A War Without End?
    By S lim Nassib
    Lib ration

    Thursday 27 July 2006

Against an inflexible Hezbollah, Israel no longer counts on anything but force alone.

    Perhaps the terrible destruction Israel is inflicting on Lebanon will finally find some semblance of political, strategic, tactical justification.... Perhaps the destruction that has struck Gaza will also be regarded as obeying a superior logic of Realpolitik.... But, for now, these destructions appear to the whole world (not only to Arab and Muslim peoples) as expressions of the anger of a state humiliated in its dominion, crazed from having been surprised on its southern and northern borders, and revenging itself with the most extreme violence against civilian populations, their supplies, roads, bridges, power stations, gas stations: everything necessary to their life. And in spite of this intense outburst, Hezbollah's rockets continue to rain down. Supported by a crushing majority of his population, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is candid enough to be outraged by foreign television stations' broadcasts of images from Lebanon that suddenly "make the aggressors into victims." This candor is the sign o persistent blindness at a time when much intelligence and clear-sightedness are required to have any chance of exiting the nightmare by the high road.

    For there exists a tremendous international, Arab, and Lebanese consensus to neutralize Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The United States and France godfathered the Security Council resolution requiring its disarmament. Countries like Egypt, Jordan, and especially Saudi Arabia do not mince their words in denouncing its "adventurism"; the head of the Lebanese government and most of the country's political and community forces (with the exception of the Shiites) demand that the militia be replaced along the border with Israel by soldiers from the regular army. Behind this Arab quasi-unanimity looms the Sunni-Shiite conflict, poised to become dominant. While Gaza is strangled and Lebanon destroyed, the bloody war between these two communities didn't stop for a single day in Iraq. In an Arab world characterized by a large Sunni majority, Saudi Arabia has no desire to see Shiite Iran, with Syria and Hezbollah taking up the relay, become the champion of the sacred Arab cause, the "liberation of Palestine." Now tha's what it's really all about, a fight to the death over influence.

    Still more important, Hamas could be party to the consensus, so different are its course and its interests from those of Hezbollah. The difference is not only that one is Sunni and the other Shiite. Hezbollah wants to show that an Islam-inspired movement can prevail where others, inspired by a more or less secular Arab nationalism, have failed. It proved that in 2000, when its military action forced the Israeli army to evacuate Lebanon, bringing Hezbollah a tremendous popularity. But with that objective achieved, Hezbollah is left with only a general ideological motivation and its role as an outpost in the war of influence of which Iran - which promises every day "to erase Israel from the map" - is the master-builder.

    Hamas is altogether different: in spite of appearances, it pursues the much more concrete objective of having an independent state in Palestine. Proof of that is that just at the moment when the war against Hezbollah is in full force, Hamas makes it known that it is ready to conclude a separate agreement with Israel including the liberation of the kidnapped corporal, withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, and a subsequent liberation of Palestinian prisoners. That initiative has just confirmed the historic change that occurred before the before the start of the crisis: the Hamas government's acceptance of the "Prisoners' Document," based on the resolution adopted by the Arab summit of Beirut in 2002, on the initiative of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah. In this (almost forgotten) resolution, the Arab world in all its components offered an overall and complete peace, with the establishment of political, diplomatic, and economic relations in exchange for Israel's withdrawal back to the 1967 borders and its accepance of a Palestinian state.

    That Hamas's Islamists, brought to power by democratic elections, should agree with President Mahmoud Abbas, representing the Palestinian Old Guard, and rally to the Arab and global consensus is obviously of considerable importance. But this reversal obviously does not please everyone. On the eve of the announcement of the agreement, a party of Palestinian military (belonging to Hamas and other organizations) and the Hamas leader in exile in Damascus, Khaled Mechaal, launched the operation that ended in the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit and the wildfire that followed. Several days later, Hezbollah opened its second front in the north of the country....

    Today, an international military force that would cover the border and open the way for a Lebanese army would allow (almost) the whole world to express a sigh of relief. But, in the meantime, the systematic destruction of Lebanon continues, feeding a hatred in the hearts of Lebanese that, paradoxically, Hezbollah's rockets express. The present crisis advances this way, on a razor blade, and everything can upend at any moment.

    But if the spectacle of too much suffering ends up imposing a cease-fire, people will realize that a real division has arisen in the Arab and Palestinian world between a large majority who are moving towards a historic compromise and a minority who do everything to prevent it. But who is the statesman, what are the Israeli political forces, capable of seizing this fragile opportunity? In that country, people seem to have ceased to believe that peace is possible; they repeat that "the whole world is against us" and count on force only as a means to settle the problem. As though the problem could be settled without being settled. Most probable - unfortunately - is that Israel will refuse to withdraw to the 1967 borders, although that's the very condition of a universally accepted settlement. Most probable is that it will continue to implement, with the United States' support, policies that make any solution impossible: completion of the wall that cuts the West Bank, annexation of territories on which "blocks f settlements" are built, occupation of the Jordan valley. In other words: constitute Israel as a ghetto surrounded by parcels of Palestinian territory and guarded by military forces capable of regularly launching punitive operations. In other words: war forever.

    --------

    S lim Nassib's last book is Un amant en Palestine [A Lover in Palestine] published by Robert Laffont.