Ian Boyne
Many people find it both alarming and abhorrent that the United States, the main patron of Israel, could be deliberately stalling a ceasefire, causing more slaughter of the innocent and giving Israel time to destroy Lebanon while taking out Hezbollah.
It is a most difficult task to have a rational discussion on the Middle East crisis. There is no greater example of the dialogue of the deaf taking place in the world than the example of discourse on the Middle East.
If we could just peep outside our firmly fixed and settled positions and understand the other person's thinking, then perhaps we could argue our positions more effectively - or come to understand why others disagree with us.
The problem with any discussion on the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian-Israeli struggle is that there are usually underlying issues divorced from the discussion which cloud the issue. For some it is religious, for others it is political. People impose ideologically-fixed positions on the issue so there is never usually any real discussion of the Middle East issue per se.
Why would the Bush administration make such a sharp turn from traditional U.S. policy of Middle East shuttle diplomacy? Why would Bush depart from not just Democratic but Republican Middle East policy? Because the Bush administration has been hardened by experience. This is the view being expressed.
They have seen ceasefire after ceasefire worked out only to be breached, usually by the Arabs, they say. Promises given have been broken. Compromises undertaken were never kept. United Nations resolutions passed have been ignored.
And the U.S., jolted by the September 11 terrorist attacks, have taken a harder line against terrorism and sees Israel' struggle as its own. This is not just a matter of supporting Israel because of the strong American Jewish lobby. It is a matter of protecting America's own security, for Hezbollah is a threat not only to Israel but to America at home.
Notice how President Bush is fixated on Iran and Syria. The casualties in Lebanon and the massive destruction of facilities there don't give him the sense of urgency that it seems to be giving the international community.
He is concerned that a prominent member of his identified axis of evil, Iran, is behind the trouble there. He wants Iran and Syria to know that the U.S. and Israel are tough and that they are able to fight fire with fire, literally. This is Great Power politics here and idealists who are mushy over the death of children and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people don't understand the real world, the hawks would say.
Concessions
The Bush administration and Israel feel that with all the concessions they have given, the terrorists are not appeased and have kept up their aggressive behaviour. They have come to the view that militant Arabs see concessions as weakness and so the administration wants to change the picture and send a message that enough is enough.
"Until 2000, many Israelis believed that if they just kept offering and giving more - if they only did a better job of implementation or showed more empathy - it would be possible to reach comprehensive peace," writes Barry Rubin, director of global research in International Affairs Centre in the
Centre, in the July/August of the journal, Foreign Affairs. "Israel's experience with the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 2000 reshaped (its) strategic thinking. Believing peace was possible, Israel made big concessions and took real risks and a majority of its leaders and people accepted the creation of a Palestinian state and withdrawal from almost all the territory captured in 1967 as tolerable compromises for peace. Israel recognised the PLO, let its forces return from exile - including terrorists - to the West Bank and Gaza and gave it guns and control over territory".
And even when the Palestinians abandoned the peace process, Ariel Sharon in an about-turn to his former extreme right-wing ways, unilaterally undertook to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, at what would prove to be great political cost.
As Rubin says in the Foreign Affairs article, "the voluntary relinquishment of territory captured in an ongoing war when an opponent refuses to make peace (or even accept the enemy's right to exist) is virtually unprecedented."
Israel and the United States have become weary in well-doing. They believe that incursions such as the one taken by Hezbollah on Israeli territory represent the kind of brazenness borne of the view that Israel and the United States have become soft because of increasing global pressure against muscular foreign policy.
Hezbollah seems to have badly miscalculated —- or had strategised for precisely this kind of Israeli reaction which has only further alienated it from international public opinion.
What people see more graphically and poignantly are the images of children lying dead on the streets, families fleeing with only a few things in their possession, big buildings reduced to rubble and hundreds of thousands of refugees. These images are easier to understand than complex analyses in specialist foreign policy journals or in right-wing publications like the Weekly Standard.
But Israel is more concerned about its continued existence rather than how favourably it is viewed. I guess if the choice is between being alive and having a bad reputation and being dead with encomiums heaped on you, the choice is clear! This is Israel's thinking and it is shared by the Bush administration which has been in no hurry to stop the destruction taking place in both Lebanon and Israel.
Profound
The problem with the Israeli reaction is that it highlights the Sisyphusian dimensions of the Middle East crisis. For while appeasement and compromised solutions might not have worked, using terror tactics against religious terrorists has absolutely no chance of working. There are significant philosophical issues involved here and we ignore these at our peril. It might have been considered racist and chauvinistic to say that Westerners and Islamic fundamentalists have a different view of the value of human life, but Hezbollah leader Nasrallah himself said it quite explicitly last week.
"The difference between us," he said referring to the Israelis and their backers, is that "they value life while we value death." This is profound. This is why suicide terrorism has proven so intractable. What is the use of a policy of deterrence when people have no fear for their lives, but in fact believe that a martyr's death earns high rewards immediately?
Bush also continues to focus on the Iranian state and its financial and political backing of Hezbollah as though Hezbollah would disappear if a moderate democratic regime were to be installed in Iran. Ignorance again.
The philosophy that drives Hezbollah is the belief in the Shia doctrine of vilayat-e-faqih(rule of the jurisprudent). This means that the only living being who can lead the Shia in their worldly and spiritual affairs is the one who represents the twelfth Shia Imam.
The majority of the world's Shia recognise such an office-holder as Iranian spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is known as Rahbar which means in Farsi "the one who shows the way." He has no political authority in Iran but he is the ultimate source of religious and political authority. Hezbollah responds to him, not whoever the Iranian president is.
Silent
He has been clear that Israel has no right to exist. On December 31, 1999, he told a massive gathering in Tehran that, "There is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Zionist state." No wonder Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on April 9, 2000 that Israel was a "cancerous body in the regionÉ (Which) must be uprooted."
The political Left has failed to publicly recognise that Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism pose a major threat to any solution of the Middle East problem, Interestingly, the largely secular and agnostic political Left has been only too willing to lampoon and ridicule Christian Fundamentalists but remains silent on the more dangerous and militant Islamic fundamentalism. It's the same "My enemy's enemy is my friend" thinking which has influenced so much of US foreign policy through the years —- and which the Left has consistently criticized.
The Left must acknowledge freely that Hezbollah is responsible for provoking Israel to destroy the lives of innocent children, women and old people and for wrecking Lebanon. Hezbollah attacked a sovereign state. Even the liberal Nation magazine in the United States admits in a July 20 article on its website ("Nasrallah's Game") that "Hezbollah did not strike the occupied Sheba Farms, a silver land in the Golan heights as it usually does, but inside Israel, a violation of international law that Israel-despite its own numerous violations so Lebanese territorial sovereignty —- could invoke as a casus belli. In other words, Hezbollah undertook an audacious act of brinkmanship that was bound, if not designed, to escalate tensions with Israel."
Nasrallah had said in 2000 that "Israel, which has both nuclear power and the strongest air force in the region, is weaker than a spider's web".
Israel is saying to Hezbollah, 'don't you bank on that' and America, stung by terrorism on its own soil, is not about to prevent Israel from teaching Nasrallah a lesson.
Lebanon should have sought international help to implement UN Resolution 1559. Lebanon, therefore, bears some responsibility for what is happening on its own soil, for it did not do enough to rout the terrorists from Southern Lebanon.
It's a pity that a country which has contributed so much to civilisation is being destroyed through an overdose of fanaticism and Great Power excesses. The first law school in history was located in Beirut by Ad 196. It had a depository of written constitutions where the oldest constitutions of the Roman Empire were safeguarded.
The Phoenicians invented the alphabet, introduced the institution of the senate and by the tenth century BC had developed written constitutions which Aristotle cited as the model for all states. Jesus preached His message of peace to Southern Lebanon, ironically-in the town of Qana. How much does Lebanon need that message today!
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. Email him at ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
