IN THE HEAT of Sunday afternoon, and while waiting for the barbecue to deliver, a very clever, pleasant Jewish man told me that he despaired of Israel’s recent actions and was wondering how to make his protest. Hot day, wrong place, I thought. Normally I’d just have recommended the organisation Peace Now and its work against the slow annexation of Palestinian lands. Or one of the groups supporting the military “refuseniks” in their protest against policing the occupation.
His distress was understandable. The morning press was full of pictures of bombed Beirut and destroyed cars, the red smudges and bloody shoes of collateral damage. The news from Haifa, where Hezbollah rockets had eliminated a dangerous group of Zionist railway workers, was yet to come. You know, to even things up a bit in the stump-waving contest.
It was too hot to disagree. Another time I might, I suppose, have asked, rhetorically, why it was that the G8 countries took such a unanimously hard line against Hezbollah when framing their joint reaction to the violence? Because what Hezbollah has done — what Hezbollah is doing — is intolerable to sovereign governments. An autonomous heavily armed militia, working from the territory of a state, has — without agreement from its own government (of which it is a part) — launched its own attacks on the territory of a neighbour. What is Israel, or any nation in that situation, supposed to do?
There have been all kinds of reactions to the past five days’ events. Many of them have run the crises in Gaza and Lebanon together, as though they were ineluctably part of the same process, and their solutions to be found in the same moment and location. David Clark, the former adviser to Robin Cook, wrote yesterday: “The key to resolving the situation in Lebanon lies, as it did throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in finding a solution to the Palestinian question.” This is apparently because, with no suffering Palestinians to emote over, Hezbollah will quickly lose its support and therefore its potency.
This reductiveness — taking as it does no account of the regional ambitions and fears of countries such as Iran and Syria — leads to analytical error. Clark ends up by arguing that Israel has launched its attack on Lebanon to forestall the possibility of a Palestinian peace effort, to be led by Mahmoud Abbas.
Two problems here, both of them fairly obvious. First, the Israelis didn’t kidnap their own soldiers (and if you think differently, please write to the bonkers websites devoted to that sort of thing); and, secondly, an Israeli government that includes the dovish Labour leader Amir Peretz as Defence Secretary is not one that is hell-bent on having a war in the north to undermine Mr Abbas in the south.
It makes more sense to ask why Hezbollah provoked this crisis. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to the reweaving of Hezbollah as a kind of unique mixture of cool guerrillismo and charity organisation, and its leader Hassan Nasrullah as the turbanned love-child of Gerry Adams and Bob Geldof. For a few years now, one or other of the preachers of this pleasant metamorphosis will appear to tell us how sophisticated, tactically astute and popular Nasrullah and his men are.
Well, the abductions were almost certainly planned long in advance, as were the measures to be taken once the Israelis retaliated. And, having seen how Israel reacted to the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit near Gaza, Hezbollah must have had some idea of what was coming. The longer-range missiles were ready. The drones were good to go.
That still leaves why. The various possibilities seem to be these. One, to big themselves up in the eyes of those Lebanese who enjoy a bit of vicarious Israeli-bashing: it has been said that Hezbollah, which took the credit for getting the Israelis to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000, has been losing support during the period of reconstruction. Or, two, a kind of secondary picketing with rockets in solidarity with their Hamas brethren down south. Or three, to help their big brothers in Iran (or Syria) to convince “the West” that these states are not people to be messed with.
The closeness between parts of the Iranian Government and Hezbollah can be judged by who supplies Hezbollah’s munitions. You can make an argument for a political force in a dangerous country to run a Kalashnikov-armed militia all of its own. But quite why Iran judges that a party with 14 MPs in the Lebanese national parliament might require armed pilotless drones and medium-range high-explosive missiles is a matter for some serious thought.
Knowing this, do we think that Israel’s response is “proportionate”? By the way, if it isn’t, then the Falklands campaign, in which deaths actually exceeded the population of the contested area, can only be described as grossly disproportionate. Dead kids in a blasted car can never be described as a price worth paying, even if — in effect — all sides actually think they are. And there are so many false trails here. On the BBC yesterday I heard a reporter in the bombed port city of Tyre being told by a local man: “No Hezbollah in Tyre!” Which — as the reporter didn’t say — will come as extraordinary news to everyone in Lebanon.
It seems to me to be utterly reasonable for Israel to take steps against an extragovernmental armed force — one that is not party to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute — that threatens its borders. The bigger questions are whether Israel’s actions will attain the desired result, and what the international community can do, if anything, to help that process. This is a matter of trying to ensure that the military campaign for security does not fatally weaken support for the democratic and reform forces in Lebanon. It is unlikely that the Israelis have any very deliberate strategy for coping with this dilemma.
That might then be the role of any international force, if it were to be deployed in southern Lebanon, as Tony Blair desires. It would have to negotiate and help to enforce the disarming of Hezbollah and the integration of its fighters back into society, while quite possibly facilitating the return of Lebanese prisoners held by the Israelis and withdrawal by Israel from the disputed Sheba farms area. It would be UN Resolution 1559, with guns.
The trouble is that I cannot for a moment see Hezbollah, or its Iranian and Syrian allies, agreeing to it. In which case the force would either fight in the southern suburbs of Beirut, or it would sit impotently, watching the missiles go both ways overhead.
And there’s more at stake even than this. The Mohajer-4 drone, supplied by Iran and test-flown over Israeli soil in 2004 and 2005, could — as Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University, pointed out last year — be adapted to take “cluster munitions or even a chemical-weapon payload”. “The short flight of the Mohajer 4,” wrote Rogers, “could be seen as the precursor of a fundamental shift.”
Developed by Iran, used by Hezbollah. And what else might Iran be developing? And who, we may ask ourselves over the charred meat, might use it?
Read David Aaronovitch’s blog here
Very well-written article.
Andy R, APO AE, USA