Ehud Olmert spent a few hours last Monday at an airbase in southern Israel, and was photographed easing his angular frame into the cockpit of an F16 fighter. Olmert is not a martial figure like so many previous Israeli prime ministers; Ariel Sharon would have cut more of a dash. But there was no doubting the sincerity of his praise for the pilots flying sorties against Hezbollah and other targets in Lebanon — and his certainty of the justice of Israel’s cause. Yet fast-forward to those terrible images of dead children being pulled out of the ruins of Qana on Sunday and there, in the dust, lay the brutally simple answer to those who insisted it was wrong, from the start of this Middle Eastern disaster, to demand an immediate ceasefire.
Olmert needed time to achieve his goal: weaken Hezbollah, shift it away from Israel’s border and stop rockets falling on Haifa. George W Bush and Tony Blair indulged him because this would be useful in their proxy war with Iran and Syria, cynically happy to encourage Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to fight the Jewish state to the last Lebanese. But re-establishing Israel’s deterrence does not come cheap: F16s, laser-guided bombs and all the hi-tech wizardry that dollars can buy couldn’t stop the slaughter of innocents, whose deaths will now only fan the flames of hatred. Rarely have the limits of force been so glaringly obvious.
So furious is any debate about Israel that many will be certain that Sunday’s bombing was deliberate. If Israel knew Hezbollah was launching rockets from Qana, surely it must have also known there were terrified civilians cowering in basements? It insists it did not. Few will give it the benefit of the doubt, or believe it did not also intend to kill four United Nations peacekeepers — though it badly wants a new international force along the border. On Qana, incidentally, no one claims the target was a command post — the United States excuse for the bombing of the Amiriya shelter in Baghdad in 1991. Israel’s ”deep regrets” will be dismissed in the face of global outrage. Its credit has run out.
The good news is that the dead Lebanese families may finally galvanise efforts to bring about a ceasefire — though how durable it will be is anyone’s guess. Qana will also increase the tiny number of Israelis who oppose this war, but it is unlikely to become a mass movement. The contrast with the ”war of choice” in Lebanon in 1982 could hardly be greater. Back then Israelis demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands when Sharon, then defence minister, turned a limited incursion into a full-scale invasion.
His goal was to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, but he occupied Beirut while his Christian allies massacred Palestinians and created a Lebanese resistance that morphed into today’s Hezbollah. But Israel withdrew from Lebanon six years ago: the UN says so. Hezbollah’s July 12 raid was across an undisputed international border, not an act of resistance to foreign occupation.
Hezbollah has become enormously popular in the Arab and Muslim worlds, alarming the pro-Western regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It is also enjoying a certain radical chic in the West. Rooted in Lebanon’s poor Shia community, the ”Party of God” has won hearts and minds with its social services, schools and hospitals, as has Hamas in Palestine. On top of that, like Hamas, it fights Israel. Last month Hamas seized the initiative in Gaza, under siege for months, by kidnapping an Israeli soldier, though the price has been Israel’s killing of more than 100 Palestinians. Maybe Hezbollah struck out of solidarity with the Palestinians, or was simply reminded that kidnapping worked. But its admirers might reflect on the significance of the fact that one of its rockets is called ”Khaybar” — the name of the battle where Muhammad defeated the Jews in seventh-century Arabia.
Israelis who have spent decades fighting for an independent Palestinian state alongside their own are confused and in despair. Israeli doves hate Hezbollah but oppose Olmert’s disproportionate response, which looks weak because he is relying only on force. Sharon might have been more pragmatic: swapping prisoners, alive, dead or in bits, is nothing new. And Israel, after all, regularly abducts Palestinians. But when it does so it is called ”arresting wanted men”.
Some of the agonising now being heard in Israel flows from a flattering self-image that few Palestinians or foreigners would recognise. One successful Hebrew TV drama has a storyline about a pilot who has a nervous breakdown after killing civilians in Gaza while pursuing Hamas suicide bombers. The concept of ”shooting and weeping” has been around since Golda Meir expressed her fury at the Arabs who forced nice Jewish boys to fight and kill. Shmuel Gordon, a former combat pilot, argued this week that Israel’s national interest required avoiding unnecessary bloodshed. ”We have to think about the day after,” he wrote. ”We have to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror.”
In the background are real worries about Israel’s power to see off its enemies, an erosion of the old certainty that it can fight its way to security. And there is unease, not to be underestimated, about the very legitimacy of the Jewish state. If there are answers to these concerns, they can only be in redoubled efforts to find a just settlement with the Palestinians. ”Let’s say we manage to kill every single Hezbollah fighter,” argues the Israeli historian Tom Segev. ”Say the US attacks Iran and takes out its nuclear reactor. Say we hit Iran. When we’ve done all that we’ll still have to deal with Gaza and the Palestinians.” — Â