Israel's March of Folly

By Ken Silverstein

Across the Middle East, Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, are more popular than ever. According to a New York Times story filed from Gaza, “the best-selling items for the past couple of weeks have been posters, T-shirts, buttons and coffee mugs featuring” the image of Nasrallah. Last Friday, a huge crowd of marchers took to the streets of Baghdad to show support for Hezbollah, and many smaller rallies have been held in the region.

From just about any vantage point—not least that of public relations—the war has been a disaster for Israel (and for its chief sponsor, the United States). The military campaign has displaced about a quarter of Lebanon's population, caused billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure, and, as of Sunday, killed as many as 900 people, overwhelmingly civilians, many of them children. “Israeli forces have systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon,” said a report issued by Human Rights Watch last week. “[T]he failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes.” The report cited a July 13 Israeli air strike that “destroyed the home of a cleric known to have sympathy for Hezbollah but who was not known to have taken any active part in the hostilities. Even if the IDF considered him a legitimate target (and Human Rights Watch has no evidence that he was), the strike killed him, his wife, their ten children and the family's Sri Lankan maid.”

Hezbollah for its part is firing “terrorist shells and rockets,” to cite a story that ran on the Fox News website, while Israel is said to be seeking to avoid civilian casualties with its use of more virtuous American-supplied “smart” bombs. But Hezbollah's attacks thus far have killed about the same number of Israeli soldiers as civilians, while the Israeli Defense Forces are killing about ten Lebanese civilians for every Hezbollah militiaman.

The Israeli invasion has empowered Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon and has severely weakened those political factions more sympathetic, or at least less hostile, to both Israel and the United States. The last few weeks have also cemented the perception—a dear one to Al Qaeda—that Israel and the United States are joined at the hip, and destroyed any remaining credibility of the United States in the Middle East, making it all but impossible for any U.S. official to serve as a political broker. Meanwhile, the radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has reportedly set up recruitment centers in Baghdad to send volunteers to fight Israel in Lebanon. And there's a higher risk than ever that Shiite forces in Iraq could attack American troops stationed there. If that happens, the situation in Iraq will grow even more chaotic.

And for what? A “victory” will not improve the security of Israel. Despite all the talk in the press of Israel acting to end the threat of “terrorist” attacks by Hezbollah, the border between the countries had been relatively quiet since the IDF withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000. According to Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations at Boston University and Middle East expert, six Israeli civilians had been killed in the six years prior to the Israeli invasion—one by a falling anti-aircraft round fired at Israeli aircraft violating Lebanese airspace and five in an August 2002 Palestinian operation that was likely aided by Hezbollah. Meanwhile, Norton says, roughly twenty Lebanese civilians were killed either by hostile action or by mines left behind by the IDF.

During the same period, 25 Israeli soldiers were killed in Hezbollah attacks; that number includes the eight soldiers killed in the July 12 incident that triggered the invasion. “The task of maintaining stability across this hostile border was neither impossible nor infeasible,” Norton wrote in the Boston Globe today. “Indeed, the rules of the game were well understood by both Israel and its Hezbollah foe.”

The war has also destroyed the perception that Israel has absolute military superiority over its Arab enemies (in precisely the same way that the war in Iraq has demystified U.S. military power). Three weeks after the current fighting erupted, Israel—which crushed Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six Day War in 1967—has been able to hold virtually no territory in Lebanon, and Hezbollah continues to hit Israeli cities with more than one hundred rockets per day. “Militarily it looks pretty much like a stand-off,” Robert Lowe, a British analyst, told the San Jose Mercury News on July 31. “From a public relations perspective, it looks like a crushing defeat for Israel.”

Israel now faces a problem in Lebanon similar to the problem faced by the United States in Iraq: it must try to win a “victory” in order to justify its foolish decision to go to war, and only then can it withdraw. But even if Israel manages to drive north to the Litani River, it's unlikely that many people will remember this as a triumph for the Jewish state. The members of Hezbollah who are killed in the conflict will be remembered as martyrs, and the call to destroy Israel will become even more fervent. “The Jews all died at Masada,” said Milt Bearden, a former CIA officer with broad experience in the Middle East, “but no one remembers that it was a Roman victory.”

[More Washington Babylon]

[Contact Ken Silverstein]

[About Washington Babylon]