Beaten by Hizbollah Israel mulling over the possibility for peace
Tel Aviv (AsiaNews) Has Israel won or lost its war on Hizbullah in Lebanon? All of Israel, left and right, is still immersed in an unending debate on this question. Cautiously, gradually, reluctantly, many conclude that Israel has lost, on points, or that, at any rate, it has not won. Hizbullah is emerging phoenix-like from the debris of the destruction that it caused Israel to wreak on swathes of Lebanon, and is publicly exulting in its "victory" over an infinitely more powerful enemy. Even the scaled-down objective of excluding the pro-Iranian armed organisation form the south of Lebanon now seems not to have been attained, not really. The Lebanese army is indeed coming into the south, for the first time in decades, but its command proclaim that it is coming there to stand "side by side with the 'resistance,'" i.e. a "victorious" Hizbullah, and already on the first weekend after the fragile cease-fire, Hizbullah's yellow flags were being defiantly waved again right on the border with Israel, at Metulah, as Israeli press photographs showed, and its south Lebanon commander, Kauk, was making stirring public speeches, even as his agents were handing over large wads of cash to returning villagers to help them with the expense of rebuilding their homes. Israeli military intelligence reported that arms were once again being busily supplied to Hizbullah from across the border with Syria, while the Lebanese government was announcing that it had no intention of using its armed forces to disarm the organisation. Even the promise of international troops to help disarm Hizbullah is proving to be a hollow one. While Israel had understood this force as being somehow analogous to the international forces that are helping the Karzai government in Afghanistan to fight the resurgent Talibans, this is decidedly not what either the U.N., or the prospective participating nations have in mind. And while Israel initially thought that a robust new international expeditionary force was coming in to replace UNIFIL, the useless (so admits its own commander, General Pellegrini) U.N. force present in southern Lebanon for decades now, the new international troops will now be part of the same UNIFIL, and are not meant to do much more, except to protect themselves more effectively, which is self-referential.
Israeli defeat, US disappointment
Considering all of this, there is almost a consensus in Israel that the fighting has not ended, but has only been interrupted for a while, with Hizbullah maintaining virtually intact the ability to re-ignite it at its pleasure, at any time it or its paymasters in Tehran consider opportune. In other words, nothing has changed. Even to the very end of the fighting, Israel was incapable of putting an end to the massive rocket and missile attacks by Hizbullah on Israel's northern regions; indeed the attacks only grew in intensity and ferocity as the war dragged on. In a sense, this is not entirely surprising, since Israel had failed to stop even the firing of primitive Qassam rockets on its southern towns from the Gaza Strip, even though the Strip is a small territory, almost entirely surrounded by Israeli forces, which operate there at will, on land, in the sea and from the air.
The disappointment, Israeli experts point out, is fully shared by the United States, which had hoped so much for an Israeli win, which it had hoped would be an important milestone in the "war on terrorism." Israel's lack of success, on top of the faltering American military efforts in Iraq, must now bring about an in-depth re-thinking of how powerful military machines could, or could not, win in a fight with irregular forces deeply embedded in a civilian population.
In Israel itself, both the political and the military leaderships are facing close scrutiny, and calls for both of them to submit to a far-ranging enquiry are growing louder by the day.
The entire Israeli agenda is undergoing mutation. Government leaders admit that Prime Minister Olmert's election promise of a unilateral withdrawal from parts of the occupied West Bank is now unthinkable, as are a number of promised reforms, such as slashing the defence budget in favour of civilian expenditure (mostly for remedying the effects on workers and the poor of the relentlessly neo-capitalist policies of the previous government), or reducing both compulsory military service and re-training periods for reservists.
Israelis console themselves in the face of it all by emphasising the renewal of the bonds of solidarity that always in the past distinguished this nation. While they are as divided as ever on the matter of the occupied Palestinian territories, the settlements and so on, the unprovoked attack by Hizbullah on 12 July, on Israeli military and civilians, has united them all, left and right, in rushing to the defence of their country from an implacable enemy that, they say, has no other objective but the destruction of Israel, in accordance with the strategic purpose attributed to present-day Iran. Never since 1967, or perhaps 1973, has the population been so united in considering the war a just one (even though a poorly managed one).
But what now?
Moving towards a peae conference
It appears that the smartest thing Israel could do some now say - would be to move to "decouple" Syria from Iran and from Hizbullah. This could come about if Israel offered to renew its peace negotiations with Syria, from the point at which they were interrupted in the 1990's, and at which Israel had already accepted the need for its withdrawal from the Golan Heights occupied in 1967 - something Israel is anyway obliged to do in accordance with international law, specifically the U.N. Charter, which excludes the acquisition of territory by war, even a war of defence. If given back the Golan Heights, in the context of a peace treaty with Israel, Syria would, as part of the deal, necessarily bring about a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon as well. This should be the easiest peace treaty to write, since there are no territorial issues between Israel and Lebanon, where the international border is well established, and certified by the U.N.. Even if Hizbullah then invented some other lame excuse to persist as an armed organisation, it would find itself completely cut off from its suppliers in Iran, since transit through Syrian territory has been essential for the supplies to reach Lebanon, which has no common border with Iran. Moreover, with Syria and Lebanon both having peace treaties with Israel, there would be a complete break between Iran and all the Arab countries having common borders with Israel. True, even then the Palestinian question would continue to serve as a potent trigger for further conflicts, and for Israel's peace with Syria and Lebanon to be stable, the 'circle of peace' would have to be completed. Again, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to achieve this, given that the possible draft peace treaties between Israel and Palestine already exist and have been lying about in desk drawers for a while. Considering all of these prospects together, it becomes fairly evident that the best, perhaps the only, way to bring about these somewhat interrelated peace treaties would be for all of these parties to meet again at a reconvened Madrid Peace Conference. The successful conclusion of such a conference would fulfil the conditions for the promise of the Arab League Summit resolution of March 2002, also known as the "Saudi initiative", for the peaceful normalisation of relations between all the Arab countries and Israel. The isolation of Iran, by far the most dangerous actor on the scene, would thereby be complete. It would also serve at the same time as a powerful counterweight to a pro-Iranian Shiite-dominated Iraq, which now seems increasingly likely to arise from the present chaos in Mesopotamia." All of this might sound somewhat utopian, but no one seems at present to hold up any more realistic proposal for a secure and stable peace. A fleeting sign that governments too are beginning to rethink their Middle East policies in some such direction did come from the conference of foreign ministers in Rome, about half-way through the recent Lebanon War, when the final statement did begin with a reminder of the need for "regional" solutions. And another hopeful sign in the same direction came when former Israeli Minister, Yossi Beilin, wrote in an opinion piece in the daily Ha'Aretz recently, in favour of calling together again the Madrid Conference, or something like it. Coming from the man who worked hard, at Oslo, to circumvent that Conference, this is a change of direction particularly worthy of note. And Beilin is not entirely alone, although he has gone the farthest in strategic long-term thinking. Calls for peace negotiations with Syria have now come also from Israel's Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, and from the Minister of Police, Avi Dichter (the former chief of the secret police), and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has established a task force to study how this might be done.
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07/09/2006
17/07/2007
