon the American marines and the Zionist army; still others foresee a new Vietnam. Whatever the case, the Yankee government’s plans to turn Iraq into a protectorate will undoubtedly backfire and give rise, sooner or later, to a huge anti-imperialist struggle…. The Yankee invasion has not only failed to give political stability to the Middle East but opened up a new cycle of revolutions in the entire region…. A quick look at the map of the Middle East and Central Asia shows that American imperialism has in fact adopted a policy of "infinite warfare." The military occupation of Afghanistan in the East and of Iraq in the West has destabilized all the regimes of the neighboring countries…. The sands of the Middle East will inevitably turn into the swamp of US imperialism. (Source: Prensa Obrera , Nº 959, August 17, 2006.)

More specifically, the article argued that “if the invasion of Iraq had as one of its main objectives to crush the Palestinian resistance, the next step is to dismantle the guerrillas operating under Syrian protection in Lebanon” ( Jorge Altamira, “The Middle East: Imperialism's Swamp,” Prensa Obrera , No. 797, 17 de abril del 2003), our emphasis. —i.e., the article predicted that, after the defeat of Iraq, the next targets of American imperialism would be Iran and Syria, and that the United States would first of all try to destroy their supposed Lebanese arm: Hizballah.

The failure of the pro-imperialist “cedar revolution” in Lebanon

Imperialism first attempted to carry out this plan by maneuvering to its benefit the popular mobilizations that followed the killing of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri—a real-estate speculator and the richest bourgeois in the country—on February 14, 2005. Imperialism made some important achievements in the aftermath of this event, such as the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 (calling for the disarming of Hizballah and the deployment of the Lebanese Army in southern Lebanon), the rise of the Siniora-Hariri team to power, and the withdrawal of the Syrian army, which operated in Lebanon since 1975, from Lebanese territory on April 27, 2005. It should be emphasized that many people in both countries see Lebanon as an artificial creation of French and later American imperialism, set up in order to weaken Syria and the Arab liberation movement in general.

The current Siniora government in Lebanon emerged from the farcical “cedar revolution,” in the course of which pogroms were carried out against Syrian workers. According to Amnesty International, tens of Syrian workers were killed and scores of others beaten, shot, threatened or robbed in Lebanon after the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, and Lebanese assailants set fire to tents and other temporary housing of Syrian workers. When elections were held in June 2005, Saad al-Hariri (Rafiq’s son, whose personal fortune is estimated at 4.1 billion dollars and appears in the 2006 Forbes list of the richest people in the world) formed an anti-Syrian bloc led by his own “Current for the Future” political movement, that ultimately won 72 of the 128 available seats in the unicameral National Assembly. Fouad Siniora became the prime minister of Lebanon and Saad Hariri the leader of the majority bloc of seats in the Lebanese Parliament.

But the so-called “cedar revolution” in Lebanon failed to achieve the Americans’ main goal, namely the disarming of the Hizballah militia. In the wake of the demonstrations organized by the anti-Syrian opposition, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah called for a "massive popular gathering" on March 8, 2005, supporting Syria and accusing Israel and the United States of meddling in Lebanon’s internal affairs. Nasrallah also criticized UN Resolution 1559, whose call for the disbanding of all Lebanese militias was aimed against its military wing, the force widely credited for the liberation of south Lebanon from the Israeli army on May 24, 2000. In his speech on March 8, 2005, Nasrallah said: "The resistance (moqawama) will not give up its arms ... because Lebanon needs the resistance to defend it", adding that "all the articles of U.N. resolution give free services to the Israeli enemy, who should have been made accountable for his crimes and now finds that he is being rewarded for his crimes and achieves all its demands." This Beirut rally called by Hizballah dwarfed the earlier anti-Syrian events; the Arab news network Aljazeera reported a figure of 1.5 million demonstrators. The protestors held pictures of Syrian President Bashar Assad and placards reading "No to the American Intervention."

Hizballah’s military act of solidarity with the Palestinian cause

After the failure of the pro-imperialist “cedar revolution” in Lebanon, the United States and its Zionist military base in Israel saw an opportunity to deal with this unfinished business—which, as the Prensa Obrera article remarked, was also meant to crush the Palestinian resistance—after Hizballah’s military act of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza on July 12, 2006. Hizballah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid, killing three more soldiers and declaring that they would release them if Israel freed Lebanese and Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails.

Much hue and cry was raised about Israel being “attacked” by Hizballah, whose fighters crossed the Lebanese-Israeli border—the “Blue Line.” Nobody seems to remember the numerous kidnappings and assassinations carried out by Israel in Lebanese territory during the last years, the repeated violations of the Lebanese air space by the Israeli air force or the Lebanese political prisoners held without trial in the Israeli dungeons. Technically, therefore, Hizballah did nothing that Israel hadn’t done before in Lebanese territory.

But the political significance of Hizballah’s military act of solidarity with the Palestinians goes well beyond a mere retaliation for Israel’s repeated violations of Lebanese sovereignty. To quote once again from Prensa Obrera, Zionism and imperialism “do not fight Hizballah because it is a terrorist organization. They fight it because, being Lebanese, it has come to the defense of Palestine; because, being Shiite, it came to defend secularists and Sunnis, inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank. They fight it because it gathers the masses instead of promoting a sectarian or civil war. They fight it because, instead of indiscriminate terrorism against civil population, it keeps on its armed resistance against the aggressor military forces. They do not fight it because it is Iran’s or Syria’s instrument… they fight it because it put the solidarity with the Palestine people above the interests of the states and great powers.” (“A Zionist Vietnam or the Endless Barbarity,” Prensa Obrera , No. 956, July 27, 2006.)

The analogy with the Vietnam War

On July 24, 2006, ten days after the outbreak of the war we wrote an article called “The Meaning of the Second Lebanese War,” where we argued that the brutality of the Israeli assault was due to the nature of Imperialism and Zionism as terrorist regimes, whose domination and exploitation of the semi-colonial countries (besides counting on the collaborationist role of the local bourgeoisie) is ultimately based on the disunity and military intimidation of the peoples of the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. We also pointed out that, like the first Lebanese war of 1975-1990, this war also had the aim of installing a puppet regime in Lebanon under the watchword of "the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolution 1559." Finally, we predicted that, after the failure of the “Yugoslav model” (according to which the war would be won quickly through mass bombings by aerial forces alone), the Zionist army would be forced to “attempt a full-scale invasion of the country by ground troops.” This invasion, we concluded, would bog down thousands of Israeli troops in a high-casualty guerrilla warfare, turning Southern Lebanon into a quagmire for the Zionist-imperialist plans: “Potentially, it's Vietnam all over again—terrible suffering for the Lebanese people and, to a much lesser degree, for the Israeli civilians—but good news for the anti-imperialist fighters all over the world." (“The Meaning of the Second Lebanese War: Zionism and Imperialism as Terrorist Regimes,” Socialist Voice , Number 89, July 28, 2006.)

Three weeks later, this prediction is gradually being confirmed, both as regards the tragedy of the Lebanese civilians (1,130 dead and 3,600 wounded —as against 41 Israeli civilians dead and 46 "seriously and moderately wounded"—and more than 1,000,000 refugees) and the dire military consequences for the invasion army. The Israeli army first occupied, at the cost of dozens of soldiers killed, a so-called “buffer zone” some eight kilometers inside Lebanon, which means nothing in either military or political terms. The ground operation, dubbed "Change of Direction 8," was intended to conquer a border strip of two to three kilometers, which was later expanded to five to six kilometers, including numerous Lebanese villages and towns. The mission was to blow up all Hizballah's outposts in this strip and drive its forces out.

The “security zone” a death trap for the Israeli forces

But, after the Israeli occupation of the so-called “security zone,” the large number and the location of the casualties that the Israel Defense Forces sustained shows, as the military analyst of the Zionist daily Haaretz put it, that “the IDF is still not in control of the strip along Lebanon's border.” In an article that looks like a description of what really happened in the areas supposedly “liberated” by the American army in Vietnam, Ze'ev Schiff wrote: “What happened in Bint Jbail recurred in Ayta al-Shab. Although it seemed that the town had been conquered, it transpired again and again that there were still Hezbollah men in it. Once again, clashes and battles took place, and again, the IDF suffered dead and wounded… Although the army had conquered the town, Hezbollah men were hiding in underground bunkers well camouflaged from the outside. The bunkers had been stocked with large quantities of food, enough to last for weeks, and ammunition, including antitank missiles and, in several cases, short-range rockets… When the fighting dies down, Hezbollah fighters emerge from the bunkers and set up ambushes for IDF soldiers and armored vehicles. That is why soldiers are hit repeatedly in the same places.” After sustaining heavy losses, the IDF decided no to occupy the border towns. “The IDF could forge ahead, as it has done in the last two days in the Marjayoun area. But even after such an incursion, Hezbollah fighters who remain in the bunkers could continue launching rockets. In other words, they could fire toward Israel from behind the lines of IDF forces that have progressed deep into Lebanon.” (Ze'ev Schiff, “IDF still not in control of strip along Lebanon's border,” Haaretz , Friday, August 11, 2006.)

In short, the army is unable to stop the firing of even short-ranged missiles by Hizballah: “The strikes on the home front are becoming worse as the IDF sends more and more brigades into Lebanon. Launchings from areas in which the army is operating have been reduced by half, but Hezbollah combatants simply relocate to the next range of hills and fire from there.” (Amos Harel, “IDF belatedly realizes Lebanon assault is no Kosovo,” Haaretz , August 04, 2006.) At the same time, the “security zone” provides Hizballah with both nation-wide support as a resistance force fighting against a foreign invader and enables its fighters to engage the IDF troops in full-scale guerrilla warfare. Even Zionist analysts wonder whether an international force would be willing to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the IDF: “Israel intends to hold the security zone as a bargaining chip until a multinational force arrives. The bargaining chip, however, could become a burden if the troops remain in Lebanon for any length of time. Over time, troops on the ground develop a routine, and guerrillas know only too well how to take advantage of this.” (Ibid).

Escaping forwards: The rush to the Litani river

Given the failure of the successive military steps undertaken by Zionism so far, and the huge cost of the war for Israel (estimated at 5 billion dollars, or NIS 23 billion, by the Israeli Finance Ministry: Moti Bassok, Amiram Cohen and Avi Bar-Eli, “War cost: NIS 23 billion, including compensation, treasury estimates,” Haaretz , Sunday, August 13, 2006.), the “Labor” party Defense Minister of Israel, the war criminal and former Histadrut leader Amir Peretz, came up with a brilliant idea: “Defense Minister Amir Peretz told Israel Defense Forces officials on Thursday evening to begin preparing for the next stage of the military offensive in south Lebanon, which would extend the IDF's control to all Lebanese territory south of the Litani River. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, however, was reluctant about expanding Israel's ground operation.” (Ze'ev Schiff, Amos Harel and Aluf Benn, “Peretz to IDF: Plan to take territory up to Litani,” Haaretz , Sunday, August 6, 2006.) The move, which meant a further call-up of reservist soldiers, was eventually approved in principle by the security cabinet, but its application was suspended pending further diplomatic developments, after the IDF tasted the first fruits of the Hizballah guerrillas in Bint Jbail, Maroun al-Ras, Ayta al-Shab, Debel, and other villages of southern Lebanon which have become symbols of the successful resistance to the Israeli army.

Vice Premier Shimon Peres put the case for the “diplomatic channel” most clearly on August 9: “Fifteen victims a day is a proof of the price we are likely to pay if we don't try to utilize the diplomatic process to the fullest." (Ronny Sofer, “Peres: Give diplomacy a chance,” Ynetnews , August10, 2006.). On the other hand, an Haaretz editorial presented the case for the Zionist warmongers: when defeated, rush to the Litani river. “Despite the efforts of the prime minister and IDF generals to enumerate the IDF's achievements, the war as it approaches its end is seen by the region and the world—and even by the Israeli public—as a stinging defeat with possibly fateful implications…. Now, at this late and critical stage of the conflict, the IDF must propose, recommend and indeed must demand political approval—public approval is clearly assured—for extensive operations that can snatch a victory from the jaws of looming defeat.” (Haaretz Editorial, “Snatch a possible victory,” Haaretz , Friday, August 11, 2006.)

Eventually, an incoherent compromise was adopted: Israel accepted the UN Security Council Resolution 1701, calling for “a full cessation of hostilities” starting Monday (August 14, 2006), while simultaneously dropping thousands of paratroopers along the Litani river, which it had been unable to reach by land due to the Hizballah’s successful military resistance (moqawama) to the Israeli army. An estimated 30,000 Israeli troops are now operating in Lebanese territory. Yesterday, (Saturday, August 12, 2006), than 24 Israeli troops were killed in a single day by the resistance, five of whom belonged to the aircrew of a helicopter shot down by a missile launched by the Hizballah fighters.

Political crisis in Israel and revolutionary mood among the Arab masses

According to Haaretz analyst Avraham Tal, the “supreme objective” of the Israeli military aggression in Lebanon was “the restoration of Israel’s deterrence.” (Avraham Tal, “Deterrence put to the test,” Haaretz , Fri., August 04, 2006). That is the thread running through all the Zionist analyses of the war: the Zionists’ panic at the possibility that the Arab masses will lose their fear of the Israeli army and realize that Zionism and imperialism can and must be defeated. Ze'ev Sternhell, an Haaretz analyst, wandered how “the campaign's goals have been reduced and shrunk during these three weeks. From restoring Israel's power of deterrence, eliminating Hezbollah, and disarming it immediately—after three weeks we have arrived at the present goal, which is the dismantling of the forward outposts of Hezbollah and the deployment of an international force to defend the North of Israel from the possibility of a repeat attack…. Is this how we are restoring the IDF's power of deterrence? Haven't we accomplished exactly the opposite? Hasn't it become clear to the entire world that our "invincible" air force not only failed for three weeks to end the barrage of rockets, but also even needs an emergency airlift of war materiel, as during the 1973 Yom Kippur War?” He went on to argue that “several thousand guerrilla fighters constitute an existential danger to a country with a strike force and weaponry that are unparalleled in this part of the world,” and concluded that “the present war is the most unsuccessful we have ever had; it is much worse than the first Lebanon War, which at least was properly prepared, and in which, with the exception of gaining control over the Beirut-Damascus highway, the army more or less achieved its goals as determined by then-defense minister Ariel Sharon.” (Ze'ev Sternhell, “The most unsuccessful war,” Haaretz , Sat., August 05, 2006.)

The political crisis in Israel has reached such proportions that even during the war there have been calls in the mainstream Zionist media for the government to resign. Ari Shavit, an Haaretz correspondent, argued that “Olmert cannot remain in the prime minister's office”: “You cannot bury 120 Israelis in cemeteries, keep a million Israelis in shelters for a month, wear down deterrent power, bring the next war very close, and then say - oops, I made a mistake.” (Ari Shavit, “Olmert cannot remain in the prime minister's office,” Haaretz , Fri., August 11, 2006). The same criticism has been aimed, in even sharper terms, against Amir Peretz, who is trying to save face by appearing (together with his fellow “Labor” minister and former general Binyamin Ben Eliezer) as the spokesman of the most war-mongering wing of the government. Many analysts also wonder about the potential reaction of the Israeli “home front,” i.e. the Arab and Jewish masses living under direct control of the Zionist state. The “powerful” state of Israel has not only failed to protect its own citizens against Hizballah’s rockets and the Arab towns and cities that, because of the lack of shelters, suffered proportionately more casualties than the Jewish ones. It is also going to throw the costs of the war on the poor, the workers and the petty bourgeoisie: the Israeli cabinet has already decided to cut some two billion shekels from the national budget and the finance ministry is going to raise taxes, mainly on small businesses.

The counterpart to the political crisis in Israel is the widespread reports in the Arab media that a revolutionary mood is developing among the masses of the Middle East. Even the Zionists agree that those regimes that adopted a more anti-imperialist stance (notably Syria) have come out strengthened from the current crisis. (Shmuel Rosner, “The Pentagon is worried by Syria's 'rising self-confidence',” Haaretz , Fri., August 11, 2006.) Even more importantly, the "relations between Arab leaders and their peoples now stand at the edge of total estrangement. The Arab regimes have been exposed to their populations as the epitome of subservience to their American masters." (Doha Al Zohairy, “Arab street rallies behind Hezbollah,” Aljazeera , Cairo, 1 August 2006.) The growing discontent was exemplified by the mass demonstrations expressing support for Lebanon and Hizballah in the capitals of Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt, as well as in the West Bank cities.

A senior Hizbullah officiall said openly what is now in the mind of every politically conscious Palestinian and Arab: the countdown has begun for the Zionist entity in Palestine. Ahmed Barakat, a member of Hizbullah's central council, declared in an interview to Qatari newspaper al-Watan that "today Arab and Muslim society is reasonably certain that the defeat of Israel is possible and that countdown to the disappearance of the Zionist entity in the region has begun." According to Barakat, "this is the reason why Shimon Peres said it was a life or death battle and this is why the triumph of the resistance is the beginning of the death of the Israeli enemy. For, if a mere organization succeeded in defeating Israel, why would Arab nations not succeed in doing so if they allied? Many Arabs and Muslims viewed Israel in a fictional way and the resistance has succeeded in changing this." (Roee Nahmias, “Hizbullah: Countdown has begun to end of Zionist entity,” Ynetnews , August 13, 2006.)

Imperialism’s diplomatic offensive and the Zionist swamp in Lebanon

While these lines were written, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1701, a text modeled on a draft submitted by the American and French imperialists, aimed at achieving a “full cessation of hostilities” in Lebanon. The aim of the resolution is to prevent Israel from falling even deeper into the Lebanese swamp and from suffering an even worse defeat, increasing the present crisis of the American occupation in Iraq. From a formal point of view, resolution 1701 is not much different from resolution 1559, providing for the withdrawal of Hizballah’s militias from southern Lebanon and their eventual disarmament. The main question will be the character and capacity of the army that will be sent to the south of the Litani river to stop the Lebanese resistance against Israel.

Point 2 of Resolution 1701 “calls upon the government of Lebanon and UNIFIL (the UN Interim Force in Lebanon),” which will be increased to a maximum of 15,000 troops, “to deploy their forces together throughout the south and calls upon the government of Israel, as that deployment begins, to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon in parallel.” Point 3 “emphasizes the importance of the extension of the control of the government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory in accordance with the provisions of resolution 1559 (2004) and resolution 1680 (2006), and of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords*, for it to exercise its full sovereignty, so that there will be no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon.” Point 8 requires again “the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon [i.e. of Hisballah], so that… there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state” and provides for an embargo on the transfer of military supplies to Hizballah from Iran and Syria: “no sales or supply of arms and related materiel to Lebanon except as authorized by its government”—a key imperialist-Zionist demand repeated on point 15. (“Full text: UN Lebanon resolution,” Aljazeera , Sunday, August 13, 2006.)

The question is, of course, who will implement all these—for Zionism and imperialism—wonderful measures. Who will uproot the Hizballah militias from southern Lebanon, if the Israeli army was unable to do it in a month of massive bombing and fighting? Who will disarm Hizballah’s militia, something that the imperialists have been unable to do during the last two years (ever since the implementation of resolution 1559 in 2004), despite all their bullying? Who will implement the arms embargo against the will of Iran, Syria and the majority of the Lebanese population that sees in Hizballah the only reason why Israel didn’t invade Beirut in a few days as during the first Lebanese war in 1982? Certainly not UNIFIL, that “pensioners’ army” as Olmert not inaccurately called it. Nasrallah has already declared that as long as any Israeli soldiers occupy Lebanese territory they will be legitimate targets for the resistance, which will continue fighting until all foreign invaders are removed from the country.

The Zionists fantasize about a contingent of 15,000 imperialist troops that will somehow materialize in the next few weeks and do the job that they were unable to do for the US. They dream about French, Australian and German troops that will come and do the actual fighting with the Lebanese resistance as the IDF retreats safely home—Paris, Sidney and Berlin having apparently developed a sudden fondness for coffins arriving at their airports every day. Without any pretensions to military expertise, we confidently predict that nobody in a foreign country will be willing to risk their lives for the sake of the miserable Zionist enterprise, that if Israeli soldiers remain in Southern Lebanon they will be bogged down as much as the Americans soldiers were in south Vietnam and suffer many casualties in a war of attrition, and that the eventual Israeli retreat will be as sudden and shameful as the one orchestrated by Ehud Barak on May 24, 2000.

The current war and the revolutionary perspective in Palestine

The current war has substantially deepened the crisis of the Zionist regime in Palestine, which up until now has been, as we already remarked elsewhere, purely the result of the Palestinian and Arab struggle (including the triumph of Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza) rather than of a common working-class struggle overcoming national barriers. The Zionist segregation regime in Palestine can be dismantled in a number of ways. It may fall as a result of a military defeat and leave behind a devastated country and region, much like Germany and Europe in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat. Roberto Rossellini’s movie Germania anno zero can provide an idea of how Palestine and the Middle East will look like if Zionism has to be defeated by purely military means.

Zionism can also theoretically be dismantled, like the Apartheid regime in South Africa, as a result of mass uprisings in the region that would be contained by imperialism by granting formal democratic reforms while leaving untouched the property system. Of course any measure providing for the end of partition, the return of the refugees to their homes, and the granting of full democratic rights to all the inhabitants of the historic territory of Palestine should be supported unconditionally, but this purely bourgeois democratic scenario is highly unlikely in the current circumstances, because the usefulness of the Zionist regime for the imperialists stems from it military rather than its economic role, and the dismantling of the Israeli army would represent a serious blow for imperialism.

That is why the Trotskyists in Palestine raise the program of attempting to gain the Jewish workers and poor to the cause of repudiating Zionism and engaging in a common struggle with the Arab masses. The precondition for the emancipation of the Jewish masses and their survival in the Middle East is the emancipation of the Palestinian people and the overthrow of the Zionist regime of national oppression and social misery, for a secular, democratic and socialist republic in the entire historic territory of Palestine, as part of a united Arab nation and a socialist federation of peoples of the Middle East.

A "Postwar" Afterword

Haifa, August 17, 2006

The preceding pages were written during the last day of the war, when, against all the predictions of the Zionist military "experts," Hizballah dropped a record numbers of missiles on the Northern area of Israel and especially on the city of Haifa. Since August 14 at 7:30 AM, no more sirens or explosions have been heard, and the war has, as far as the civilian population of Israel is concerned, finished, although there are still thousands of Israeli troops occupying Southern Lebanon and their complete withdrawal in the coming weeks is by no means assured.

Though Olmert and Bush are doing their best to market the second Lebanese war as an Israeli triumph, there are widespread feelings in Israel that it was a resounding failure, and many voices call for a second round, if not immediately then in the next few years. But if Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker, according to which the Zionist aggression in Lebanon was a sort of pilot project (in his own words, "the mirror image") of what the United States has been planning for Iran, is correct, then Israeli's defeat in Lebanon would help prevent a planned American-Israeli war against Iran. Hersh argued that the Bush administration was convinced "that successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground." Yet the IDF's failure in Lebanon "may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can't pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million." Again: "The surprising strength of Hezbollah's resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing … is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back." (Seymour M. Hersh, “Test Case: Washington's interests in Israel's war,” The New Yorker , August 21, 2006.)

Zionism's military defeat in Lebanon led to a deep crisis in the Israeli army and government. The press revealed that Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz sold a NIS 120,000 investment portfolio a few hours after the two IDF soldiers were abducted by Hizballah on the northern border, and it is clear to everybody that he cannot escape resignation in the coming weeks. (The Marker, “Chief of staff dumped his stocks three hours after soldiers' abduction,” Haaretz , Thu., August 17, 2006.) Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz announced Tuesday that he had decided to indict MK Tzahi Hanegbi, currently the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and a leading member of the government party Kadima, for making 80 illegal political appointments to the Environment Ministry between 2001 and 2003. (Dan Izenberg, “Mazuz indicts Hanegbi for political appointments,” Jerusalem Post , Tue., August 15, 2006.) The police said Tuesday that there is sufficient evidence to indict Justice Minister Haim Ramon, another leading member of Kadima, for sexual harassment of a government worker last month. (Jonathan Lis, “Police: Solid evidence in Haim Ramon sexual harassment case,” Haaretz , Tue., August 15, 2006.) Ramon will almost surely share the fate of the current President of Israel, Moshe Katzav, who also faces sexual harassment charges by at least five women and will have to resign in the near future. (Esti Aharonovitch and Roni Singer-Heruti, “Five more women accuse President Katsav of sexual harassment,” Haaretz , Thu., August 17, 2006.) Finally, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert himself has been summoned to an investigation in the State Comptroller's office for illicitly receiving about half a million dollars from the contractor who sold him his new house. Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit predicted that, as a result of the bribery deal, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz will have no choice but to open a criminal inquiry against the prime minister and his wife and concluded: "It is highly doubtful that Olmert could even temporarily survive such a police probe considering the present public mood. Chances are that within about two months he will no longer be Israel's prime minister." (Ari Shavit, “Dead man walking,” Haaretz , Thu., August 17, 2006.)

The mood among the Zionists was described most vividly by Reuven Pedatzur in Haaretz:

When the largest and strongest army in the Middle East clashes for more than two weeks with 50 Hezbollah fighters in Bint Jbail and does not bring them to their knees, the commanders are left with no choice but to point to the number of dead fighters the enemy has left behind. It can be assumed that Bint Jbail will turn into a symbol of the second Lebanon war. For the Hezbollah fighters it will be remembered as their Stalingrad, and for us it will be a painful reminder of the IDF's defeat.

Ze'ev Schiff wrote in Haaretz on August 11 that we had "gotten a slap." It seems that "knockout" would be a more appropriate description. This is not a mere military defeat. This is a strategic failure whose far-reaching implications are still not clear. And like the boxer who took the blow, we are still lying dazed on the ground, trying to understand what happened to us. Just like the Six-Day War led to a strategic change in the Middle East and established Israel's status as the regional power, the second Lebanon war may bring about the opposite. The IDF's failure is eroding our national security's most important asset—the belligerent image of this country, led by a vast, strong and advanced army capable of dealing our enemies a decisive blow if they even try to bother us. This war, it soon transpired, was about "awareness" and "deterrence." We lost the fight for both. (Reuven Pedatzur, “The Day After / How we suffered a knockout,” Haaretz , Thu., August 17, 2006.)

The situation in the Arab world and the Middle East is quite the opposite. The refugees as returning to Southern Lebanon en masse, waving Hizballah flags and carrying pictures of Nasrallah, despite the flyers dropped by Israeli airplanes calling on them to stay away from their homes until an imperialist army is deployed in their cities and villages. Hizballah already declared that it has no intention of disarming its militia, which is surely rearming quickly since the opening of the roads from Syria to Lebanon. The UNIFIL force is still a Fata Morgana, and the Lebanese army (35 percent of whose members are Shiites and 25 percent Sunnis) has announced that, though it will deploy forces in the South, it has no intention of disarming the resistance. Huge celebrations of the Hizballah victory against the IDF invasion plans were held in Teheran, and Syrian President Bashar Assad gave a speech on Tuesday declaring that America's plan for a "new Middle East" has collapsed "because of the achievements of the resistance." Assad said this war revealed the limitations of Israel's military power: while in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israeli forces surrounded Beirut within seven days, in this opportunity after five weeks Israel was "still struggling to occupy a few hundred meters." (Eli Ashkenazi, “Assad: U.S. plan for Mideast is 'illusion' after Lebanon war,” Haaretz , Thu., August 17, 2006.)

Evidently anti-imperialism has become the vogue, even among unsavory characters like the Assad dynasty in Syria. Those are surface manifestations of the deep revolutionary mood developing among the Arab masses, which will surely find more honest and effective expressions in the near future.

(*The Taif Accords were signed on October 22, 1989. The Lebanese National Assembly meeting in Taif, Saudi Arabia, endorsed an “accord for national reconciliation” which restructured the political system in Lebanon by transferring some of the power away from the Maronite Christian community, which had been given a privileged status in Lebanon under French colonial rule. The accords established a cabinet divided equally between Christians and Muslims. Prior to Taif, the Sunni Prime Minister was appointed by and responsible to the Maronite President. After Taif the Prime Minister was responsible to the legislature, as in a traditional parliamentary system. But representation in the legislature is still apportioned according to Lebanon’s anti-democratic confessionalist system, by which government offices are distributed according to religion. The 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament are apportioned confessionally as follows (58.7% Muslims and 41.3% Christians): 34 Maronite Christians, 27 Sunnites, 27 Shiites, 14 Greek, Orthodox, 8 Greek Catholics, 8 Druzes, and 10 members of other religious denominations.)