Policymakers can never fully control the outcome of their conscious choices because they inevitably act on incomplete information, personal bias and wishful thinking. A political intervention itself creates new conditions, the fallout of which is seldom anticipated. These unintended consequences comprise the irony of history, and recent Middle Eastern events serve as a good example, affecting each country in unforeseen ways.
Lebanon. The Lebanese devastation will further strengthen the 40% Shi’ites demographically and politically, as more Christian Lebanese and wealthier Sunnis will seek to emigrate. If US President George W Bush was interested in Lebanon as a showcase of a friendly Arab democracy, the Israeli attack has brought the show to an end. It has enraged even previously anti-Shi’ite factions and temporarily united the fragile melting pot of divided religious communities. Israel had hoped that the damage to the Lebanese infrastructure would turn Christians and Sunnis against the Shi’ites. Strategic bombing of civilians, besides being a war crime, has always made the population blame the aggressor, never the alleged cause of the destruction. The promising revival of Lebanon after a devastating civil war and after the expulsion of Syrian forces has been set back for a long time.
Iran. What the Bush administration envisaged as a prelude to an attack against Iran — weakening its proxy’s ability to shoot rockets at Israel and practising destroying underground bunkers with air power — has actually aided Tehran. If the sophisticated Israeli army could not succeed against a small guerrilla force, how could an attack against a state ten times stronger achieve its goals? For those planning US-Israeli military action against Iran, the Lebanon interlude has served as a timely warning.
Syria. If Israel were to make peace with Syria by returning the occupied Golan Heights, (as Ehud Barak almost did before bowing to unfavourable opinion polls), the weak, but secular (Alawite) Syrian regime would have no reason to support Hizbullah and allow Iranian arms transfers to Lebanon through its territory. According to some press reports, Bush even urged Olmert to attack Syria as part of the US policy to bring about the ”rebirth of a new Middle East”. The advice was not heeded and described by some Israeli officials as ”nuts”.
Iraq. Now bogged down in continued resistance against foreign occupation and an escalating sectarian civil war, the likely eventual break-up of Iraq will spill over into the entire region. Huge numbers of refugees from the fighting will unsettle other states, such as Bahrain with its unrecognised Shi’ite majority. Ironically, the Iraqi Shi’ite regime installed by the US has already declared its active solidarity with the Palestinians, and Iran has emerged as the main winner of the US military adventure in the region.
Israel. The Hizbullah experience has destroyed the already flimsy credibility of barriers and walls as guarantees of greater security. No buffer zone can prevent ever more sophisticated rockets crossing it. With this simple military logic the Kadima policy of unilateralism has died.
Unilaterally dictating borders never provided legitimacy or security in the first place. Only a mutually agreed upon political solution can bring about peace. The second Lebanon war has also shattered the image of Israeli invincibility. Despite the overwhelming support for the war among the Israeli public, including the left peace camp, its fallout at home has deepened the cleavages within Israeli society.
Sadly, the Israeli debate is about how efficiently the war was executed, not whether it should have been started in the first place. Now it is not a question of whether, but when, the weakened Ehud Olmert government will be replaced by an even more hard-line alternative.
Internationally, the Lebanese civilian casualties caused proved a global public relations disaster for Israel. The reckless crimes of Hizbullah rockets against Israeli civilians fade in comparison with the criminal unexploded cluster bombs with which Israel’s ”most moral army” mined Lebanese areas for years to come.
Palestine. Hizbullah’s successful holdout against Israeli bombardments has strengthened the Palestinian advocates of armed resistance to the detriment of the partisans of negotiations. The continued boycott of Hamas by the West and the refusal by Israel to transfer taxes due to the Palestinian Authority (PA) also drives Palestinians to seek other sponsors. The intentional dismemberment of the PA through arrests of half of the elected Hamas officials and administrative destruction facilitates anarchy, in which nobody controls ever more radical militias. The collapse of the PA reinforces the Israeli myth of ”no partner to negotiate with” precisely at the moment when the mainstream sections of Hamas and Fatah forged a strategic unity to negotiate a viable Palestinian state.
For ideological reasons and on the basis of settler resistance, the current Israeli government has shown no interest in allowing a viable Palestinian state to emerge. The senior adviser to Ariel Sharon, Dov Weissglas, in the context of the Gaza withdrawal has explicitly stated that ”the significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” (Interview in Ha’aretz magazine, October 8 2004.)
Continuing with this approach results either in permanent warfare — with ever escalating regional and global confrontations — or potentially in a multicultural, binational state and the end of Zionism. An increasing number of voices, including Palestinian intellectuals and post-Zionists in the Jewish diaspora, already consider the two-state model a dead end.
The unresolved Palestinian issue remains the root of the crisis which the US and Israeli governments ignore at their peril.
Heribert Adam is Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and an annual visitor at the University of Cape Town. His most recent book, co-authored with Kogila Moodley, is Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians (Temple University and Wits University Press, 2005)