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ISRANET DAILY
BRIEFING ARCHIVE Volume VI, No. 1,411 • Monday, July 31, 2006 CANADA’S
ONLY PRO-ISRAEL Please help us Fight for Israel! Please Help CIJR—the Unique Public-Oriented Think-Tank—Support Israel in its Current Crisis! YOUR TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS CIJR’s:
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ONLINE or Send Payment to address at the top of the
page A DOCTRINE OF CRUELTY AND
FOLLY Proportionality is the cry of the day since the crisis in Lebanon began. The abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah terrorists was the immediate occasion of the current conflict. Rockets launched by Hezbollah into Israel since 2000 may be said to provide its bristling context. Proportionality would, I suppose, have called for Israel to send in its commandos and abduct two of Hezbollah's team and, for perfection's sake, to fire rockets at whatever and wherever it liked in Lebanon, up to the number Hezbollah has sent its way in the six years since Israel departed Lebanon. For truly ideal proportionality, the rockets would have to be launched by a rogue army, operating out of Israel, in defiance of the Israeli government, and supported by states either indifferent to Israel's own interests or positively hostile to them. Proportionality may be easy to pronounce but, as can be seen, it's delicate and refined in practice. As far as I know, the Israeli military doesn't surround itself with Israeli civilians when it launches an operation, hiding rocket launchers in apartment buildings. Hezbollah, on the contrary, conducts its "adventures" only under these conditions. Israel has the decency to be tormented by civilian deaths. Hezbollah views civilian casualties as a tactical and public-relations utility. Hezbollah is a self-nominated militia that operates under the aegis of Iran and the "goodwill" of Syria. The Israeli military answers to its own government, and does not oblige itself with freelancing on its own or others' bidding. It should be clear that to attempt the proportionality that has become so popular a cry against Israel runs up against some eminently practical difficulties, not least the very idea of any rules—tactical, political or moral—being thought to pertain to a terrorist militia. Even-handed, balanced, neutral, proportional—how do any of these words fit the current conflict? Proportionality has one last grievous flaw. I can't recall the word being invoked by anyone at all when Hezbollah was firing its rockets and Israel wasn't responding. Proportionality, as the word is currently understood, appears to me, anyway, to be a kind of code. The state of Israel is allowed now and then to respond to those who are unlawfully attacking it or abducting its soldiers, but it must on no account do so in a manner that might actually end the attacks and permanently stop the abductions. It must fight terrorists according to rules that do not, by definition, apply to terrorists. To accept this understanding of proportionality is to accept that Israel is in a perpetual war of attrition, that it is always obliged to contain what force it has so that it is always balanced, even to ideal equivalence, with the force enjoyed by the rogues and terrorists who attack it. I cannot think of any other state in the world that is asked and, by the truly high-minded, expected to live in a perpetual dynamic of attack and response—with the initiative always understood to be with its enemies. Such is proportionality. It is a doctrine of cruelty and folly, but, more significant, it is a doctrine designed for the only state in the world that has to seriously worry about the fact of its own existence. Lately, it has more reason to do so than has ever been the norm for that battered country. One of the other ruder messages coming out of this current crisis is the number of voices starting to remind us that maybe Israel was a mistake to begin with. In Western opinion, this thought is but a whisper, but how common a whisper it is becoming.
Matthew Parris of The Times, no less, gave the thought its most weary expression: "My opinion—held not passionately but with little personal doubt—is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was because it has become a fact. To try to remove it now would be at least as great an injustice as the one originally done to the Palestinians." What an interesting thought: Clear away the clutter and the ennui and what it says is that Israel was a mistake, both where and when, and if it weren't so much trouble, maybe we could fix it. Well, there are others on this globe who don't mind the trouble involved in fixing it, among them Hezbollah, al-Qaeda (which has jumped onside with Hezbollah) and the Iranian President, who speaks with such fervour of wiping Israel off the map. The latter is building a nuclear arsenal, and is likely not as dispassionate as the weary Mr. Parris. That kind of whisper is the tuning of an orchestra we do not want to hear. Nor do we wish to view, even in our dreams, the horrid proportionality its strains would most likely evoke. (Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.) A
MUST-WIN SITUATION While we analyze the individual battles and the stages of this campaign, we must not forget the most important aspect of this war: Hezbollah and what this terrorist organization symbolizes must be destroyed at any price. This is the only option that Israel has. We cannot afford a situation of strategic parity between Israel and Hezbollah. If Hezbollah does not experience defeat in this war, this will spell the end of Israeli deterrence against its enemies. We did not choose this war, but we have reached a strategic crossroad. Following two weeks of fighting, Israel has still not achieved its main goals on the battlefield. The talks about a political solution are still in their early stages. At the same time, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has issued a declaration from his lair that he intends to move on to the stage that includes launching long-range rockets at Israeli towns south of Haifa. Hezbollah seeks to step up the war of attrition against civilian targets so that Israel will accept a vague cease-fire that will serve as a stepping stone for future attacks on Israel. Such a cease-fire should not be accepted. Iran is known to be demanding that Syria increase its support for Hezbollah in order to enable it to better resist the pressure from the Israel Defense Forces. Just as the United States would like Israel to defeat Hezbollah, Iran does not want the organization destroyed and is doing everything in its power to prevent this. This shows that the military struggle has still not reached its peak, nor have the diplomatic efforts. It is important for the Israeli public to know that there are critical issues to be decided. What matters is not the future of the Shiite town of Bint Jbail or the Hezbollah positions in Maroun al-Ras, but the future and safety of the State of Israel. This struggle will also determine Iran’s position in the Middle East and its role among the Arab states. Some of the Arab states recognize this fact and do not wish Hezbollah to emerge victorious in this campaign. Their stance does not stem from love of Israel, but from concerns for their own future. If Israel’s deterrence is shaken as a result of failure in battle, the hard-won peace with Jordan and Egypt will also be undermined. Israel’s deterrence is what lies behind the willingness of moderate Arabs to make peace with it. Hamas, which calls for Israel’s destruction, will be strengthened and it is doubtful whether any Palestinians will be willing to reach agreements with Israel. Therein lies the link between the fight with Hezbollah and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is also a link between Israel’s deterrence and what the Israeli public feels, as well as what it is fed. Unfortunately, over the past few days, a new national sport has emerged in the Israeli media: criticizing the IDF to the point of humiliation and unearthing failures, real or otherwise. The war has barely started, yet there are already calls for a commission of inquiry. If this had been the case during the War of Independence, we would not even have managed to take Jaffa… There is a whole generation in Israel that may not recall how many useless cease-fire agreements were signed in Lebanon. The most significant, which followed the 1978 Litani Operation, established UNIFIL. Israel does not need another cease-fire of this sort in southern Lebanon; it needs a new reality that, at the least, will distance Hezbollah’s military wing from this area. This is clear to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are trying to prevent it. IS
THIS A BIAS I SEE BEFORE ME? If Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, had her druthers, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt would have been tried as war criminals, since countless civilians were killed by Allied bombing throughout Europe during the Second World War. This is the eerie conclusion of Ms. Arbour's hasty and somewhat biased intervention in the war in Lebanon. A few days ago, she declared that "indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians," and condemned "the bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians." And she warned that "this could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control." By these standards, the war against the Nazis should be considered unjustifiable... Most cities under German control were bombed and many of their inhabitants killed, and so were sites of "military significance" such as bridges in populated towns, airports, factories and so on, and this is how, in part, that war was won. And what about the hundreds of civilian deaths caused by NATO's humanitarian mission in Kosovo? Ms. Arbour was cautious not to openly take sides, but the subtext was very clear: Only Israel targets what its army believes (sometimes wrongly) are "military sites" (Hezbollah usually targets civilians); and the human casualties of Israeli bombings are much larger than those resulting from Hezbollah's attacks on Israel. This makes Israel the culprit. The implication of Ms. Arbour's statement is that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert might follow Slobodan Milosevic in the dock at the International Criminal Court… The former Supreme Court of Canada judge didn't bother to explain what a country should do when it is attacked by terrorist groups that stockpile their arms in "ordinary" houses, launch their rockets from densely populated areas and generally use innocent civilians as human shields. She didn't condemn Hezbollah's previous incursions across a UN-sanctioned international border. And she didn't condemn terrorism, which essentially targets civilians. Does sending explosive-strapped teenagers to kill other kids in Israeli pizzerias fit with Ms. Arbour's conception of human rights? Does she think a movement the stated aim of which is the annihilation of a country shows respect for human rights? Is Ms. Arbour comfortable with the UN Human Rights Council, one of the organizations she oversees as high commissioner? The council is a recent reincarnation of the discredited Human Rights Commission (Libya was actually elected its chairman in 2003). In 2001, the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban turned into an ignominious circus dominated by vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric. The problem is, the new Human Rights Council doesn't seem much different from the old Human Rights Commission. It still includes such well-known human-rights champions as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Algeria. At the council's inaugural session in June, Israel was the only country officially castigated for violating human rights. The council's first "extraordinary session," on July 6, focused exclusively on Israel's operations in Gaza. A resolution, adopted 29-11, didn't mention that these operations were in response to a Hamas attack on Israeli soil a year after Israel had withdrawn from Gaza. This is not exactly what Ms. Arbour had said when the council was created in February by the UN General Assembly. She declared then that "the council will be required to review on a periodic basis the human-rights record of all countries, beginning with its members." Obviously, a majority of council members had another agenda. It will be interesting to see, in the coming months, whether Ms. Arbour is able to withstand this close companionship with a group devoted to the demonization of Israel. Volume VI, No. 1,410 • Friday, July 28, 2006
THE FIRST
WAR, ALL OVER AGAIN This is a different kind of war, and an old kind of war. In the last war, when they blew up buses and restaurants and sidewalks and cafes, Israelis were enraged, apoplectic with anger. This time, it’s different. Rage has given way to sadness. Disbelief has given way to recognition. Because we’ve been here before. Because we’d once believed we wouldn’t be back here again. And because we know why this war is happening. A rocket hit Haifa in the first days of the war, killing no one, but injuring a number of people. It also tore the face off an apartment building, leaving the apartments inside eerily exposed, naked, for all to gaze into. That small block of Haifa, with its shattered shell of a building, rubble all along the street, citizens dazed as they wandered about looking at it all, appeared to be exactly what it was – a war zone. And yet, the people in the street stayed near their homes, going nowhere. The newscaster asked them why they didn’t go somewhere else, where it might be safer. One man answered with statistics. “Why leave now? We’ve already been hit. The chances of us being hit again are one in a million.” To which another man responded almost with outrage. “What do numbers have to do with it?” he asked. And then, he turned to the camera, almost screaming, pointed to the broken building, and said, “This is our home. Mi-po ani lo zaz. From here, I am not budging. And he repeated his refrain over and over again… Israelis understand what this is. This is a war over our homes. Over our homes in the north, for now, but eventually, as the rockets get better and larger, all of our homes. This is not about the territories. This is not about the “occupation.” This is not about creating a Palestinian State. This is about whether there will be a state called Israel. Sixty years after Arab nations greeted the UN resolution on November 29, 1947 with a declaration of war, nothing much has changed. They attacked this time for the same reason that they did sixty years ago. At first, it was the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians. We put a stop to that in 1949, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Then it was the Palestinians, who bamboozled the world (and many of us Israelis) into believing that they just wanted a State, and that their terror was simply a way of forcing us to make one possible. We fought the terror in 1982 (Lebanon), 1987 (Intifada) and even after Camp David and Oslo, once again in 2000-2005 (the Terror War). And then, we actually tried to make the State happen. We got out of Lebanon to put an end to that conflict. And even more momentous, we got out of Gaza, hoping that they’d start to build something. And now, it’s Hezbollah. Or more accurately, Syria. Or to be more precise, Iran. What’s Iran’s beef with Israel? Territory it lost? It didn’t lose any. And does anyone really believe that Iran cares one whit about the Palestinians and their state? That’s not the reason. We know it, and so do they. Now, the bitter reality of which Israel’s right-wing had warned about all along is beginning to settle in. It is not lost on virtually any Israelis that the two primary fronts on which this war is being conducted are precisely the two fronts from which we withdrew to internationally recognized borders. We withdrew from Gaza, despite all the internal objections, hoping to move Palestinian statehood – and peace – one step closer. But all we got in return was the election of Hamas, and a barrage of more than 800 Qassams that they refused to end. And then they stole Gilad Shalit. Not from Gaza. Not from some contested no man’s land. From inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel. As if to make sure that we got the point – “There is no place that you’re safe. There is no place to which we won’t take this war. You can’t stay here.” Because as much as we have wanted to believe otherwise, they have no interest in building their homeland. They only care about destroying ours. Six years ago we pulled out of Lebanon. Same story. In defiance of the UN’s resolution 1559, Hezbollah armed itself to the teeth, and as we watched and did nothing, accumulated more than 10,000 rockets. And dug itself into the mountains. And established itself in Beirut, effectively using the entire Lebanese population as human shields. And, assuming that there was little that we could or would do, it attacked on June 12, killing eight soldiers, and stealing Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Not from Southern Lebanon. Not from Har Dov, a tiny hilltop that’s still contested. But from inside Israel. Inside a line that no one contests. Unless, of course, they contest the idea of the whole enterprise. Which they do. And which is precisely the point. And which is why this incredibly divided and divisive society has rallied so monolithically around a Prime Minister who until last week wasn’t terribly popular, and around a war that may or may not accomplish all its military objectives. It explains why, even as the air raid sirens go off across the country, and may eventually start their wail in Tel Aviv, too, as people dash across streets, panicked, trying to find the nearest bomb shelter, no one complains about the government. No one’s complaining about the amount of time it’s taking the air force to put a stop to this. It explains why all over this city, advertisements on bus stops have been replaced with a photo of an Israeli flag and the phrase Chazak Ve-ematz – “be strong and resolute” (Moses’ words to Joshua in Deut. 31:7). Even the people who’ve lost family members, who are interviewed while still overwrought with grief, have no complaints about the government or the army. “Finish this job,” they effectively say. “We’ll stick it out.” But behind the defiance lies sadness, a tired and experienced renewed loss of optimism, a wondering if it will ever, ever end. Because we know what they want. It’s not the Golan Heights. It’s not the West Bank. And it’s not a State. We know what they want, and we know why they want it. On TV the other night, one of the news shows started off with a brief comedic episode. It showed two guys, looking and acting Israeli to the hilt. One of them was speaking in a heavy caricatured Sephardic North African [accent]…telling his friend, over and over and over, “mi-po ani lo zaz. This is the only place where Jews can be safe, he insisted. This is the place we must stay. From here, I’m not moving.” And then the camera panned back, until gradually, you realized that the background you were staring at was the London Bridge, and the Tower of London. It would have been funny, if it weren’t so sad. It’s sad, because deep down, people are starting to wonder. Would going there be the only way to get beyond their hate? We got out of Lebanon. We left Gaza. Olmert was elected after he openly declared his intention to give back the majority of the West Bank. But without intending to, we called their bluff. And now we know: the issue isn’t their statehood. It’s ours. The sadness comes from the clarity. We can sign peace treaties, and withdraw, and arm ourselves. But nothing’s enough. You sign a treaty with Egypt, but then Syria takes over Lebanon and uses Hezbollah as its proxy. You get peace with Jordan, but Iran joins the fray. You learn to defend your border, so they attack you from well within their countries. It feels relentless, because it is. It feels like it never ends, because it doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like the seventh war. It feels like a continuation of the first. Could it be that we’re right back where we started? … Is this like the first war, because we could win it and still not have security? What if, as even the army says is likely, Hezbollah is left wounded but still intact at the end? What, we just wait until they decide to lob more missiles at Haifa, or Safed, or even Tel Aviv? Bomb shelters will once again be part of the reality of [life for] Israeli kids? Have we returned to the late 40’s and 1950’s, when border towns had to live with the ongoing dread that Fedayeen would sneak across the border and kill people? Except that now, in an era of missiles, most of the country is a border town. This is like the first war because Israeli citizens, in the middle of the country, are getting killed by a foreign “army.” In 1956, 1967 and even in 1973, we mostly took the war to the border. And then to their territory. Israel’s civilian population centers, even in those horrible conflagrations, were left more or less intact. But not in 1948, and not this time. Haifa is the front. Safed is the front. Nazarath is the front. And they’re all burying people. Adults, and children. Jews, and Israeli Arabs. And Tel Aviv, if you believe Nasrallah, may well be next. And it’s like the old wars because all our hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, the casualties are mounting. Just days after the Israeli pundits were discussing whether or not a limited ground incursion might be necessary…there are troops on the ground in Lebanon. Thousands of soldiers, the papers say this morning. And in the few days since they’ve gone in, kids have been coming back in body bags. These are elite units, and though we’re told that they’re having some successes in finding and destroying the bunkers built into the mountain, they’re encountering heavy resistance. And not all of them are making it home. We’ve been here before, too. We’d thought we were done with that. For the first few days of this new war, Israelis were relieved to see the footage of a hundred Israeli planes over Lebanon at any one point. We’d show them that they’d miscalculated. We’d put a stop to this. We’d get our stolen boys back. A decisive victory, like in days of old... But well into the second week of the war, we don’t have our boys back. And soldiers are dying… And the victory hasn’t been decisive. And Israeli cities are still being shelled, and traumatized Israeli kids by the thousands are still sleeping in bomb shelters. Just like in the first war. And it’s like the first war because the news is broadcasting photos of lines of Arab refugees fleeing the fighting in Beirut, heading north, or to Syria. Israeli TV is showing footage of a former city that looks much more like Dresden than Beirut. There are probably some Israelis who couldn’t care less, but the ones that I talk to, work with and share a neighbourhood with, do care. They understand that we probably have no choice, for Hezbollah has decided to use Beirut as its human shield, and for years and years, Lebanon did nothing to stop them. Or even to try. And we have no choice but to survive. But the Israelis I talk to all day long are still saddened by the miles-long lines of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Lebanese refugees, fleeing their homes and rubble filled neighbourhoods with white flags hovering outside their cars even as Israeli war planes roar overhead. Simply on a human level, we know that the suffering is incalculable. That, too, looks like that old black and white footage from the War of Independence. And as a problem for Israel, we know, Arab refugees don’t disappear. They attack, we respond, they flee. And then the problem becomes ours... And so it goes. Another all out war, when it could have been different. If they’d wanted something else. But they don’t. Not the Iranians, not the civilians in Syria interviewed on CNN who spoke with admiration of Nasrallah, not the Palestinians on the West Bank who’ve posted his picture everywhere, and not even the Israeli Arabs in Nazareth who, from the depths of their mourning, blame Israel and not Nasrallah for the loss of their children. So it’s the seventh war (Or the eighth, if you count the War of Attrition. Or the ninth, if you count the first Intifada). And the first war. It’s all the wars. They’re all the same, in the end, because we can’t afford to lose. We can’t afford to lose, so we won’t. More decisively or less, with more destruction of Lebanon or less, sooner or later, we’ll win it. We have to. The whole enterprise is at stake. …When the 1973 Yom Kippur War was at its height, Yehoram Gaon went to the front and sang the now famous lyrics, Ani mavti’ach lach – “I promise you, my little girl, that this will be the last war.” They never play that song anymore. Because no one believes it. There will be no last war. It’s the eighth war, or the ninth. But it isn’t the last war. It’s the first war, all over again. We’ve got this war for the same reason that we had all the others. We have this war for the same reason that people in Haifa are still saying mi-po ani lo zaz. We got this war for the same reason that we got the first, and the second. We know why they attacked then. And we know why they’re still attacking. And we’re determined to hold on for the same reason that they’re so determined never to stop. There’s one reason, and one reason only: The Jewish People has no where else to go. SPEECH
AT SOLIDARITY RALLY FOR ISRAEL …[T]oday I want a message to go forth from us to Israel to say: Israel, you make us proud. In a mere 58 years, in a country half the size of Lake Michigan, you have done things that are unbelievable. You have gathered together Jews from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than eighty different languages and out of them made a great nation. You have taken a land with no natural resources and turned it into one of the great economies of the modern world. You have created a democracy in a part of the world where no one thought it possible. You have taken a desolate land and made it blossom and bear fruit. You have developed medical technologies to save life. Wherever in the world there has been a natural disaster, you have been among the first to offer humanitarian aid. Through six decades under almost continuous threat you have given the world poets and philosophers and musicians and novelists whose heart is Jewish and whose love is for all humanity. You have taken the language of the Bible and made it speak again you have taken a people from the valley of the shadow of death and made it live again. You have taken hope itself – hatikvah shnot alpayim – and made it breath again. Israel: you are our people and our pride and we stand with you today. Why then does a people who have consistently said ‘Yes’ to life and ‘No’ to death, who have consistently said ‘Yes’ to peace and ‘No’ to terror, find itself today fighting in Lebanon and Gaza? The answer is so simple, yet so unbelievable, that we must hear it clearly and unequivocally: Israel is fighting today in Lebanon because 6 years ago it withdrew from Lebanon. Israel is fighting today in Gaza because 1 year ago it withdrew from Gaza. And Israel discovered the terrible truth spoken by the late Mother Theresa. That no good deed goes unpunished. Every gesture of goodwill undertaken by Israel has been seized on by its enemies as a sign of weakness. Every Israeli effort towards peace has led without exception to an increase in violence against Israel. The Oslo Peace Process led directly to the first Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel. Taba: the most generous offer Israel ever made to the Palestinians, led directly to the most concerted set of terrorist attacks against any nation in modern history. The Gaza Withdrawal, the most painful act Israel has ever had to undertake, led within less than a year to 1000 Kassam rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets including schoolchildren. And finally the Lebanon withdrawal, undertaken by Israel six years ago in full compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 425. That resolution was immediately broken by Hizbullah, about which the United Nations special envoy to Lebanon warned at the time, in November 2000: “Such breaches of international peace and security in the south threaten to ignite a new spiral of violence with tragic consequences for the civilian population.” That failure led in 2004 to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 which called categorically for the disarming of militias in Lebanon. Again rejected. This time Kofi Annan himself protested to the Syrians. The effect? The arming of Hizbullah with weapons that threaten the very heart of Israel. Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Israel does not want to be in Lebanon. It does not want to do any of the things it is now doing. It accepted in good faith the commitment of the United Nations that it would not have to. It is acting today only because the international community has failed to ensure that its neighbours met their obligations when Israel met hers. Israel, the Israel we know and love, is a people that pursues peace, yearns for peace, sings about peace, needs peace. For 58 years it has done everything a nation could do in pursuit of peace, and it has been rewarded instead with violence and terror. It has done what the world has asked it to do, and the result has been that it has been left vulnerable and alone… Tragically, Jews have learned over the centuries that when their enemies [speak] of killing them, driving them into the sea, [and] wiping them off the face of the earth, they mean what they say…. Friends, let me tell you what is wrong with terror. It is not just that it murders the innocent—the young, the old, the defenceless, the uninvolved—it is that it murders innocence itself. It turns virtue into weakness, decency into vulnerability. And if we, if Israel, if Europe, if America, do not take a stand against terror, if we ignore it as the world ignored it for so long, then it will leave a stain on the human future that no tears, no regrets, will ever remove. The battle Israel is fighting today is not for itself alone, it is for the sake of all those who say ‘No’ to terror, ‘No’ to the desecration of life, ‘No’ to killing in the name of God. Whether they live in Bali or Beslan, or Madrid or Mumbai. Shabbat Shalom to all our readers!
Volume VI, No. 1,409 • Thursday, July 27, 2006 SOLDIER
DESCRIBED LIFE IN WAR ZONE "What I can tell you is this; we have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both artillery and aerial bombing," [Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener] wrote in an e-mail just nine days before he was killed with three other UN peacekeepers by an Israeli bomb… He attributed the attacks to the grim reality of war, refusing to blame the Israelis for hitting the compound and emphasizing "the nature of my job here is to be impartial and to report violations from both sides without bias." "This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity," he wrote. The statement suggested that Hezbollah fighters were operating close to the UN base… …For the past nine months, [Maj. Hess-von Kruedener] had been stationed on a patrol base about 10 kilometres from the Israeli border. His eight-man team was responsible for reporting any violations of a United Nations ceasefire, but as unarmed observers they had no ability to enforce it. [He] wrote about what he had seen before the outbreak of all-out war—a failed attempt by Hezbollah to kidnap Israeli soldiers last November, the Israeli shooting of a shepherd boy a few months later. Border skirmishes grew increasingly intense as Hezbollah continued to lob rockets into northern Israel. He described the current fighting as "by far the most spectacular and intensive" he had ever seen. It was so intense it forced his UN team to retreat to their camp… Yesterday, Maj. Hess-von Kruedener's body was airlifted out of southern Lebanon. The UN border post where he had served was destroyed. ANNAN’S
LIBEL It is difficult at times, and perhaps today impossible, to fathom how UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan assesses events involving Israel. On Tuesday, four members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) were killed when their position was hit by IDF fire. Annan reacted by declaring that the incident was "an apparent deliberate targeting by the Israeli Defense Forces of a UN observer post." Yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert conveyed to Annan Israel's "deep regret" over the incident, as well his "reservations" over Annan's "inconceivable" decision to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting UN forces. Reservations? Perhaps Olmert had to be polite, but outrage would be a more appropriate sentiment. Just yesterday, Israel paid another terrible price in its soldiers' lives in the fight against Hizbullah. They died defending their country, but they also died, in effect, implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demands the disarming of Hizbullah. Israel has already apologized for, and pledged to investigate, the deaths of the UNIFIL soldiers. Where is Kofi Annan's apology for insulting Israel, and his investigation of how UNIFIL came to be so inseparable from Hizbullah that it has been almost impossible to target the later without inadvertently hitting the former? Where is his gratitude for Israel's implementation, with the blood of its children, of a UN resolution? And why, pray tell, would Israel target UNIFIL? Is Annan suggesting some sort of Israeli anti-UN sadism, or that Israel would have some reason to target UNIFIL in its war with Hizbullah? …The IDF, perhaps more than any other military force, does its utmost to avoid hitting noncombatants… In his own report on UNIFIL, delivered just last week to the UN Security Council, Annan noted that "on the morning of 15 July, IDF announced via loudspeakers to the residents of [the Lebanese villages of] Ayta ash Shab and Marwallin that they should vacate their villages," clearly to minimize noncombatant casualties. Far from targeting civilians, Annan is aware that the IDF routinely sacrifices the element of surprise to spare them. The lamentable killing of the four UNIFIL personnel clearly requires investigation, something the IDF carries out in any case of a mistake made in the heat of battle. But an investigation of even greater importance to long-term regional stability would be of UNIFIL's failure to fulfill its mandate of restoring peace and security in southern Lebanon… With diplomacy focused on creating a new multinational force in the aftermath of the fighting in southern Lebanon, it is essential to understand what went wrong with the existing one. Such an investigation must determine more than just how UNIFIL troops were located in such close proximity to Hizbullah terrorists... More fundamentally, it would delve into how, in complete contravention of its objectives, UNIFIL stood by without a murmur as a terrorist organization amassed thousands upon thousands of rockets whose unprovoked use has killed and wounded dozens of Israelis and precipitated the current war… It is Israel that is owed an apology for Annan’s accusation, which our UN ambassador called shocking, distressing, premature, hasty and erroneous. We are owed more than that: an independent, blue-ribbon investigation into how UNIFIL forces became human shields for the terrorist army they should have been fighting to dismantle. WHO’S
DISSIN’ WHOM As Israel fights to defend itself against the Iranian-and-Syrian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah, are we really seeing a reckless, damaging and—yes—disproportionate response? You bet. But not from Israel. It's coming from the U.N. Hezbollah deliberately provoked this war on July 12 by kidnapping Israeli soldiers inside Israel's borders, and has been launching rockets into Israel from a massive arsenal that under U.N. writ Hezbollah is not even supposed to possess. That was not the deal under which Israel, in keeping with U.N. wishes, withdrew entirely from southern Lebanon in 2000. The U.N. promise was that Hezbollah would be defanged and that U.N. peacekeepers would help the Lebanese government reestablish control over Hezbollah-infested terrain inside Lebanon. Over the past six years, Israel honored its commitment to peace. The U.N.—disproportionately—required in practice no such compliance on the Lebanese side of the border. The "peacekeepers" of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, called UNIFIL, sat passively looking on, costing about $100 million a year and doing nothing to stop Hezbollah from trucking in weapons, digging tunnels, and running the armed protection rackets with which it has kept a grip on swathes of Lebanon… With its false promises, and disproportionate deals for "peace," the U.N. left Israel exposed to the attack that has now come, and a war that Israel did not seek. Like America when attacked by al Qaeda, Israel has been fighting back. In response, U.N. officials have come close to trampling each other in their stampede to the media microphones—not to admit the U.N.'s own failure to stop Hezbollah…but to denounce Israel. These latest exercises in disproportion begin, of course, with U.N. officials ritually condemning all parties. With that sleight of hand, they conjure the baseline U.N. fallacy known as moral equivalence. In that U.N. scheme of the universe, a democratic society that is attacked while honoring U.N. agreements is treated as no different from its death-cult rule-violating terrorist attackers… Thus did we get last week's Pollyanna platitudes from U.N. Deputy-Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown, who on the subject of this Hezbollah-propelled war opined that "military solutions"—an apparent allusion to Israel—are not the answer. "The basic point," said Malloch Brown, is that "saving or losing a life is a very simple business". Perhaps that is how the world looks from the tree-shaded lawns of the George Soros estate, where Malloch Brown rents a $10,000 per month home. But the saving of lives is anything but simple in the face of a Lebanese landscape infested with Hezbollah terrorists using Lebanese civilians…as shields to launch death-dealing attacks on Israel. It is even less simple when you consider that Hezbollah has for years been on the receiving end of a Syrian-Iranian Ho Chi Minh trail of money and munitions which the U.N…. has done nothing in practice to block. And it all gets most terrifyingly un-simple when you take into account that Hezbollah…is the Lebanon-based arm of a nuclear-bomb-seeking Iran, which the U.N. has also failed to stop, and whose president has vowed to annihilate Israel. At the very least, one has to wonder if Malloch Brown would take the same Bambi-eyed view were Hezbollah rocketing his local tennis courts. Following the words of Malloch Brown, we have been treated over the past week to Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemning Israel for "excessive use of force," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour hinting darkly about "war crimes," and the accusations this past weekend of U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Jan Egeland about "violation of humanitarian law." The issue here is not, in fact, what yardsticks these people are using…but that they are abusing their U.N. positions by making these selective, ad hoc accusations against Israel in the first place. These folks are not presidents, or prime ministers. They are U.N. civil servants… In the case of Arbour, and her threats aimed at Israelis, Ambassador John Bolton had a very good point when he offered [her] a reminder last weekend…as "one lawyer to another," that "In America, prosecutors are not supposed to threaten people in public based on press accounts."… Among other things, it was apparently lost on [Jan] Egeland, when he toured the bomb damage in south Beirut last weekend, that his convoy was waved past a road block by "a Hezbollah guard dressed in black and armed with an assault rifle," according to a Reuters report. That scene right there was a violation of everything in the U.N. book, and not by Israel—but apparently it didn't fit his script. There are of course some subjects on which the same senior U.N. civil servants now so vocal have been most disproportionately circumspect. I can't recall any of them protesting in public that totalitarian, terrorist-sponsoring Syria (surely something in there is a violation of international law?) was allowed not so long ago to chair the U.N. Security Council, while democratic Israel has been chronically shunned… Right now it is the job of the world's more responsible political leaders not simply to deplore the horrors of war, or construct another false U.N. peace leading to even worse nightmare ahead, but to seek real answers to the miseries and menaces of the Middle East. That is a task perilous, contentious, and rough enough, without a parade of unelected and largely unaccountable U.N. civil servants using public platforms to insinuate into the process their private prejudices. (Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.) THE
UN VS. ISRAEL The war between Israel and Hezbollah has prompted many international leaders and commentators to support a deployment of an expanded UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. This idea should be rejected for a variety of reasons. The most important is this: The UN is not a neutral actor in the Middle East. Time and again, it has been co-opted by Israel's enemies. Examples abound. But perhaps the best lies with the United Nations agency touted as the new face of the world organization: the UN Human Rights Council. The new body was established this year as a replacement for the discredited Commission on Human Rights… After only three weeks in operation, however, the council reverted to the hypocrisy of its predecessor. The first disappointment came during the Council's inaugural two-week session, which opened on June 19. Western countries, seeking to focus the body on establishing basic mechanisms, naively proposed to omit mention of specific geopolitical situations. Predictably, the UN's Arab and Muslim blocs objected. At the Council, as everywhere at the UN, their goal was to censure a single country: Israel. In meetings leading up to the Council's inauguration, the 56-country Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) insisted on a special agenda item to knock Israel, just like at the old commission. The Europeans surrendered, as always, with a last-minute "compromise." Yes, the OIC would get its Israel-bashing day. However, the listing on the official agenda would be obscured so as to hide the blatant bias. The result: the session's only substantive debate, while featuring a few references to the crimes in Darfur and dissidents elsewhere, was dominated by demonization of the Jewish state. Thus emboldened, the OIC and its allies promptly bagged four additional victories, each another dagger in the council's credibility: *The OIC subverted the resolution extending the mandates of the independent human rights experts. Adding a footnote, the text singled out the Special Rapporteur on Palestine—whose instructions allow for examination of only Israeli violations—as the sole investigation lacking an express year of expiry. The entire Western group—including Canada—voted for the tainted text. *The same resolution retained Switzerland's Jean Ziegler as the "Special Rapporteur on the right to food." Ziegler is the 1989 co-founder of the "Moammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize"--a distinction he won himself, in 2002, together with convicted French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy. *In its only resolution naming a specific country, the council officially denounced Israel. The decision, drafted by the OIC, orders reports on Israel that prejudge it as guilty, and forces "Israeli violations" to be written on the agenda at all future sessions. *The council adopted another OIC-written resolution, against "defamation of religions"--i.e., cartoons of Mohammed. Canada and EU countries voted No, but never challenged the hypocrisy of countries such as Saudi Arabia—whose textbooks preach hatred against non-Muslim "infidels"—pronouncing themselves on the issue of "religious intolerance." So concluded the inaugural session of the world's top human rights body. Only it didn't end there. Just as the gathering adjourned, the Arab League demanded a "Special Session" to censure Israel again. Days later, the council duly convened to produce yet another resolution slamming the Jewish state, and creating "an urgent fact-finding mission"—one headed by the Special Rapporteur on Palestine, John Dugard, who zealously embraces his one-sided mandate. Indeed it was Dugard who opened the session, offering "every sympathy for Corporal Gilad Shalit; and indeed for all Israel's young soldiers compelled to serve in the army of an occupying power."… This is the same man who has lauded Palestinian terrorists for their "new determination, daring, and success." Real change at the United Nations will require moral clarity and courage—the kind that Stephen Harper exhibits when he identifies Hezbollah and Hamas as the true source of Middle East instability and warfare. So long as the UN eschews such clarity, and remains the diplomatic plaything of terror apologists, the idea of the United Nations safeguarding Israel's security—in Lebanon or anywhere else—will remain a pipe dream. (Hillel Neuer is executive director of UN Watch, and editor of its Web site, www.unwatch.org.) Volume VI, No. 1,408 • Wednesday, July 26, 2006 WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces. This coordinated artillery and aerial attack…occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that UN positions would be spared Israeli fire.”—UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking from Rome, accusing Israeli forces of intentionally striking a UN outpost, killing four UN observers yesterday in South Lebanon. It is believed that the four, who only recently arrived in Lebanon, were aiding the UN’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). (Globe & Mail, July 26) “I am shocked and deeply distressed by the hasty statement of the Secretary-General.”—Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman, calling Kofi Annan’s words “premature and erroneous.” Israeli Spokesman Mark Regev has said the military will investigate, “We do not target UN personnel and, since the beginning of this conflict, we have made a consistent effort to ensure the safety of all members. This tragic event will be thoroughly investigated.” (Globe & Mail,CanWest News, July 26) “Those who urge Egypt to go to war to defend Lebanon or Hezbollah are not aware that the time of exterior adventures is over.”—Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, following talks with Saudi King Abdullah, rejecting the Iranian leaders demands that Egypt and the rest of Arab world respond to Israel's actions in Lebanon. “The Egyptian army is for defending Egypt only and this is not going to change,” Mubarak added. Saudi Arabia was the first Arab state to openly criticize Hezbollah, arguing that the people should distinguish between legitimate resistance and dangerous adventurism by some parties without cooperation from their governments and the Arab states. The Saudi stand reflected the position of all the Gulf countries, which are of the opinion that Hizbullah and Hamas are acting on orders from Teheran and Damascus. (Ynet News, July 26; Jerusalem Post, July 17) “In my opinion, Lebanon is the scene of an historic test, which will determine the future of humanity... It is inconceivable for anyone who calls himself a Muslim and who heads an Islamic state to maintain relations under the table with the regime that occupied Jerusalem.”—Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a July 23rd interview on the Iranian News Channel, dismissing statements by Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian leaders that Arabs and Muslims cannot allow Hezbollah to drag the region to war. Ahmadinejad’s statement follows earlier, more threatening remarks directed toward these states. “[T]he people who close their ears to the cries of the Palestinians and blindly support [the Zionist] regime will be responsible for the consequences.” (MEMRI, No. 1212, July 26; Globe & Mail, July 21) “If we’re going to have a permanent settlement in the Middle East, we have to stop this kind of violence, we have to stop these kinds of attacks.”—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, singling out Hezbollah and Hamas for accumulating arsenals and launching terrorist attacks against Israel. On the subject of a multinational peacekeeping force now being discussed by the international community in Rome, Harper said this proposed force should not just keep the peace but root out terror. (National Post, July 26) “It’s double rejection… Not only did the Arabs reject Israel’s right to exist at the dawn of Israel’s statehood, they were prepared to forgo Palestinian independence if it meant accepting a Jewish state.”—International human rights lawyer and former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, speaking at the annual general meeting of the Israeli branch of the Lions of Judah. In a subsequent comment on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cotler said, “We have a leadership that seeks a Middle East holocaust at the same time that it denies the Nazi Holocaust.” (Jerusalem Post, July 2) “On a trip to the Roman ruins of Baalbek, Lebanon, in 2001, I noticed a non-descript entrance to a strange little museum literally dug into the actual temple base—festooned with banners and photos of the Ayatollah and various heroes of various terrorist movements. Well-armed teenagers on motorbikes and in pickup trucks were scurrying in and out of this ‘Museum of Truth and Friendship’ or whatever it was euphemistically called. I asked my guide if I could go have a look at the ‘museum.’ He simply replied, ‘That wouldn’t be a good idea.’ Perhaps it really was a museum of sorts, but as I walked around the 1,800-year-old temple atop the ‘museum,’ I couldn’t help thinking I was walking on a massive munitions store. A mysterious, walled military compound in plain view atop a nearby hill didn’t do much to settle my nerves. Which raises this question: If Hezbollah and other Islamic terrorist groups seem to have no qualms using priceless heritage sites as ‘shields,’ wouldn’t it follow that homes, schools or any other public or private building are used this way as well? That day, I understood that in the war on terror, the line between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ targets no longer holds. And if the Lebanese government really wants to shield their World Heritage sites from bombardment, the first step would be to evict some of the less desirable tenants.”—Raymond Girard, in a letter to the editor in today’s National Post. (National Post, July 26) SHORT TAKES MORE ISRAELIS WOUNDED IN HEZBOLLAH ROCKET ATTACKS—(Jerusalem) Hezbollah continued to fire rocket barrages at northern Israel on Wednesday afternoon. At least 130 rockets were fired at the Tiberias, Safed, Rosh Pina, and Kiryat Shmona. At least 55 Israelis were wounded from rocket attacks in some 35 locations in the country's North, Magen David Adom reported. (Jer. Post, July 26) EIGHT GOLANI SOLDIERS KILLED IN BATTLE—(Jerusalem) Dozens of Hezbollah gunmen, armed with anti-tank missiles, machine guns and geared up in night-vision goggles and bulletproof vests, executed a well-planned ambush on Israeli forces on the outskirts of the southern Lebanese village of Bint Jbail, a known Hezbollah stronghold. The attack devastated Battalion 51 of the Golani Brigade, which left eight soldiers dead, including three officers, and another 22 wounded. BUSH OFFERS LEBANON $30 MILLION—(Washington) American ships and helicopters began delivering US$30-million in aid to help head off a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon. The package, part of US$150-million in international aid requested by the UN, “is designed in recognition of the fact that innocent men, women and children are being hurt,” said Tony Snow, White House press secretary. (National Post, July 25) WHILE MOST CANADIANS SUPPORT ISRAEL, QUEBECERS DO NOT—(Ottawa) Almost two in three Canadians believe Israel’s military action in Lebanon is justified, a new poll has revealed. The survey, conducted online by Ipsos Reid for CanWest News Service and Global National, found 64 per cent of Canadians believed Israel’s action is either somewhat justified or completely justified. However, fifty-seven per cent of Quebecers believed the Israeli response is “not all justified.” When asked which side should compromise in order to secure a ceasefire, 63 per cent of Canadians said it was “those who kidnapped the Israeli soldiers,” while 53 per cent of Quebecers said it was the Israeli government. (National Post, July 25) CANADIAN PUBLIC SATISFIED WITH EVACUATION—(Ottawa) An Ipsos-Reid survey of 1,023 people, conducted on July 20 on the Internet for CanWest News Service and Global National, found 66 per cent of respondents were satisfied with the government’s response to “the largest evacuation of Canadian citizens in Canada’s history.” Only 34 per cent felt the government response was “slow and unacceptable,” with the strongest criticism coming from Quebec, where 50 per cent of respondents were unhappy. The survey also found 56 per cent of respondents believed the evacuees were “unreasonable in demanding that the government get them out of the war zone quicker and without cost.” But 57 per cent of respondents in Quebec disagreed with that view. (National Post, July 22) QUEBEC: ANTI-MUSLIM SENTIMENT HIGHEST—(Montreal) A majority of Canadians expressed a positive view of each of the three religious groups—Christians, Jews and Muslims—mentioned in a poll conducted by Leger Marketing. However, 40 per cent of Quebecers reported a somewhat negative attitude toward Muslims, compared with 14 per cent toward Christians and 18 per cent toward Jews—the highest negative numbers for each group. Results of the poll were likely influenced by the recent arrest of 17 terror suspects in Toronto and the recent violence between Israel and Lebanon, says Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies. (National Post, July 22) SHARON’S CONDITION DETERIORATES—(Jerusalem) Ariel Sharon was taken to an intensive care unit at an Israeli hospital as his condition worsened. Doctors at the Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv said 78-year-old former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who fell into a coma after a stroke on January 4, was suffering from an accumulation of fluids in his body and problems with the functioning of his kidneys. (National Post, July 24; JTA, July 26) RADICAL CLERIC TRIED TO EVACUATE—(London) An Islamist preacher barred from Britain for his radical views tried to join the British evacuation from Lebanon but was turned away. The Syrian born Omar Bakri Mohammed, who settled in Britain in 1985, was banned from re-entering the country last August when the government ruled his presence was “not conducive to the public good.” He headed the radical al-Muhajiroun group in London until 2004 and had praised the 9/11 hijackers as the “magnificent 19.” Bakri said he did not want to return to Britain. “I applied for them to give me a visitor’s visa, not to appeal against the decision to withdraw my indefinite leave to stay in the UK,” he told BBC radio July 21 from Beirut. (National Post, July 22)
Volume VI, No. 1,407 • Tuesday, July 25, 2006 GOD'S ARMY HAS PLANS TO
RUN THE WHOLE MIDDLE EAST “You are the sun of Islam, shining on the universe!” This is how Muhammad Khatami, the mullah who was president of Iran until last year, described Hezbollah last week. It would be no exaggeration to describe Hezbollah — the Lebanese Shi’ite militia — as Tehran’s regional trump card. Each time Tehran has played it, it has won. As war rages between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Tehran policymakers think that this time, too, they can win. “I invite the faithful to wait for good news,” Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last Tuesday. “We shall soon witness the elimination of the Zionist stain of shame.” What are the links between Hezbollah and Iran? In 1982 Iran had almost no influence in Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi’ite bourgeoisie that had had close ties with Iran when it was ruled by the Shah was horrified by the advent of the clerics who created an Islamic republic. Seeking a bridgehead in Lebanon, Iran asked its ambassador to Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, a radical mullah, to create one. Mohtashamipour decided to open a branch in Lebanon of the Iranian Hezbollah (the party of God). After many meetings in Lebanon Mohtashamipour succeeded: in its founding statement it committed itself to the “creation of an Islamic republic in Lebanon”. To this end hundreds of Iranian mullahs, political “educators” and Islamic Revolutionary Guards were dispatched to Beirut. Within two years several radical Shi’ite groups in Lebanon, including some with Marxist backgrounds, had united under the Hezbollah name and became the main force resisting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon after the expulsion of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1983. Terror has been its principal weapon. Throughout the 1980s Hezbollah kidnapped more than 200 foreign nationals in Lebanon, most of them Americans or western Europeans (including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy). It organised the hijacking of civilian aircraft and more or less pioneered the idea of suicide bombings against American and French targets, killing almost 1,000 people, including 241 US marines in Beirut and 58 French paratroopers… Once the Iran-Iraq war was over, Tehran found other uses for its Lebanese asset. It purged and then reshaped Hezbollah to influence the broader course of regional politics while using it to wage a low-intensity war against Israel. In 2000, when the Israelis evacuated the strip they controlled in southern Lebanon, Tehran presented the event as the “first victory of Islam over the Zionist crusader camp” and Hezbollah was lauded across the Arab world… To prop up that myth, Tehran invested in a propaganda campaign that included television “documentaries”, feature films and books and magazine articles. The message was simple: while secular ideologies—from pan-Arabism to Arab socialism—had failed to liberate an inch of Arab territory, Islamism, in its Iranian Khomeinist version working through Hezbollah, had achieved “total victory” over Israel… …Hezbollah was launched with just £13m. After that, according to best estimates, Iran spent £32m to £54m a year on its Lebanese assets. Even if we add the cost of training Hezbollah fighters and equipping them with hardware, Hezbollah (the strongest fighting force in the Middle East after Iran and Israel) has not cost Iran more than £1.3 billion over two decades. According to Naim Kassem, Hezbollah’s number two, the party has an annual budget of £279m, much of which comes from businesses set up by the movement… In its power base in southern Lebanon, particularly south Beirut and the Bekaa valley, it is possible for a visitor to spend a whole week without stepping outside a Hezbollah business unit: the hotel he checks into, the restaurant he eats in, the taxi that takes him around, the guide who shows him the sights and the shop where he buys souvenirs all belong to the party. Hezbollah is a state within the Lebanese state. It controls some 25% of the national territory. Almost 400,000 of Lebanon’s estimated 4m inhabitants live under its control. It collects its own taxes with a 20% levy, known as “khoms”, on all incomes. It runs its own schools, where a syllabus produced in Iran is taught at all levels. It also runs clinics, hospitals, social welfare networks and centres for orphans and widows. The party controls the elected municipal councils and appoints local officials, who in theory should be selected by the central government in Beirut. To complete its status as a virtual state, the party maintains a number of unofficial “embassies”: the one in Tehran is bigger and has a larger number of staff than that of Lebanon itself. Hezbollah also has its own media including a satellite television channel, Al-Manar (the lighthouse), which is watched all over the Arab world, four radio stations, newspapers and magazines plus a book publishing venture. The party has its own system of justice based on sharia and operates its own police force, courts and prisons… Its relationship with the rest of Lebanon is complex; it occupies 14 seats in the 128-seat national assembly and holds two portfolios in the council of ministers. But it still describes itself as “a people-based movement fighting on behalf of the Muslim world”. The backbone of all that is Hezbollah’s militia, a fighting force of about 8,000 men, trained and armed with the latest weapons by Iran and Syria. Of these about 2,000 men represent an elite force under the direct command of the party’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, a former pupil of the late Ayatollah Khomeini… [T]he party also claims more than 30,000 reservists. Arab and western experts concur that Hezbollah’s militia is a stronger fighting force than the Lebanese army that is supposed to disarm it under United Nations resolution 1559. Also, most soldiers in the official Lebanese army are Shi’ites who would balk at fighting their own. Accounts concerning Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons vary. The militia is said to be armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and an Iranian rapid-fire gun initially modelled on the Israeli Uzi. The party’s crown jewels, however, are an estimated 14,000 rockets and missiles shipped in from Iran over the past six years. Most of these are modified versions of the Soviet-designed Katyusha. The party also has some Chinese-made Silkworm missiles for special use in naval warfare… A few minutes’ drive south from central Beirut takes you into what appears to be a different country… Once you enter Hezbollah land, the scene changes. You feel as if you are in Qom, the Iranian holy city, with men sporting bushy beards and women covered by mandatory hijab, milling around in noisy narrow streets fronted by nondescript shops. Billboards that advertise global bands in Beirut are used in Hezbollah land for pasting giant portraits of Khomeini and the Iranian “supreme guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Not surprisingly Hezbollah describes its territory as “Dar al-Iman” (House of Faith)... Support for Hezbollah cuts across the political divides within the Iranian ruling establishment. Whether “reformist” or “hardliner”, Iran’s ruling mullahs and their political associates look to Hezbollah as a reflection of their own revolutionary youth. Last week parliamentary members of the Islamic Majlis in Tehran set aside their disputes to unite in their demand to go and fight alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon if Sheikh Nasrallah called them. Why has Tehran decided to play its Lebanese card now? Part of the answer lies in Washington’s decision last May to reverse its policy towards Iran by offering large concessions on its nuclear program. Tehran interpreted that as a sign of weakness. Ahmadinejad believes that his strategy to drive the “infidel” out of the Islamic heartland cannot succeed unless Arabs accept Iran’s leadership. The problem is that since the Iranian regime is Shi’ite it would not be easy to sell it to most Arabs, who are Sunni. To overcome that hurdle, it is necessary to persuade the Arabs that only Iran is sincere in its desire and capacity to wipe Israel off the map. Once that claim is sold to the Arabs, so Ahmadinejad hopes, they would rally behind his vision of the Middle East instead of the “American vision”. That strategy pushed Israel to the top of Tehran’s agenda. This is why, in May, Tehran became the first country to grant the Hamas government in the occupied territories an emergency grant of £27m to cope with a freeze imposed by European Union aid and other international donations. As moderate Arab countries have distanced themselves from Hamas, Iran along with Syria has stepped in. The pincer war launched by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel is also related to domestic politics. In the occupied territories, Hamas needs to marginalise Mahmoud Abbas’s PLO and establish itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In Lebanon, Hezbollah wants to prevent the consolidation of power in the hands of a new pro-American coalition government led by Fouad Siniora, the prime minister, and Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader. …If the pincer war against Israel is won, Iran would be able to expand its zone of influence, already taking shape in Iraq and assured in Syria, to take in Lebanon and Gaza. This would be the first time since the 7th century that Persian power has extended so far to the west. The strategy is high risk. If the Israelis manage to crush Hamas and destroy Hezbollah’s military machine, Iran’s influence will diminish massively. Defeat could revive an internal Hezbollah debate between those who continue to support a total and exclusive alliance with Iran until the infidel, led by America, is driven out of the Middle East and those who want Hezbollah to distance itself from Tehran and emphasise its Lebanese identity. One reason why Hezbollah has found such little support among Arabs in Egypt and Saudi Arabia this time is the perception that it is fighting Israel on behalf of Iran, a Persian Shi’ite power that has been regarded by the majority of Arab Sunnis as an ancestral enemy… The mini war that is taking place between Israel and Hezbollah is, in fact, a proxy war in which Iran’s vision for the Middle East clashes with the administration in Washington. What is at stake is not the exchange of kidnapped Israeli soldiers with Arab prisoners in Israel. Such exchanges have happened routinely over five decades. The real issue is who will set the agenda for the Middle East: Iran or America? IRAN'S
SHOWDOWN WITH THE WEST …We don't know whether Hezbollah anticipated the strong Israeli reaction to its kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. That means we don't know whether Hezbollah intended to trigger a major regional war—or whether it complacently assumed it could pressure Israel into a 400-to-1 prisoner exchange like the one Hezbollah extracted in 2004. But [we do know]that Hezbollah is financed, equipped, and trained by the Iranian secret service. It carries out terror missions on behalf of Iran. For all practical purposes, Hezbollah is an arm of the Iranian state. And when Hezbollah goaded Israel into war, the war it triggered was not a war between Israel and Lebanon. The war Hezbollah provoked is a war between Israel and Iran, with Hezbollah as Iran's proxy--and the people of Lebanon as Iran's victims. The Lebanese have been kidnapped by Iran as surely as those two Israeli soldiers abducted on the northern border. Israel has recognized that tragic fact. It has fought this war on its northern border as humanely as it can. Flip the switch in Beirut and the lights come on; open the taps, and the water flows. Essential services have been spared. The runways at Beirut Airport have been bombed to stop reinforcements to Hezbollah, but the control towers and the newly built terminal have been spared because Lebanon will need them later. Unintended civilian casualties have tragically occurred, as they do in any war. But Israel's sincere and costly attempts to minimize the loss of innocent life present a stark contrast with Hezbollah's deliberately atrocious war methods. Hezbollah has boasted that it has tried to fire missiles into Haifa's chemical factories, in hope of releasing gases to poison the civilian population. Hezbollah rocket warheads arrive crammed with ball bearings, so as to inflict maximum death and suffering upon the civilian populations at which they are fired. Nobody wants the war to last a minute longer than it needs to. But ironically, letting this war go to the finish would be a far more humane policy than the UN's call for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire. If the war ends today, it ends with Hezbollah bloodied, but intact. It ends with Hezbollah still in possession of much of southern Lebanon, ready to be resupplied and reinforced by Syria and Iran. It ends with Hezbollah able to boast that it fought a war with Israel that ended with Israeli concessions. In other words: it ends with a Hezbollah, which is to say an Iranian, victory. What would happen then? Well, such a victory would finish forever the hopes of those Lebanese, the majority of the population, who want to see their country regain its national independence. And it would embolden the mullahs of Iran. In the early 1990s, the mullahs launched a global terror campaign. They assassinated Iranian dissident exiles in the streets of Paris and the restaurants of Berlin. In 1994, they bombed the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, killing almost 100 people, and bombed the Israeli embassy. In 1996 they attacked the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 17 Americans. That last attack was too much even for the Clinton admininstration, which issued an ultimatum to the Iranians. Overt Iranian violence subsided. Instead, the Iranians redoubled their investment in their nuclear bomb program so that next time, they could kill with impunity. "Next time" is now here. Intended or not, the war on Israel's northern border is Iran's showdown with the West. Now see the stakes if Iran loses. If Hezbollah is destroyed as a military force, Iran loses its most potent weapon of attack and retaliation against the Western world. Through the years of negotiating with Iran over its nuclear bomb program, the Iranians have repeatedly threatened: "If you should dare ever to strike our nuclear facilities, we will unleash a global Hezbollah terror campaign against oil in the Persian Gulf, against Israel, against Europe, against the United States!" No more Hezbollah means no more such terror threats. When negotiations over the nuclear program resume, they will resume with the West powerfully strengthened and Iran visibly weakened by the failure of Iran's own reckless aggression. This will be Israel's achievement--and Israel's latest gift to the peace of the world. To achieve this positive result, however, Israel must be allowed to finish the job. Israel must be allowed to shatter Hezbollah as a military force and put an end to its state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon. Once that work is done, the international community can act to rebuild and restore. There has been talk of replacing Hezbollah with an international military force. The right kind of force should be welcome. Not a UN force obviously: the UN force in southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, not only stood by as Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers, but actually helped cover up for Hezbollah by concealing videotape it had recorded of the attack. But a NATO force, perhaps led by France, which has strongly championed Lebanese independence from Syria--such a force could open the way to peace, reconstruction, and the full democratization of Lebanon. All that comes later. There is a war to be won first. We grieve for the innocent Lebanese victimized by Iran's terror war. But we remember too the millions of other innocents for whom we would have to grieve unless Iran's power to wreak terror, next time with nukes, is taken away in time. Volume VI, No. 1,406 • Monday, July 24, 2006 HOSTAGE
TO HEZBOLLAH Pity Lebanon: In a world of states, it has not had a state of its own. A garden without fences, was the way Beirut, its capital city, was once described. A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin. He presented the country with a fait accompli: the "gift" of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped across an international frontier. Nasrallah never let the Lebanese government in on his venture. He was giddy with triumphalism and defiance when this crisis began… It did not seem to matter to Nasrallah that the ground that would burn in Lebanon would in the main be Shiite land in the south. Nor was it of great concern to he who lives on the subsidies of the Iranian theocrats that the ordinary Lebanese would pay for his adventure. The cruel and cynical hope was that Nasrallah's rivals would be bullied into submission and false solidarity, and that the man himself would emerge as the master of the game of Lebanon's politics. …History repeats here, endlessly it seems. There was something to Nasrallah's conduct that recalled the performance of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Six Day War of 1967. That leader, it should be recalled, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, asked for the evacuation of U.N. forces from the Sinai Peninsula--clear acts of war--but never expected the onset of war. He had only wanted the gains of war. Nasrallah's brazen deed was, in the man's calculus, an invitation to an exchange of prisoners. Now, the man who triggered this crisis stands exposed as an Iranian proxy, doing the bidding of Tehran and Damascus. He had confidently asserted that "sources" in Israel had confided to Hezbollah that Israel's government would not strike into Lebanon because Hezbollah held northern Israel hostage to its rockets, and that the demand within Israel for an exchange of prisoners would force Ehud Olmert's hand. The time of the "warrior class" in Israel had passed, Nasrallah believed, and this new Israeli government, without decorated soldiers and former generals, was likely to capitulate. Now this knowingness has been exposed for the delusion it was. There was steel in Israel and determination to be done with Hezbollah's presence on the border. States can't--and don't--share borders with militias. That abnormality on the Lebanese-Israeli border is sure not to survive this crisis. One way or other, the Lebanese army will have to take up its duty on the Lebanon-Israel border. By the time the dust settles, this terrible summer storm will have done what the Lebanese government had been unable to do on its own. In his cocoon, Nasrallah did not accurately judge the temper of his own country to begin with. No less a figure than the hereditary leader of the Druze community, Walid Jumblatt, was quick to break with Hezbollah, and to read this crisis as it really is. "We had been trying for months," he said, "to spring our country out of the Syrian-Iranian trap, and here we are forcibly pushed into that trap again." In this two-front war--Hamas's in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah's in Lebanon--Mr. Jumblatt saw the fine hand of the Syrian regime attempting to retrieve its dominion in Lebanon, and to forestall the international investigations of its reign of terror in that country… In retrospect, Ehud Barak's withdrawal from Israel's "security zone" in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2000 had robbed Hezbollah of its raison d'être... But the imperative of disarming Hezbollah and pulling it back from the international border with Israel was never put into effect. Hezbollah found its way into Parliament, was given two cabinet posts in the most recent government, and branched out into real estate ventures; but the heavy military infrastructure survived and, indeed, was to be augmented in the years that followed Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Syria gave Hezbollah cover... A pretext was found to justify the odd spectacle of an armed militia in a time of peace: Hezbollah now claimed that the battle had not ended, and that a barren piece of ground, the Shebaa Farms, was still in Israel's possession. By a twist of fate, that land had been in Syrian hands when they fell to Israel in the Six Day War. No great emotions stirred in Lebanon about the Shebaa Farms. It was easy to see through the pretense of Hezbollah. The state within a state was an end in itself. For Hezbollah, the moment of truth would come when Syria made a sudden, unexpected retreat out of Lebanon in the spring of 2005. An edifice that had the look of permanence was undone with stunning speed as the Syrians raced to the border, convinced that the Pax Americana might topple the regime in Damascus, as it had Saddam Hussein's tyranny. For Hezbollah's leaders, this would be a time of great uncertainty. The "Cedar Revolution" that had helped bring an end to Syrian occupation appeared to be a genuine middle-class phenomenon, hip and stylish, made up in the main of Sunni Muslims, Druze and Christians. Great numbers of propertied and worldly Shiites found their way to that Cedar Revolution, but Hezbollah's ranks were filled with the excluded, newly urbanized people from villages in the south and the Bekaa Valley. ...A seam was stitched between the jihadist origins of Hezbollah and the pursuit of political power in a country as subtle and complex and pluralistic as Lebanon… But Nasrallah was in the end just the Lebanese face of Hezbollah… Hezbollah is fully subservient to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The hope that Hezbollah would "go Lebanese," and "go local," was thus set aside… That raid into Israel, the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, was a deliberate attack against the new Lebanon. That the crisis would play out when the mighty of the G-8 were assembled in Russia was a good indication of Iran's role in this turn of events. Hassan Nasrallah had waded beyond his depth: The moment of his glory would mark what is destined to be a setback of consequence for him and for his foot soldiers. Iran's needs had trumped Hezbollah's more strictly Lebanese agenda. In the normal course of things, Hezbollah's operatives expected at least the appearance of Arab solidarity and brotherhood. And here, too, Hezbollah was to be denied. A great diplomatic setback was handed it when Saudi Arabia shed its customary silence and reticence to condemn what it described as the "uncalculated adventures" of those in Hezbollah and Hamas who brought about this crisis. The custodians of power in Arabia noted that they had stood with the "Lebanese resistance" until the end of Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. But that was then, and there is a world of difference between "legitimate resistance" and "uncalculated adventures undertaken by elements within the state, and behind its back, exposing the region and its accomplishments to danger and destruction." Gone was the standard deference to Arab solidarity. This had little to do with the Shiism of Hezbollah, but with the Saudi dread of instability. The Saudis are heavily invested in the reconstruction and stability of Lebanon… Untold thousands of Saudis have their summer homes and vacations in Lebanon. A memory of old Beirut in its days of glitter tugs at older Saudis. On less sentimental grounds, the Saudis have been keen to shore up Lebanon's mercantile Sunni population against the demographic and political weight of the Shiites. Hezbollah's unilateral decision to push Lebanon over the brink was anathema to the Saudi way. In due course, the Saudis were joined by the Jordanians and the Egyptians. The Arab order of power would not give Nasrallah control over the great issues of regional war and peace. Nor would it give sustenance to Syria's desire to find its way back into Lebanon's politics. The axes of the region were laid bare: The trail runs from the southern slums of Beirut through Damascus to Tehran--with Hezbollah and its Palestinian allies in the Hamas on one side, and the conservative order of power on the other. This isn't exactly the split between the Sunni Arab order and its Shiite challengers. (Hamas, it should be noted, is zealously Sunni.) The wellsprings of this impasse are to be found in the more prosaic impasse between order and its radical enemies. In time, we are sure to hear from Nasrallah's own Shiite community: There had been unease among growing numbers of educated Shiites about the political monopoly over their affairs of Hezbollah and its local allies, an unease with the zealotry and the military parades--and with the subservience to Iran. The defection will be easier now as the downtrodden of southern Lebanon take stock of the misery triggered by Nasrallah's venture. He will need enormous Iranian treasure to repair the damage of this ill-starred endeavor. The Shiites are Lebanon's single largest community. There lie before them two ways: Lebanonism, an attachment to their own land, assimilation into the wider currents of their country, an acceptance of it as a place of services and trade and pluralism; or a path of belligerence, a journey on road to Damascus--and to the Iranian theocracy. By the time the guns fall silent and the Lebanese begin to dig out of the rubble, we should get an intimation of which Shiite future beckons. The Shiites can make Lebanon or they can break it. Their deliverance lies in a recognition of the truths and limitations of their country. The "holy war" they can leave to others. There could have been another way: There could have been a sovereign state in Lebanon, and the Syrians would have let it be, and the distant Iranian state would have been a world apart. There needn't have been a Lebanese parody of the Iranian Revolution, a "sister republic" by the Mediterranean sustained with Iranian wealth. The border between Israel and Lebanon would have been a "normal" border. (The Lebanese would settle for a border as quiet and tranquil as the one Syria has maintained with Israel for well over three decades now, with the Syrians waging proxy battles on Lebanese soil and through Lebanese satraps.) But the Lebanese have been given to feuds among themselves, and larger players have found it easy to insert themselves into that small, fragile republic. Now the Lebanese have been given yet again a cautionary tale about what befalls lands without sovereign, responsible states of their own. In an earlier time, three decades ago, Lebanon was made to pay for the legends of Arabism, and for the false glamour of the Palestinian "revolutionary" experiment. The country lost well over a quarter-century of its history--its best people quit it, and its modernist inheritance was brutally and steadily undermined. Now comes this new push by Damascus and Tehran. It promises nothing save sterility and ruin. It will throw the Lebanese back onto a history whose terrible harvest is well known to them. The military performance of Hezbollah, it should be apparent by now, is not a performance of a militia; nor are unmanned drones and missiles of long range the weapons of boys of the alleyways. A formidable military structure has been put together by the Iranians in Lebanon. In a small, densely populated country that keeps and knows no secrets, Hezbollah and its Iranian handlers have been at work on this military undertaking for quite some time, under the gaze of Lebanese authorities too frightened to raise questions. The Mediterranean vocation of Lebanon as a land of enlightenment and commerce may have had its exaggerations and pretense. But set it against the future offered Lebanon by Syria, and by Tehran's theocrats seeking a diplomatic reprieve for themselves by setting Lebanon on fire, and Lebanon's choice should be easy to see. The Lebanese, though, are not masters of their own domain. They will need protection and political support; they will need to see the will and the designs of the radical axis contested by resolute American power, and by an Arab constellation of states that can convince the Shiites of Lebanon that there is a place for them in the Arab scheme of things. For a long time, the Arab states have worked through and favored the Sunni middle classes of Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli. This has made it easy for Iran--overcoming barriers of language and distance--to make its inroads into a large Shiite community awakening to a sense of power and violation. To truly turn Iran back from the Mediterranean, to check its reach into Beirut, the Arab world needs to rethink the basic compact of its communities, and those Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world will have to be brought into the old. Lebanon's strength lies in its weakness, went an old maxim. And the Arab states themselves were for decades egregious in the way they treated Lebanon, shifting onto it the burden of the Palestinian fight with Israel, acquiescing in the encroachments on its sovereignty by the Palestinians and the Syrians--encroachments often subsidized with Arab money. Iran then picked up where the Arab states left off. Now that weakness of the Lebanese state has become a source of great menace to the Lebanese, and to their neighbors as well. No one can say with confidence how this crisis will play out. There are limits on what Israel can do in Lebanon. The Israelis will not be pulled deeper into Lebanon and its villages and urban alleyways, and Israel can't be expected to disarm Hezbollah or to find its missiles in Lebanon's crannies. Finding the political way out, and working out a decent security arrangement on the border, will require a serious international effort and active American diplomacy. International peacekeeping forces have had a bad name, and they often deserve it. But they may be inevitable on Lebanon's border with Israel; they may be needed to buy time for the Lebanese government to come into full sovereignty over its soil. The Europeans claim a special affinity for Lebanon, a country of the eastern Mediterranean. This is their chance to help redeem that land, and to come to its rescue by strengthening its national army and its bureaucratic institutions. We have already seen order's enemies play their hand. We now await the forces of order and rescue, and by all appearances a long, big struggle is playing out in Lebanon. This is from the Book of Habakkuk: "The violence done to Lebanon shall overwhelm you" (2:17). The struggles of the mighty forces of the region yet again converge on a small country that has seen more than its share of history's heartbreak and history's follies. (Fouad Ajami, a 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, is the Majid Khadduri Professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book, "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq," has just been published by the Free Press.)
Volume VI, No. 1,405 • Friday, July 21, 2006
A STRATEGIC
ASSESSMENT OF THE HIZBALLAH WAR: …The current war being waged against Israel by Hizballah and its Syrian and Iranian patrons is in large part the result of Israel's long-time, hands-off policy with regard to the Lebanon-based fundamentalist terror group. Since Israel's overnight unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Hizballah built itself into a deterrent military force possessing 13,000 to 15,000 short- and medium-range missiles. The terror organization exploited Israel's political preference to maintain the relative quiet for the residents of its northern border communities instead of uprooting the Hizballah terror infrastructure and risking war. As a result of Israel's skittishness to confront it, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah assessed that he could determine when to launch hostilities against Israel completely on Hizballah's terms. Hizballah - the "Party of God" - has no red lines. Any strategic strike that it can execute, it will execute, limited only by its ability and the conditions permitting it to carry out an attack at any particular moment. In that regard, Hassan Nasrallah lives in his own bubble in which he judges democratic Israel the same way he judges the Lebanese or those in Hizballah. Nasrallah recently called Israeli resolve "weaker than a spider's web." Nasrallah's decision to kidnap two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was made partly in reaction to Hamas' kidnapping at the Israel-Gaza border of Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Nasrallah said in a speech shortly after the terror attack and kidnapping of the two Israeli army reservists that he wished to negotiate an exchange for Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese terrorist, and other "prisoners and detainees held by Israel." Israeli intelligence assessed that Nasrallah meant he would also negotiate for Palestinians as well, and thereby assume a leading role on the Palestinian issue as well, even ahead of Hamas… According to Israeli intelligence assessments, Hizballah, Syria, and Iran were taken by surprise by the sheer magnitude and intensity of Israel's response to the missile attacks and kidnapping. Nasrallah did not understand what causes a democratic country to act harshly when its red lines are crossed and its citizens are threatened, as Israelis are today. Nasrallah never thought that as a result of kidnapping two soldiers, Israel would launch such a far-reaching counter-offensive. He failed to understand that Israel has gone to war because Hizballah has launched a strategic attack against it, and that Israel views the kidnappings as part of a much greater threat… Hizballah has a disciplined, well-trained army with sophisticated weaponry, backed directly by Syria and Iran. …According to a May 11, 2006, Asharq Al-Awsat report, a high-level Iranian official who held a closed meeting with a small group of Western diplomats in London emphasized Hizballah's importance to Iran: "Hizballah is one of the pillars of our security strategy, and forms Iran's first line of defense against Israel. We reject [the claim] that it must be disarmed." Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, shares this perspective: "The war is no longer Lebanon's...it is an Iranian war. Iran is telling the United States: You want to fight me in the Gulf and destroy my nuclear program? I will hit you at home, in Israel." Hizballah is not an independent actor. Iran's Revolutionary Guards provide the majority of Hizballah's weaponry, financing, instruction, and strategic command and control. Most of Hizballah's terrorist weaponry, particularly short- and medium-range missiles—including the Zalzal missile that can reach as far as Tel Aviv, 150 kilometers from Israel's northern border—are manufactured in Iran and exported to Lebanon via the Damascus International Airport. Weaponry and materiel are then openly transported by truck convoys to Hizbullah in Lebanon. According Israeli intelligence, Iranian officers from the Revolutionary Guards are on the ground in Lebanon, playing active roles in supervising terror actions and training Hizballah operatives to launch rockets against Israel. On July 14, Hizbullah fired an Iranian copy of a Chinese C-802 Kowthar missile at an Israeli warship, killing four crew members. These rockets have been in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' arsenal for four or five years. Some of Hizballah's weaponry is manufactured by Syria and is provided to the terror organization at the direct order of President Bashar Assad. The rockets in the first barrage that struck the northern city of Haifa on July 16, killing eight Israelis, were manufactured and supplied by Syria. Other medium-range Syrian and Iranian missiles are also in Hizballah's stockpile but have yet to be used against Israel. Dimensions of the
Conflict Second, Hizballah cannot be allowed to be the driving force that decides, whenever it so chooses, together with its Syrian and Iranian patrons, to inflame the Middle East. In this sense, Israel's current war in Lebanon is not punitive; it is strategic. The Israeli air force has struck the main arteries for the transfer of weapons to Hizballah from Syria and Iran through Beirut International Airport, all Lebanese seaports, and across the Beirut-Damascus highway from the east, which has served as one of Hizballah's main lines of weapons transport. During the present hostilities, Syria has continued to attempt to resupply Hizballah in the Bekaa Valley, as well. In bombing Hizballah's Daheyh stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Israel is seeking to separate it from Hizballah forces further south. Thus, Hizballah is being cut off from Syria and Iran and isolated from the rest of Lebanon. Hizballah has waged an insurgency against Israel from the mini-state it has created inside of Lebanon. The only way to defeat an insurgency is to first isolate it from external reinforcement. That is what Israel is seeking to do. In a second phase, the insurgency must be disarmed. In this regard, the international community must enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1559 that imposes the obligations of state sovereignty and responsibility on Lebanon to force the Hizballah to disarm, as even French President Jacques Chirac has demanded. The third and broader dimension of the escalating conflict is that Hizballah is nothing less than an extension of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iran has taken a strategic decision to activate Hizballah terror against Israel in order to preclude the United States and its Western allies from stopping Iran's nuclear development program. The uprooting of Hizballah's military capacity will neutralize one of Iran's most dangerous and valuable deterrent threats against any country that attempts to act against Tehran's nuclear weapons program. Israel must carry out its current military operation against Hizballah until it is fully neutralized, disarmed, and unable to serve as Iran's long "arm" that can bring terror upon Israel and destabilize the Middle East region at will. The current Israeli victims of Hizballah terror will not have sacrificed their lives in vain if Israel conducts its war to an uncompromising victory. However, if Hizballah is allowed to remain a military force in Lebanon or even an armed presence in southern Lebanon, Israel will have indeed sacrificed its soldiers and citizens in vain, and will also suffer similar attacks in the future. Furthermore, it is a primary interest of the international community that Hizballah be fully neutralized as a military extension of Iran. Only a full victory against Hizballah will allow the possibility for Lebanon to emerge as a free and democratic country. This is also in line with the Bush Administration's vision of helping the peoples of the Middle East to free themselves of tyrannical and fundamentalist elements and prevent the threat to the region of a nuclear Iran. This underscores the regional and international importance of Israel's current mission. Any Syrian or Iranian forces or advisors in Lebanon are legitimate targets for Israel. Israel must send a clear message to Bashar Assad that it will not accept any Syrian interference in Lebanon. However, while Israel should not open up a front against Syria at this juncture, if Syrian forces show any type of movement, Israel must be ready to engage them. The duration of the current war depends on Israel, Lebanon, and the international community. If the Lebanese realize that with every passing day the accumulating losses are taking too great a toll, if the international community continues to allow Israel to uproot Hizballah without pressuring Israel for a cease-fire, and if the UN stays out of the fray, the war does not have to last very long. But if Israel is pressured to stop its operations, this acute conflict will indeed last a long time. This is a war in which Israel is acting primarily through its air force, which is a new approach. However, if Israel's air force fails to stop Hizballah rocket assaults, Israel may be forced to send in substantial ground forces to control the areas from which rockets are being launched. This real possibility would have far-reaching implications in terms of potential losses for the IDF and for the citizens of Lebanon. No less significant is Israel's readiness to absorb damage to its home front. This requires a much higher degree of national resilience than that of the first Iraq war when Saddam Hussein fired 39 Scud missiles at Israeli cities. This time there is much more damage and loss of life on the home front, but Israel is showing great fortitude and national will… In order to achieve its war objectives, Israel must succeed on the diplomatic front in addition to the battlefield. It would be nothing short of catastrophic for both Israel and the international community if diplomatic efforts result in Israel being forced to end its military operation prematurely. Furthermore, it is incumbent on the international community, which last year demanded that the Syrian army withdraw from Lebanon, to provide the necessary assistance to Lebanon that will ensure that Hizballah is disbanded as a military force, and this must be the highest international priority. (Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, Program Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs, is former commander of the IDF's National Defense College and the IDF Staff and Command College. Dan Diker is a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and heads its Defensible Borders Initiative.) THE
HYENAS AND MAGGOTS WHO FEED OFF OUR WORLD Beneath the anguished sounds of destruction in the Levant, a new Lebanon is being born. This Lebanon will be freed from the savage hordes of Hezbollah jihadists, snatched from the jaws of Syrian and Iranian hyenas, and liberated at last from Palestinian Arab maggots who for 50 years masqueraded as freedom fighters and poisoned everything they touched. As we watch this magnificent tragedy unfold amid so much blood, tears, guts, rockets, and smoke, we, the long silenced Arab majority, must insist that it bring down the curtain on the barbarians in our midst. Given the enormous stakes, it is imperative that the collective will of Israel, America, France—indeed, all of Europe—and the many Arab nations quietly backing the fight does not weaken before the job is done. It was Lebanon's misfortune to be the experimental theater where jihadists first spread mayhem back in the 1980s, killing American and French soldiers, initiating the long, dark nightmares of hostages and terror, and placing Lebanon under Syria's boot for 30 years. It is only fair, then, that in the past week Lebanon has witnessed the return of American Marines, 22 years after their flight, and of the Israeli army, back this time to liberate, not occupy. By all indications, these troops are laboring hand in hand with Arabs who want to roll back the march of Islamic fundamentalism and its kingdom of darkness. We should view the events now unfolding not as a local battle for Lebanon but as a larger fight for the future of the entire Arab nation. For two decades, this nation of 350 million has been hijacked by a bizarre collection of Neanderthals, pseudo-revolutionaries, illiterate imams, and "Mad Max"-style Palestinian Arab terrorists of every hue, all united only in their desire to pillage in the name of a religion they expropriated. Their manifest failure, which we hope will be delivered in resounding military terms, should come as a hard knock on the head of any Arab drifters. Cynics and cowards are already shouting "Enough!" but we know it will only be enough when the madman of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, and…the whole Hezbollah movement in Lebanon—as well as Hamas and the other freelance Palestinian Arab factions—is convincingly discredited. These groups are already running on empty… The first phase of their path to disgrace is complete: Sheik Nasrallah and various Hamas leaders have joined the growing club of Arab terrorist fugitives in hiding, sneaking their videotapes to Al-Jazeera like Osama bin Laden. Gone are the days when they could find hideouts among their patrons. Unless the Israeli campaign in Lebanon collapses, Sheik Nasrallah will have to be smuggled into Iran, where he will be kept under wraps. By far the biggest surprise in this debacle has been Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf Arab states' unstinting denunciation of their would-be fundamentalist minions. One after another, senior Saudi princes—as well as Egyptian, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, and other Arab decision-makers—have made it clear they will not support Hezbollah… While they have been critical of Israel's destruction of Lebanon, none have championed Hezbollah's unilateral rush to war. Nor have they objected to Israel's determination to rout Hezbollah—or, for that matter, Israel's hounding of Hamas. Indeed, both jihadist groups have been described repeatedly as an embarrassment to Muslim governance. Behind it all is the Arab world's growing impatience with the concept of "eternal struggle" and the heavy price paid after September 11, 2001. Today's Arab world is a much younger and more prosperous place, one that is eager for modernization and globalization. This Arab world has graduated from juvenile pursuits of Palestinian Arab causes, dreams of Arab nationalism, and hopes for a Muslim super-nation. And guess who these Arabs are now following into liberation from their ghosts? Israel. Shabbat Shalom to all our readers! Volume VI, No. 1,404 • Thursday, July 20, 2006
LEBANON:
THE ONLY EXIT STRATEGY There is crisis and there is opportunity. Amid the general wringing of hands over the seemingly endless and escalating Israel-Hezbollah fighting, everyone asks: Where will it end? The answer, blindingly clear, begins with understanding that this crisis represents a rare, perhaps irreproducible, opportunity. Every important party in the region and in the world, except the radical Islamists in Tehran and their clients in Damascus, wants Hezbollah disarmed and removed from south Lebanon so that it is no longer able to destabilize the peace of both Lebanon and the broader Middle East. Which parties? Start with the great powers. In September 2004 they passed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, demanding that Hezbollah disarm and allow the Lebanese army to take back control of south Lebanon. The resolution enjoyed the sponsorship of the United States and, yes, France… Then there are the Arabs, beginning with the Lebanese who want Hezbollah out. The majority of Lebanese--Christian, Druze, Sunni Muslim and secular--bitterly resent their country's being hijacked by Hezbollah and turned into a war zone. And in the name of what Lebanese interest? Israel evacuated every square inch of Lebanon six years ago. The other Arabs have spoken, too. In a stunning development, the 22-member Arab League criticized Hezbollah for provoking the current crisis. It is unprecedented for the Arab League to criticize any Arab party while it is actively engaged in hostilities with Israel. But the Arab states know that Hezbollah, a Shiite militia in the service of Persian Iran, is a threat not just to Lebanon but to them as well. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have openly criticized Hezbollah for starting a war on what is essentially Iran's timetable (to distract attention from Iran's pending referral to the Security Council for sanctions over its nuclear program). They are far more worried about Iran and its proxies than about Israel. They are therefore eager to see Hezbollah disarmed and defanged. Fine. Everyone agrees it must be done. But who to do it? No one. The Lebanese are too weak. The Europeans don't invade anyone. After its bitter experience of 20 years ago, the United States has a Lebanon allergy. And Israel could not act out of the blue because it would immediately have been branded the aggressor and forced to retreat. Hence the golden, unprecedented opportunity. Hezbollah makes a fatal mistake. It crosses the U.N.-delineated international frontier to attack Israel, kill soldiers and take hostages. This aggression is so naked that even Russia joins in the Group of Eight summit communiqué blaming Hezbollah for the violence and calling for the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty in the south. But only one country has the capacity to do the job. That is Israel, now recognized by the world as forced into this fight by Hezbollah's aggression. The road to a solution is therefore clear: Israel liberates south Lebanon and gives it back to the Lebanese. It starts by preparing the ground with air power, just as the Persian Gulf War began with a 40-day air campaign… Just as in Kuwait in 1991, what must follow the air campaign is a land invasion to clear the ground and expel the occupier. Israel must retake south Lebanon and expel Hezbollah. It would then declare the obvious: that it has no claim to Lebanese territory and is prepared to withdraw and hand south Lebanon over to the Lebanese army (augmented perhaps by an international force), thus finally bringing about what the world has demanded—implementation of Resolution 1559 and restoration of south Lebanon to Lebanese sovereignty. Only two questions remain: Israel's will and America's wisdom. Does Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have the courage to do what is so obviously necessary? And will Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's upcoming peace trip to the Middle East force a premature cease-fire that spares her the humiliation of coming home empty-handed but prevents precisely the kind of decisive military outcome that would secure the interests of Israel, Lebanon, the moderate Arabs and the West? THE
STATUS QUO IN GAZA AND SOUTH LEBANON IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE Once again, the spectre of total war looms large over the Middle East. Israel, facing aggressive acts from beyond its borders on two fronts, has responded vigorously against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In the past, such conflicts were understood in the larger context of Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States… This time, the context appears regional, but in fact still has an important global dimension. The patrons of the terrorist groups engaged in unprovoked rocket attacks against Israel are heavily supported and financed by Syria and Iran. It is no coincidence that Iran's clients are stirring the pot just when Iran is facing increased determination from Western countries to do something about its nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the current conflict is another episode in the struggle between militant Islam and the West. To the Islamists, Israel represents many things. Most significantly, it is a majority non-Muslim liberal democratic state and U.S. ally in the centre of what to Islamists should be an exclusively Muslim-dominated region… The objectives of these terrorist organizations in the current conflict include disrupting any progress in relations between Israel and the Palestinians, underscoring certain vulnerabilities and weaknesses of what is arguably the dominant military power in the region, diverting the world's attention from the Iranian nuclear issue and reducing U.S. pressure on Syria. Thus, once again Israelis, Palestinians, and their neighbours are victims of forces outside the immediate area, principally Iran. The current hostilities were precipitated by acts of war, most notably sending rockets over international frontiers into Israeli cities and abducting Israeli soldiers from within Israel. No state that took seriously the wellbeing of its citizens would fail to respond aggressively to such attacks. In 2000, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the security zone it had established in south Lebanon to prevent terrorist attacks across its northern border. Since then, Hezbollah, with Iranian and Syrian support, has set up an effective state within a state in south Lebanon and has positioned about 12,000 rockets targeting Israel. It is now firing those rockets at Israel, causing considerable damage and civilian casualties. In the south, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip in 2005, expecting that the Palestinian Authority would grasp the opportunity to control the terrorist gangs operating there, and demonstrate its people's readiness for peaceful self-government. Instead, Hamas has been firing rockets into Israel from densely populated civilian areas in Gaza for more than 10 months without an effective response from Israel… In voting for Hamas, [the Palestinians] opted for a policy of continued terrorism with the predictable Israeli military reprisals… Israel correctly found that situation intolerable. As a result, Israel cannot return to the same conditions that made it vulnerable to the hostile actions precipitating the current crisis. Instead, through the current campaign Israel must find a way to neutralize the threat from the rockets, even if this requires extensive ground operations in Gaza and Lebanon. But in doing so, Israel faces a grave dilemma. Past occupations of southern Lebanon and Gaza did not solve the terrorism problem. Reoccupation now is not the answer. Although a renewed military presence might be necessary in the short run, some force other than Israel has to exert control in these territories for any hope of a long-term solution. For Lebanon that means Hezbollah, which forms part of the Lebanese government, must be disarmed and that Syria must not be allowed to exert any control over the country. Moreover, the Lebanese government will have to be strengthened with external support to exercise sovereignty throughout the country and ensure its territory cannot be used to attack Israel. Many Lebanese are reportedly furious at Hezbollah for the aggression that triggered Israel's response and damaged the country's efforts to rebuild. Undoubtedly, Israel believes if it exacts a high price for the aggression, Lebanese resolve will be generated to rein in Hezbollah and prevent it from launching future attacks. For the Gaza Strip it will be necessary to have a government in control that acts against terrorists rather than one which represents terrorist interests. To date, the Palestinian Authority has been unable or unwilling to take effective action. Until the Palestinians themselves do something about the terrorists in their midst other than voting for them, they cannot aspire to a normal existence. If the Palestinians are unable to produce an internal solution, perhaps it is time to consider an external one. Certainly the status quo, either in Gaza or in south Lebanon, is no longer acceptable. (Harold Waller, a Fellow of CIJR, teaches Israeli politics at McGill University. Howard Gerson practices law in Toronto.) AFTER
UNIFIL We have to work with the Lebanese government to extend its authority over southern Lebanon... The Lebanese government has indicated to me that already they've put in a thousand troops, and others will follow as the UN also moves down, and we will re-enforce the UN troops on the ground... Let me say that Hizbullah... is a player in the south of Lebanon... I did tell Mr. Nasrallah that Hizbullah exercised restraint, responsibility and discipline after the withdrawal, and that we would want to see that continue, and I'm sure from the indications that he gave me that he intends to do it. - UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, with prime minister Ehud Barak, June 21, 2000 Kofi Annan's faith in "Mr. Nasrallah" and the Lebanese government, just after the UN had certified Israel's complete withdrawal from Lebanon six years ago, was somewhat misplaced. Now Annan is talking about sending a "considerably larger" force than UNIFIL with a "different concept of operation." What can we learn from the UN's failures in Lebanon? The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon was created after a March 11, 1978 PLO attack against Israel from Lebanon that caused "many dead and wounded among the Israeli population," as UNIFIL's Web site explains. Israel retaliated with a massive military operation against the PLO state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon on the night of March 14. The next day, the Lebanese government asked the Security Council to intervene, claiming that the Israeli action had "no connection" to the PLO attack. Just four days later, the Security Council obliged, demanding Israel's immediate withdrawal and establishing UNIFIL to "confirm the Israeli withdrawal, restore international peace and security, and assist the government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area." Almost 30 years later, after much confirming, restoring, and assisting by UNIFIL, Israel is again in Lebanon, again destroying an alien force ensconced there, this one with capabilities that the PLO could only dream of. Hizbullah's massive arsenal of missiles, some of which can reach greater Tel Aviv and are controlled directly by Iran, was assembled under the noses of UNIFIL troops. Indeed, UNIFIL's latest contribution is to complain that the current IDF operation has endangered its troops. Perhaps this is because Hizbullah has been known to base itself right next to UNIFIL forces, in the hopes that Israel would inadvertently hit UNIFIL in response. This is understandable from Hizbullah's cynical perspective, but harder to fathom in relation to UNIFIL's mandate to restore peace and security… UNIFIL has provided more security to Hizbullah than it has to Israel, thereby increasing the likelihood of conflict and helping to make the current war inevitable... Enlarging UNIFIL will not solve this problem. An international force—by whatever name, of whatever size, and manned by whichever countries—can at best be the decoration on a fundamental shift in the strategic landscape that prevents further aggression. That shift must begin with "letting" Israel maximize Hizbullah's destruction. It should continue with a Lebanese, international and Israeli determination to physically prevent southern Lebanon from becoming a terrorist state-within-a-state ever again. There is already broad international understanding that Hizbullah must be trounced, not trusted. To this must be added the realization that the road to peace and security lies not in helping to protect Israel's attackers, but in helping Israel to protect itself.
Volume VI, No. 1,403 • Wednesday, July 19, 2006
WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “[W]e [G8 members] were able to reach a very strong consensus that the world must confront the root causes of the current instability. And the root cause of that current instability is terrorism and terrorist attacks on a democratic country. And part of those terrorist attacks are inspired by nation states, like Syria and Iran. And in order to be able to deal with this crisis, the world must deal with Hezbollah, with Syria and to continue to work to isolate Iran. I strongly believe every nation ought to be able to defend herself from terrorist attacks.”—President George W. Bush, in Washington, discussing this week’s Group of Eight summit meeting in Russia. Bush, responding to questions, added “this crisis started when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers… Imagine how the United States would react if somebody provoked us with that kind of action. And secondly, [Hezbollah] started firing rockets. And it's this provocation of Hezbollah that has created this crisis, and that's the root cause of the problem.” (White House Press Release, July 18) “We sent a firm message that the extremists who committed cross-border murder and kidnapped Israeli soldiers bear the responsibility for instigating the crises in Lebanon and Gaza.”—Canadian PM Steven Harper, referring to the G-8’s position. Last week, following Hezbollah’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers and the endless barrage of rockets on Israeli cities, Harper characterized the action by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government as a "measured" response. At a news conference earlier this week, the Canadian prime minister defended his remarks, “I think our evaluation of the situation has been accurate. Obviously, there's been an ongoing escalation. And frankly, ongoing escalation is inevitable once conflict begins.” Harper added, “We are not going to give in to the temptation of some to single out Israel, which was the victim of the initial attack.” “We recognize it is difficult when you are fighting a non-governmental organization that's embedded in a civilian population,” Harper said in a reference to Hezbollah's dispersed position in southern Lebanon. Israeli PM Ehud Olmert reportedly telephoned Harper early Wednesday, and expressed his appreciation for Canada's statements of support for Israel in the campaign against Hezbollah and Hamas. Olmert also expressed his regret and offered his condolences over the deaths of eight Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon. He emphasized that Israel was fighting Hezbollah and attacking its targets, and was being as careful as possible not to hurt innocent civilians. (Toronto Star, July 18; Independent Media and Review Analysis [IMRA], July 19) “Today there is a multinational force in Lebanon, and we are seeing what they do. I want to be careful about this, and I think it is premature to talk about it.”—Prime Minster Ehud Olmert, cynically referring to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Olmert rejected the idea, raised by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in St. Petersburg, of an international force in Lebanon, but he did not rule out negotiations to end the current crisis. Olmert, in a meeting with Israeli diplomats, said that the idea of an international force made “a good headline,” but that Israel's experience “shows that there is nothing behind it.” (Jerusalem Post, July 19) “As a condition to a ceasefire, Israel demands the enforcement of the UN Security Council resolution that calls for the deployment of the Lebanese Army throughout the country, the dismantling of Hezbollah and the prevention of the organization from rearming.”—Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, in a joint press conference with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, reiterating Israel’s demand that in addition to disarming Hezbollah, the three kidnapped soldiers are returned without any pre-conditions and attacks, from both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, are halted. She argued that it was in everyone’s interest to ensure peace and to accelerate a process that will bring long-term change to the region. (Jerusalem Post, July 19) “If Israel commits another act of idiocy and attacks Syria, this will be the same as an aggression against the entire Islamic orld and it will receive a stinging response.”—Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a telephone conversation with Syrian President Bashar Assad, quoted by Iranian state-run television. (New York Times, July 19) “You wanted open war. We are going to open war. The surprises I promised you will start now. The Israeli war vessels that inflicted damage on our infrastructure…will burn and sink in front of you.”—Hezbollah’s terror leader Sheikh Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, vowing further attacks on Israeli targets, in a television broadcast. “You Arab and Muslim people must take a positive toward your future, the future of your children. The peoples of the Arab and Islamic world have a historic opportunity to score a defeat against the Zionist enemy,” Nasrallah said in his speech which was broadcast live across the Middle East on Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya networks.(Los Angeles Times, July 15; National Post, July 17) “Europeans have forgotten the Nazi Holocaust and expect Israel to let Hamas and Hezbollah attack with impunity… They are not even-handed. I say shame on them. Can you imagine if missiles from Italy or Switzerland rained in on the third biggest city in France?”—Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, calling French President Jacques Chirac’s comments “treacherous”. Chirac, an outspoken critic of Israel and the Iraq war, blasted Israel, calling its military action “totally disproportionate.” (New York Post, July 15) “There is no doubt that the disengagement failed. This failure emanates from the fact that the disengagement was essentially based on a doomed idea. It was not the result of thorough strategic analysis but the result of political distress of…Ariel Sharon.”—Former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon, in an interview last week with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. Yaalon added that Israel’s disengagement from Gaza last summer was a “disengagement from reality.” Yaalon, who will be CIJR’s Keynote Speaker at this year’s Chai Anniversary Gala, explained that the disengagement process “created an illusionary hope that was not planned strategically and practically… The intellectual failure of the disengagement is this,” he said, “the fact that there is no one to speak to on the other side doesn’t mean that we can ignore the other side and the effects of his activities on us…[P]ulling out under fire is perceived as surrender and encourages terror… It brought about Hamas’s victory. It emboldened terror groups… It created a feeling among the Iranian, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al Qaeda, that Israel can be beaten. Our steps affect them,” he concluded, “when the steps are withdrawal after withdrawal, after withdrawal, we convey weakness. And he conveys weakness in the Middle East is like a weak animal in nature: he comes under attack.” (Ha’aretz, July 6) SHORT TAKES POLL: ISRAELI PUBLIC OPPOSES CONVERGENCE—(Jerusalem) A poll conducted by research company Midgam on behalf of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on July 9 and 10—before the current confrontation with Hezbollah began—shows that of the 1004 respondents, 65 per cent believed that the disengagement from Gaza contributed to the rise of Hamas in the Palestinian administered territories. Moreover, 59 per cent opposed Ehud Olmert’s convergence plan, and 60 per cent thought that the plan will expand the Kassam missile threat to additional Israeli cities. A similar majority, 68 per cent, believed that the convergence plan will strengthen extremist elements of the PA. (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, July 19) ROCKETS REACH NAZARETH, KILLING TWO—(Nazareth) Two brothers, three-year-old Muhammed Taluzi and seven-year-old Rabiya Taluzi, were killed today when several Katyusha rockets fell on the Arab Israeli town of Nazareth. An addition 37 people were wounded. According to witnesses, the rockets hit the street while the children were playing outside. (Jerusalem Post, July 19) MONTREAL FAMILY KILLED IN LEBANON—(Montreal) Eight members of a Montreal family were killed by an Israeli bomb which was targeting terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon. Family members said the Montreal pharmacist, Ali Al-Akhrass, died in a Beirut hospital Monday. His wife, four children, mother and uncle also died in the attack while on vacation in Aitaroun, a small village about three kilometers from Israel's border. At a pro-Israel Unity Meeting yesterday, Aaron Remer, B’nai Brith Canada’s chair of international affairs and CIJR’s Israel Chairman said, “Ali Al-Akhrass was a friend of the Jewish community…we’re in complete shock.” At least 229 people have been killed in Lebanon, and more than 450 wounded, since the fighting began one week ago, according to figures reported by Lebanese police and the military. (National Post, July 18; Jer. Post, July 19) PALESTINIANS EAGER TO JOIN HEZBOLLAH—(Gaza) Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have expressed their desire to travel to Lebanon to join Hezbollah in the current confrontation with Israel. "We have thus far received hundreds of requests from people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who have expressed their desire to join the Lebanese resistance forces," one official told the Jerusalem Post. Another official said some veteran PLO security officers who were based in Beirut in the 1970s and 80s had also asked for permission to travel to Lebanon to help Hezbollah. He added, however, that the PA leadership had no intention, at this stage, of dispatching security experts and recruits to Lebanon. (Jer. Post, July 15) ISRAEL DESTROYS MAJORITY OF HEZBOLLAH’S ARSENAL—(Beirut) Israel confirmed yesterday, that its air force had destroyed an Iranian-made long-range Zelzal missile that would have had enough range (200 km) to hit Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. The IDF believes it may another week or two to reach the declared goal of dramatically weakening the Lebanon-based terror group but it has cut its military capability in half. In recent months Hezbollah has built a network of sophisticated control towers and monitoring stations along the length of the border with Israel. The new equipment, which has cost tens of millions of dollars, was paid for by Iran. Israeli officers have reported frequent sightings of Iranian military officials inspecting the new facilities and advising local Hezbollah commanders. (National Post, July 13; CanWest News, July 18) POLICE DETAIN AL-JAZEERA CHIEF—(Jerusalem) Israeli police detained the Jerusalem bureau chief of the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera July 17 for the second time in two days. Walid Al Omari was questioned for several hours about issues related to Israeli military censorship rules and was released without being charged. Israeli authorities and local media have accused the Qatar-based satellite station of showing sensitive security locations that could be used by Hezbollah to pinpoint targets for an attack. Israeli authorities said Umari's coverage of Hezbollah's July 16 attack on Haifa that killed eight people violated military censorship rules that ban real-time reporting of the exact location of rocket hits. (New York Sun, July 18) KILLING SPREE AT MARKET BEGAN AT SHIITE FUNERAL—(Baghdad) Gunmen sprayed grenades and automatic weapons fire in a market south of Baghdad July 17, killing at least 50 people, mostly Shiites. The sectarian attack drew an angry protest from legislators who accused Iraqi forces of idly standing by during the rampage. Several witnesses said the attack began when gunmen, presumed to be Sunnis, fired on the funeral of a member of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, killing nine mourners and then drove to the nearby market. Police said they found 12 bodies, in different parts of town, possible victims of reprisal killings following the market attack. (AP, July 18) HATE SPEECH LANDS ONTARIAN IN JAIL—(Ottawa) The Federal Court, for the first time in Canada, incarcerated a white supremacist for ignoring a court order to stop spreading hate messages against Jews, blacks and immigrants on the Internet. Tomasz Winnicki of London, Ontario has been jailed for nine months for refusing to cease his “vicious and dehumanizing” messages, as per a previous court ruling. According to Justice Konrad von Finckenstein, the Internet postings “send a persistent vile message, which in essence suggests that there is a Zionist conspiracy, that Jews dominate all levels of government, that those of the black race are lazy, AIDS-infected criminals and welfare cheats…and that multiculturalism is a policy conceived by Zionists to perpetuate non-white immigration.” (National Post, July 14) Volume VI, No. 1,402 • Tuesday, July 18, 2006
ADDRESS
TO THE KNESSET BY PM EHUD OLMERT …Over the past few weeks, our enemies have challenged the sovereignty of the State of Israel and the safety of its residents—first in the southern sector, then on the northern border, and deeper into the home front. Israel did not seek these confrontations. On the contrary. We have done a lot to prevent them. We returned to the borders of the State of Israel, recognized by the entire international community. There were those who misconstrued our desire for peace—for us and our neighbors—as a sign of frailty. Our enemies misinterpreted our willingness to exercise restraint as a sign of weakness. They were wrong! … The campaign we are engaged in these days is against the terror organizations operating from Lebanon and Gaza. These organizations are nothing but "sub-contractors" operating under the inspiration, permission, instigation and financing of the terror-sponsoring and peace-rejecting regimes, on the Axis of Evil which stretches from Tehran to Damascus… Iran and Syria still continue to meddle, from afar, in the affairs of Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, through Hizballah and the Hamas. Even if last Wednesday's criminal attack against an IDF patrol was carried out without the consent of the Lebanese government and without the assistance of its military, this does not absolve it of full responsibility for the attack which emanated from its sovereign territory. Just as the fact that the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority opposes terrorism against Israel does not relieve him and the Palestinian Authority of their responsibility for the attack carried out from their territory against our soldiers in Kerem Shalom. They are both fully responsible for the safety of our soldiers who were taken hostage. Radical, terrorist and violent elements are sabotaging the life of the entire region and placing its stability at risk… We can all see how the majority of the international community supports our battle against the terror organizations and our efforts to remove this threat of the Middle East… We will continue to operate in full force until we achieve this. On the Palestinian front, we will conduct a tireless battle until terror ceases, Gilad Shalit is returned home safely and the shooting of Qassam missiles stops. And in Lebanon, we will insist on compliance with the terms stipulated long ago by the international community, as unequivocally expressed only yesterday in the resolution of the eight leading countries of the world: The return of the hostages, Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser and Eldad Regev; A complete cease fire; Deployment of the Lebanese army in all of southern Lebanon; Expulsion of Hizbullah from the area, and Fulfillment of United Nations Resolution 1559… There are moments in the life of a nation, when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality and say: no more! And I say to everyone: no more! Israel will not be held hostage—not by terror gangs or by a terrorist authority or by any sovereign state… We are entitled to our freedom, and when necessary, we know how to fight for it and defend it... Finally, I wish to speak on a more personal note to the families of Shalit, Goldwasser and Regev, the families of the soldiers who are held hostage by the Hamas and Hizbullah. You, and mainly your children—our children—are always on my mind… I see before me the kidnapped boys, those standing in the front line and in the line of fire, those brave and determined ones who are fighting today and who could—God forbid—be the target of tomorrow’s kidnapping. We will defend all of them, on behalf of all of them we will fight, and with all of them before our eyes—the civilians in the line of fire, the kidnapped fighters and their families—we will continue, without hesitating, without capitulating and without fretting, until our goals are achieved. I wish to conclude by reading an extract from Prophet Jeremiah:
We will triumph! CHANGING
THE RULES OF THE GAME …At first glance, [Maj. Gen. Doron] Almog is a typical IDF high-flier—squat, sharp, straight-talking—with a career that includes starring roles in the Entebbe rescue and a host of clandestine anti-terror operations, and an extraordinary unblemished record of having overseen the prevention of every single effort by Palestinian bombers to infiltrate into Israel from Gaza during his period as Southern Command chief. First glances are misleading, however… Below are excerpts of the [Jerusalem Post’s] two conversations [with Maj. Gen. Almog]: What do you mean by "changing the rules of the game?" Hizbullah is seeking to seize upon the momentum gained by Hamas. It has opened a second front, and exploited an Israeli vulnerability. Negotiating with Hizbullah over the kidnapped soldiers, in the way we had begun to do with Hamas, would be a mistake. First and foremost, we have to strike a heavy blow, a very heavy blow, to Hizbullah—from the very top of its leadership, all the way down to the field, to the infrastructure, the force they've built up. There is no escaping our need to do this. The other side needs to understand that we will not accept years of attrition, where they determine the nature of the war. If, in a week or two from now, Hizbullah is left with only 10 percent of its forces, it will understand that. It needs to be thrown completely off balance… We need to strike Hizbullah—from the air, the sea, and with ground forces—over a matter of days, maximum weeks. Not months… Obviously, there is a very clear connection between what's been happening in Gaza and what's going on in the North. Hizbullah and Hamas are connected. They are sharing information. They share a non-reconciliation to the fact of Israel's existence. In Gaza, the soldier [Shalit] isn't the only hostage. We have two whole towns held hostage—Sderot and Ashkelon. We have to put an end to that… So Israel needs to do what? Israel needs good intelligence and the capacity to act upon it. Israel is always confronting three major threats: One, the long-range missiles and non-conventional threat from Iran. Two, conventional armies and threats—from Syria, Hizbullah, even Egypt, where there's peace, but if the regime changes... Three, terror—which is taking a heavy price, impacting daily life and the economy, and distracting the army from the other two challenges. Is it possible to find a middle ground between stopping the bombers, on the one hand, and not creating fertile ground for the extremists to recruit, on the other, especially when the leadership is encouraging terror? The most important factor is education. So long as in schools and mosques they are recruiting suicide bombers...the Palestinian street [will remain] full of hatred and demonization of Israel. It has nothing to do with what force we use. They exploit every incident. Israel's policymakers knew Hamas would seize on disengagement as proof of victory, but determined that Israel's other interests outweighed that concern? Indeed, there was a concern to minimize the daily friction between Israelis and Palestinians - and that is at the basis of Ehud Olmert's realignment plan, too. The idea was to ensure a Jewish majority in the State of Israel and thus separate strategically. That was a prime consideration. Another was to bolster international legitimacy, to change the perception of Israel as occupier… But if anyone thought it would yield complete calm, he was wrong. For them, disengagement was perceived as victory and helped Hamas to power and encouraged more armed struggle. It didn't encourage a perception of the need to negotiate, but rather that force could bear political fruit… I have some tactical criticisms of disengagement…. [W]e should have reached an international understanding, with the US and Europe, that this is a strategic move of great significance so that when we uproot our residents, the Palestinian refugees should be moved out of their camps and into new neighborhoods. There is a refugee culture—they live in great density, poverty, amid incitement. A nakba [catastrophe] culture. They have eternalized their refugee issue. They could have knocked down these camps long ago and built neighborhoods. Before we moved on disengagement, the other side should have had a program for destroying the refugee camps and building modern neighborhoods. Jabalya refugee camp, where 100,000 people live—they're firing from there—should have been torn down and new neighborhoods built in Netzarim or Gush Katif. The UN, UNRWA, Europe should have been there, with the money, building... In Lebanon, Hizbullah has used the Shaba farms as a pretext to keep its terror going. There was a concern about something similar in Gaza if we didn't leave 100%. Well, they got 100% and still kept on. So that pretext isn't the issue. The whole confrontation between us and them is over a readiness to compromise. Israel has said that it is ready to compromise. The other side says "No, we're not ready to compromise. Let's have another round." To read this interview in full, please visit CIJR’s Picks of the Week. THE
MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT IS HARD TO SOLVE BUT EASY TO EXPLAIN The Middle East conflict is difficult to solve, but it is among the simplest conflicts in history to understand. The Arab and other Muslim enemies of Israel (for the easily confused, this does not mean every Arab or every Muslim) want Israel destroyed. That is why there is a Middle East conflict. Everything else is commentary. Those who deny this and ascribe the conflict to other reasons, such as "Israeli occupation," "Jewish settlements," a "cycle of violence," "the Zionist lobby" and the like, do so despite the fact that Israel's enemies regularly announce the reason for the conflict. The Iranian regime, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Palestinians—in their public opinion polls, in their anti-Semitic school curricula and media, in their election of Hamas, in their support for terror against Israeli civilians in pre-1967 borders—as well as their Muslim supporters around the world, all want the Jewish state annihilated. In 1947-48, the Arab states tried to destroy the tiny Jewish state formed by the United Nations partition plan. In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan tried to destroy Israel in what became known as the Six-Day War. All of this took place before Israel occupied one millimeter of Palestinian land and before there was a single Jewish settler in the West Bank. Two months after the Six-Day War of June 5-10, 1967, the Arab countries convened in Khartoum, Sudan, and announced on Sept. 1, 1967, their famous "Three NOs" to Israel: "No peace, No recognition, No negotiations." Six years later, in 1973, Egypt invaded the Israeli-held Sinai Peninsula, a war that ended in a boost in Egyptian morale from its initially successful surprise attack. Though nearly all of the Sinai remained in Israel's hands, the boost in Egyptian self-confidence enabled Egypt's visionary president, Anwar Sadat, four years later (November 1977), to do the unimaginable for an Arab leader: He visited Israel and addressed its parliament in Jerusalem. As a result, in 1978, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in return for which Israel gave all of the oil-rich Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt. Three years later, in 1981, Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian Muslims, a killing welcomed by most Arabs, including the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). Why welcomed? Because Sadat had done the unforgivable—recognized Israel and made peace with it. The lesson that Palestinians should have learned from the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement was that if you make peace with Israel, you will not only get peace in return, you will also get all or nearly all of your land back. That is how much Israelis ache for peace. Think about Israel for one moment: Israel is one of the most advanced countries on earth in terms of culture (most books published, translated from other languages and read per capita; most orchestras per capita, etc.); major advances in medicine; technological breakthroughs; and decency as a society, as exemplified by its treatment of its women, gays and even its large Arab minority (particularly remarkable in light of the widespread Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism and desire to annihilate Israel). This is hardly a picture of some bloodthirsty, land-grabbing society. And Jews, whatever their flaws, have never been known to be a violent people. If anything, the stereotypical Jew has been depicted as particularly docile. As a lifelong liberal critic of Israeli policies, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote just two weeks ago: "The Palestinians could have a state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem tomorrow, if they and the Arab League clearly recognized Israel, normalized relations and renounced violence. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't know Israel today." Give Israel peace, and Israel will give you land. Which is exactly what Israel agreed to do in the last year of the Clinton administration. It offered PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat about 97 percent of the West Bank and three percent of Israel's land in exchange for peace. Instead, Israel got its men, women and children routinely blown up and maimed by Palestinian terrorists after the Palestinians rejected the Israeli offer at Camp David… Israel's Camp David offer of a Palestinian state for Palestinian peace was rejected because most Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim supporters don't want a second state. They want Israel destroyed. They admit it. Only those who wish Israel's demise and the willfully naive do not. If you don't believe this, ask almost anyone living in the Middle East why there is a Middle East War, preferably in Arabic. If you ask in English, they will assume you are either an academic, a Western news reporter, a diplomat or a "peace activist." And then, they will assume you are gullible and will tell you that it's because of "Israeli occupation" or "the Zionist lobby." But they know it isn't. And it never was. Volume VI, No. 1,401 • Monday, July 17 , 2006
ISRAEL’S
DEFENSE EDITOR'S NOTE: Below are excerpts from a speech yesterday by Israel's U.N. Ambassador, Dan Gillerman, at the U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the Israel-Lebanon crisis. Hezbollah terrorists, operating with impunity in southern Lebanon, [on Wednesday] unleashed a sudden and unprovoked attack into Israeli territory. Scores of Katyusha rockets rained down on Israeli towns and villages, causing many civilian casualties. In the midst of this horrific assault, Hezbollah terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing a number of soldiers and kidnapping two more, who were taken deep into the terrorist stronghold of Lebanon. Israel had no choice but to react, as would any other responsible democratic government. Having shown unparalleled restraint for six years while bearing the brunt of countless attacks, Israel had to respond to this absolutely unprovoked assault whose scale and depth was unprecedented in recent years. Let me emphasize this indisputable fact: Israel's actions were in direct response to an act of war from Lebanon. Although Israel holds the government of Lebanon responsible, it is concentrating its response carefully, mainly on Hezbollah strongholds, positions and infrastructure… Many of the long-range missiles that have hit Israeli towns—including Nahariya, Zefat, Rosh Pina and the port city of Haifa—were launched from private homes with families residing inside, where a special room was designated as a launching pad, with the family playing host to the missile. [Y]et another example of the cynical and brutal way the Hezbollah organization uses civilians as human shields… Over the last 48 hours, more than 500 Katyushas and mortar shells were fired into the northern part of Israel, killing 2 civilians and wounding hundreds more, among them, women and children. Israeli civilians and eight Israeli soldiers have been killed. Hundreds have been wounded. It is very important for the international community to understand that while Hezbollah executes this vicious terrorism, it is only the finger on the bloodstained, long-reaching arms of Syria and Iran. Hezbollah, together with Hamas, Syria and Iran, comprise the world's new and ominous Axis of Terror, an infamous club, the entry fee to which is the blood of innocents and the terrorizing of the entire world. Membership to this club requires an unfathomable capacity for evil. The president of Iran has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, while gleefully preparing the next one. Many of the long-range missiles fired into Israel in recent days were Iranian missiles…this same regime that is funding Hezbollah to the sum of 100 million dollars a year. Syria, another member of this club, is a well-known protector and financier of terrorist organizations… The Syrian government, which still regards Lebanon as southern Syria, works ceaselessly to undermine all efforts toward a peaceful future in the region. Lebanon is today occupied by terror…terror instigated by Hezbollah but initiated, funded and perpetrated by Syria and Iran. The Lebanese government, having missed so many chances in the past, at such a horrendous cost to its people, today has another chance to free itself from the stranglehold of terror… There are words that speak far louder and clearer than anything I can voice today. These are voices of Lebanese—brave, patriotic Lebanese parliamentarians and ministers—who just over the last two days have cried out to all of us from the brink of the abyss in their beloved country. Let me quote some of these courageous statements. The words of Lebanon's communication minister, Maruan Hammuda, saying that "Damascus gives the orders, Iran supplies the equipment, Israel reacts, Lebanon is the victim." … Or the words of an unnamed Lebanese minister, who said, "The Hezbollah has not only kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, it has taken the whole of Lebanon hostage." This council and the international community have a duty today to help the Lebanese people achieve the goal of a free, prosperous and democratic Lebanon. It is up to every one of us to ensure that this opportunity is seized, not only for the benefit of the Lebanese and Israeli people, but for the sake of generations to come. (Amb. Gillerman is a member of CIJR’s International Board of Directors) ISRAEL’S
TO LOSE Even as the fighting escalates, Israel has won the war against the Hezbollah in Lebanon. It must now do everything it can to ensure that it does not, as it has done after military victories in the past, lose the war's aftermath. When the president of Lebanon, Fuad Siniora, in a Saturday night speech and press conference, stated that Lebanon is prepared, following a ceasefire, to "extend the state's authority over all its territories, in cooperation with the United Nations in southern Lebanon," he was publicly declaring that Israel's major war aims have been almost entirely met. If the Lebanese government is indeed now ready to send its army south to the Israeli border, as it has refused to do since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, and to see to it that Hezbollah ceases its military operations there, every shell fired and every bomb dropped by Israel in the past days will have been worthwhile. The problem with the Lebanese army has never been military. Although it may not be a powerful force, it has more than enough power to whip Hezbollah soundly in any armed confrontation. The problem has been a lack of political will. What has kept the army in Beirut is the threat of the civil conflict that Hezbollah has threatened to unleash should its grip on southern Lebanon be challenged. If President Siniora is now seriously prepared to face this threat down, Israel should do everything to help him. It can do this by trying as quickly as possible to work out with him, with the active assistance of America, the terms of a ceasefire and the implementation of the new Lebanese policy announced by him. This means making certain that, in the time it takes the Lebanese army to deploy, no Hezbollah forces remain in, or return to, southern Lebanon. Even after a general ceasefire takes hold, Israel must insist on the right to keep the area clean of Hezbollah until Lebanese troops are ready to move into it… Of course, any United Nations resolution or other agreement that puts an end to the fighting must also call for the release of the two captive Israeli soldiers whose abduction started the hostilities. Yet it would be wrong, as Israel's first reaction has been to do, to make their release a precondition for ending the fighting, because the Lebanese government, which does have the ability to send its army south, does not have the ability to free them—certainly not immediately. They are presumably well-hidden, and since one may assume that Hezbollah will refuse to hand them over to the Lebanese government and cannot be easily forced to, they should be dealt with as a separate issue that will demand time and internal Lebanese negotiations. As important as their welfare is, it should not be allowed to destroy the opportunity for a major strategic breakthrough… As for the world, the fighting in Lebanon has demonstrated once again what was hardly a secret beforehand. Israel has one real friend, the Bush administration in Washington, and a host of pseudo-well-wishers in Europe whose advice, at least on matters of security, should be routinely shredded. Over and over this past week, as on countless occasions in the past, Europe's leaders have warned Israel against "overreacting," against the "disproportionate use of force," against recklessly attacking "civilian targets." (A high percentage of which were roads, bridges, airports, and seaports that could have been used to replenish Hezbollah's armory, heavily depleted by Israeli air attacks.) Yet had Israel heeded these calls for moderation, its military campaign would have had no real effect, President Siniora would never have made the declaration that he did, and things would have gone back in the end to being exactly the same as before, with Hezbollah still sitting on the Israeli border and the Lebanese army playing cards in its barracks. With the possible exception of England and Germany, Israel has no reason to trust Europe and should not rush to welcome it as part of the new peacekeeping operations that will eventually have to be put into place. If anything, a number of Arab leaders, such as President Mubarak and King Abdullah, played a more positive role this week than did President Chirac or Prime Minister Zapatero. One would welcome a statement from as to what exactly the "proportionate" use of force in such a situation would have been. ISRAEL'S
NEW FEAR Something big hasn't happened in the current round of fighting between Israel and its terrorist foes. That absence represents a potentially fatal change in Israeli policy. For all of the air-attacks on targets in Lebanon, the Israeli Defense Force has not sent in ground troops. If IDF tanks don't thrust across the border in force in the next few days, it will reflect the greatest crisis of will in Israel's history. Israel is signaling its enemies that it's afraid to risk its soldiers' lives. And the terrorists read the message clearly. This caution will only encourage Israel's enemies… Israel never squandered the lives of its soldiers. It couldn't afford to. But in past crises a sense of necessity prevailed. The IDF did what it had to do, and did it well for two generations. Then came the long involvement in Lebanon, "Israel's Vietnam." It broke something inside the IDF… Once brilliant in the attack, the IDF has declined into a defensive mindset that air-strikes can't camouflage. Meanwhile, the ruthlessness of Israel's enemies has increased horrifically. They would sacrifice millions of their own people to destroy Israel… Israeli decision-makers appear to have learned nothing from the failure of our "Shock and Awe" air campaign against Saddam's regime. After all the ludicrous claims that a sound-and-light show over Baghdad would drive Saddam to surrender, the war had to be won the old-fashioned way, with the Army and Marines battling their way to Baghdad… One of the many frustrating aspects of Hezbollah is that, while it's increasingly a potent, disciplined military force, it doesn't present many conventional military targets. It's maddeningly difficult to find dispersed clusters of terrorists—and it's impossible to corner and kill them in significant numbers without boots on the ground. Israel is making the American mistake of betting on technology to defeat primal beliefs. The result is the opposite of the one desired: Stand-off attacks only convince religion-fueled terrorists that we—Americans or Israelis—lack the courage to "face them like men." … For all the capabilities of hi-tech weapons systems, this is a new age of Cain-and-Abel warfare, of vicious close-in fighting in villages, apartment blocks and olive groves. No reconnaissance system can locate enemy warriors hiding in an urban labyrinth or a shaded village courtyard. The grunts have to do it. As in the age of Joshua, David and Solomon. No one wants to pay a price in blood. But postponing the payment of an unavoidable blood-price in war only raises the ultimate cost (another lesson of Iraq). Without defeating Hezbollah on the ground—no matter what it takes—Israel can't win. Israel faces enormous challenges and metastasizing threats. Like cancer, those threats will only grow worse if not treated aggressively. By trying to establish "psychological leverage" over the Lebanese government and population with attacks on the country's civilian infrastructure, Israel played into the hands of its enemies and came off as a bully in the eyes of the world. Attempts to wage "war-lite" have a heavy price. Israel is in a fight for its life, but looks irresolute for the first time in its history. It appears shockingly weak where it counts most, in strength of will. And will is one thing Israel's fanatical enemies do not lack. If, in the coming days, we do not hear the roar of IDF tanks pursuing Israel's enemies, we may one day hear a new lament for the children of Zion. (Ralph Peters is the author of the new book "Never Quit the Fight.")
Volume VI, No. 1,400 • Friday, July 14, 2006
WHY THEY
FIGHT Next June will mark the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. For four decades we have been told that the cause of the anger, violence and terror against Israel is its occupation of the territories seized in that war. End the occupation and the "cycle of violence" ceases. The problem with this claim was that before Israel came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six-Day War, every Arab state had rejected Israel's right to exist and declared Israel's pre-1967 borders—now deemed sacred—to be nothing more than the armistice lines suspending, and not ending, the 1948-49 war to exterminate Israel. But you don't have to be a historian to understand the intention of Israel's enemies. You only have to read today's newspapers. Exhibit A: Gaza. Just last September, Israel evacuated Gaza completely. It declared the border between Israel and Gaza an international frontier, renouncing any claim to the territory. Gaza became the first independent Palestinian territory in history. Yet the Gazans continued the war. They turned Gaza into a base for launching rocket attacks against Israel and for digging tunnels under the border to conduct attacks such as the one that killed two Israeli soldiers on June 25 and yielded a wounded hostage brought back to Gaza. Israeli tanks have now had to return to Gaza to try to rescue the hostage and suppress the rocket fire. Exhibit B: South Lebanon. Two weeks later, the Lebanese terror organization, Hezbollah, which has representation in the Lebanese parliament and in the cabinet, launched an attack into Israel on Wednesday that resulted in the deaths of eight soldiers and the wounding of two others, who were brought back to Lebanon as hostages. What's the grievance here? Israel withdrew from Lebanon completely in 2000. It was so scrupulous in making sure that not one square inch of Lebanon was left inadvertently occupied that it asked the United Nations to verify the exact frontier defining Lebanon's southern border and retreated behind it. This "blue line" was approved by the Security Council, which declared that Israel had fully complied with resolutions demanding its withdrawal from Lebanon. Grievance satisfied. Yet what happens? Hezbollah has done to South Lebanon exactly what Hamas has done to Gaza: turned it into a military base and terrorist operations center from which to continue the war against Israel. South Lebanon bristles with Hezbollah's 10,000 Katyusha rockets that put northern Israel under the gun. Fired in the first hours of fighting, just 85 of these killed two Israelis and wounded 120 in Israel's northern towns… Why? Because occupation was a mere excuse to persuade gullible and historically ignorant Westerners to support the Arab cause against Israel. The issue is, and has always been, Israel's existence. That is what is at stake. It was Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization that convinced the world that the issue was occupation. Yet, through all those years of pretense, Arafat's own group celebrated its annual Fatah Day on the anniversary of its first attack on Israel, the bombing of Israel's National Water Carrier—on Jan. 1, 1965. Note: 1965. Two years before the 1967 war. Two years before Gaza and the West Bank fell into Israeli hands. Two years before there were any "occupied territories." But, again, who needs history? As the Palestinian excuses for continuing their war disappear one by one, the rhetoric is becoming more bold and honest. Just Tuesday, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, writing in The[Washington] Post, referred to Israel as "a supposedly 'legitimate' state"… He made clear what he wants done with this bastard entity. "Contrary to popular depictions of the crisis in the American media," he writes, "the dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank." It is about "a wider national conflict" that requires the vindication of "Palestinian national rights." That, of course, means the right to all of Palestine, with no Jewish state. In the end, the fighting is about "the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967." In 1967 Israel acquired the "occupied territories." In 1948 Israel acquired life. The fighting raging now in 2006—between Israel and the "genocidal Islamism" (to quote the writer Yossi Klein Halevi) of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them—is about whether that life should and will continue to exist. ISRAEL'S
NEXT WAR HAS BEGUN The next Middle East war—Israel against genocidal Islamism—has begun. The first stage of the war started two weeks ago, with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim; now, with Hezbollah's latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon. Ultimately, though, Israel's antagonists won't be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years… The goals of the war should be the destruction of the Hamas regime and the dismantling of the Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon. Israel cannot coexist with Iranian proxies pressing in on its borders. In particular, allowing Hamas to remain in power—and to run the Palestinian educational system—will mean the end of hopes for Arab-Israeli reconciliation not only in this generation but in the next one too. For the Israeli right, this is the moment of "We told you so." The fact that the kidnappings and missile attacks have come from southern Lebanon and Gaza—precisely the areas from which Israel has unilaterally withdrawn—is proof, for right-wingers, of the bankruptcy of unilateralism. Yet the right has always misunderstood the meaning of unilateral withdrawal. Those of us who have supported unilateralism didn't expect a quiet border in return for our withdrawal but simply the creation of a border from which we could more vigorously defend ourselves, with greater domestic consensus and international understanding. The anticipated outcome, then, wasn't an illusory peace but a more effective way to fight the war. The question wasn't whether Hamas or Hezbollah would forswear aggression but whether Israel would act with appropriate vigor to their continued aggression. So it wasn't the rocket attacks that were a blow to the unilateralist camp, but rather Israel's tepid responses to those attacks. If unilateralists made a mistake, it was in believing our political leaders—including Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert—when they promised a policy of zero tolerance against any attacks emanating from Gaza after Israel's withdrawal. That policy was not implemented—until two weeks ago. Now, belatedly, the Olmert government is trying to regain something of its lost credibility, and that is the real meaning of this initial phase of the war, both in Gaza and in Lebanon… Absurdly, despite Israel's withdrawal to the international borders with Lebanon and Gaza, much of the international community still sees the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers as a legitimate act of war: Just as Israel holds Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, so Hamas and Hezbollah now hold Israeli prisoners. One difference, though, is that inmates in Israeli jails receive visits from family and Red Cross representatives, while Israeli prisoners in Gaza and Lebanon disappear into oblivion. Like Israeli pilot Ron Arad, who was captured by Hezbollah 20 years ago, then sold to Iran, and whose fate has never been determined. That is one reason why Israelis are so maddened by the kidnapping of their soldiers. Another reason is the nature of the crimes committed by the prisoners whose release is being demanded by Hezbollah and Hamas. One of them is Samir Kuntar, a PLO terrorist who in 1979 broke into an apartment in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, took a father and child hostage, and smashed the child's head against a rock. In the [PA], Kuntar is considered a hero, a role model for Palestinian children. The ultimate threat, though, isn't Hezbollah or Hamas but Iran. And as Iran draws closer to nuclear capability—which the Israeli intelligence community believes could happen this year—an Israeli-Iranian showdown becomes increasingly likely. According to a very senior military source with whom I've spoken, Israel is still hoping that an international effort will stop a nuclear Iran; if that fails, then Israel is hoping for an American attack. But if the Bush administration is too weakened to take on Iran, then, as a last resort, Israel will have to act unilaterally. And, added the source, Israel has the operational capability to do so... IRAN'S
DANGEROUS MIDDLE EAST GAMBIT Iran's leaders have apparently decided to reject the Western offer to peacefully settle the dispute over its weapons-grade uranium-enrichment program. Many had hoped that, in spite of its extremism, Tehran would agree to be bought off with a deal that included a light-water reactor, supplies of safer enriched uranium, aircraft spare parts and economic co-operation, if for no other reason than to avoid sanctions that are sure to come soon. (Even if China and Russia refuse to vote for them in the UN Security Council, the United States and Europe can do much by themselves to cut off Iran from world banking, prohibit the travel of Iranian leaders, and stop exports to Iran of everything but food and medicine.) So, instead of waiting passively for the inevitable retaliation, Iran's leaders decided to trigger a Middle East crisis of their own by organizing recent attacks against Israel. Their aim is to discourage the U.S. and the Europeans from starting another crisis vis-à-vis Iran—after all, financial markets and everyday politics in Europe can only tolerate so much. Iran's moves were prepared in a series of meetings with its local allies, both Hamas of Palestine and Hezbollah of Lebanon. Khaled Mashaal, the overall Hamas leader who remains safely in Damascus under Syrian protection, travelled to Tehran at one point, where he received about $50-million in cash. Although an offshoot of the (strictly Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood, whose financial supporters in Saudi Arabia loathe Iran's Shia ayatollahs, Hamas evidently decided to co-operate in Iran's scheme. It was already cut off from Western funding because of its refusal to recognize Israel, and it was diplomatically isolated. Hamas acted by increasing rocket attacks on nearby Israeli territory and by launching a raid across the international border into Israel in which two soldiers were killed and one was captured. That duly provoked Israeli retaliation, starting the Gaza end of the crisis that Iran wanted. It was altogether more costly for Hezbollah to serve Iran's strategy. While it retains a heavily armed, salaried and uniformed guerrilla force of some 5,000, its leader Hassan Nasrallah has been striving for years to build up Hezbollah as a legitimate political party in Lebanese politics, and the main representative of the country's Shia population. This effort was so successful that Hezbollah has two ministers in the current coalition government. But there was a stringent requirement. To be accepted by other Lebanese, and to a degree even to retain the support of its fellow Shiites, Hezbollah had to agree to join the Lebanese consensus on the priority of reconstruction and economic recovery after years of civil war. That meant avoiding a war with Israel. Hezbollah is under an order of the UN Security Council to disarm and disband its armed force, but it claimed that it needed its weapons even after Israel's full withdrawal, because it had to continue to liberate what it calls "Lebanese territory." That refers to a tiny fragment of land, the so-called the Shebaa Farms, which UN inspectors specifically declared not to be part of Lebanon. Other Lebanese political parties agreed that Hezbollah could keep its weapons to fight there—but only on condition that it keep the peace on the rest of the Lebanon-Israel border, to avoid Israeli retaliation and the destruction of newly reconstructed infrastructures. That is the condition that Hassan Nasrallah has now violated by ordering his men to attack an Israeli patrol, taking two prisoners, and to launch rockets into Israeli territory. With that, Hezbollah has thrown away its political position in Lebanon, because it is obvious to all that it is bringing destruction upon the country. Evidently, Sheik Nasrallah felt compelled to serve Iran's strategy. Aside from the multimillion-dollar monthly subsidy it provides, Iran is the spiritual homeland of Hezbollah leaders, some of whom have studied in Iranian religious schools. For the Israeli coalition government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, matters are relatively simple. It had ordered last year's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, on the presumption that Israeli territory would not be attacked. But the possibility was anticipated and military planners determined that the only possible response was to counterattack, as heavily and for as long as might be needed, until Palestinian attacks would stop by exhaustion or by agreement. As for Hezbollah, the Israeli military response is by no means confined to retaliation, let alone to attempts to retrieve the two captured soldiers. It has much wider military and political aims. Over the years, Hezbollah has received and stored several thousand bombardment rockets and some 100 longer-range missiles, these from Iran by way of Syrian ports and airports. They amounted to a large and an almost instantaneous bombardment capacity against Israel. Recently, and very revealingly, two Iranian leaders threatened Israel with bombardment by Hezbollah's rockets, if Israel attacked Iran's nuclear installations. Israel, therefore, is now using the opportunity of the current fighting to search out and destroy the underground and other hidden sites where Hezbollah keeps its rockets and missiles… Israel's political aim, on the other hand, is to destroy Hezbollah's much-desired position as a legitimate Lebanese political party, by exposing it as the paid agent of Iran, serving foreign interests at grievous cost to Lebanon. Therefore, the Israelis are blocking Lebanon's ports from the sea, they have breached the runways of all three jet-capable airfields in the country, including Beirut International Airport, and remain ready to destroy generating plants and other high-value targets if that is what it takes to generate enough political pressure on Hezbollah. Its first success has been to induce Hezbollah to deny that it launched a missile against Haifa... In the past, it would have boasted of the feat. As for the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora has already stated that he knew nothing of the long-planned Hezbollah attack. If other Lebanese political forces, and its own followers, cannot persuade Hassan Nasrallah to revert to a ceasefire, Israel will bombard more targets, including Sheik Nasrallah's offices in south Beirut, while, if more missiles are launched, the newly mobilized Israeli division will cross the border deep into Lebanese territory. In both Gaza and southern Lebanon, the outcome is, of course, predetermined by the very one-sided military balance. The only open question in both places is how much damage the Israelis will have to inflict to obtain new ceasefires. (Edward N. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.) Shabbat Shalom to all our readers. Volume VI, No. 1,399 • Thursday, July 13, 2006 WAR AND
PEACE An act of war. This is how [PM] Ehud Olmert has correctly described the Wednesday morning attacks on soldiers defending Israel's sovereign border in the North. The words may also be applied to the escalating attacks across Israel's sovereign borders in the South. The responsibility of the Israeli government in such circumstances…is to cripple the attackers and to restore security to its people. Hizbullah on Wednesday killed three IDF soldiers on border patrol and captured two more in an onslaught that included heavy Katyusha and mortar fire. Four more IDF soldiers died when their tank was blown up as the IDF moved into Lebanon in response. Olmert said, "The events this morning are not terror attacks but actions of a sovereign state that attacked Israel for no reason. The Lebanese government, of which Hizbullah is a member, is trying to undermine regional stability. Lebanon is responsible and it will bear responsibility." Later, Olmert elaborated on the role of Syria in supporting Hizbullah. Indeed, not only Syria but Iran are also clearly responsible for these attacks, the former by preventing Lebanon from exercising its full sovereignty and the latter as Hizbullah's chief international sponsor…. …Hizbullah's rocket arsenal, army and terrorist training camps…should be destroyed to the maximum extent possible, within the constraint of Israel's desire not to reoccupy Lebanese territory over an extended period. We can also expect, given Olmert's remarks, that the IDF will strike targets of importance to the Lebanese, and perhaps the Syrian governments… In the past, the UN Security Council has actually provided a vital incentive to Israel's attackers by standing silent when Israel is attacked and stepping in only to restrain the Israeli response. If the international community wants to prevent future crises, this pattern must be reversed. The European Union has appropriately called for the immediate release of the IDF soldiers captured by Hizbullah, and it clearly regards this attack as an act of unprovoked aggression. Israel should quickly demand that this position be expressed in a Security Council resolution condemning the attack and the governments hosting or supporting Hizbullah, demanding the deployment of the Lebanese Army along the border and the dismantling of Hizbullah's army, and supporting Israel's right to self defense. This resolution should also recognize Israel's withdrawal from Gaza of a year ago, thereby explicitly delegitimizing Palestinian attacks launched from the Strip. The logic of the withdrawal from Lebanon, of last year's disengagement, and of Olmert's planned continuation of that strategy in Judea and Samaria, was and is the same: taking military risks, sometimes severe ones, to improve Israel's international position in a way that deters further attacks against us. If this international support is not forthcoming or is insufficient, as has proven to be the case so far, this strategy will continue to unravel, as we have seen in recent weeks. TIME
FOR A GROUND OFFENSIVE? ...Aside from a few longer-range operations, mainly by special forces, the role of IDF ground forces ever since the pullback to the security zone has essentially been a defensive one. Even over the last three weeks following Cpl. Gilad Shalit's capture by Hamas, most of the units massed around the Gaza Strip have only gone in relatively limited force, a few kilometers inwards, careful to avoid built-up areas, and then left after a few days. The prevailing strategy has remained and the IDF has yet to commit a major ground force to combat. All that might be changing now. Following Hizbullah's attack, Israel is facing two kidnapping situations and emboldened enemies on two fronts, while the situation in the West Bank, where the Paratroopers Brigade have been busy in a low-profile offensive for the last couple of months might also flare up. The IDF command is pushing for a major offensive on both fronts that will drastically "change the rules of play" and that will mean a widespread operation, including probably dozens of casualties, incurring the wrath of the international community and calling up thousands of reservists, a step that will have widespread implications on the army's long-term plans and the Israeli economy as a whole. Not to mention Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's realignment plan. Many in the government and the IDF believe that such a step is now unavoidable, and that Hamas and especially Hizbullah are long overdue a sharp and painful lesson.... It falls now to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz to decide whether Israel will retake the upper hand by acting forcefully and smashing Hizbullah with the IDF's full might. They are both fully aware that it's much easier to go into Lebanon than to leave and that they might be playing into Nasrallah's hands. Either way it's an almost impossible choice. OLMERT
NOT RULING OUT EMERGENCY GOV’T Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met individually with Labor chairman Amir Peretz and Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu late Wednesday night, raising speculation that an expanded "national emergency government" could be on the way. Former prime minister Levy Eshkol formed such a government when the Six Day War started in 1967. MKs in Kadima, Likud, Israel Beiteinu and the National Union called upon Olmert to follow suit due to the tense security situation in the North and South. Olmert made a point of not ruling out the possibility when he was asked about it in a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in the afternoon. "I have not dealt with political or coalition activity but its time will come," Olmert said. Olmert's associates said that expanding the government was unlikely at this stage but it could be considered if the security situation continues to worsen. Coalition chairman Avigdor Yitzhaki said that he was always in favor of having as wide a coalition as possible, especially at a time of war. Sources close to Olmert denied a report on Channel 2 that Kadima officials were interested in replacing Peretz as defense minister with Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter—a move that would likely chase Labor out of the government. Dichter's spokesman said the report was baseless and that "he was not tailoring any suits." Netanyahu told Channel 2 that if Olmert invited him to join the cabinet, he would consider it and bring it to his Likud colleagues for approval. He said the Likud could support the government from the opposition if strong military action was taken.… …Likud MK Yisrael Katz called on Olmert and Peretz to resign due to what he termed their "unsuccessful policies." Likud MKs Shalom and Yuval Steinitz urged the government to order the Israel Defense Forces to make Hizbullah, Lebanon and Syria pay a heavy price for the kidnappings. "We can't have a situation in Lebanon where there is peace and quiet on one side and our soldiers are living in bunkers on the other," Shalom said. "We have to disarm Hizbullah. All the weapons that are being used come through Damascus. Damascus must know that we cannot tolerate this. We must act immediately."… BACK
INTO GAZA As the situation in Gaza deteriorates, Israeli troops enter Lebanon, and the Middle East teeters toward a wider war, the man best suited to deal with the situation lies in a coma. As one of Israel's greatest heroes, Ariel Sharon possesses the unique combination of experience and resolve that is needed. Mr. Sharon is also the architect of this situation…. …Many former allies of Mr. Sharon were confused by his disengagement plan. They questioned how an ideological follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a believer in Greater Israel, and a champion of the so-called settler movement, could surrender part of the land of Israel. While it's impossible to know Mr. Sharon's intentions, given his knowledge of the Palestinian Arab psyche and leadership it's hard to believe that he didn't foresee the current chaos. If so, Mr. Sharon's intention in disengaging from Gaza was in all likelihood not to give the Palestinian Arabs a state in Gaza and then eventually in parts of Judea and Samaria as well. His intention was probably to show the world, through giving the Palestinian Arabs partial control in Gaza, the folly of giving them full control and statehood. But even if this wasn't Mr. Sharon's intention, it still is the lesson of his disengagement… The terrorist group Hamas is in control of the Palestinian Arab government. Hamas is not just a threat to Israel. Israel is their first target, but they intend to follow up with a world wide Islamic state. As the Hamas terrorists stated in a recent video, which Palestinian Media Watch posted on its Web site, "We will rule the nations, by Allah's will, the USA will be conquered, Israel will be conquered, Rome and Britain will be conquered."… The most important question for Israel's politicians to consider is what would be Mr. Sharon's next move? One option is for Israel to retake Gaza and fully destroy Hamas and the other terrorist groups there. Staying in Lebanon until Hezbollah's terrorist capabilities are eradicated makes sense too. And it's a perfect time to remind the world why Judea and Samaria are permanently off the negotiating table… Ariel Sharon probably would. THE
RISKS OF ‘RESTRAINT’ When Israeli troops withdrew from Southern Lebanon back in 2000, the leaders of the Jewish state asserted that they were under no illusions. At a cabinet meeting on May 24, 2000, [PM] Barak stated "that Israel places responsibility for quiet in southern Lebanon on the Lebanese and Syrian governments, and that any firing on IDF soldiers or civilians within Israel's borders would be considered as an act of war which would be met with appropriate action. "That same day, Mr. Barak wrote to his top general, "No one knows better than I that the war is not yet over. We may yet face hard days ahead, days of fire and battle." Well, events today are certainly proving the truth of that prediction…. As far back as 1994, the State Department's annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report said of Hezbollah that it is "Known or suspected to have been involved in numerous anti-US terrorist attacks, including the suicide truck-bombing of the US Embassy and US Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983 and the US Embassy annex in Beirut in September 1984. Group also hijacked TWA 847 in 1985." The annual State Department report has given a similar summary, under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, for 12 years. How else but "restraint" to explain that Hezbollah is operating with impunity, waging new attacks against the West from a position within a Lebanon in which its representatives hold 23 in seats parliament and a Hezbollah official is minister of energy and water. What else but "restraint" could explain that American Christian leaders have been meeting with Hezbollah officials? One such American, a Presbyterian elder from Pittsburgh, Ronald Stone, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, after such a meeting in 2004, "When you meet Hezbollah on a Sunday afternoon, they're not running around with guns. There are things that Hezbollah does that are a social service, such as health, education and social welfare."… Tehran has been in the headlines lately for its nuclear ambitions, but its role in backing Hamas and Hezbollah is a reminder that the problem in Tehran isn't only nuclear arms but the terror-sponsoring that can come from only an unfree regime. The Islamic republic's ruling mullahs, emboldened by America's efforts to engage them in direct negotiations, may hope the conflict on Israel's borders distracts attention from their nuclear scheme. They may be trying to test Israel's new prime minister. They may just enjoy killing Jews. Whatever Iran's motives, or Syria's, America's reaction to Israel's efforts to defend itself will be most constructive if it recognizes, as Israelis do, that while peace is the goal, restraint has its own risks. This war can't be won with bombs alone—financial and public support for freedom fighters in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran is essential. But neither can it be won with restraint alone.
Volume VI, No. 1,398 • Wednesday, July 12, 2006 WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “It is an act of war by the state of Lebanon against the state of Israel in its sovereign territory.”—Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, during a press conference following Hezbollah cross-border attacks in which two IDF soldiers were captured and eight were killed. Israeli Air Force warplanes and navy gunboats struck a Palestinian terrorist base, run by the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, south of Beirut late Wednesday. OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam said the IDF was preparing for a widespread operation not only against Hezbollah but also against the Lebanese government. “The IDF is responding with its full might by the air, the sea and the ground,” Adam said. “We are also preparing for a massive operation to defend Israeli citizens and stop the terror.” According to the Jerusalem Post, the IDF has drawn up plans to bomb the Beirut International Airport and other main infrastructure, including power stations in Lebanon. (Jerusalem Post, Reuters, July 12) “Israel may have to take alarming force as an outcome of the latest attacks, which may even result in the disarming of the Hezbollah… Lebanon continues to allow these terrorist activities to take place within her borders and therefore the Lebanese government plays a key role in the reoccurrence of these events… This is an expected escalation that will force the IDF to increase the scope of the conflict. Today's events demonstrate the failure of the international community, in particular, the US and Europe to address Hezbollah's capabilities and impact on regional stability. The US and the UN are in no position to…call for Israel's restraint or to act as mediators… Israel's leaders will have to decide how to act next along its borders as well as with Syria. They cannot sit back and allow terrorist organizations to dictate the situation. The primary focus must be military… Hezbollah's latest attack was initiated in order to show support for the Hamas and the situation in the Gaza Strip.”—Gerald Steinberg, Bar Ilan University professor of Political Studies, in response to the Hezbollah attacks on Israel's northern frontier. According to Steinberg, “Israel must not partake in a prisoners swap in order to bring home the kidnapped soldiers. Each discussion of this nature will only result in additional kidnappings.” (Jer. Post, July 12) “Anybody who calls this operation disproportionate has no clue about the facts on the ground. With all due respect to all those who criticize us, if anything of this nature would have happened in their homeland, they would have acted much worse.”—Israeli cabinet minister Yitzhak Herzog, explaining his disregard for international reaction to Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip following the abduction of IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit. (CanWest News, July 10) “As I inspect the ruins of our infrastructure...all turned to rubble once more by F-16s and American-made missiles, my thoughts again turn to the minds of Americans. What do they think of this? Surely the American people grow weary of this folly, after 50 years and $160-billion in taxpayer support for Israel's war-making capacity—its ‘defence’… Some Americans, I believe, must be asking themselves if all this blood and treasure could not have bought more tangible results for Palestine if only U.S. policies had been predicated from the start on historical truth, equity and justice.”—Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post, criticizing American Middle East support of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Haniyeh added that peace with Israel could only be achieved upon the realisation of “full dimensions of Palestinian national rights, …statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, [and] a capital in Arab East Jerusalem and [by] resolving the 1948 Palestinian refugee issue fairly.” (National Post, July 12) To read Haniyeh’s Washington Post op-ed click here. “We are going to continue the work together. But what is very important here: If it was today like it was in the 1980s, …you would have…much more complicated problems. Because when the Soviet Union was present there, the whole Western community was creating bin Ladens there in large numbers, and spared no money and efforts for that.”—Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with CTV, describing Russian and Western joint efforts to pacify and reconstruct Afghanistan. Putin criticized the West for its backing of the Islamic militia after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. (Globe & Mail, July 12) “I have to tell you that I am very much worried about Canada. If we don't stop [the radicals] and we don't weed them out, it will grow… I will be very blunt to the Muslims and I will say to them: ‘You have the best country in the world, and if you are not loyal to this country, you have no religious right to stay here. If your loyalties are in Afghanistan, go back to Afghanistan. If your loyalty is in Pakistan, go back to Pakistan. Because, being a Muslim, you cannot be a hypocrite’.”—Maulana Naseem Mahdj, amir of the Canadian Ahmadiyya Mulsim community, cited sections of the Koran which outline the Muslim obligation to be law-abiding and loyal to a country of residence. (National Post, July 8) “What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a series of attacks that will continue and increase in strength until you withdraw your soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq, and until you [the British government] stop your financial and military support for America and Israel.”—Shehzad Tanweer, one of last year’s London subway bombers, appearing in a video broadcast by al Jazeera on the first anniversary of July 7, 2005 attack. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said, “Since July, the threat [of more attacks] has palpably increased.” (New York Post, July 7) “If the fight for security ends up meaning that the United States becomes more closed to its friends, then the terrorists have won. And I don't think either of us want that.”—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, at a joint news conference with U.S. President George W. Bush. Harper appealed to the United States Congress to delay legislation requiring Canadians travelling to the U.S. to carry a passport. President Bush commended recent Canadian efforts to curb terrorism in the alleged Toronto terror plot. “When you've got a government that's active and a police force that's capable, people ought to rest assured that Canada is on top of any plots,” said Bush. (National Post, July 7) SHORT TAKES ISLAMIC ATTACKS IN INDIA—(Mumbai and Srinagar) At least 163 people were killed and hundreds more injured yesterday when seven bombs exploded on or near crowded commuter trains in Mumbai [Bombay], India’s largest city. The CNN-IBN television network reported that the Islamic extremist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous) had issued a claim of responsibility. A separate attack in Srinagar yesterday killed eight tourists and injured 39 people in a series of grenade attacks targeting holiday areas in the main city of Indian Kashmir. The attacks were blamed on Islamic separatist rebels but links between the Srinagar and Mumbai attacks were ruled out by officials. (National Post, July 12)
CANADIAN LINKED TO NY TERROR PLOT—(New York) U.S. law enforcement officials foiled a terrorist plot July 7 against New York that involved at least one Canadian currently in custody overseas. The alleged leader of the plot, Lebanese native Assem Hammoud, studied for seven years at Montreal’s Concordia University and in 2003 left to teach a business ethics class at a local Beirut university. Hammoud is among eight suspects who the FBI alleges were planning to blow up commuter-train tunnels linking New York and New Jersey. Mark Mershon, assistant director for the FBI New York field office said, “The plotting for this attack had matured to a point where it appeared that the individuals were about to move forward.” Hammoud, who applied for a visa to return to Canada before his April 27 arrest in connection with the New York transit bomb plot, is believed to be a member of the Lebanese Sunni Muslim group Asbat al-Ansar, a violent al Qaeda affiliate. Lebanese security services, at the request of the FBI, arrested Hammoud after he began sending his co-conspirators detailed maps of the New York transit system. Lebanese officials said Hammoud confessed to his role in the plot and said he was “proud” to be a foot soldier in Osama bin Laden’s holy war. (NYP, National Post, July; 8, 12; Toronto Star July 11) IRAN: REMOVE INSPECTION CHIEF—(Betina, Croatia) Iran has asked the IAEA to remove the head of the inspection team probing Tehran’s nuclear program. The inspector, Chris Charlier, has not been back to Iran since April because of Iranian displeasure with his work, UN officials said July 9. The German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that Charlier had been removed from his post and assigned to other duties. It quoted him as saying he believes Iran is operating a clandestine nuclear program and suggested it was linked to weapons. However, Charlier remains the head of the team, the officials said. Charlier has previously complained publicly that Iranian constraints made inspection work there difficult. (AP, July 10) NEW GROUP SHARES AL QAEDA AGENDA—(Amman) An unknown terror group, The Army of Islam, is one of three Palestinian groups who say they together are holding Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Israeli intelligence officials doubt the significance of the group and lay responsibility for the capture on Hamas, which is one of the two other groups claiming responsibility. In Jordan, experts in Islamic terrorist groups say that the small Army of Islam represents the first time a Palestinian group has adopted the agenda of al Qaeda. The group’s goal is to divorce Palestinian factions, including Hamas, from involvement in the political process, or negotiations with Israel. Videos and statements posted by the Army of Islam on a web site serving as a primary forum for al Qaeda and like-minded groups show that the group is not fighting “for a piece of land” but waging a religious war aimed at restoring a religious caliphate, or government, throughout the Muslim world. “It is the first time we see a pure Islamic resistance and not a nationalist movement involved in the Israeli resistance, researcher Marwan Shahadeh said. (New York Times, July 8) BAGHDAD GUNMEN ON KILLING SPREE—(Baghdad) Masked Shiite gunmen roamed through a west Baghdad neighborhood July 9, dragging Sunnis from their cars, picking them out on the street and killing them in a rampage that police said killed 41 people. Hours later, two car bombs exploded near a Shiite mosque in the city’s north, killing 17 people and wounding 38 in what appeared to be a reprisal attack, police said. Police and Shiite leaders speculated the rampage was carried out in retaliation for a Saturday night car-bombing at a Shiite mosque that killed two people and wounded nine. (AP, July 10) EGYPTIAN NEWSPAPERS STOP PRESSES—(Cairo) Egypt’s independent and opposition newspapers were not published July 9 to protest against a draft press law that the government bills as a reform, but that journalists say puts new limits on press freedom. The government-drafted bill, which won preliminary approval in parliament on July 8, eliminates imprisonment as a penalty for some media offences but continues to allow judges to impose jail terms for journalists in many others. The opposition said the bill was another blow to reform in Egypt and showed the insincerity of pledges by President Hosni Mubarak to allow more political freedoms and end custodial sentences for publishing offences. (Reuters, July 10) NO WOMEN WINNERS IN KUWAIT ELECTION—(Kuwait) None of the 27 women who ran in last week’s parliamentary elections, the first in which women could vote and run as candidates, won enough votes to win a seat, according to official results. Analysts had expected one or two women to win. A mix of Islamists, liberals and independents, all favoring electoral reform, swept 36 seats in the 50-seat Parliament, promising to bring about reforms. (NYT, July 1) ROMANIA COMMEMORATES 1941 POGROM—(Iasi) On June 28, Romania marked the 65th anniversary of the country’s worst pogrom during World War II, when 14,850 Jews were killed. In June 1941, under the pro-Nazi government of Marshal Ion Antonescu, many were taken from their homes in the northeastern city of Iasi and put on cargo trains for several days where they died of heat, thirst and suffocation. Others were shot dead by members of the military. Some 50 researchers of contemporary history from the U.S., Germany, Israel, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine attended the commemoration, as did 150 Romanian Jews who emigrated to Israel. (Ha’aretz, June 29)
Volume VI, No. 1,397 • Tuesday, July 11, 2006 DEAR BRETHREN,
THE WAR WITH ISRAEL IS OVER As Israel enters the third week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends: Dear Palestinian Arab brethren: The war with Israel is over. You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children. We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel. Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness. At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends. You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins. Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win. In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day. What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots? We, your Arab brothers, have moved on. Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you. Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab. Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods—more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives—while your children played in the sewers of Gaza. The war is over. Why not let a new future begin? (Youssef Ibrahim is an Egyptian-born American reporter serving for 24 years as a senior Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal). HAMAS
CAN’T LET ISRAEL GO Nearly 10 months after Israel withdrew every last soldier, settler, nail and bucket from Gaza, the Hamas-led Palestinians can't seem to let go. There is something psychologically profound about Hamas abducting to Gaza and holding hostage an Israeli soldier, 19-year-old Cpl. Gilad Shalit. You would think that the last thing the Palestinians would want to import to Gaza is precisely the emblem of their former occupation: a soldier. And yet, on a psychological plane, this seemingly senseless political act might be symbolically important. Perhaps without the soldier in their midst, the Palestinians in and of themselves feel no existential purpose. Perhaps they have no way to establish their own sense of destiny without the perpetual agony of conflict with Israel. Hamas literally needs an occupier-enemy, just as released convicts who can't seem to make it on the outside intentionally commit crimes to be returned to prison, where they feel safer and better understand the rules. How else to explain the barrage of Kassam rockets from Gaza at Israel's populated areas even after Israel has evacuated the Palestinians' land? How else to fathom the pointless murder of a West Bank settler, 18-year-old Eliyahu Asheri, killed almost immediately following his abduction? Each rocket, each murder, is a painful tap on Israel's shoulder from a frustrated former marriage partner who cannot let go and is threatening homicide. I'm still here, proclaims each explosion. Take me back, each murder demands. Unfortunately, Israel cannot take out a restraining order against Hamas. To some North Americans, Israel's military strike on the Gaza Strip in response to Shalit's kidnapping might seem like an overreaction, no less irrational than the behaviour of the other side. After all, it's just one soldier. Four and sometimes eight times as many U.S. soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan each day, their deaths hardly noted. But in Israel, the loss by death or abduction of a single soldier is an utterly devastating national event. As a veteran of the Israel Defence Forces who served extensively in the Gaza Strip, I remember how—strolling Jerusalem's streets on leave from my military service—I saw the glow of a television set in every window. I heard the same newscaster's voice—multiplied and amplified throughout the city—as he read the roll call of the day's casualties. Israelis sat huddled and still, with hands over mouths, suppressing shock. Occasionally there were actual cries, as though some mother, in her flat, felt the loss of the soldiers as her very own children. This is an aspect of Israel that is rarely talked about, a side not portrayed in Steven Spielberg's and Tony Kushner's cynical film, Munich. Its source is a deeply Jewish perspective that holds that the loss of a single Jewish life is equal to that of an entire universe—the code of a people who, to this day, remember the anonymous graves of 6 million Jews, including 1 million children, killed in the Holocaust. Today, not only Israelis but Jews everywhere, from San Francisco to Paris to Tel Aviv, are praying for Shalit's safe return. And there is anger in our prayers, reflected in the Israeli response, which reflects our deep sense of betrayal over the refusal by the Hamas-led Palestinian government to accept the existence of the Jewish state. It has become abundantly clear since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and the advent of the Hamas government, that not even disengagement is enough. Hamas, like a jilted homicidal lover, will not rest until Israel is destroyed. POLL
FINDS DISCORD BETWEEN THE MUSLIM AND WESTERN WORLDS Non-Muslim Westerners and Muslims around the world have widely different views of world events, and each group tends to view the other as violent, intolerant and lacking in respect for women, a new international survey of more than 14,000 people in 13 nations indicates. In what the survey, part of the Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2006, called one of its most striking findings, majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey—Muslim countries with fairly strong ties to the United States—said, for example, that they did not believe that Arabs had carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. The findings illustrating the chasm in beliefs follow another year of violence and tension centered on that divide. In the last 12 months there have been terrorist bombings in London; riots in France by unemployed youths, many of them Muslim; a global uproar over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad; and no letup in the war in Iraq. This led majorities in the United States and in countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East to describe relations between Muslims and people in Western countries as generally bad, Pew found. Over all, Muslims in the survey, including the large Islamic populations in Britain, France, Germany and Spain, broadly blamed the West for the bad relations, while Westerners tended to blame Muslims. Muslims in the Middle East and Asia depicted Westerners as immoral and selfish, while Westerners saw Muslims as fanatical. The results were not uniform, and delivered some surprises. Support for terrorism declined in some of the Muslim countries surveyed, dropping sharply in Jordan, where terrorist bombings killed more than 50 people in Amman in November. Two-thirds of the French people surveyed expressed positive views of Muslims, and even larger majorities of French Muslims felt favorable toward Christians and Jews. Muslims surveyed in Europe were less inclined to see a ''clash of civilizations'' than were general publics in Europe or Muslims elsewhere. Pew found sharp divergences regarding respect for women… In the West, where many see Islamic customs like mandatory veils for women and regulations barring them from working outside the home or driving as discriminatory, big majorities saw Muslims as not respectful of women. In contrast, fewer than half of the Muslims asked in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey said they associated Westerners with respect for women. European Muslims surveyed were more likely to view Westerners as respectful of women, in some places by wide margins. Pew, which interviewed Muslims in Europe as a group for the first time this year, said their views represented ''a bridge'' between the widely divergent views of other Europeans and of Muslims in Asia and the Middle East. The overall results, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, show that ''even though relations are not good, there hasn't been a spike in outright hostility between the two groups over the past year.'' Nonetheless, majorities in every country surveyed except Pakistan expressed pessimism about Muslim-Western relations, with Germany most strongly viewing the situation as bad (70 percent), followed by France (66 percent), Turkey (64 percent), Spain and Britain (61 percent), and Egypt (58 percent). Pew surveyed 14,030 people from March 31 to May 14 in Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the [U.S.]. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus two to four percentage points, except in Britain and Germany, where it was six points… In follow-up interviews in countries surveyed about the results, Muslims attributed poor relations with the West to a variety of causes. But many pointed to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as the main cause and accused the West of double standards on terrorism. Pew asked respondents to give their opinions of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and it found anti-Jewish sentiment to be ''overwhelming'' in the Muslim countries surveyed. It reached 98 percent in Jordan and 97 percent in Egypt. Majorities in the Muslim world, Pew said, also expressed the opinion that the victory of the militant group Hamas in Palestinian elections in January would ''be helpful to a fair settlement between Israel and the Palestinians''—a view that was roundly rejected by non-Muslim publics.
Volume VI, No. 1,396 • Monday, July 10, 2006
THE DECLINE
AND FALL OF THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL MOVEMENT …There is a wide gap between the prevalent Western image of the Palestinian movement and its actual self-defined identity. Much of the West imagines the conflict is about a Palestinian wish to create a West Bank-Gaza Strip state, a simple matter of nationalist resistance to foreign occupation. Yet this is not what Palestinian leaders say when they talk to each other, their own public, or the Arab world. If this outside perception were accurate, the conflict could be quickly and easily solved. Indeed, this would have already happened before the 1948 or after the 1967 wars, when Egypt made peace with Israel in the late 1970s, or during the diplomatic campaign for peace of the 1988-1990 era. The fact that the classical nationalist narrative does not fit here was most thoroughly disproved by the experience of the 1990s' peace process and especially in the way it ended. In pragmatic terms, Palestinian leaders should be thinking:
Since this seems logical, much of the world simply assumes that such is the Palestinian position. However, the leadership's real standpoint is:
Accepting this standpoint, Hamas does not expect to change everything overnight. In fact, given the hegemony of this kind of thinking, Hamas has to change far less in terms of Palestinian ideology, programs, and policies than it might appear; and certainly Hamas has patience. Its leaders often say that 20 years will be needed to wipe out Israel. Since it believes its goal and methods have divine sanction, Hamas is not too concerned with the time needed, international opinion, or any sufferings this plan inflicts on Palestinians. What it is trying to do now is to establish hegemony over the Palestinian movement in a way that would ensure Hamas will be the permanent leader. Since Hamas' campaign is ahead of schedule—it did not expect to do so well in the election—this can proceed in a step-by-step fashion. Nor does Hamas really worry about winning the next vote, which might never be held or at least, like parliament's previous "four-year term," take ten years to hold. Hamas knows, however, that it faces two serious domestic barriers. First, while its program of destroying Israel and using terrorism is popular, Islamization is far less supported by the Palestinian majority. Islamist measures, then, should advance gradually and mostly by local councils. Hamas' second big problem is more serious: the institutional competition with Fatah. How is Hamas going to form a government and get control of the mechanisms of power—money, jobs, and guns—without triggering a civil war with Fatah? For example, the firing of any Fatah supporter from any job, especially in the overstuffed security forces, could set off a major crisis. Similarly, how can Hamas fight corruption since it could face a civil war if it arrests Fatah officials and puts them on trial? Given this situation, the most likely Hamas response is to put the priority on what unites Palestinians, i.e. blaming their problems on Israel and fighting against it. Joint Fatah-Hamas terrorist operations have been common since 2000. Rather than shoot at each other, Hamas and Fatah are offered the attractive alternative of cooperating in their campaign against the common foe. This strategy fits Hamas' effort to make itself leader of the whole people and "national" cause—rather than just an Islamist party—in a way parallel to how Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese Communists achieved similar outcomes. Since there is basically no political difference between Hamas and Fatah except for Islamism, this should not be too difficult. For example, Hamas wants to ensure the educational system will raise a generation that would reject any peace or compromise with Israel, extol terrorism, and vote Hamas. Meanwhile, Hamas will stick to its radical line in order to consolidate and guide its supporters. As Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar explains, "Those who built their structure on the basis of the Quran...cannot budge because of promises from America or a dollar from Europe," and, "Our program is to liberate Palestine, all of Palestine." At the same time, though, Hamas will try to create an illusion of moderation among foreigners. Its current "moderate" plan states that if Israel concedes everything (withdraws from all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, while letting all Palestinian refugees come live in Israel), in exchange Hamas will not attack Israel until it wants to do so, while reserving the right to commit genocide on Israel. However, even this offer does not mean Hamas would make any effort to stop others—Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas people operating "unofficially"—from staging terror attacks during this time; or, in Zahar's words, "Anyone who thinks the calm means giving in is mistaken. The calm is in preparation for a new round of resistance and victory." As for previous Palestinian commitments, he explains that Hamas is entering parliament in order "to eliminate any traces" of the Oslo agreements. This means that all previous concessions made by Israel have achieved no reciprocal steps by the Palestinians. Fatah also has a multi-layered strategy, but it is in far worse shape. The election defeat has solved none of its problems. All the establishment leaders are still in place, the bitter factional strife is completely unresolved, and Fatah is stuck with a weak, discredited Abbas as its standard bearer. Still, he can provide a moderate face, a way to attract international money and support with the message: "Hamas are the bad guys; we are the good guys." Yet the main two elements of Fatah strategy remain terrorism and patronage. Fatah will fight desperately to hold onto jobs and money, with the implicit threat of a civil war if its interests are neglected. At the same time, Fatah's gunmen will try to attack Israel to prove it the superior fighter; striving by fighting against Israel—rather than against corruption, for example—to defeat its rival at home. Nevertheless, Fatah leaders are still living in a dream world, having no sense of how to organize and compete politically. Without control of the budget and government agencies, how well will Fatah hold onto its supporters? Recovery, if it happens at all, will be very difficult for Fatah, which could face splits as well. Indeed, large portions of Fatah might well ally themselves to Hamas. At a minimum, the purportedly nationalist forces are in deep crisis; at worst, they may become a permanent minority that simply tries to compete within the framework laid down by Hamas. For the Palestinian movement generally, weakness and failure is guaranteed by these same factors: internal divisions and the inability to make key decisions, on the one hand, and the lack of moderate goals or a viable strategy, on the other hand. Military victory is impossible; a war based on terrorism is counterproductive. As a result, it is unable to achieve a state, end the Israeli occupation, improve its people's material well-being, end the violence, or gain good relations with the West. (Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs [GLORIA] Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs [MERIA] Journal. His latest book is The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East.) Click here to read the unedited version of this text. SPARE
THE CHILDREN "How sweet is the fragrance of the martyrs, how sweet is the fragrance of the earth, its thirst quenched by the gush of blood flowing from the youthful body." - Palestinian Authority television After a three-year hiatus, official Palestinian Authority television—which remains under the office of President Mahmoud Abbas—has begun rebroadcasting a film that was shown hundreds of times between 2000 and 2004. The film stars a child actor playing Muhammad Al Dura, the most famous Palestinian child martyr, who was killed in a crossfire between Palestinian forces and the IDF. In the film, which originally bore a credit to the "Ministry of Information and Culture, Palestinian National Fund," the Al Dura character beckons the child viewer to "follow me," and is seen frolicking in heaven. A narrator says the words quoted above, and a popular Palestinian vocalist sings them, with pictures of "Al Dura" playing on the beach and flying a kite in the background ... This is disappointing, to say the least, given what Abbas said just two weeks ago in Petra, at a meeting of Nobel prize winners. Abbas was on a panel with author Elie Wiesel, who challenged him to declare that suicide bombings are "crimes against humanity." Abbas responded, "First of all, as Muslims, it is a crime to commit suicide. Muslims believe that if you commit suicide, you go to hell and that goes without saying for killing others." Abbas also said, "We say to the Israelis—we are your partners. Everyone should stop [the violence], sit down at a table and talk." When questioned by Wiesel regarding incitement of hatred and violence in the official Palestinian media, Abbas said he would work to stamp out "instigation" in the curriculum as well as in the media and literature. Whether Abbas was being untruthful or exhibiting his powerlessness is hardly material. Abbas is the Palestinian leader who has campaigned for at least the suspension of terrorism. Yet it is not just through PA TV that the Palestinian cult of martyrdom is being perpetuated rather than dismantled. The attempt to obtain Hamas's agreement on the "prisoners' document" has been widely portrayed as a bold assertion of moderation on Abbas's part. But in his interview last week with The Jerusalem Post, President Moshe Katsav raises a critical point: "I think it's wrong that murderers of women and children, prisoners in Israeli jails, initiate a political move and are given precedence over the Palestinian parliamen... and government. That also says something about the Palestinians themselves... why do they need people in jail to set the agenda?" The prisoners' document repeatedly calls for continued Palestinian "resistance," what we know as terrorism. But in addition to its inherent lack of moderation, there is the matter of its source. If terrorism is against Islam and terrorists will go to "hell," as Abbas said in Petra, why is he turning to the terrorists themselves as a source of political legitimacy? These are not only profound moral questions; they have direct life-and-death consequences. At this moment, the IDF is already deployed inside the Gaza Strip, and is poised to extend its operations into Palestinian cities to root out the terrorist infrastructure that has only grown since Israel withdrew its forces and citizens from the area. The terrorists, far from avoiding civilian areas, hide deeply within them, deliberately endangering Palestinian civilians. As Air Force chief Eliezer Shkedy explained to the Post, "They know who they are fighting... The terrorists are capable of putting their own children in the car when they set off to fire a Kassam ... [and] to terror training camps... You see the cynicism in that they put their laboratories in a building where every other apartment is full of civilians." No one is forcing Abbas to reject terrorism with one hand and hold up terrorists as moral arbiters and resume the brainwashing of new child "martyrs" with another. No one is forcing the terrorists to use their own civilians as human armor. Even if we cannot immediately end the conflict between us, is it too much to ask that Palestinian leaders of all factions leave their children and ours out of it? Volume VI, No. 1,395 • Friday, July 7, 2006 BACK TO
ENTEBBE The fear, the flight and the fight of the miraculous hostage rescue as told by those who executed it 30 years ago. It's an anniversary given unexpected resonance by the intense drama that has gripped Israel this week. SATURDAY JULY 3,
1976 Preceding them by six days were 100-plus Israeli and other Jewish passengers from skyjacked Air France flight 139, held at gunpoint in Entebbe after most non-Israeli passengers were freed… With three cars—two Land Rover jeeps and a civilian Mercedes—filling the Hercules, there was little space for the 29 soldiers to sprawl out comfortably, except under, inside and atop the vehicles… The plan to rescue the more than 100 hostages held at Uganda's Entebbe airport was certainly unprecedented. The elite team was used to covert operations on Israeli or nearby soil, where the terrain was familiar. But passing over Ethiopia and then Kenya, their final mission in Uganda would be an unparalleled 3,800 km. from Israel; the round-trip distance too far for the Hercules to handle without refueling. Meanwhile, Uganda's leader, despot Idi Amin, was helping the hijackers from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, allowing them to keep the hostages in his military airfield terminal. According to hostage testimonies taken later, Amin visited the hostages a number of times, telling them with jolly tones and waving "shalom" that he was appointed by God and was their friend. Their release, he said, was dependent not on him, but on the Israeli government's ability to be reasonable and release 53 Palestinian "freedom fighters" from jails, primarily in Israel, but also held in France, Germany, Switzerland and Kenya. Israeli Intelligence warned that hundreds of Amin's soldiers were guarding the terminal… Trailing a safe distance behind the Hercules planes were also two Israeli 707s: a medical unit headed by Ephraim Sneh and a command headquarters filled with high-ranking officers and generals. Later, soldiers would joke that the plan sounded like a script from Mission Impossible: The Israelis would land without arousing suspicion, pretend to be Ugandan guards traveling in an entourage of Land Rovers behind President Idi Amin in his famous black Mercedes, and overtake the terrorists with the element of surprise, despite hundreds of enemy soldiers in every direction. Kafri would be the first in the counterfeit convoy as the driver of the Mercedes, sitting next to Sayeret Matkal Commander, Lt.-Col. Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, in charge of the inner ground assault, and Sayeret Matkal officer Maj. Muki Betzer, second in command for the inner ground assault. [Sgt.-Maj. Amir] Ofer would be the last soldier in the convoy, in the back of the second Land Rover. Together, the 29 Israelis in the three cars commanded by Netanyahu were to kill the terrorists, ward off the Ugandan guards and free the hostages, while the other teams, acting in parallel—some as far as one mile away—secured the periphery areas, guarded the planes, refueled, destroyed the Ugandan fighter planes and reloaded the Israeli planes with the hostages… TWO DAYS EARLIER,
THURSDAY, JULY 1 The rest of the passengers were flown to Europe. Through the night and the early morning of July 1, Israeli agents met with the freed hostages to collect descriptions of the areas where the hostages were kept, the terminal and the hijackers' dress and behavior. Without waiting for cabinet approval, Netanyahu, Maj. Muki Betzer, Maj-Gen. Dan Shomron, Intelligence officer Col. Ehud Barak and other top IDF officials continued to work on their military rescue plan. The Idi Amin entourage ground plan sounded convincing to them, except for a few minor details…the army did not own a Mercedes. Kafri, in charge of special military operations and arms, was put to the task. Through the previous night and the early morning, he set about hunting down a Mercedes in Tel Aviv from a government connection and getting it into shape... [T]he car was white. "We took it back to the unit…painted it black and made it a really good car. A guy named Roded from Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael made the Ugandan flag and a license plate… As they examined the car, they found a hamsa, an anti-evil-eye charm, tied underneath the car on the right side which, despite their laughter, they decided to leave in place… Back in Jerusalem, Defense Minister Shimon Peres was continuing to amass intelligence information, including the unusual task of creating a character profile for the dictator widely considered a homicidal psychopath. Stroking Amin's ego was one way to gain time for the hostages… Peres…ordered ret. Col. Burka Bar-Lev—a former diplomat in good standing with Amin who had been stationed in Uganda when the two countries had better diplomatic relations—to phone Amin and butter him up. "We wanted to know how much time we had… We [flattered him and] told him, 'You are very ambitious. You can win the Nobel Peace Prize [if you help us].'"… Perhaps the kissing-up to Amin paid off. When Amin received the news that the Israelis agreed to negotiate, he ordered the hijackers to extend their deadline to 14:00 July 4. The IDF planning for a rescue mission went into a frenzied overtime… All over the country, soldiers were being summoned to base. FRIDAY, JULY 2 While soldiers prepared the vehicles and planes and organized artillery, Yoni Netanyahu divided up the Sayeret Matkal team into squads, each responsible for storming one area of the terminal, where the hijackers were guarding the hostages… Ofer would not only be in the squad at greatest risk, but now he would be the team member among them to carry special explosives to break down any necessary doors or walls. "I was chosen to go to Entebbe with five kilos of explosives on my back and a detonator in my pockets. Every bullet could have blown me up," he says. "The intelligence file showed 200 to 1,000 Ugandan soldiers in a military airport with about 20 MIG-21 and MIG-17 fighter planes; MIG 21 was the most advanced fighter in the world at that time. It was clear that we 30 soldiers [from our Sayeret Matkal team] were hugely outnumbered." …A contact in East Africa snuck into Uganda to photograph the Entebbe terminal. The freed hostages helped the Israelis draw a picture of where the hostages were held and where the hijackers camped out. And from a bout of wild good fortune, the contractor who built the old airport terminal where the hostages were held turned out to be Israeli—and all the airport blueprints were quietly collected by the IDF. Maj. Muki Betzer, who had been previously stationed in Entebbe when Israel had diplomatic relations with Uganda several years earlier, was assigned to the inner circle and briefed the team about the Ugandan military and terminal. It was all coming together. Late on Friday, the intelligence information was used to build a mock terminal from tarps and poles. The planes were flown into the runway, loaded with the soldiers, the Land Rovers and the Mercedes. The soldiers spent the rest of the night in dry runs, with Chief of Staff Motta Gur observing… The dry run was also unrealistic, charges Ofer. "In a real dry run you should take a flight of 8 hours to see how you function and storm a 'real' building. We just hung some fabric to imitate the first-floor terminal. We didn't even shoot. God knows why Motta Gur was happy with the dry run and approved the mission."… SATURDAY, JULY 3
In the Sinai, when Rabin finally approved Operation Thunderbolt, Netanyahu delivered his team their final briefing. "He was cool as ice and didn't show the slightest fear; he was full of confidence and focus," says Ofer. "…I saw myself watching him from the side and admiring him." … ENTEBBE, UGANDA-SUNDAY,
JULY 4, 00:01 It is speculated that in the days preceding the Entebbe raid, Idi Amin bought a new car, and no longer drove a black Mercedes. Also unbeknownst to the soldiers…Ugandan cars are designed with the driver on the right, unlike the Mercedes they brought from Israel with the driver on the left. Rifles were pointed at them and there was no time to pause. "Giora Zussman shot from the right window with a silencer, and at the same time a guy in the second vehicle decided to shoot with an automatic machine gun," says Kafri. Though the second soldier may have saved lives by his on-the-spot decision, his echoing shot did take away the element of surprise on which the whole mission was founded. "Yoni [Netanyahu] now had to change the plan without a moment's consideration. Instead of driving the convoy directly to the terminal where the hostages were being kept, it stopped a distance away at the control tower," says Kafri, "so they wouldn't see us coming." As soon as the shots were fired, the Ugandans ordered the airport landing lights shut, and shooting began… The commander of [Ofer’s] squad was to lead him and two others to door number two. But when Ofer looked up from holding onto the car, his commander, Amnon Peled was nowhere in sight. "I was sure he was already far ahead and his back exposed. The fear and trembling disappeared and I ran as fast as possible to cover his back… But it was a mistake–he was still behind me. And when he saw me he understood, and tried to catch up..." [E]veryone continued, following the line of the side of the building. "Only I was running at an angle towards the building to get there faster… I was already almost at the door, and seconds later, by the last 20 meters before I got there, I heard a shout that 'Yoni has been injured.' But I did not have time to even flicker, my instructions were to reach the door or they could blow up the building in a matter of seconds," he says. …“Suddenly, someone lying on the floor started shooting at me…” says Ofer. "We shot at each other, and finally I saw his head drop. I rushed in, shot him again, and looked to the right, and realized I was—unintentionally—alone. I was the first to arrive."… Ofer's mistaken dart ahead of his unit turned out to be fortuitous in more than one way. After he shot the first hijacker, two more hijackers in a second room were lying on the floor, their weapons pointed at the line of soldiers approaching along the wall. But in a flash, they suddenly heard Ofer on their other side, and rotated their guns towards him. "In exactly that moment, my commanding officer had reached the door, and saw the hijackers rotate. He shot them before they could shoot me in the back," he says. “A fourth hijacker was hiding behind a pillar and pointed his gun to shoot at Amos [Goren]. And a fraction of a second before him, Amos shot him…” says Ofer. Ofer ran to the hostages with the loudspeaker he was also carrying, and shouted to them in Hebrew and English to lie down. Within seconds, the rest of the unit arrived. One hostage jumped up and was shot by two other IDF soldiers who mistakenly thought he was a terrorist. Two other hostages were also killed, ostensibly by the hijackers. Within minutes, all of the hijackers were dead. Around the terminal, there was shooting everywhere for at least 15 minutes. The Israelis were engaging the Ugandan soldiers… According to Sneh, some seven IDF soldiers were lightly wounded, and three were seriously injured, including Yoni Netanyahu. Only one of the three in critical condition would survive—Sorin Herschko, who would become a war hero and a paraplegic… "It was an expensive mission," [Maj.-Gen. Matan Vilnai] says, "because we lost Yoni." Maj. Ephraim Sneh, in charge of the air hospital, treated the wounded on the ground before putting them on the air hospital's return flight. "This was my strongest memory from the mission," Sneh says, "leaning on the ground taking care of the wounded at Entebbe's old terminal, when suddenly I heard all this noise. I turned around and saw the hostages being loaded onto the airplane. And I thought, 'Now we have succeeded.'" In the air hospital on the one-hour flight to Nairobi to refuel and transfer the seriously wounded, Sneh and Dr. David Hasin were treating Yoni when he died… In the first Hercules, on its way back to Israel, a pilot heard Idi Amin on shortwave radio and attached it to the loudspeaker, says Ofer. "Idi Amin announced that he had reoccupied the airport. Everyone burst out laughing. It was a grand finale." The soldiers were drained and all the way back from Kenya people slept. But there was much mixed emotion—sadness over the death of their commander mixed with a feeling of euphoria: the hostages were free and the danger past. "It was early morning and a combat aircraft from the Red Sea escorted us back because they were afraid someone would follow us," says Kafri. "It was my first time to be in Africa or overseas; and to see this escort through the window, to see the trees and the mountains, it was so beautiful. I felt high." He lay back down by the Mercedes that he would hold onto for a week, and stared at the hamsa that would become his permanent keepsake. BACK IN ISRAEL,
AT AROUND 9 A.M. He had dreaded the mission, but in retrospect would say he had no regrets. "This was the right thing to do and I am only sorry that we were not that determined in other situations." Kafri meanwhile took some of his men in the Mercedes with the Ugandan flag and license plate back to base, driving past Ben-Gurion Airport, past hundreds of Israelis singing, dancing and celebrating. They kept driving… Entebbe isn't a tale of heroism, [Kafri]says. "The most important thing when I look back is the courage of the prime minister [Rabin] to approve that mission," he says. “It was very scary and the line between failure and success was very fine... Maybe all of them would have died if we hadn't tried... But if you rescue someone you can't count how many die on the way… The one has to know that someone is coming to rescue him…” In memory of Yonatan Netanyahu z’’l, and in the hope of a safe return of Cpl. Gilad Shalit—eds. To read the unedited version of this text please visit CIJR’s Picks of the Week page. Shabbat Shalom to all our readers!
Volume VI, No. 1,394 • Thursday, July 6, 2006 I’M
AFRAID IT WILL BE LIKE THIS Early in the fall, I visited a high school in Sha’ar HaNegev, not far from Sderot and the Gaza border, to interview some students. A while into the conversation, I asked them two questions. “You’ll be middle aged when Israel’s 100 years old,” I told them. “So tell me. As you imagine the future, what do you dream of? And what are you afraid of?” These were fifteen highly intelligent, very articulate kids. But interestingly, none of them had anything terribly substantive to say about their dreams. As they sat quietly, trying to think what they could say that might not sound platitudinous, one of the guys spoke up. “Can I tell you,” he asked with a slight hesitation and a cautious glance at his schoolmates, “what I’m afraid of?” There was a moment of discomfort in the group, and a stifled giggle here and there. Sixteen year old guys, sitting in a group that also includes girls, aren’t supposed to want to talk about what they’re afraid of. But this guy wanted to speak, and within seconds, it was completely silent in the room. Everyone looked at him, and waited. “I’m afraid,” he said after a pause, “that the future will be just like this.” That was in November, after the Kassams and Red Dawn sirens had started, but long before the rain of rockets on their town began in earnest. It was before Ariel Sharon’s stroke, before the election of Hamas, before the people who took over the Gaza strip that we’d left in August declared that they would fire so many rockets on Sderot that that they would turn it into a ghost town. And even then, with many fewer rockets falling, this kid was afraid – afraid that the future would look like the present. My secretary, who has two very young children, was with me at that interview. [She] looked at me, her eyes wide with shock, as though his hopelessness was unbearable. Because no matter what else may be wrong with Israeli society, and there is plenty, it’s a society in which we take care of our kids. It’s a country filled with parks and playgrounds, a country where strangers will stop for a crying child on the street, hold him by the hand and take him home. It’s a country where young teenagers go camping by themselves, because they’ll be OK. Someone else will be around. And whoever that person is, they will take care of them, if our kids need them to. And it’s a society which, in those rare moments when we can’t keep our kids safe, memorializes them in a way that I still find chilling. Every year, on the Fast of Gedaliah, I go with a close friend to the cemetery on Mount Herzl. To Rabin’s grave. To Herzl’s. To some of the military sections. And invariably, we find ourselves making our way to the half-underground bunker of graves for people who were killed during the siege on Jerusalem in 1948. There are adults, there, lots of them. But there are kids, too. These kids were used primarily as runners, to carry messages in or out. A lot of them made it, but some of them didn’t. And now, those who didn’t make it through are memorialized near the soldiers who died in combat, and like the soldiers, have plaques commemorating the price they paid. The plaques list their name, their age, and then the phrase “nafal be-milui tafkido” – “he fell in the performance of his mission.” A boy aged seventeen. And a girl aged fifteen. And, a boy named Nisim Gini, born in Jerusalem, and killed at the age of ten, “in the performance of his mission.”… It’s been the week of kids, an unbearably long week since Sunday. I was in Zichron Yaakov, a gentrified city about an hour and a half north of Jerusalem, with our Foundation’s staff for the day. Mid-day, I began to notice a number of people listening attentively to their cell phones, and others trying to get the news on the little screens. So, I called Avi, and asked him to check the Internet. Two Israeli soldiers had been killed, he told me. Another wounded. And worse, one had been kidnapped. We’re a society that is tragically used to burying our kids in uniform. But we’re not used to their being held captive. The thought of our kids – for that’s what they are – in the hands of “people” like that is simply unbearable. And later that day, when the news released the now ubiquitous photograph of Gilad Shalit, his thick black glasses making him look younger than his nineteen years, Israelis found themselves despondent. The baby face. In the hands of who knew whom… Did he know we’d come to get him, I wondered? Because it was clear we would. You don’t take care of kid in the parks to let them grow up and be stolen out of sovereign Israeli territory. You just don’t. Avi and I talked on the phone a couple of times that day. He’d check the news, and keep me posted. “Nothing new,” he said a few times, his voice no less anguished than any of the adults with whom I was spending the day. And then he called an hour later. “Are you and Ema still planning to go away next week?” I told him we were. “Why do you ask?” “Because I just got a call from the army,” he said. “They’re moving up my date [for the next phase of his tryout to get into a certain commando unit that he wants to try to get into]. If I go, I can’t watch Micha while you’re gone.” I told him we’d make arrangements for Micha, and that if he wanted to go, he should. And I wondered what it must have felt like to still be just sixteen, to hear news like he’d heard that morning, and then to get a call from the army about his unit. And to still want to go. I thought of asking him, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. And then a day or two later, the wounded soldier, still in the hospital, began to speak to reporters who visited his room. “When I realized that I was trapped [in the tank],” he said, “I knew that was it.” And, he added, “I started to cry.” So did the people I saw at work reading the article. And then, I was driving down Hebron Road, a main drag in our part of town, and I stopped at a red light. It’s been hot this week, so all the cars had their windows closed and the air conditioning on. There was another car in the lane to my left, and one to the right. The newscaster (for who wasn’t tuned to the news?) announced that that Gilad’s parents had written him a letter and had made it public. He then read the text (the translation is mine, but the Hebrew original is posted): “To our dear, sweet Gilad, Mommy and Daddy, Yoel and Hadas, are terribly worried about you, want to hear you, and hope that you are healthy and that you feel OK, as well as you can in your circumstances. We hope that you will be able to read these words, and we want you to know that all possible steps are being taken so that you can return home to Hila and the Galilee, as quickly as possible, to your family, and to your room that is waiting for you…. Know that we are thinking of you at every moment, [hoping] that you are somehow managing, and that you will make it through these difficult moments. We know and believe that the people holding you also have families, and will know what it is that we are enduring, and will know how to take care of you and [safeguard] your health. We love you and send you strength. Mommy and Daddy” As the newscaster finished reading the letter, I happened to glance out the windows of my car. Both drivers to my side, one a man in his fifties and one a woman in her late twenties, were wiping tears from their eyes. The windows didn’t need to be open to know what they’d been hearing. And then, what had been rumors of a second kidnapping proved true. On the West Bank, the PRC claimed to be holding Eliyahu Asheri. An eighteen year old kid, now in the hands of animals, for the crime of hitchhiking. … Another big child. Wearing a t-shirt, sitting under a tree. With a wide smile. And a numb country didn’t know what to do. (Eliyahu, of course, was shot in the head the day they kidnapped him, and was buried yesterday. Another reminder of who our neighbors are.) In the meantime, the IDF was amassing tanks, APC’s and artillery along the border, just minutes away from the high school that I’d visited in November. The enormous array of armor was a relief, at least to people here. Because they can’t steal our kids and think that we’re simply going to let it go on. Then, a few nights ago, the movement into Gaza began. Now, days later, the campaign still goes on. We’ve bombed here and there, have taken out much of their electric power, destroyed some bridges, sealed Gaza tight, buzzed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s summer home with four F-16’s. But still, no Gilad. So the IDF arrested dozens of members of the Hamas government. And still, no Gilad. The rest of the world thinks we’re looking for a kidnapped soldier, so they don’t really get this massive reaction. The EU’s beginning to express concern. Bombing bridges was OK, but arresting the members of Hamas’ parliament, they think, is a bit over the top. Buzzing Assad’s palace, we’re told, was provocative. Maybe. The reason they don’t get it is that they think we’re looking for a soldier. But we’re not. We’re looking for Gilad. Everyone I hear talking about it calls him by name. Never “the soldier.” Always Gilad. Our cell phones are buzzing with text messages reminding us to say a Psalm for him. Email in-boxes are filling with the same reminder, and even include the text of the Psalm, so you can say it right when you open the e-mail. And then, you’re supposed to forward it. For the past several mornings, as our kids have woken up, the very first words out of their mouths have been “Did we find him?” They just have to look at us to know the answer. Not yet. The unbearable week drags on. The international press is abuzz with the accounts of what Israel’s troops are up to. It’s an interesting word, that term “troops.” One of them (though not one who’s in Gaza) has a bedroom across the hall from ours. She got some mail the other day, but she was away in the army, so I walked upstairs to leave it for her. To the left of her desk was her knapsack, which, for some reason, she hadn’t taken with her back to the base. Draped over the chair behind her desk, a shirt from her uniform. And on her bed, her stuffed animal, Curious George, or “Curious” as we’ve all called him since he joined the family the week she was born nineteen years ago. The combination of her uniform shirt draped over the chair, and Curious lying there all alone, almost as if he was waiting for her to come home – especially this week – was simply too much. I just needed to get out of her room. So I put the mail on her desk, gave Curious a last glance, left the room and firmly shut the door. Gilad, I’m sure, has a room something like hers. Probably no stuffed animals, but maybe. Who knows? He is, after all, just a kid. Take a look at his picture, and you see. In a few hours, Shabbat will begin. Hopefully, we’ll get Gilad back by then, but we may not. And if we haven’t, people all across our neighborhood, with an anguish that words can scarcely capture, will turn off their cell phones, shut down their computers and silence the radios, knowing that on Shabbat, we’re going be cut off from the world. That, of course, is precisely the point of Shabbat, and usually, it’s a great relief. But on a Friday night like tonight, it’s going to be beyond painful. Not to know. Not to be able to check. Simply to have to wonder, and to wait. And as soon as the sun sets tomorrow night, we’ll make Havdalah, and turn on the TV and the computers. Hoping, and praying. Praying that he’ll have come home, safe. And hoping that we’ll have some plausible reason to give our kids a hug, and to tell them, “You see, the future will be better than this. Really, it will.” A
VIEW FROM JERUSALEM I am sitting here in the center of the maelstrom that has once again hit my little country, drowning in the blah blah of hypocritical world leaders and my own confused government and military. First, a clarification is necessary. Last week, the official military arm of the democratically elected government in Gaza headed by Hamas, which is on the official list of international terror groups recognized by the U.S. and its allies, crossed the internationally recognized border, entering the sovereign State of Israel, by tunneling under a fence, attacking with explosives and machine guns an IDF military outpost. Two soldiers were killed, others were injured, and one, Gilad Shalit, was forcibly abducted. This unprovoked attack followed months of missiles fired into Israel towns, which Israel has ignored. Here is the list of the number of Qassam rockets that landed in the Western Negev by month from an article by Ami Isseroff; 12 Sep 2005, 8 Oct 2005, 4 Nov 2005, 16 Dec 2005, 00 Jan 2006, 1 Feb 2006, 49 Mar 2006, 64 Apr 2006, 46 May 2006, 89 June 2006 According to all international conventions, these are continuing, escalating, acts of war. The current conflict is not about the release of an Israeli soldier, may God protect him and watch over him and return him safely. It is about acts of war. Even should Gilad Shalit be returned, God willing, two soldiers will never return. This act of war must be met with a declaration of war and an all out offensive that will destroy the enemy. Media outlets like the BBC play it both ways, saying Gilad Shalit was “captured” not “kidnapped.” If they wish to confer legitimacy on the gangsters of Hamas, then they cannot use the argument that this attack was not an act of war, to which Israel must not respond in kind. The U.S. saw fit to enter Afghanistan and Iraq following a terrorist attack by Saudi nationals that killed thousands of Americans in New York and Washington, bombing cities and killing civilians who were not directly involved, have no border with the U.S., and have not formally declared their intention of destroying the U.S. Nevertheless, the U.S. administration now sees fit to suggest to Israel that it exercise "restraint" when its borders are violated by those who publicly declare their intention of wiping Israel off the map. The Foreign Ministry of Switzerland, which was silent in the face of death and injury to thousands of innocent Israel civilians during the last five years at the hands of Palestinian suicide bombers, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention on Human Rights, nevertheless saw fit to declare on July 3 that Israel is in violation of the Geneva Convention in responding to this act of war with its reasonable and most circumspect and so far, overly cautious and highly ineffective campaign in Gaza. Israel Air Force chief Major General Eliezer Shkedy told the Jerusalem Post: “If we know that [the terrorist] is holding his son's hand, we do not fire. Even if the terrorist is in the midst of firing a Kassam, and the Kassam is aimed to kill. We do not fire. You should know that. And that’s a fearsome thing.” The Palestinian people, like the German people in World War II, will no doubt be faced with additional casualties and additional suffering, as a direct result of their active support for, and participation in, creating a terrorist state which continues to attempt to murder its innocent neighbors next door. While our human sympathy goes out to the child whose father chooses to hold his hand as he fires a Kassam rocket at other people's children, war is by its very nature a collective punishment. [But] the joy in Gaza reported by Arab newspapers belies the idea that the people are not in complete agreement with their elected government. In an article by Ami Isseroff, quoted by IMRA, he writes: “Al-Quds Al-Arab newspaper of June 26 told the truth, not for Western ears and eyes: “Sources in Gaza Strip confirmed yesterday [the] happiness in the ranks of the population, due to the quality operation carried out by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam which claimed the lives of two Israeli soldiers and two men from the resistance, and resulted in the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. Eyewitnesses [said] that joy was obvious on the faces of hundreds of people in Rafah…. They indicated that hundreds of people congratulated one another and some distributed sweets to the citizens to express their joy.” We would like to hear international protests concerning this, before we can take seriously anybody who wishes to interfere and be taken seriously as a broker in this conflict. I, as an Israeli citizen, ask the Government of Israel to respond to this act of war by declaring war and putting an end to the conflict by military means once and for all, given that all diplomatic attempts at solution have failed and that Hamas is not a trustworthy negotiating partner, having negotiated the release of a young Israeli kidnap victim the day after they’d already murdered him. As for releasing prisoners, the 1,500 prisoners Hamas want released in exchange for Gilad are not political prisoners. They are terrorist scum tried and convicted of crimes: murder, attempted murder, etc. The last time Israel released hundreds of terrorists to secure the return of the bodies of three Israeli soldiers and the release of an Israeli drug dealer and double agent, 34 Israelis were subsequently murdered by those set free. My prayers are with the family of Gilad Shalit. May God rescue him. Volume VI, No. 1,393 • Wednesday, July 5, 2006 WEDNESDAY’S “NEWS IN REVIEW” ROUND-UP WEEKLY QUOTES “Our dear, sweet Gilad: Mom and Dad, Yoel and Hadas are very concerned for you, want to hear you and are hoping you are well and feeling alright—as good as possible in your condition. Hoping you can read these lines and we want you to know that everything possible is being done to bring you home to Hila and the Galilee, as quickly as possible, to your family, your room that's waiting for you (and to help us with the B & B rooms). Know that we're thinking of you all the time and hoping you're managing somehow and surviving these difficult moments. We know and believe that whoever is holding you also has a family and knows what we're going through and will know to watch over you and your health. Loving you and encouraging you, Mom and Dad.”—Noam Shalit and his wife, parents of abducted IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit, in an open letter to their son. Cpl. Shalit, 19, was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip on June 25, 2006. His father approved of Israel's response not to yield to the terrorists’ ultimatum. (Ha’aretz, June 27; Jerusalem Post, July 3) “Israel will not give in to extortion by the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government, led by murderous terrorist organizations. We will not conduct negotiations on the release of prisoners.”—Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a written statement released Sunday, refusing to negotiate with terrorists. The three Palestinian terror groups involved in Shalit’s kidnapping threatened to “close the kidnapped solider’s file” if Israel did not release 1,500 prisoners by yesterday’s deadline. (National Post, July 4) “The initial goal should be freeing the Israeli soldier. That is the key to ending the crisis.”--United States President George W. Bush, in a telephone conversation with Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday, calling for the freeing an Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian gunmen. The content of the President’s conversation with the Turkish Prime Minister was released by Frederick Jones, White House National Security Council spokesman. (Ynet News, July 1) “The Jews have the technology and the power, the mighty fortresses and their tanks, and they think that this will protect them from us. But God has sent his men to destroy them. God has sent his soldiers to execute his will on the Jews.”—Hamas preacher Sheikh Ahmed Nimr, of the Rahma “Mercy” mosque in Khan Younis, explaining that the kidnappping of the young Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, is the culmination of a Koranic verse that promised God would send his solderiers to punish Jews. Nimr, a former a Arabic teacher whose fiery sermons draw worshippers from throughout Khan Younis, also says that Palestinians who die attacking Israel are the true chosen people. “God has chosen his people, to carry out his work and they are great men.”(National Post, July 1) “In the army, as usual in the past few weeks, it was difficult to discern any great admiration for the performance of the political echelon. This week the prime minister and the defense minister displayed a surplus of public presence and a deficit of practical contribution. It is not only security authority that is lacking here, but also a clear political line. The troops in the forward command posts of Givati and Golani, the infantry brigades carrying out Operation Summer Rains, found it difficult to explain its goals. With events hurtling unmistakably toward a direct collision with the Hamas government, the goal of the campaign has yet to become clear: Is Israel ready to risk toppling the Hamas government, and who does it think will replace it?—Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, columnists. (Ha’aretz, June 30) “These people are not Israeli citizens; they are residents, and in all democracies, if someone is involved in hostile activity, you are under no obligation to continue their residency. They are senior members of Hamas, which under Israeli law…is a terrorist organization.”–Mark Regev, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, regarding Israel’s decision to expel and revoke residency permits of four Palestinians from East Jerusalem who are members of the Hamas-led government. Three of the four Palestinians were already in Israeli custody following Israel’s arrests of 64 Hamas members on June 28. (Globe & Mail, July 1) “Both the request for the session and the proposed resolution are entirely one-sided. Both speak only about Israeli violations, while ignoring the Hamas government’s role, not only in the hostage-taking that precipitated the crisis, but in perpetrating deliberate attacks on civilians, such as last night’s firing of a rocket at a children’s school in the city of Ashkelon.”—Hillel Neuer, UN Watch Executive Director, expressing deep concern over the imbalance in both the new UN Human Rights Council special session’s agenda and its proposed resolution. UN Watch commended the United States, Canada and Australia for speaking out against the biased nature of the proceedings. Neuer described this afternoon's session as “primarily consisting of anti-Israel tirades by Arab and Islamic states, with the spectacle of Sudan accusing others of ‘war crimes’.” Non-governmental organizations were left literally speechless when the Islamic group moved to suspend debate right before they were slated to speak. Since the council was created on March 15, several months of preparatory sessions in Geneva were dominated by repeated demands of Arab and Muslim states for a special agenda item to censure Israel. (UN Watch Press Release, July 5) “There is no doubt there are people, there are groups that we believe are engaged in planning this kind of [terrorist] activity. I think the roots of this extremism lie in the attitudes and ideas as much as organisation. I don't think there is an answer to this terrorism that is simply about police work or security measures. If we want to defeat the extremism, we have got to defeat its ideas and we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West. Government itself cannot go and root out the extremism in these communities. I am not the person to go into the Muslim community and explain to them that this extreme view is not the true face of Islam.”—British PM Tony Blair, at his twice yearly cross-examination by the Commons liaison committee, urging British Muslims to do more to combat Islamic extremism. A recent poll showed that more than one in 10 British Muslims think that the July 7 London suicide bombers were martyrs. Peter Clarke, head of the anti-terrorist branch at London's Metropolitan Police, said Monday that his colleagues were investigating an unprecedented 70 terrorist-related cases at home and in the rest of the world, warning that the information being uncovered was "very sinister". He also revealed that officers had stopped three and probably four attacks since last year’s July 7 bombings. (National Post, July 5) SHORT TAKES AL AKSA CLAIMS CHEMICAL WEAPONS—(Gaza) The Aksa Martyrs Brigades announced on July 2 that its members have succeeded in manufacturing at least 20 different types of biological and chemical weapons. In a leaflet distributed in the Gaza Strip, the group, which belongs to PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party, threatened to add the new weapons to Kassam rockets that are being fired at Israeli communities almost daily [one of which reached Ashkelon for the first time on July 4—E d.] and to use the weapons against Israeli Defense Forces soldiers if Israel carried out its threats to invade the Gaza Strip. (Jerusalem Post, June 27) MOST WANTED HAMAS MAN ON TV—(Gaza) Mohammed Deif, the Hamas operative who has been number one on Israel’s most-wanted list for a decade, appeared on TV July 3 in a documentary prepared by the Al-Jazeera satellite network. It was a rare appearance for Deif, who is usually underground avoiding the Israelis, who accuse him of responsibility for many suicide bombing attacks in Israel over the past decade. Deif, a master bombmaker, called for the Arab world to push for an Israeli pullout from the West Bank. (Jer. Post, July 3) SHIN BET, IDF THWART KIDNAPPING—(Gaza) Agents from Israel’s Security Agency, Shin Bet, thwarted an attempt last month by two operatives from the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in the Gaza Strip to infiltrate Israel, in a bid to kidnap Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. On June 11, Ibrahim Magdova and Mahmad Azar were arrested in a joint IDF-Shin Bet operation as they tried to infiltrate into Israel from Egypt. Magdov told Shin Bet interrogators that Jamal Abu Samhadana—the former PRC chief who was killed in an Israeli Air Force missile strike last month—recruited him in June to abduct and murder soldiers whose bodies would be used as bargaining chips to negotiate the release of Palestinians held by Israel. (Jer. Post, July 2) ABBAS FIRES JERUSALEM MUFTI—(Gaza) The mufti of Jerusalem, fired last week by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, said over the weekend that he had been punished for criticizing Israel and opposing Abbas’s policies. Abbas’s decision to dismiss the mufti, Sheikh Ikremah Sabri, came shortly after the latter said in a newspaper interview that “since Israel did not want peace, negotiating with it would be a waste of time.” Moreover, the decision came after Sabri criticized the international sanctions imposed on the Hamas government and attempts by some Palestinians to bring down the Hamas government. Abbas was also angered by Sabri’s participation in a rally organized by Sheikh Raed Salah’s Islamic Movement at which Sabri criticized Abbas’s decision to hold a referendum on a controversial document drafted by Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. (Jer. Post, July 1) IRAN: NUCLEAR DEMANDS “UNREASONABLE”—(Tehran) Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator said July 3, ahead of a key meeting with the EU on the nuclear dispute, that the international community’s proposal for Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment was unreasonable. Iran has been offered a package of incentives by the world’s major powers if it agrees to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment—a process in the nuclear fuel cycle that can also make the core of an atom bomb. (National Post, July 4) POLL: DISCORD BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND WEST—(Paris) An international survey of more than 14, 000 people in 13 nations conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that non-Muslim Westerners and Muslims around the world have widely different views of world events, and each group tends to view the other as violent, intolerant and lacking in respect for women. Over all, Muslims in the survey, including the large Islamic populations in Britain, France, Germany and Spain, broadly blamed the West for the bad relations, while Westerners tended to blame Muslims. Pew asked respondents to give their opinions of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and it found anti-Jewish sentiment to be “overwhelming” in the Muslim countries surveyed. It reached 98 per cent in Jordan and 97 per cent in Egypt. Majorities in the Muslim world, Pew said, also expressed the opinion that the victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections in January would “be helpful to a fair settlement between Israel and the Palestinians”—a view that was roundly rejected by non-Muslim publics. (New York Times, June 23) DIEUDONNÉ BOOKED FOR 10 SHOWS—(Montreal) Controversial French comic Dieudonné Mbala Mbala is booked for 10 shows as part of the French-language side of the Just for Laughs comedy festival beginning this month. Dieudonné’s increasingly virulent attacks on Israel and Jewish groups have caused former colleagues to accuse him of anti-Semitism, and a French court to convict him of “incitement to racial hatred” for saying that his Jewish critics were “slave traders, who converted to banking, show business and, today, terrorist action.” Sylvie Savard, a spokeswoman for Just for Laughs said Dieudonné is always a big draw in Montreal. “For years, there has been a kind of love story between Dieudonné and Just for Laughs, and Quebecers as well…he has a lot of fans here.” (National Post, June 29) N. KOREA THREATENS NUCLEAR WAR—(Washington) North Korea’s state-run media said July 3 the country’s army is ready to answer any pre-emptive U.S. military attack against a missile site with a “relentless annihilating strike and a nuclear war.” The Korean Central News Agency, citing an unidentified Rodung Sinmun newspaper “analyst,” highlighted what it described as aggressive U.S. intentions by repeating accusations made last week that the U.S. military is sending spy planes into its airspace. Early this morning, North Korea test-fired its seventh missile intensifying the furor ignited when the regime defied international protests by launching a long-range missile and at least five shorter-range rockets earlier in the day. The missiles all apparently fell harmlessly into the Sea of Japan. (National Post, July 4, 5) BBC REJECTS CALL TO CHANGE TERMS—(London) The BBC has rejected a call made by an independent panel studying charges of bias in its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to change its editorial policies on the use of the word “terrorist” and to appoint a senior editor to oversee its Middle East coverage. Using the word “terrorist” to describe attacks on civilians, BBC management argued in a paper released June 19, would make the “very value judgments” it had been asked to eschew. An independent panel in May found the BBC’s reporting from Israel did “not consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture.” (Jer. Post, June 29) BILLING HOLOCAUST VICTIMS—(New York) Having represented Holocaust survivors who won a $1.25 billion settlement from Swiss banks, New York University law professor, Burt Neuborne’s bill is more than $4 million. Neuborne worked pro bono on the first stage of the case that won the settlement against Swiss banks accused of helping Nazis steal Jewish holdings. He is now charging $700 an hour— money that will come from the sum available to the survivors—helping the court decide how to allocate the money among Holocaust victims worldwide. A group of survivors who are dissatisfied are challenging the bill. (New York Times, June 29) Volume VI, No. 1,392 • Tuesday, July 4, 2006 STOP TERROR
AT ITS SOURCE Dawn broke yesterday over the Israel-Gaza border on a surreal but not unfamiliar scene: Rows of Merkava tanks, armored personnel carriers and Humvees were assembled in preparation for an incursion into the strip. These forces—when given the green light—would punch through booby-trapped refugee camps in search of Hamas and Islamic Jihad gunmen, while Israeli jets and helicopters hunt the terrorists from above. By invading Gaza, Israel hopes to counter increasingly bold Palestinian attacks—such as the firing of some 1,000 Qassam rockets at Israeli border towns and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Hamas earlier this week. The troops will probably net a large number of terrorists and may rescue the captured soldier. But while the operation may flex its military muscle, it cannot restore Israel's deterrence power or prevent future rocket attacks and kidnappings. Indeed, the attack may well prove Pyrrhic—inflicting greater injury on Israel than on the Palestinians. The quandary Israel confronts today originated in the unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli settlers and soldiers from Gaza last August. A sizable majority of Israelis supported disengagement, excruciating as it was, as a means of achieving a national consensus on the country's borders and of preserving its vital Jewish majority. Yet even those Israelis most in favor of the Gaza pullout understood that many Palestinians would interpret the move as a strategic retreat and a victory for Hamas and al-Aqsa terror. "We shot at the Jews and they fled Gaza," they would say, "so let's keep shooting and they'll abandon Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem." Israel could have refuted that claim by responding immediately and massively to every infiltration and to every rocket fired, irrespective of whether the attacks caused Israeli casualties. Gaza is now a de facto independent state, Israel should have declared, and like any other state it must bear the consequences of its aggression. But Israel did none of this. On the contrary, infiltrations and rocket strikes began almost the day after the Gaza disengagement. The primary target was Sderot, a working-class town in the western Negev populated mostly by long-settled immigrants from North Africa and more recent arrivals from Russia. Israel responded with missile attacks aimed at eliminating the Palestinian rocket crews and destroying the Qassam factories. But the crews were too elusive and the factories too readily rebuilt… Israel's impotence was the product of several factors, firstly [PM] Ariel Sharon's reluctance to reoccupy Gaza so soon after evacuating it. Then came Mr. Sharon's stroke and the Israeli elections, during which, traditionally, Israel refrains from staging large-scale operations. Finally, Ehud Olmert succeeded in cobbling together a left-of-center coalition that pledged to proceed with the unilateral disengagement from the territories…but largely abandoned Mr. Sharon's [earlier] hard-hitting antiterror tactics… The deaths of more than a dozen Palestinian civilians by Israeli fire in the last few weeks has further widened these schisms, pinning the government between the leftists who denounce its callousness and the generals who disdain its sheepishness. An Israeli raid into Gaza will almost certainly result in a frightful number of civilian deaths. The press will once again focus on funerals and mourning families and forget the reason for Israel's action. Israelis will once again agonize over whether these casualties were justified or avoidable… After a few days of heated battles and accusations of Israeli atrocities, the government will be compelled to extract its forces from Gaza, but not all the soldiers will be going home. And the rockets will keep raining on Sderot. Posing as defenders of the land, Hamas will be made more, not less, popular by the Israeli attack, and Abu Mazen will be commensurately weakened. Mr. Olmert will be unable to proceed on convergence and the Israeli right will begin its inexorable return to office. There is, however, one way to avert a public relations disaster for Israel, to limit casualties, and to restore Israel's deterrence power: Israel must return to the targeted-killing policy that enabled Mr. Sharon to triumph over terrorist organizations. Israel must target those Palestinians who order others to fire rockets from within civilian areas but whose families are located safely away from the firing zones. No Hamas or Islamic Jihad leader should be immune from such reprisals—neither Prime Minister Ismail Haniya nor Khaled Meshal, who masterminds Hamas from Damascus. Though there is certain to be some international backlash, the damage to Israel's image will likely be temporary. Who today remembers Abdel Aziz Ranitisi and Sheikh Yassin? Those responsible for causing injury and death to both Israelis and Palestinians must pay the ultimate price. Only then can quiet be restored to Israel's borders and progress toward either unilateral or negotiated solutions resumed. (Michael Oren, senior fellow at the Shalem center in Jerusalem, is author of "Six Days of War" [Oxford, 2002].) 'SHARON’S
WAY IS STILL THE RIGHT WAY' Now that Palestinian terror has gotten out of hand in Gaza, people like me who strongly favor unilateral Israeli withdrawal—from Gaza and northern Samaria last year and from the West Bank interior in the coming years—owe an accounting. With the torrent of Kassams on Sderot in recent weeks and now the killing of two IDF soldiers and the kidnapping of a third, this is obviously not what we hoped or expected the Palestinians to be doing in Gaza 10 months after Israel got out of there. So was Ariel Sharon's disengagement a mistake? Is Ehud Olmert's realignment plan a mistake? Is Israel's whole post-Oslo policy of unilateralism a mistake? My answer, based on what's happened in the last six years instead of just the last few weeks, is no, no and no. For all the condemnations now being heard over last summer's pullout from Gaza, I don't think too many Israelis wish our settlers and soldiers were still in there. Very few Israelis regret that our flag no longer flies in a strip of territory where 9,000 Jews lived alongside 1.4 million Palestinians. And if they think back, Israelis will remember that the Kassams on Sderot and attacks on IDF soldiers didn't start only after Israel got out of Gaza. No, the terror in Gaza and from Gaza was much, much worse when Israeli settlers and soldiers were still inside the strip. The two IDF soldiers killed at Kerem Shalom this week were the first two fatalities caused by Gazan Palestinians during the 10 months since disengagement. By comparison, Gazan Palestinians killed 148 Israelis and 11 foreigners in the five years between the September 2000 start of the intifada and last September's completion of the withdrawal, according to Foreign Ministry statistics. The recent Kassams on Sderot, bad as they've been, haven't killed anyone yet... Stepping back from the bloodshed, anguish and fury of these days, and thinking back over recent years instead, there's just no other conclusion but that unilateral withdrawal from Gaza has made Israel a vastly more secure country than it was before, not to mention a far more Jewish and democratic country… So where do we go now? Should we plow ahead with the realignment plan and get ready to hand everything on the far side of the West Bank security barrier to the Palestinians? No. Not for now, at any rate. Something has changed. Gaza has gotten out of control. While Palestinian terrorists there have become much less of a problem for Israel than they were before disengagement, they've become a much bigger problem than Israel should tolerate now that we've gone from their midst… Gaza has become too violent for Israel to go forward now with the realignment plan. I still support it, but it has to wait until Gaza is basically secured—until safety along the Gazan border is at least comparable to that along the border with Lebanon, where unilateral withdrawal has proven a great success. I think this is going to happen, too, because I think the government and the IDF are going to make it happen. In the last few years the IDF has worked wonders, beating down the intifada and forcing Hamas to call a truce, which held for 16 months until the current bloodletting. Now it's time for the IDF, especially the Air Force, to really go to work on the terrorists in Gaza. There will no doubt be more innocent Palestinian children killed accidentally—but such tragedies happen in the most justified of wars, and Israel's war against Gazan terror is absolutely justified… I'm afraid I don't have much confidence anymore that the Palestinians will do the right thing or the smart thing, but I do have a lot of confidence that the IDF will ultimately force them into it. The new Israeli unilateralism--"Sharon's way," as it's called—is going through a terrible few weeks, but this is a setback, not a defeat. Israel in 2006 has far too much strength, justice and smarts not to win this fight against the Palestinians. I think it's only a matter of time. OLMERT
DOESN’T GET IT Since replacing Ariel Sharon in office last December, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has refused to permit a large-scale IDF incursion into the Gaza Strip. The hundreds of rockets, mortars and missiles that have rendered the Western Negev's population and economy hostage to Palestinian rocket crews could not budge him from his refusal to take the war to the enemy. Indeed, for months he ignored the pleas of residents of Sderot and told the IDF to suffice with artillery fire into empty fields and aerial bombings of terrorists en route to launching rockets. The fact that Israel's intelligence collection capabilities in Gaza were grievously undermined in the aftermath of last summer's withdrawal; the fact that IDF commanders acknowledge that more weaponry has been brought into Gaza in the past ten months than entered in the previous 38 years, made no impression. Repeated reports of Al Qaida opening shop in Gaza and of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units training Fatah and Hamas members in the destroyed Israeli communities were dismissed as unimportant, irrelevant and insignificant. Olmert refused to send forces into Gaza to contend with the transformation of Gaza into a strategic threat to Israel because doing so would involve acknowledging that his plan to retreat from Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem will turn Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Hadera, Afula and Beersheba into frontline communities. He refused to send forces into Gaza because doing so would demonstrate that Israel cannot defend its cities from their outskirts… Acknowledging that Fatah and Hamas are equally at war with Israel would mean that Israel has no option of giving away Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem to any of these groups… As to the current IDF operation in Gaza, it is fairly clear that whatever accomplishments the IDF may achieve over the next few days, Olmert will call for a retreat rather than enable those tactical accomplishments to become translated into an enhanced strategic environment for Israel. Olmert, whose primary goal as prime minister is to reenact the failed withdrawal from Gaza twenty-fold in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem cannot enable the Israeli public to see proof on its television screens night after night that the withdrawal was an abysmal failure… [While Ariel Sharon’s] Defensive Shield's goal was to "defeat the terror infrastructure," the current Operation Summer Rains in Gaza has set as its goal returning Cpl. Shalit to Israel. Olmert and Peretz hope to somehow convince Hamas and Fatah and their bosses in Damascus and Teheran that they are better off coughing up Shalit. They are supposed to think this even though Israel has made it clear that it won't stay in Gaza and is dead set—regardless of the outcome of Summer Rain—on giving them Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem… Olmert, like Barak was brought to power as the head of leftist coalition. If Olmert loses that support base, his government could easily fall… In short, the limited nature of this week's IDF operations makes clear that Olmert still refuses to get it. WHY THEY
NEED US For all the worldwide whining and bellyaching about the United States, today—America's 230th birthday—provides an opportune time for them to consider for just a moment what the world might be like without good ol' Uncle Sam. The picture isn't pretty. Absent U.S. leadership, diplomatic influence, military might, economic power and unprecedented generosity, life aboard planet earth would likely be pretty grim, indeed. Set aside the differences America made last century–just imagine a world where this country had vanished on Jan. 1, 2001. On security, the United States is the global balance of power. While it's not our preference, we are the world's "cop on the beat," providing critical stability in some of the planet's toughest neighborhoods. Without the U.S. "Globo-cop," rivals India and Pakistan might well find cause to unleash the dogs of war in South Asia—undoubtedly leading to history's first nuclear (weapons) exchange. Talk about Fourth of July fireworks… In Afghanistan, al Qaeda would still be an honored guest, scheming over a global caliphate stretching from Spain to Indonesia… In Asia, China would be the "Middle Kingdom," gobbling up democratic Taiwan and compelling pacifist Japan (reluctantly) to join the nuclear weapons cl |