August 31, 2006

Hezbollah's Strength

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

Thankfully, the war between Israel and the Lebanese “Party of God,” Hezbollah, has ended – at least temporarily. But this was no victory for the Jewish state. A majority of Israelis think that few of the war’s aims were achieved.

All that was accomplished was the installation of an unreliable UN force in southern Lebanon to act as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah and the deployment there of an inept Lebanese army that is afraid to challenge terrorists, in return for the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

The UN-brokered cease-fire resolution mandated a reinforced United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), to eventually comprise 15,000 troops. Supplemented by a 15,000-man Lebanese army, they now take up positions south of the Litani River and guard the so-called Blue Line, the UN-demarcated border between Lebanon and Israel. It marks the first presence of Lebanese troops in the south in decades.

But Hezbollah has stated that it will not disarm – their fighters will simply hide their weapons and melt into the general population. The Lebanese government seems to approve: “There will be no confrontation between the army and our brothers in Hezbollah,” Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said in mid-August. “That is not the army's mission.”

Added Lebanon’s Defense Minister, Elias Murr, “The army is not going to the south to strip the Hezbollah of its weapons and do the work that Israel did not.” Indeed, for Hezbollah, the army provides a convenient cover for their work.

As Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote recently, “In the south, the Lebanese army will be taking orders from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not just returning to being a ‘state within a state.’ It is becoming the state.” The Lebanese government has been reduced to acting as its front.

So what is to prevent Hezbollah from firing rockets from north of the Litani into Israel at some future date? Also, given that the multinational UN force will probably include soldiers from Muslim states such as Bangladesh, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey, will Israel even be able to bypass these troops in order to again move into Lebanon to stop Hezbollah, if it becomes necessary?

This might itself be a moot point, as Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has stated that he does not want countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel to participate in the force. None of these states except Turkey recognize Israel.

The war proved to be an almost cost-free way for Iran and Syria, Hezbollah’s sponsors, to damage Israel economically and militarily while flexing their own political muscles in the Middle East.

The two countries lost not a single soldier, while 119 Israeli troops were killed. During the conflict, almost 4,000 rockets rained down on Israel, tens of thousands of civilians were forced to evacuate their homes in the northern part of the country, and places such as Nahariya and Kiryat Shmona became virtual ghost towns. At least 40 Israeli civilians died during the war.

Israel’s massive air strikes reduced entire south Lebanese villages to rubble and made for bad optics worldwide, but, it seems, did little to damage Hezbollah’s capacity to strike at northern Israeli cities and towns.

In the six years since Israel left southern Lebanon, Hezbollah was able to build bunkers and tunnels and amass an enormous cache of missiles, rockets and sophisticated weaponry for the purpose of attacking Israel. During the war, it was able to move its rocket launchers rapidly and demonstrated striking battlefield agility and flexibility. The guerrilla group impeded the advance of Israel’s army for almost five weeks.

As well, Hezbollah’s popularity throughout the region grew by leaps and bounds during this war, even among non-Shi’ite Muslims. They managed to cross a deep sectarian divide, and this has also benefitted Iran, whom they serve as a surrogate against Israel.

There were disquieting features about this war closer to home as well. Demonstrations against Israel and in support of terrorists became commonplace in our major cities, particularly in Quebec. It showed a depth of anger against Israel among Canadians that is quite unprecedented in our history.

This hostility is a product of Liberal spinelessness over the past decade, plus, perhaps, the arrival of millions of new Canadians with little understanding of the Middle East. In more than a few cases, they were people already predisposed against Israel.

We Jews need to wake up and realize that the real Canada, not the one of our Jewish leaders’ dreams, is far less hospitable than we had thought. Telling us that Canadians and Israelis share the same “values” will not impress us anymore.

Ironically, this gap between fantasy and reality was masked while the Liberals were in government, because they managed to pretend to support Israel while in actuality being “even-handed” or even pro-Arab when it came to the Middle East. This enabled both Jewish and other Canadians to act as though they were generally satisfied with Canada’s policies.

But when Prime Minister Stephen Harper demonstrated actual support for Israel, that contradiction was exposed for what it really was. Some polls published during the fighting indicated less than one third of Canadians approved of Harper’s stance.

Unlike many analysts, I was not surprised at how tough Hezbollah proved to be. Regular Arab armies, in the Arab-Israeli wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, were composed of conscripts indifferent to the dictatorships under which they lived. Hezbollah is a sophisticated and fanatical volunteer force, well-trained, and believes in what it is doing. It remains a determined foe and is far from vanquished.

August 4, 2006

Pondering What Will Happen Next for Lebanon

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Wracked by internal tensions that periodically erupt into all-out civil wars between its religious communities, Lebanon has always been, in effect, a failed state.

It was artificially created by the French in 1943 in order to provide a sovereign entity for the country’s then Christian majority. But for the intervention of 14,000 American troops in 1958, the country would have fallen apart long ago. President Dwight Eisenhower sent them over to quell an insurrection by pan-Arab nationalists, who wanted Lebanon to become part of Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser’s new United Arab Republic.

The UAR, a union between Egypt and Syria, itself only lasted three years. Meanwhile, Lebanon was preserved as a Christian-dominated country.

Today, however, following the effective defeat of the Maronite Catholics and other Christians in the 1975-1991 civil war, and the decades-long occupation by Syria, even that rationale for keeping this fractured country together may no longer hold.

The Shi’ite Muslim Hezbollah (Party of God), formed in 1982, and backed by Iran and Syria, has carte blanche over much of Lebanon’s territory and pays little attention to pronouncements by the authorities in Beirut.

The poorest community in Lebanon, the Shi’ites were in the past also the most underprivileged. But they now comprise, according to some estimates, some 40% of the population. As their numbers have increased, so has Hezbollah’s power.

Now an entrenched part of the Lebanese political system, Hezbollah is treated as a legitimate political entity, not as a terrorist group. The movement runs hospitals, clinics, schools and agricultural centres and sustains a large social welfare net.

Hezbollah won 14 seats in the 128-member Lebanese parliament in the spring 2005 elections, and is part of the Resistance and Development Bloc, a joint ticket by the two main Shi’ite parties Amal and Hezbollah. They altogether control 35 seats, and Hezbollah even has two ministers in the Lebanese government.

Indeed, the president of Lebanon, Emile Lahoud, has declared his full support for Hezbollah. Though a Maronite Christian (as mandated by the constitution), he is considered by many as little more than a puppet of Syria.

The prime minister of Lebanon must, also by law, come from the Sunni Muslim community, and the present incumbent, Fouad Siniora, is a member of the Current for the Future (Tayyar Al Mustaqbal) movement.

This is the party that was led by Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister who was assassinated in February 2005. Many Lebanese suspect Syria of involvement in his death.

So Siniora, unlike Lahoud, is no friend of Hezbollah. But he seems powerless to control their activities. Israel is exasperated with the fact that Lebanon has done nothing to enforce Security Council Resolution 1559, passed in 2004, which called for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias” and for the Beirut government to extend its control over the border region with Israel.

It is therefore rather disingenuous of the Lebanese to now wail that Israel has attacked their country – after thousands of missiles have been imported by Hezbollah, under their very eyes, to be used against their southern neighbours and launched from Lebanese soil.

Many commentators have expressed surprise that Israel seems to be engaged in an all-out attack in Lebanon and is indifferent to the fate of the Lebanese state itself. Is it possible that the Israelis have simply grown tired of all this, and perhaps concluded that this sort of state may not be worth preserving?

Could it be that they might prefer an “official” Shi’ite mini-state in the south – even if under Iranian and Syrian suzerainty – while the rest of the country becomes a truncated but, once again, Christian-dominated entity less antagonistic to Israel?

That way there would be no “good guy” (today’s Lebanese state) trying to gain the international community’s sympathy while the “bad guy” (the non-state actor Hezbollah) kept firing missiles into Israel and provoking border clashes. It would certainly clarify matters.

Meanwhile, what role should the international community – a fictional notion, in any case – play in all of this? Who can be trusted to be tough enough to control the Israeli-Lebanese frontier?

Last week George W. Bush and Tony Blair met in Washington and called for an international peacekeeping force. Certainly a NATO force would be preferable to one sent in by the hapless UN.

But should its mandate emanate from the UN Security Council, NATO would have to negotiate a tough set of conditions, to ensure that members such as Russia and China not be able to hamstring its operations, once the troops were deployed.

Would a land-based army along the border be enough to stop the fighting? Couldn’t Hezbollah retreat further north and still pound Israel with missiles? Then what? Would NATO be forced to occupy much of the country – as it has done in Kosovo and, to some extent, Afghanistan? There are no easy answers.