Is there any genuine anxiety in Israel over the real or imaginary Syrian nuclear weapons? If so, it’s very difficult to detect. Dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel, as far as Bashar Assad is concerned, would be like dropping one outside your own balcony. And Assad is not stupid.
The appeasing messages sent out of Assad’s palace this year freaked the hell out of Israeli officials, and prompted aggression toward him. Nothing seems to scare Israeli governments more than the idea of an Arab leader proposing peace. The responses ranged from “He is lying through his teeth while planning to attack us” to “he is proposing peace because he is too weak to go to war.”
The only Israeli prime minister who took an Arab state’s peace proposal seriously was Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing Likud party, in 1978. Many Israelis feel that the signing of a peace accord with the Egyptians by Begin was the proof that “only the right wing can make peace”. But the truth of the matter is that reluctant Begin was dragged to Camp David and to the negotiation table by the American President Jimmy Carter, to the benefit of the Israelis and the Egyptians, at the expense of the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is facing a very different American administration. George Bush and his diligent secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, spare no efforts to blow the winds of war at the back of Olmert, who is desperately seeking political survival. Olmert, struggling in a sea of allegations of personal corruption and public scorn due to the failure of the not only disgraceful but also disgracing invasion of Lebanon last year, seems to be tempted to believe that a new war is the way to achieve political redemption.
In this, he is joined by another political failure desperate to prove his dubious merits — new minister of defense and former prime minister, Ehud Barak — who always fancied a Syrian distraction in order to stall even further negotiations with the Palestinians. During his tenure as prime minister, Barak was always threatening the Palestinians with engaging in negotiations with the Syrians while hanging them out to dry. Now he is implicitly threatening them by leaving them in the cold, while considering the possibility an attack on Syria.
The escalation has been prompted by American policy over the last five years. From the allegations that Saddam Hussein transferred all his legendary weapons of mass destruction to Syria before the invasion of Iraq to the current accusations of a Syrian-North Korean nuclear axis, the US has singled out Syria as an anachronistic state due to fall, and designated Israel to do its dirty work.
Dirty it would indeed be. Many Israelis are still traumatized by the bitter fighting against the Syrians in the Golan Heights during the 1973 War, and wonder whether the current rather wobbly Israeli Army would suffer a much worse defeat on the Syrian front than the bloody nose it got from Hezbollah last year.
They are also well-aware of the fact that, weak as Syria may be, if attacked, it would have no choice but to use its Scud missiles, which have a range that covers the whole of Israel. Israeli citizens are already horrified by the proven inability of the Israeli countermeasures to defend them.
During the 2006 war in Lebanon, thousands of the inhabitants of the Israeli north found themselves in a refugee camp in central Israel, courtesy of the Israeli-Russian oligarch and wannabe politician Arcadi Gaydamak. A self-glorifying private initiative replaced the state’s obligation to its citizens. Having to count on such charity again is not an appealing prospect.
The American insistence on putting obstacles in the path to peace and backing Israeli belligerence is apparent not only on the Syrian front. Rice responded to the Israeli declaration of Gaza as “enemy entity” by saying that the US also regards Gaza under Hamas control as an enemy. This is an American green light to Barak and Olmert’s declared plan to cut off all Gaza’s infrastructure, a strategy likely to create a humanitarian catastrophe.
All this is taking place under the banner of the Bush-initiated “peace summit”, to take place in November, which aims to dictate some conditions to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is a decent man who has been undermined by the American and Israeli insistence on ignoring the elected Hamas leadership and making Abbas lead a bloody battle against Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza.
Whatever arrangements are forced on him in that summit will inevitably lead to the total collapse of his already scant credibility in Palestine.
Israel should strive to advance its own interests in reaching settlements with both Syria and Hamas beyond the suffocating embrace of American policy.
But with Olmert busy ducking behind Rice’s back to escape police investigations, and the final Winograd Commission report regarding his Lebanese adventure, and with Barak keen to go back to his days as a general, the chances of this happening are as slim as ever.
