The Blair–Bush summit in Washington was long-planned, but fortuitously well-timed. The President and Prime Minister face not only a huge strategic challenge in the Middle East but also a fundamental political problem at home. They have not yet managed to persuade Western voters of the path they have jointly pursued in the region. Neither man is seeking re-election. All the more reason, then, for
candour and robust explanation of what this crisis is truly about.
With some exceptions, the default position in the West is now that Mr Bush and Mr Blair have allowed Israel to deploy tactics in southern Lebanon that are at best ‘disproportionate’ and at worst — in the words of Jan Egeland, the UN’s under-
secretary-general for humanitarian affairs — ‘a violation of humanitarian law’. On Tuesday the Tory MP Sir Peter Tapsell claimed — with a disgraceful lack of taste, matched only by historical ignorance — that Israel’s actions were ‘a war crime gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw’. Meanwhile
14 charities, aid agencies and the public- sector union Unison have written an open letter to the Prime Minister complaining that ‘the present policy looks in danger of placing the UK government in the uncomfortable position of only calling for a ceasefire once one side in the conflict has achieved its military objectives’.
Israel does indeed have a military goal, which is — as far as possible — to eradicate Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But, to an extent that is woefully under-reported, Hezbollah has a military objective, too, and a much more ambitious one. As an implacable guerrilla force subsidised and supplied with state-of-the art weaponry by Tehran, it seeks nothing less than what the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calls ‘the elimination of the Zionist strain’. Those who say that the Israeli retaliation against Hezbollah is ‘disproportionate’ should bear in mind that the Jewish state faces — as so often — a nexus of terrorist groups and sponsor nations that seek nothing less than its extinction.
Yet only rarely has this aspect of the crisis been reported on the hourly bulletins. Hezbollah’s cunning in this conflict has been to nurture the impression in the West that it is somehow a romantic maquis, a rag-tag force of freedom fighters and pimpernels defending the people of Lebanon against murderous colonialists. In fact, the true occupying force is Hezbollah itself, resoundingly rejected by the Lebanese people in last year’s elections, and now using them, in the memorable phrase of Amos Oz, as ‘human sandbags’. Planting its armaments in civilian areas, Hezbollah has ensured that —
however much damage it sustains itself
— innocent people will die too, their lifeless bodies seen on screens all over the world.
In the past fortnight we have been shown image after image of Israeli tanks and Lebanese casualties. Hezbollah itself has been the phantom of this conflict, nimbly absent from the television coverage. But the missiles that have rained down on northern Israel — 111 last Monday, more than 80 on Tuesday — have been all too real. Assisted by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah has used the six years since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon to build up a terrifying arsenal and a warren-like infrastructure of bunkers and bases. Like generals fighting the last war, much of the global media is still, effectively, reporting the Palestinian intifada — as if Israel were facing little more than a street uprising of youths armed with bricks and bottles. The reality is very different: a Katyusha missile aimed at Israeli civilians does a lot more damage than a Molotov cocktail thrown at a tank.
The calls, led by the UN, for an ‘immediate cessation of hostilities’ put Israel’s defenders in a difficult position. Who, after all, could be against peace? The answer is that peace and a ceasefire are not the same thing. ‘Peace,’ as Spinoza taught, ‘is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.’
When Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on 12 July, its masters must have known that a fierce Israeli response was inevitable. But they also, presumably, calculated that the rest of the world would call a halt to that response after a few days, leaving Israel looking like the aggressor in
need of restraint by the ‘international community’. That would have been a good week’s work for the Islamists.
In practice, America — backed by Britain — has called their bluff and given Israel the time it needs to take on Hezbollah. ‘If this is to stop,’ Mr Blair has said, ‘it has to stop by undoing how it started, and it started with the kidnap of Israeli soldiers and the bombardment of northern Israel. If we want this to stop, that has to stop.’ This may not be what people want to hear — how much easier and familiar it is to condemn Israel — but it is true nonetheless.
Of course, the relentless focus upon Israel’s methods, their propriety and their ‘proportionality’ serves a useful psychological purpose, enabling the world to avert its gaze from the true meaning of this conflict. For what we are witnessing in northern Israel and southern Lebanon is the first battle in a new war waged by theocratic Iran — vigorously pursuing its nuclear ambitions and supporting Islamist terror around the world — for unchallenged hegemony in this afflicted region. Hezbollah is but one pawn in this great struggle, and Israel only the front line.
At stake is nothing less than the West’s strategic future in the Middle East. Iran, via its murderous proxy force, is testing the resolve of all its chosen enemies. The only peace worth having in the Middle East is one in which Iran is tamed, Israel is secure, and a true Palestinian state can at last be recognised. And the only ceasefire worth having is one that nudges the region a little closer to that bleakly distant objective.
Comments