On Jul 26, 2006, at 9:58 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> [man, this is some wacky shit]
>
> <http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060724&s=halevi072606>
>
> WHY ISRAEL FIGHTS.
> Drawing the Line
> by Yossi Klein Halevi
>
> Three times in the last century, the Jewish people has found itself
> on the front line against totalitarian ideologies with aspirations
> to rule the world, and which defined the Jewish people as its
> primary obstacle in fulfilling that goal. For Nazism, the Jew was
> not only the source of racial impurity but inventor of conscience,
> crippling humanity's survival instincts in an amoral world. For
> Soviet communism, the Jew was the source of capitalism, and Zionism
> the front line of imperialism. And now, for fundamentalist Islam,
> the Jew is the satanic enemy, and the Jewish state an abomination
> against God that must be destroyed.
>
> Though Israeli officials are calling the conflict with Hezbollah
> and Hamas an "operation," it is, in fact, a war. Ultimately, the
> war will transcend its Iranian proxies and engage Iran itself. One
> crucial result must be the destruction of Iran's nuclear
> capability, which would provide the religious genocidalists with
> the ability to turn theology into practice. Imagine Israel
> confronting a Hezbollah backed by a nuclear Iran. Would we be able
> to defend our northern border knowing that an attack on Hezbollah
> could provoke an Iranian nuclear attack against Tel Aviv? That
> prospect is not inconceivable: Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
> believes that the Muslim messianic age is about to be inaugurated
> by the destruction of Israel. Certainly Israel has the capacity to
> deliver an overwhelming second strike. But the balance of terror
> that worked during the cold war against the Soviet Union may fail
> against an enemy that welcomes death as a prelude to eternal life.
> A nuclear Iran could be the ultimate suicide bomber.
>
> The war of the missiles in Lebanon and in Gaza is actually the
> second stage of the war that began six years ago. Erroneously, self-
> defeatingly, Israelis accepted the Palestinian terminology, and
> called the wave of Islamist suicide bombings that started in
> September 2000 "the second intifada." Unlike the intifada of the
> late 1980s, however, which united Palestinian Christians and
> Muslims against the occupation, the war that began in 2000 has been
> led by Islamists, after Israel tried to end the occupation. Not
> coincidentally, there have been no Christian suicide bombers. The
> Palestinian cause had shifted from national struggle to jihad.
>
> Nevertheless, some insist on distinguishing between Hezbollah and
> Hamas. While Hezbollah is an operational extension of the Shia
> Iranian revolution, Hamas, they argue, represents the national
> aspirations of the Palestinian people. In fact, Hamas represents
> the undoing of Palestinian national aspirations. For Hamas, a
> Palestinian state is merely a means to an end: the resurrection of
> the medieval Caliphate and the transformation of the Middle East
> into a single Islamist state. The rise of Hamas, then, has
> completed the process, which began with the suicide bombings, of
> Islamizing the conflict. The so-called second intifada has
> destroyed the achievement of the first intifada, which convinced a
> majority of Israelis that former Prime Minister Golda Meir had been
> wrong to insist there was no Palestinian people and that a distinct
> Palestinian identity had indeed emerged. In rejecting mere
> nationalism, Hamas is returning the Palestinians to their pre-
> national consciousness, when Palestinians were part of an amorphous
> Arab or Muslim identity. The first casualty of the jihad, then, has
> been a viable Palestinian national identity, and, with it, the
> possibility of a viable Palestinian state.
>
> What unites Shia Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas is the theology of
> genocide. Both organizations preach that the Holocaust never
> happened, even as they actively plan the next one. According to the
> Hamas Covenant, every ill in the world, from the French Revolution
> to the two world wars, was provoked by the Jews. For its part,
> Hezbollah's Al Manar TV station spread the story that the Mossad
> was behind September 11 and warned 4,000 Jews who worked in the
> Twin Towers to stay home that day--a calumny that was accepted,
> according to polls, by majorities throughout the Muslim world.
>
> The grievance of the Islamists isn't only that they were conquered
> and occupied but that they have failed, so far, to conquer and
> occupy. Like Hezbollah, Hamas won't "moderate" with the
> responsibility of power. To believe otherwise is to underestimate
> the power of religion. For Hamas is not a political movement but a
> faith. And for Hamas to abandon its goal of Israel's destruction is
> to commit heresy against the core of that faith. Religious change,
> even among fundamentalists, is surely possible; but it is a process
> measured not in months but in decades, or centuries.
>
> In targeting Lebanon and Gaza, Israel is sending a simultaneous
> message: It is time for the Arab world to take responsibility for
> its actions. What Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and
> Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora share is a helplessness--to
> some extent self-inflicted--against the terrorists in their midst.
> In large measure, the Oslo process failed because the international
> community allowed Palestinians to continue to act as victims,
> rather than as responsible peace partners prepared to exploit the
> extraordinary circumstances they enjoyed for creating a state.
> Those circumstances included virtually unlimited international
> political and financial support, and the willingness of a majority
> of Israelis--induced, in part, by a justifiable guilty conscience--
> to consider previously unthinkable scenarios, like ceding part of
> Jerusalem to Yasir Arafat. Imagine what the Tibetans or the Kurds
> could have done with that level of political goodwill and foreign
> aid. Indeed, billions of dollars in international aid have gone to
> the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps the greatest defeat the
> Palestinians inflicted on themselves was to lose the patience of at
> least part of the international community and, most of all, the
> Israeli guilty conscience.
>
> Yet many continue to indulge Palestinian rejectionism.
> Astonishingly, Israel still needs to prove that it offered a
> credible and contiguous Palestinian state at Camp David in July
> 2000, and not, as Palestinian leaders put it, a series of
> "Bantustans." What doubt remained from Camp David should have been
> dispelled five months later when Israel accepted President
> Clinton's proposals--ceding almost the entirety of the West Bank,
> all of Gaza, and three-quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem. The
> Palestinian counter-offer was suicide bombings.
>
> The tendency of much of the international community to excuse every
> Palestinian failure has helped convince Palestinians that
> victimization--even when it is self-willed--affords immunity from
> responsibility. Many foreign journalists with whom I've spoken in
> recent weeks accept the Palestinian argument that the rocket
> attacks from the 1967 Gaza border into sovereign Israel are
> legitimate, or at least understandable, given that Israel continues
> to occupy the West Bank. Yet that argument ignores the historic
> Palestinian failure to exploit the Gaza withdrawal, which created
> the first sovereign Palestinian territory. Had the Palestinians
> shown the most minimal effort at statebuilding--for example,
> applying foreign aid to rehabilitate refugee camps--the Israeli
> public would have supported a return to the negotiating table.
> Instead, the Palestinian national movement proved again that it is
> more keen on subverting the Jewish state than on creating a
> Palestinian state. And so one more opportunity for a negotiated end
> to the conflict was lost.
>
> In conversations I've had over the years with Palestinians,
> invariably my interlocutor would offer a version of the following:
> You and I, we are little people. The "big ones" are only interested
> in themselves. They don't care if we suffer. I used to find that
> sentiment moving, an attempt by Palestinians to create a common
> humanity with Israelis. But now I see it as an expression of self-
> induced helplessness, precisely why the Palestinians and the
> Lebanese have allowed our common tragedy to reach this point.
>
> Israel's attack on Lebanon, holding it responsible for what occurs
> in its territory, is not a violation of Lebanese sovereignty but an
> affirmation of it. And in targeting the democratically elected
> Hamas government, Israel is telling the Palestinians that there is
> a price to pay for empowering the theology of genocide. If the only
> alternative to a corrupt Fatah that Palestinian society can
> generate is a non-corrupt Hamas, then Palestine will become a
> pariah. Israel's policy, then, is to stop patronizing the Lebanese
> and the Palestinians and relate to them as adults responsible for
> their fate.
>
> Some in the Arab world are beginning to understand this. In an
> article published in the Kuwaiti newspaper Arab Times, the editor-
> in-chief, Ahmed Al Jarallah, wrote:
>
> This war was inevitable as the Lebanese government couldn't bring
> Hezbollah within its authority and make it work for the interests
> of Lebanon. Similarly leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud
> Abbas has been unable to rein in the Hamas movement. Unfortunately
> we must admit that in such a war the only way to get rid of 'these
> irregular phenomena' is what Israel is doing. The operations of
> Israel in Gaza and Lebanon are in the interest of the people of
> Arab countries and the international community.
>
> The war, then, is not only inciting Islamists, but may,
> potentially, embolden moderates. The extraordinary Saudi--along
> with Egyptian and Jordanian--condemnation of Hezbollah marks the
> first time in any of Israel's wars that a significant chunk of the
> Arab world has publicly blamed Arab aggression for starting
> hostilities. This could create an opening for a tacit Israeli
> alliance with moderate Arabs against the Islamist, and particularly
> Iranian, threat. Just as we need to be resolute against the
> pathologies of the Middle East, so we need to be open to its
> changes. The responsibility of the people of Israel is not only to
> be on the front line against terror but to be on the front line for
> reconciliation. Not only to help stop evil, but to help empower the
> good.
>
> So far, Israel enjoys three crucial strategic advantages in this
> war: unequivocal American support, a divided Arab world, and, most
> crucial of all, a united Israeli people. Arguably not since the
> 1973 Yom Kippur War has Israel been as determined in war as it is
> today. Though some restlessness has begun--an antiwar rally in Tel
> Aviv drew 2,500 people--most of the left supports the invasion.
> Indeed, Peace Now and other Zionist left-wing groups stayed away
> from the Tel Aviv rally. One reason for the absence of serious left-
> wing opposition is the fact that Amir Peretz, our most dovish
> mainstream politician, happens to be running the war as defense
> minister. Peretz's ideological credentials are compensation for his
> lack of military ones: Just as Ariel Sharon helped insure broad
> support for withdrawal from Gaza, so Peretz is insuring broad
> support for the reinvasion of Gaza and Lebanon.
>
> Most of the left understands that this is a war, in part, for the
> viability of the concept of territorial withdrawal. For years the
> left assured the Israeli public that, in the event of withdrawal,
> Israel would resist any subsequent aggression with determination,
> unity, and international legitimacy. In Lebanon and Gaza, then, two
> fronts from which Israel has already withdrawn to the green line
> (Israel also withdrew to the green line on the Egyptian border in
> 1982), that premise is now being tested. If the left defects from
> the war effort, triggering international pressure, then the Israeli
> public will rightly despair of future withdrawals.
>
> Most of all, this is a war for the viability of Israeli deterrence.
> After Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000,
> Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah described the Jewish state
> as a "spider web": Just as a spider web seems solid from a distance
> but disintegrates when swiped, so Israel will collapse under the
> pressure of Arab resolve. The "spider web" speech, as it came to be
> known, is very much in the mind of Israelis today as we belatedly
> try to restore our lost deterrence, without which the Jewish state
> will not survive long in the Middle East.
>
> Israel tried to avoid this war, to the point of endangering its
> most basic credibility. For months we allowed Palestinian groups to
> shell Israeli towns on the Gaza border with virtual immunity. And
> for six years we turned away as Iran supplied Hezbollah with
> thousands of long-range rockets and built a vast infrastructure
> literally meters across our border. When three Israeli soldiers
> were kidnapped by Hezbollah in October 2000, then-Prime Minister
> Ehud Barak didn't massively retaliate, preferring to negotiate a
> prisoner exchange. Among some Israeli journalists, Nasrallah was
> considered a "responsible" leader, capable of insuring quiet in the
> north, rather than biding his time and awaiting instructions from
> Iran to act.
>
> The Jewish people is once again being forced to act as a brake
> against evil. This is not a repetition of the first Lebanon war,
> but a return to our consensus wars of survival--not a Vietnam
> moment but a World War II moment. That is why Israel fights, and
> why it will win.
>
> ---
>
> Yossi Klein Halevi is a foreign correspondent for The New Republic
> and senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
>
>
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