S.A.M.
09-20-06, 06:58 AM
"Jewish Voice For Peace" In-Depth: After Lebanon
The war on Lebanon seems to be over, at least for the time being. But the effects of that war will be felt for a long time. In stark contrast to the Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, the Lebanon War, as we shall see below, was much more about American designs than Israeli ones.
It looks very much like we are at the beginning of a long period of renewed and intensified conflict in the Middle East. It is important to understand how these events came about, and to at least try to understand the motivations of the players involved. Jewish Voice for Peace brings you this extensive in-depth analysis.
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/publish/article_728.shtml
Note: these are just the main highlights of the article
After an occupation that lasted 18 years and cost hundreds of lives, far more Lebanese than Israeli but significant for both sides, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.
The United Nations certified a full Israeli withdrawal, but Israel maintained control of the disputed Sheba'a Farms area. Interestingly, while Lebanon claims this area as its own, Israel's claim is that it is actually occupying Syrian territory. No one claims the area legitimately belongs to Israel, not even Israel. Israel also reneged on an agreement to hand over maps of many tens of thousands of mines they laid during the years of occupation.
Hezbollah also has made claims of Israel holding Lebanese prisoners. These combined with the factors listed above to cause cross-border skirmishes and regularly occurring attacks in the Sheba’a Farms region over the past six years.
These grew more intense in May, after a car bomb killed a leader of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon. Israel is generally believed to have been behind this act, and the man arrested for it claimed to have been working for the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. An exchange of fire followed soon after, greatly raising tensions between Hezbollah and Israel leading up to the July 12 Hezbollah attack.
The Hezbollah attack precipitated a major escalation in the already dangerous situation in the Middle East. It gave Israel the excuse it needed to launch a major attack on Lebanon. It has to be unequivocally stated that, having said that Hezbollah violated international law, Israel’s immediate targeting of civilian infrastructure and use of disproportionate and overwhelming force is a major war crime. Israel completely decimated much of Lebanon's infrastructure, internally displaced some 1,000,000 Lebanese and the death toll was well over 1,000, the vast majority of them civilians.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 settled a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. The resolution calls for international aid for Lebanon, and it is also significant that the United States has made it clear that Israel must foot the bill for this war themselves. Clearly, the US is dissatisfied with Israel’s performance.
Hezbollah has stated that, while it would remain ideologically opposed to Israel’s existence, it would not oppose a solution accepted by the Palestinians, even if that solution meant Israel’s continued existence and even Israel’s continued control over at least part of Jerusalem.
Hezbollah’s actions in their conflict with Israel, including the 2006 confrontation, have been confined to defending what they see as Lebanese interests. While they certainly support the Palestinian cause, this has mostly taken the form of moral and rhetorical support. They do not have the means to support Palestinian militant groups significantly with weapons or funding. The best they have been able to do has possibly been to help facilitate the delivery of weapons to Palestinian groups. Hezbollah’s own attacks on Israel have been confined to military targets for years. They have long since abandoned attacks on anything other than Israeli targets, and have for years, before 2006, limited their attacks on Israelis either to military targets or to response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians.
Israel:
This war was the biggest military failure in Israel’s history. Although in truth, there was never any real attempt to retrieve the two soldiers taken by Hezbollah, it is certainly not lost on the Israeli public that those two soldiers remain in Hezbollah’s hands. Israel’s stated goals of first destroying Hezbollah and later damaging them or driving them from Southern Lebanon all failed.
To the extent that this war was an Israeli one, it was largely the creation of Dan Halutz, the Chief of Staff. As we shall see below, the United States played a very prominent role. But Halutz was one of numerous Israeli military people who were deeply opposed to the 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon and have been preparing for a renewed assault on Southern Lebanon ever since. Plans for a re-invasion of Lebanon had been in development since the withdrawal.
In the wake of the Lebanon failure, Israel is confronting new circumstances. Iranian influence throughout the region is growing. This constitutes a much greater threat to other Arab regimes, especially some of the major oil producers, than to Israel, but it is cause for concern for Israel as well.
Arab moderates are facing greatly increased pressure, but they have also renewed their call for peace with Israel based on the 2002 initiative approved by the Arab League. That initiative calls for full peace and recognition of Israel and the establishment of fully normal relations with her, in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories it captured in 1967 and a “just resolution” of the Palestinian refugee problem.
Israel essentially ignored the 2002 initiative, to its own detriment. However, as the wounds of the Lebanon War begin to heal, Israel may realize that negotiations based on that initiative, a far better basis than the absurd “roadmap” advocated by the Bush Administration, are very much in their best interests. Short of that, it may finally dawn on the Israeli and American leadership that the best way to curb Iranian influence, particularly in Lebanon is to reach a peace agreement with Syria, based on a return of the Golan Heights. This would take Syria, a country already uneasy in its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, out of the equation and would likely leave Hezbollah as an independent actor, still nationalist and representative of the Shi’a of Lebanon, but no longer able to call on Iran for arms to help them mount independent offensives.
Hezbollah:
Hezbollah’s own position in Lebanon has been a bit more tenuous since the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for the disbanding of all militias in Lebanon.
There are also outstanding issues between Israel and Lebanon on which there has been no motion in six years, and which were surely a factor in Hezbollah’s decision to launch their attack. One is that Israel had promised, upon its withdrawal in 2000, to hand over maps to Lebanon of mines they had laid during the occupation. This never happened, and periodically, Lebanese civilians are injured or killed by Israeli mines left over form the occupation. This issue remains unresolved after the war, although Israel did at least provide detailed maps of areas where they had launched cluster bombs during the war so that effective clean-up measures could be taken.
Israel also holds Lebanese prisoners. Although some are guilty of heinous crimes against Israeli civilians (most notably, Samir al-Kuntar who took refuge in an Israeli home after a guerilla operation and killed a father and his four-year old daughter), Lebanon contends their capture and detainment were illegal, and they have an arguable case.
Finally, Israel continues to occupy the Sheba’a Farms area, which Israel claims is captured Syrian territory and which Syria and Lebanon claim is Lebanese territory.
Iran
Iran’s role in all of this is not extremely clear, but we can be certain that they are somehow involved. With Iran under increasing US pressure over its nuclear program and knowing that the US and Israel would like nothing more than regime change in the Islamic Republic, Iran has every reason to want to act against the US and its ally, Israel.
Syria
Syria is largely caught in the middle now. They are outside the world of Arab states friendly to the US. They are the only Arab country that has offered anything like significant support to Palestinian militant groups, although even that support is often vastly overstated. Their alliance with Iran and Hezbollah is not entirely comfortable for them, as the Syrian regime is not Shi’ite, and Syria’s interests and Iran’s are not always the same. Yet they have also tried to mend their relations with the West, although not with Israel, reconciliation with whom will remain impossible as long as Israel holds the Golan Heights.
United States
No party could have been done as much to change the entire scenario of this past summer as the US. The escalation in Gaza is directly attributable to the Bush Administration’s decision to abandon the entire Israel-Palestine issue with the lone exception being efforts to undermine the legitimately elected Hamas government.
The Lebanon War, in contrast to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, was largely about US interests. This is not to suggest that Israel was an unwilling participant, or that there was not support for it among the Israeli leadership even before the taking of the two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However, when the attack was actually carried out, it was intended to serve American more than Israeli interests.
In the early days of the war, the Lebanese President, Fouad Siniora, called for a cease-fire. Ehud Olmert responded by discussing the sort of terms Israel would require. The US (both George Bush and Condi Rice) immediately rejected any kind of cease-fire. When the time came, it was the US who decided when the war should end, even though the terms of that ending were extremely unfavorable to Israel.
There is also the following, from another source: "Amid the political and diplomatic fallout from Israel's faltering invasion of Lebanon, some Israeli officials are privately blaming President George W. Bush for egging Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into the ill-conceived military adventure against the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon… As part of Bush's determination to create a "new Middle East" - one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires - Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources." The Jerusalem Post also referenced the American urging and Israeli refusal to attack Syria.
There is another point that none of these scholars has touched on, and that is the initial condemnation of Hezbollah by numerous Arab states, whose only real commonality was that they were US clients. This was an unprecedented event. Why did they choose this incident? The only plausible answer is that it was part of a US program. Any other answer begs the same question of why this Hezbollah attack was so different from so many other attacks on Israel, many of which were at least as apparently "unprovoked". Moreover, this was an attack on a military target. Such an unprecedented call would have made at least a little more sense in response to an attack on civilians.
As always, it is the US that has the most power to change things.
The war on Lebanon seems to be over, at least for the time being. But the effects of that war will be felt for a long time. In stark contrast to the Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, the Lebanon War, as we shall see below, was much more about American designs than Israeli ones.
It looks very much like we are at the beginning of a long period of renewed and intensified conflict in the Middle East. It is important to understand how these events came about, and to at least try to understand the motivations of the players involved. Jewish Voice for Peace brings you this extensive in-depth analysis.
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/publish/article_728.shtml
Note: these are just the main highlights of the article
After an occupation that lasted 18 years and cost hundreds of lives, far more Lebanese than Israeli but significant for both sides, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.
The United Nations certified a full Israeli withdrawal, but Israel maintained control of the disputed Sheba'a Farms area. Interestingly, while Lebanon claims this area as its own, Israel's claim is that it is actually occupying Syrian territory. No one claims the area legitimately belongs to Israel, not even Israel. Israel also reneged on an agreement to hand over maps of many tens of thousands of mines they laid during the years of occupation.
Hezbollah also has made claims of Israel holding Lebanese prisoners. These combined with the factors listed above to cause cross-border skirmishes and regularly occurring attacks in the Sheba’a Farms region over the past six years.
These grew more intense in May, after a car bomb killed a leader of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon. Israel is generally believed to have been behind this act, and the man arrested for it claimed to have been working for the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. An exchange of fire followed soon after, greatly raising tensions between Hezbollah and Israel leading up to the July 12 Hezbollah attack.
The Hezbollah attack precipitated a major escalation in the already dangerous situation in the Middle East. It gave Israel the excuse it needed to launch a major attack on Lebanon. It has to be unequivocally stated that, having said that Hezbollah violated international law, Israel’s immediate targeting of civilian infrastructure and use of disproportionate and overwhelming force is a major war crime. Israel completely decimated much of Lebanon's infrastructure, internally displaced some 1,000,000 Lebanese and the death toll was well over 1,000, the vast majority of them civilians.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701 settled a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. The resolution calls for international aid for Lebanon, and it is also significant that the United States has made it clear that Israel must foot the bill for this war themselves. Clearly, the US is dissatisfied with Israel’s performance.
Hezbollah has stated that, while it would remain ideologically opposed to Israel’s existence, it would not oppose a solution accepted by the Palestinians, even if that solution meant Israel’s continued existence and even Israel’s continued control over at least part of Jerusalem.
Hezbollah’s actions in their conflict with Israel, including the 2006 confrontation, have been confined to defending what they see as Lebanese interests. While they certainly support the Palestinian cause, this has mostly taken the form of moral and rhetorical support. They do not have the means to support Palestinian militant groups significantly with weapons or funding. The best they have been able to do has possibly been to help facilitate the delivery of weapons to Palestinian groups. Hezbollah’s own attacks on Israel have been confined to military targets for years. They have long since abandoned attacks on anything other than Israeli targets, and have for years, before 2006, limited their attacks on Israelis either to military targets or to response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians.
Israel:
This war was the biggest military failure in Israel’s history. Although in truth, there was never any real attempt to retrieve the two soldiers taken by Hezbollah, it is certainly not lost on the Israeli public that those two soldiers remain in Hezbollah’s hands. Israel’s stated goals of first destroying Hezbollah and later damaging them or driving them from Southern Lebanon all failed.
To the extent that this war was an Israeli one, it was largely the creation of Dan Halutz, the Chief of Staff. As we shall see below, the United States played a very prominent role. But Halutz was one of numerous Israeli military people who were deeply opposed to the 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon and have been preparing for a renewed assault on Southern Lebanon ever since. Plans for a re-invasion of Lebanon had been in development since the withdrawal.
In the wake of the Lebanon failure, Israel is confronting new circumstances. Iranian influence throughout the region is growing. This constitutes a much greater threat to other Arab regimes, especially some of the major oil producers, than to Israel, but it is cause for concern for Israel as well.
Arab moderates are facing greatly increased pressure, but they have also renewed their call for peace with Israel based on the 2002 initiative approved by the Arab League. That initiative calls for full peace and recognition of Israel and the establishment of fully normal relations with her, in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories it captured in 1967 and a “just resolution” of the Palestinian refugee problem.
Israel essentially ignored the 2002 initiative, to its own detriment. However, as the wounds of the Lebanon War begin to heal, Israel may realize that negotiations based on that initiative, a far better basis than the absurd “roadmap” advocated by the Bush Administration, are very much in their best interests. Short of that, it may finally dawn on the Israeli and American leadership that the best way to curb Iranian influence, particularly in Lebanon is to reach a peace agreement with Syria, based on a return of the Golan Heights. This would take Syria, a country already uneasy in its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, out of the equation and would likely leave Hezbollah as an independent actor, still nationalist and representative of the Shi’a of Lebanon, but no longer able to call on Iran for arms to help them mount independent offensives.
Hezbollah:
Hezbollah’s own position in Lebanon has been a bit more tenuous since the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for the disbanding of all militias in Lebanon.
There are also outstanding issues between Israel and Lebanon on which there has been no motion in six years, and which were surely a factor in Hezbollah’s decision to launch their attack. One is that Israel had promised, upon its withdrawal in 2000, to hand over maps to Lebanon of mines they had laid during the occupation. This never happened, and periodically, Lebanese civilians are injured or killed by Israeli mines left over form the occupation. This issue remains unresolved after the war, although Israel did at least provide detailed maps of areas where they had launched cluster bombs during the war so that effective clean-up measures could be taken.
Israel also holds Lebanese prisoners. Although some are guilty of heinous crimes against Israeli civilians (most notably, Samir al-Kuntar who took refuge in an Israeli home after a guerilla operation and killed a father and his four-year old daughter), Lebanon contends their capture and detainment were illegal, and they have an arguable case.
Finally, Israel continues to occupy the Sheba’a Farms area, which Israel claims is captured Syrian territory and which Syria and Lebanon claim is Lebanese territory.
Iran
Iran’s role in all of this is not extremely clear, but we can be certain that they are somehow involved. With Iran under increasing US pressure over its nuclear program and knowing that the US and Israel would like nothing more than regime change in the Islamic Republic, Iran has every reason to want to act against the US and its ally, Israel.
Syria
Syria is largely caught in the middle now. They are outside the world of Arab states friendly to the US. They are the only Arab country that has offered anything like significant support to Palestinian militant groups, although even that support is often vastly overstated. Their alliance with Iran and Hezbollah is not entirely comfortable for them, as the Syrian regime is not Shi’ite, and Syria’s interests and Iran’s are not always the same. Yet they have also tried to mend their relations with the West, although not with Israel, reconciliation with whom will remain impossible as long as Israel holds the Golan Heights.
United States
No party could have been done as much to change the entire scenario of this past summer as the US. The escalation in Gaza is directly attributable to the Bush Administration’s decision to abandon the entire Israel-Palestine issue with the lone exception being efforts to undermine the legitimately elected Hamas government.
The Lebanon War, in contrast to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, was largely about US interests. This is not to suggest that Israel was an unwilling participant, or that there was not support for it among the Israeli leadership even before the taking of the two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However, when the attack was actually carried out, it was intended to serve American more than Israeli interests.
In the early days of the war, the Lebanese President, Fouad Siniora, called for a cease-fire. Ehud Olmert responded by discussing the sort of terms Israel would require. The US (both George Bush and Condi Rice) immediately rejected any kind of cease-fire. When the time came, it was the US who decided when the war should end, even though the terms of that ending were extremely unfavorable to Israel.
There is also the following, from another source: "Amid the political and diplomatic fallout from Israel's faltering invasion of Lebanon, some Israeli officials are privately blaming President George W. Bush for egging Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into the ill-conceived military adventure against the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon… As part of Bush's determination to create a "new Middle East" - one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires - Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources." The Jerusalem Post also referenced the American urging and Israeli refusal to attack Syria.
There is another point that none of these scholars has touched on, and that is the initial condemnation of Hezbollah by numerous Arab states, whose only real commonality was that they were US clients. This was an unprecedented event. Why did they choose this incident? The only plausible answer is that it was part of a US program. Any other answer begs the same question of why this Hezbollah attack was so different from so many other attacks on Israel, many of which were at least as apparently "unprovoked". Moreover, this was an attack on a military target. Such an unprecedented call would have made at least a little more sense in response to an attack on civilians.
As always, it is the US that has the most power to change things.