From Gaza to Lebanon: Aflame Again
“People are witnessing the first rationing of bread in living memory...80,000 families in Gaza [are] “hardship social cases… About a third of these receive food from the World Food Program. For the rest, there is no longer a safety net.”
~
Isdud Al Najjar, Mercy Corp Gaza
That was the situation in Gaza May 18, 2006.
Forty-one days later, June 28, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) re-entered Gaza in strength in an effort to find a soldier captured three days earlier by the military arm of the Hamas resistance. Two weeks after the start of that incursion, another Palestinian resistance group, Hezbollah, captured two more IDF soldiers. A brief IDF attempt to locate and free these soldiers ended when a tank hit a mine, killing four Israelis. Reacting more quickly than in the Gaza incident, IDF airplanes began what has become an ever-widening bombardment, hitting Beirut airport, multiple bridges and other airports in the north of Lebanon, at least one power plant in southern Lebanon, and shelling coastal areas of Lebanon from the sea. For its part, Hezbollah has been firing dozens of extended-range Katyusha rockets daily into towns and villages in northern Israel, striking further than ever before, from Haifa on the coast to settlements on the Sea of Galilee.
Whenever killing flares in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, all sides – and there always are more than two – selectively recall the history of past conflicts and oppression to “justify” their use of violence, blame others for the new crisis, and appeal for validation by other countries of each version of events. This time, the crisis came just before the start of the annual G-8 heads-of-state meeting. After lengthy discussions, the G-8 called for Hamas and Hezbollah to release the three Israeli soldiers and to stop firing mortars and rockets at Israeli cities, and for Israel to cease military operations against Gaza and Lebanon, to withdraw all forces back inside Israel, and release Palestinian government officials arrested in early July.
The U.S. side says that the “intent” behind the G-8 demands is for Hamas and Hezbollah to return the soldiers and cease shelling first, after which Israel would halt its operations. But, other than Britain, the remaining summit participants apparently do not endorse this interpretation as the written version of the conditions does not specify a sequence. Nonetheless, the statement avoids dwelling on history and emphasizes the goal of halting the fighting before more people die, more vital infrastructure is destroyed, and the violence becomes self-perpetuating and contagious. Already, more than 250 Palestinians, Lebanese, Israelis, and foreigners are dead, hundreds are wounded, and the three IDF soldiers remain captive – their whereabouts unknown.
In one sense, the context for the present emergency begins in April 2000. That month, Israel announced it would pull out of southern Lebanon in July. (At the end of Israel’s 1982 invasion, some Israeli forces, along with a proxy “Southern Lebanon Army,” stayed behind to maintain a buffer zone along the Israeli-Lebanese border.) No sooner was this announcement made than Israel’s proxy imploded. With its own troops suddenly exposed, Israel decided to redeploy in May, catching both the UN and the Lebanese government off guard. Neither the UN nor the Lebanese were prepared to fill the inevitable power vacuum on such short notice. Lebanese police and some army units moved south, and a UN inspection team was sent to verify that Israel had actually removed all its forces from Lebanon and its security barriers were not on Lebanon’s territory. On a day-to-day basis, the reality was the Lebanese army did not patrol the border; the 2,000 member United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), created in 1978, continued to report incursions and shelling across the border by any party; and Hezbollah, better armed and more cohesive than the Lebanese army, assumed control of the Lebanese side of the border.
Fast forward to August 2005 when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon implemented another unilateral plan: abandoning Israeli settlements and most Israeli military posts in Gaza. Sharon’s initiative, while eliminating some flash points between Israelis and Palestinians, really was an integral part of the larger unilateral Israeli plan to build a “separation wall” enclosing and cutting off Gaza from other parts of the putative Palestinian state. As with the pullout of the IDF from southern Lebanon in 2000, the Gaza evacuation was uncoordinated, creating – predictably – a governance and security vacuum that an economically constrained Palestinian National Authority (PNA) simply was and still is unprepared to fill.
Israel’s position is that the PNA is fully responsible for Gaza and for anything that emanates from Gaza toward Israel. But Tel Aviv has made it virtually impossible for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to counter the appeal and influence of Hamas and other militant groups that have become integral parts of the Palestinian social fabric. Abbas and the Hamas-dominated government elected in January may not have to contend with physical occupation by the IDF, but they remain effectively contained and constrained by Israel’s continued control of the Gaza airport, shoreline, border crossings, and a significant stream of much-needed revenue belonging to the PNA.
Under Yasser Arafat and his Fatah party, the PNA was chronically crippled by internal political divisions, cronyism, corruption, and a complete failure to gain control of the instruments of violence that a functioning, effective government must have to survive. (Israel’s systematic destruction of the PNA’s police forces and the crushing of the security infrastructure exacerbated this problem.) Abbas, confronted by the military wing of Hamas on one side and, on the other, Israeli reprisal air attacks that inevitably killed innocent bystanders, has been unable to give the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza what they want most: physical security. Inevitably, this turned the January 2006 parliamentary elections into a referendum on Fatah’s performance. In what was judged a free and fair election, Palestinians rejected the status quo, electing 76 Hamas members or supporters to the 132-seat legislature. The new government, installed in late March, immediately faced a cut-off of foreign aid from the U.S. and the European Union and the withholding of Palestinian tax revenue collected by Israel and normally passed to the PNA.
Which brings us back to June 2006. On the Israeli side, the deaths of two IDF soldiers and the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit on June 25 by Hamas militants posed the initial challenge to the equally new Israeli government headed by Ehud Olmert. (When Ariel Sharon suffered a major stroke in January 2006, Olmert succeeded Sharon as head of the Kadina party which won the March 2006 Israeli election.) That the first direct test for the Olmert government was "military" may have contributed to Israel’s decision to try to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah. Since Olmert and his defense minister, Amir Peretz, are the first Israeli leaders not to have had experience at senior military command levels, to do less than apply maximum military power might leave them open to accusations equivalent to being “soft on terrorism” – especially if they turn to negotiations to gain the release of the three Israeli soldiers.
That this may be more than idle speculation is already clear in statements emanating from the Israeli government. From Amir Peretz: “The government of Lebanon is directly responsible for the fate of the IDF soldiers, and it must act immediately and seriously to locate them, to prevent any harm to them, and to return them to Israel.” For his part, Ehud Olmert said that Hezbollah’s infiltration across the border into Israel and the seizure of two ID soldiers “was not a terrorist act, it was an act of war” for which he held the Lebanese government responsible for failing to implement UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1559 (2004)..
Passed on September 2, 2004, UNSC 1559 called for “strict respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity, and political independence of Lebanon,” the complete withdrawal of all foreign forces, and the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias.
Given the precarious internal “balance of power” among the many political factions in Lebanon, the resolution was poorly devised. It threw the entire burden of providing physical security in southern Lebanon and along the Lebanese-Israeli border on a fragile, confessional-based Lebanese government that simply did not have the power to disarm and disband Hezbollah militia forces. In fact, Hezbollah had become so entrenched in the social fabric of the country that the Lebanese prime minister had felt compelled to include two Hezbollah supporters in his cabinet.
All this played out against another backdrop: the departure of Syrian military forces from Lebanon in 2005. Originally, Syrian forces had been seen as stabilizing Lebanon as it emerged from a fifteen-year civil war in 1990. But by 2005, Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs became onerous. The United States and its European allies accused Syria of sponsoring a terrorist organization by serving as a conduit for money and equipment for Hezbollah and Hamas from their chief sponsor – Iran, the second of George Bush’s triple “axis of evil.”
It is here that the U.S. war in the Gulf intersects with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Washington and Tel Aviv see the hand of Iran in both, with Syria as a conduit for fighters, weapons, and money in two directions. Syria now finds itself effectively “surrounded” by Israel on one side and the U.S. in Iraq on the other, making it susceptible to a “squeeze play.”
There is a further affinity that is discernible in the way that both Israel and the U.S. have approached security in the recent past. Both have emphasized unilateral, overpowering force or the threat of such force to try to carve out for themselves the equivalent of absolute security from attack or even intimidation from others. This was the genesis of the U.S. attack on Iraq (Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction threatened the U.S.) and of Israel’s “separation wall” which dictated Israel’s leaving Gaza and southern Lebanon but retaining the “right” to initiate military action against either area.
Since David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s creation as an independent state on March 14, 1948, the United States has invariably supported Israel in all its military activities. U.S. criticism, when it does come, is in the form of undertaking “proportionate responses” to armed attacks by others – but always preceded by asserting that Israel has the right to defend itself. While this is quite true under the UN charter, it is true for all nations on an equal basis. But, as Israeli novelist David Grossman has observed, from its very inception the modern state of Israel has yet to come to grips with the reality of its overwhelming military power. Its response to any provocation is the application of maximum force, a practice that has never brought it the one thing it craves: peace and security.
Perhaps the U.S. and Israel should try something that neither country is very good at: examining policy from the viewpoint of those who do not have overwhelming dominance. Without doubt, looking at the world “upside down” is guaranteed to be a different perspective. Staying with the current perspective seems to have made things worse. A different perspective might bring Israel and the U.S. a different result, maybe even long term peace and security.
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