I have argued recently that Israel’s attack on Lebanon was premeditated: Hizbullah’s capture of two soldiers gave Israel’s government the excuse to launch an assault it had been planning since 2004. Both George W Bush and Tony Blair knew that it would happen and gave it their approval.
I was denounced as an anti-Semite and an apologist for terror. But last Sunday this hypothesis was confirmed by an article Seymour Hersh published in the New Yorker. Israel, his sources told him, ”had devised a plan for attacking Hizbullah — and shared it with Bush administration officials — well before the July 12 kidnappings”. A US government consultant revealed that Israeli officials visited Washington earlier in the year ”to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear”.
One question then arises. Why? Given that the invasion has cost Israel far more in terms of both lives and international standing than the status quo could have done, why did Ehud Olmert’s government choose to attack?
The motives of the US administration are easy to understand. The neocons believe that, by attacking Hizbullah, Israel is helping them to confront Iran. Its bombing raids could even be a wet run for an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While a full-scale invasion of that country is impossible, fighting the guerrillas they regard as Iranian proxies is the next best thing. As Bush’s grip on reality weakens, he seems to believe that he is seeking a showdown with the forces of evil, which will result in a triumph for ”freedom and democracy”. But why would Israel allow itself to be used as his battering ram?
The obvious answer is that it thought it would win. If so, this suggests a failure to learn from recent history. In 1996 Hizbullah had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. Shimon Peres, hoping — like Olmert — to show the electorate that he was as tough as the generals, decided to clear the civilians out of southern Lebanon by means of bombing and then destroy Hizbullah. He received the support of the US and drove 400 000 people from their homes, but failed to defeat the enemy. The guerrillas continued to send their rockets into Israel, while Israeli shells killed 102 civilians.
The resulting outrage forced the US to support a ceasefire. Ten years later the whole fiasco — including the killing of civilians — spools past like a repeated film.
I am not suggesting that Olmert’s administration believed it would lose.
But it seems to me that to be quite so blind to the lessons of 1996 it must have had a powerful incentive to attack. Is it possible that Israel is pursuing a territorial claim?
The Israeli columnist Tanya Reinhart reminds us that David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, believed that its borders should be ”natural”: the Jordan river in the east, the Suez canal and Sharm el-Sheikh in the south-west and south, and the Litani river (inside Lebanon) in the north. In his book The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, historian Avi Shlaim describes Ben-Gurion’s ”fantastic plan” for annexing southern Lebanon and turning the rest of the country into a Maronite Christian state. In 1956 he explained this scheme to the British and French at the secret talks in Sevres that launched the Suez invasion. His chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, planned to sponsor a Lebanese officer who would ”declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population”, then ”enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place.”
There are plenty of articles on the Internet suggesting that this ambition has been revived. I don’t believe it.
The evidence I presented when arguing that Israel’s attack on Lebanon was premeditated suggests that the soldiers planning this assault envisaged an operation lasting three weeks. They would storm into Lebanon, eliminate Hizbullah and storm out again. Since the attack began, Israel has been pressing for someone else — the ”multinational force” — to patrol southern Lebanon on its behalf. Though the government is incapable of learning from 1996, it still seems to remember the lesson of May 2000, when the Israeli armed forces discovered that an occupation of southern Lebanon was impossible to sustain. I have not been able to find any evidence that Ben-Gurion’s successors contemplated annexation. This is not an attempt to seize more territory.
But you cannot read any account of Israeli politics without being struck by the extraordinary domination of the generals. Israel is unique in being a military democracy. An electoral system much fairer than our own repeatedly places the country in the hands of warriors. Even when civilians are elected, they are pushed around by the generals. To sustain their position, the warrior chiefs seek to ensure that Israel is constantly on the verge of war. As Moshe Dayan observed, military retaliation is a ”life drug”. Avi Shlaim summarises Dayan’s argument thus: ”First, [retaliation] obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second … it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and in the army.”
The warriors in Israel have almost always been empowered by armed action. Their interests are best served by escalation, however inappropriate. After the latest attack on Lebanon began, the generals demanded to intensify it. At the Cabinet meeting of July 27, when it had already become clear that the assault was turning into a strategic and political disaster, they insisted that they be allowed to mount a full-scale ground offensive.
Who loses from this war? The people of Lebanon and northern Israel, of course, and maybe the rest of us. The civilians in the Israeli government, perhaps including Ehud Olmert. But not Hizbullah, who are now proclaimed as heroes in Muslim nations across the Middle East. Not Bush or Blair, for whom every attack by terrorists — even those motivated by opposition to their policies — is a vindication of their war on terror. And not the Israel Defence Forces. Faced with emboldened enemies they can demand more resources and greater powers. The generals did not intend to lose, but even this disaster has done them no harm. It has made the Israeli people less secure, and therefore more inclined to vote for those who promise to defend them.– Â