Oy vey, what happened in Lebanon?

1. Desert of Trapped Corpses Testifies to Israel's Failure -- by Robert Fisk

They made a desert and called it peace. Srifa - or what was once the village of Srifa -- is a place of pancaked homes, blasted walls, rubble, starving cats and trapped corpses. But it is also a place of victory for the Hizbollah, whose fighters walked amid the destruction yesterday with the air of conquering heroes. So who is to blame for this desert? The Shia militia which provoked this war -- or the Israeli air force and army which has laid waste to southern Lebanon and killed so many of its people?

There was no doubt what the village mukhtar thought. As three Hizbollah men --one wounded in the arm, the other carrying two ammunition clips and a two-way radio -- passed us amid the piles of broken concrete, Hussein Kamel el-Din yelled to them: "Hallo, heroes!" Then he turned to me. "You know why they are angry? Because God didn't give them the opportunity of dying."

You have to be down here with the Hizbollah amid this terrifying destruction -- way south of the Litani river, in the territory from which Israel once vowed to expel them -- to realise the nature of the past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the Middle East. Israel's mighty army has already retreated from the neighbouring village of Ghandoutiya after losing 40 men in just over 36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the smashed town of Khiam where the Hizbollah were celebrating yesterday afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hizbollah men looking at the empty roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the settlement of Mizgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.

Far from humiliating Iran and Syria -- which was the Israeli-American plan -- these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and the Hizbollah's reputation lionised across the Arab world. The "opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the weakness of Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armour was to be seen inside Lebanon -- just one solitary tank could be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the "safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.

Down the coast road from Beirut, meanwhile, came a massive exodus of tens of thousands of Shia families, bedding piled on the roofs of their cars, many of them sporting Hizbollah flags and pictures of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's chairman, on their windscreens. At the massive traffic jams around the broken motorway bridges and craters which litter the landscape, the Hizbollah was even handing out yellow and green "victory" flags, along with official notices urging parents not to allow children to play with the thousands of unexploded bombs that now lie across the landscape. At least one Lebanese child was killed by unexploded ordnance and another 15 were wounded yesterday.

But to what are these people returning? Haj Ali Dakroub, a 42-year old construction manager, lost part of his home in Israel's 1996 bombardment of Srifa. Now his entire house has been flattened. "What is here that Israel should destroy all this?" he asked. "We don't deny that the resistance was in Srifa. It was here before and it will be here in the future. But in this house lived only my family. So why would Israel bomb it?"

Well, I did happen to notice what appeared to be the casing of a missile hanging from the balcony of a much-damaged house facing the rubble of Ali Dakroub's home. And a group of Hizbollah militiamen, one of them with a pistol tucked into his trousers, walked past us nonchalantly and disappeared into an orchard. Was this, perhaps, where they kept some of their rockets?

Mr Dakroub wasn't saying. "I am going to rebuild my home with my two sons," he insisted. "Israel may come back in 10 years and destroy it all over again and then I'll just rebuild it all over again. This was a Hizbollah victory. The Israelis were able to defeat all the Arab countries in six days in 1967 but here they could not defeat the resistance in a month. These resistance men would come out of the ground and shoot back. They are still here."

"Come out of the ground" is an expression I have heard several times these past four weeks and I am beginning to suspect that many of the thousands of guerrillas did indeed shelter in caves and basements and tunnels, only to emerge to fire their missiles or to use their infra-red rockets on the Israeli army once it made the mistake of sending troops into Lebanon on the ground. And does anyone believe that the Hizbollah will submit to their own disarmament by a new international force of UN and Lebanese troops once -- if -- it arrives? There was a symbolic moment yesterday when Lebanese soldiers already based in southern Lebanon joined Hizbollah men in Srifa to clear the rubble of a house in which the bodies of an entire family were believed buried. Lebanese Red Cross and civil defence personnel -- representatives of the civil power which is supposed to claw back its sovereignty from the Hizbollah -- joined in the search. The mukhtar, who so blatantly regarded the Hizbollah as heroes, is also a government representative. And at the entrance to this shattered village still stands a poster of Nasrallah and the Iranian President Ali Khamenei.

Far from driving the Hizbollah north across the Litani river, Israel has entrenched them in their Lebanese villages as never before.


2. No process, no peace
By Paul Woodward (from warincontext.org)

On July 12, three hours after Hezbollah lit the fuse, triggering Israel's existential threat, IDF chief of staff, Dan Halutz, ran to the bank . It was time to sell his 120,000 shekel investment portfolio. An IDF spokesman, explaining the timing, said that:

‘Halutz has a bank account like any other Israeli citizen and needs to perform transactions in the account from time to time. Any attempt to link between personal matters of the chief of staff and Israel's national security is inappropriate, the army said. Halutz himself says that, "At the time I did not expect or think that there would be a war."’

If the IDF's chief is to be taken at his word, we can only conclude that the military did not regard the abduction of two soldiers as an act of war. If Halutz is simply trying to protect himself, then when he sold off his portfolio he either had more concern about his wealth than the fate of Israel, or he thought that his wealth was in greater jeopardy than the nation. Either way, his actions seem emblematic of the folly of Israel's war against Hezbollah.

Now the fighting is over, President Bush insists on making the hollow claim that Hezbollah has been defeated. Presumably it was Dick Cheney who assured Bush that Hezbollah's 250-rocket attack on Sunday meant that the organization must be in its last throes. Yet strangely, Hezbollah's "defeat" has resulted in no celebrations in Israel. Indeed, this defeat with no victor is already bringing demands that the Olmert government must go .

As for what happens next, the expectation is that Hezbollah will not be disarmed, and yesterday Bush inadvertently let it slip that the peace process really is well and truly dead.

Bush says, "We want peace. We're not interested in process." Peace Not Process might work for antiwar demonstrators, but what any politician knows is that you can't get there from here without a process. Bush's apparent loss of faith in the peace process is really an implicit confession that his own feeble effort -- his so-called "road map" -- was nothing more than a facade designed to conceal the fact that the peace process had already been abandoned.

It was widely acknowledged that the peace process had been abandoned once Ariel Sharon initiated Israel's unilateral policy of "convergence." But this was simply an overt departure from any semblance of a path to reconciliation between Israel and its foes. The fatal blow to the process had already been struck. As soon as the Bush administration embraced the view that Israel's "war on terrorism" was a key front in its "global war on terrorism," the peace process was dead.

A lesson that the latest war could yield (but probably won't) is this: Terrorism is a concept that contains very little explanatory power; global terrorism even less. Likewise, Islamism is a beguilingly simplistic notion.

As Islamist terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas are by definition unfit to become "partners for peace." But as political entities they are not only fit but indispensable to a comprehensive resolution to the Middle East conflict. The starting point of reconciliation isn't going to be some implausible renunciation of violence (something Nelson Mandela was never willing to do); it comes when the warring parties are finally willing to sit down and face each other with a measure of respect in spite of an enduring enmity.


3. The Semantics of Terror – by Ian Williams (from The Nation)

What do Nelson Mandela, Michael Collins, Archbishop Makarios, Menachim Begin, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Shamir, Eamon DeValera and Jomo Kenyatta have in common?

As everybody knows, but few remember, they were all vilified as "terrorists," by the British or American authorities.

Ronald Reagan branded Mandela's African National Congress as a terrorist organization--and to be fair, they did commit some terrorist acts, while the ancestors of Israel's Likud Party blew up the King David Hotel, assassinated Lord Moyne, the highest British official in the Middle East during the war against the Nazis, and gunned down United Nations representative Count Folke Bernadotte for trying to negotiate a peace settlement.

I have appeared on several Fox and MSNBC shows recently where the hosts acknowledge that Israel is failing in Lebanon, and that the invasion was a mistake, not least because there is no exit strategy. But then I find myself under attack because I will not describe Hezbollah as "terrorist." In fact, I use the same formula that British diplomats (in the better days of a more independent foreign policy) used: "a group that sometimes commits terrorist acts." This answer does not satisfy pro-Israeli cable television anchors; in fact, it gives them an excuse to grandstand their fury.

The easy invocation of "terrorism"--whether by journalists or political leaders--is not merely sloppy use of language. It is precisely targeted phrasing and intended to terrorize dissent. Especially in the binary, Manichaean mindset of the United States and Likudnik Israel, once a group has been labeled "terrorist" it becomes the epitome of evil; to suggest that any of their arguments have any validity makes one a terrorist supporter. Using these words seems to shut down the higher cerebral functions of many of the listeners.

Of course, it is difficult to be dispassionate about blood and dismembered bodies, but in the interests of preventing more of the same, we should take a deeper look. According to Kofi Annan, who was trying to get governments to agree on a definition at the United Nations last year, an act is terrorism "if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non- combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act."

It is concise and precise--and clearly excludes much of what Israel, the US and other governments have tried to brand as terrorism.

For years Israeli leaders have called Palestinian leaders terrorists, because they did not want to deal with them or indeed with any of the claims of the people they represented. In recent weeks, Israeli forces have kidnapped some thirty-eight elected Palestinian representatives, because they deemed them "terrorists." Hamas and Hezbollah are "terrorists," and in Israel's view, no one should talk to them, no matter how many Palestinians or Lebanese vote for them and support them.

The abuse of the concept has reached its nadir in the amorphous "war on terror," which currently covers any military operations that the United States, Israel, Russia, and anyone else trying to jump on the bloody bandwagon should wish to undertake, not to mention any rolling back of civil liberties and international law that it entails. Dead dissidents, or even just passers-by from Chechnya to Xinjiang, from Uzbekistan to Gaza, Abu Ghraib to south Lebanon, become posthumous terrorists as soon as their killing is reported.

It was under the guise of the "war on terror" that Iraq was invaded. The alleged weapons of mass destruction were a legal distraction: For most Americans the real justification of the war was the fiction that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks. Interestingly, under the fog of the "war on terror," the one place that the term was justifiable, American troops have now pretty much abandoned Afghanistan, the host country of uncaught Osama Bin Laden, and handed over operations to NATO.

Simply labeling groups as "terrorist," and demonizing those who stop to think more deeply about it, stops odious comparisons that may challenge prevailing prejudices.

For example, in 2001, I was interviewed on a radio show some weeks after the indisputably terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which I had lived close to and watched in real time. The host asked about progress at the UN in adopting a definition of terrorism. I was explaining the difficulties and went out on a limb--"You know, there were hundreds of brave firemen and police who died in the Center--and how many of them do you think had attended NorAid dinners," raising funds for the Irish Republican Army bombings. Luckily the interviewer did not explode, but stopped in his tracks to think about it--"That means that they were supporting terrorism, too!" he exclaimed as revelation hit him. Of course, if they had been raising funds for Hamas, they would probably have been in prison instead of rescuing people in the towers.

But even here, there is room for clear thinking. Under the prospective UN definition, Irish Republican Army attacks against Security Forces may have been criminal--but they were not terrorist actions. A phoned-in warning usually preceded even the IRA bombs on civilian targets. Sadly, however, the IRA made such a mess of the warnings so often that their campaign carried an inevitability of deaths and injuries that certainly put its actions inside Annan's definition.

So, while it certainly was not the most clever action that Hezbollah has perpetrated, taking two Israeli soldiers prisoner was not terrorism, although raining Katyusha rockets indiscriminately down on civilians certainly is a form of it.

But how is that different from Israeli planes and artillery killing civilians in Lebanon--or, for that matter, in Gaza? Israel claims that the civilian deaths are collateral damage of attacks on Hezbollah, but apart from the morality and legality, the math defies these excuses. Current Israeli deaths run roughly one civilian dead for two military dead. The far higher Lebanese casualties are running at around ten civilian dead (including three children) for every claimed Hezbollah victim. The continuing nature of those casualties suggests, as Kofi Annan told the Security Council last week, that there is a "pattern of breaches of international law." His view was backed up even forcefully by NGOs like Human Rights Watch .

To put it in another and even more topical context, blowing up a random airliner is clearly terrorism--but could someone blow up an airliner to get Ehud Olmert and claim that the other casualties were just a regrettable necessity? That sounds callously unconvincing. But how is this different from bombing an apartment block full of civilians because there may be a Hamas or Hezbollah leader in there?

Committing terrorism requires a fanatical worldview: The casualties are either deemed guilty by association--as implied by Al Qaeda for those working in the WTC--or sadly necessary sacrifices on the altar of a better world. Insofar as they have any rationality, acts of terror are often predicated on the stupidity of the authorities who can be relied upon to create support for the perpetrators with widespread repression and retaliation.

From that perspective, Hezbollah's capture of the two Israeli soldiers has been spectacularly successful. Israel began the war on moral high ground, at least as the West saw it. After a month of concentrated viciousness and incompetence the tide of public opinion has turned.

Israel's retaliation with its recklessness for civilian life has won overwhelming Lebanese and Arab support for Hezbollah, and has in one short month reversed Israel's diplomatic gains across the world, while totally isolating the United States and Tony Blair.

One might add that Osama bin Laden's bloody assault on the WTC has had precisely the same effect on a global scale. From a position of overwhelming global public sympathy and support, the Bush Administration's reactions with the "war on terror" have alienated the rest of the world to the extent that China is now much more popular in many countries polled.

Mesmerized by the word "terrorism," as I said, it appears that the Bush Administration's higher mental faculties, never really in top gear, have been totally paralyzed. But that is no reason for the rest of us to succumb.


4. In a Military Democracy, it is the Warriors Who Call the Shots
The failure of the attack on Lebanon has left the Israeli people less secure, but it has done nothing to dent the generals' power
By George Monbiot

Last week I argued that Israel's attack on Lebanon was premeditated: Hizbullah's capture of two soldiers gave Israel's government the excuse to launch an assault it had been planning since 2004. Both Bush and Blair knew that it would happen and gave it their approval.

I was, of course, denounced by supporters of Israel's government as an anti-semite and an apologist for terror. But on Sunday this hypothesis was confirmed by an article Seymour Hersh published in the New Yorker. Israel, his sources told him, "had devised a plan for attacking Hizbullah - and shared it with Bush administration officials - well before the July 12 kidnappings". One US government consultant revealed that Israeli officials visited Washington earlier in the summer "to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear".

One obvious question then arises. Why? Given that the invasion has cost Israel far more in terms of both lives and international standing than the status quo could have done, why did Ehud Olmert's government choose to attack?

The motives of the US administration are easy to understand. The neocons believe that, by attacking Hizbullah, Israel is helping them to confront Iran. Its bombing raids could even be a wet run for an assault on Iran's nuclear facilities. While a full-scale invasion of that country is impossible, fighting the guerrillas they regard as Iranian proxies is the next best thing. As Bush's grip on reality weakens, he really does seem to believe that he is seeking a final showdown with the forces of evil, which will result in a triumph for "freedom and democracy" as definitive as the second coming of the Lord (in either case an apocalypse is involved). But why would Israel allow itself to be used as his battering ram?

The obvious answer is that it thought it would win. If so, this suggests a failure to learn even from recent history. In 1996 Hizbullah, the Shia force formed to fight the Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon, had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. Shimon Peres, hoping - like Olmert - to show the electorate that he was as tough as any of the generals, decided to clear the civilians out of southern Lebanon by means of heavy bombing and then destroy Hizbullah. He received the support of the US and drove 400,000 people from their homes, but failed to defeat the enemy. The guerrillas continued to send their rockets into Israel, while Israeli shells killed 102 civilians taking refuge in the village of Qana. The resulting outrage forced the US government to support a ceasefire. Ten years later the whole fiasco - including the killing of civilians in Qana - spools past like a repeated film.

I am not suggesting that Olmert's administration believed it would lose. But it seems to me that to be quite so blind to the lessons of 1996 it must have had a powerful incentive to attack. Is it possible, as some have claimed, that Israel is pursuing a territorial claim?

The Israeli columnist Tanya Reinhart reminds us that David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, believed that its borders should be "natural": the Jordan river in the east, the Suez canal and Sharm el-Sheikh in the south-west and south, and the Litani river (20 miles inside Lebanon) in the north. In his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, the historian Avi Shlaim describes Ben-Gurion's "fantastic plan" for annexing southern Lebanon and turning the rest of the country into a Maronite Christian state. In 1956 he explained this scheme to the British and French at the secret talks in Sèvres that launched the Suez invasion. His chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, planned to sponsor a Lebanese officer who would "declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population", then "enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place."

There are plenty of articles on the internet - including Reinhart's - suggesting that this ambition has been revived. I don't believe it.

The evidence I presented last week suggests that the soldiers planning this assault envisaged an operation lasting for three weeks. They would storm into Lebanon, eliminate Hizbullah and storm out again. Since the attack began, Israel has been pressing for someone else - the "multinational force" - to patrol southern Lebanon on its behalf. Though the government is incapable of learning from 1996, it still seems to remember the lesson of May 2000, when the Israeli armed forces discovered that an occupation of southern Lebanon was impossible to sustain. I have not been able to find any evidence that Ben-Gurion's successors contemplated annexation. Even Ariel Sharon, who engineered Menachem Begin's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, envisaged not a land-grab but the establishment of a puppet government and the destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in the hope that the West Bank - not southern Lebanon - could be incorporated into Israel. This is not an attempt to seize more territory.

But you cannot read any account of Israeli politics without being struck by the extraordinary domination of the generals. We are familiar with military dictatorships. But Israel is unique in being a military democracy. An electoral system much fairer than our own repeatedly places the country in the hands of warriors, and sometimes (I am thinking of Yitzhak Shamir and Sharon) war criminals. Even when civilians are elected, they are pushed around by the generals. To sustain their position, the warrior chiefs seek to ensure that Israel is constantly on the verge of war. As Moshe Dayan observed, military retaliation is a "life drug". Avi Shlaim summarises Dayan's argument thus: "First, [retaliation] obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second, and this was the essence, it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and in the army."

The warriors in Israel have almost always been empowered by armed action. (Even while planning the biggest political disaster in Israeli history - Suez - Ben-Gurion was able to depose his peace-seeking foreign minister, Moshe Sharett.) Their interests are best served by escalation, however inappropriate. After the latest attack on Lebanon began, the generals demanded to intensify it. At the cabinet meeting of July 27, when it had already become clear that the assault was turning into a strategic and political disaster, they insisted that they be allowed to mount a full-scale ground offensive.

Who loses from this war? The people of Lebanon and northern Israel, of course, and maybe - one day - the rest of us. The civilians in the Israeli government, perhaps including Ehud Olmert. But not Hizbullah, who are now proclaimed as heroes in Muslim nations across the Middle East. Not Bush or Blair, for whom every attack by terrorists - even those motivated by opposition to their policies - is a further vindication of their war on terror. And not the Israel Defence Forces. Faced with emboldened enemies, they can demand more resources and greater powers. The generals did not intend to lose, but even this disaster has done them no harm. It has made the Israeli people less secure, and therefore more inclined to vote for those who promise to defend them.


5. Why Israel May Fight Again -- by Ira Chernus

No one knows if the ceasefire in Lebanon will hold. It should be obvious to both Israel and Hezbollah that neither side can win. If the fighting starts again, Hezbollah would lose more fighters and more weapons. Israel would have to send its people back into the bomb shelters. But rational considerations may not rule the day.

Since I’m Jewish, and every Israeli bullet is fired in my name, I pay special attention to what the Israeli government does. Why might Israeli leaders choose to go another round in a self-destructive war?

To get at least part of the answer, let’s look at why they heated up the last round. Last week, as diplomats struggled to hammer out the ceasefire agreement, Israel’s cabinet debated about what to do if the diplomats failed. They decided that they’d launch a much bigger offensive in Lebanon. Here’s the story of how they reached that decision, as told by Akiva Eldar and Aluf Benn , two leading journalists from Israel’s most prestigious newspaper, Ha’aretz.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “will apparently meet, sooner or later, on opposing sides of the ballot box.” Both suffered plenty of criticism at home for the way they handled the war. “They both have the same fear of receiving a grade of ‘barely satisfactory’ on the final exam that has suddenly landed on their heads.”

Peretz, who has never led troops in battle, needed to prove that he could map out and implement a winning war strategy. So he took the hard line, pushing the cabinet to approve the all-out assault. His predecessor as Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz, warned that Peretz’s plan would require at least two months of fighting and maybe longer to achieve victory. Mofaz suggested a more modest plan: a quick deep ground assault to capture the Litani river. "You can get there in 48 hours and say we won,” he told the cabinet. That “would enable Israel to announce victory quickly and with minimal casualties.”

A noisy debate broke about between Mofaz and Peretz, adding to the general confusion. “One of those present summed the situation up by saying, ‘everyone was involved in at least one quarrel.’"

In the end, Olmert took charge. He did not like the Peretz plan. Nevertheless he supported it. He “made efforts to restore calm in the meeting and explained that since he must maintain authority and responsibility, he can only bring the defense establishment's proposal up to a vote.” In other words Olmert, Israel’s first prime minister who was never a military officer, would not buck the powerful military establishment. If he did, and Israel ended up looking like a loser to Hezbollah, his political career would be finished.

But Olmert also feared massive Israeli casualties in a long, drawn-out war that would probably end with no meaningful victory: “Confidants who have spoken with Olmert in the past few days received the impression that he is well aware of the danger that the situation on the ground on the day after a second unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon will be similar to the situation in the territories on the day after the first disengagement from the Gaza Strip.” That outcome, too, would spell death for Olmert’s career. So what could he do?

“In the end, his salvation came from Condoleezza Rice. The U.S. Secretary of State called to inform the cabinet of expected progress in talks over a UN resolution. … And so the cabinet meeting ended in a rather predictable compromise: Approval of an outline of the operation in principle, while postponing its implementation to allow for development in the UN talks. Troops, however, will take up positions in preparation for the operation.”

It was not a compromise that pleased the cabinet: “’If everyone voted the way they spoke, there would be a majority opposing the [Peretz] proposal,’ one minister said. So why didn't anyone vote against the proposal? We were afraid, the minister explained, of showing the public and the Hezbollah that there are rifts within the government and cracks in its support for the IDF.”

The cabinet ministers probably had their eye more on the Israeli public than on Hezbollah. The image of a divided cabinet might undermine public morale and support for the war. More importantly, it would undermine support for the coalition government. Voting against a wider war might cost these politicians votes in a country that heartily supported the IDF (the army) and its war. Akiva Elder concluded his analysis bluntly: “According to the latest Peace Index poll, the vast majority wants ‘victory’ -- no matter what the cost. Olmert from Kadima and Peretz from Labor have given them what they want.”

In that poll (taken at the very end of July), 93% of Jewish Israelis said the war against Lebanon was justified. 87% assessed the Israeli army's combat capability as good or very good. 79% said they wanted Israel to go on fighting until its goals are reached -- even though only 56% thought their government had clearly defined war goals, and a majority said that they felt personally secure.

Politics drove Olmert and his cabinet to approve a plan they didn’t like, one that would kill and endanger far more Israelis. Foreign policymakers in every country keep an eye on the political fallout from their decisions. But most Israel-watchers agree that internal politics drives foreign policy in that country to an extraordinary degree. Henry Kissinger (who knew the Israelis well) once said that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy. Though that’s an exaggeration, the point behind it seems to be as valid as ever.

Now that Israel has clearly failed to get a victory, the political attack on the government is growing more fierce. Leading the war party from the right is the still-popular former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. If Olmert and Peretz think they can stave off the attack by renewing the fighting, they might very well go to war and send their own people down into the bomb shelters again.

Of course the Israelis always check with Washington before they act. “Olmert did not shoot from the hip,” Eldar wrote. “Every word of his was not only well thought out, but also coordinated with the American administration.” Analyzing the cabinet’s decision for wider war if there were no ceasefire, Aluf Benn concluded: “Israel is telling the UN ‘hold me back,’ in efforts to prevent itself from getting swept up in any one decision and hoping for the best.” Olmert counted on Condi Rice and John Bolton to make sure that the UN ceasefire resolution gave Israel enough advantage that he could claim some kind of Israeli victory.

His strategy tied Israeli politics to U.S. politics, too. If the Republicans stick to their “get-tough, kill all the terrorists” campaign stand, they’ll probably back another Israeli decision for war. But Karl Rove and his strategists are always watching the polls. If they decide that they need to temper their cowboy image with more diplomatic compromise, they may turn off the green light no matter what the Israeli leaders and their voters want.

(Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea and Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin . He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu)