The old order changeth, yielding place to new: as Fidel Castro’s mortality marks the fall of the last Cold War colossus, so a new global ideological struggle hardens in our midst. The conflict in the Middle East is but one symptom of this battle between the West and militant Islam. To extract this particular crisis from its broader context and see it as merely another chapter in the long battle between Jew and Arab — as many do — is a grievous error, and one that could have terrible consequences far beyond the Middle East.
Rarely has the word ‘renaissance’ been used as euphemistically as it was by Tony Blair in his speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Tuesday. In calling for ‘a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us’, the Prime Minister was making public the exasperation he has long felt in private about the incoherence of the argument made by the West in response to 9/11 and its aftermath. He was not, as has been widely reported, calling for a new strategy, but demanding that the existing strategy be articulated clearly and championed fearlessly. He was challenging those — especially in America — who believe that regime change achieved by military force automatically leads to the flowering of Jeffersonian democracy (Iraq has tested that theory to destruction). But his speech was also a riposte to those who insist, with an air of intellectual self-congratulation, that ‘there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that 11 September predated either. The West didn’t attack this movement. We were attacked.’
Mr Blair has an irritating predilection for jargon, notably in his fixation with what he calls ‘interdependence’. But there is a kernel of truth in what he has to say in this regard. To see what is happening in southern Lebanon and northern Israel in parochial terms — as so many do — is a fatal error. The orthodox view in the West, especially since the appalling tragedy of Qana, is that we are witnessing merely another conflagration of the great struggle between militarised Israel and pan-Arabism. In fact, this is something much more alarming: a proxy war between the West and Islamism. With each passing day, we see how well armed Hezbollah has been by its Iranian and Syrian sponsors. It is said that Israel has been cynically preparing for a ground invasion of southern Lebanon ever since its withdrawal from those territories in 2000. More striking is the way in which Hezbollah and its masters have used those six years. Since the Israeli bombardment began we have heard much about its alleged role as a ‘recruiting sergeant for Hezbollah’. In fact, the organisation’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah appears to have been recruiting quite successfully long before this crisis began.
It is not Israel’s military retaliation that is primarily driving young Muslims to the Hezbollah standard. It is Israel’s very existence. It is not the absence of a viable Palestinian state that underpins this new strain of terrorism — regrettable as that absence is — but a terrible and virulent mutation of a great world religion: what the Prime Minister called ‘reactionary Islam’. Of course, this global movement feeds on hatred of the West, and of America specifically. But its rise cannot be attributed simply to errors made in the Oval Office (neat and easy as such an explanation would be): from the Philippines and Indonesia to India and Pakistan, from Spain to North Africa, from Hamburg to the West Yorkshire homes of the 7 July bombers, a new belief system is laying down roots and spawning what amounts to a global franchise.
The images of children being lifted from the rubble of Qana last weekend were utterly intolerable. We have grown used to the sanitised video-game images of conflict that have been common coin since the first Gulf war 15 years ago. In contrast, the pictures from Qana showed war in all its appalling reality: a reality from which we have generally been shielded.
It is absolutely right that we should not be so shielded. Israel and its allies must confront daily the human consequences of their tactics. But to see the pictures from Qana in isolation — and to conclude instantly, as so many have, that Israel was guilty of a ‘war crime’ — does the cause of peace and the Lebanese people no true favours. The clearest lesson of the fighting since 12 July has been that Hezbollah wishes to maximise civilian casualties on both sides of the border. Jan Egeland, the UN’s humanitarian affairs chief, has rightly criticised the ‘cowardly blending’ of the terrorists among women and children. When four UN observers were killed under Israeli fire on 25 July, it was immediately assumed — not least by Kofi Annan — that the attack had been deliberate. So it had been; but only, it now emerges from an email sent by a Canadian officer killed in the crossfire, because Hezbollah had congregated at the UN site, drawing Israeli fire to the observers.
The Islamists are making it intensely difficult for Israel to respond to their provocations without falling foul of global opinion. On the other hand, those who say only that Israel’s response has been ‘disproportionate’ and that it must stop instantly offer no plausible alternative strategy. The Jewish state has on its doorstep a militia, backed by Tehran, armed with state-of-the-art weaponry and perversely enthusiastic about the gathering of Jews in Israel because — in the words of Nasrallah — ‘it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide’. What, exactly, should Israel do about this threat if not address it militarily? The silence is deafening. It is the silence of a world that has forgotten the great struggle that Castro personified, but has yet to awake to the much more complex but no less frightening struggle that is taking its place.
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