‘We will have to fight them again’

21 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

Dan Gillerman, Israel’s UN ambassador, is a dapper figure with a gift for the smart-bomb turn of phrase that can hit a target with deadly accuracy. ‘During the first few days of that conflict,’ he told me, ‘I had numerous of my Arab colleagues, who for their sake I will not name — including some representing countries that have no diplomatic relations with Israel or that are even perceived as hostile to Israel — coming to me in the corridors, coming to me in the Security Council chamber, and saying to me, ‘Go, girl. Finish the job. Don’t stop.’ They were, he suggested, much more upset that Israel failed to finish off Hezbollah than they had been about Israel’s original decision to go to war in Lebanon with such force.

With such a complex mix of different agendas at play, it is perhaps unsurprising that the diplomatic machinery designed to address this kind of crisis should have proved so creaky, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the diplomatic process was also poisoned by all sorts of extraneous rivalries which did not directly arise from the matter in hand. Friction between the United States and the UN bureaucracy, bubbling away since the invasion of Iraq, became an open wound; John Bolton told me that Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, was no more than ‘an interested bystander’, and Mr Annan’s people were almost as rude about him. And other familiar rivalries surfaced. At the Rome summit in late July, the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, had an hour-long row with the American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, prompting the kind of British accusations of French grandstanding you usually hear after an especially acrimonious EU summit.