Mohammad Gill August 3, 2006

Tags: middle-east

href="/tag/War">War. Though Israeli officials said publicly that they had expected the stiff resistance Hizbullah guerrillas showed, other Israeli analysts were more skeptical. “It’s not going well,” says historian Tom Segev.” It should never have started.” (Mideast: Ripples of war by Christopher Dickey and Rod Nordland, Newsweek, August 7, 2006 issue).

The Middle East situation is a tangled muddle. I do not understand it intrinsically, that is the reason I try to comprehend it through what the experts, those who have spent better parts of their lives in covering it, say about it and make predictions extrapolating from the past history of the Middle East.

I was thirteen years old when the State of Israel was created from the Arab Palestine which was part of the Ottoman Empire before World War I, in 1948. As a consequence of that, war erupted between Israel and the Arab states in which Israel prevailed. I did not follow these events closely because I had not recovered from the trauma of the partition of 1947; I didn’t care much about the Middle Eastern entanglement. The evening news invariably mentioned Palestinian problem but my mind was numbed by what had happened to us in 1947. However, I vividly remember the Six Day War of 1967 when Nasser had boasted to push Israel into the Mediterranean and had suffered a shameful defeat in just six days. I also remember Anwar Sadat’s war on Israel in 1973 when one thing had become quite clear to the Arab world that no matter what they do, the US wouldn’t let them eliminate Israel. In due time, Israel became the only nuclear power in the Middle East.

I had lost interest in the Middle Eastern problems in the decades of 1980, 1990, and 2000. That is the time when Hizbullah came into existence and made life miserable for Israel during its occupation of southern Lebanon. Eventually, Israel left it. I had believed that Hamas and Hizbullah could only create petty nuisance for Israel without making any real impact on the Mid-east politics. The recent events prove how ignorant I was about it.

The ongoing war is not between Israel and any bona fide government of the Middle Eastern countries; it is between Israel and Hamas (a Sunni resistance group; it has won the elections in Palestine and has formed its government also) and Israel and Hizbullah (a Shiite militant group). The war has already lasted for three weeks and is still raging. It is not a conventional war because the Arabs have realized that they cannot win a conventional war; Israel is much too strong for them. The outcome of a conventional war is fairly well known to all even before it begins. The victory in the ongoing war is not a victory on the ground; it a victory of perception. The odds are heavily against Hizbullah yet they continue fighting. Their victory is not winning the ground battles but it is implied in engaging Israel as long as they can. The longer the struggle is becoming, the bloodier it is in terms of loss of life on both sides. It also creates a favorable perception of Hizbullah, in the Muslim world, which is becoming increasingly more popular every day of the war. The war has coalesced the Arab population behind Hizbullah. Many believe, probably rightly, that even if it lost the war on ground, Hizbullah would become a more formidable force in Middle East.
Mitchell Plitnick, director of Education and Policy for Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote (Pro-Israel and Pro-Lebanon, Tompaine.com, July 31, 2006), “Now, more than two weeks after Israel invaded Lebanon and almost a month since Israel began its assault on the Gaza Strip, Israeli leaders have admitted that these operations have little to do with freeing their captive soldiers. Instead, we hear daily of the “new Middle East” which this war will create. This was attempted before, when in 1982 Israel attempted to install by force a government favorable to it in South Lebanon. The results then, as now, were only an intensification of the “old” Middle East violence.”
Ironically, it is said incessantly in the pro-Israeli propaganda that Hizbullah is a terror organization that targets the civilians. Yet, the actual numbers show that Israel has caused a great deal more loss of civilian life in Lebanon than Hizbullah in Israel. Hizbullah killed Israeli soldiers in combat and some civilians in Israeli cities by their random missiles. Israel’s bombardment doesn’t distinguish civilians from the Hizbullah operatives. They bombarded a residential building in Qana in which 60 civilians were killed; 34 of them were children. There was not a single Hizbullah operatives among those who were killed.

Hizbullah’s perception of victory was epitomized by one of its spokesmen. According to Newsweek, “In Beirut a member of Hizbullah’s politburo smiled when asked what it would take for Hizbullah to win. ‘To hang on,’ he told Newsweek. ‘When we can stand in the face of the forces supported by the United States, that is a great victory.’” On this account, they have outperformed themselves because no one thought they would survive Israeli pounding from the air and the ground artillery for so long.

The bigger question looming large is: How long can they keep standing on their feet against the unprecedented and fierce invading forces of Israel? Will the US-Israeli strategy work successfully by letting the war to continue and allow Israel to erase Hizbullah? Again, I must admit that I am no expert for answering this difficult question. The knowledgeable pundits are already predicting that the US-Israeli policy will most probably fail. In the end, they may have to accept a cease-fire not completely on their own terms.

One of these pundits, John Berry, wrote in Newsweek (Israel’s Mistake, MSNB.com, July 27, 2006), “Whether Israel is ‘justified’ in its actions is a debating point for TV talk show hosts. In the real world, the question is whether Israel is likely to achieve such a smashing victory that the short-term gains will be worth the long-term costs. And, to repeat, nothing suggests that is remotely plausible. If that is so, then America’s blessing for the campaign in Lebanon is merely increasing the final costs, not only for Israel but for the United States and more generally western policy in the region. But then an inability to weigh short-term gain (e.g., the overthrow of Saddam) against long-term costs (e.g., an insurgency by Iraqi Sunnis determined not to lose power) appears to be characteristic of this administration.”

The Shia-Sunni face-off in Iraq has a different complexion vis-à-vis Israel. Hamas is a Sunni-dominated organization while Hizbullah is Shiite. In their struggle against Israel, they are one with each other. Dickey and Nordland wrote in their report (Newsweek, week of August 7 issue), “But some in the militant Hamas organization, no friend of Hizbullah’s in the past, made it clear there would be no separate talks. ‘Nobody wants to negotiate without Hizbullah, says Mahmoud Musleh, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Parliament. ‘To do it in isolation would be a betrayal.’”

Dickey and Nordland believe, “Something less than victory for Israel, and something less than defeat for Hizbullah, may be the only formula that can bring fighting to a stop.” Let us see if Secretary of State Rice is more creative than Henry Kissinger to separate the seemingly-eternal foes and patch up a kind of peace between them. But peace with Hizbullah is not the goal of President Bush’s administration. It is seeking complete annihilation of Hizbullah which they believe is messing up the situation in Iraq also.

Postscript

I had started writing this article some 4-5 days ago. There is still no cease-fire on the US-Israeli terms or on the terms of the rest of the world. Israel has expanded its desperate campaign through a massive ground invasion but the fight is very tough. Hizbullah is not folding up; it is putting up a strong resistance. The casualties on both sides are increasing every hour and every day. There is a talk of cease-fire but nobody knows when it will occur. There is a growing criticism of the US foreign policy which has alienated it from almost every country of the world. There is a grave danger in the ongoing war which has a potential of getting out of control and engulfing other countries also. Syria has put its armies on active alert although it has shown a great deal of caution so far.