Disproportionate Force 2
By Gwynne Dyer
"The objective of the operation is clear to no-one -- not the
government, not the prime minister, not the Israel Defence Force with all
its commanders," wrote journalist Hagay Huberman on Thursday in the
conservative Israeli newspaper Hatzofe. "No-one tried to think 20 steps
ahead. When an operation is called a 'rolling operation' they mean that the
operation continues to roll independently and then we will all see where it
leads."
In just a few days, the situation has spun completely out of
control. Beirut airport's runways have been cratered by Israeli fighters,
rockets have landed on Haifa, Israel's third-biggest city, and the Israeli
army has crossed into southern Lebanon. Israeli troops were there for
eighteen years after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and they took hundreds
of casualties and killed several thousand people before they finally
withdrew. Now they're back, for God knows how long.
Less than a year ago, the IDF also pulled out of the Gaza Strip.
They're back there now, too, blasting away at houses and government offices
and police stations, not because they really think that that will help them
find their kidnapped soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, but because they
cannot think of anything else to do. The whole game-plan has unravelled,
and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has run out of strategies. He is just
responding by reflex -- and the habitual Israeli reflex, when confronted
with a serious challenge, is to lash out with overwhelming force.
That's understandable, because Israel's great asset is exactly
that: overwhelming force. Its armed forces are incomparably superior to
those of all its neighbours combined, both because they have
state-of-the-art technology and because they simply outnumber all the other
armies they face. Only Israel in the region is rich and well organised
enough to mobilise its entire population for war, with the result that it
has actually had numerical superiority at the front in every war it has
fought since 1948. When you have that kind of advantage, it seems foolish
not to use it.
Except that winning all the wars and killing tens of thousands of
Arabs never seems to settle anything. There are only six million Israelis,
and about a hundred million Arabs live within 500 miles (750 kilometres) of
Israel. Sooner or later, if Israel is to have a long-term future, it must
make peace with its neighbours -- and that depends critically on making
peace with the Palestinians, the main victims of the creation of Israel.
That is not impossible, for the Palestinians are pretty desperate
after almost forty years of Israeli military occupation. Most of them are
willing to settle for a pretty meagre share of what used to be Palestine --
say, the twenty percent that they retained until Israel conquered them in
1967. But that has never been on offer.
The so-called "peace process" has been paralysed for fifteen years
by bitter Israeli arguments over whether the Palestinians should be allowed
to have fifteen percent of former Palestine for their state, or ten
percent, or none at all. Almost nobody in the Israeli debate was willing
to let the Palestinians have everything they had controlled in 1967,
because that would mean abandoning the Jewish settlements that had been
planted all over the occupied territories.
Ehud Olmert's goal, inherited from former prime minister Ariel
Sharon, has been to impose a peace settlement on the Palestinians that
leaves East Jerusalem and all the main Jewish settlement blocks in the West
Bank in Israeli hands. "Impose" rather than negotiate, since no
Palestinian would ever agree to such a deal, but Israel could only justify
such an arbitrary act if it could plausibly claim that there were no
reasonable Palestinians to negotiate with.
The Palestinians' election of a Hamas government that rejected any
kind of peace with Israel helped Olmert to make that case. The killing of
two Israeli soldiers and the abduction of Cpl. Shalit by Hamas's military
wing three weeks ago should have reinforced that case, and initially it
did. But then the temptation of overwhelming force kicked in.
Since Shalit was taken prisoner, increasingly indiscriminate
Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip have killed close to a hundred
Palestinians. Arabs elsewhere watched in helpless rage, and eventually,
last Wednesday, the Hizbollah guerillas who drove the Israelis out of
southern Lebanon six years ago struck across Israel's northern border,
killing three Israeli soldiers and taking two others hostage.
Everyone knows that the Lebanese government does not control
Hizbollah, but Israel held Beirut responsible, rolled its tanks across the
border, and launched a wave of air strikes that has already killed over
fifty Lebanese. That won't free the hostages, and it poses the risk of a
wider war that could involve not only Lebanon but Syria, but at least it
protects Olmert from the accusation of being "weak," always the kiss of
death for an Israeli politician.
Both Hamas and Hizbollah are adept at pushing Israel's buttons and
getting it to overreact (even if that does involve Israel destroying what
little infrastructure there was in the Gaza Strip, and destroying Lebanon's
infrastructure all over again). The dwarf superpower of the Middle East is
good at smashing things up, and so long as the real superpower behind it
does not intervene, nobody else can stop it. But nobody in this game has a
coherent strategy for getting out of it.
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Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.
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