‘We will have to fight them again’

24 March 2007

Edward Stourton has had unrivalled access to the protagonists in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Here, on the eve of the Winograd Commission’s report, he reveals what really happened in this conflict that nobody won

Mr Bolton evidently enjoys being provocative, but this version of events cannot simply be dismissed as a jolly tease designed to annoy those he likes to call ‘the highminded’, because it is to a great extent corroborated by the evidence of another central player in the diplomacy of the period, Israel’s then ambassador to Washington, Danny Ayalon. Mr Ayalon, like Mr Bolton, has since left government service, and he was equally candid. He told me that ‘in my discussions with the Americans we did understand that this may be now an opportunity to change the strategic equation’ in southern Lebanon, and said that when he raised this with the administration, ‘I didn’t hear any surprises or, I would say, any dissenting views at the time’. Of his early contacts with Condoleezza Rice and the White House, he added, ‘I do not recall anybody ...asking us to exercise caution’.

Those who regard the Americans as the source of all the Middle East’s woes will no doubt be cheered up by this evidence of Israeli–American conniving, but they would do well also to reflect on an extraordinary piece of double-speak diplomacy that was going on among the Arab nations of the Middle East. Early in the conflict, the Arab League held a meeting in Cairo at which what we like to call ‘moderate’ Arab nations — notably Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — united to condemn Hezbollah for provoking Israel. Their statement raised a few eyebrows at the time, but I understand that it was as nothing compared to what was being said behind the scenes; several governments in the region were in fact among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for Israel’s efforts to crush Hezbollah, and while they publicly condemned the Israeli tactics, they privately expressed the hope that the Israeli Defence Force would prevail as successfully as it always had done in the past.