Fear and anger pervade this city in equal measure — fear that Israel’s airstrikes may intensify once the foreigners have all escaped, and anger that the world has failed to impose a cease-fire. But behind this mixture of emotions the few people who are able to think calmly about the extraordinary events of the past week are filled with shock and awe. How could the protagonists have miscalculated so badly? Where is Israel’s exit strategy? What did Hezbollah, the Shiite militia, expect when it launched the attacks that captured two Israeli soldiers and left eight others dead?
Timur Goksel used to be the senior adviser to the UN mission on the Lebanese border. The day before the Hezbollah raid, he went down to the seaside resort of Tyre with a group of students from Beirut’s American University where he now teaches. “The beaches were packed. It was like Florida,” he recalls. “Many of them were well-off Lebanese Shiites from the Diaspora in west Africa and the US. They don’t support Hezbollah politically but they finance its welfare services, and I remember thinking Hezbollah would never start anything at least until the end of the season. How wrong I was.”
Some analysts wonder whether Hezbollah thought the US would never allow Israel to strike so heavily across Lebanon. After last spring’s so-called Cedar revolution, which impelled the departure of Syrian troops, Lebanon seemed to be the Bush administration’s favorite Arab country, a showcase for the process of democracy that Washington hoped to export across the region.
Others suggest Hezbollah may have calculated that Israel was too busy in Gaza to handle a second front on its northern borders. There was little evidence for such an argument, however. The militarily inexperienced Olmert-Peretz team was already overreacting to the Palestinian raid, which killed two soldiers and captured one. Rather than negotiate a prisoner swap, they were lashing out all over Gaza. Why would they not also overreact to a bigger military setback up north?
On the Israeli side, lack of logic is equally striking. The strangest element is the decision to mount airstrikes against the Lebanese Army. How can Israel demand that the Lebanese Army move down to the border to disarm and replace Hezbollah while hitting the very people it hopes to encourage to implement that strategy? It has killed at least 11 officers and men in a series of raids.
In a powerful speech to foreign diplomats, the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fuad Siniora, pointed out that Israel was not only killing civilians and destroying huge chunks of the country’s infrastructure, but had also hit army barracks. “Is this the price we pay for aspiring to build our democratic institutions? Is this the message to send to the country of diversity, freedom and tolerance?” he asked.
While both Hezbollah and Israel have blundered, Israel is likely to come off worse. Its military planners appear not to have expected Hezbollah to retaliate so fiercely to the first Israeli bombs after the two soldiers were seized.
The rain of missiles on cities as distant as Haifa, as well as the successful strike on an Israeli warship, was a surprise. Hezbollah may have been weakened militarily by the weeklong aerial barrage, but it is still able to launch new rockets. With air power not working, a cross-border incursion by an elite Israeli unit on Wednesday led to two soldiers being killed by Hezbollah guerrillas. Amos Harel, an analyst for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, argues that in the wake of such casualties in a relatively small ground operation “the government will have to consider this fact if it decides on a more massive invasion in the future.”
In each of its earlier wars, Israel fought and won against the conventional armies of Arab states. It always enjoyed superiority. But today’s asymmetrical warfare is proving far harder for Israel to handle, and is exacting a deadlier toll. First came the Palestinian resort to suicide bombing, which tanks are powerless to defeat. Now come long-range rockets that have killed more Israelis in one week than Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles did in 1991.
It is true that Israel is no longer fighting for its existence as it did in 1967 and 1973, when Arab forces penetrated the country. Today’s issue is the degree of pain the enemies of Israel’s hard-line policies can inflict. The state is secure but this crisis has heightened every Israeli’s sense of individual insecurity.
That changes the political basis of all strategic calculations. What if long-range rockets of the kind that Hezbollah has were to replace the Palestinians’ home-made ones? Will Israel not have to think seriously about a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian issue at last?
Israeli hawks recognize the dangers. An analysis by retired Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror and Dan Diker for the Institute for Contemporary Affairs in Jerusalem acknowledges that any Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon “would have far-reaching implications in terms of potential losses for the Israeli Defense Forces.” They question Israel’s “readiness to absorb damage on the home front” and say much higher resilience will be required than in 1991.
The key questions for Lebanon are whether Hezbollah will emerge from the crisis stronger or weaker, and whether the sectarian divisions that sparked its last civil war will re-emerge deeply enough to launch a new one. In the first hours of the Israeli bombing, many Lebanese politicians criticized the militia for provoking it. But as Israel continues to destroy the country’s infrastructure, killing more than 300 civilians and putting half a million people to flight, anger has forged Lebanon-wide unity. In the Middle East at large Hezbollah is likely to have won support for fighting back against Israel.
Strongly anti-Hezbollah Lebanese commentators such as the Daily Star’s Michael Young fear that Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, will emerge victorious. “He doesn’t need a military victory in order to secure his political resurrection. He needs only to survive with his militia intact and Israel sufficiently bloodied,” he argued yesterday. But even as Hezbollah is likely to come out well, its opponents’ suspicions and resentment will have grown, weakening Lebanon’s tentative unity again. So everything points to the need for an immediate cease-fire.
Bush and Blair seem unmoved by the human catastrophe in Lebanon and, to a smaller but still terrible extent, in Israel. They ought at least to understand what political damage it is causing.
