David
McReynolds
LEFT LETTERS
2006 August 28
Israel
and Lebanon - What Next?
The
tragic events of recent weeks, which saw the killing of three Israeli
soldiers and the kidnapping of two of them by Hezbollah, on the
border between Israel and Lebanon, and then saw the Israeli attack on
Lebanon, with the loss of over a thousand lives, brings a number of
things to mind.
First, I've realized as the debate and
discussion has gone on, that there is something unique about Israel
which applies to no other country I can think of - it is referred to
not as Israel, but as the State of Israel. France is France, Germany
is Germany, Italy is Italy, but Israel is The State of Israel. The
more I've heard this phrase, the more I realize it indicates a basic
insecurity in the Israeli psyche. And the more I'm reminded of the
dialogue between God and the Hebrews in the old Testament when the
Hebrews tell God they want a King. God says "what, the law I
gave you isn't good enough?". No, the children of Israel said,
"we want a King like other nations". Students of the bible
will remember God's stern warning of what having a King would mean.
And if the Zionists didn't quite get a King, they got, God help us, a
State.
There are times when, in the heat of the discussion on
listserves, I find the "Stateness" of Israel, and all that
goes with it - the armies, the lies, the politicians, so that Israel
can be a State like all other States - like a chill knife that
separates me from the historic culture of Judaism, from the comfort
I've always felt among Jews, so different from the cold silence of
WASP culture. That Yiddishkeit which is cultural chicken soup to the
arid soul of white Protestants. The Catholics are great at theology -
far better than the good Baptists among whom I was raised. But the
intricate logic of Catholic theologians pales beside the five
thousand and more years of Rabbis arguing in the temple.
Many
years ago, in Ocean Park, California, where I lived as a student at
UCLA, an area of poverty (otherwise how could a student live there?)
inhabited largely by poor Jews who had come West for the golden
warmth of California, I watched as the congregation of the store
front synagogue, the doors of which opened onto the beach, took out
the Torah for what I suspect was an annual "airing". Under
a tent the Torah went, a tent unsteadily held by old men and young
men, with a rag tag band playing American marching tunes, until, at
the end, when the little congregation stood at the entrance of the
synagogue, the band changed to ancient Hebrew melodies as the Torah
was safely taken inside. There on the Pacific coast, thousands of
miles, thousands of years, from home. A culture of law, of humanity,
that gave us Einstein and Marx and Freud and radical journalists such
as the late I.F. Stone. And now it gives us what? Olmert, Peretz, and
a general who sold his stock just before going to war. And an Israeli
population which seems to have no idea what Israel has done to the
Palestinians.
Last week I went to a forum organized by
American for Peace Now, with Jo-Ann Mort and Mark Rosenblum as
speakers. It was a good meeting. What a relief to escape, for an
evening, from the endless yelling of listserves, to listen, and to
think.
Where does Israel go now? First let's begin with
something we need to understand, just as we need to understand Sheik
Hassan Nasrallah - not to agree with something, but to understand it.
Israel calls itself The State of Israel because it is deeply uneasy.
It has fought several wars - some of which were launched against it,
some of which it started - but it remains without secure borders. I
don't mean "insecure" borders, as the US has "permeable"
(and demilitarized) borders with Mexico and Canada, but angry,
hostile, insecure borders. Only with Jordan and Egypt has Israel been
able to establish "secure internationally recognized borders".
But the border with Syria and with the Palestinians is in
dispute.
The Israelis had thought the border with Lebanon was
"secure and internationally recognized". It was for this
reason that almost the entire Israeli Left, with the exception of
some marginal saints, who are to Israel as the Catholic Worker is to
the US, supported the war when it began. We now know that Israel (and
Washington DC) had been waiting to strike. The US idea was that if
Hezbollah could be neutralized it might be a good trial run for an
air attack on Iran. (I assume most of you have read the New Yorker
article by Seymour Hersh, which documents this).
But what was
in the minds of the Israeli government and of Bush's war cabinet was
not in the minds of the Israeli public. They saw the Hezbollah attack
across the border as a violation of what they had come to believe was
"secure and internationally" recognized, that following the
Israeli withdrawal (under the steady pressure of Hezbollah attacks),
after the ill-advised Israeli invasion of 1982, the border was
secure. The feeling among the majority of Israelis was "what
good does withdrawal do - we withdrew from Gaza and we are attacked,
we withdrew from Lebanon and we are attacked". Let's leave to
one side how unjustly the Israelis make this arguement - my point is
that they believe this. For a moment suspend judgement - just try to
understand.
Thus in the early days a (nearly) unanimous
support for the invasion of Lebanon on the part of the Israeli left.
But then two things happened for which nothing had prepared
the Israeli public (or the hawks in Washington). First, Hezbollah
beat the pants off the invading Israeli army, one of the best trained
armies in the world. Instead of sweeping forward like a knife through
warm butter to the Litani river, Israeli tanks were blown up, troops
killed, and the invasion ground to a virtual halt. For the first time
in any of the wars Israel had waged, it was beaten on the ground by
what it had assumed was a "mere guerrilla force". Second,
the Israeli military launched a most extraordinary series of air
strikes across Lebanon, aiming at civilian targets in violation of
the laws of war, destroying bridges, blockading harbors, taking out
apartment complexes, and in the process killing a thousand civilians.
One must assume the Israeli government had thought such massive
strikes would break the back of Lebanon, causing it to turn on
Hezbollah. (I can't think of any other reason for air strikes which
so precisely struck non-military targets). Every day, on American TV
news, where we are used to seeing pro-Israeli material, we were
seeing instead the horrific devastation of an entire people. And we
saw Hezbollah supported by the population, which, far from rejecting
it, rallied to it. The world cried out for an immediate cease fire
but Tony Blair, that contemptable British politician, and George
Bush, who is almost too dense to be worthy of contempt, urged a wait,
so that Israel could finish its job (though they didn't say that in
so many words).
Except that Israel, the designated hitter in
the game, blew it. They couldn't finish the job. And the world had
had enough of seeing children's bodies pulled from the rubble in
Beirut. The ceasefire marked a sharp Israeli military defeat. What is
most remarkable is what I think has been largely missed - Israel (and
the US) suddenly turned to the United Nations, so recently the object
of their contempt (and in the case of Israel, the object of a
deliberate and lethal attack early in the war), and called for it to
come in. The Europeans, who had been locked out of the Middle East,
have now been brought in. The Israelis are hoping that, having failed
on their own to secure their border with Lebanon, the United Nations
can do it for them.
It is not likely that the UN can disarm
Hezbollah, or will even try. And it is not likely that the flow of
arms from Iran and Syria to Hezbollah can be blocked - anymore than
the flow of US arms to Israel can be blocked. But for the time being
the border may be secured. Not by Israeli military power, but by an
international force of the United Nations.
What next? The view
of Jo-Ann Mort at the forum I attended was that all three of the
leading figures in the Israeli government will be forced to resign.
There had been hopes, particularly among left-Zionists, for the role
Amir Peretz might play but in the end, Peretz, of the Labour Party,
was trapped by his entering this government, and he will go down with
it. Olmert is discredited, with Israeli troops calling for his
resignation. And General Halutz who sold his stock? He is history.
The problem is what waits in the wings. One of the figure most likely
to emerge is Netanyahu, an Israeli politician who gives opportunism a
bad name, and makes Tony Blair look like a statesman.
But
most interesting, out of that evening, came the suggestion by Mark
Rosenblum that all roads now lead to Syria. Syria had put forward
some suggestions in 1999 about getting back the Golan Heights in
return for a secure border. Israel dismissed those suggestions out of
hand, as it dismissed the earlier Arab League proposals of 2002 for
recogntion of Israel within its 1967 borders in return for a genuine
Palestinian state. But it seems that the US has opened some very
unofficial doors to Syria, and that Israel has also opened a quiet
probe. Would Assad settle? The chance of stopping the flow of arms to
Hezbollah may well depend on Syria's role. And Syria might play that
role in exchange for the return of the Golan Heights. If such a
settlerment occurs, it would mean a secure, internationally
recognized border for Israel.
What does seem certain (or
relatively certain) is that Israel now realizes it cannot achieve
"peace and security" with Lebanon or Syria by military
means. The fallback on the UN is one step toward securing the border
with Lebanon. A deal with Syria would be a second step. Both would
require diplomacy, not a military solution. US plans to launch air
strikes on Iran seem to be on hold - in large part because Hezbollah
showed how ineffective such air strikes are.
However hostile
one may be to the Israeli State, and I'm fed up with it and want the
US to end all economic and military aid to Israel, it is necessary to
understand both Hezbollah and Israel. The hatred Hezbollah feels
toward Israel is rooted in its long and bloody struggle to drive
Israel out. That hatred is genuine, and deep.
So too the
statements from Iran reflect in the Israeli minds a fear that not
only Hezbollah but also Iran holds an "annihilatory" view
of Israel. We know that some of the statements of Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, Iran's Supreme leader, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
are deeply troubling (even though in fairness, some of Ahmadinejad's
statements have been carelessly or deliberately mistranslated) and if
I lived in Israel I would certainly find them troubling. What is
necessary, both for us, and for at least some people in Israel and in
Iran, is to see things in more than one dimension. We must try to
understand better the basis for some of the Iranian statements, even
as we reject the fundamental Islamic religious positions from which
they flow. We must try to understand the Israeli fears, even if they
flow from equally flawed positions.
One final possibiity,
raised in several quarters, is for a new international conference -
in Spain, in Italy, in Finland - which would bring together all the
parties which might be willing at least to speak to each other. This
is an idea that has been raised by Yossi Beilin, chairman of Meretz.
An international conference, in Beilin's view, that brought together
Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian authority might open the door.
The problem, of course, is that Bush has sided so openly with the
Israeli hawks that the Arab world has good reason to distrust him.
But the irony is that Nasrallah has now said he would not have
ordered the capture of the Israeli soldiers if he had known the
Israeli intention to launch the devasting attack on Lebanon, and
Israel knows that it lost the war. Out of this defeat one may hope to
find the seeds of peace.
David
was Socialist Party nominee (write-in) for Congress, 1958. Peace &
Freedom Party nominee for Congress, 1968. Socialist Party nominee for
President, 1980 and and the Green Party candidate for Senate in New
York in 2004. National Co-Chair, Socialist Party, two terms. National
Committeeman, Socialist Party. Arrested over a dozen times for
participation in peace, civil rights, and labor demonstrations.