‘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

The resolution which finally ended the conflict was negotiated at the United Nations by France and the United States, the two governments to some degree acting as proxies for Lebanon/Hezbollah and Israel respectively. It is spoken of as a good piece of work in diplomatic circles in New York, but no amount of diplomatic skill could conceal the fact that the final agreement reflected the weakness of Israel’s position. Resolution 1701 did not dictate the immediate disarming of Hezbollah by a robust outside military force — as Israel would have liked it to — and John Bolton describes that as ‘a big disappointment and, I think, a fundamental flaw’ in the resolution which he himself negotiated.

The Israeli government has set up the Winograd Commission to examine the way the war was prosecuted. The Commission’s conclusions are expected in the near future, and it is widely thought in Israel that they could lead to the resignation of Ehud Olmert. Hezbollah, more surprisingly, has admitted mistakes too; its leader Hassan Nasrallah has said that he miscalculated the Israeli response when he ordered the movement’s kidnapping operation — a recognition that even if Hezbollah ‘won’ the victory, it came at a heavy price.

‘I don’t think anybody won,’ Margaret Beckett told me. ‘I think they were all losers.’ But she claimed that the conflict had given a new impetus to the search for peace in the Middle East because everyone recognised ‘that such a profoundly dangerous and unstable situation ought not to be allowed to continue’. One can only hope that her optimism proves justified. I regret to report that the overwhelming majority of those to whom I spoke believe that the uneasy peace Lebanon currently enjoys is no more than a pause in hostilities. ‘I am afraid,’ said Ephraim Sneh, now deputy defence minister in Mr Olmert’s coalition, ‘that we will have to do it again.’
The Summer War in Lebanon: A Tragedy of Errors, Edward Stourton’s accounts from the underground bunkers of Hezbollah, inside the Israeli government in Jerusalem and behind closed doors in Washington and London, is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 8.02 pm on 3 April and 10 April.