Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2006, pages 7-9

Special Report

A Fragile Truce in Lebanon, But No Peace If Hard-Liners Have Their Way

By Rachelle Marshall

Israel and the United States have shown they are prepared to destroy an entire country to assert their interests, if not also their dominance, in this region.—Rami G. Khouri, Agence Global, Aug. 15, 2006.

We need a dialogue of civilizations, not a clash of civilizations.—Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah, New York Times, Aug. 17, 2006.

ISRAEL’S EFFORT to eliminate Hezbollah succeeded in crippling Lebanon’s infrastructure, killing more than 1,100 civilians and driving nearly a million people from their homes, but failed of its purpose. Hezbollah remained largely intact, with its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, now regarded as a hero throughout the Middle East. Still to be determined, however, is whether the U. N. cease-fire imposed in August means an end to Lebanon’s nightmare or only a temporary respite. Like the thousands of U.S.-made cluster bomblets that lie scattered over southern Lebanon waiting to explode, the ingredients for renewed warfare remain.

An article in the April 20, 1996 issue of the Economist titled “Two eyes for an eye” could have appeared last summer with only a few changes. “Lebanon, though not Hezbollah, has been badly hurt, its land once again a battlefield,” the article said. “Since the barrage began on April 11, several hundred thousand Lebanese have been forced to flee their homes, seeking temporary refuge in the streets, schools and mosques of Beirut. Israel’s surgical strikes at two of Beirut’s power stations have plunged the capital back into the disorder it thought it had escaped.” The article goes on to describe the bombing of a U.N. peacekeeping base that was sheltering hundreds of refugees.

Then as now, the Israelis claimed their attacks were aimed at stopping Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks. Those attacks had killed 12 Israelis since 1982, while Israeli bombing had killed many more Lebanese. When Labor Prime Minister Shimon Peres, refrained from sending ground troops into Lebanon, the Likud party was not satisfied. Likud party chief Binyamin Netanyahu, who was soon to replace Peres as prime minister, demanded that Hezbollah be “dismantled,” and his two top lieutenants, Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan, called for Israel to expand its occupation zone in Lebanon north to the Litani River.

Ten years later Israeli hard-liners are again criticizing a cease-fire and demanding renewed action against Hezbollah. “Israel should have taken over southern Lebanon and cleaned out Hezbollah several weeks ago,” Likud party member Yuval Stienmetz said just after the cease-fire was announced. “Unless this is done now, Israel will be forced to do it sometime in the future.” When Lebanese villagers returned to Bint Jbail in late August after the Israelis left, they not only found their homes and shops destroyed, and the town hospital leveled, but a scrawled message saying “We will come back.” Olmert promised that Israel would “do better” the next time.

It is a promise endorsed by top army officials, according to Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri. In an article titled “From Mania to Depression,” Avneri wrote that “Generals are talking about ”˜another round’...in a month or in a year.” They complain that the cease-fire came just when the army was on the verge of “a great victory.” The prevailing opinion among civilians is that Israel needs a better war machine, not a more serious effort to achieve peace. Israeli hard-liners even use the same slogans as the early Nazis in claiming the army was “betrayed” by the politicians.

The Olmert government also has been plagued by scandals, with Israel’s president and justice minister facing charges of sexual harassment, and prominent businessmen suspected of fraudulent practices. Columnist Gideon Samet commented in Haaretz that Israel is “a country that is going off the rails,...a country of proliferating poverty, arrogant millionaires, Third World infrastructure, crumbling city centers, a miserable Knesset and broken promises.” If Samet is right, Israel may be ripe for the kind of extremism born of anger and disillusionment that is more conducive to making war than peace.

Eyal Press reported in the Sept. 11, 2006 Nation that Israeli policy analysts are presenting the government with two options, either to seek a comprehensive peace agreement with Syria and Lebanon involving Israel’s return of the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms, or launch a pre-emptive war on Syria aimed at destroying Syria’s military capability. Current Israeli leaders are not likely to accept the first option, Press writes, “and we all know which approach the hard-liners in Washington favor.” When Olmert spoke before the Knesset’s Committee on Foreign Policy and Defense on Sept. 4, he said that a war with Syria would be “handled with full force.”

American presidents have been willing in the past to impose brakes on Israel. After Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in 1996 the Clinton administration urged Israel to show restraint and engineered a renewal of a ban on cross-border attacks between the two sides. George H.W. Bush pressured Israel to suspend settlement expansion and initiated comprehensive peace talks. The current President Bush, by contrast, sees the Arab-Israeli conflict as a zero-sum battle between the forces of good and evil in which Israel can do no wrong.

“As we saw on Sept. 11, the status quo in the Middle East permitted tyranny and terror to thrive,” he told a Miami audience on Aug. 3.“The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East.”

As Israeli air strikes were devastating southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut, and targeting convoys carrying refugees from southern villages, the White House declared, “These steps are designed to stop Hezbollah and put an end to Iran and Syria’s efforts to hold the Lebanese people hostage to their own extremist agenda.”

There is mounting evidence that Israel’s latest assault on Lebanon, which was launched after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them for Lebanese prisoners in Israel, was a prelude to an American attack on Iran. The Bush administration was in on the planning of the operation and, once it was underway, did everything possible to assist Israel but send troops. American officials resisted international efforts to impose a cease-fire for more than two weeks, and kept Israel supplied with weapons, including 5,000-pound “bunker busters” and cluster bombs.

“A Demo for Iran”

Seymour M. Hersh reported in the Aug. 20 issue of the New Yorker that top administration officials hoped the destruction of Hezbollah’s rocket sites in Lebanon would prevent Hezbollah from retaliating against Israel if and when the United States attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. In bombing Hezbollah’s buried weapons caches, Israel would also be testing the effectiveness of tactics the U.S. Air Force had devised for use against Iran. “It would be a demo for Iran,” a Pentagon consultant told Hersh.

The consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies is that Iran is years away from developing nuclear weapons and is not using Hezbollah as its proxy against Israel. But such findings do not sit well with administration hawks and their backers in Congress. The House Intelligence Commttee issued a report in late August warning that Iran’s nuclear weapons program constitutes an immediate threat to America and accusing the intelligence agencies of failing to accurately assess the dangers posed by Iran and Hezbollah. Inspectors with the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency called the committee’s report “outrageous and dishonest,” and said it contained at least a dozen “erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements.”

One of Hersh’s informants told him that Cheney believed “We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.” What Cheney learned if he was watching is that Israel’s 9,000 bombing missions over Lebanon left much of the country in ruins, created a humanitarian disaster, and caused an oil spill that turned 87 miles of the Mediterranean coast into a toxic dead zone. Far from being destroyed, Hezbollah has been proving far more effective than the government in helping to rebuild the country. The massive bombing that was intended to turn the Lebanese people against Hezbollah, instead turned them against Israel and America. “Everybody was hurt by this, the pain goes all around,” said the deputy mayor of the Christian village of Al Qawzah, where invading Israeli soldiers had ransacked homes and used the church as an outhouse.

The cease-fire imposed by the United Nations in mid-August is a fragile one that depends on whether a U.N. peacekeeping mission is able to enforce it and Israel is willing to observe it. Israel lifted its air blockade of Lebanon three weeks after the cease-fire but kept in place the sea blockade that was seriously hampering reconstruction efforts. Israel also retained the right to bomb trucks suspected of carrying weapons from Syria into Lebanon. The Israelis can be confident that any action they take will be justified by the Bush administration as “self-defense.”

A few days after the cease-fire was imposed, Israeli commandoes wearing Lebanese army uniforms invaded a village in northern Lebanon hunting for Sheikh Nasrallah and killed at least 10 villagers before they left. At least 32 Hassan Nasrallahs lived in the village, but none was the Hezbollah leader. Long after the cease-fire went into effect Israeli tanks continued to roll across the hills of southern Lebanon crushing houses and stone walls in order to prevent inhabitants from returning. An Israeli spokeswoman said, “We are at a cessation of hostilities, not a cease-fire.”

No Cease-Fire in Gaza

There has been no international call for a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel continues to wage war against a defenseless population. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Israeli air strikes kill an average of eight Palestinians a day, most of whom are children. Many more are maimed and paralyzed. The siege began in August 2005, when Israel evacuated its settlements and turned Gaza into a maximum security prison camp. Israeli attacks were intensified in January fllowing Hamas’ election victory, and became an all-out offensive after militants captured an Israeli soldier on June 25.

By the end of August the Israelis had killed more than 200 Palestinians and showed no signs of stopping. Most Gazans are without electricity, water is scarce, and the health crisis is worsening. The blockade Israel imposed nearly a year ago has left 70 percent of Gaza’s population dependent on U.N. aid to survive.

At least 40 members of the Palestinian parliament are in prison, as well as the deputy prime minister and most of the cabinet. “Israel is a state above the law,” a Hamas spokesman said after parliamentary speaker Abdel Aziz Duaik was seized from his home in Ramallah. An Israeli army spokesman said, “Any member of Hamas is a target for arrest, and we will conduct the arrests at our own discretion.”

As long as Palestinians know only grinding hardship and humiliation, Gaza and the West Bank will remain festering wounds, and Israel’s occupation a primary cause of instability and conflict in the Middle East. Yet Israel and the United States have steadfastly rejected Palestinian and other Arab efforts to end the conflict in accord with U.N. Security Council resolutions. Hamas leaders have expressed willingess to accept a two-state solution based on Israel’s return to its pre-June 1967 borders. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah and President Mahmoud Abbas are in the process of forming a national-unity government that will agree to coexistence with Israel.

If they do, Israel is unlikely to respond, but the European Union may act. The New York Times reported on Sept. 2 that the EU is trying to promote peace talks based on Israel’s return to its pre-1967 boundaries, a solution similar to the proposal adopted by the Arab League in 2002. The missing ingredient, and the one most essential to peace, is the willingness of the United States to adopt a Middle East policy that respects the concerns of all of the parties to the conflict. The Bush administration’s refusal even to talk with Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas means that no serious peace talks can take place.

“It’s time for Europe to awaken U.S. leadership,” Spain’s Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said after the EU meeting. This will not be easy. At a news conference in late August Bush told reporters, “What’s very interesting about the violence in Lebanon, the violence in Iraq and the violence in Gaza is this. These are all groups of terrorists who are trying to stop the advance of democracy.”

As the world outside the White House knows, Hezbollah is a legitimate member of the Lebanese government and came into being in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon; Hamas engages in armed resistance to Israel’s occupation but it also provides much needed social services. Hamas members were voted into office in democratic elections.

Bush is equally detached from reality when it comes to Iraq. The Pentagon announced in late August that the number of civilian deaths in Iraq had soared to 120 a day, mainly because of fighting taking place between Sunni and Shi’i militias, and between the militias and U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. Criminal gangs also contribute to the death toll. To Bush, however, Americans in Iraq are fighting World War II. The enemy “are successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century,” he said at an American Legion convention. “If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.”

Lebanese President Fouad Siniora, who saw his country again devastated by Israeli bombs, stated the reality of the situation. “Lebanon will be the last Arab country that could sign a peace agreement with Israel,” he said. “There will be no agreement with Israel before there is a global peace deal that is just and lasting.”

Lebanon’s democratic leader was telling the West that the chief obstacle to Middle East peace is not what Bush calls “Islamic fascism,” but the threat Israel poses to its neighbors and its continued occupation of Arab land. Until there are comprehensive negotiations that address these issues, there will be no lasting peace.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.